I saw Kirsti again at a second-year Indian Studies lecture. The snow white hair, pale skin and eerily light blue eyes she had inherited from her Finnish grandfather made her stand out in a crowd. As soon as I caught sight of her sitting in the top row of the lecture theatre I turned to leave, but she called me back.
‘I’m sorry,’ she called out. ‘I shouldn’t have sneered at you. I should have been rude to Craig.’
‘Yes, me too,’ I answered.
She patted the seat beside her. When I flopped down, heaving my bag to my lap, she elbowed me. ‘He was quite fun in bed, but I did think he seemed a bit tired.’
‘Yes, you tart,’ I said, giggling. ‘You wore him out!’
We wagged the lecture and sat all day in the cafeteria, oblivious to the echoing clatter of plates and cups, talking about men and India. I showed her the picture I had cut out of a textbook in the library. In the foreground of the fuzzy black and white snapshot, three smiling yogis hovered a couple of feet above the wooden floor.
‘Can you believe this?’ I said, ‘Wow!’
‘There’s much more than we know out there,’ Kirsti said, and shook her head so that her hair flew out in a blinding halo.
‘I know what you mean,’ I said.
‘Actually, I think just quoted The X-Files. Please, shoot me.’
We were serious, though. We decided we should go to India to be enlightened. To meet sages, gurus, gods. To learn harmony.
‘Remember that lecturer who talked about India being the birthplace of inner life?’ I asked.
‘The nutty professor? The one who kept hitching up his pants and smacking his lips when anyone asked a question?’
‘I liked him!’ I protested. ‘He wrote on my essay that I needed to let go of my Western consciousness and embrace the spirituality of India. Well, I’m ready.’
Kirsti told me that Finnish people had a special affinity with the spiritual side of life, just like Indians. I did hesitate–Finns and Indians seemed an odd pair–but she kept on talking.
We’ll go to India together, we promised each other.
As I got to know Kirsti better, I learnt to be less startled by the way she kept proclaiming her Finnishness, or by the sayings she claimed she had learnt from her Finnish grandfather. I even started to believe them.
The evening I introduced her to my new boyfriend, she whispered to me, ‘Men with overhanging foreheads have no pity. It is a famous Finnish proverb. They are cruel, and have large penises.’
‘David doesn’t,’ I said.
‘Then he will be even more cruel.’
I had pictured the heart of David as a red velvet cushion, shaped like an egg with a small, round impression where my head would rest, but Kirsti’s proverb drove the image from my mind and left me thinking of rusted iron, the twisted and intertwined strips of an ornate balcony. Elegant. Hard.
The postcard, stuck to the fridge by a magnet shaped like a cat’s paw, lifts and flutters with the breeze each time I pass, as if it is waving a greeting.
This is my first card from Kirsti in India. I’ve never been to India, but I know what the country looks like and how it smells and sounds. India means the smell of rain. It means purifying rain, a downpour like a waterfall soaking the long black hair of Indian women, and washing the shit from the streets. People shouting through the hiss of water on clay. Crowds sheltering under the faded, coloured awnings of stalls in the market. Even as I look at the stamps I can smell a faint odour of fecundity.
I stand on my balcony, which is plain and sensible bars of steel and meshed wire covered in glass, and watch the dusky sky before rain. The air is warm and damp–almost tropical. Almost Indian. I can imagine the card starting to wilt in the humidity inside the kitchen.
Drops of rain spatter on the balcony rail. A car pulls into the car park eight storeys below and a man in a plain navy blue suit slams the car door and runs for the entrance to the apartment building. Whichever way I look I see squat grey buildings with their hard lines cutting through the mist, the indistinct red of house roofs, street lights shimmering in what is becoming a deluge.
Back inside I pause in the darkened bedroom, listening to a stutter of breath. The clock, mesmerised by my eyes, takes an hour to tick over each minute. Kirsti gave me this clock for my twenty-third birthday. The hands are chrome-plated and fat, and have become rusty in only a few years. Big luminescent globs mark each hour and the tips of the hands shine in the dark, telling me how many hours of waiting before the alarm bell rings. I hate being alarmed.
Jakarta alarmed me. David and I both had just enough money to go to Indonesia for a holiday. Although it was winter in Melbourne, Jakarta was steamy and fetid. Everything I ate made my gut churn like a washing machine.
I tried to enjoy myself. We strolled around the streets and I handed out coins to the smiling, cheeky children who asked. David told me to save my alms for the real beggars. That night, as we walked through the city, almost tripping over the skinny black arms stretched out in the darkness, I passed my purse to him. I told him I couldn’t decide between a man with no legs and a woman with a throbbing pustule on her breast.
‘Throbbing pustule?’ David said, his eyebrows lifting.
After he looked the cripples over carefully and distributed a few coins to the chosen, the losers let out soft moans. They reached out to brush my ankles with their fingers, leaving the same sticky sensation as a cobweb caught on the skin.
Back at the filthy guest house we were sharing with cockroaches like shiny black footballs and German tourists who sang songs every night after dinner, I screamed at David over the off-key notes of ‘Let it Be’.
‘I wanted to go to Bali,’ I shouted. ‘I wanted to see beaches. Why don’t I ever get what I want? Why would anyone want to see misery like this?’
I’ve been up for hours now, wandering through the rooms of the apartment, thinking about the grocery list of my old boyfriends. Nights like this, when I can’t sleep, I turn into a ghost and haunt the house.
The things I have dropped on the floor are forming a mountain. Letters that have only got as far as ‘Dear’, dirty plates, a half-eaten apple, TV guide, two books, diary, old address book where I tried to look up old lovers. Old lovers are attractive again on nights like this. I forget why I left them. And even why I liked them in the first place. I only remember talking about them with Kirsti. We didn’t seem to talk about much else.
Kirsti’s boyfriends, Al, Simon, Giorgio, Chris, one by one failed to please her. Then Mustaph stepped off a ship in Port Phillip Bay and straight into Kirsti’s arms. Despite the praise she had for him, I was suspicious. To me, sailors were like the men out of South Pacific. They wore flared pants, walked with a rolling gait, brawled in bars. Even before I met Mustaph I had marked his heart as a hammer.
‘I want you to like him, Lucy,’ Kirsti said. ‘I think he might be it.’
‘Might be what?’ I asked, trying to fool myself.
‘It. The one. You know.’
Later I told Kirsti and Mustaph how I had imagined Mustaph as one of the sailors out of South Pacific, just to make them laugh.
‘What’s a brawl?’ Mustaph asked.
They can’t even understand each other’s language, I said to myself. The revelation made me blush, as if I had uncovered their secret; they communicated in a language I didn’t know.
‘When do you leave port?’ I asked him several times, but his answers, coated in a thick Lebanese accent, were difficult to understand. Sometimes his answers were obscured because they were spoken from Kirsti’s neck, or her cleavage, where he was resting his lips.
‘I’m not a prude,’ I said to Kirsti, ‘but nuzzling your tits in a restaurant...’
I wanted some nuzzling myself. Lack of affection was making me pale compared to Kirsti, always flushed and laughing.
He would remember in a restaurant or a theatre. She needs affection. His head would jerk up and his limp hand would flop on to my lap and lie there. I remember looking at the shape of it after he had threaded it through my hand, watching the fingers twitch like the feet of dreaming dogs.
Mark, my latest lover, is in the bedroom now, muttering and snuffling through his dreams. On my rounds I pace past him and through to the lounge room as though he isn’t there. He always sleeps through my anxious nights.
I met Mark in a pub. On the first night he slept with me he said, ‘I don’t expect anything of you.’
I could see his heart at that moment. It was a sour sultana: tiny, shrivelled.
Mustaph, Kirsti said, was always asking her to marry him, to have his baby, to wear his grandmother’s ring, to love him.
‘I do love him, in a way,’ she told me. ‘I love his body, his arms, his mouth, his cock. I love that he loves me.’
‘I could love Mark,’ I said. I was imagining how a sultana, soaking in warm water, balloons out until it returns to the soft, round shape of a grape. ‘I think he could love me.’
‘Sure he could,’ Kirsti answered.
Kirsti’s message is squeezed into the small space of the card.
Dear Lucy,
Remember how we used to talk about India? The markets full of brightly coloured silks and food and the gurus and ashrams, all of that. And dope on tap! Well, the dope’s here all right, but the rest is different. It’s dusty and grey here, and it stinks. Mustaph and I are both sick in bed in a hotel where everyone is trying to rip us off. And he’s driving me crazy with his mother talk. I feel about a hundred years old. Miss you. xx
If what Kirsti says is true, and India is a mean and dirty country of thieves, I won’t have anything left to believe in. The things Kirsti and I talked about seemed so transparent before. Men, India, the future. I could look into them and see everything, right through to the heart.
Kirsti always told me I was naïve. When I described her crystal heart, she laughed and said I couldn’t be more wrong.
‘My hair might be white,’ she said, ‘but my heart is coal black.’
When I complained that she had found Mr Right while I only found Mr Wrongs, she corrected me again.
‘Mustaph is a great lover. We have wild sex and lie there with nothing to say to each other.’
Kirsti said I was a dreamer, that I’d spend my life wishing for impossible things. When she was about to leave on the trip to India without me, she said, ‘I don’t know why I’m going with Mustaph and not you. It’s not like I want to marry him or anything. Men aren’t that important.’
‘Maybe not,’ I said. ‘So what is?’
Kirsti laughed like she always does.
‘Old Finnish proverb, just for you,’ she said. ‘Dreamers never wake up–they just keep on dreaming.’
Last month, when Kirsti left for India with Mustaph, I was running late. I arrived at the time the plane should have been taxiing away from the terminal. I stood on the observation deck with my eyes watering from the heat and smell of the aeroplane exhaust. There was a blur of white in one of the windows of the Garuda aeroplane. Had they decided to stop over in Bali? If I was with Kirsti on the way to India, I would have liked to stop in Bali for a day or two.
I took out my hanky, ran toward the far corner of the observation deck, and swung my arm in an arc over my head, a white flutter like a message blowing in the breeze.
The India of Kirsti’s letter is not the real India. She’s ill–of course she’s unhappy. How can she experience the real India while she’s sick in bed? Things will change in the next letter. She’ll describe the food and the street stalls and the pedlars who tell her stories. She’ll make me want to be there.
The rain starts to fall again. Kirsti strolls through the crowded streets of India. She strokes the cheeks of small children. Her boyfriend buys her an ice-cream thick with condensed milk and spoons it lovingly into her mouth. Kirsti licks the spoon and smiles at her short, passionate man while the women with long black hair look up to catch the first drops of rain on their faces. More drops of rain ball like mercury in the dust. The noise of the rain grows louder and louder as it pummels the faded awnings of the stalls, and people begin to shout above the clamour. The market is hot and humid. Kirsti wipes the sweat from her face, her boyfriend orders a fizzy drink, the straw floats lightly in the glass, and Kirsti thinks, for a moment, of me.
Fluid
When the car in front of me brakes, the raindrops on my windscreen shimmer like blood. We all creep forward another metre. In the dusk light the traffic is heavy. Red-faced drivers on mobile phones shout silently behind their windows and a distant siren probably means the traffic jam will get worse. I want to get out of the car and walk. Or run. Or stand and bend over and hold myself. But I turn on the radio and the heater and pick up my own mobile phone so I can shout into it.
The phone rings out. Colin never answers. He has a new lover, a woman of his own age who likes to cook him meals of creamy veal and lamb roasts with gravy and potatoes. The last time I saw him he was fat and old and I wondered how I could ever have lain beneath him and watched his grey whiskery face crease
above me.
‘God, I love you so much,’ he would say after he had come. ‘Was it all right? Did you have a good time?’ I knew that if he had to ask then I probably hadn’t had a good time.
His bedroom looked out over a park. I’d lie there after he got up for a shower, watching the kids on the swing and the gardener sowing flowers in black damp beds of soil. Then I felt calm.
Now Colin’s acting like the eighteen year old while I feel like a crone. My pain is a wetness that is hot and sticky and staining the car seat and the hospital is miles away and here I am stuck in a traffic jam.
Perhaps I should have taken more of his vitamin pills. Colin had a whole shelf of them in his flat and he swallowed them by the handful–trace minerals, megavitamins, iron and calcium and zinc. He said he wanted to stop his arteries hardening and his body weakening but I could imagine the effect all those metals were having–as though he was building a shell of his own body. Sometimes I took a few and washed them down with water. He laughed.
‘You don’t need those,’ he said. ‘Look at you.’
We’d already split up by the time I knew. Colin had told me I was too young for him. He said I needed a father not a lover, that I was too dependent, that my smooth skin and gangly limbs made him feel like a paedophile. He told me that I had no boundaries. ‘You’re not formed yet,’ he said, as if I was a jelly that hadn’t set. He still wanted me though.
‘When I touch your breasts, I wonder how I could have been so lucky. And then I wonder if I’m an old perv.’ He never asked how I felt. ‘I know you’re mature and smart but you’re eighteen. Eighteen!’
He offered me a mobile phone as a present, with credit for plenty of calls. He handed it to me still in the box from the shop, saying, ‘Don’t be a stranger,’ and I felt like I already was.
I sent him a text message. ‘Y did u lve me?’ Then I wondered if I’d made a mistake. Did lve stand for leave or love? I didn’t worry for too long. Old people are useless with mobiles. Colin treated his phone like it was a complex mathematical equation requiring deep thought and number crunching. He probably couldn’t open the message.
I can see from the gauge that my car is overheating. The engine throbs noisily. There seems to be a hissing sound but I can’t be sure because around me car horns are starting to beep. A Range Rover careers past on the median strip, thumping over bushes. Two frightened children’s faces peer out from the back window.
‘You’re a child yourself,’ Colin had whispered. ‘A child with child.’
When I pointed out that the child was his too he promised to pay for everything. ‘For the baby,’ he said. ‘I’m already supporting an ex-wife and two kids, so I can’t keep you as well. But I’ll do the right thing by the baby.’
As the traffic jerks forward I massage my belly with my left hand. The hissing sound has become too loud to ignore. The car stinks–an oily, metallic, watery smell.
‘I suppose it’s so cheap because it’s a student car,’ my mother said when she lent me the money to buy it. She said she wasn’t going to come and rescue me like she had my brother so many times when his car broke down. She said it was a father’s job to fix his children’s cars and put deadlocks on their apartment doors but since he was gone we’d have to learn to look after ourselves.
Lucaballoo, my dad called me. Or Lucibelle or Lucadaluca or Little Luceen. He said I’d grown far too complicated for a name as short as Lucy. If I was in trouble he called me Lucifer.
‘Give Lucifer a break,’ he’d say to my mother. ‘She’s struggling with her devilish nature.’
My mother folded her arms across her chest. ‘Girls and their fathers–God Almighty. It’s like I don’t exist.’
Other drivers are waving at me and pointing to the front of the car. One woman makes a gesture like a volcano erupting. I laugh, thinking that I feel a bit the same way, and she turns her face aside and speaks to the man beside her and never looks back.
So I’m eighteen and Colin’s forty-nine. So he’s having a midlife crisis and I’m looking for a father figure. So I was an innocent and didn’t do anything about contraception even though I knew I should. He never bothered to ask. Then what? He got tired of me?
My girlfriend said she’d never heard of a forty-nine year old dumping his teenage mistress. She said I had it all wrong.
‘You’re supposed to dump him,’ she laughed. ‘After you’ve fleeced him, that is.’
But I was crying. I was in love. I’d thought he was such a softie. I’d decided I would wheel him along and feed him mush when he was ninety. Colin turned out to be harder than that. Now I know that by ninety he will be rigid like a body with rigor mortis. They’ll have to break him to get him into a chair. All those mineral supplements he gulps down each day will have melded into steel, cold hard steel, and he will have trouble even opening his metal mouth.
The End of the World Page 13