Perfect Skin

by Nick Earls

  So it’s important to make time for it. Around the baby things, around work. And it’s enough that I have to try to make time for all that, without getting into conversations about number plates, or whatever. Useless attempts to offer some kind of reassurance to someone whose luck you can’t change.

  It’s strange. That was probably the first time in months that I’ve had a conversation with someone I don’t know, other than a patient or one of the childcare people. And that seems like it should be a bad thing – keeping to your own small world to that degree – but why should it? It’s having a baby around, partly. It changes things, particularly how you spend your time.

  Sylvia’s at my door again, wondering what’s got into me today, but making her point with nothing more vocal than raised eyebrows. But they make it clearly enough. I’m well used to interpreting her eyebrows now. Not that there’s anything subtle about them. They’re a pretty fiendish pair of eyebrows, but that’s Sylvia. From certain angles she looks a little like Robin Williams in Mrs Doubtfire. From other angles she looks more like the regular Robin Williams, but with a well-tended bun and, fortunately, less arm hair. She’s fifty-something, and treats us all like children who aren’t quite behaving. Particularly George, who gave her the job in the first place. It’s a system that works better than I might have expected.

  Sorry, yeah, I’m ready, I tell her. Let’s have him. Her.

  Her. The name’s on the file. Like the others.

  I’ve seen my twelve o’clock patient before.

  It’s not getting lighter, his mother says, about the red lump of a strawberry naevus on his forehead just above his nose. And I’ve thought about it, and I’d really like to do something before he starts school.

  I take the photo from last year out of his file, and we compare. I go round to their side of the table and crouch down next to Tom. I hold a mirror up to let him see his lesion, and I hold the photo next to it.

  Okay, I tell him, what we hoped was going to happen was that this would just start to fade away. And then we wouldn’t do anything. But it doesn’t look like it’s going to, does it? So we can do something to make it go away. How does that sound?

  Tom looks far from convinced.

  Remember? his mother says. Remember what we talked about if you promise to do everything the doctor tells you?

  McDonald’s? Suddenly things look up. Okay.

  So we can make it go away?

  Yeah.

  Good. Well, I’d better tell you how we’re going to do that. And it’s pretty clever, and it should all go fine. First – and this is the funny bit – I’m going to put a sticker on your head.

  A sticker?

  Yeah. I’m going to squirt something on there, then put a sticker on. And we’ll leave that there for a little while, then when you come back and I take the sticker off, it’ll be numb. Do you know what numb is? Numb is when you can’t feel anything. So I can fiddle round with the lump, and you won’t feel it. And you just have to lie really still for a little while, then it’ll all be done. And we might have to get you back a couple more times to do that all again to make sure it’s finished. But all you have to do each time is stay still. Sound okay?

  Yeah.

  And how does it sound to you? I ask his mother. Can we get you back in an hour or two, once the local’s taken effect? What I want to do is use some local anaesthetic cream, rather than anything that might be uncomfortable.

  That sounds good. And coming back would be fine. We go into the treatment room for me to put the local on and she says, How’s your baby? You were going to have a baby not long after we were here last time.

  She’s fine. She’s really good, actually. A lot of fun. A lot of work too, but a lot of fun. She’s six months now.

  What’s her name?

  Lily.

  That’s a nice name. You should have a photo on your desk. You and your wife and Lily.

  Yeah. I keep thinking I should take more photos of her. She’s only this old once, I guess.

  The first thing I do at lunchtime is call my mother. I ask her how Lily is and she says, We’ve been having fun. Lots of rolling round, some sucking of feet.

  I think that started a couple of days ago.

  Could be teething.

  Do you think so? She seems pretty calm, most of the time.

  She is six months.

  Yeah, I know. And that’s kind of hard to believe, isn’t it?

  George sticks his head around the door and tells me lunch is here.

  There was a time when Lily would almost fit on my hand. It wasn’t long ago, but now that it’s gone it almost seems like something I’ve made up.

  Salad roll, large, George says, when I get round to the lunch room, and he throws it to me like a quarterback.

  Would you treat your own lunch that way, Porge?

  Would it ever be a salad roll, large? They GladWrap them good and tight, Jon Boy, just for throwing. George has three pies in front of him. He picks one up, takes a bite, and through a full mouth says, Lentils, as though he’s therefore got the healthy food pyramid totally under control.

  Wendy comes in and takes the other salad roll (small) without having to demonstrate her catching prowess. She sees me as a convert to the salad roll now, though all it actually shows on my part is a lack of imagination. I decided a while back that I could do better than cheap Chinese and sloppy lasagne, and suddenly I was a regular with the salad roll (large) simply because I hadn’t given lunch enough thought to come up with two healthy options. And it’s such a seventies high-school tuckshop choice.

  Oscar claims the last pie – the other lentil pie – and starts on it carefully with a knife and fork. Despite having seen him eat plenty of times, it can be hard not to notice his neatness as he goes about it. Particularly when he’s sitting next to George, who treats each pie like a mortal enemy and attacks. It’s like eating in a Hall of Mirrors – each of them embarking on the same process, but one of them turning it minute and the other beastly. Wendy knows it, I know it, and they don’t.

  Oscar lives at George’s place and they always split the takeaway bills evenly, since each of them gets a whole meal from his portion. Two satay sticks would do Oscar most nights, but it really is as though they haven’t noticed the disparity. Oscar is the definition of compact, the last person I know to wear panther-print Bata Scout school shoes. He got so annoyed when they stopped putting the compass in the heel – when he was in his twenties – that my father made him write to the company and complain. There’s a lot you can do with a compass, lad, I think my father said, getting on side. Not that any of us could ever think of a second thing you could do with a compass. But I think the letter scored Oscar a free pair of compassed shoes that someone found in the warehouse. They wouldn’t reverse their decision, though.

  Today, mid-pie, he says, Hey, check this out, and takes a very small phone from one of his pockets. Pretty cool.

  Oh god, you’ve gone and bought it, George says in an exaggerated groan. I knew you would. Why couldn’t you get one the size of a phone? Nanotech as virility symbol, episode sixty-four. A definite step beyond the big car for the small-penised man.

  Hey, I’m a small man. A small phone works for me. It’s a simple matter of scale. Nothing to do with my penis. And, anyway, look at me. I weigh forty-eight kilos. I wear schoolboy-size pants. Who’s going to look at me and think there’s a big penis?

  Come on. George has got a point, I say, deciding to take him on. You weren’t offering it that way. You were being size-ist again. Going down that ‘small is sexy’ track. And how does that phone work style-wise for the guys who fight out of the flyweight division?

  Medium-to-large guys, for instance, George specifies.

  Or large guys who used to be medium.

  Without making this personal.

  Hey, you were never medium, Porge, Oscar says.

  This is the phone equivalent of the small, sleek, throbbing red sports car that’s all engine. And I can’t get one but
t cheek into those. This is what I’m saying. You’re turning small and sleek and intricate into something desirable, and where’s the room for the big simple people in your new millennium? The people whose hands work best with a house-brick-size phone, who biologically need the Landcruiser-equivalent vehicle.

  You big guys have had it your way too long.

  And can I get a date any more? I’m emasculated by this. This phone, George says, taking it between thumb and forefinger, this is the new millennium penis. The ‘wow’ penis. That’s what it’s about. Wow factor. And big things don’t have it. Big is passé now. It’s all about neat little things with flair, presentation, cutting-edge applications.

  What, the penis that’s also a corkscrew and nail clippers?

  No, that sounds like the Swiss-army penis. And those applications, while they broaden the scope of the instrument, aren’t exactly cutting edge. Maybe I’m thinking more about slinky contours, a funky range of colours.

  Yeah, that’d be it, Wendy says. A funky range of colours’d be enough for me. That’d fix all the design flaws. How about we vote for penises in all colours and move on to the next agenda item? I think improving the penis is probably beyond us since, for a start, you’d have to try attaching it to some kind of brain. It does usually operate without much input from the cranial one.

  You don’t mean Steve? George begins.

  No, Steve’s the exception. Now that he’s trained. I’m talking generally. The people who think their idea of – what was it – flair? Who think that flair is some substitute for a second’s consideration. And if it turns out that it’s not biologically possible to attach the penis to a thinking body part, some delaying device would be okay. A warning signal even, so you knew there was, like, a minute to go.

  Or a seven-second delay, like live radio.

  Now there’s a very male time frame. Why does it so often get treated like speed reading? It’s not better if it’s faster. That only means you get to roll over and sleep sooner. And how do you think it is for women, reaching their prime at thirty-five when you reach yours at eighteen? You were all appalling when you were eighteen. No reasonable woman went near any of you.

  As opposed to now, you mean? George says.

  Wendy stops, looks at us and laughs. Good point. Nice phone, Oscar. That’s what I meant to say.

  Thanks, Wend.

  So we begin our meeting. The four of us. Three of us associates in LaserWest, Oscar the hired-hand part-timer. It’s a Wendy MBA strategy, regular meetings. Not that you need a degree to see the sense in it but, since Wendy’s the one with the MBA, it’s the kind of policy she gets to set.

  Today, she talks through budgets and billing, how much we’re spending on disposables, patient numbers, which have been down a little for this month and the last, exactly as anticipated with Christmas and the holidays.

  But it’s at least as busy as this time last year, she says, which means it should be busier over the next couple of months. So it’s probably time to be looking seriously at getting another dermatologist in to take some of the load from George. What do people think about that?

  She looks at me, and I nod.

  Yeah.

  It’s easy to agree with. The numbers show we’ll need someone else, and with George the only one of us who’s a specialist dermatologist (and referral patterns as they are), it’s another dermatologist we need. But I’m tired today and I can’t concentrate, and I’m looking past Wendy’s head and out the window. So I agree and I tell her I’m happy if she starts asking around, and I leave it at that. It’s still hot outside, from the look of it, and the window tint makes the sky a deeper blue. Lily didn’t sleep so well last night, and she’s on my mind today.

  When the meeting is closing it’s as though Wendy’s aware of that, and she says to me, Childcare’s back on for tomorrow. The runny-nose emergency is over. As though it’s the last item of business.

  Then she and George have their two o’clock patients to see and I have Nigel telling me, The strawberry naevus from this morning’s back and ready to go.

  After work I go to Coles. At the start of the day I was carrying a list of things to buy, but it’s elsewhere now. And when I lose my list I usually buy toilet paper, just to be sure. Sometimes I end up with an awful lot of toilet paper that way, but I never run out.

  But I usually buy Designer Collection grey, which seems to be absent today. So I stand there, thinking about the cupboard under the bathroom sink. Trying to visualise it, to put a picture in my mind of its stock levels. Meanwhile, singing along to 10CC’s ‘The Things We Do For Love’ on the muzak, and only becoming aware of it a couple of verses in.

  Can I help you, sir? a woman’s voice says next to me, just as I realise I’m putting in a significant subconscious effort to portray a mad bastard, standing quietly singing a seventies hit to an empty toilet-paper shelf.

  Yeah, I can’t see the Designer Collection grey, I tell her as I turn, figuring that the singing’s made it too late for dignity already and I might as well not hide my toilet-paper preference from the Coles staff.

  Designer Collection grey? Toilet paper has names like that? the student from this morning’s run says, smirking at me, and then deciding what the hell, why not laugh?

  Maybe.

  She laughs again. If it wasn’t at me, I think we’d both be having fun here.

  You have to put thought into toilet paper, I tell her. You don’t just pull off a six pack without slowing down on your way past, you know. And, if you’d seen my bathroom, you’d understand why it had to be Designer Collection grey. This peach, for instance, it’d send out all the wrong signals, design-wise.

  Really?

  Yeah. See?

  I point to the packet.

  This bit here. ‘Complement your bathroom’, it says. Peach would be a radical departure for me.

  You read toilet-paper packets? She takes it from me. Hey, it also says, ‘Try the unexpected and be adventurous. Use colours and objects not commonly found in bathrooms.’ What’s that about?

  I don’t want to know. I’m happy to go no further than point one – complement your bathroom. But it’s possible that I could be a creature of habit. People might have said that once or twice.

  So, is the running a habit too?

  Yeah. It’d happen most mornings.

  I might see you out there. I run a bit myself. I’m Ash, by the way. Ashley.

  I’m Jon.

  And I’ve never met anyone while standing next to this much toilet paper before. Maybe that’s what suddenly makes me feel awkward and wonder what I’m doing here. Standing with this student who must think I’m at least eccentric, hung up on very specific toilet paper and singing to the shelf when the toilet paper isn’t there. I’m not sure what to do, where to look, where I should look at a time like this.

  So I look down into her trolley and I find myself saying, No-one can eat that much sour cream . . . as though it’s any of my business at all.

  I’ve really lost it this evening.

  It’s those months without meeting new people. That’s what I put it down to afterwards. After Ash has emphatically told me sour cream goes with anything. After she has asked my advice as to whether she should buy toilet paper based on complementing the peeling paint on the wall or the dark fungus on the ceiling. After she has thrown a six pack of peach into my trolley and told me, Vibrant and contrasting – you’ll thank me for it, and we’ve both suddenly realised we don’t actually know each other, and reeled off in opposite directions. And then, I suspect, scuttled up and down the aisles, doing our utmost to stay well apart.

  I should concentrate so much more when I’m out. You change the way you operate when you’re the only adult in a house with a six-month-old child, and I should remember to change back to my previous well-monitored self in public. It’s a critical age for communication – I have a book that says that – so you find yourself verbalising any thought that comes into your head, so that she gets to learn what words are abo
ut. You wander round the house talking about trees and birds and dog hair. About putting that dirty plate in the dishwasher. About tucking your own shirt in. All without any inhibitions.

  You find yourself singing a lot, because all your life you wouldn’t have minded singing a lot but you were so obviously crap at it that you didn’t, and finally you’ve met someone who’s far too young to know. So it’s Lily’s fault, all this. I have no qualms about scapegoating an infant.

  And my workmates have adjusted to the fact that I almost always tell them when I’m going to the toilet now, and I try very hard not to get into the specifics of the trip. There are too many nappies in my life, and that and too much unmonitored commentating make for a dangerous combination. Somehow Wendy seems to have gone through this with two children and hardly blurred things at all. She’s obviously better with boundaries than I am. There have been a couple of times when I’ve pulled up not more than a microsecond before telling Sylvia, when she’s trying to thrust a patient on me, Hang on, I’ve just got to go and do a poo.

  Things, therefore, could actually have been worse in Coles. Sometimes, in fact, they are worse in Coles. One of the checkout people is called Eileen, and what chance have I got of avoiding at least humming the only big hit of Dexy’s Midnight Runners as I’m unloading my groceries onto her conveyor belt? Sometimes I start to hear words muttering tunelessly out of me before I realise what I’m doing. And she looks at me. She knows I’m doing it. I’m sure of it. So I avoid her queue entirely now, even though she’s a pretty slick operator.

  When I park at my parents’ place and open the car door, the heat slurps in and shows me the kind of day I’ve missed while I’ve been in airconditioning.

  Just having a sleep, my mother says. So I’ll make us some tea.

  I go into the bedroom to take a look at Lily while the kettle’s boiling, and she’s curling and uncurling her fingers as though, somewhere off in a dream, she’s doing something purposeful. Explaining the double-helix shape of a DNA molecule to someone, something like that. No, Watson, no. It goes like this.