Perfect Skin

by Nick Earls

  We only went skiing once. She didn’t like the way the boots felt. She probably also didn’t like not being good at it right away, but she didn’t say that.

  By the time it was spring and the weather was sometimes better, we seemed quite sure that we were together. So we were together when we got back to Brisbane, in a way that we hadn’t been when we’d left.

  We rented a flat, and started looking around for a place to buy. And we decided – we both decided, as far as I can recall – that we didn’t want people to think this was something we had stumbled into. We wanted to show them it was more than that. We decided to get married. It went exactly as expected. Mel had clear ideas, I had none, so it suited us both to go with hers. My mother gave up her hold on calm in stages. First, there was, It’s your wedding, so you make all the decisions. Then there was, It’s your wedding, so you make all the decisions, but said accompanied by the sound of grinding molars. Then we moved to, It’s not quite how I’d do it . . . and finally to her strident decision that the cut of Mel’s dress was morally wrong.

  And next your head spins, I told her, and green vomit comes out.

  My father brokered a fragile peace the next afternoon. It was all very odd. My mother and I weren’t used to arguing at all.

  And I don’t know if my edginess on our wedding day was more than the average and, if it was, I don’t know if my mother’s madness was to blame. Again, I’m looking for signs. Signs that all was not quite right. But it’s too late, far too late, to look back fairly on the day we got married. And perhaps the certainty and uncertainty of it all was nothing more nor less than normal.

  Mel did dermatology locums when we got back from the UK, and was still doing one when we got married. I got a job with a laser surgery group, but it was mainly cosmetic work and that wasn’t really the direction I wanted to take. Meanwhile, George was thinking of setting up his own dermatology practice, focusing on laser, and Wendy – who was a year or two older than us – was finishing her MBA, about to have Emily and aiming to resume her clinical career the following year.

  So we got together and planned. Wendy and Mel seemed to get on pretty well from the start and, in a way, that counterbalanced the fact that George and I had been friends at uni in the eighties and had enough in-jokes to last us for years. With two of the four of us being married to each other, we’d all started off wary that that relationship would intrude but, when each meeting began, it seemed easier to leave the marriage at the door than George’s projectile vomiting stories. I can remember Wendy arguing with him, and insisting that the Med Ball of 1986 couldn’t possibly be as legendary as he was making out, and George coming back with something along the lines of, You graduated in eighty-five, didn’t you?

  Mel and I were on the same side that day, the side that could remember the legendary Med Ball of 1986, but valued neutrality a little more. And we were already putting any problems we had – and they seemed to be small problems – down to the stress of investing large amounts of money in a business together, and taking on a new mortgage, and any other good reason going.

  Maybe that’s when we started to agree on less and less. In the context of setting up the business, a context in which we’d all made it clear that we had to speak our minds, be up front, hold nothing back. But Mel and I would go home and do the same, and it came to characterise our interactions. We both dealt with any issue as though the argument concerned only the issue itself, and the incompatibility that was starting to gape between us became something we were good at turning away from, a big dark space that we put our backs to and pretended wasn’t there.

  And you can’t do that forever but, by the time we started looking at it seriously, the relationship was used up, all of it. If I’m going to be honest. Long ago we’d used up all the affection. We’d used up most of the arguments. We’d used up even the simple differences of opinion.

  We’d used up each other’s faces, senses of humour, presence in the house. We had become blanks to each other, each of us the only person in the other’s life who had taken on a kind of invisibility. A heartless, but not cruel, invisibility.

  We had descended to the mathematical part of the relationship. The co-ownership of things. The arithmetic of partnership, mortgages, leases. Documents to do with money and bearing both our names.

  Punctuated by desperate attempts to take history by the collar, pull it around, stare into its eyes and change its mind. Therapy, consideration, compromise on the smallest things. Cooking Mel’s noodle dish when she was feeling big and tired in the late weeks of pregnancy. But that’s not love, however decent it might be for an evening. However much I might have wanted to fix the situation as she paced with her hands on her sore back and the unbalanceable bulge out the front and the near desperation some nights that it all be over soon. And she’d slump into the sofa and put her feet up and look down at the bulge and tell me there must be a better way. I’d do what I could to help and that only led to misunderstandings, the idea that things might be better than they were. An idea that always had its wings clipped soon enough. She’d find some energy somewhere and we’d discover the capacity to argue again, or talk differences up instead of down, or simply not like each other and do separate things.

  It’s all that normal stuff that happened to us – two people who have made a simple mistake and actually shouldn’t be together, who are drawn together by things that don’t work in the long term. Back then I blamed it on Mel, but therapy genuinely made me realise I wasn’t as right as I’d thought. We were just different, and it had become problematic when put to the test. Mel did hold views dogmatically, and it did make arguments hell. And I did avoid conflict about anything that mattered, and I also stirred it up sometimes to prove the contrary, and to prove that Mel was the unreasonable one.

  But she was also the spontaneous one, the risk taker. They were all parts of the same package. They were actually the same thing. I admired it sometimes, and sometimes I battled against it, and how could that make sense to her? Her ambitious ideas and her dogged pursuit of them could take us places, or take us nowhere but a fight. They took me to England and turned me into a laser surgeon. They came, irrevocably, between us. I’m allowed, I think, to feel ambivalent about them now.

  Too many things worked like that, worked for us and against us.

  In return, I gave her a kind of support I think she’d never had. The last year of her training, the year in England, wasn’t easy. There seemed to be some resentment that she’d won her place ahead of someone local, and she had a pretty rough time. I was there for her to talk things through with, night after night, one injustice after another. I’d be on her side. Quietly, steadily on her side, and I’d talk her down, and she’d go back the next day. You got me through that, she said, on the plane heading home. I wouldn’t be – I might not be – a dermatologist now, if you hadn’t been there for me to whinge to.

  And if I tried the same tactic in an argument between us, it only made things much worse. It’d be called patronising. I’d be told I shouldn’t think I was always right.

  Our differences showed themselves in antagonism, and then showed themselves less and less. As we each learned how to be better in relationships, we each became less inclined to try what we’d learned on each other. And maybe people could see it, but they gave us space. Besides, we were at our best with other people. At work, for instance. Our different opinions on some things made us seem independent – something we were supposed to be – and the four of us worked well as a group, setting up and running the practice. Another source of false hope.

  Like everything else, our differences can’t be interpreted simply. They could have been the making of us, or the breaking. They brought out the best in each of us, sometimes, and brought our flaws right to the surface.

  Separation loomed like something caught in headlights, and any time we looked at it we’d try to swerve. But not as a team. We were fighting for the wheel or both letting go of it, too tired to fight, so the view ahead o
f us didn’t change. It still loomed. It got bigger, closer.

  And here’s the hard thing. Lily was conceived one drunken, reconciliatory night. The night of the last try. The night we blew off therapy and spent the hundred bucks at the pub instead. What a sad story to have. How unlike Birds ’n’ Bees version 1.0, where two people make a baby because they love each other. So how do I handle that when she’s five or eight or however old they’re supposed to be to hear it? Actually, no. We didn’t make you out of love. We just got so tired of arguing, we had a truce one night and made you out of beer. So you became our last try. Our last try that wouldn’t have worked.

  Is this how all those stork and cabbage-patch stories came about? To mask that kind of history? No. I still want to believe that many – maybe even most – conceptions involve acts of great affection. Not just drunken, misshapen, impossible reconciliations. Or some sense that it’s the thing to do, or that time’s running out.

  During the pregnancy, we still talked through the options. I think we could have come up with something workable. We could have held the business partnership together and let the life one go. Something like that. That’s where we were heading. It feels wrong to even think it now, of course. It’s odd in every conceivable way. Right down to the price on her head. Mel’s insurance has paid out our mortgage, and much more. I’m worth a million bucks now, at least, but only because she’s dead.

  All the questions I had about my life were answered at once, but each of them given an answer I’d never thought of. Would Mel and I break up? Suddenly the answer was no. An emphatic no that was more than a no. A never. It had been the big question, and now it couldn’t be a question any more. We would never break up, but I was single anyway, and a parent. We’d stuck to the promise when it looked like we couldn’t, been parted only by death, and here’s how it was going to work.

  The house freaked me out and I talked about selling it, but it would have been too much change. Besides, selling it would have involved so many steps, and explanations, and more finalities. My parents moved in. We had plenty of room, so that was easy. And less strange than me trying to move to their place since they’ve only got a three-bedroom unit now, and too much computer hardware to fit guests in comfortably.

  We had a stupidly big house. That was a Mel plan. Don’t be an only child. Mel had been an only child, and born long after her parents had stopped being young. So she wanted four to six, which seemed ridiculous to me. We never sorted that out. We just agreed we could review it with each child. I was going to go in hard after two, regardless of gender balance, but I’d kept that to myself. It was as though, if we bought a big place and filled it with children, we’d be kept so busy all would have to be well.

  And then it didn’t happen. Another doubt rendered pointless.

  I bummed around. I couldn’t work, couldn’t look at a lesion for at least weeks without being baffled about my life. I stayed at home, stayed with friends, pestered friends, added myself onto their holidays. Me, at my most distracted, and a new baby whose every noise left me panicked and confused. Whatever good advice came my way, whoever it came from, whatever bestselling books I read by paediatricians with regional English accents.

  I can remember a town house at Noosa, walking over the bridge behind the Sheraton round about dawn, the Bean on my front, me singing Blondie’s ‘In the Flesh’. I’m not even sure who I was staying with. I took her into the National Park, all the way to Hell’s Gates where the wind whipped madly up off the sea, pulling at me with such strength I had to stand with my arms around her to stop the fear that she might be blown away.

  It was just us there – it was winter and early – and before we turned back to the track a gust whacked a bug into the corner of my mouth. The thought that it could have gone down my airway nearly panicked me, and all the way back I breathed through my teeth. And imagined myself asphyxiated among the rocks, Lily struggling to pull herself free from the pouch on my chest. Or, still tiny, not trying, not having any idea she should try, making no effort other than noises about hunger.

  Then I remember being back at a cafe looking out over the beach. It might have been the same day, or it might not. Wendy – so now I remember who I was with – pointed out the old guy with the metal detector on his slow patrol along the sand and said, Hey, your dad in ten years’ time . . . And anyone who knows him would back her up.

  We’d planned the trip. I remember now. So it wasn’t me gatecrashing someone’s week away. Not that time, at least. We’d planned a holiday at Noosa for when Lily was a few weeks old. We were going to share a town house out along the sound. Because Wendy and Steve wouldn’t be scared off by the presence of a new baby. Because Wendy always worked hard at being a friend to both of us and would have mediated once or twice, or laughed at us, or argued with Steve a couple of times, just to show us we were normal. I’m sure she did that.

  It was in that cafe looking out over the beach that Wendy asked me if I wanted to talk. Asked me in a way that tried to be conversational but didn’t make it, and came out sounding very premeditated. Steve was up at the counter, organising some more drinks. That’s when she asked. And he didn’t need to go to the counter because there was table service. There were even signs saying that. And I thought about talking, and about what mattered to me that minute. And it was the same day as the walk to Hell’s Gates, because I thought about the bug. My fear of choking on the bug, and that Lily might be abandoned there, that this whole wrenching story might come to a close among those rocks.

  I thought back to the night that it all went wrong. And I said, No. I said I was fine. I looked away, and Wendy looked away. That’s when she pointed to the beach, to the old guy with the metal detector.

  So, I can remember much more than I thought.

  Maybe Lily could have fixed something, or at least made us think. Put us on the same team, got us trying out that way of doing things. It sounds like such a big deal, the problems we were having, but we were just two people who didn’t get on, and that happens all the time. And, shit, it complicates things afterwards. Not that anyone, ever, could have this notion of afterwards in their heads at the time.

  But it’s what happened, and it’s why my mother made at least some kind of issue of checking with me before leaving this week. This is the first time my parents have gone away for longer than a weekend since all that.

  12

  I’ve told Ash about learning guitar because of the Knack. I’ve let her in on my dog-feeding secrets, and she’s had my best bad eighties tie around her neck. I run with her every day and I don’t tell her about Mel and, even though I’ve known her only a couple of weeks, she’s become someone I think should be told.

  In which case, the issue is telling her. How to tell her. I think of myself telling her, and all the words for it are so horrible I have to stop. And the whole thing so inexplicable. Once I start telling, how much do I tell? Does the story end with Mel being dead, or only begin with it? I’ve got no idea, because it’s not a story. It’s something that gapes there, off in the dark, and I try not to look.

  Even with my friends, how much can I tell? Which day is the right day to talk? There are no two successive days when I feel exactly the same about it all, and out there there’s an assumption about how I should feel, every day.

  Not long ago, I saw an interview with Marc Rosset, the Swiss tennis player, at the Australian Open. A few months before, he’d changed a flight booking to stay in the US and practise after the US Open, and the flight he should have been on went down into the sea off Nova Scotia. Everyone was killed. And the interviewer said something like, Every day must feel like a bonus after that. Every day you must feel lucky to be alive. It must really put it into perspective when you lose matches now.

  And Rosset said that everyone said that, and that’s how he’d expected it would be. But he still gets angry whenever he loses a match, just as angry as always. He gets annoyed when he double-faults. And most days are just like they used to be, and his lucky
break is something that seems to be behind him now.

  Half an hour later, during his match, he double-faulted. And the commentator said only, Every day feels like a bonus for Marc Rosset now, after not getting on that plane that went down off Nova Scotia.

  So Marc Rosset thought he’d fought off the cliché, but no-one was listening. No-one actually wanted to know how he felt. He’d had a life-changing experience – that’s what they’d decided – and it was a story that wasn’t to be spoiled by how things were. But Rosset hadn’t noticed. He hadn’t noticed that the interviewer had said must three times, had told him three times how he must feel.

  Of course, there are ways in which that’s very different to my situation. Some things did change for me. Plenty of things changed. But it’d be wrong to think that every one of those changes was for the worse, or that I felt the same obvious way about anything, day after day. It’s complicated by the fact that no-one really knows how things were before. There was a lot that we told no-one, and that I can’t go telling people now. And it’d shock people if I told them even one thing was better than it used to be. It’d be as though I wanted Mel dead. It’s absurd.

  Ash has no weekend plans. Some reading for uni, but nothing other than that.

  I’ll go mad if that’s all I do, she says on Friday morning after we run.

  So on Saturday afternoon, late in the afternoon when it’s not so hot, we take Elvis and the Bean for a walk around the campus.

  What was this place like when you were here? she says.

  Mainly like it is now, I guess. I suppose there are a few new buildings. More proper cafes, but the whole city’s like that. Mid-eighties you couldn’t get a good cup of coffee here, then suddenly a few years later there were coffee shops everywhere. The campus looks more corporatised now. The eatery parts of it anyway.