Back in the Purple Palace we were hit with a weird mouse plague. Mice everywhere. It was like something out of the Bible. Swarms of little brown critters. I didn’t really mind all that much because I thought they were cute, and so did the boys. I knew I’d have to tell the doctors downstairs, though, because it was a hygiene problem for the surgery, but then they’d send in exterminators and kill them en masse, so I just kept putting off mentioning it, while the mice just kept breeding.
It was a Saturday morning.
‘But it’s soooo cute,’ Toby moaned as I picked up a baby mouse by the tail and took it downstairs.
The damned little creatures had taken over my apartment and they were so complacent that they sat patiently and waited for me to pick them up to dispose of them. In a very Zen Buddhist way, I felt unable to actually buy a proper mousetrap to kill them, because I agreed with Toby – they were very cute – and the thought of peeling back the guillotine to retrieve a broken little body made me squeamish. I had lived long enough to have witnessed many a not-quite-dead mouse struggling most upsettingly in a trap. Heartbreaking. So we had taken to collecting them by hand. Unfortunately we couldn’t seem to catch them as fast as they could breed.
‘I have to go downstairs to work,’ I told the boys, as I dressed in a conservative pair of pants and a nice button-up blouse. ‘You guys can watch a video.’
I padded down the back stairs again and unlocked the door to the surgery proper, and then made my way down the corridor towards the front reception room. I unlocked the front door, turning over the open sign, and I pressed play on the portable ghetto blaster for some light and soothing Frank Sinatra to keep the patients patient while they waited an uncomfortable amount of time to see the doctor. Doctor G liked to have the patients in and out like a fast-motion revolving door but sometimes a sick person required more attention than just a cursory glance and a script for antibiotics. Like all medical practices, by mid-morning, we were usually running hopelessly behind schedule.
The female doctor was also coming in that morning, so she’d inevitably be up to her elbows in pap smears and other clacker-related disorders … discharges, menstrual problems, genital warts, thrush and cystitis. Once I’d booked myself in to see Doctor G and asked him for a pap smear for a joke. His face had turned deathly white and he’d stammered like a whispering jackhammer.
‘See the lady doctor for that … I couldn’t possibly … well … you know—’
I’d laughed and told him I was only joking: I’d just needed a script for the pill. He’d looked most relieved. It was a landlord/tenant line that really shouldn’t be crossed. You really should never pay rent to a guy who routinely scrapes cells off your reproductive bits.
I heard the bell above the front door tinkle and looked up to see Clay. Krissy and I giggled over this guy often. He was handsome, with sullen hawkish eyes and a boyish mop of dark hair. He was four years younger than me (I’d checked his file) and had a body that looked like it had been snipped out of a Calvin Klein ad. He was kind of shy and so very polite.
‘Morning.’ I gave him one of my better smiles. ‘Doctor’s not in yet. Can I get you a coffee?’
‘Sure.’ He nodded and smiled back.
He followed me back to the little kitchenette tucked under the back stairs, right next to the sterilising station, where a stainless steel kidney-shaped tray sat carrying a clear plastic sterilised packet of sharp implements. I was glad they were all clean because once I’d found a tray with a bit of gristle in it and Krissy had told me it was a foreskin.
We chatted while I boiled the kettle.
‘How’s your week been?’ he asked.
‘Pretty quiet really. With the rain and all,’ I answered.
‘Yeah, I’m looking forward to summer and the beach.’
I enjoyed an unbidden image of his body in a pair of tight swimmers, his chest beaded with salty water as he emerged from the surf.
‘Hmmm, me too.’
We took our beverages back to the waiting room and continued chatting as I pulled files in manila folders from the filing cabinet and set them up in order of appointments as listed in the diary.
‘How’s work?’ I asked.
He worked in the security industry or something. I wasn’t sure doing what. Maybe a bouncer. It would figure. With muscles like that. Another fantasy flashed through my brain of the very gorgeous Clay in a uniform with a gun.
‘A bit stressful really.’ He squirmed and looked away as if wanting to change the subject.
Damn. I’d probably been too nosy. ‘Looks like it’s going to rain again.’ I smiled, trying to salvage the conversation.
‘It does. Yes.’
He gave a nervous smile and picked up a magazine. He read for a moment and I tried not to stare at him and then he looked back up at me and opened his mouth as if to say something. We both looked away shyly. It was all kind of childish and sweet but there was a current of electricity zapping about the room. I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it or not. I might have been. This might just have been a case of me having a torrid one-way fantasy, because he was so gorgeous it should have been against the law. He was after all reading a Women’s Weekly instead of taking any notice of me. He might have only accepted the coffee and crumbs of small talk to be polite, while I was undressing him and licking his chest and tasting the warm salty skin and …
Then the lady doctor arrived. Doctor E was so nice. She was one of those doctors who had got into the medicine gig because she genuinely wanted to help people. She wasn’t in it for the money. I had had to go to her a year or so earlier when I’d been having period problems after I first moved in, a hangover from my cervical biopsy. In the wake of that operation and after the exertion of moving house, I had started haemorrhaging like a Freddy Krueger slasher-fest. I was passing clots the size of kidneys. I bled so much I was almost drained and thought I was going to die and I had rocked up to Doctor E with this little problem, thinking I had sprung a critical and possibly fatal leak, and she had not blinked an eye as she slapped on a pair of gloves and a face mask and dived head first into the Red Sea to assess the problem. She’d prescribed me something and told me to take full bed rest and it all ended up happily enough. I stopped bleeding, the bleach fixed up the mess in the consultation room and Doctor E was lovely and there was never any weirdness between us, despite us having shared such blood-splattered intimacy.
‘Hi!’ She breezed by me and looked at her patient list.
‘It’s the fanny doctor,’ I teased under my breath. ‘Ready to plumb the depths of twenty vaginas today?’
‘Naughty girl,’ she whispered back and then looked over her shoulder to Clay.
‘Hello there.’ She smiled at him. ‘My first patient isn’t for another half an hour and Doctor G’s not here yet. Do you want to wait and see him or can I help you? You can come straight through.’
He stood up and gave a curt nod. ‘That’d be great. It’s just for a repeat script, so yeah …’
They disappeared and I cleaned away his coffee cup and looked in the mirror out in the back room, topped up my lipstick, most of which I’d left on my own cup like a Rocky Horror kiss, and practised a sultry smile.
His consultation was brief, during which time I indulged in a more sordid fantasy that involved me mounting him on the examination table, with a stethoscope bouncing against my bare breasts. When he reappeared I was blushing.
‘Thanks for the coffee,’ he murmured, signed the Medicare form and left.
Just like that.
I watched him walk out into the dusky grey day and sighed. Doctor E appeared by my side.
‘Did you get to touch him?’ I asked dreamily.
She just snorted and called me a naughty girl again.
The morning progressed slowly through an endless stream of hypochondriac geriatrics who just liked the company of the doctor and enjoyed talki
ng about themselves and their ailments because it was the social highlight of their lonely week. In the waiting room they chatted to me about the most banal things. After morning tea, there was a lesbian couple telling me they wanted to get the doctor to artificially inseminate them with a vial of sperm they’d brought in. It’s fresh, they told me and I couldn’t begin to imagine what and who they’d been up to that morning. A fairly well-known actor came in with a sore back, needing some painkillers because he had a vigorous sex scene coming up in the movie he was filming. There in the waiting room, he actually got on the floor and re-enacted the scene to show me what muscles he needed to use. A very well-known rock musician came in and asked me for a fresh syringe.
‘I’ve got a heroin habit and I’m trying to kick it but I’m not strong this morning and I don’t want to share my mate’s.’
‘Sure.’ I smiled and pulled one from a drawer.
He suddenly recognised me from my old rock ’n’ roll days and looked ashamed and sheepish. ‘Thanks.’ He smiled back sadly. ‘I’ve been to two other surgeries and a chemist and they all told me to fuck off.’
‘No problem.’ He had such gentle brown eyes. ‘Take care, OK? I hope you get on top of it all.’
‘I will.’ He nodded seriously. ‘But not today. Nice to see you again. Thanks.’
The last few coughing and spluttering stragglers and tightly cross-legged old women were deeply engaged in the out-of-date magazines when I spied a brown twittering fellow at the edge of the room. A mouse. A big, fat stallion of a mouse. He was looking directly at me, challenging me. Shit. They were migrating downstairs. A mouse in a surgery was not a good look. I walked towards him with old Western cowboy music playing in my ears. Closer. He flinched and hurried back down the hallway. At the edge of the stairs he stopped and looked up at me. I opened the back door leading to the backyard and car park.
‘On your way, Mickey,’ I whispered. ‘Go on.’
He thought about it, seemed to look back up the stairs and then back towards the door. I tapped my foot impatiently and he got the message.
‘And don’t come back,’ I called softly as he sped out the door.
That night I had a dream about Clay. We were on a lake, in a boat, rowing, like something out of romantic scene from the pages of Jane Eyre, except that Clay was dressed in a brown mouse-suit with little black pipe-cleaners sticky-taped to his face as whiskers. We were laughing and then the boat tipped over and we were in the water and Clay was screaming that the weight of his costume was weighing him down, dragging him under. I grabbed his hand but he was sinking away, pulling me with him and I gasped for air and tried to keep my head above water. His grip was strong and he was pulling me deeper and I was under water. With all my strength I wrenched my hand away and kicked to the surface, where I took a deep gulp of air and started panting in a panic. Clay was gone. He’d drowned. I woke up in a cold sweat with my heart hammering in time to the pouring rain outside my bedroom window.
I spent all day wondering what the dream might have meant. It felt like a harbinger of some danger. If a normal person had a dream like that, they might think their subconscious was giving them a warning. Subconscious minds are much more intuitive and sensible than conscious ones. A sensible person would have heeded such an omen. I was not a sensible person.
The thing with sinkholes is you never see them until you fall in. There’s no instrument that detects them, no slow symptomatic build-up as a warning. They just yawn open and swallow up whatever is closest and, if that happens to be you, then you’re a goner.
I didn’t want to fall in love. I really didn’t. Even though it had been a few years, I wasn’t ready. It was all too soon. But like falling into a surprise sinkhole, I couldn’t help it. You can say no to unwanted advances. You can say no to another slice of cake. But when love comes a-knocking, it’s impossible not to open the door.
At first it was just your standard, run-of-the-mill banquet of lust. Once I’d got it into my head to seduce him, Clay didn’t stand a chance. Every day I worked in the surgery all through that month, I prayed he’d get sick. Really sick. So sick he would need a course of doctor’s consultations. But that didn’t happen and I suppose that’s a good thing because I liked the guy and also no one really wants to sleep with a sick person because it might be contagious.
Like most initial hook-ups, it happened at the pub. The Clovelly Hotel. Girl George and I were sitting outside in the courtyard having lunch one brisk but sunny Saturday, as we did about once a month. We were kid-free for the weekend. Mine were at Kate’s having a last sleepover among all the boxes before those guys moved away from Sydney for good. I was chowing down on a chicken schnitzel with a side order of chips when I saw him. Clay was sitting with a mate, another muscle-bound hottie, and I pointed him out to George.
‘Dear God,’ she said, peering over the top of her designer sunglasses. ‘Well, they’re tasty. Which one is your patient?’
‘Dark hair.’
‘Hmmmm.’ She nodded. ‘Invite them over.’
‘Really?’
George’s engagement had sadly not lasted a week, cough, and she was back on the market for a new man and, as she often said, time was a’ticking because she was over thirty.
I was not going to get Clay and his mate over and have George propose some sort of double wedding and scare him off. But she got quite insistent and promised me she would behave and let me drive the conversation and she would not hit on the friend. So I did it. I invited them over. It was Clay’s birthday, he told us. I decided, within about five minutes of talking to them, to be his birthday present, and that was exactly how it went. I didn’t have to collect the kids until the following afternoon at the farewell barbecue and then Kate and her family were off to their new life in the Highlands, which was almost too sad to think about.
So I had Saturday night stretched out ahead of me and Clay gave me that shy look laced with innuendo that said he was up for some mutual fun. And that was all I was after. Some fun. It had been a little while. I was worried I would become that old woman they made jokes about. The dried-up old woman with cobwebs in her undies. The last fellow I’d dragged back to my lair had been somewhat disappointing. Young, eager and … well … too eager. I was a young, hot-blooded woman and it was my biological duty to keep my bits all serviced and, let’s face it, we all needed a grease and oil change occasionally. Sex turns up and I start with the racing car analogies again. I really do not know what that is all about!
The sex was great. Clay was like a Greek god. His arms, his thighs, his hands, his pecs, all like a rock. It was like making love to a warm statue. By comparison I felt like a soggy marshmallow. It was so good it was like a brand new drug. He worked nights so he began visiting me during the day while the boys were at school. On the days I was working he would meet me upstairs at lunchtime and I don’t think Krissy missed the rosy glow in my cheeks of an afternoon, but we were careful and sneaky and she never caught on that I was boning one of the patients. This went on for weeks and I was like a teenage girl. I felt like I was walking on air and every other stupid cliché.
At first it was an intense physical addiction. And then, then, then I started becoming entirely entranced by the man, the boy, the Clay.
Clay. Let me describe Clay. He was quiet. It wasn’t that he didn’t talk. He talked a lot. Just very quietly and slowly. By comparison I sounded like a Melbourne Cup race-caller. This, I think, was because I was always around two kids who shouted and machine-gunned every word. ‘Can I have some Weet-Bix?’ ‘He took my toy!’ Everything was shouted. ‘Brush your teeth! Comb your hair! Stop fighting. I’m going to count to three!’ The family dialogue was one of capital letters and exclamation marks while Clay spoke like he was reciting a gently lilting poem.
Clay was also very funny. Not showy, clown funny. Deep, weird and warped funny. He had a jet-black sense of humour and I loved it because I loved laughing with
him. He was intelligent. That very first night together we talked about stuff like God, the afterlife, the meaning of life and our mutual love of Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci. We were on the same page. I was blindsided by the feelings that were lighting up inside me. I’d spent years talking to my girlfriends about men and it was nice to be talking to a man for a change.
Sometimes we disagreed on certain subjects but then we argued like champion debaters and eventually agreed to disagree. Clay was kind. He was generous. He was thoughtful and romantic. He bought me flowers and cooked me exotic curries for lunch. He made a mean, blisteringly hot curry.
I woke up one Sunday morning (the boys had stayed at Sam’s for the night as a special treat for me) and he was gone. I blinked and looked around the room, tracing my hand over the crumpled white sheets. I was an impossibly light sleeper so I didn’t know how he’d managed to sneak out without me noticing. His backpack was on the chair in the corner of the room so I knew he hadn’t gone far. I lay back, shut my eyes, ran my hand over my skin and relived the previous evening of tender passion. I listened for the flush of a toilet or the sound of the kettle from the kitchen. He was being awfully quiet, whatever he was up to.
I drifted off back to that lovely whimsical place between sleep and wakefulness. I heard the door downstairs and startled. It was a Sunday. The surgery was closed. I struggled to sit up, pulling the sheet up over my bare skin.
And suddenly there he was with a bag from the bakery and two cups of coffee in a little cardboard tray.
‘Better than your crappy instant.’ Clay grinned. ‘And croissants. I’ve got two plain, a ham and cheese and a chocolate. Covering all bases.’
We ate on the balcony looking out over the traffic heading down to the beach. Bus brakes screeched.
Madness, Mayhem and Motherhood Page 16