Unzipped

by Nicki Reed

  ‘So that’s what you care about? Carole Smart?’

  BJ is somewhere not far away, in the cafeteria perhaps. Last time I saw her she was bruised, worried, standing in the arms of her mother.

  ‘I go away for a few weeks and you turn into a dyke?’

  ‘You’re away when you’re here.’

  ‘Fuck off.’ He grabs his satchel, throws the curtain open, and stalks off. His coffee still sliding down the wall.

  I close my eyes. That went well.

  ‘Did you know your sister is a fucking rug-muncher?’ Mark confronts Ruby in the corridor just outside the room.

  It’s late. Nobody in my four-bed ward is getting any sleep. Can’t they talk about me someplace else?

  ‘She’s been at it with my boss’s daughter.’ It’s as if he loves the sound of it. Boss’s daughter.

  Ruby: ‘Ssh. Let’s sit.’ The chairs must be just outside the door.

  ‘Did you know?’

  ‘No.’ Smooth liar, much smoother than I am.

  ‘You must have known. She says she loves her. They were fucking in the shower or something when she fell… We were going to have a baby.’

  ‘Peta’s pregnant?’ This is the first time she manages to sound surprised, as if the news of your sister running off with a woman is an everyday occurrence.

  ‘No, not yet. But we were going to try when I got back from Chicago…’ His voice cracks.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mark. I had no idea.’ The truth sounds honest. ‘Come here.’ The chair squeaks vinyl and I know she has him in her arms.

  They sit outside my room and cry. Ruby has always been close to Mark. At our wedding reception she announced he was the big brother she’d like to fuck. Most people laughed. That’s Ruby, aiming for shock-value.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Go back to work, I guess.’

  ‘Are you planning to sleep under your desk, George Costanza—style?’

  He laughs. It’s good to hear it. The chairs squeak as they stand and it’s quiet as they hug.

  ‘Keep in touch,’ she says. ‘I mean it.’

  Ruby kisses my cheek. Tiny teardrops glisten on her lashes.

  ‘I didn’t know you were going to have a baby.’

  ‘He was. I was thinking about it and not thinking about it.’ I shrug. Wrong move. I see stars: a milky, dark-night constellation.

  She’s in the chair next to my bed, her bag in her lap. She’s brought in toothpaste, soap, pyjamas. The pyjamas are hers. I won’t be walking anywhere, so hot pink satin won’t matter.

  ‘So, you were fucking in the shower? And this,’ she points to my crêpey, hospital turban, ‘a sex-injury.’

  ‘My first.’

  ‘Carpet burn?’

  ‘Can you call carpet burn a sex-injury, Rube? Carpet burn is standard. A rite of passage, like L plates and lease documents.’

  ‘Not if it’s on your face.’ She smiles the smile of a good memory and I’m not going to ask.

  Sex-injury talk goes only so far. ‘Is he going to tell everyone?’

  I haven’t seen Alex and Rob, Theresa and Ravi recently but I care what they think. They’ve been in my life a long time. Secondary school, prom night, abandoned love affairs, graduations, so many twenty-firsts we got sick of them. Weddings, a divorce, babies. Three of us have suffered the death of a parent and Alex lost her brother last year in a car accident.

  ‘Peta, he’s in shock. It was a brutal way to find out. This is nobody’s idea of a great Friday night.’

  ‘I want to talk to him.’

  Ruby grinds her teeth. ‘Why? How are you going to make it better? You think he can forget you were fucking someone else?’

  I wish Ruby would stop telling it like it is.

  ‘I get it. I deserve all the shit that’s coming.’

  ‘Yeah, you do.’

  I roll away from her and she says she’s going for a walk, she’ll be back. Moments later I sense someone at my bedside.

  ‘Go away.’

  ‘Should I come back tomorrow?’ I hear the unzipping, the jacket coming off, and feel the light pressure of it on my bed. Cigarettes and leather mixed with the antiseptic hospital.

  I roll back over. Stars again.

  There’s a bruise on BJ’s arm and her left eye is purple turning black. I can’t stop looking at it, the pugilistic shine, the eye itself, bloody and marbled.

  ‘I think it was your elbow.’ She touches it. ‘I guess it could have been a knee.’ She grins. ‘I have had worse, but I never got it better.’

  I make room for her.

  ‘Wouldn’t you two be more comfortable in the shower?’

  Ruby is back.

  ‘I’ve just been on the phone with Mark,’ she says. ‘He’s going home to get some stuff and he’ll stay with me until you decide what you’re doing.’

  She has a spare room, a spare bed, towels, food, space. But I can see him in her bed, his polished shoes at its foot, their customary overnight position. I can see her holding him when he cries. Hot tears, hot faces, mouths turning to each other.

  ‘He’s staying with you?’ Anger rises, a burning surge, through my stomach, up to my face. ‘Well, Ruby. Isn’t that nice? I guess you’ll get what you’ve always wanted.’

  ‘What do you care? You said only this morning you wished he’d meet someone else.’

  BJ holds my hand.

  ‘God, could you leave each other alone for a minute? It’s revolting.’

  ‘Fuck off, Ruby. Go home. You’re not helping.’ BJ says. No more unhappy girl, skinny and hunched over; now she’s my best defender. ‘Come back tomorrow and be an arsehole.’

  ‘I don’t understand you.’ Up on my elbows, head throbbing. My voice is low, menacing. I don’t mind. ‘This morning you knew the decision I was going to make. You said you’d be there. If you’re going to hang around making noises, Ruby, BJ’s right, fuck off.’

  I have never sworn at her before. Not even the time she didn’t just jam my fingers in her car door—she locked them in and spent a minute looking for her car keys in her handbag before remembering they were in her pocket.

  Ruby dissolves.

  ‘I didn’t expect it to be so quick, Pete. I thought you’d have time to do it better. I’ve never seen Mark cry.’

  ‘Darling girl, I wasn’t planning on smacking my head on the toilet. It’s an inauspicious beginning, isn’t it? And you know how I feel about germs. Come here.’

  BJ turns and brings Ruby into our huddle.

  27.

  I stay in hospital for one night, almost two, due to how long it takes to discharge me. It’s okay, I understand procedure. When I get home Mark has already had the removalists around. Fair enough. He always said it never felt like his house. Mum left the house to Ruby and me and I bought her out. Ruby bought a two-bedroom flat. It reeked of the seventies—orange and green, a macramé owl hanging just inside the front door—and she hasn’t changed a thing.

  An oil stain in the garage. His gorgeous, sky-blue VW Karmann gone. The spare room is empty except for the footprints in the carpet left by the multi-gym. One toothbrush. No shaver, no shaving cream, only half the towels in the cupboard.

  He’s taken our photos. The fridge is covered in Sellotape remnants, vacant, rectangular spaces. Cameron, Lachlan, Jasmine gone. Eucalyptus oil will remove the residue-sticky reminders of our life, but I’m not ready to release the gummy twist of guilt every time I open the door.

  At the electrical wholesalers, BJ is close behind me, loaded with boxes—wok, blender, toaster, kettle. She’s proving she’s essential.

  ‘He was never home to cook. I suppose he’s punishing me.’ We unload at the counter. ‘How did this get in here?’ A Darth Vader clock/radio and CD player.

  ‘For the kitchen,’ BJ grins. That dimple is a killer.

  ‘For you then.’

  Plastic, movie kitsch in my kitchen. What next? BJ smacks a kiss onto my lips, my first at a service desk. I blush. But not as much as th
e woman who is serving us.

  A full replacement of kitchen appliances is the price of my adultery. I push my PIN into the keypad, press enter. ‘Fair enough, Mark.’

  The space his body took up is missing. So is the sound of his bare feet down the hallway. I’d listened to it for years, every time trying to understand why his bare-feet walk was so much louder than when he was wearing shoes.

  His body in my bed.

  His voice on my phone.

  Space in my email and on my phone.

  Why can’t our friends be available to both of us? Do a couple of months of less than brilliant behaviour erase twenty years of friendship?

  I try to talk to Ruby but she’s not picking up.

  Taylor says she’ll be round as soon as she can.

  Other people find the time.

  ‘Peta? You’re disgusting.’

  Alex and Rob on speaker. I let them talk. They’ll say their bit and leave me alone. I deserve it.

  ‘We don’t want you to be the baby’s godmother. We don’t want to see you again. Nobody does. Cheating on Mark is bad enough, but with a woman.’ Rob is in the background, barracking. ‘You’re going to hell,’ she says.

  No, I don’t deserve this.

  ‘Is this what Jesus would do if he had a phone?’

  ‘We hope you and that filthy bitch rot, Peta.’

  Okay, that’s enough.

  ‘Alex, ask Rob about the last golf trip. Ask him which DVD they watched and who watched it for the longest.’

  Maybe my friends think the stink will wear off, fasten itself to them, make them look at their own relationships.

  I hope they’ll come round. I hope, if they do, I’ll feel like talking to them.

  Keith left a message. He sounded tired. Peta, I don’t love it but I know it wasn’t easy. You can call me anytime. I hope you do. Take care.

  I’ve had some interested looks from Jackie, Jacqui and Trish. My first day back we have lunch.

  Trish is curious. ‘You’re with a woman now, Peta.’

  Jackie and Jacqui lean in.

  Bull by the horns: ‘Yes, her name’s BJ.’

  ‘We heard, we heard,’ Jackie looks about, ‘you did that,’ she points to my head, which is taped now, ‘while you were having sex in a toilet.’

  Ride the bull around the arena: ‘It sounds a little unseemly when you say it like that, but it’s practically true. As of three months ago, I’m no stranger to toilet sex.’

  ‘I did it in a toilet once. The disabled ones at Flagstaff,’ Trish says.

  ‘And she’s at uni?’

  Ride it one-handed for eight seconds: ‘Meaning she’s young? Yes, she is. And she’s Mark’s boss’s daughter. And Mark has moved in with my sister.’

  Jackie chips in, ‘I saw something just like that on Home and Away.’

  ‘It was Neighbours. Only idiots watch Home and Away.’

  ‘Are you calling me an idiot?’ Jackie flicks her ponytail.

  ‘She didn’t mean that, just that your taste in TV is idiotic.’

  Jackie turns to Trish, pointing with her butter knife, ‘Don’t you watch Prisoner on Foxtel?’

  Bull-riding is easy. And TV is much more interesting than real life.

  Saturday morning, mid-July. We’re out of bed late because we spent most of the night watching the Tour de France. Last night it was a mountain stage. The downhill sections made me nauseous; my head swam with the long bends and hairpin turns.

  BJ and I are in the kitchen. It’s cold and our breath is foggy.

  ‘It’s time,’ BJ says.

  Darth Vader says 10:45. ‘For what?’

  BJ is in front of the fridge. She has a small brown bottle in her hand and a roll of paper towel on the bench beside her.

  ‘Are you doing it? Or do you want me to? I think you should.’

  I bite my lip.

  ‘Pete, it’s been two weeks since he moved out, you’ve got to start letting go of the guilt. It’ll become nothing but self-indulgence. I saw that on Dr. Phil.’

  Self-indulgence. That sounds right.

  ‘Dr Phil know much about Euripides, BJ?’

  She grins. I take the bottle and tip some oil into my fistful of paper towel. Eucalyptus stings my nose, eyes. I begin. It’s harder than I expected.

  ‘I’ll help,’ she says. ‘Shit, it stinks.’

  Rubbing, inhaling, I do the high parts. Ancient stickytape corners and backs of photos—the bits slide and eventually come off the fridge. My sinuses were never so clear.

  ‘Back in a sec.’ BJ skips out the kitchen door.

  She returns with her hands behind her back.

  ‘What have you got?’ I reach, but she twists away from me, playful.

  ‘I thought we could start again.’

  She has a photo of us that Loz took on her phone. Us at the museum on the low leather couches where we’d watched the documentary about the discovery and installation of the museum’s whale. There’s so much space inside a whale. You could live in there.

  In the photo our heads are leaning together. BJ is in her jacket, I’m in my favourite dress, wraparound, long sleeved, black—every one of my favourite dresses is black. We’re smiling. All dimples and discovery.

  BJ sticks the photo on the fridge, right in the middle.

  BJ’s Eurythmics poster is where the TV used to be. It covers the entire wall.

  ‘Aren’t you a little young for the Eurythmics?’ I’d asked as we battled for an hour to hang it. ‘They were on their way out when I was in school.’

  ‘It used to be Mum’s, from their 1987 tour. It’s the best thing she ever gave me. I’ve never had a big enough space for it.’

  I took the bins out the other night and from the footpath, with the lights on in the lounge room, Annie Lennox was lit enormous. Peroxide hair, leather jacket, a pixelated billboard-sized televisual blur. I love it.

  Nearly four weeks of living with a woman and things are the same, not the same. The toilet seat stays down. Not the same. I’m replacing the toilet roll. The same. We’re doing dishes but we don’t use the dishwasher—BJ likes to do them by hand. She washes and I dry. I sleep on the same side of the bed as always. BJ is small, so much smaller than Mark, than me. She sleeps on her side and I tuck in behind, wrap an arm around her, listen to her snore, soft, feminine, if that’s possible, and marvel at my luck.

  BJ has persuaded me to have a dinner party on Saturday night. She wants to introduce us as an above-the-board couple. We’re testing ourselves on Ruby and Carole Smart.

  Ruby is unusually quiet. I call her at work, she’s on the phone all day, and I’m told to call back. Now I know how she felt.

  She reaches me on a Friday night. BJ and I are in front of the TV watching a recorded Dr Who. I press pause. ‘It’s Ruby’. BJ says she’ll leave me to it and begins her Aeschylus essay.

  At the sound of Ruby’s voice, I cry. I wipe my eyes with the heel of my hand, keep my responses even as she explains she hasn’t been ignoring me on Mark’s behalf. She had things on her mind and work is demanding.

  ‘I’m sorry I accused you of wanting Mark.’

  ‘It’s okay, Pete. You’d had a head injury. I’m calling it a mental lapse. Like your denim-overall shorts phase.’ Ruby cackles. She can laugh. She has photos.

  ‘That’s nothing on going out with Marcus Vidalo. And I don’t have his name tattooed on my bum.’ I’ll fight fire with whatever’s available. ‘So, we’re having a dinner party and it won’t be a party without you.’

  ‘Aw, shucks,’ she says.

  ‘No, really. It’s BJ and me and you and Carole Smart. If you’re not there, we’re down to four walls, three people not talking and leftovers for the week. Rube, bring your warmest and your coolest, make sure you eat before you come and don’t wear anything flammable.’ We play a protracted version of the you-hang-up-first game.

  Carole Smart is harder to convince. She thinks BJ should keep her room in Northcote.

  ‘Mum, I don’t need
it.’ She squeezes my hand, big smile.

  BJ is sitting next to me on the couch, her phone pressed to her ear. She rolls her eyes, a wisecracking teenager expression. She never looks as young as when she’s rolling her eyes.

  ‘What do you mean, Mum? Her lesbianism might not take? Do you think her body’s going to reject it, like a donor-organ?’ She mouths the word idiot at me. ‘She’s not going back to Mark, Mum.’ I move to leave the room but BJ pats the couch. ‘Anyway, she told me if she did I could kill her.’

  BJ has permission. She can kill me if I go back to Mark.

  ‘I don’t know, smother her with a pillow. Steal a garbage truck and run her over. Slip some cyanide into her tea. I’ll Google it. It’ll be easy.’

  BJ is headstrong and she has the internet—I’d never cross her. I tune out, think about the menu, and look out the window.

  The liquid amber in the front garden is a skeleton, bare, but beautiful. We bagged five loads of leaves, but not before BJ tipped me over into the heap—five-pointed stars of red, brown, yellow and orange, soggy and sticking to us. Under the leaves, we kissed, my hands snaking up inside her T-shirt.

  ‘See, Mum, you said it, BJ, you can do it. See you Saturday, bye.’ BJ switches off her phone and slides it under a cushion on the couch. ‘What are you smiling at?’

  We decide to serve three courses. Nothing that can’t be reheated or frozen.

  ‘I’ll make soup,’ BJ says. ‘Roasted parsnip and carrot.’

  ‘Parsnip?’ I make a face.

  She grabs my chin, shakes it. ‘Trust me, it’s beautiful.’

  If I can trust her not to abandon me for someone closer to her age, someone more fun, with more energy and fewer hang-ups, I can rely on her to make soup.

  28.

  Ruby is first to arrive. The taxi beeps bye-bye when she’s dropped off. I throw an arm around her neck and kiss her on the cheek. She smells of alcohol. I lead her to the lounge room and sit her under the big blue gaze of Annie Lennox.

  ‘Been to the pub first, Rube? Wish I’d thought of that.’