Perfect Skin

by Nick Earls

  I wonder what’s going on in Katie’s mind out there, with the disjointed statements she’s making that seem to add up to suggest I’ve misled her, and harmed her in some way. And that she was expecting this evening to go very differently. She’d gone for special, without knowing that special was never my thing. But it’s overwhelmed me tonight. Katie and her eighties hair, conjuring up one gourmet moment after another and making the night feel like such a big deal. And completely the wrong kind of big deal.

  Flag, being a cat, gets curious. He knows that something out of the ordinary is happening, involving a stream of yellow fluid flying down into a bowl.

  Not a lot of men in the place, hey Flaggy, I say to him quietly, as he pushes between my legs again.

  His tail flicks dangerously by as he passes. He circles, then stands up on his back legs with his front paws on the edge of the bowl.

  Flag, be careful there. I know I’ve still got a young man’s prostate, but what’s happening is honestly not that impressive.

  But Flag is impressed. And I’m mid-stream, so it’s not as though I can push him aside. He’s looking down into the bowl, looking up at where it’s coming from, looking down into the bowl again.

  Okay, Flag, stay right there and we all get out of here alive. No sudden movements.

  He crouches down, and looks like he’s about to clamber into the bowl.

  No, Flag, I say in the no-shit, firm voice I’ve been practising for the day when Lily takes an interest in a power point.

  And that’s when he jumps.

  Jumps for the urine stream and grabs at it with both paws, spraying it everywhere. This surprises him. He has no grasp of simple physics and obviously expected a different outcome. Worse, it makes me recoil backwards, changing the simple physics and directing the stream right at his head before I can stop it. He jumps away, shakes himself, manages to spread it around more. Tonight’s dinner had not been going well. And now I’ve pissed on her cat. Every other grim moment seems inconceivably subtle in comparison.

  Flag runs little catty wee footprints around the room as I try to catch him. And Flaggy, as Katie said, loves a game. It takes a lot of pursuit and two bath towels before I pin him to the floor near the door. He purrs like a buzz-saw, licks my face.

  Katie doesn’t play this one with you enough, does she? I say to him quietly, and he licks me again.

  I wrestle him up to the sink to try to wash him. I get the water running, and that’s when he goes crazy. Being urinated on he didn’t mind so much, tap water could be the end of him. He wrestles, slips out of my hands, slurps out of the sink and into the bath and out the window.

  Urine is dispersed over most of the bathroom. Fortunately, I’ve already ruined two towels trying to catch Flag, so it’s not hard to work out what I should use to mop up. My pants and my shirt front are wet, but I’m telling myself it’s at least eighty per cent water. I replace the towels with fresh ones from the cupboard when I’ve finished, and I ball the urine-stained ones up as tightly as I can and fling them out the window, as close to the road as I can get them.

  I do up my fly, I walk back into the lounge room and I tell Katie, Thanks, it’s been great, but I might call a cab now.

  8

  Listen, Jon, this is going to sound kind of weird, Wendy says, when I get to work at lunchtime on Monday. But it probably needs to be sorted out. She leads me into her room, shuts the door. Katie called me yesterday. She’s a bit worried about you. And maybe I’m a bit worried about her. Jon, I don’t know where she’s got this idea from . . . she thinks you might have urinated on Flag. The look on my face is probably horror, since behind the look it’s horror I’m feeling. I know. It’s all very embarrassing. Katie can get herself . . . worked up, if you know what I mean. But this . . .

  Yeah.

  I don’t know what we’re going to do, Jon.

  Yeah, I know. He just followed me in there.

  And now Katie’s got this idea . . .

  He just followed me in there, and I’d had a couple of drinks by then. A few drinks. And I haven’t been drinking much lately.

  Wendy’s watching me. She’s stopped interrupting. She’s now taken over the look of horror. Just as I’m realising she thought this was all in Katie’s head, Wendy works out she’s hearing the preamble to a confession.

  It wasn’t intentional.

  Oh god, Jon, I told her no way. I told her you didn’t do that sort of thing.

  Of course I don’t do that sort of thing. I might not have been concentrating particularly well though.

  She makes a teeth-gritting motion and nods.

  I’d had a couple of drinks. And he moved very quickly.

  She looks like someone who’s about to up their level of care again. Someone who thought I was handling things all right, allowed her attention to lapse, and now look what I’ve done. Jon’s not coping well at all. We thought he was doing okay, but . . .

  It was the fucking cat’s fault.

  The cat’s fault?

  Totally. I was standing there, minding my own business, directing my stream with nothing less than the required competence. Not concentrating particularly well, as I said, but it is something I’ve done a few times before. But I don’t think Flag’s seen a lot of men in that position.

  Men not concentrating particularly well?

  Urinating. The standing-up version. He got a bit excited. And he sort of jumped me. And I tried to clean him up . . .

  Now, wait a second. I think you’ve missed a bit.

  The bit where I pissed on his head? Is that the bit? Or the bit where he waved his paws around in it first when he was trying to catch it?

  Wendy starts to laugh.

  Or the bit where I had to chase him round the room to catch him.

  Oh, any of those, she says, as the truth of it starts to sink in. I can’t believe you pissed on Flag. Katie’s had some bad dates before, but as far as I know you are the first to piss on her cat.

  I didn’t know it was a date.

  Hardly seems to matter now, does it? Anyway, the date rhetoric’s all just ridiculous Georgespeak. Call it what you want. It’s the outcome that’s the interesting bit. You think you know someone . . . She laughs again. You dark horse, you. You operator.

  Oh god, Katie was so intense, and she kept topping up my wine.

  Well, you pretty much have to piss on people’s cats if they’re intense and they give you wine.

  Do you have to keep saying it? In such a frank way?

  I think I do. I think this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. You were dorky at uni, and I was worried over the last, you know, decade or so that you were getting your shit together. This is good. Hey, you should get a ping-pong ball to put in your toilet at home. It’s great for the aim. I used it with Patrick when he was toilet training. Simple, but effective. And one of the many reasons to be glad you’ve got a daughter.

  Thanks.

  That’s okay. Oh, sorry, one other thing. This is pretty embarrassing. I think – okay, I get the weeing bit and the extenuating circumstances – but I think it’s affected Katie’s judgement. You know the way she can be a bit . . . Doesn’t matter. What I’m saying is . . . She stops to laugh, as though even she can’t believe this story might have any more left in it. This is just a small thing we’ll have to sort out with her and I’m sure, when we tell her the rest of it, she’ll realise she’s got this wrong. Katie thinks you steal things. She thinks you went back to her place yesterday morning and took a couple of towels.

  Later, after my last patient has gone, I’m sitting in my room and telling myself it’s not so much a lie as something that simply can’t be explained properly.

  Okay, I caught the cab home. I slept poorly, but there was nothing paradoxical about it, and no reading. My father is an early riser, so it was easy to get back to Katie’s place while she should still have been asleep. And to thank my father for the lift, wave him off and foray briefly into her garden, pull the weed-on towels out of the bushes and d
rive away. They’re in my bin now. And they’re never going back.

  Katie thinks she heard someone in her bushes around dawn, Wendy told me. And then a car driving off. Your car. She went to change her towels late yesterday and noticed there were two missing from the cupboard.

  Fortunately, I know Wendy well enough that I got the sense she was presenting this to me as a piece of mad supposition on Katie’s part. And when I said, Obviously the only reason I’d agreed to go there for dinner was to pick myself up a couple of towels, she said, Exactly, and apologised on Katie’s behalf.

  And as if she’d know what a Corolla engine sounded like.

  I was in the Beemer, actually.

  Well, there you go. She’s getting bars on her windows now, you know.

  Who wouldn’t be, with all this towel thieving going on?

  Oh, she’ll find them in the laundry, or somewhere. She loses things all the time and thinks people have taken them. And she was way out of line when she asked if I thought you were somewhere in the kleptomaniac spectrum, or if it was just a personality disorder.

  And with that excellent backhander, Katie was dismissed.

  So I might get away with it. But it’s hard to believe that I’m telling myself it’s a good outcome, any kind of win at all. That I’m now known to a close friend and workmate as a cat-pisser, but not a towel thief, so that’s okay.

  I know I have to apologise to Katie, but how do I begin? With an email, obviously. I will begin (and hopefully end) the apology with a single well-composed email. It might not look as good as handling it face-to-face, but this is hardly a time to begin worrying about appearances.

  Today, I get a weasel with attitude.

  Hey. I don’t know that I like you so much any more. I thought you were one of the good guys, Jon. Not one of those folk always expecting something for nothing. Now go click YES!! I LOVE MY WEASEL!! and you can register to use Window Weasel for life for only $30! Click LATER to register later.

  So I’m no longer one of the good guys. As if that’s news. I open one of the ktnflag emails in my in-box, and I hit Reply. I delete the text that’s there, and then I’m faced by the large rectangular space that has to be filled by apology. Maybe I should try to keep it light.

  Katie, Just a note to say thanks for Saturday night. Had a great time. Sorry for pissing on the cat though.

  And if it sounded frivolous in my head – which it did – it looks simply stupid when reduced to the nuance-free, semi-formality of text.

  Katie, It’s like this. I suspect Flag hasn’t seen a lot of men weeing before.

  No.

  Katie, It’s probably not possible to explain the events of Saturday night in a way that seems reasonable, or perhaps even plausible. (I’d settle for plausible.) I don’t think I even told you how much I’d enjoyed the dinner, horrified as I was at the accident in the bathroom. Flag and I did seem to be getting on well and he is, as you know, a very playful cat. He happened to lunge at a rather unfortunate moment, and this created a small mess. When I tried to catch him so that I could clean him, he jumped out the window. I must have used an entire roll of paper cleaning up. I’m sure you can imagine how embarrassed I was, and that I just didn’t know how to explain it to you.

  I go on-line to send, and I have two new emails. A joke forward from George that I’m sure he forwarded weeks ago, but that must have come back around, and one called ‘calender-driven email’ from a student at Queensland Uni. Nothing from Katie. That’s probably for the best.

  I open the student one.

  Hey, just got my email access here sorted out. Trying to learn how to use it (not used to the software). Which is why my address has my student no. in it and nothing more friendly. I’ve tried attaching a document, just to see if it works. So let me know.

  A

  It works, it’s Ash’s uni timetable. I email her right back, and I tell her Tuesdays suck.

  I send the Katie email, get off-line and decide I’d rather pick up the Bean from my parents than take on my in-tray. Wendy, who has stayed back taking on her in-tray, gets to the lift at the same time as I do.

  Katie is emailed, I tell her. It took a bit of thought, but it’s done.

  And I’m up on the paperwork, so a big elephant stamp for each of us then.

  No, I think you get the elephant stamp. I didn’t do any paperwork. But then, you didn’t wee on anything, did you? It does make a person start the week behind.

  Well, you’ve done the email now. You’ve cleared the decks.

  And I’m assuming Saturday night is something we can keep to ourselves.

  There’s a pause, and that can’t be good. She jiggles her car keys in her hand.

  Jon, you went over to my sister’s place for dinner and you urinated on her cat. Was there one day in your life when you would have kept that kind of thing to yourself if it had been someone else?

  It was the dinner. I was thinking it was a dinner party. I was caught unawares. I’m not ready for this stuff, for nights like that.

  Jon, that bit of it’s fine. That stuff happens. Being not ready is quite okay. I don’t plan to go there. You know that. The bit I want to tell people is the urinating bit. Let me put it another way. The bit I’ve been telling people is the urinating bit.

  Tonight, there’s more teething. It’s probably more teething. Not much sleep, anyway. A grizzly baby, a worried dog and, out there in the world, who knows how many people who have already heard about my Saturday night.

  The Bean works up a sweat with the effort she’s putting in. I wipe her face and head with a wet washer, but the game I try to turn that into isn’t good enough to end in sleep. It’s time for the car, the soothing rhythm of driving, the aircon, the Lemonheads.

  We drive, I sing, the Bean chews away at the wet washer. The CD ends, I talk. About the heat, about summer and winter, temporarily about the long-term implications of climate change, about traffic lights, about Ash’s house where the lights are all off, about the rowing sheds at uni, about the City Cat ferry stop, the route I run every weekday, about the sugarcane farm that was here in this pocket of the river before they built the campus. About her mother.

  Somehow I’m talking about Mel, about how we hardly knew each other when we were here at uni. That we really met afterwards.

  I’m listening to some tour-guide voice telling Lily about Mel, and it’s me and I want to throw up. I have to stop the car.

  It’s just the surprise of it. I was commentating, in the usual bland way, and she crept in. I take a few deep breaths. Usually I think advice to take a few deep breaths is crap, but this time it helps. I should pay more attention to what I’m saying. I hit the play button, and the Lemonheads come on. I sing, and drive.

  I’ve got to watch for that sort of thing. I’ve got to handle it better. I have to work it out first, rather than just let it out. Kids take things in, even really early on, and I’m not ready to put that in the Bean’s world yet. It’s hard enough, anyway, fitting it into its place in a lot of other worlds, but I don’t know when she’ll know enough about life to understand it.

  I took Wendy’s kids to McDonald’s a few weeks ago, and Emily started talking about birds, birds taking away babies. I think she was worried about Lily. It took a while to work out what she was on about, and it was only when I asked her if the birds were storks that I had a chance of fixing it. I told her not to worry. That birds never took babies away. That there’s a very old story about where babies come from that says storks carry them here in their beaks. But even that’s just an old story, and everything’s okay.

  I told Wendy and she said, Bloody grandparents. The deprogramming I have to do . . .

  But that one was easy to fix. It was far harder months ago, working out how to explain why Mel wouldn’t be coming round any more. Why it was me and a baby instead. Actually, it was impossible. Beyond me. I decided I couldn’t see them, because I knew it’d be the first question and I knew it wouldn’t go well.

  But Wendy came over. She
came over a lot anyway, but one day she came over to talk about this – as though she could read my mind to tell me that Emily had been talking about Mel. Jon and Mel. Where are Jon and Mel?

  So I told her, she said. I told them. And, I’m sorry, but I’ve done it in a kind of strange way. I couldn’t work out how to do it. So, for the moment, I’ve told them Mel’s gone away. And – I should probably have planned it better – Steve’s the only person they know who goes away. To Mount Isa with work. So they’re assuming Mel’s in Mount Isa, and that’s kind of where I left it.

  And I said to her, That’s fine. Lots of skin cancers in the Isa.

  That’s what I told her, and that way she smiled instead of crying. Crying was a distinct possibility, as though she’d let me down by being unable to find a tellable truth in what had happened.

  She smiled and nodded. Asked how I was, and we both waited for the moment to pass. She said, It’s all so strange, and I said, I know. And she went into my kitchen, blew her nose on a paper towel and made us both coffee. She’d never made coffee at my place before. That was always a thing I did. And I couldn’t believe that, in some peculiar way, I was secretly annoyed with her for making coffee, because it just made things stranger.

  When she left, I said I’d go to their place for a barbecue the next day, now that we had a plan that would do for the moment, an explanation that could buffer, temporarily, the inexplicable truth.

  And I wanted to say to her – then, and plenty of times since – How the fuck do you explain this stuff? If only the hassles with explaining it ended when the person was five or six or whatever age you needed to be to have some comprehension of it all. As if it’s something you can tell even the people who can understand what you’re saying. I haven’t told a new person for months. It’s just too big. It’s not like it’s the size of a piece of information yet. It’d be more like turning myself inside out than telling a person something.