Perfect Skin

by Nick Earls

  Then my mother’s next to me, with a pot and two cups and a plate of mixed biscuits on a tray. We go back to the lounge room, and through my father’s study door I can see his computer toiling away, its cursor having been set off in the morning on another chase around the Mandelbrot set, or whatever. Programmed to do something shapely and mathematical, so that when he finishes work and gets home at the end of the day there’s something new on the screen. Now there’s a man who knows how to live.

  And it’s not as though it has anything to do with his job. Management consultants simply have no need for recreational mathematics. He’s even happy to call it a hobby, though that only makes other people think it stranger. I’m sick of telling him to stop bombarding people with his Jim’s Fractal Gallery home-page address. And I wish Oscar hadn’t once sent him a polite email in reply, but he wasn’t to know that my father would call it fan mail and take it as encouragement.

  I think it started with an interest in chaos theory, years ago – when chaos theory was a concept still owned by mathematicians – but with improvements in technology it’s got way out of hand.

  Of course, he said, a couple of months back when displaying that day’s screen marvel, now chaos theory’s just some advertising term. Gives you better airconditioning, and the like. What are they going to grab hold of next and turn into a buzz word? The Feigenbaum period-doubling cascade?

  Which only demonstrates that my father, for all his science and surprising Fractal Gallery marketing flare, doesn’t have much of a grasp of advertising, and doesn’t realise what it is about buzz words that appeals. That it’s the simple juxtaposition of two paradoxical but normal words that sells. ‘Chaos’ and ‘theory’. Fuzzy and logic. And the notion that there might truly be science that creates the buzz (however insurmountable the science might be for the everyday non-postgrad brain). And Feigenbaum won’t get a look in. Heisenberg never quite fired the public imagination with his uncertainty principle – despite following the paired paradox rule and combining it with a solid German boffinesque name – so no way does Feigenbaum stand a chance.

  So, any idea what’s happening with the childcare place tomorrow? my mother asks me.

  Oh, yeah, didn’t I tell you? Wendy said things are okay now, apparently. So everyone can go back tomorrow.

  Lily, like her father, is a creature of routine. Except I get to decide the routines for both of us, at least in principle. Monday and Tuesday she spends half the day with my mother (and sometimes my father) and half with me. Wednesday, Thursday and mornings on Friday she’s at childcare at Indooroopilly. Wendy’s daughter Emily goes there too, and it’s through that connection that Lily got in. It’s small, it’s expensive, it’s unduly cautious when there’s anything viral about, but she seems happy there, and that matters more than most things.

  By the time I check on Lily again, she’s awake and being quietly amazed by her own hand. It’s as if she’s trying to work out whether she’s controlling it or not. Or maybe it’s some wriggly pink thing someone else left there. She flaps it around, sees me, says, Haaa, as though I’m something worth sighing about.

  Hey, Bean, I say to her, using the name George gave her when she was a day old and he was the first to comment on her kidney-bean-shaped head. I pick her up and give her a bit of a throw around and she laughs in her gurgly, drunk-person-drowning kind of way. A glob of cheery drool swings down onto my right cheek.

  Fortunately her head is much less kidney-bean-like than it was. The birth canal is merciless when it comes to head shape, so it’s lucky babies’ skulls are designed to take it. But I think it meant that George (himself morphologically many sizes above conventional beauty) took to her the first time he saw her, and he bought her a series of toys with affirming strange-shaped heads during her first week. But he couldn’t let go of the name, so it’s stuck. I even tried to put him off by telling him he was just copying Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, but he said, They were basing it on ultrasound, and have you noticed the special temporary shape of your lovely daughter’s head?

  In the car on the way home we play the Lemonheads. I sing. The baby book didn’t specify that I should sing the Lemonheads’ ‘Big Gay Heart’, but it didn’t specify anything else, either, and I’m planning to swerve nursery rhymes as long as I can. The Bean flaps around, grabbing handfuls of air. I’m going to assume that’s appreciation.

  I’d get a toy out of your bag, I tell her, but I’m driving. So the best I can do is sing. You can join in any time, by the way.

  Blah blah blah. I talk about our evening, walking the dog, mashed pumpkin.

  Mashed pumpki-i-in, I sing, to the irresistible phrasing of ‘Big Gay Heart’,. Please don’t eat my mashed pumpkin.

  On to the weather, my day at work, how we both like having a bit of a drive around in the car, the coincidence of meeting that student twice in one day. But she had to buy groceries, I suppose. It’s not that improbable that she’d find herself late afternoon in the nearest supermarket.

  Let’s talk about the word ‘coincidence’. Have we done that one before?

  As soon as I open the car door at home I can hear Elvis approaching, the click-click of hard whippet toenails on the concrete under the house. It’s too hot for him to jump around today with the usual small-brained glee that comes with us arriving home, so he gives me a stare instead, and I try not to misinterpret it as meaningful.

  It’s something, I think, that he learned from my father, who has a great capacity for the apparently meaningful stare. He’s an indisputably clever man and there are times when the stare really does mean he’s deep in thought, but once at a wedding he broke from a very meaningful twenty-minute gaze to say only, I’m sure those two women are related, because they have identical teeth. But he could just as easily have come out with something about number theory. As far as I know the same can’t be said for Elvis, but they’re both prone to keeping things internal.

  I take Lily in one arm and her voluminous baby bag in the other and we all go inside, to room after room of stifling, closed-in heat. I get the fans going and the windows open, and the evening rituals start. Elvis asking for Bonios in his big grumbly feed-me voice. Jumping, begging shamelessly, saying something that sounds very like Bonio, nudging at the container with his nose. Me sounding him out first to see if he’d prefer a cheeseburger, the way I do every night. Running the whole routine and making him progressively more excited so that, when it comes, the Bonio’s like a gold ingot and he clunks it into his mouth and jogs off somewhere to hide it. Then I can move on to a few slow spoonfuls of apple puree for the Bean, followed by an attempt at the last bottle of formula in the fridge.

  We sit on the back verandah, since it’s less hot, but that doesn’t seem to help much. Despite all my friendly talk and the attention I draw to the lorikeets in the trees, Lily’s not in a great mood for feeding.

  See the birds. Look at the colours.

  Thanks, but no thanks.

  We walk. I push her in a stroller and Elvis trots along beside us, stopping to sniff at weeds other dogs have marked, sometimes giving them a squirt of his own signal. I have a sense that he has some map of the world in his mind, his world, a small, insular medieval kind of world with an absolute perimeter and these pheromonal signposts along the way. A smaller world than mine, even.

  Later, Lily seems a little more contented in the bath, but maybe it’s her first chance in a while to get cool. We get involved in a game that has me whipping up a current and sailing several plastic ships around her, but somehow I end up singing 10CC’s ‘The Things We Do For Love’ again, just when I should be singing Nick Cave. Damn that muzak. She gives a red tugboat a joyful whack that splashes us both, then picks it up and gnaws on its funnel.

  I think we’ll dress light, I tell her afterwards. Even though we’re having company, it’s far from formal.

  George and Oscar come over with Thai takeaway. It’s a pretty regular Wednesday night thing, eating at each other’s houses. It started a few months ag
o, and I think it began with a misunderstanding of Wendy’s. There’s a particular Wednesday night each month when she goes to a book club, and on one of them George and Oscar and I happened to plan to get together for takeaway on the same night. Either she wasn’t concentrating or she misheard something, but she referred to it as your book club. So now we do it regularly and that’s what it seems to be called. No books, though. George told Wendy we like the modern classics. So much, in fact, that we get together nearly every Wednesday. He said he asked her if her book club had done much Proust yet, and told her, He kept us going for weeks.

  I start serving the food, since George and Oscar want to have a play with the Bean.

  Don’t get her too worked up, I tell them, or she’ll never sleep.

  And George says, Nag, bloody nag. That’s all I ever hear from you, and he throws her in the air again, until I tell him to watch out for the fan.

  Hours after they’ve gone, the Bean still isn’t settling. I’d quite like to blame George, but it’s probably the heat. I mix formula with robotic non-enthusiasm. Another day draws to a close.

  At uni, I wouldn’t have picked that the three of us would be doing this in our mid-thirties, being single and sharing takeaway together. I thought we’d all be married, settled down with the next generation made and growing. It’s as if uni synchronised our lives by giving us exams together twice a year and I thought they’d stay synchronised, and just as predictable. But we’ve each found our own way to LaserWest and Wednesday night takeaway and the lives we lead, and the overlaps aren’t the obvious ones. Thai food, for example, rather than having children who play together on weekends.

  I’m surprised that I had such a rigid view of the world. Surprised that it didn’t cross my mind that Oscar was gay until he told me. That I didn’t realise George might find himself simply going out with no-one, and structuring his whole life around the expectation that that’s how things’ll be. And then deciding, since he’s got that sorted out, that there’s probably plenty of advice he can give other people about their lives.

  What am I supposed to do? Get a hobby? I found myself saying to him tonight to shut him up. My guess is that all the good stamps have been collected by now.

  But I’m being harsh. He’s actually not that bad. So I’m glad I didn’t keep going and tell him I was years away from a genuine understanding of the Feigenbaum period-doubling cascade, or even a passing interest in any of the other things people I know call hobbies. And, as Wendy once explained to me, Advice is a guy way of letting someone know you care. Maybe.

  There’s still grizzling from Lily’s room, so I get her out of her cot to see if I can settle her down. We lie on the sofa with the fan on above us, the voices of the late news talking in the background and her heavy head on my chest. She’s making snuffling noises, checking, checking, looking up at me to ensure all’s well. Without meaning to I start singing and she looks at me again, her big blue eyes somehow reassured, dopey, diverging as her sweaty head thumps down on my sternum, and she’s asleep.

  It’s ridiculous that I once thought my medical degree meant that I understood something about babies. I now know that it prepares you well for everything except the ninety-nine per cent of the time that they don’t have an actual disease. As an undergraduate I became the slickest in my tute group at checking for congenital dislocation of the hip. And that’s handy. On each baby, once. It doesn’t count for much as a day-to-day management skill.

  Now she’s quiet, I put her to bed again.

  You’re okay, I tell her, in that reassuring voice that comes in just above a whisper. You can sleep now. Great hips, by the way.

  I go to bed myself, and Elvis begins his usual routine of restless sleep alternating with night patrol. Shuttling between my room and the Bean’s to keep a check on both of us. Folding and unfolding his bony limbs down at the end of my bed, until he’s arranged like a collapsed director’s chair across my feet. Nudging Bonios into any available armpit with his long nose, knowing they’ll be safe there. Occasionally he posts them through the bars of the Bean’s cot. Sometimes she finds them and I’ll walk in there in the morning and she’ll be clutching a Bonio in both hands, like a dense, wheaty dance partner, her hands on its hips. Sometimes gumming away at it with her mouth, drooling all over its head.

  Tonight we don’t get that far. The grizzling starts again, and I want her to be years older and amenable to reason. Decades older and off somewhere, having a great grown-up time and hopefully not feeling the need to cry at night at all. Not a minute older, just the age she is now, but taking things slowly, peacefully, and sleeping when it’s time to.

  Please, please sleep, I say aloud as I lie there, willing her to stop the noise. Please.

  She doesn’t.

  We don’t have many nights like this. That’s what I tell myself while we’re out in the car, driving round the dark suburbs in the early hours. Driving – the rhythm of it – is usually good for putting Lily to sleep.

  Driving, the cool of the car airconditioning and me singing doggedly along to the Lemonheads. What more could a girl want? I ask her between tracks.

  Eventually it works, or something does. She tires of the upset and sleeps, and I can put my fears of a drastic undiagnosed disease aside once I see her back in the cot and calm. I lie on my bed, listening to every breath on the monitor.

  Then it’s dawn, and the light surprises me, shocks me into realising I’ve slept for a couple of hours.

  She’s still snuffling. I can hear her, asleep and breathing. Maybe even dreaming. It’s all okay.

  2

  Teething, Oscar says confidently, after giving her the once over. See that little incisor about to come through?

  Just teething?

  A life-threatening meningitis would be quite a way down the list, he says, thereby inviting me to shut up and trust him. It’s a long time since you’ve done the general stuff, hey? Haven’t you even read one of those books? You know, one of those groovy best-sellers written by some cuddly paediatrician with a British regional accent.

  Yeah, I’ve got one of those. I just . . .

  Teething. Despite any recent articles that might doubt the syndrome, that’s what I’d call it. There’s certainly no evidence of anything else. She’ll be fine. You know what to do for teething?

  Yeah. I’m not sure about taking her to childcare now, though. You know how paranoid they get about the possibility of anything being contagious.

  So much for my professional credibility.

  It’s Sylvia who suggests keeping her at work, and takes her from me as I fetch the port-a-cot from the car and battle with it in the filing room.

  We’ll be all right, she says. And soon that nasty tooth’ll be through and everything will be fine. And we’ll be back to being lovely with everyone again.

  I go into my room, press my terminal’s Start button, and the Window Weasel appears again.

  Hi, Jon. Your trial period was up yesterday and you haven’t registered yet, but we’re sure this is just an oversight. We hope you’re enjoying your Window Weasel software. Click YES!! I LOVE MY WEASEL!! and you can register to use Window Weasel for life for only $30! Click LATER to register later.

  If the weasel loved me back it would have helped out with Lily last night. I click LATER.

  I pick up my emails. The first two are joke forwards from George. A list of forty things that show you aren’t drinking enough coffee. Another called ‘Does a Bear Shit in the Woods????’ that I leave unopened, and that sits on my priority list somewhere below gratifying the weasel. Would the bear shitting in the woods be any less hilarious if it had only one question mark, instead of four?

  There’s also one from Wendy’s sister Katie, a reply to one of mine from a couple of days ago called ‘On the versatility of the wok’, in which I suggested that my new wok-based approach was the ideal way to a low-risk, smoke-free risotto:

  > that if I leave something alone it solders itself to what-

  > ever it’
s cooking in. So one of my main strategies is to

  > keep things moving. That way you see your mistakes

  > good and early. And something with the elbow room of

  > a wok makes it all much easier. It breaks all the rules,

  > but we get to hear the smoke alarms a lot less this way.

  Jon,

  To be frank, I hardly see the versatility at all. What is it with men and this attachment to woks? Master one tool, and you think the kitchen’s yours. I bet you think you can give advice about everything that goes on in there. When you bake a cake in your wok, save a piece for me.

  And, hey, I think you told me once work keeps you pretty busy, but W tells me you’re prone to slacking off. Or maybe business has slacked off at the moment. One or the other. Anyway, I do sessions out your way sometimes. We should have coffee, or something.

  Slacking off . . . This deserves a quick reply.

  Katie,

  The wok is the Sensitive New Age Barbecue. Things are way better than they used to be. There was a time when men could only club stuff, then burn it. And that was only a few years ago. I can’t claim the wok does EVERYTHING, but since it easily extends to balti curries, noodle dishes and now risotto, what else could you need?

  But coffee could be good. I’m actually a very busy man, but I try to do coffee semi-regularly. Can’t devote all our time to the service of others, can we? And I thought you learned not to listen to W back when we were all much younger than this.

  That should do it. A final defence of wok mastery, an invisible lie about going out for coffee. Half-lie – I only claimed semi-regularly. But why shouldn’t I go out for coffee? It’s a thing people do.

  Sylvia’s in my doorway, saying, You’re all playing today. George is sitting next door with jokes coming in from all over the world, he tells me.

  And they’re all going to be bad, aren’t they? That’s the tragedy of cyberspace. That so much can travel so far and yet mean so little.