All That I Remember About Dean Cola

by Tania Chandler

  She gazed across at Christos’s fake-timber shelf. The last of the day’s light lazed on Nan’s old canisters: the white Pillsbury All Purpose Flour, the yellow Domino Sugar, the blue Maxwell House Coffee. Whatever happened to the red Lipton Tea that completed the set?

  Faye had wanted to throw away those canisters when Nan and Pop sold their unit in town and moved into the caravan at Broken River Road. Sidney had squirrelled them into one of Pop’s dozens of Pac King boxes in the shed, and taken them with her when she’d left home with Christos. They now stood alongside her miniature Tasmanian houses. Christos had decided to keep his tobacco tin and rollie papers also on the ugly shelf filled with her special old things.

  Maybe their song had been old too — not from 1989. It could have been from any previous year. For all she knew, it might have been ‘Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict’. Why couldn’t she remember!

  A blanket of tiredness swaddled her as she closed her laptop and headed upstairs to the bedroom.

  She had only enough energy to change her bottom half — two-sizes-too-small skirt for two-sizes-too-small pyjama shorts.

  Her boobs flopped to the sides like big water balloons as she lay back on the bed, unfastening her shirt buttons and bra. So hot. Drowsy. She closed her eyes, and a vignette passed behind them.

  Getting off the school bus outside Cola Hardware instead of going home. You’re sitting at the desk down the back of the shop, doing the books. You look up and lean back in your chair, sliding a pencil behind your ear. Dark eyes, sulky lips that don’t quite touch together, five o’clock shadow. A circle has been drawn around 14 February on the desk-pad calendar. I sit on it, tensing my quadriceps muscles so you don’t think I’m fat. I hate the way the flesh of my legs spreads when I sit down. They are tanned, though, and that makes them look slimmer. My skin smells of the coconut oil slathered on during the lunchtime sunbathing session on the oval with my friends. You place your cool hand on the inside of my warm thigh, just below the hemline of my very short uniform. ‘Psycho bitch.’ No, I’m sure you didn’t really call me that.

  ‘Sorry. Did I wake you?’ Christos said.

  Sidney sat up, rubbing her face. The room was stuffy with a vinegary-sweaty smell. ‘Just a little nap.’

  He flicked on the fan, and changed out of his uniform into shorts and a singlet. ‘How was it?’

  What?

  ‘Work.’

  She blinked. ‘Good.’

  ‘Had dinner?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Toastie? I’ll make them. You take it easy. Wanna eat in bed?’ He kissed her, told her her shorts looked sexy, and headed down to the kitchen.

  She fastened her shirt buttons and stared at the fan. Dean Cola, it said with each rotation. Dean Cola, Dean Cola, Dean Cola.

  Christos brought in the toasted sandwiches and sat next to Sidney. ‘I’ve been doing some research,’ he said.

  A tomato slice burned the roof of her mouth, and then her bottom lip as she spat a bite of sandwich onto her plate.

  ‘Careful, it’s hot,’ he said.

  She fanned her mouth.

  ‘The studies I’ve looked at show no significant link between the use of atypical antipsychotics during pregnancy and an increased risk of birth defects.’ Big words for Christos. He smiled and placed a hand on her thigh — cold worms in dirt. ‘I think it was just the wrong time before. And it takes longer when you’re older.’ He put his plate on the bedside table, and she let him hold her, let his armpit hairs drip sweat on her shoulder. ‘I booked an appointment for us with the GP. Get some tests done.’

  ‘I don’t want to have tests.’

  ‘Just to make sure everything’s all right. Maybe get a referral to a specialist.’

  She shook her head against his chest. Mad sad people should not have babies. ‘I need a drink of water.’ She squirmed out of his embrace.

  ‘I’ll get it.’

  ‘I will.’ She left her plate on the bed and rushed out, her boobs sloshing under their unfastened bra.

  Downstairs, dizziness stopped her for a rest against the kitchen table. Her laptop woke up when she bumped it. Petra Sommer has sent you a direct message.

  Sid!!! the DM said. How are you? I’m store manager at Finley’s now. 2 kids, just separated from deadshit hubby. You?

  She took a deep breath and replied: Petra! Went to uni as a mature-age student. Work as an editor now.

  Christos called from the bedroom, ‘You all right, Sid?’

  ‘Just checking what the weather’s going to be like tomorrow.’

  Petra: You and Christos still together?

  So, that’s why Petra had made contact. She was slow with her reply and Petra beat her with another message.

  Petra: You got kids?

  Sidney: No. Who did you marry?

  Petra: Fuckwit Damian Wilson.

  She remembered Damo’s hotted-up, old maroon EH Holden.

  Petra: You still with Christos?

  She closed the dialogue box and perused Petra’s list of friends — she had hundreds more than Sidney. Some she remembered from back home, some she wanted to forget, but none seemed to have any connection to Dean Cola.

  She thought about Petra, when they were kids, playing and swimming in the river. And when they were older, Petra teasing her about her clothes. Petra drunk and sloppy, flirting with all the boys. Petra passed out at parties. The pain they’d caused each other. Jealousy. Dumb teenage stuff. And worse things: rumours, betrayal. The taste of West Coast Coolers rose with the memories like nausea. Sidney pushed them back down. Making contact with Petra Sommer had been a bad idea. She unfriended her.

  She shut down her laptop and stood up as Christos clomped into the kitchen. He took his tobacco tin and rollie papers from the ugly shelf of special old things.

  ‘Hot again tomorrow,’ he said as he rolled a cigarette. ‘With a cool change in the arvo.’

  THE SOUNDS of Christos blowing his nose and hawking up his lungs in the shower woke her. Five past five on the alarm clock. She rolled over and went back to sleep.

  It was getting light when he woke her again with a kiss. He mumbled something about leaving early for his shift, a bushfire threat in the outer suburbs.

  Sidney left open the doors to the bedroom balcony, and the bathroom. She gazed dreamily at the treetops and powerlines while she sat on the toilet.

  Stepping into the shower, she turned on the water. A glob of phlegm clung to the glass door like a uvula. On closer inspection, there was a string of blood inside, which reminded her of an insect fossilised in amber. When Sidney was a kid, Auntie Stella had relayed graphic details to her and Faye of Uncle Colin coughing up blood while he was dying of cancer. An image of what that might have looked like had stuck in Sidney’s memory. She sucked in her breath and backed up hard against the wall. Christos probably just cut himself shaving. She lifted the handheld showerhead from its cradle and hosed the mucous, stepping out of its way as it slimed across the floor and down the drain hole.

  ‘Firefighters have stopped the spread of a bushfire in Melbourne’s outer north,’ said the radio news presenter. ‘The blaze was out of control earlier, closing the Hume Highway in Campbellfield. There is currently no threat to communities, but the Metropolitan Fire Brigade has issued an advice message urging residents to monitor weather conditions and warnings.’

  Christos had left a bowl of muesli and fresh fruit salad for Sidney on the kitchen bench. She scraped it into the bin and made coffee.

  ‘The Country Fire Authority are battling another, much larger fire burning near the Grampians. The blaze comes with windy conditions and temperatures set to soar across Victoria today, with the mercury tipped to hit forty degrees in some areas. Rain is forecast for this afternoon, but firefighters are concerned the southerly change will make the f
ire front even larger before bringing relief. Residents are being warned to enact their bushfire plans.

  ‘And in breaking news, the six-month-old baby injured in the Collins Street truck rampage has died in hospital overnight, becoming the fifth victim —’

  Sidney couldn’t bear to hear any more; she turned off the radio. She shoved her work shoes into her bag and put on sneakers, needing to walk — the long way, along the creek, to the train station.

  It was dirty out with smoke from the bushfires in the air. The brown creek brought memories of the river back home. Familiarity and deception. Boring could quickly become flood or drought. Predictable turned dangerous. She walked faster.

  She didn’t often come down here. This was ‘where women shouldn’t walk alone, where they’re followed, flashed, assaulted. Worse,’ Christos always reminded her. She slid the blade of her house key between the knuckles of her useless fist. Cyclists, joggers, and an Irish setter walking its walker passed her on the trail beside the velodrome. Birds chirped and warbled; nearby building works banged and buzzed.

  Around the bend, the Russian cathedral loomed — a gingerbread palace with gold onion-shaped domes glinting. A large cross, rusted in parts, almost as tall as Christos, lay sideways on the ground, propped against the building. Fallen or awaiting repairs?

  High-voltage power lines marched towards the environment park, like The War of the Worlds’ Martians. In the water, ducks dipped their bills among the rubbish — discarded clothing, plastic bags, soccer balls — caught on rocks, weeds, and willows where once the Wurundjeri people had gathered and, long before, volcanic lava had flowed and set the creek’s course. The smell down here was peppery, earthy, with a hint of something rotting, like dead snails and dog shit: slime-coloured.

  By the time Sidney reached the station, sweat had glued her light-cotton dress to the parts of her body that stuck out. The air conditioning on the train wasn’t working. She tried to think about anything except the baby and the pain that had seeped into Collins Street; the baby’s mother and the others who had been there, who would be there always; their last phone calls, the songs they’d been listening to through earphones; their forever-frozen moments in time.

  Dean Cola, Dean Cola, Dean Cola. My green light, my bell jar, my pool of tears. I’m scared. I’m ashamed. You were, you are. Did you really exist? Does She, did I, exist? What is existence anyway? Reality or reflection?

  Shockwaves of dizziness still fizzed through her body, but small ones, and only every now and then. Her mind was feeling like her own again. Had she ever really been mad? Or had Faye and Christos made it all up?

  The creek piddled alongside the train line until it disappeared from view, joining the river somewhere beyond the freeway. When the train stopped at Clifton Hill, Sidney stood and gave her seat to a pregnant woman. Clinging to the handrail, she caught her reflection in the window. Her body was starting to look like her own again too — she’d lost weight, but her waist remained thick. A middle-age encumbrance. Along with other things you couldn’t see, on the inside. Perhaps Christos was right and she should have a baby. Soon she’d run out of good eggs. Maybe she already had.

  How could she take care of a child! And there was the chance of passing on her illness. Or worse — parenting like her mother. Mad sad people should never have babies. Why had Christos suddenly become so desperate about wanting a baby anyway? Was it because both his brothers had started families? Tick tock? Time sliding away, too fast now, like blood in amber down the drain. Dizzy, she gripped the handrail tighter, trying not to slide away too. Hold on, hold on. Christos is fine. It was just a shaving cut.

  The smells of BO, cigarette smoke, sour milk, and something else even more acrid filled the carriage as an ashen couple, with a pink-clad baby in a battered pram, rattled on at Collingwood. The father stuck an unlit cigarette in his mouth. The mother nodded off against the wall, and slid down slowly like a pancake on Teflon until she was squatting, head lolling to one side. A poster family for the unfairness of the damaged being lumbered with the responsibility of damage control.

  The train stopped at West Richmond for an age. An announcement screeched over the PA: the driver was waiting on an ambulance for a sick passenger. The baby started crying. The father swore and banged his fist on the window, shouting that he wanted to get out, before finding that the doors were unlocked. Sidney tensed with the rest of the commuters who looked up from their phones, glancing sideways at each other, on high alert since Collins Street. The father shook the mother awake and dragged her and the pram off the train into the filthy north wind. Sidney had a strange urge to scoop up and hold the baby, tell her she was safe now. The commuters went back to their phones.

  Sidney found a seat next to a man wearing a fisherman’s cap. ‘How old do you think I am, love?’ he said, running a hand over his shiny face.

  Her guess was seventy. ‘Sixty.’

  ‘Higher.’ He gestured with his hand.

  ‘Sixty-five.’

  ‘Higher. Turn seventy-one next week.’

  ‘No! Really?’

  ‘Lots of moisturiser. That’s my secret.’

  The train started moving. The shiny man took out his phone and opened a photo album. He showed Sidney pictures of himself as a young man: a posed black-and-white portrait, a casual shot, an army photo.

  ‘Very handsome,’ she said.

  He found another picture: shirtless on the beach, flexing his muscles. ‘We didn’t go to the gym back in the day. We just did push-ups and used bars for chin-ups.’

  ‘And who’s that?’ She pointed at a colour photo of an older woman.

  ‘My wife. Lung cancer got her two years and nine months back.’

  She felt dizzy again. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘At the start, we kept saying it was just a cold.’ He opened a document — a magazine article about the ideal lip shape: Even and perfectly symmetrical. ‘Look!’ He proudly showed her the magazine-perfect lips next to a close-up of his own lips cropped from one of his old photos.

  She nodded, impressed — more by the trouble he had taken to collate the images than by the shape of his lips. There were so many creative ways to assuage pain or guilt.

  He stood and tipped his cap as the train pulled into Jolimont. ‘Remember to think of me when I was young!’ he called as he alighted.

  Sidney stuck in earphones — a Taylor Swift playlist Aubrey had cheekily snuck onto her phone. A song about stars, country roads at night, a boy with a pick-up truck, and an unread letter in a box. She looked towards the opposite platform. Open a Coke, open happiness.

  SIDNEY STEPPED out of the Southern Cross station florist with a mixed bouquet wrapped in pink tissue. The heat felt almost solid now.

  Trudging towards the office reminded her of John Brack’s painting of Collins Street. In school, the blank-faced office workers and grey city buildings reproduced in the Handbook of Art had seemed alien to a small-town girl. Now, glass towers had replaced Brack’s 1950s sandstone buildings. Not all the faces were white, and mobile phones were stuck to ears, but the blank expressions were the same. Strange now that here she was — that girl grown up — in the street, in the picture, in the book. Her past self in the future. Or her future self in the past? Or the present? Thoughts like that — time plains, continuums, illusion — could do her head in; she shook them off as she crossed King Street.

  The few bunches of flowers had grown into an ocean blocking the footpath from just past the Anpat-Enlaw building to William Street. The aroma of blooming and rotting was suffocating. Too much colour. Foil balloons were deflating, candles melting. Here a soft toy, there a chalk message of love and peace scrawled on the concrete. Sidney looked up as a tram swept past, an advertisement for the new horror movie Cleave plastered along the side: an attractive woman’s face in a broken mirror. Tamsin has two distinct sides. Be sure to stay on the right one. Sidney added her bouquet to
the pile and headed up to work.

  On level ten, the stainless-steel door to LOC loomed: Sidney’s reflection rippled like a disturbance in still water. Welcome to the funhouse. She swiped her pass. Inside, the glass and unnatural light was excessive. Sunglasses would have been a good idea, but she didn’t want anybody thinking she’d gone mad again.

  Waiting for her computer to start up, she changed her shoes.

  ‘Sidney.’ Ros swivelled her chair. She was wearing a rose-patterned tent. ‘Could I see what you’re working on?’

  Sidney opened the file — a business-admin learning resource on communication in the workplace — and leaned to one side so Ros could see her screen.

  ‘Print it out, please, so I can have a proper look.’ Ros lifted her glasses, rubbed at the indentations on her nose, and replaced them.

  Sidney sensed Dee and Dave holding their breaths. She glanced at the ceiling and sent her document to the printer. Ros uncapped a red pen as Sidney brushed past on her way to the copy room.

  She returned with the document and stood with arms folded as Ros corrected her work, striking out any whiches without parentheses, and replacing them with thats.

  Excruciate was a word that made Sidney think of snails on salt, bubbling over with slime: excruciating (verb). She felt like a snail.

  ‘You’ve almost got the hang of it,’ Ros said with a thin smile: two worms stretched above her chins. She smelled of Dioressence, like Nan used to wear — old-lady violet and rose — and leaked urine on deodorised panty liners. Dark yellow.

  Sidney snuck a look at Dee, who was shaking her head.

  ‘Just pay more attention to the style guide in future, please.’ Ros handed back the papers.

  Sidney’s hands felt heavy as she sat at her desk. The words in the assessment section of the resource swam on her computer screen. You must complete all five questions successfuly before moving on to the next section. Successfuly was spelled incorrectly. Successfully? Sucessfully? Sucsessfully? She couldn’t think. Her hands, her arms, and then her whole body was expanding, inflating like a balloon, but filling with cement instead of air. The outlines of objects started to melt; the colours within separating into dots like a Seurat painting. You knew this would happen without the meds. I knew. She knew.