by PJ Mayhem
‘No, I’ve got a niece and nephew, they’re adorable.’ I stop short of showing him some photos.
‘Do you want children?’ he asks before I have a chance to ask him if he has children.
‘No, it’s just not my thing. I love kids but being an aunty is enough for me.’
‘Isn’t that selfish? Women should want to be mothers, it’s what they’re made to do. You’ll change your mind. Women always do. They say they don’t want children but then they wake up one day and their biological clock’s alarm has gone off and all they can see in a man is someone to father their children.’
Thank Buddha Germaine is still alive, because if she weren’t she’d be spinning in her grave that, after all her work, men were still making such comments. Maybe he’d been burnt—we all carried some baggage. I could forgive him that. But if there’s one thing I cannot stand it’s being told I don’t know my own mind.
‘It sounds like maybe you’ve had a bad experience,’ I say, reaching over to fill his glass before mine. It’s both a hint and a move to try to remain composed.
‘This was a bad experience.’ He points at his plate so I gather he doesn’t mean me.
‘Oh, look, is that the time? I really should be getting back to work.’ I’ve totally lost my appetite. I need to get away from his toxic negativity before it eats any further into my aura. I don’t even care about the five-minute signal for Angela and Tiffany.
I almost die when Suparman snaps his fingers to get the waitress’s attention for the bill. Who does that?
I’m sure I do die for just a moment when he shoves his chair in, loudly announcing to the waitress and everyone else in the café, ‘That was crap.’
Govinda, how I hate a scene.
I’ve always said I would walk out on a date if they were rude to wait staff, or rude full stop, and here I am, walking out, even if the date has technically ended.
I put my head down to be sure not to look at Angela and Tiffany as I pass.
‘Split bill. She had more than me,’ Suparman says as we pay.
Buddha above, someone give this guy a gold medal for being an obnoxious prick. I wasn’t expecting him to pay for me but quibbling over a couple of bucks and not simply halving it just shows a meanness of spirit. And that was a definite deal breaker, as if everything else wasn’t enough.
I’m careful not to get too close to him as we make our way outside. I don’t want anyone to think I really know him.
‘I’d like to see you again sometime,’ he says, as we stand and wait for the lights to change.
Is he insane? Now would be the perfect time to call him out on his lie but why waste my energy? I poke at the button again and it seems to work miraculously. The green man flashes immediately. ‘I’m very busy at the moment, actually, I’m busy till next year,’ I say, running across the street.
Frankie wouldn’t ever be rude to a waitress, I think, but then Frankie hasn’t done anything and for all intents and purposes it looks like he never will.
So much for Mission Moving On.
39
When Sunday comes, I’m strung out like a trapeze artist on speed—restless, fidgety, edgy and distracted. I lie on my bed and try to become a flowing stream, drifting around the rocks of life, without force, without aggression, moving fluidly, with grace and beauty in my own perfect rhythm.
But it’s hopeless. Lying there only makes me feel worse. I start to think, start trying to figure things out. Fate, the signs, the list, Frankie.
So much for Lao Tzu and his single step. If I wore a Fitbit it would be well over a thousand miles by now and I felt like I’d got nowhere, or worse.
I needed a definitive sign.
True, a sausage dog probably isn’t likely to come sniffing at my door but I’d asked to see one in the flesh (or hair) during my intention setting this morning so I’ll know what to do. The only way to get an answer is to head out.
At the end of my block I get tangled in the confusion of pedestrians and cars turning in and out of the narrow T-intersection—everyone and everything going in different directions.
Karmic crumpets! A sausage dog is tied up outside a shop on the side street. I only see it because of the confusion. My fate is sealed for today at least.
I’m reaching in to get my yoghurt when I hear Frankie’s voice from the deli section.
‘Hi, Fiona,’ he calls, breaking his sing along to The Pretenders’ ‘Don’t Get Me Wrong’.
I’m not sure if I flinch or what—there’s really no explanation—but two little pots of yoghurt leap from the refrigerator shelf. I can’t do anything but watch as they hit the floor with a devastating splat. Fucking fantastic! Just fabulous!
I rescue the slightly battered and bent one and pop it back, then pick up the spewing offender and step away, careful not to tread in the soft pink blobs and splatters of yoghurt around my feet. Rather than head to the front, I go in search of Frankie, who has disappeared.
A voice from beyond (Frankie’s not God’s) starts singing the Little River Band’s ‘Help is on its Way’. I have no idea how he knows what’s happened. Maybe they have a Clumsy Girl Yoghurt Alarm that whoever is at the counter has activated.
‘You’ve got to be unlucky.’ Frankie appears, mop and bucket in hand.
He joins me for the journey back to the scene of the yoghurt disaster.
‘Oh my god, I am so sorry. How embarrassing. Sorry.’ My cheeks on fire, I cycle through my humiliation rainbow.
‘I’ve just finished cleaning up another mess.’ Frankie points to the large wet patch on the floor nearby. That explains the ‘unlucky’ comment so I can forego worrying that it was anything untoward being directed at me. ‘A dropped dip,’ he explains and shakes his head. ‘It was a nightmare, such a mess, took me forever to clean up. Yours is nothing compared to that.’
Still I can’t look at him properly. I’m beyond my humiliation rainbow now and bordering on post-note-fiasco-reaction—I’ve just started the hair-pulling thing.
This is where things go a little hazy.
We’re standing at the fridge together, and I must pass him the ruined yoghurt that I still have in my hand. ‘I should pay for that,’ I say.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ he says in his soothing way.
Obviously I open the fridge to get out the yoghurt I need because I’m standing in front of it. Frankie is behind me, one large hand propping the fridge door open, and—oh my fucking God—his other one is on my waist, resting on the upper curve of my hip!
It is so intimate and comforting. If I thought I’d felt like a melting ice cap before, that was nothing to what I’m feeling now. I have no desire to say, ‘Unhand me young (or middle-aged) man,’ or even, ‘Get your fucking hands off me,’ like I would do with anyone else.
But of all the things I could say, ‘Oh God, now I can’t remember what I wanted,’ is what comes out, as Frankie removes his hand from my waist.
Seriously, what is wrong with me? It’s perfectly obvious that what I want is right behind me. Why didn’t I turn around and just freaking well kiss him?
‘That’s OK,’ Frankie says, standing so close behind me that I can feel him—his warmth, his breath in my hair. It is absolutely the most reassuring thing for me to hear.
Then, as I put a pot of yoghurt into my basket, he says, ‘That’s not the sort you normally get.’
‘Oh, yeah, thanks.’ Good thing someone has managed to keep their wits about them here. I force every cell in my body to concentrate on not creating any other disasters as I put the wrong one back and retrieve my usual brand.
Frankie starts to mop up my mess. I move away, offering more apologies with each mop stroke. One hand clutches my basket so tightly my knuckles are white, while the other flutters around my face in embarrassment. But Frankie just reminds me of the dropped dip, as though trying to make me feel that everything’s alright.
I rally myself to toss a couple of humorous lines at him as I step away. I’m not really aware of what I’m saying or d
oing but I gather they’re amusing, because Frankie and Thuga, who I now see has been watching from the till, both give a small laugh. Ms Totally-Middle-of-the-Road doesn’t even entertain the paranoid notion that they might be laughing at me. A breakthrough of sorts.
‘Don’t stop now, Fiona, go for a trifecta,’ Frankie says as he passes me in the deli section.
‘I’m just looking for what will make the most mess.’ I gathered he was talking about the mopping up rather than the fantastically humiliating moments I’d created with the note and the spillage.
Frankie runs around the shop in his hurricane-like way, singing along to Toni Basil’s ‘Mickey’. I only lift my head to watch him when I know he and Thuga can’t see me.
‘Man, I’m so problematic today,’ I say to Thuga at the counter, as Frankie has to run off to check a price on something I’ve bought.
Thuga looks at me and smiles when I pass him my fifty dollars, once Frankie has yelled out, ‘Three twenty-five!’
‘Thanks,’ I say, smiling. I walk home feeling like I’ve had the spiritual equivalent of electric shock therapy—I even forgot to say goodbye to Frankie.
When I get there I’m off in every direction—mentally and physically. By the end of the evening I have cooked, I have cleaned and I have reflected on Situation Frankie from every angle. The conclusion: I am officially more confused than I have ever been.
I sit on the bus, I drink coffee, I work, I run on the treadmill, I go to meetings, I lie in bed, I sit at my desk, I use my computer, I watch TV, I walk along the street, I chat … I do all the things I do and every so often a little smirk appears on my face and if anyone is around and aware enough to catch it they ask, ‘What are you thinking about?’
‘Oh, nothing,’ I reply every time, not once sharing that it’s Frankie who curls the corners of my mouth with affection, girlish skittishness and a longing for our next interaction. And we have them. My life becomes a movie trailer of Frankie highlights. Everything else exists in the shadows.
The Monday after Yoghurtgate, Desmond needs counselling as he’s having trouble with his fiancée, Valeria. We all knew there was trouble in paradise when he stopped referring to her as ‘my beautiful bride-to-be’. I feel terrible when he walks away dissatisfied—I’m really off my life-advice game. I just can’t concentrate.
A week after, at one of our family lunches, I keep drifting off, thinking about Frankie and slipping into how I felt with his hand on my waist. I’m so awash with desire that waves of heat spring up like spot fires, taking over my body. In every conversation I’m in two minds: one on the words, the other on Frankie.
‘Fiona, what’s wrong with you? You keep blushing or flushing or something. It can’t be the menopause, you’re too young for that. It’s not in our genes to get it early,’ Catherine says in her way, thankfully not in front of anyone else.
Of course I tell her nothing.
I don’t even tell Jane. It’s not that I’m avoiding her, technically. I knew she’d probably be pleased to hear that desire had rapidly overtaken destiny, but I still haven’t been to the doctor like I promised and work has been so busy and she’s busy and that’s just the way life is sometimes, I guess. She seems fine in our texts and my Suparman disaster date had been fantastic for defrosting any autumn chill left in the air. We just both seem to have a lot going on.
And Stephanie, things aren’t good with her mum, so I only text her to see how she is and let her know I’m here if she needs me.
Before I know it, it’s over a month since Yoghurtgate. Even as time moves on, the thought of Frankie with his arm around my waist can give me goosebumps and make me swoony. Sometimes when I run to the bathroom or rush to the gym—the only times I have a moment to breathe, think or feel at work these days—I want to call just so I can hear him.
The couple of near-death experiences I have at the gym—so distracted that I nearly fly off the treadmill—are reminders that I should probably come back down to earth.
It’s not just Yoghurtgate. Over the next few weeks as we chat and become more familiar, he gets past my safety mode of deflection and humour. I lower the drawbridge that I don’t open for anyone, and he doesn’t even know it.
It’s not like I don’t still have a mini meltdown, lose the plot and also my ability to function around Frankie each and every time. Yet I find a strange comfort in being around him, more comfort than I’ve ever found in anything. It’s the way he says something so simple but so perfectly soothing or calming whenever I need to hear it. Like recently when I was feeling timid about going in because I thought they were about to close. He was there, doing his unforgivably sexy lean against the door, and he came out with, ‘You’re right, Fiona,’ with a softness that caught at my heart.
Sometimes the way he appears in front of me on the street like an apparition, the rest of the world swept away, makes me wonder if he’s even real.
This Frankie feeling is so many tiny things, from the conversations we have where my words tumble out as I tell him about the simple things of my life. It’s the considered questions he asks that are so inconsequential and ordinary that they conceal how much they truly matter.
It’s the way he laughs at my stupid asides, the way I’m all crazy nervous around him and the way the clumsiness this causes has become a joke between us. It’s also the fact that not even my clothes behave themselves in his proximity now and do crazy things like slipping off my shoulders. My feet turn into lead weights whenever I’m close to him, making it hard to leave. The world washes away when I look in his eyes. He doesn’t demand anything from me; I can come and go as I please.
I’m still one hundred per cent Urthboy’s ‘Crushing Hard’. Well, I would be if Retro FM would play it for me to serenade Frankie and that’s never going to happen. Not that I’d be likely to go singing to Frankie, least of all a song that would give the game away.
I’ve managed to clock up so many things on my mental list of Endearing Things About Frankie that I can no longer tally what they all are. Even the way he pretends not to look at my arse or down my shirt is appealing.
But some days I want to scream, ‘Frankie, you’re a fuckwit!’, thinking Jane’s original assessment is right. Like when I push the conversation too far or my words come out wrong, explaining rather than just letting it be, or Frankie’s tired and cranky days. There’s also a distance between us still and if I step too close, he recoils like a cobra preparing to strike.
Signs swirl around me in the manner of incense smoke at a temple on a windy day, even to the point of a sausage dog appearing at my feet when I walk down to PGGG.
There is all of this yet there is nothing!
Nothing happens!
‘Later’ doesn’t ever come to talk about the note and Yoghurtgate isn’t mentioned.
There’s an energetic elephant in the eggplants that neither of us want to name, and I don’t mean one in Lycra and legwarmers working out to Jane Fonda like Bev used to do. This elephant has ‘not free to be fully with me’ written all over it. Item ten gazillion and twenty on my What I Want and Need in my Next Male Love Relationship list requires exactly the opposite.
40
The first person I see when I walk into the nursing home is an old lady in the corner, tears washing her eye make-up into bruises that streak her face.
‘Don’t mind her, love,’ one of the other residents says, ‘she just sits there every day, waiting. Sometimes she cries, sometimes she doesn’t. She’s not having a good day today.’
I ignore the man and walk over to her. You can tell she was attractive once, with high cheekbones and cut-glass green eyes that have become clouded and dull. She’s mumbling something to herself. When I get close enough her fingers become claws that wrap around my forearm.
‘Where’s Frankie? Is he with you? I’ve been waiting for him so long.’
I kneel beside her and brush the wisps of grey hair that the carers haven’t managed to catch in her bun away from the crepe paper of her face. Wet
with tears, the hair sticks to my fingers, as though every part of her is trying to find something to cling to.
‘Not today,’ I tell her. ‘Maybe tomorrow.’
She whimpers like a wounded dog.
‘Definitely tomorrow. I remember now, he said definitely, one hundred per cent tomorrow, he’ll be here,’ I say because I can’t stand to see her like this.
Her eyes light up and her face loses twenty years.
I wake from the dream in a cold sweat. No dream analyst required to understand what that was about. Great Govinda, I couldn’t let it be my future.
‘What would you do if you didn’t consider anything or anyone else, Kismet?’ Lionel asks me when I tell him about the dream.
‘Oh, that’s easy. I’d study Mandarin in China.’
‘You seem very sure of that.’
‘I am. I’ve wanted to ever since I started learning it. I just haven’t got around to it.’
‘Sorry, I don’t quite understand. You’ve studied for years but never got yourself there?’
‘I’ve been but not to study. You know me, more tortoise than hare.’
Lionel nods in the way I’ve come to recognise as his way of saying, ‘It’s OK, that’s just you. You can’t un-be who you are. I’m here to help you know what’s you and what’s other people—to know yourself well enough to spot the difference, believe in yourself and find the courage to overcome what stops you.’
‘I’ve probably been all or nothing with that too, thinking that unless I do a full three-year degree, or even a year, it isn’t worth it. I know there are shorter intensives.’
‘That’s what I want you do to for your homework this week: research some courses you could do,’ Lionel says before he hugs me goodbye. I’m even more comfortable with Lionel hugging me now, he’s got a quirky, kind-grandpa way about him that I’ve grown quite fond of, even though he sometimes challenges me.
Over the next few days, the idea of studying in China starts to take root properly. Once again Lionel has really hit the nail on the head. I just had to be pushed. Obviously I need to be in Shanghai to land my perfect job. I can’t believe I hadn’t realised that for myself.