Charlie and Pearl

by Robinson, Tammy

  I feel so relaxed in front of him I undo the top button on my jeans after the meal leaves me physically groaning I’m so full. He is impressed I could eat it all.

  I pass on desert though, but then obviously watch longingly while he eats his strawberry sundae so he lets me have a few mouthfuls. “You look like a begging Labrador” he laughs.

  Somewhere after desert one or both of us decide to try one of the shots off the shot menu, delightfully named ‘quick fuck’, a potent mix of Baileys, Kahlua and Midori, which we declare “hmm! delicious!” and order another round.

  We challenge some locals, a man named Dave (whose name is Joe) and his friend Fatty (who is a little man, smaller than Posh spice on her most bloated day) to a game of pool, and if it wasn’t for the fact they’d been in the pub since knockoff time so were streaks ahead of us in terms of being pissed, they would have wasted us because I kept hitting the white ball off the table and Charlie kept sinking the wrong balls altogether.

  All in all a delightful night. Just what the doctor ordered.

  Oh, and although I wake up in Charlie’s bed, he’s not in here with me. Like a true gentleman when it became clear that neither of us were capable of driving, he called his mum who came and got us and lent me a nighty and whose toilet I fear I have been violently sick into at least twice.

  Ugh.

  CHARLIE

  Man, can she pack it away.

  I was impressed that she ordered the seafood platter in the first place. I certainly didn’t think she’d eat it all. I figured I’d be left to clean it up but no, she ate it all down to the last crumb, licking her finger and wiping it around the rim of the plate and savouring the crumbs with an ecstatic expression on her face.

  I liked that she was comfortable enough to undo her jeans button in front of me.

  “Don’t tell anyone” she stage whispered, a finger in front of pursed lips. “It’ll be our little secret”.

  To know something like that, something personal that was just between her and I and that no one else in the whole world knew, felt, well it just felt pretty amazing. I even caught a little glimpse of her stomach when she leaned back to undo the offending button. A beautiful soft cream colour and oh so smooth by the looks. Not that I’m a pervert or anything, because I’m not.

  It was hard to sit there all night and try to concentrate on conversation when the whole time all I could think about was that was that after that button there was only a zip left between the difference in jeans on or jeans off.

  It was also hard to concentrate with Rangi sitting at a table behind us, Pearl with her back to him, and every time I looked his way he gave me the thumbs up and grinned like a dirty man. After a few more beers he started holding the salt shaker suggestively and making sex faces at me. Several times I didn’t hear something Pearl said because I was trying so hard to ignore him. Asshole.

  I didn’t want the night to end.

  She was....

  Everything.

  When she smiled at me my heart almost popped, it swelled so much with the pure joy of it all.

  I read books almost every day yet I can’t find the words I need to say how Pearl makes me feel.

  Ok I’ll try.

  You know how sometimes, you have these moments when everything in your life just falls into place in one perfect moment and you look around and think, this is it; this is what life is about, this exact, perfect moment in life that I’m living right now. You may not be rich, or have a job you love. But something in your life, your family, a friend, your dog who loves you unconditionally, or your partner/wife/husband/lover, something or someone just occasionally breaks through the stresses of the everyday bullshit and makes you stop and smile and think....oh yes. This, this moment right here, is what it’s all about.

  That’s how I felt every second of every minute when I was with Pearl.

  She is the stars, the sun, and the moon. The butterflies, the rainbows, the puppies, the music, the chocolate, the soft cushions, spring flowers. The jacket that keeps you warm on a cold winter’s day. She is everything that is beautiful in this world.

  Not that I told her any of that.

  I didn’t want her to think I was crazy.

  PEARL

  This morning, despite my headache and dry mouth and overall general tiredness, I feel...happy.

  Life here seems pretty damn simple.

  And although I know it can’t stay like this forever, suspended in an unrealistic moment of time, forever is a long way away.

  I decide that in the right here and now I’ll just worry about today.

  Charlie’s mum is so ecstatically happy he has brought a girl home to the house that I guess I must be the first. It’s sweet. She fusses over me, and even though I say a polite “no thanks” to breakfast I am nevertheless presented 10 minutes later with a plate of fried eggs, bacon, half a fried tomato and a couple of hash browns.

  “Just a little bit of food” she says, “you have to eat something, you’re far too skinny”. And she plonks a glass of Just juice down in front of me. “Or would you prefer coffee?”

  Charlie looks, fresh. He’s just out of the shower and his sandy blond hair is damp, curly at the edges. He obviously hasn’t had time to style it with gel yet. It’s funny, I had thought he was only about twenty or twenty one tops, but last night he told me he’s actually twenty four as well. Only a few months older than I but much younger in appearance, or at least that’s how it feels. He has a vibrant sense of youth about him. The endless promise of time.

  I know I’m too skinny right now. At my height it doesn’t suit, I look more like a scarecrow than a supermodel. And my hair has been falling out, stress, according to my GP back in the city. I haven’t been taking care of myself. I have been my lowest priority. For the first time I realise how I have let myself go, how I must look next to Charlie. How dry my skin feels, papery, and I feel the urge to dash out and invest in an expensive moisturiser.

  “I’m so sorry we woke you up”, I tell Jacqui, Charlie’s mum, while I stick my fork into the tomato and watch the juices bleed onto the plate.

  “Oh it’s fine!” she says. “No problem at all”.

  They are so comfortable together, these two. It’s clear they have a close mother/son relationship. She kisses him easily on the head as she puts his plate in front of him, piled much higher with food than mine, and he accepts it without complaint or embarrassment. They joke; she makes fun of the state he was in last night. He tells her she’s jealous he has a life.

  Together they seem so normal, so drama free. I am filled with a yearning to belong here. To worry about nothing, no one.

  “I’ll give you a ride to work” Jacqui says to Charlie. “And what about you love? Where would you like to go?”

  I know what she means, but for a second I allow myself to misread the question. Where would I like to go?

  I’ve always wanted to travel. Ever since I was a child and I learned to read. It’s why I used to collect travel brochures. Or, at least, the pictures from travel brochures. Thinking about this reminds me that I haven’t looked at my dream book for a long, long time, years in fact. So long I’m not even sure where it is. Did I take it with me when I moved out of home?

  I started my dream book when I was about fifteen. It’s a black and silver scrapbook (which I thought was seriously cool at the time), and on every page I have glued pictures of places I want to go to. At first I separated everything into sections, like beaches, cities, small towns, snowy landscapes, European Christmas markets, but after awhile I just started sticking the pictures in wherever I could find a space to fit them, so ended up a bit of a jumble. I used to carry it in my bag and whenever I was having a bad day at school, or work, or was somewhere I really didn’t want to be, like the dentists waiting room, I could take it out and look through the pictures and dream about that day, sometime in my future when I would be there.

  I wonder again where my book ended up. When I left home my mother threw a lot of my thing
s away, bitter and feeling like I’d abandoned her just as my father had. She got over it, with the help of counselling and some meds, but my things were long gone.

  I guess there’s only one option.

  “Back to town if you don’t mind, to my car”, I answer Jackie. “I’m in a shopping mood”.

  “Oh yes, “she smiled approvingly, “you’re my kind of girl”.

  CHARLIE

  On the drive into town I was insanely conscious of Pearl’s knee a mere 10cm or so from mine in the backseat of mum’s car.

  The whole situation was so crazy, so teenage like, I had an irresistible urge to giggle manically like a cartoon crazy villain, even though I’ve never giggled in my life.

  The irrefutable facts:

  Pearl slept in my bed last night.

  My bed, and ok, so I wasn’t in there with her, but I lay awake on the couch for ages thinking about her in my bed touching the same sheets I slept in the night before and which I probably wouldn’t wash ever again now. And I snuck in while she was in the shower this morning and, ok this is hard to admit because I know it makes me sound either like a real saddo or a bit weird, but I sniffed my pillow, and I could smell a lingering trace of her. It smelt a bit like coconut, exotic.

  She ate breakfast at MY table, in MY house, with MY mum.

  And now she was in the backseat of mum’s car with me, because the front seat was overflowing with folders and boxes and other crap from mum’s work, and her knee, bony and with tiny stubbles of light blond hair (I can see them because the sunlight is streaming through the window on her side of the car and illuminating her skin like an angels) is close enough that if I reached out I could touch it without even fully extending my arm.

  Shivers down my body at the thought.

  Delicious shivers.

  PEARL

  I’ve made myself a new dream book.

  The other day when Jacqui dropped me at my car I turned left at the roundabout instead of right and drove for 40 minutes to Tauranga, with the window down and the radio blaring.

  Even though it wasn’t summer it was sunny enough for me to pretend it was, flashbacks to long hot days with Tania, driving to beaches close but far enough away that our mothers or Gran couldn’t see when we doused ourselves in baby oil and sunbathed with our tops off. Face down, not face up, we weren’t brave enough for that. Gran would have KILLED us if word had got back to her. She was ahead of her time, our Gran, and right from when we were a young age she worried about the damage the sun was doing to our delicate, beautiful skin. She made us wear T-shirts over our bathers when we swam, and sit under a shade umbrella while other children baked themselves like potatoes in the sun. I suppose I have her to thank for my soft, relatively unblemished skin now.

  I returned home from the city with:

  - A new, stylish scrapbook, hardcover, a gorgeous shiny royal blue colour with a delicate border of scallop shells and starfish. It called to me from a shelf filled with plain cream and cardboard covers.

  - About 30 travel brochures for locations as diverse as Thailand, Alaska, Europe, South America. I went through a lot to get them as things had changed since last I ventured into a shop. Brochures, from memory, used to be freely available on shelves. Not anymore. I had to sit down and give over all my details (I gave a fake name, address, DOB – last thing I need is to end up on another database) and explain where I wanted to go and why, and because I wanted brochures for a variety of places I had to pretend I was some kind of ditzy backpacker planning on travelling the world but without any money issues whatsoever. The travel ‘consultant’ was a chubby bleached blond with some serious raccoon eyes; mascara smeared halfway down each cheek and halfway up to her eyebrows. A corner shelf on her desk was piled high with food; miniscule tins of baked beans, packets of biscuits, crackers, all of it the distinct blue and white weight watcher brand. From the look of her I didn’t think it was working. The top button on her shirt was straining, pulled apart by opposing forces, I was scared it was going to pop off and ping me in the face, so I kept leaning to the left a little, out of the direct firing line.

  - A new hair cut. Sleek, bobbed, just under my chin. A stupid choice really, with my naturally curly hair, as I would need to straighten it every morning or risk it curling out like an afro.

  - A packet of hair dye, bitter chocolate brown No# 851

  And other assorted goodies such as chocolate (the good stuff, 70% cocoa), more wine, a gorgeous pair of ocean blue fisherman pants (so comfy), Bridget Jones Diary DVD (volume one and two) and a CD of hits from the 90’s, girl power ballads.

  It was time for a revamp.

  I put on the CD, cranked it up to LOUD, dyed my hair, accidentally dying the shower curtain and a couple of spots of the lino as well, (sorry Gran), and boogied my way round the house.

  It was fun, but there was something missing. So I text Charlie to get Cushla’s number and shyly sent her a text, asking if she wanted to come over for a bit of a ‘girl’s night’.

  “Hell yeah!” she text back, “b there soon”

  I was worried she might not be into the same things as me, but I needn’t have. As it turned out we got on awesomely. Drank some wine, ate some chocolate, drank some more wine, painted out nails. I felt girlie, and pretty again, and carefree, like one of those travelling pants sisterhood girls, or Britney in that crappy road trip movie she made (that I secretly enjoyed).

  Later though, when the CD had finished, the chocolate and the wine were all gone and we had watched Bridget drink nine hundred gallons of chardonnay and make out with Colin Firth, Rangi picked a tipsy Cushla up and I was left to my own devices once more. I walked down to the beach in my fisherman pants, barefoot, the sand cool and coarse between my toes. I looked at the moon, fat and heavy in the sky, blue on the water, the breeze caressing, and I had a moment where I could have waded out into that water and just...kept on swimming.

  CHARLIE

  So autumn turned into winter.

  Leaves fell, nights shortened; dews got heavier, frosts crunchier. You know how it works.

  I had a few more ‘non dates’ with Pearl. I couldn’t get past that friends stage.

  I picked her up one Sunday and we went to a small beach that I knew at this time of the year would be secluded. The walk there is over private land; the owner is a nice enough guy, rarely seen in town. A real salt of the earth local, bearded and self sufficient. He doesn’t mind locals going there but he’ll threaten to shoot any out-of-towners who dare try to cross in summer. When we got to the beach she was puffed, breathing heavily and quickly and leaning on the fence. I thought for a second I might have to carry her back but she came right after a few minutes rest. I had planned everything carefully. Wanted to it to be romantic, but not romantic, if you know what I mean. I had a backpack in which I’d packed lunch; breadsticks, fancy crackers, camembert cheese, cracked pepper pate, some sundried tomato hummus (which I tried once and thought tasted like wet paper but which I knew she liked). A jar of green olives (gross), some Italian Salami (yum), and a chilli and garlic flavoured cheese whose price I was still reeling from - $9.89!! for a small round cheese!! But Rangi told me that Cushla bought it every week as her treat so I was hoping Pearl would like it too.

  She did.

  I also took a bag of twisties, as a backup in case everything else turned out to be yuck.

  We ate the food on a tartan blanket I’d borrowed from mum’s long unused picnic basket, and drank a cheap bottle of red wine (I’d blown my money on the damn cheese) out of plastic glasses.

  After we ate we lay back on the blanket and I watched her adoringly out of the corner of my eye until she dozed off and then I could openly stare.

  I’d never met someone so seemingly untouched by the sun before. Did she even tan I wondered? Her face was angular, not what you would think of as conventionally pretty but pretty all the same. I watched her breathe, her lips slightly parted, the air whistling ever so softly as it passed between. I could have listened to it for ho
urs.

  Another night we drove to the hot pools and hopped from the Jacuzzi (hot) to the big pool (not quite as hot) until our skin wrinkled and turned pink and we laughed because we looked like a pair of 70 year olds. She wouldn’t let us sit in the Jacuzzi for more than the ‘recommended ten minutes’, in case it left us with lasting brain damage.

  “It’s true” she insisted, ‘it happened to a friend of a friend”

  I gave her a look, “What was his name?”

  “Ok so maybe it was a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend, but still, it happened” she said stubbornly.

  I’d heard that urban legend myself, growing up, but I didn’t disillusion her.

  And then there was the night I drove us to the city and we watched a depressing movie called Revolutionary Road. God it was terrible. I picked it because it had Leonardo Dicaprio and Kate Winslet in, and any guy who knows his stuff knows that girls went gaga over the two of them in Titanic so I figured it might be romantic. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Pearl physically stiffened beside me while watching it. I felt her body tense, then sag wearily. Leaning slightly away from me.

  Afterwards we drove home in silence. I kept trying to look at her sideways, gauge her mood. I couldn’t work out why the movie had affected her so much.

  I still have no idea. It was just a movie after all.

  When I saw her two days later at the weekend she was over it, happy again, smiling. I took her some crayfish that Rangi gave me and we ate it on her deck, rugged up in blankets.

  We had a shared love of food, Pearl and I. I don’t understand people who ‘forget’ to eat meals, or who eat because ‘they have to’. Food is an indulgence. Sure, we need to eat to survive, but choosing what we eat is one of life’s greatest luxuries.