Perfect Skin

by Nick Earls

  I’m looking forward to things with her. Stories, making her laugh with words, telling her about things that she might never get to see. Typewriters, for instance. She may never see a working typewriter. That struck me yesterday, as I shut my computer down for the weekend. Not so long ago it would have been unbelievable.

  I want to tell her about typewriters and how, with them and other old machines, you could actually see how they worked. How you would push down on a key and it would make a tiny hammer hit a piece of ribbon with ink in it, and hit the ink off the ribbon and onto the page. And I can tell her about paper money, stamps you had to lick, the time before bar codes. It sounds like I went to school with Dickens. It sounds as though I’m going to bore the shit out of my daughter. When has a child ever thanked a parent for a long dissertation on the artifacts of the industrial age? Bad luck. That’s how it’s going to be. She’s not just going to be bought a Nintendo and left in a corner.

  And I can tell her about laser surgery, for that matter. By then it’ll be far less special. I can tell her that laser surgery and the Internet and CD players and a lot of other things weren’t always around. That I know how things were before them and when they were new, before they were commonplace and merged with the background. I knew them when they were part of current affairs, before they were history, part of the set of things already in the world. And history seems weighted somehow differently to the events of your own time. It’s as though you’re given it, and the things you store as your own memory are put somewhere else.

  I was too young to get Watergate at all, so I inherited it. I watched the Clinton impeachment day-to-day and it unravelled as a current event. They’re both impeachments of American presidents, but in my head they couldn’t be more different. I received the Nixon story afterwards, end first. I heard Clinton’s from the beginning, from the first denials.

  The death of Marilyn Monroe was world history. As a sixties child, one of the first things you got to know about Marilyn Monroe was that she was dead. So that affected every frame of her that you ever viewed. Before Kurt Cobain died, I owned two Nirvana albums. I think I can remember the first time I heard ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, the street I was driving on, not far from here. Even though I probably can’t, I think I can.

  I wonder when Lily will speak. Not for ages yet, but I still wonder. My first words were spoken to dogs, perhaps since dog affirmations get so much repetition. Maybe she’ll be the same. Maybe her first recognisable sound will be Elvis. Maybe her first sentence will be, Go away and leave me with my Nintendo, some day when I barge into her room to tell her about the world, and some useless ancient notion that’s offering me a moment’s fascination.

  And I wonder where Ash is today, if she’s around. We’re near her house. What’s she doing on her first weekend in Brisbane? I’d like to think – not that it’s any of my business – that she’s got friends here, even if she’s new and I already know she’s got no-one to run with in the mornings. A big, lumbering, sedentary boyfriend even, or one who sleeps in and gets athletic later. She looks very fit, so my guess is that’s the kind of guy she’d be with. Maybe they even transferred here together.

  But enough mindless speculation. I’m in need of adult conversation, and we’re due soon at Wendy and Steve’s. A swim and a barbecue. Wendy and Steve mastered suburban summer weekend rituals a while back. After lunch the Bean can sleep there, and as long as I don’t run any theories about history by them, or reach a point where I’m unable to suppress my urge to explain the typewriter, everything should be fine.

  5

  We can’t run together, I tell Ash on Monday morning. You’ve no idea what it’ll do to my self-esteem.

  I’ll be gentle with you, she says. Promise.

  We run, she chats. And that alone is enough to tell me there’s only disgrace for me out here. She chats, and I can’t find a fraction of a second when I’d fit a word in around the mechanics of breathing.

  And I’m wondering, did we organise this? Did we arrange this last week, or is it just happening? Is it a simple overlap of habits? Of her habits with mine, technically, since I’ve been running here for months now.

  I know now why I run by myself. Why I don’t buy special clothes for it. Why I boast about my running only to the morbidly sedentary and the genuinely elderly and people with chronic lower-limb ailments. I’m crap at it. Sure, I’m the fittest I’ve ever been in my life, but I’m coming off a very low base.

  And I need to spit. Runners spit. I spit all the time when I’m running. It’s okay to spit, isn’t it? But suddenly, probably since I’ve never run with someone before, this seems as much like a social event as it does like running. Ash helps that along by talking, of course. Long, effortless unpunctuated sentences of talk, damn her. Pointing things out along my running track and talking about them – the City Cat ferry, the huge river-bank houses at West End. This is the kind of activity I usually conduct with someone who’s six months old, but I get to be the talker then. And there’s no simultaneous running going on.

  So, with the talking, it seems wrong to spit, as though it could kill the mood or something. Not that there should be a mood. Suddenly, though, it would feel strange to spit. No matter how much I need to. No matter how much saliva has built up in my mouth. No matter that I’d normally be at least six spits into my run by now, and there’s no way I can swallow it all. But she’s made a mood out of all this chat, and spitting now would be like sitting under the umbrella of a street-side coffee shop and hoicking one over my shoulder.

  She turns to her right at the end of a sentence. Spits. Neatly, onto the base of a palm tree. She really is a runner.

  And I’m in the clear. I turn to my left. I spit. Or, rather, I let loose a huge gob of stringy saliva that loops out of my mouth, travels a very short distance, becomes aware of its own vast mass and flops onto my shoulder. And manages to be stringy enough to stay connected to my mouth.

  Perhaps I’m teething, I think, as the run stops for a laugh break on the part of the more efficient runner. If I was thirty-four years younger, I’d be looking pretty cute right now. Perhaps a photo would be nice.

  Ash stands leaning forward, with her hands on her thighs, laughing so much that most of her shakes. She looks around at my shoulder, squawks again, looks away. The spit gob clings on.

  Damn seagulls, I say, since it’s a moment long past saving.

  I should mail Saturday’s photos off for cheap processing, but I want to see them now, so I go to Kmart as soon as I get to Toowong. Somehow even the hour wait for one-hour photoprocessing seems like a major imposition.

  Since I have no affinity with shopping, I figure I might as well drop in on work to check my emails. And the Window Weasel says:

  Yo! Sleepy! People pay for this, you know. So go click YES!! I LOVE MY WEASEL!! and you can register to use Window Weasel for life for only $30! Click LATER to register later.

  Okay, I don’t like the tone, I don’t even know what it is that the people are paying for and, to be honest, I’m pretty sure I hate being called Sleepy. No way do I LOVE MY WEASEL.

  And what an email harvest I get. There’s an update from a laser surgery web site, but when I go there it’s not much more than an ad for someone’s latest attempt at the laser-that-does-every thing. Which is actually just a new version of the laser that does a couple of things and costs a lot.

  Then there are two from my father. One headed ‘Could be time to buy BHP?’, and the other ‘NEW this week at Jim’s Fractal Gallery!!!’ My father, whose day-to-day life almost never calls for the exclamation mark, has almost as much judgement as George out in the parallel cyber universe.

  George, who has today sent me a joke forward about the capacity of dogs to lick their own genitals, and one of those stupid games where you write down the numbers one to six and put various names next to them, and this somehow predicts your future. I did one of them once, I still haven’t slept with my mother, and I really don’t expect that to change.

/>   No, email’s essential, George said, when we decided to computerise properly. And he demonstrates it almost every day, doesn’t he?

  I go back to Kmart, I beg them to reduce the one-hour wait to forty minutes, but the woman tells me the process is automated.

  Once the spitting episode was over, the run went a little better. We found a pace I could maintain and that might have constituted some form of exercise for Ash. And from then on I spat early and decisively, and wore none of it.

  You’ve got a baby seat in the car, she said as she did a hamstring stretch on my bumper. Does that mean you’ve got a baby?

  And I told her, No, I’m just prepared for anything. I’ve got snow shoes in the boot. And that sounded dumb, so I said, Maybe I’ve got a baby, as though there might be some intrigue about the issue.

  Could have been that previous owner, she said, and looked down at the number plate. MLB. But people don’t usually leave baby seats behind, I guess.

  And what an attractive baby she is, too, I’m thinking in Kmart as I look through the photos. What a thoughtful face, what a laugh, and could that perhaps be just a hint of tooth?

  Katie’s already in the cafe when I get there. She’s reading a newspaper, but I can see her hair over the top of it, all foofed up and kept there with a limp, hot-pink bow.

  Hey there, I say, when I get close enough to see her face.

  And she says, Hi, as though she’s been taken slightly by surprise. And she blushes – or does something that looks a lot like blushing – and tries to fold the newspaper in a way it isn’t meant to go. I’ve ordered already. It seemed like that kind of place.

  It is that kind of place.

  So I put my order in and sit down opposite her. I start talking – rattling on in the way I would at the keyboard – and Katie fumbles a few replies. She’s still swamped by newspaper, probably wishing she’d gone tabloid instead of broadsheet.

  Damn thing, she mutters, giving up and setting it on an empty chair, leaving it like a half-made pirate hat.

  My mother used to fold it that way for fire starters, I tell her.

  What?

  Old newspaper. She used it to start fires.

  Pause. It occurs to me that I might be making my mother look like a pyromaniac.

  In the fireplace.

  Oh. We never had a fireplace.

  Well, most people don’t, do they?

  Pause. Okay, now I guess I’ve gone for something rhetorical. Not a good choice. This isn’t easy.

  It’s to do with coming from England, I tell her, pushing on. When we came out here my parents looked around for ages for a house with a fireplace. You’d think that, after the first couple of dozen didn’t have one, they’d have worked it out.

  Yeah.

  They don’t have one now though. They’re in a flat.

  She nods. There’s still no eye contact. I start to wonder if she’s had a bad experience with a fireplace, or if there’s something hanging out my nose, then I realise it’s probably me who hasn’t worked it out. We actually don’t know each other very well. Not in a face-to-face way, and I’d forgotten that. Face-to-face we only know how to say ‘Hi’ over coloured cake at kids’ birthdays, and not much more. I’m going in with the mild detached boldness of text, Katie’s hanging back, missing the modesty-screen of email now that she can see the person she’s talking to.

  And, if the talk troubles her, she seems even more tense in the pauses when no-one talks, as though they’re abnormal, and that only keeps me trying to fill them.

  I tell her about my tedious weekend, and ask about hers. It wasn’t bad, apparently. And that’s that out of the way.

  I tell her about running with someone this morning and spitting all over myself, and she’s supposed to laugh but instead she says – using a therapeutic low tone and sudden serious eye contact – But how are you going, really? With everything? How are you going?

  Fine. I’m going fine, I tell her. The Bean gives me plenty to do, though. Want to see some photos?

  And, since she’s already Auntie Katie twice over, this puts us into territory where she’s altogether more comfortable. She knows baby photos, she knows the noises to make, she knows just when to make them.

  Look at that stare, I tell her, glad that the photos have saved the conversation. Don’t you think that suggests high intelligence?

  I’m sure it does. I wonder what she’s thinking about. Can you remember anything of what you thought about at that age? She flicks through a couple more. I can’t remember anything till I was three. At least three. Can you remember when you looked like that? She holds the photo up – Lily, the straining-to-poo face, the drool on the shoulder.

  Well, yeah. About seven-thirty this morning, but I don’t think I was thinking the same things.

  I can’t believe you spat on yourself, she says, and shakes her head. That is just so . . . unco. Did the guy you were running with notice?

  It was a lot of spit. An unmissable amount of spit. I tried to put it down to a seagull, but that was never going to work.

  She laughs, and says, Hey, since we’re sharing, how about this? She rummages around in her bag and pulls out a photo of a very fluffy cat. Here’s Flag.

  Which is an interesting name for a cat. Why Flag?

  I just liked the sound of it, really.

  You’re aware that it’s a noun, though? That out in the real world it’s got some kind of meaning attached?

  She goes red again, and says, Do you have any pets, or anything?

  Yeah. A dog. Called Elvis, actually. Which, out in the real world means big fat dead megastar often sighted in Seven Elevens.

  She nods, stays red.

  And my daughter was named after a flower, but I seem to have got into the habit of referring to her as a legume. So I can’t be too picky about nouns, can I?

  I guess not.

  She puts the photo back in her bag, nods again, looks at the door, seems to be enduring something uncomfortable. This time I hold off, figuring I’ve used words as Spakfilla for pauses more than enough in this conversation.

  Wendy says things are a bit quiet this month for you. At work. Or did I say that already?

  She pulls a tissue out of her bag, wrenches it slowly apart under the table.

  Mid-afternoon I have a no-show. George passes my open door with coffee while I’m checking some lab results.

  Hey, he says, coming back and standing in the doorway. How was the date?

  Date? There was no date.

  People say you’ve been lunching with, he looks around, checks the corridor, chicks with eighties hair.

  I should never have said that. I should never have said eighties hair.

  And you think if you hadn’t no-one would have noticed?

  Oh, it’s all so Flashdance.

  So how was the date? You did go, didn’t you? Remember, no-one leaves baby in the corner.

  What?

  It’s a Flashdance quote.

  Shit you’re good with that stuff.

  Hey, there were generations that quoted Shakespeare. I’m part of a long tradition.

  And regardless of that, it wasn’t a date.

  Okay, but if it’s not a date, why would Wendy mention it to me?

  Why wouldn’t she? It wasn’t a secret. Did she mention it in any particular way?

  Should she have?

  She might have. I think you’ve got this one wrong, Porge. If Katie said anything to Wendy afterwards she would just have been calling to tell her she works with a fuckwit.

  Can’t see why she’d bother to do that. Wendy’s known you for years.

  It wasn’t the best lunch.

  What do you mean?

  I think Katie doesn’t get out much. I talked a lot. I think it’s having a baby. It makes you disinhibited. I talked a lot, and she didn’t. So I talked more. I told her about fireplaces. I told her about spitting on myself today. I told her I named my child after a legume. Those things would not have happened had it been either a re
asonable social occasion or a date. I think we both know that.

  I think we do, he says, and laughs. Spat on yourself, hey? You sure know how to get them horny.

  It’s a long story. And entirely without horn. And lunch was just lunch. You know lunch? I have lunch with you sometimes. And I think a lot of you, but it’s no date. I have lunch with people. It’s something I do.

  No it’s not.

  Look, you tell me all the time, everyone tells me all the time. Get out and do things. Even if it’s only lunch with people. Katie actually does something more dynamic than the rest of you, we agree on a time and place and suddenly it’s a date. You weren’t there. It was no date. It was a casual suggestion made in an email. Lunch, coffee, casual. The suggestion, anyway. It was just a sort of coffee-friend thing to do.

  Is that a category? Coffee friend?

  Of course it’s a category. And it’s a nice, supportive, non-date category. And the fact that she went from coffee – which was the original suggestion – to lunch, just like that, actually shows how much of a big deal it isn’t. I’ve been on dates, you know. In the eighties, back when Katie got the hair. I’ve been on dates, and they weren’t like today.

  No, this is the thing. You’ve been out of the loop a while. My guess is you were on a mid-thirties date. It doesn’t work the same.

  No, no. No date. We showed each other photos. Bean photos, cat photos. What does that sound like to you?

  Oh, north African fruit, grows on a palm, dark brown, sticky, sweet. No idea what it sounds like to me. It’s a mid-thirties date.

  Oh no. If that’s a date this entire demographic sucks. If that’s what happens to you on dates, stick to the goodwill of your own two hands. George, that can’t be a date. We can’t be so bloody old that we accept that that’s a date. What about even a minor undercurrent of seething sexual tension?

  Hold out for it, Jon Boy. I want you in there batting for us. For the guys who hold out for dates the way they used to be when we were young. Or even partly young. That moment of date competence that hung there for a second or two between adolescent dysfunction and the mid-thirties photo-swap lunch.