by Kathy Lette
‘Usual television heavies.’ Russell was only interested in people for what they could do for him. Kerrie had occasionally heard him refer to his friends and immediate family as “contacts”. ‘Bond, Sam Chisholm. Packer, Murdoch’s man …’
‘You’re kidding!’ The names lit up the shabby room. ‘Why didn’t you take me?’
‘Pet, it was not a mixed do. It was one of those ocker occasions. It’s degrading enough for me to be marooned amid of all that macho insensitivity. It would have insulted you as a feminist. Besides, pet, we do have to keep up appearances.’
Kerrie’s stomach was churning with tiny unexpected turmoils. ‘Are you … are you ever going to leave her?’
He felt oppressed by the conversation that was about to engulf him. Kerrie, he had always thought, was wise enough not to attempt orienteering in his marital landscape. ‘Any decision is subject to reassessment in a different time frame allowing for emotional parameters and unpredictable impactions and …’
‘So, answer-wise, you’ll have to respond to my question with a definite guarded negative.’ Kerrie had come equipped with a man map and conversational compass.
‘Ah, yes, I, ah … think so. Imogen is a person in her own right, pet.’ Russell squirmed. ‘I would expect you, Kerrie, as a fellow woman, to empathise with that. The three of us have to be above the suburban mentality of possession and jealousy.’ Kerrie thought momentarily that he had tuned into some FM community radio station. ‘In all fairness, my departure must be executed as gently as possible.’
‘Russell …’ She fumbled in vain to change his frequency.
‘Besides, it’s too impractical this fiscal year.’ Russell spoke every currency of the world fluently. ‘Is there anything to drink in this house?’
‘Cooking sherry. I’m broke. It wouldn’t hurt if you brought round the odd wine cask.’
Russell flinched. ‘You know I never drink bulk wine. You earn a good salary. Thanks to me putting in a word for your promotion. I can’t help it if you’re a negative saver.’
Kerrie narrowed her eyes at him. ‘You may have got me that pissy little research job, but I work bloody hard, you Turramurra Turd Brain.’ She was now convinced that mistresses must have been better off last century. Feminism had created equality alright. Women still got treated like shit, only now they had to pay for it. ‘You know I want to be a presenter.’
Russell swivelled on his cowboy heels to face her. He was torn between anger and an opportunistic appreciation of his delicate timetable. The trouble with women was that you could never just leap straight into the cot. They always needed at least an hour’s chat upfront, then at least half an hour after the act. Imogen’s curfew was 1 am. If he wasn’t in bed with Kerrie by eleven, he usually called it quits. To arrive home this side of midnight would score him some brownie points with the wife. And Kerrie would interpret any platonic gesture as proof of the sincerity of his affection.
‘My God!’ He glanced at his swatch. It was only 10.30. ‘Darling. You’re so complex, I can’t keep up. One minute I am overwhelmed by the maturity displayed by a girl of your tender twenty years. And then the next, I’m reeling from your … forthrightness.’
Kerrie rolled her eyes at his rehearsed preamble. She had learned that with television people it was advisable to divide or multiply everything they said by at least one hundred. When Russell described someone in an interview as ‘fascinating’, her translation told her that the person was scarcely tolerable. ‘The next minute I’m enthralled by your exuberant, nymph-like charm.’ Now he was combining Gallic hand gestures with his rhetoric. In frustration, she hurled herself backwards onto the couch and sighed. Russell glimpsed the seaweed clump of dark hair in the crease of Kerrie’s thighs and felt movement in the groin of his Guccis. ‘It’s the dichotomies of your personality that make you so … fascinating.’
‘Russell.’ She flinched away from his groping fingers. ‘Face it. There’s no future for us. You’re forty, you know. That’s nearly fifty. And fifty is a quarter of Captain Phillip. Your age times four is how long Australia’s been colonised. Do you realise that?’
The smile that Russell donned to accept Logie Awards dissolved on his lips. ‘No. No, I hadn’t realised that. If you find it repugnant that I’m balding, why don’t you just say so?’ He turned away from her, temporarily eclipsing his face from her view, and checked his Swatch again.
‘Huh? God. Your receding hair line’s got nothing to do with it.’
‘How would you like to be forty … ish, in midlife crisis, unhappily married, the property of the public and balding? Be patient with me, pet. I came to feminism late. I’m still evolving. When I think back on my attitudes to women … How crass, how callous I was …’ He slumped into a state of contrite melancholia. ‘Dumping me really would be fair retribution for all my past ill behaviour.’ Russell noted to himself that remorse was not an entirely unpleasant sensation. ‘I’ve got a few years left in television and then I’ll be nothing but a geriatric joke. A pathetic, prehistoric relic with a hair transplant.’
‘Oh, come on,’ Kerrie relented. ‘It’s not that bad.’ A residue of affection forced a wry smile from her. ‘Look at it this way. You’re not balding, you’re just gaining more face.’
Russell brightened. ‘Really?’ I’m in, he thought to himself. I’m in like Flynn. ‘You really see it that way?’ He slid his arms around her.
‘Yeah. You gain face,’ she addressed the wall over his shoulder, ‘while I lose it.’
Russell peered into the mirror at his tiny bald patch. ‘Frankly, to look at me, would you think I was forty-ish?’ He was overcome by a burst of tenderness towards himself. ‘Rasheen, the girl who does my scalp massage, says I have incredibly youthful skin. I’m sorry I didn’t call.’ Russell scanned his mental autocue for emotional pointers. ‘You know you really are very …’ He shrugged out of his leather jacket. ‘… special.’
Kerrie closed her eyes. The summer heat was filled with a sad cicada mantra. The night was stagnant with the vapours of the day – the Commonsense Cookery Book tuna casserole Soula had bashed up for tea, the Nair hair remover Debbie had used on her underarms, fumes from the Fabulon Julia had sprayed all over her ironing, the forgotten vegetables liquidising in the crisper along with half a decaying onion badly wrapped in tinfoil – all mingled now in the evening air, a melange of awful odours. She retreated into his familiar embrace.
‘You’re not wearing perfume, are you, pet?’ He steered her towards the stairs, torpid and inevitable as a tide. ‘Your problem is that you’re too uptight.’ Leaning her backwards for a kiss, he surreptitiously set the timer on his Swatch. ‘Just go with the flow.’ Kerry surrendered to her weary lubricity. ‘Jeez, if I doze off and the bloody thing doesn’t go off … wake me by eleven-fifty, won’t you?’
More married men – The glory box
‘I only come alive when I’m here with you.’ Wayne yawned as he crossed to the phone. He looked like someone who had leaped off a billboard assuring you that Foster’s made more of a man of you. His body was the colour of golden syrup, except for a pair of albino buttocks. Soula watched their wriggling retreat.
Anastasoula’s mum had freaked out when she’d told her about Wayne. ‘Aussie men only want one thing,’ she’d wept. ‘Wham, bam, thank you ma’am. And you’re lucky if you get the thank-you. They don’t know our dances!… What will we eat at the wedding?… You won’t be able to cook for him. No souvlaki, yeeros, dolmades, moussaka. Only McDonald’s!’
She wanted her only daughter to marry her husband’s business partner’s cousin’s son from their old fishing village. Con was mohair and drove a wog chariot. When he’d picked her up from teachers’ college her friends had called it a ‘Marrickville Mercedes’ – a red Monaro with a sunroof and mag wheels. But the mags were too big for the car – Con secretly smeared the chassis with Vaseline to stop friction.
But then she’d got her first teaching position at Arncliffe Primary School and met Wayne.
Wayne, blond-haired and blue-eyed, epitomised all the boys who had made Soula’s school life a misery. The Skips at school had teased her about being Greek and jibed that she’d never get an Aussie boyfriend ’cause she only had one eyebrow. ‘It’s like a skid mark! Vroom!’ they used to taunt. ‘Right across your forehead.’
‘And check her mo. It’s as if her eyebrows have come down to drink!’
‘It’s me,’ Wayne announced into the phone. ‘Where am I?… In the change rooms, at footy practice.’
Soula sat with her thin knees folded up against her bare chest, listening.
‘Rain?’ He glanced out of the window and noticed for the first time the wet, blustery weather.
‘Bloody oath! Yes, it’s like a bloody chocolate cake mix out there on the field. We’re covered in mud and shit from head to …’
Soula stared across the carpet at the smooth, clean contours of Wayne’s naked body.
‘No, I’m not coming straight home. Gonna sink a couple of coldies with the boys.’ He covered the mouthpiece before rolling his eyes, as though this look of frustration would otherwise have been audible to his wife. ‘Okay, darl … Yeah, me too.’
Glancing self-consciously at Soula, he cut short his endearment and replaced the receiver in its cradle. ‘She’s okay,’ he said by way of apology. ‘In her own way.’
He looked at Soula expectantly, but she’d wriggled her big toe under the tear in the armchair fabric and was concentrating on snapping threads with her foot. Wayne pressed the tele vision remote control and sprawled back along the couch as the set hissed into life. His gastric juices gurgled and he slapped his muscly midriff with the affection usually reserved for a favourite pet. ‘Jeez, I’m hungry, Sue. Anything to eat, babe?’
Without thinking, Soula shrugged on Wayne’s discarded, pristine footy shirt, crossed to the kitchen and gazed into the fridge. She’d read an article in Cosmopolitan magazine claiming that you could analyse someone’s personality by the contents of their fridge. A couple of shrivelled lemons, half an onion wrapped in tinfoil, a soggy tomato, some Kraft cheese slices, curling at the edges, a wilted lettuce, a distressed capsicum and a carton of congealed custard was all to be found. She made a mental note that once Wayne moved in, she would call DJ’s Food Hall and get them to deliver her a whole new personality.
‘Gail doesn’t cook,’ Wayne whinged. ‘She burns.’
Soula chipped her way through the freezer to excavate a packet of fish fingers from the ice floe.
‘And what she doesn’t burn, she thaws.’ He raised one buttock to launch a loud fart. ‘Jeez! That packet shit my wife feeds me … Drop one fart and you’re hungry again.’
Soula abandoned her rescue mission and left the packet buried deep within the Arctic wastelands of the freezer.
Wayne was positioning a bucket of water between his legs. Fishing underneath the couch, he retrieved the top half of a plastic Orchy orange-juice container. He placed it over the bucket, lit the small tinfoil cone containing dope, placed his mouth over the neck of the bottle and inhaled.
‘Wa-ayne …’ Soula was constructing pagodas of cheese, tomato and capsicum. ‘What do you want? To be buried or cremated?’
He exhaled long and hard. ‘Cremated. Who wants to be put to bed with a shovel?’ Besides, I’ve been buried up to my ears in shit most of my life. Repayments, mortgages …’ He suspended his head once more over the bucket and performed a Hoovermatic inhalation.
‘I wonder if there is an afterlife …’ Gingerly, Soula lifted her towering culinary creations onto the grill, where all three sandwiches slowly capsized.
‘No. Load of bullshit.’ He laced his fingers behind his head and stretched back on the couch as if he were sunbathing beneath the overhead fluorescent. ‘Mind you, I may pack a couple of tinnies and a cut lunch. Just in case,’ he chuckled.
‘Are you frightened?’ she salvaged some anaemic shreds of lettuce to add to the sandwiches. ‘You know, of dying and that?’
‘Nah.’ Wayne flicked off the ring-pull of his beer can and frisbeed it in the vague direction of the overflowing ashtray. ‘I’ve thought it all through. Reincarnation and death and that. And it doesn’t really matter. ’Cause, no matter where you go …’ He leaned up on one elbow to deliver his insight into the mysteries of the universe. ‘… there you are!’ Then he immersed himself in a re-run of Dallas.
‘But, like, if there is some sort of God bloke,’ Soula insisted, leaning on the armrest opposite him, ‘Why doesn’t he give me some kind of a … sign?’
‘Yeah,’ Wayne agreed, gazing over at her intently and nodding.
Thinking she was finally about to elicit from him some kind of romantic commitment, Soula looked back at her lover with longing.
‘… Like stopping Clubbies from dropping in on me and dingin’ me board,’ he concluded. ‘Arseholes!’
Soula rescued the scorching toast. The cheese had puffed into brown pillows. ‘But the world is so weird.’ She pierced the bloated bits with a fork and camouflaged the damage beneath a layer of lettuce, like a little green toupee. ‘Take us for example. Like, all the other teachers at school reckon we’re just mates. Nobody suspects that we’re sort of, like, passionately in love an’ that!’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ he grunted. ‘I was thinking about all that stuff out on me board this morning before school.’
Soula looked up expectantly. ‘What stuff?’
‘As I got chundered in a six-foot swell, I thought how weird it is to call the Pacific Ocean the Pacific. It never is. Peaceful, you know? And, I mean, Greenland. It’s not green, it’s all iced up. And flying fish don’t fly. They just sort of waterski on their fins. Fascinating, huh?’ Wayne wrapped himself around his toasted sandwich. ‘What about you? Haven’tchagotthumuncheeez?’
‘Pardon?’
He swallowed. ‘Haven’t you got the munchies?’ Glancing at his girlfriend’s protruding hip bones and concave stomach he noticed for the first time that his lover had turned into a human dipstick.
‘Knowing my luck, I’ll be reincarnated as a …’ She folded herself into a different shape at his feet. ‘… nun.’
He lifted his legs so she could sit down on the couch then stretched his tanned limbs nonchalantly across her lap. ‘What are we yacking about this morbid shit for, huh? As long as next time round we’re reincarnated together.’ He lowered his sandwich to kiss her, but the melted cheese stretched like bubblegum from his mouth. ‘Shit.’ He dissected the sandwich with surgical precision. ‘What, or rather who is it?’ he peered inside. ‘Did someone die in here?… Where are the other girls tonight, anyways?’
On cue, the phone rang. Soula answered. ‘Hello?’
‘Soula, it’s me, Deb. Can I come home yet? Is the coast clear?’
‘Not quite …’
‘How is that arsehole Wayne?
‘He’s much more sensitive than you give him credit for …’
‘Has he taken you out in public yet?’
‘No … but –’
‘No buts. The only thing he’ll ever have his arm around in public is a beer can. Ditch the dag.’
Soula lowered her voice so that Wayne couldn’t hear her above the TV. ‘At least a married man is better than no man. Besides, he’s leaving his wife, he prom–’
‘I have a man, actually. He’s coming over on Friday. At seven. So make sure you’re out. It’s my turn to have the house to myself.’
‘So you’re finally over Garry?’
‘Yes. God yes. Eons ago. Now listen, while I’ve got you, did you get the note I shoved under your bedroom door about the big girls’ night out? All my old gang from school are coming, plus the surfie girls, and some new pals I want you to meet too. Put the date in your Filofax.’
‘I’ll be there … If I haven’t eloped with Wayne, that is!’ Soula giggled, ringing off. ‘Sorry Wayne, what were you saying?’
‘Where are all the girls?’
‘Oh, Debbie’s working late. Julia’s at her Prisoners Action
Group thingo, and Ro’s interstate. Kerrie’s out with that sleaze-schmucko Russell she hangs round with. He’ll never get divorced and marry her. She’ll miss the boat. She’ll be an old boiler. You get past being marriage material. I mean –’ Soula’s voice lowered to a revelatory hush ‘– she is twenty-one, you know! Don’t you reckon,’ she said tentatively, ‘it’s off for a guy to string a girl along like that? It’s so, you know, exploitative.’
Wayne flicked a copy of Cleo off the end of the couch with his foot. ‘I reckon the only thing that’s off is all the bulldyke literature these chicks force-feed you. That nude male centrefold. It’s bloody disgustin’!’
He sounded as prissy as her mother. ‘Going to teachers’ college will stuff up your brain. You should have met a nice boy at the Greek Club and settled down by now. Men can tell if you’re not a virgin. You’ve only got one bag. If that bag gets filled, I’ll scratch your eyes out! Tha vgalo ta matia sou! ’
‘Cleo is a liberating and informative magazine that empowers women. The only reading you do, Wayne, is the back of the Corn Flakes pack! You’re a Corn Flakes Conversationalist. Did you know that? Like, it gets really sort of dull talking about riboflavin and niacin all the t–’ Soula broke off and, for the first time in front of him, she burst into tears.
Alarmed, Wayne leaned over and stroked her upper arm. ‘Shhh. Calm down. It’s not that bad,’ he comforted. ‘You can actually learn a lot from the back of the pack. Did you know,’ he recited, in an effort to cheer her up, ‘that swans mate with the same partner forever?’
Soula dumped his legs off her lap and manoeuvred a cushion into the fig-leaf location. ‘How is Gail?’
‘Oh!’ He slammed the flat of his hand into his forehead. ‘She reversed into the letterbox the other day. In the goddamned Laser.’ Having polished off the first melted cheese sandwich, he now attacked the second. ‘Loves to look in any mirror, except the rear-vision.’ He glanced up from his plate. ‘Hey, don’t forget your bloody car rego, Soula. It’s due about now … You know the Esso garage near school? They’ll look after you. Just mention my name … She’s got so slobby round the house too. Shit! What are you trying to do?’ With forefinger and thumb, he extracted a piece of melted plastic cheese wrapper and flicked it onto the carpet. ‘Get my water cut off?!… Anyway, I dunno what’s got into her. Drops her underchunders and clothes all over the friggin’ floor too. It’s bloody annoying.’
