Perfect Skin

by Nick Earls

  Um, no. It’s okay. Don’t worry about it. And Flag’s all right. In case you were wondering.

  Good.

  I think he liked you. He was a bit funny on Sunday, though, but I think cats can detect anxiety. They can detect lots of things. They’re quite perceptive.

  I think I’d heard that.

  Katie takes her cup in both hands, stares down at the table. Whatever’s going on, it looks vaguely religious.

  I’m sorry about mentioning the towels, she says. To Wendy. I had no cause to add things up that way. No cause. I knew there had been . . . an incident, but just because I’ve misplaced some towels, and I heard a car and heard something in the bushes . . . of approximately human size . . . There’s no excuse for it. There are some big dogs in my part of town, and I should have remembered that. All I can say is, I was distressed at the time I spoke to Wendy. My bathroom was in a bit of a state and Flag wasn’t himself. He spends time in there now, and he didn’t used to before Saturday. And maybe I just have to adjust to that.

  I’m sure it’ll be okay.

  Yes, but I don’t want you to think I’m spreading allegations about you all over the place.

  No, that wouldn’t be like you. I wasn’t thinking that for a second.

  That’s good. Thank you. Thank you, Jon. But I would have understood if you’d had some concerns like that. And it was wrong of me to think it, and to say it to Wendy. And that’s been playing on my mind. So I wanted to see you. To clear the air.

  About the towels?

  Yes.

  Consider it clear.

  In the end, there are very few parallels between coffee with Katie and being sprung wanking by your mother and her load of clean laundry or steaming mug of tea.

  There’s thunder somewhere far away as I cross the road, but at Toowong the air is definitely clear. And I wiped up my own urine with another person’s towels, then stole the towels, and I seem to have completely got away with it.

  Okay, there’s the mild guilt that comes with all the lying, but nothing would have improved if I’d told the truth, to Wendy or Katie. And I feel like a bit of a bastard for letting Katie off the hook with such grand magnanimity, but I’m sure that’s how she wanted it.

  I’m going to stop rationalising now, before I’m actually proud of my behaviour.

  Everyone’s about to see their two o’clocks when I get back to work. They’re talking about something, a drug company function tonight, and how dare the company put it on the same night as everyone’s book clubs.

  We thought we’d get a cab, George says. Do you want us to pick you up on the way?

  I think I’ve got something on, actually.

  Yes, this. It’s in your diary. Has been for weeks. Remember? This is one of the ones you always say yes to. Small group thing, minimal drug bullshit, expensive restaurant, good wine?

  Oh, okay.

  Sylvia hands him a file and he goes into the vascular-laser room, humming to himself. Oscar calls in his next patient. In my room, I pretend to check my diary. I find it and open it at today’s date, to kill the right amount of time. I buzz George on the intercom.

  I do actually have something else on tonight, I tell him. I must have written the dinner down in the wrong place.

  Oh, really? Something else on? So you were going to be a no-show at book club anyway?

  Yeah. And . . . um, it’s good you reminded me, since I had a favour to ask. I wondered if you could take my last patient today. I’ve got something to do after work and I want to do it at five, so that I don’t get to childcare late.

  That’s a lot of somethings you’ve got on. Two already, at least. One at five, one tonight.

  Yeah.

  You’re not planning to tell me what they are, are you?

  That’s the real favour part of it. Call me oversensitive, but I am a man who’s had ping-pong balls in his in-tray this week.

  And if you urinate on anyone or anything tonight, you’d rather we didn’t all know?

  That’s right.

  Do you really think that’s fair?

  But he agrees to it. The storm grumbles in from the west and passes, dumping its rain on the city and the northern suburbs.

  At five, I meet Ash outside Coles.

  She says, Hi, and smiles, and leaving work early to meet her feels like wagging school.

  You get quite dressed up for that job of yours, don’t you?

  What were you expecting? I can take the tie off.

  I didn’t know there’d be a tie.

  Ninety per cent of people expect a tie, if you’re going to be lasering the shit out of their skin. Don’t ask me why. You’ve got a problem, buying groceries with someone who works in a tie job?

  I can probably get around it.

  Just wait. You’ll be corporatised before you know it. I wouldn’t be so smug if I were you.

  I’m not getting corporatised.

  You’re doing a thesis on retail. Where do you plan to head?

  A PhD. Maybe.

  You are heading for such a tie job. You and your cargo pants and your exposed midriff and your tableland hippy-chick sensibilities.

  She laughs, gives me large amounts of mock indignation. You wouldn’t know a tableland if it fell on you, city boy. Obviously. Or a hippy.

  Your turn’ll come. Tie job. That’s all I’ve got to say. Tie job. You have been warned.

  We cruise around among the fruit, neither of us devoting a lot of attention to purchasing.

  What is it with grapes in Coles? I say to her, when I see someone standing there and sampling about twenty of them. Why do people eat them? Don’t they know what a shop is?

  What’s your worry? Are you a shareholder, or something?

  Well, maybe I am. But not in a big way.

  Tie job, she says slowly. You have a go at me when you wear a tie to buy groceries, and I bet you’re standing there with a wallet stuffed with shareholder discount cards.

  It’s the principle I’m arguing here. This is theft we’re talking about.

  Go. Go. Make a citizen’s arrest. There’s another one doing it now.

  I’m busy. I’m very busy with the coriander. There’s planning going on. For your dinner.

  I have a recipe in mind for tonight, but I haven’t cooked it in a while. I should have written it down. I need fresh chillies, and ginger. I’m trying to remember how much ginger when a large man pushes past me with a baby in his trolley, about the same age as Lily. He’s setting up a brown paper mushroom bag on the baby’s head and chatting away, paying so little attention to anything else that his thigh drives me into the onions without him realising.

  Let’s go and show Mummy, he says.

  Ten minutes later I see them again, still charging along, now among the frozen foods, the gleeful baby with its paper-bag crown still in place.

  So are you going to have a go at me about the sour cream again? Ash says when we reach dairy.

  We’ll see. How much are you going to get?

  Look, the options are limited when you live by yourself. The idea of nachos comes up pretty regularly.

  How many people do you think there are at my place? Or do you think that maybe one night I do a curry, the next night Lily knocks up a saffron and chive risotto, with fiddly bits of shit wrapped in vine leaves as hors d’oeuvres? I think she’s a hell of a clever baby, but she’s not that good. You’ll notice that formula powder and a rather uninspiring range of purees figure prominently in my trolley.

  Which is a shame, since I wouldn’t have minded the saffron and chive risotto.

  Give her twenty years. Meanwhile, it’s just me and the wok.

  We queue for a checkout, and I’m wondering if I should offer Ash a go of my shareholder discount card, or if it would seem patronising. Or rude not to. Obviously I’m not confident where cargo-pant-wearing, tableland hippy chicks stand on these things. And that was a dumb, spur-of-the-moment thing to say, for a start. I can’t believe it sounded smart in my head. I go through first, and
take the card out of my wallet so it can be swiped. Ash looks at me wryly.

  Look, two hundred thousand people own Coles Myer shares, I tell her. It’s not such an unreasonable thing to do. If you were nicer I might let you use this.

  Really? She pulls a wallet from her back pocket and takes out a shareholder discount card.

  Like I said, two hundred thousand people own Coles Myer shares. And you’re one of them too.

  We take the groceries down to the car.

  You do a lot of painting? she says, when I open the boot and move a paint-spattered blue bedsheet aside.

  It’s my stabilising sheet.

  It’s got a name?

  It didn’t have at first. But it’s good. It arose kind of by chance – on one of those rare occasions when I might have been doing some painting – but, trust me, it’s the best way to stop everything sliding round in the back.

  That sheet? It actually does something?

  Cover and tuck. Cover and tuck. That’s all there is to it.

  You’re going to tough this one out, aren’t you?

  Yes, I am, damn it. On behalf of stabilising sheets everywhere. Which might be just this one but that’s not the point. Innovation provokes such scepticism, doesn’t it? And stop looking at me like someone with a psych degree. It’s not as though I don’t know it’s slightly anally retentive.

  And down here, do you park in the same spot every time?

  Every time.

  Are you worried about that?

  Less worried than the people wandering round the car park with their keys, wondering where the hell they’ve left it this time.

  Can I feed her? Ash says, when I line up the chopping I have to do.

  That’d be great. Do you want to go for the solids first while I warm up the formula?

  I give her a jar of apple puree and Lily’s spoon. She takes the lid off and says, This is solids?

  Don’t worry. Our solids’ll be more solid than that. And right now solids are so recent for her that the concept alone’s pretty exciting. An interesting solid would be too much for her to grasp.

  I start chopping, but I pay more attention to Lily and Ash. I shouldn’t. Wendy’s fed Lily and my parents have fed Lily and George has bounced Lily up and down on his knee so thoroughly he’s ended up with curdled milk on his shoes and handed her right back, but this isn’t the same. At least, it doesn’t look the same. It looks like an evening in the suburbs, someone feeding a baby, someone else making dinner. The faithful hound with the begging eyes nearby in the kitchen, patiently urging that all scraps should be his. All of it looking like someone’s definition of average, normal, and I’ve never had a night like it in my life. And most days my definition of normal is fine, but some days it’s not. Shit. Where do these ideas come from?

  I’ve done the chicken. I move onto the coriander, and the smell of it comes up from the board. I don’t know how long it’s been since I chopped coriander. Yes I do. Two months. Two months ago I decided to show how okay I was, so I had some people over and I made this then. And the time before that was about six months and two weeks ago.

  It’s a recipe of Mel’s. A favourite of hers that was her first choice any time she’d have to cook anything. I started doing it when she was pregnant. Particularly on the days when she was feeling really tired and big. There’s a certain amount of guilt attached to being the partner who isn’t tired and big, and a need to do any small thing that might make up for it.

  Easy, Ash says, coming back in with an empty jar and Lily on her hip. We liked it. So, milk now?

  Well, complex off-white chemical formula-based drink, yes. You don’t mind?

  She gives me a look that implies that people who mind don’t offer. As if the world’s that straightforward.

  Do you want to put some music on while you’re doing it? Unless you want to watch TV. She’s not quick.

  Let’s have music.

  She hands Lily over to me and goes to the stereo. She clatters around among my CDs. What’s she going to play, I wonder? I’m not expecting Debussy, my one Debussy CD that I’d forgotten about years ago, but that’s what she picks.

  I was sure you’d have Fleetwood Mac, she says, when she comes back into the kitchen.

  I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.

  Are you going to pretend you never had a Fleetwood Mac CD? Or never at least liked Fleetwood Mac?

  That might be what I’m going to pretend. And you’re going to let me.

  Besides, there’s an era issue she hasn’t worked out. I owned Fleetwood Mac on vinyl. Own Fleetwood Mac on vinyl still, perhaps, tucked away somewhere. That’s where she went wrong.

  I’ve never owned a Fleetwood Mac CD, I tell her. Now that I think about it, I can say that pretty confidently.

  What was the first album you ever bought?

  Do we have to go there?

  The Cranberries, the album with ‘Linger’ on it, she says. But I’m over them now. Then she nods at me, in case I didn’t already know it was my turn next.

  Tubeway Army, Tubeway Army. But I’m over them now. And don’t look at me like you’ve just noticed my second and third heads. You were definitely alive then. Probably alive then.

  Tubeway Army, Tubeway Army, she says, as she goes back into the lounge room with Lily and her bottle. What is a tubeway, and why does it need an army?

  Hey, this looks impressive, she says, as I’m hurling things around in the wok.

  It’s all show.

  So is this indicative of your kitchen talents?

  No, this is the extent of my kitchen talents. Me and the wok. I only do bite-size.

  You only do bite-size?

  Yeah. The idea of cooking a roast, a whole potato even, is quite beyond me. I’ve got no idea how people can be confident enough to cook something so big it wouldn’t fit in their own mouth.

  She picks up a fork, stabs a piece of chicken and then says, Can I try it?

  Looks like it.

  I’m sorry. This is pretty exciting. It smells good. And I don’t get out much. So what I mean is, it doesn’t smell like nachos. This’d be the first time anyone’s cooked a meal for me since I moved.

  So are you meeting lots of people in your year?

  Not really. Which is maybe what happens when you transfer to do honours. You’re sort of in between. You’re not as in with the department as you would be if it was a PhD, but it’s not like you’re an undergraduate either, so you don’t have a lot of course time with other people. And when I do have lectures and tutes, I’m with different people for each subject. That’s how it looks anyway.

  Uni hasn’t really got going yet though, has it?

  No. This is the first proper week.

  It’ll be good once you’ve met some people. It’s a nice campus to be at.

  Yeah. And I’m thinking of getting a job, too. Looking for a part-time job. So I’ll have plenty to do.

  Good. It’ll be good once it’s all sorted out. It’s quite a move you’ve made though.

  Yeah, I guess.

  Now, this is ready to serve. Do you want some wine? I’ve got wine in the fridge.

  Yeah, thank you.

  I open it once I’ve scooped noodles into two bowls and, damn it, it’s a chardonnay. We toast. Ash says we should toast, then clinks my glass and doesn’t seem to know where to go next.

  Thanks, she says, and then, To home-cooked meals. Bite-size.

  And a good year. A year that settles down and makes some sense.

  And I wonder when I’m going to tell her about Mel. I know it won’t be tonight. What is she thinking? What does she think is going on? Where does she think the source of the other half of Lily is, and does she wonder why she hasn’t been told? Maybe she doesn’t. We don’t know much about each other and, since she doesn’t know about Mel, she can’t know what a big thing it is not to have been told about.

  She picked Lily up without holding back, got involved. I watched her and I’m sure she knew I was watching her, as
though she was being tested, but that wasn’t it at all. I couldn’t help watching her, and that’s why I watched. The feeding, the bathing – my turn to do something, but Ash came in anyway, and both of us got splashed and stood there in our splashed-on shirts while I cooked dinner. I like the way she got involved, the energy and fearlessness and something like curiosity, the new range of boat noises. I always held back with other people’s babies, before I had one. I think I was afraid of breaking them.

  We eat on the verandah, with bats fighting in the trees and Debussy coming out through the French doors. There’s lightning far off, a silent storm lighting up clouds, but the air is thick and windless here.

  I complain about the heat, but she says, It’s not so bad. Or maybe it’s what I’m used to.

  Sorry. I’ve got English parents. Complaining about the heat’s a sort of lifestyle choice if you’ve got English parents. Every summer catches my father unawares.

  She tells me about her family. About how they grow tea on the Atherton Tableland. And the house she’s living in now belongs to a family friend and spent years being rented to students through an agent. The people who owned it thought everything was fine, and then suddenly it couldn’t get approval to be tenanted any more. Since they’d planned to build town houses on the block, they didn’t fight the decision. They didn’t even look into the reasons behind it. They knew Ash was coming down here, and if she lived in the house that’d keep out squatters. And her father remembered it from his time at uni as a grand, old, riverfront house, a little past its best. He’d slept under it in a hammock after balls, or on a mattress on the bare floor, one of those kinds of stories (of which I’ve got a million, having a father who was brought up in the war).

  So she’d heard about the house and the grandparents of the family friend, the people who had owned it back then but been dead her whole life. And she’d seen a photo – her father had got her a photo of the place, so she could know where she was going – and for some stupid reason she even had the old curtains in her mind when she drove down here.

  It was pretty bad arriving, she says. They’ve got no idea what the place is like. It was good you turned up. You and your mysterious car that belonged to someone else.