by Les Zig
‘Didn’t I tell you to get fucked last week?’
‘You certainly did, Mr Weekes. I’m calling on behalf—’
‘Then get fucked.’
I stop, wait for the phone to go dead. It doesn’t. Weekes’s breath is even on the other end.
‘Well?’ he says.
‘Yes?’
‘Have you gotten fucked?’
‘Literally or figuratively?’ I ask with blissful mindlessness.
‘What?’
‘Would you like me to get fucked literally or figuratively?’
‘Don’t get smart with me.’
‘I am asking a question, sir.’ My tone remains polite, professional.
‘Fuck your question.’
‘Literally or figuratively?’
‘You fucking prick.’
‘I try my best, sir,’ I say.
‘Get fucked every which way, okay?’
‘Okay, I will certainly get on that. Now, Mr Weekes, if I could have a minute or two—’
‘No. Get fucked!’ Weekes hangs up.
I spin a rapid three-hundred-and-sixty degrees, and then slower, idling, taking in everybody else, seeing Ronnie and Sam, and hearing every individual voice as it contributes to the collective of the same spiel being fired in every manner possible. It’s not a cacophony. It’s a collective. I push up my sleeves. Boyd remains in the corner, arms folded across his chest, watching me. I wave once to him, pull myself back in towards my desk, and hit my next call.
The morning whizzes by, and more successfully than any other morning I’ve had. I coax reluctant targets, disarm unsuspecting ones, and even convince several who are adamant they’re not interested in giving money. It’s horrible—I know that as I do it, even if I’m raising money for a good cause (and I don’t presume to question that all the money’s going where it’s intended)—but there’s also satisfaction in not just sitting here, counting down the hours.
When lunch comes around, I take the first elevator to the ground floor, run to Charisma’s, and sit in my usual booth. Nicole the waitress is surly as ever when I tell her I’m waiting for somebody. But 12.15 ticks over to 12.30. I message Julie, but get nothing, so ring her, and get her voicemail. At 12.45, I message her again, at 12.55 I ring, and at 1.00 I have no choice but to return to work, sure that’s it—I was a blip in Julie’s life, and she’s decided I’m too much trouble.
Boyd’s in the corner, his gaze fixed on me as I hurry to my cubicle. I hold up my hand by way of apology, but his face is unflinching. I sit down and get back to work, but feel his eyes on my back. It’s not until I’ve made a couple of calls that I’m game to check if he’s still in the corner—he’s not. I lift myself in my chair to peer over the cubicle walls so I can see into his office. He’s not there either. A hand falls on my shoulder. I jump, flop back into my seat.
‘Everything okay, August?’
The voice is deep but polite, the syllables and enunciation crisp, like some Shakespearian stage actor. It’s Boyd. He smiles, genuinely smiles, bereft of any authority or malice you might expect from a boss.
‘I’m fine,’ I say.
Boyd pats my back. ‘Okay. You seem a little out there.’
‘No, no, I was a bit worried about getting back late from lunch.’ My phone buzzes in my pocket.
‘Yes. It’s all right. Just don’t make a habit of it.’
‘Of course.’
Boyd pats my back again. ‘Probably best I leave you to it.’
As soon as he’s gone, I take my phone from my pocket—it’s a message from Julie: Sorry! Sorry! Sorry! Got held up at work. SO SORRY!
I send back a message, tell her it’s okay as all the tension seeps from my body. She answers, Tomorrow, 12.15?
Sure.
The rest of the afternoon disappears back into the murk of making calls, the anticipation that fuelled my morning gone.
On the train ride home, I remain pensive. The Kmart rushes by, followed by the Carpet Duke that signals I should get up. Nothing’s perfect. That’s what I think as I head to the doors. Especially when you meet somebody. Once the lustre fades, you need something solid—something real—to ground you, to bond you, to hold you together, because when you see your partner at their pettiest, at their worst, at their ugliest, those feelings can change. That’s why couples break up. I want to see Julie as perfect—and not because I need her to be perfect. It’s something else that nags at me, but which I can’t pinpoint.
Back home, I sit with a beer, my feet up on the coffee table by the laptop, with no pretence that I’m going to write. I grab the cards, scatter them across the coffee table but there’s no order in what I’m seeing, no logic that my imagination can make sense of, so I begin my customary prowl, until my eyes are drawn to the dog-eared picture of Lisa and Bobby that sits on the counter, by the picture of Mum and Dad. Ronnie’s right. I should get rid of it. I grab it between both hands, prepared to rip it—but I can’t. My phone rings, telling me what time it is.
‘Hey, Gen.’ I sit back on the couch, dropping the photo among the cards.
‘What’re you up to?’ Gen asks. ‘You writing?’
‘I wish.’
‘What’s up?’
‘Nothing,’ I say, deciding Gen doesn’t need to hear every one of my little disappointments. ‘Just struggling to get this story going.’
‘It’ll come. But Pat and I were thinking—we should do dinner.’
‘We?’
‘All of us—Pat, me, you, Julie.’
‘Isn’t that a little quick?’
‘Is it?’
‘You know it is.’
‘Okay, fair enough, but keep it in mind—we are going to do dinner, right?’
I think about taking Julie to a family dinner. I didn’t introduce Lisa to Gen for a month, because I knew they’d clash. Julie’s different, although I still get the sense that Gen wants to screen her.
‘Right?’ Gen says.
‘We’ll do it, but not right away.’
‘Okay—but it’s on the radar.’
There’s none of the buoyancy during work in the morning, just tension in my shoulders that sends a cramp into my midriff. Boyd stands in the corner watching—he watches everybody, but I constantly feel his eyes on me. Come the lunch break, I’m out of the building and in my booth at Charisma’s. Nicole’s immediately by my side.
‘Ordering something today?’ she asks. ‘Or just occupying the booth again?’
‘I’m waiting for somebody.’
‘Hope they don’t stand you up again.’
Nicole scuttles off and I take my phone out and place it on the table. At 12.20, the dread arises that the same thing’s going to happen again. At 12.40, I wonder if she’s simply somebody who’s serially late. At 12.45, my mindset changes, and it’s no longer about her being serially late, but using no-shows as a means of breaking up. At 12.50, I’m ready to slink out, even if it means doing so under the smug glare of Nicole, who’s been watching me intermittently. Maybe it’s a sign I’m just not ready for a relationship. But at 12.54, Julie hurries in, flustered, hair dishevelled, and sweat gleaming on her forehead. We exchange a kiss, and she sits opposite me.
‘I’m so sorry—again,’ she says. ‘Shit! How long have you got?’
‘About five minutes.’
‘And you haven’t eaten either, have you?’
‘No, but it’s okay—I was thinking of dieting.’
‘Were you?’
‘Not really.’
‘Don—the professor I’m a PA for—has had a book published. He’s running me around organising the launch in a couple of weeks. I’ll make it up to you tonight? How about I bring pizza around?’
I take a deep breath, and want to exhale to release the tension, but it bottles up inside me. I’ve made too much of this. She was late. That’s all. People are late. Who knows why? And that’s when it hits me. It’s not about her being late, but wondering what she’s doing when she’s not with me. Like with Lisa.
‘You mad at me?’ Julie asks.
‘No, not at all.’
Julie closes her hands on mine. ‘Sure?’
I pause to check that I’m being truthful and not just telling her what she wants to hear. But I’m not peeved. I’m glad she’s here, holding my hands. If that’s all she could ever do with me, it would still be enough.
‘Everything’s good,’ I say. ‘I had pizza on Sunday night, though.’
‘Anything you don’t like?’
‘Nothing I can think of.’
‘Anything you love?’
‘Tomatoes—and lots of them.’
Julie presses her hands together and points her index fingers at me. ‘No you don’t.’
‘You’re right. Surprise me.’ I check the time on my phone. ‘I should get going.’
At the counter, Julie orders a couple of focaccias—me waiting impatiently behind her, incessantly checking the time on my phone. The barista—the European—makes a show of wrapping the focaccias, like he’s mixing cocktails. Julie rolls her eyes. The barista twirls the focaccias, and pushes them across the counter.
‘I want to apologise,’ he says, as he takes the twenty-dollar note Julie thrusts at him.
‘For …?’
‘I called you when I heard your phone number. I shouldn’t have done that.’
‘It’s okay.’ Julie’s tone is flat.
‘I should’ve asked you face to face.’
Julie’s face grows stony. The barista holds out the change, like he’s going to deposit it in her hand. Then he pulls it back.
‘So, how about it?’ he says. ‘How about we get together?’
‘I’m with somebody.’ Julie’s voice has an edge that’s challenging.
‘So?’
‘Hey,’ I say, and take a step forward, the anger from earlier fuelling my bravado. The barista frowns, but Julie snatches her change from his hand, locks an arm around mine, and drags me from Charisma’s.
‘The nerve of that guy,’ I say, as Julie hurries me back to work.
‘Forget it.’
‘How can I? Right in front of me!’
‘He’s a sleaze. Don’t worry about it.’
‘How can I not worry about it?’
‘One, because I’m used to it. And two, because if there’s something I’ve learned in life, it’s that some people are pricks. You can get angry, or you can forget them.’
We reach my building, and I keep looking back towards Charisma’s. I don’t want to worry, but given everything that’s happened, it’s hard not to.
Julie bookends her hands around my face, rises on her toes, and kisses me soundly on the lips. ‘It’s okay,’ she says. ‘Okay?’
I don’t know what to say.
‘Okay?’
I nod once and Julie kisses me again, then hugs me. She thrusts one of the focaccias into my hands.
‘Tonight,’ she says and starts off.
‘When?’ I ask.
She holds out her arms and spins; her dress whirls with a flourish. ‘Seven?’ she says.
‘Sure.’
She disappears into the lunchtime crowd.
Us
13
When I get home, I shower, run some crap through my hair and try to make something of its dishevelment, then consider whether I should trim the scraggly growth that’s become my beard. In the end, I judge myself in the steamed mirror, like a teenager eager to impress.
In the lounge, I sit on the couch and check my phone. There’s a missed call from Gen—of course. I call her back, tell her I was in the shower.
‘You’re getting a little difficult to reach,’ she says.
‘Sorry—’
‘What’re you doing taking a shower now?’ she says.
‘Julie’s coming over for dinner.’
‘Oh.’ I imagine Gen smiling, maybe even whispering to Pat what’s happening; if she doesn’t now, she’ll definitely tell Pat once we’ve hung up. ‘What about our dinner? Have you asked her?’
‘Not yet—’
‘August.’
‘Okay, okay.’
‘I better let you go then.’
‘Thanks.’
I rest my phone on the coffee table among the scattered cards, by the dog-eared picture of Lisa and Bobby—something I still haven’t ditched. I think it’s because of Bobby—the naivety and trust and love beaming in his eyes, although I doubt he remembers the picture being taken. Give him a few years and he definitely won’t remember it being taken, other than for the evidence of its existence. It’s not like Lisa’s going to show him a copy—if she’s kept a copy for herself. I should relocate the picture, but it’s become a landmark on the coffee table, an anchor to the past I’m not ready to haul up.
This is silly. I pick up the picture, my eyes drawn to the way the dog-ear cuts across Lisa’s neck, like a guillotine. I shudder, try to push the thought from my head, but guilt surges through me. I gently pry open the dog-ear. My chest tightens until my breath constricts. The whole room sways to one side, but I don’t let it stop me.
Lisa smiles at me.
She smiles.
Smiles.
I try to draw something positive from the smile—happiness, love, warmth, joy, pride, passion, lust. Was it ever there? Did I lose it? Wasn’t I enough? Always the same questions, spiralling into that same obsessive uncertainty. But she looks happy. It wasn’t a facade—not entirely. It couldn’t have been. Is that what claws at me?
What I have with Julie feels right. Even though it hasn’t been long, I feel comfortable with her—or maybe it’s that she makes me feel comfortable. From that first dinner we had—despite my nervousness, despite my self-consciousness about saying stupid things, despite me just being the idiot I am—she’s clicked with me, and I’ve clicked with her. Did I ever feel that with Lisa? Or was it something that dissipated so gradually that I never noticed it going?
A knock at the door startles me. I drop the photo onto the cards, check the time on my phone—6.52—and hurry to answer the door. Julie bounces on my doorstep, a leather satchel under one arm, a bag that reeks of barbecue sauce swinging from the other.
‘You’re early. Well, for you.’
‘Never tell a woman she’s running late. Just accept you’re privileged whatever the time.’
‘Oh, is that the case? And what about when you’re early?’
‘Admire it as a natural phenomenon, like the aurora borealis.’
Julie kisses me, then sweeps past me and rests her leather satchel on the armrest of the couch. She pushes the cards away so they’re heaped around one side of the laptop and unpacks from her bag a couple of aluminium boxes with cardboard tops. Then it’s a couple of plastic containers. She pulls the lid off one. The crown of a tomato sits triumphantly on top. She pulls the lid off the other, picks at a sheaf of lettuce, only to see the bulbous back of another tomato.
‘I told them no tomato!’ she says. ‘I hate that they get it wrong when you’re expressly clear about what you want.’
‘Want a drink?’
‘Sure.’
As I grab beers from the fridge, she fetches a couple of knives and forks from one of the kitchenette drawers. She pulls the cardboard tops off the aluminium boxes. In each sit two racks of ribs coated in barbecue sauce surrounded by a mound of thick-cut chips. We return to the lounge and sit on the floor, on opposite sides of the coffee table.
‘Hopefully, it’s still hot,’ she says.
The chips are soggy, but the ribs are sumptuous and melt off the bone, washed in a rich barbecue sauce that would make cardboard taste good.
‘They’re better when you get them in the restaurant—when they come straight to the table and they’re still so hot you can barely pick them up and steam lifts from the sauce. We should go there one day. It’s this little place not far from where I live.’
‘That would be great.’
We continue to eat and make small talk. Julie tells me—with considerable pride—th
at she’s going to start interning at the city hospital as part of her study.
‘I hope they keep my weekends free, so I can keep visiting my aunt.’ Julie tears the meat from the last of her ribs. The sauce smudges across her right cheek.
‘How has she been?’ I get up and fetch some napkins from the kitchen.
‘Always the same—I don’t know if that’s a blessing or a curse. My take on it changes from day to day, depending on how I’m feeling.’
I lean towards Julie with a napkin. ‘You’ve got something there.’
Julie thrusts her face towards me, and I wipe the sauce away.
‘I have this fantasy that one day I’ll get to the home and Aunt Zoe will be as she is now, but then she’ll come out of it, and start talking to me—that she’ll manage that for five or so minutes, and we can talk like we used to.’ Julie takes the napkin from me. ‘She won’t. She can’t. I guess that’s why it’s a fantasy.’
She scrunches up the napkin and dabs it against her eyes, then sweeps all the stuff into the bag that contained the food, and hurries to the kitchen. I get up to follow her but she stops when she sees the picture of my parents, which faces the wall.
‘I thought I …’ Julie spins towards me. ‘I turned that. You turned it back. Is that like an OCD thing? Like you have to have everything in a certain place? Because I haven’t noticed anything else that OCDy about you.’
‘No.’ The picture challenges me to turn it back. I reach out, but then grab the rubbish from Julie and stuff it in the bin inside the cupboard. ‘I’ve struggled to look at pictures of them since they died. You look at a picture of somebody when they’re alive, and you see the life in them—you see the life in them in the picture.’
‘And when they’ve passed away,’ Julie’s frown deepens, ‘you see the death in them?’
‘Not the death but, like …’ I grab the picture, hold it between tightening hands: Mum and Dad smiling, arms around each other, but their eyes gleam with … what is it? ‘It’s like they know, in that moment of time, that this is the picture somebody will be looking at, remembering them, after they’ve passed. And you see it in the way they look at you … I don’t know. That sounds stupid. It’s probably more a reflection of me.’