by Nick Earls
Allen & Unwin’s House of Books aims to bring Australia’s cultural and literary heritage to a broad audience by creating affordable print and ebook editions of the nation’s most significant and enduring writers and their work. The fiction, non-fiction, plays and poetry of generations of Australian writers that were published before the advent of ebooks will now be available to new readers, alongside a selection of more recently published books that had fallen out of circulation.
The House of Books is an eloquent collection of Australia’s finest literary achievements.
Nick Earls is the author of fourteen books, including the bestselling novels Zigzag Street and Bachelor Kisses, Headgames, a collection of short stories, and two novels for young adults—After January and 48 Shades of Brown, which won the Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Award for older readers in 2000.
His work has been published internationally in English and in translation, as well as being successfully adapted for film and theatre. He worked as a suburban GP and medical editor before turning to writing. Nick Earls lives in Brisbane.
HOUSE of BOOKS
NICK
EARLS
Perfect Skin
This edition published by Allen & Unwin House of Books in 2012
First published by Penguin Books Australia Ltd in 2000
Copyright © Nick Earls 2000
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
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Australia
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ISBN 978 1 74331 220 9 (pbk)
ISBN 978 1 74269 946 2 (ebook)
I didn’t think my life would be like this. As naive as it seems, when I was at uni I think I assumed that everything would be sorted out long before I was thirty . . .
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
1
You’ll be under a drape, a green paper drape, and you’ll have to lie very still. You’ll hear some zapping noises, and something that sounds like a vacuum cleaner. That’s just the sucker, and it’s there to suck up the smoke that we get when we zap the cancer with the laser. That’s all totally routine. And we’ll have someone else in there, probably Nigel, our nurse, holding the sucker so that I can concentrate on the zapping. Okay?
Yeah.
Good. Any questions at this stage?
No.
Okay.
And every time I get into the preamble to minor laser skin surgery, I try to stop it seeming totally routine. I try to take myself by surprise, as though each idea is occurring to me for the first time, and then leading me to think the next. Rather than the whole thing coming out as a long and tedious list of effects and side effects, personnel and noises and what we can hope for. All lost in a drone as even the patient loses interest.
I check that we’ve got time to do this one now, and that Nigel has the treatment room prepared.
Okay, Brian, I tell the now well-informed patient, sitting there with his skin cancer on his ear. We’re ready to roll.
I put my surgical glasses on, and my mask, and I scrub. Meanwhile, Nigel checks where the lesion is and sets everything up. I prep the skin, drop the drape into place so that the ear and not much more is left exposed. I inject the local and fix a sterile handpiece to the laser.
How are you going there, Brian?
No worries, he says, from under the drape.
Can you feel this?
I touch the ear with a needle tip.
No, he says, and shakes his head.
Can you feel this? And this time, if you could try not to shake your head, that’d be good. It could be a bad habit to get into if I’m lasering your ear and I have to ask you questions.
No problem.
Could you feel the needle?
No.
Okay, let’s get to it. Let us know if there’s any problem under there, but I don’t expect there will be. You’ll feel me fiddling with your ear. That’s normal, since the whole ear’s not supposed to be numb. The top bit should be, and you shouldn’t feel any pain. So let me know if you do. And remember there’ll be noise – zapping and sucking. So don’t be put off by that, and just stay nice and still. Okay?
No worries.
I get started, holding the foot pedal down and passing the red guide light along the edge of the tumour, dropping circle after circle of Silktouch CO2 laser on there, ablating the skin to a depth of one hundred microns each time. I lift off a sample to be sent for analysis, and I work away, working down through tumour, lifting the debris off with a cotton bud. I clear the malignant tissue and some normal epidermis around it. Thinking of skin, the layers of skin. Knowing skin well enough that I know what’s happening at a microscopic level as I follow the tumour down through the dermis until I can be sure that what I’m seeing is normal deep tissue.
And then it’s done. The same preamble for each skin cancer, but a different job each time as I face each specific tumour and work my way to its tidy elimination.
Looks pretty good, I tell him. Nigel will put a dressing on there, and he’ll explain everything you’ve got to do to look after it. We should get results through by the end of the week. Okay?
Yeah.
Any questions?
Do you think you got it all?
Yeah, I do. Like I said before, there’s a small chance it’ll come back, but just a small chance. So if you notice a lump developing like the one you had, get it looked at. But it’s very unlikely. That all went just the way it should.
I wash my hands and I leave it to Nigel to finish. Sylvia, our receptionist, is in the corridor when I walk out of the treatment room.
So now can I check my emails? I ask her. Once I’ve written the file up?
Once you’ve written the file up.
Thanks.
I was late today. Not late by much but by Sylvia’s reckoning that’s still late, and patients take priority over email. Mornings don’t always organise themselves easily for me – the multitude of baby rituals, the run around the uni campus, the shower before starting work. Before my first patient. Today, Brian and the skin cancer on his ear. I seem to have found myself a lot of things to fit in before eight-thirty, but babies do wake you early, so it works most days.
Back in my room I hit the On key and my terminal kerboings into life as I make notes in the file. Something called a Window Weasel pops up on screen. It looks pretty cheery, but it says:
Hi, Jon. Your trial period is up. We hope you’re enjoying your Window Weasel software. Click YES!! I LOVE MY WEASEL!! and you can register to use Window Weasel for life for only $30! Click LATER to register later.
This mystifies me. Where this crap comes from I have no idea. I really don’t have a clue about the software that might be lurking among the vast numbers of megabytes that George said were essential to make the system worth having. Not that it’ll be completely worth having anyway until everything’s on there, but some of us are still more attached than we should be to the practice of scrawling a few notes on paper after each consultation.
So, if I’m to be honest about it, I’m at best AMBIVALENT ABOUT MY WEASEL, and clicking LATER seems the only option.
And then all I’ve got when I check my mail is a bunch of jokes from George, yet again putting his share of the megabytes to great use. Ten blondes conquering a jigsaw puzzle, important things Mariah Carey has said about life. Why do I get my hopes up? Why do I have it in my mind that there might be something interesting waiting for me? Why do I treat the process of checking my emails with any kind of enthusiasm, when the paper mail in my in-tray gets nothing but disdain and has to wait its turn? It can’t be because George only sends me jokes electronically.
George, meanwhile, is no further away than the next room. I can hear him talking through the wall, the wordless murmur that I know is his voice explaining something to a patient. There is no actual need for George to email me anything, he’s just having a love affair with the electronic transmission of text. What I don’t get about it – and I’m sure George isn’t even aware of this – is that he’s never actually told me a joke in his life.
Seventeen years I’ve known him – half his life, or thereabouts – and never once has he verbally told me a formally constructed joke. We get email access, and in minutes he’s zapping me things about dogs, mice and elephants going into bars, or various famous people on fishing trips together or dying simultaneously and confronting a very droll Saint Peter at the pearly gates. There’s a vaudevillian lurking in George that, sadly, in the real world will never be done justice.
Jon, your next one’s arrived, Sylvia says. No hurry. Here’s the file.
Thanks.
And your running clothes are still in the change room.
Yeah, sorry, I had to move a bit quickly when I got here, didn’t I?
I hand her the file I’ve been writing in and I go to load my running gear into a plastic bag before the room takes on the smell of this morning’s sweat. The theme song from Porky Pig comes back into my head, the way it has done the last few days when I’ve been out running. Why is it that I always seem to run with a rhythm that takes my mind to something crappy like that? Is it that way for everyone else too? I can’t believe my timing’s so different that they’re all out there with something interesting and contemporary in their heads, and I’m the only one stuck with a cartoon theme song. And I can’t believe I can remember so many of the words.
My running gear is particularly foul today. My run finished at about eight and it was already too hot then for running in comfort, and rank with the steaming wet smells of a lifting monsoonal low as the sun hit the ground for the first morning in a week. Not that there’s any good time of day to run in February.
So I wasn’t at my best when I had the conversation that made me late. Conversations, two of them, a few minutes apart. Me with sweat stinging my eyes and my shirt slapped wet across my chest and the theme song from Porky Pig still bouncing through my head in its jolly way as a student pulled up in her car to ask directions. Just as I was spitting, but managing a neat, professional runner’s spit so I don’t think she noticed anyway.
First she drove past me slowly down the street, obviously looking for something, her old red Pulsar loaded with junk and going slowly enough for me to notice it and to see a bumper sticker advertising tea, and another with the name of a Cairns car dealer and a phone number two digits too short to be up to date.
Uni starts in a week or two. And the bumper stickers stuck in my head because they were part of – maybe even the basis of – my assumptions about what she was doing. Moving cities, a thousand miles, to study. I still don’t think I’d find that easy, even though I’m twice as old now as when I started uni. I still don’t know if I could drive a thousand miles with everything I own in the car and set up a new life somewhere, away from everything I’m used to. Of course, that’s an assumption too, the untested assumption of an idling mind, out running along a street it’s been down plenty of times and that doesn’t often present something new to think about.
She got to the end of the street, U-turned and came back and stopped to ask me for directions.
Oh good, she said, I was worried for a second, when I told her there was another section to the road, just over the creek, and that whatever high number she was looking for was probably there, and three easy left turns away.
Near my car, coincidentally, I realised a couple of hundred metres later as the path dipped at the end of the street and I hit the concrete ramp and saw her car again, stopping, behind mine. And I can remember seeing the water flowing out from under the ramp as I ran over it, and seeing that it actually looked like a creek today rather than an empty open drain. Somehow I couldn’t tell her she’d rented a place near an open drain. That doesn’t seem like a fair introduction to the neighbourhood.
I watched her get out of her car as I ran towards her. She swung her legs out, lifted herself from the driver’s seat and stood there, looking at the house, her hands on her hips. She didn’t even shut her door, as though she might still have changed her mind, driven off. Turned north again, and gone.
With our cars parked end-to-end, conversation two was unavoidable. But maybe I would have said something to her anyway.
I said something like, It’s not what you were expecting, is it?
And she said, It does look a bit more condemned than I’d hoped.
I told her there were students living in it last year, and it looked just as condemned then. She laughed, but in the polite way of someone whose situation has not been improved by the joke. The house is in bad shape, and the fact that I park near it often enough to know that it’s in a relatively stable state of decay wasn’t going to be much help to her. There are tiles missing from one end of the roof, the verandah leans like an old man badly in need of a Zimmer walking frame and the only new feature is the large rezoning application sign at the front.
She said, Maybe it’ll be lovely inside, knowing it wouldn’t be. I’m not paying anything for it, at least. It belongs to a family friend. I think he hasn’t been down here for a while. They’re putting units up. Some time.
She was hoping for more, for something different. She’d driven a long way with a different house in her mind, a different beginning to the year. And I felt sorry for her – I still feel sorry for her – but it didn’t seem to be my place to do anything. I couldn’t think what to do. It would have been easy if there had been some emergency going on, but this was just bad luck, disappointment.
But the moment might have been handled slightly more sensitively if I hadn’t right then pressed the button that unlocked my car doors. The doors of the navy BMW parked in front of her old red Pulsar. And they unlocked with a flash of the lights and a smug electronic tone that made me feel like a big middle-aged Beemer wanker.
I remember she looked at the car, then at my hand. I always run with the keys in my hand. I didn’t mean to press. I probably press all the time, and spend my whole run locking and unlocking the car, if it’s in range.
Mine looks a bit incongruous parked behind that, she said. But at least it goes with the house, I suppose.
And that’s when I said the BMW wasn’t actually mine – which I figured I could, since it wasn�
�t and it won’t be, even though I’m driving it now. And conversation two became about that.
No, I wasn’t the MLB on the personalised plates. I kind of inherited the car when some things got sorted out. There’s a grey Corolla at home. Which I actually own. I just can’t see any reason to add distance to its odometer until the lease runs out on this one and I hand it back. And the grey Corolla’s got regular plates.
How I came to be explaining this in any detail at all to someone I’d never met, I don’t know, but that’s what made me late for work. A student who’d found the falling-down house she was to live in and didn’t want to face it, and wanted to talk about anything else instead. And the inexplicable lie she thought she was being told about car ownership was simply the first topic going.
And no, MLB doesn’t want the car back, or the plates. Personalised plates are so . . . eighties. Anyway, I think she got them as a twenty-first present from a bunch of people she’d stopped liking by her twenty-second. Something like that. Something very MLB.
That’s what I told her. And then I said I thought she must have a lot to unpack and I was going to be late for work if I wasn’t careful. I wished her luck with the house, as though that’s a thing you do with houses, and as though her luck with the house hadn’t already declared itself to be bad, and I got into the car.
Got in and drove without stopping to arrange the towel on the seat first, in the way that I usually do. Drove and sweated right into the BMW upholstery and took the first corner faster than I meant to, while pushing the Lemonheads CD into the player. Getting my head into work, singing along and wondering why the Lemonheads fell out of my brain the moment my feet hit bitumen. I would have felt quite good about myself, running with the Lemonheads going through my mind.
And the running’s easier now, much easier than it was when I started months ago. I pass more people than pass me now. I get the chance to be amazed at just how slowly some people can run. Not that the fast people aren’t still way out of my league, and that won’t change. But it doesn’t have to. That’s not what this is about. I’m fitter. I’ve never been this fit. That’s good. It’s enough. This is about fitness.