“G’day, mate. How’s it hangin’?” asks Alex.
“Come si, Komsomol.”
They laugh uproariously. She doesn’t get the joke.
“Sergei, meet my new friend, Claire.”
“Oh, gosh, the phone call. The blind singer and his, um, stool,” she says, blushing.
Instead of chastising her, the pair hoots with laughter. “You had a lot on your mind last night, Claire,” says Alex.
“So, things hangin’ good with you?” Serge says, inclining his head Claire’s way.
“Sorry to disappoint you, Serge. Claire is my brother’s fiancée.”
Must I be your brother’s fiancée forever? Claire wonders. What if it’s a mistake?
“Too bad luck. My love life rubbish also. Natalya with bonzer bazookas want to be friend.”
Alex shakes his head sadly.
“A Macintosh is coming, just by way,” says Serge.
“Real deal?”
“You never pick difference.”
Claire wonders whether Alex collects old raincoats. She’s a stranger in her own land while Alex moves easily between worlds. “My chest?” she asks, to get things moving.
“No problem with your chest. Aleksandr, you marry this girl. She is gold. Too good for Clive.”
“She’s taken,” says Alex testily. “Listen, we need a chest of drawers for Claire’s drawers.”
Serge removes his feet from the desk and throws his cigarette stub into the bin. He stands and a tidal wave of displaced flesh ripples southwards. “Not much in. Just cheap pine crap.”
“Find something under twenty bucks. Untreated. I’ll finish it.”
Serge leads them to a workshop.
“That one, do you?” Alex asks Claire. “Ten bucks, Serge?” he asks, when she nods.
“Fifteen.” Sergei sighs.
Claire fumbles in her purse.
“No this is on me love, you buy us a cappuccino. Now let’s see that stool.”
Chapter 16
Facial
Claire’s moved her undies to the chest of drawers. She and Clive are having their first evening together alone. Together or alone? Only a pedant would ask.
She’s eager to start living her new life but unsure how to fulfil her part of the bargain.
If Clive pays for the roof over her head, she’ll be cook and cleaner. She doesn’t have a big culinary repertoire. Can’t even get them fish and chips tonight. All her savings went into the knee-high boots – well, not into them literally – but they were leather, bought to impress. “An investment in your future,” Mary said.
Apparently, the boots did the trick. She’s established a beachhead in Clive’s life. There’s 17 dollars to last until Thursday. She’s not one to let her funds run low. If Clive knew, he’d think her profligate. She’ll walk to St V’s all week to save on fares.
Italian boots! Ridiculous! Claire berates herself; she usually spins her salary into fine strong filaments. Makes it last. The boots were her downfall. In the dark of Clive’s bedroom, no one would’ve guessed they were leather, let alone Italian. Would Clive want a pair of boots moving in with him or a warm thrifty sexy woman who can cook…a bit?
Claire empties out the fridge, stocktaking. There are eggs, cheese, bacon and bread from breakfast. Unfinished Asian food is in plastic containers: old takeaways looking so set and lacquered, they remind her of the plaster of Paris dishes at the entrance to Asian restaurants.
She junks them without the benefit of a sniff test. They’ll have a cheese omelette tonight.
Tomorrow she’ll buy an AWW cookbook for all the dinner parties they’ll have.
Later, Claire learns Clive hasn’t any friends, just people he knows from work; people he drinks with at Xmas parties; women he dates Saturdays. His Melbourne life is bleaker than hers, but she doesn’t know this yet.
Claire irons her uniform for work. She squeezes her belongings into Clive’s wardrobe, folds her civvies in the chest of drawers, so he won’t feel crowded.
Is she being overly polite? Maybe. But she wants this…whatever it is to work. Clive almost matches her mental template of the man she wants to love. She reminds herself they have medicine in common.
She’s shoehorning herself, effortfully, into his life. There’s no Claire-shaped space for her to inhabit yet. Alex has helped more than any brother would. She sighs. She’ll find good crockery, organise a romantic nosh-up mit candle.
In the bathroom, she shelves her cosmetics. The eyes looking back at her are raccoon eyes!
Her normally translucent skin looks pasty.
Self-maintenance is over-due. A good soak in the rust-stained bath will be relaxing, and then she’ll have time to pamper herself before Clive’s due home.
She washes and conditions her hair to tame the frizz and applies an egg-white facial from the Australian Women’s Weekly, filched from the staffroom bin just last week. She never buys magazines down the celebrity swill end of journalism.
An article opened her eyes to unpalatable facts about womanhood. Good looks don’t last, it said. Sure, she knew that already, subliminally. The entire advertising industry is based on this assumption. Without a regimen of defoliation, steam, anti-rides ointment, moisturiser, women become aesthetically offensive.
Her gorgeous fading mother should have alerted her to the unuttered truth of femaledom.
Even the best favoured won’t be adored once the apples fade from their cheeks. They may be liked and respected but rarely loved. Her mum ought to have left her a note upon turning 13 saying: U2 LB UGLY 2.
She’d have ignored the warning back then but a tiny seed might have germinated, saving her from vanity. But who’d want to be loved by someone so superficial anyway? Aren’t plain men loved?
Uncle Tom, a jovial ex-VFL player is paunchy with age, all jowls and broken capillaries, yet Aunty Jane loves him as much as ever.
Today she’s ready to heed the spectre of old-womanhood hidden within her. Is she fearful of losing her fiancé before their engagement’s one-day old? Yes. He’s chosen her for her face and not her finer traits. Is he worth pleasing? Maybe. If she wants a normal life with babies in the mix, she may have to keep her side of the bargain.
Her facial accomplished, she lies under Clive’s famous red quilt using her upturned palms as claws to keep her mucky face from spoiling the bedding. She wills herself expressionless to preserve her egg-white glaze. It’s hard to be desperate and bland!
The front door opens and Clive calls: “Honey, it’s me. Just dropping off my work things, I’ll nick down to the Royal to pick up some booze. Beer? Wine? Spirits?”
Yesh! Please don’t open the bedroom door, she prays, wishing she still believed in prayer. “Miine,” she calls through horizontal lips.
“I’ll get us a video too while I’m out and a Tex Mex. You like the extra hot?”
“Mm,” she says. It comes out as a growl. The door slams shut. At least he won’t see her looking like a pav but he doesn’t say: “I love you, Claire,” the way men do in movies.
She pushes off the quilt, whisks off the cucumber eye patches and eats the evidence, runs to the bathroom and scrubs at her face. The egg has dried hard. There’s a spray-on cream in the fridge. It may act as a solvent. She spreads it on her face just as Clive returns with provisions.
“God Lord! Is this a vision I see before me? A fruit-free pavlova?”
“Ease onn dease ee.”
“Do you always rhyme in white-face? It’s sweet.”
Claire cries.
“Oh, mon ange, you poor little thing. Are you pie-eyed over me?” He holds her at arms-length to save his jacket.
“Caa tallg.”
“Well, if you could talk, what would you say?”
“Oii faffe will raaack.”
“Sorry, I can’t talk pavlova,” says Clive. “Here’s a post-it. A pen.”
I TALK! FACE CRACK! Claire writes.
“I thought I’d bought a flawless beauty. I’ll have to activate
your warranty toot sweet!”
“NO FUNNY 2 TRU.”
“Darling, I love you whatever your flavour.”
“WIP FACE QIK!”
“You mean quickly. I abhor the Americanisation of the language.”
“I hate you, you pretentious jerk!” she says.
“Oops, now you have cracked it.” Clive finds a roll of kitchen paper. Tenderly, he lifts her chin towards the light from the naked light bulb illuminating the kitchen. He removes most of the cream. “Now off to the bathroom, Madam Butterfly. Use my shaving cream. Leave it on for one minute. Then steam off the residue. You’ll be lovely in the morning.”
“You want me lovely. Shiiit!”
“Don’t swear. An’ it’s lovely you’ll be, me dairlin’.”
Chapter 17
Post Facial
Claire has been applying unguents to impress her fiancé with her natural beauty when he comes home early? Damn!
Her egg white and whipped cream facial reminds him of 1, his mother’s doughy face, and 2, a pav. He banishes her to the bathroom to clean up before presenting herself fresh-faced in the kitchen all the better to re-enact their tender homecoming scene.
Claire doesn’t believe in any of that kitchen goddess nonsense, but she slinks – at least she hopes she’s slinking; if she doesn’t slink tonight, she never will – into the kitchen, wearing a loose-knit chemise that’s tightly belted at the waist plus her Italian boots. Having allowed her hair to fall loose and fluffy to her shoulders, she feels desirable. Clive’s not in the kitchen. Nor is he in the lounge-room where there’s no wine, nor candles, nor potpourri.
Disappointed, she struts to the dining room to find him on a recliner nursing a Scotch – nursing it literally – it’s being grasped by the pointy bit of his chin that’s resting on his collarbone while he turns through The Age. He’s dextrous in swapping one body part for another.
Claire imagines him suturing a client with his knee-crook. The warped domesticity of this scene evokes a car-wreck, or whack in the face with a bunch of scotch thistles. But she’s relentless.
She sneaks up on him and wraps her arms around her man.
“What the f…!”
“How was your day, Hon?” Claire asks, determined to get her lines said before her sacking.
Clive retrieves his glass from under his chin, takes a deep draught and snorts. “A day’s a day. It went, thank Christ!”
“Sorry, Clive, I don’t know how I should be in a marriage.”
“Oh, Claire. Lose your script. And tomorrow turn yourself into toad in the hole. We’ll have the laughs and dinner too.”
“Clive, I want to be a proper wife.”
“Who wants a proper wife?” he says, pinching her bottom. “You’re only on probation,” he says, wagging his finger at her. When she fails to laugh, he relents. “Surely you Catholic girls know how a marriage goes.”
“A marriage doesn’t ‘go’ like a car on automatic. It needs coaxing.” Claire knows she’s sounding hysterical here. Thank God Alex is out tonight and not witnessing this, she thinks.
“In my experience, you marry, then get on with it.”
“What’s your experience?”
“Watched the poor suckers from med school who married early.”
“‘Poor suckers’?”
“The couples who don’t fuss over everything get by,” he says.
“I don’t want to get by. I want love romance. Ecstasy!”
"Good Lord! Ecstasy? That’s asking a lot. Take my olds – no ecstasy but they’re happy antagonists.
“They quarrel. But they own property in common; they’ve something worth fighting about; they hold different views on integrity, fairness and politics. But they jog along together well enough. Sex is the key. Whenever they hate each other with a passion, they tear at each other’s clothes.”
“You know about your parents’ love life?”
"They’re in a draughty old tower room, and we kids would hear shouting and throwing of silver-backed hairbrushes, then after a while the chairs on the Titanic moved about.
“‘Harkest thou, Clive, two separate entities are about to merge,’ Alex would say. Things would go quiet for a bit, then the tower room would rock like a yacht in a hurricane. Risky doing it up there like bull elephants mating. Alex and I used to lie below, stifling laughter and praying the ceiling wouldn’t fall in. We bet our pocket money on the energy and duration of the encounter. Stormy nights were best. Maybe danger added something.”
“Why were they shifting furniture?”
“Twin beds. Ma wanted us to believe their sex life was over. Their beds had mini handcuffs to bind the legs together when needed. Dada made them, said they were to catch tiny thieves.”
“Good story. Am I supposed to fight with you?”
“No, Claire, my parents’ case is probably unique. But marriage should come naturally.”
“Like language acquisition, loving should be effortless.” He snakes his arm around her waist.
“Just like hugging is.”
“Needing someone to love is universal,” he goes on. “I’ve been so lonely lately.”
Claire is shocked by Clive’s honesty. It’s at odds with how she’d seen him. Alpha male. Proud. Unfailingly capable. How many Australian blokes let their neediness show?
“I love your honesty,” she says. Any doubts about marrying a desperate man she isn’t going to dwell upon.
“You’re perfect, Claire.”
“Shouldn’t we just live together for a while?”
“No, Claire. Last night I knew it was time to give in, settle down.”
Is marriage giving in? Claire wonders. It sounds as if you’re accepting failure. “Why me?” she asks, disingenuously. What a fraud I am, she thinks, to beg for a compliment.
“You got me there,” is Clive’s immediate reply. Claire’s shocked, but after this stumble, he finds his lines. “You’re the one; I like you. Enormously. I saved your life. We talked, bonked.”
“I hate puerile cartoon words like bonk; it sounds like cheap bedsprings pinging. It’s not a word for something meaningful.”
“Whoo!” Now Clive holds his ears, wiggles his fingers at her and pokes out his tongue. “Meaningful?”
“Yes! Sex is more than bedsprings bouncing up and down. Women are more than cars that handle well…”
“Ooh, you terrifying feminist, you!” He laughs delightedly and pinches her cheek.
“Shack-up sounds like we’re sheltering in a hut until the weather turns,” she cries.
He stares at her, puzzled.
“Sorry,” she says. “I’m pathetic.”
“No, you’re perfect! So are we. We two snuggling in our cosy cave. Better than establishing a joint domicile.”
“You didn’t ask me how it went with Suz,” she says, aggrieved.
He shrugs. “No need. You went. Suz didn’t went.”
“You heartless bugger!” she pummels him with her fists.
He folds his arms against his face as if cowering from her. “Okay, what more do I need to know on this subject?”
“My life isn’t a subject. You could have pretended to care.”
“You want me insincere? God forgive me for not lying.”
“Okay, since you’re desperate to know, Suz didn’t die of heartbreak. She’s dating Alex.”
“Great! Where is he?”
“Out. Clive, can we eat before I die of malnutrition?”
“Of course, honey,” he says, and kisses her hand.
“I’ll make that omelette.”
The telephone trills.
“Holy shit! Hardly poured my first Scotch before Mater’s on the blower. She can sense my desperation for a drink way down in Warrnambool.” He reaches down and rips the cord from its socket. “That’ll fix her. She triggers pre-emptive guilt in me!”
Claire wonders what pre-emptive guilt is. She replaces the jack in its socket. Immediately, the phone rings. “Answer it, Claire, tell Ma to go
away and die.”
Claire lifts the handset. “Helloo?”
“Are you Claive’s new cleaning lady?”
“I’m Claire, a friend.”
“Ay haven’t heard of you beef whore.”
“Aym a niyew friend,” Claire says, yielding to Ma’s posh accent. “Here’s Claive.”
Clive takes the handset. “Bonsoir, Maman!” he says.
From what Claire can hear, the olds are entertaining. Clive waves her over so she can share the handset. A Scrabble tournament is underway. The guests are getting supper for their hosts. How odd! Claire thinks.
“Mama asks if they should cheat a little – since they’re playing for real money and they’ve a stinker of a butcher’s bill and Gwen and Len are rich as Croesus. A win with ‘synchronicity’ could keep them in food for a week,” he tells her his hand covering the mouthpiece.
“But you won’t have enough tiles,” says Clive, even before mentioning that cheating’s not on.
Apparently, his mama will nick the extra tiles from the pile. Once she’s enjoying her cream cake, Gwen won’t notice. They’ll exploit Len’s three-word score ‘city’.
Clive’s hackles rise. “Treat your friends well or you’ll lose them, you decadent squattocrats.”
Chapter 18
Cooking
“How come you forgot the food but not the grog?” asks Claire.
Clive gives her a mock-rueful look. “I went to the bottle shop first. Nothing left for food.”
His face droops in a parody of remorse. But his eyes twinkle. “Bankcard’s maxed out – the Porsche.” He shrugs sheepishly.
Claire searches the cupboards once more as if her diligence may yet unearth something but as she’d feared, finds nothing but the breakfast eggs, an antique Rosella sauce bottle and parmesan. “Okay,” she says. “We’ll have omelette. What do you eat normally?”
“I eat normally, normally,” he says. “Take-aways. Tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce.”
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