The Origin of Me

by Bernard Gallate

  ‘I know that now.’

  ‘You changed so much when you got together.’

  ‘It’s funny, because at the start he said he was attracted to my free spirit. But then pretty soon he started trying to change me and contain me. He used to tell me that I was “too much” but could never explain what he meant.’

  ‘Too interesting, too smart, too fun?’

  ‘I think probably too strange.’ Venn frowned.

  ‘Remember all the games you invented for us to play on Mackerel when we were younger, all the rituals you made up? Elliot made you think they were stupid and childish.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Venn peeled the fuzz off the peach and then ate it anyway.

  ‘Isn’t that defeating the purpose?’

  ‘I can’t stand eating the fruit covered in fuzz. Separately they’re fine. That’s probably a metaphor for something.’ She paused for a moment then turned to face me. ‘Elliot schmelliot,’ she said. ‘Why did Nicole break up with you? You’ve never really told me.’

  ‘She thought I was the embodiment of evil.’

  ‘Is that all?’ Venn laughed. She cut up the peach and gave me a slice. I was reminded of when Mum first returned to paid work. Venn used to prepare health snacks like almond and chia spread on apple slices for me after school, then would take me out catching crabs or exploring the bush with my dog Gus instead of making me do homework.

  ‘Aside from telling Dad about your change of direction, you hardly spoke to him at my birthday dinner,’ I said, to deflect from Nicole.

  ‘Do you blame me?’

  ‘I haven’t been able to bring that stuff up with him yet. Do you think things will ever return to normal?’

  ‘Lincoln, there is no normal and there probably never was. Things will eventually settle and improve, but they’ll never be the same. “Normal” is a construct anyway – like Valentine’s Day. Speaking of, I’ve thought of a little ceremony we could perform, something to prove to you that Elliot Grobecker failed to make me conform to his idea of normal. A Solemn Relinquishment.’

  Venn took a large sheet of origami paper and wrote NEED FOR ROMANTIC LOVE on the plain side, then instructed me to write whatever I thought I most needed or wished for in secret on another sheet. I wrote NEED FOR A FRIEND and WISH TO BE ANYBODY BUT ME. We folded our squares into little boats and took them down to the shore.

  ‘By solemnly relinquishing your need for something, you’ll be freed from the power it holds over you. And one day that very thing might return of its own accord.’

  ‘Reminds me of Pop Locke’s advice to cast your bread on the water.’

  ‘My inspiration comes from a variety of sources.’

  We launched our boats from the end of the jetty. A gentle offshore breeze blew them twenty metres out and left them bobbing merrily. Then the whiny roar of a speedboat split the air as it rounded the point and ploughed right through them.

  ‘Nothing solemn about that,’ Venn said.

  ‘Definitely won’t be returning.’

  I envied and admired Venn’s ability to attach significance or meaning to something one day then let go of it the next, while I tended to get stuck on things. She’d become intensely serious and seriously intense last year – understandable, given everything that had happened, but it was good to see her recovering her independence. I just hoped her decision to steer away from environmental law was what she really wanted.

  We walked home, and I joined Oscar the Burmese out on the deck to read My One Redeeming Affliction.

  Performing the role of a respectable lady in polite society held no appeal for a young woman of infinite capability like my mother. Not only had she been overlooked for the role of taxidermy assistant by her father, she was also forbidden from pursuing any form of paid work or formal study. Her prescribed lot was nurturing her younger brothers, Samuel and Arthur, in the sanctuary of the family home – a duty made insufferable by the jealousy her elder brother Frederick’s departure for England had aroused. Unwilling to continue practising the accomplishments of singing, dancing and deportment under her sharp-nosed governess, Esther secretly responded to a milliner’s advertisement for an assistant with taxidermy skills. Her knowledge of hat-making was negligible, but being the only applicant with the required ability to skin and stuff animals, she won the position. Walter, though perplexed by his daughter’s caprice, allowed her to accept the role, declaring it a ‘self-inflicted punishment commensurate with her defiance’.

  Coming from a good family won Esther no special attention from her employer, Madame Zora, who vacillated between extreme irritability and crippling shyness, the legacy of mercury poisoning from years working in a pelting factory. Suffering frequent tremors and dizzy spells, she relied heavily on her employees Henriette and Maude to cover for her. Both from humble beginnings, they’d endured unpaid apprenticeships for the sake of eventual remuneration and assumed the new girl, having no financial imperative, would be gone before Friday.

  But Esther was driven by a stubborn determination to prove her father wrong. Apart from the aching back and raw-boned fingers, she preferred labouring in the cramped and stuffy studio to the supposed reward of serving on the floor. There she found it galling when customers from her genteel suburb, on discovering her in a position of servitude, affected an air of superiority. Her most frequently recounted incident involved one particularly haughty neighbour, Mildred Babbington.

  The Vice President of the Hospital Spring Gala Organising Committee had ordered a hat for the event, which Esther had spent every night of the prior week constructing. A magnificently verdant study in the cycles of nature, it featured on one side a leaf-chewing caterpillar, a chrysalis suspended from a pink orchid and an iridescent blue-winged Ulysses butterfly. The other boasted a worm peeking from a crabapple beneath a swooping lark. Dipping the poor bird in molten silver had been the most irksome task for Esther, who considered it a distasteful indulgence.

  Mrs Babbington was delighted with the assemblage and spent fifteen minutes before the looking glass, gazing at the exotic garden sprouting from her head. Finally yielding the hat for boxing, she asked if Esther was attending the gala.

  ‘Unfortunately, circumstances prevent me,’ Esther said.

  ‘Come now. The Gardens are already in full bloom and all of Sydney’s most eligible men will be there.’ She paused. ‘Why the look of vexation? You’ve turned the colour of a plum.’

  A handsome moustached fellow on the other side of the window was stealing glances at Esther while feigning an interest in the display. It was my father’s third such appearance. Hoping to send him on his way before Mrs Babbington turned and caught sight of him, Esther said loudly, ‘My Aunt Harriet has insisted on introducing a Melburnian to me, and my father has forbidden me from any other social occasion until I comply.’

  Mrs Babbington clucked her tongue. ‘A peach not picked in due season will soon overripen and fall of its own accord.’

  The hat’s elaborate architecture was preventing it from fitting into the box, so Esther forced it down and gave the lid a decisive tap, causing Mrs Babbington to scowl. ‘One must treat Madame Zora’s work with the utmost delicacy,’ she said. The woman’s misattribution of the hat’s creator, and her comparison of Esther to rotting fruit, sparked a small angry flame in Esther’s chest. Wishing the woman gone, she tied the package with string instead of ribbon. Apropos of nothing save her penchant for gossip, Mildred Babbington said, ‘I understand that Althea Beauclare has been showing uncommon kindness to your family lately. The spinster’s charity must be a welcome relief to your father.’

  Esther was overcome with prickly heat, fiercer than a company of ants biting at her neck and sides. She glared at my father till he left, then, abandoning all concern for etiquette, scratched at her arms and neck, and tugged and twisted her corset to prevent further aggravation. Mrs Babbington, appalled by Esther’s lack of decorum, smacked the service bell repeatedly, demanding to see Madame Zora.

  ‘That won’t be possib
le,’ Esther said. ‘She’s taken ill.’

  Suffering a bout of anxiety, Zora Blatchford had taken refuge behind the two-way mirror and nothing had gone unnoticed. Her hands trembled as she scrawled a rebuke, inserted it into a wooden ball and set it on the cash railway. It rolled through to the other side, then down a switchback before dropping onto a red velvet cushion in a basket.

  ‘Troublesome thing,’ Esther said, making a performance of unscrewing the two halves. She turned her back on the customer to read the scrawled message:

  Insolence will not be tolerated!

  Venn came out and caught me reading the end of the passage aloud to Oscar. ‘He’s very intelligent,’ she said, ‘but he only has a vocabulary of thirty-seven words. What’s the book about?’

  I told her about Esther’s lack of opportunity in the world, and said how much better it was for women today.

  ‘Yes, things have improved dramatically,’ Venn said. ‘But there’s still a long way to go.’ And then she delivered a short but assertive lecture on the perpetuation of rich, white, heteronormative male privilege.

  Neither Oscar nor I had a leg to stand on. We were two ostensibly straight guys sunbaking on a third-level deck with uninterrupted water views. And I was soaking in as much as I could before returning to the grinding city.

  Monday was the final squad session before the swimming carnival. I bought a new pair of goggles and returned the oldies to Pericles, who slung them into the bin. Swimming in lane five, free of cranial pressure and goggle fog, I managed to stay just far enough behind him to avoid accusations of drafting.

  At the end of training, Simmons rallied us for a pep talk. ‘Everybody who wants to win on Wednesday, raise your hands.’ Everybody did. ‘Keep them up if you have what it takes.’ Keenly aware that lowering my hand would demonstrate a conspicuous lack of esprit de corps, I stiffened my arm. ‘Look up there at the Roll of Champions,’ Simmons said, pointing to the wooden shield that I’d seen on the school tour. ‘If any of you break a Crestfield record on Wednesday, your name will be recorded alongside those legends.’

  My eyes were drawn back to Nigel Lethbridge, Junior Backstroke Champion in 1942. Simply reading the old boy’s name triggered the smell memory of his mothballed leather-elbowed jacket. Merely imagining the odour of camphor made me gag.

  During English, Mr Field read a passage from The Picture of Dorian Gray where Dorian studies the psychological effect of perfumes. Oscar Wilde wrote about ambergris, the whale poo Isa had mentioned, stirring passion, and the scent of musk troubling the mind. Aloes cure your melancholy and hovenia, the Japanese raisin tree, sends you mad.

  He then called on Isa to read a passage from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time about a guy who dips a madeleine, a small shell-shaped sponge cake, in his tea. The taste summons a flashback to happier days.

  ‘Well read,’ he said. ‘You seem familiar with the text.’

  ‘I read all seven volumes last year,’ Isa said.

  ‘Congratulations. That’s no small undertaking. Would anybody like to share their experience of an involuntary memory triggered by smell?’

  ‘The stuff in your hair,’ I said. ‘It’s Swiss Valley Hair Pomade™, sir.’ Mr Field touched his head. ‘It reminds me of going to the barber with my grandfather.’ The class laughed. It was supposed to be a compliment but it backfired, so I didn’t tell them the rest.

  I really missed having my hair cut with Pop Locke at Joe and Vic’s Continental Hairstylists. No matter what style I requested, Giuseppe always gave me a short back and sides, matching Vittorio snip-for-snip as he worked on Pop. The climax of the sacred ritual was the liberal application of Swiss Valley Hair Pomade™. Giuseppe never asked if I wanted it, and I never refused. Pop used to say it would’ve been like preventing Michelangelo from making the finishing touches to the Sistine Chapel. On completion, Pop Locke always purchased a mint-green jar from the pyramid stacked behind the counter, and emulated the pomade styling every day till our next visit. It smelt floral and minty and antiseptic all at once.

  In Biology, we explored triggered memory from a scientific perspective. Raymond, the lab assistant, arranged thirty plastic cups, each containing a different essence, on the benches running along the wall, with a small picture card in front of each. In turn we moved down the line, sniffing the cups while looking at their accompanying pictures. Each time I smelt something pleasant, like peppermint, strawberry or eucalyptus, I experienced a peculiar sensation: the nub tingled. But not every odour was pleasant. When Starkey sniffed the cup behind an image of a boat, he called out, ‘That’s fucking cat piss!’

  ‘Vulgar language will not be tolerated,’ Miss Keenan said. ‘Evan, take yourself down to The Labyrinth immediately. Sit there and have a think about your behaviour. Mr Jespersen will be waiting for you.’

  ‘This school fully sucks arse,’ Starkey said on the way out. Crestfield seems to be rigorously monitored and yet I’ve noticed that punishment here seems strangely lenient. When I smelt the cup that had caused Starkey’s outburst, it made the nub prickle and itch, and I realised that he was on the money – it was definitely cat piss.

  During Art, Ms Tarasek announced that our collaborative works were to be loosely themed around life in our local or school community, and would be exhibited in a show called YOU ARE HERE! She then played us a doco on French sculptor Camille Claudel, who wasn’t just Auguste Rodin’s pupil, and later his lover and collaborator, but was also a talented artist and innovator in her own right and had to fight for a place in an art world controlled by men. The doco featured a recurring photo of Camille taken when she was nineteen. Aside from the dark hair falling on her face, she bore a striking resemblance to Isa Mountwinter. At the part where Camille separated from Rodin to establish her individuality, I noticed Isa fidgeting with her pencil. When we heard of Camille becoming overwhelmed with paranoia and destroying her artworks, Isa snapped the pencil in half. And at the point where Camille was committed to a mental asylum and prevented from receiving letters from anyone except her brother, Isa herself looked to be at breaking point.

  Tonight at home, still unable to broach the Maëlle incident with Dad but not wanting to continue living in self-imposed isolation, I initiated a conversation with him about the psychology of smell. Dad told me that neural marketing was becoming a large part of his business at The BrandCanyon, and the ‘first-sniff principle’ was key to its success.

  ‘We’ve partnered with Tschoppe Shibata, who’ve created a gaming console with scent pods,’ he said. ‘Imagine a game designed around a female hero who’s beautiful, strong and confident. One of our clients, say a clothing company, pay for their signature scent to be associated with that character. During game play, the signature scent is released whenever she performs well. Sometime later in real life, the player walks into a clothing store equipped with scent diffusers that release an identical aroma. The customer will experience the same emotion they felt playing the game, increasing the levels of serotonin and oxytocin in their brain. Their dwell-time will be extended, increasing the likelihood of purchase.’

  ‘It’s a brave new world,’ I said, getting up from the table. I went to fetch my wallet from my satchel then came back through the dining room.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Coles.’ I wanted to find out if they stocked Swiss Valley Hair Pomade™, and hoped that a sniff would instantly transport me back to the barbershop with Pop.

  Scoping out the haircare section, I saw an old lady dressed in a pink heart-patterned skirt with a pink blouse and pink ribbons in her pink plaited hair, the same shade as Venn’s, reaching for a packet of dye. She even smelt pink – like a musk stick. She turned to me and said, ‘Excuse me young man, could you reach the L’Oréal box up there for me, the pink one?’ Her lipstick had strayed well beyond the creases of her lips, and two distinct circles of blush highlighted the lack of flesh remaining on her cheekbones. I grabbed a box of the L’Oréal Dirty Pink. ‘You’re a true gentleman,’ she
said as I handed her the box. ‘Your mother must be very proud of you.’

  I left without finding the Swiss Valley.

  Lying in bed tonight, I thought about how much effort the Pink Lady must put into maintaining her look. When you’re young like Venn, it’s called individuality. But when you’re old, the refusal to slip into elastic-sided obscurity – to fade away without screaming that you want to keep dancing forever on this Earth – is assumed to be madness. Camille Claudel; Raina Bramble, the Blue Lady; the Pink Lady; Loose Pants Lenny; and the old junkyard guy.

  An idea for the collaborative assignment I was working on with Isa began swirling in my head, but I needed a good sleep before the carnival. Just as I was about to drop off, Homunculus said, ‘Tomorrow you stand virtually naked before the entire school. Perhaps you want to check what’s been going on down the back? Ignoring it won’t make it go away.’

  I crawled out of bed and assessed my backside in the main bathroom’s full-length mirror. The nub had neither shrunk nor grown, which gave me mild relief, until I noticed eleven dark hairs had sprouted between my shoulderblades.

  Walking through The Hive’s glass doors exhorting me to excel, I was smacked with the ammonial funk of superchlorination, evidence that today would be all swimming and no carnival. Every student was expected to enter at least one event unless they’d lodged an exemption request on The Owlet and had it approved by Simmons, who believes a lack of enthusiasm for swimming is un-Austraaayan. Competing in the carnival had nothing to do with some misguided notion of patriotism for students like Amber Briggs and Tibor Mintz who, occupying opposite ends of the weight spectrum and seats on the back bleacher, probably had no desire to walk past the rest of the school in a wet swimming costume. Having an extra feature of my own to conceal, I could fully empathise.

  Conversely, Nads and Mullows were all about maximum exposure. They’d entered as many events as they could manage. Nads peeled off his shirt and began stretching to impress his imaginary fan club. The striations in his deltoids heightened my earlier suspicion that he was on the juice. His shoulders weren’t just big – they were grooved and ridged with tightly strung fibres. Mullows was more modest. Though he was equally ripped and taller than Nads, his skin was milky white, and covered with hundreds of freckles and a smattering of moles. Runty in comparison, Starkey was taking a shot of them with his phone, and noticed Pericles and me walking past in the background.