Perfect Skin

by Nick Earls

  That second one sounds to me like a work issue. So I think I only have to come up with one to match the notch discovery.

  Okay. You can start with one, but I’m assuming it’s going to be good.

  Okay. Erikson.

  Erikson?

  Erik Erikson. Childhood and Society. Part three, chapter seven. I did a child development subject, and the lecturer was big on Erikson. And when you look at it – when you look at the eight stages part – it applies to everyone. And just when people tell you adolescence is the turbulent time, bang, you sort it out – Stage Five, identity versus role confusion – and suddenly you’re into Stage Six, intimacy versus isolation. But you would have done that at uni too, wouldn’t you? Erikson?

  Yeah.

  So you know what I mean, then.

  It was a while ago but, yeah, I think I know what you mean.

  Good. So, we’re even. Unless I have to come up with a work-related one too. Hey, I meant to tell you – I got a job. At Bagelos at Indooroopilly. A few shifts a week for a few hours each, starting Monday afternoon. Making bagels.

  I think I know what you mean.

  So how long has it been since I did Erikson? Mid-eighties. I can vaguely remember it, but not even enough to drop his name in conversation. Therefore I probably shouldn’t go round pretending I know what people mean when they start talking stages.

  Why can’t I just admit it when I don’t know something? Is there something unresolved in one of those early Eriksonian stages (and who knows which one) that means I can’t admit it when I don’t know something? In case people might like me less? I even hated it – quietly hated it – when I got the century of the Battle of Agincourt wrong. And no-one ever liked anyone even slightly less for that, surely.

  It’s probably my parents’ fault. Those kinds of things usually are. They were probably too supportive, gave too much reinforcement to me when I got things right or did well. Plus, I have to remember that I was a notch child, stricken with a secret asymmetry, living in fear that my fate was always just one wrong answer away.

  I should never go into therapy (real capital-T, couch-based therapy, as opposed to the relationship-fixing kind). I’m sure it’d only do me harm. My poor parents. They were so encouraging when it came to me knowing things. As if you can be critical of people for that, for fostering a chronic sense of excitement at having the right answer. I think my father once even gave me fifty cents for knowing the capital of Zaire.

  But Erikson’s stages are lost somewhere, back in the huge vault of early uni knowledge that got archived at the end of each semester. The only stages of anything I remember from the recent past were in an email from George a few weeks ago, and they were stages of drunkenness. Stage one was something about becoming an expert on every subject in the known universe, and wanting to pass your knowledge on to anyone who will listen. To which George had added some Who needs alcohol? kind of remark.

  Bread. I also learned to cut bread when I was at uni. This number two non-work-related useful thing crosses my mind as I’m slicing into a fresh loaf on Sunday morning.

  We were generally a sliced-white family back then, so I didn’t cut much bread at the time, but I picked up the principles of cutting when I did surgery. One of the keys to a neat incision is never cutting a moving target. Hold the skin to cut it, put it slightly on the stretch and ensure that the only moving thing is the knife. Same with a big crusty loaf of bread, or the knife finds its way anywhere.

  But what do I know? I try to impress a girl by poking her in the eye, and she comes back at me with comments on the uneasy transition between Erikson stages Five and Six.

  13

  I know I should have planned ahead more effectively when my parents told me they were going away, but I didn’t. So it’s not until late Sunday night that I work out I haven’t made any childcare arrangements that would allow me to keep up the usual running plans over the next couple of days.

  I call Ash just before I’m due at her place in the morning.

  That’s okay, she says. I think I know the way by now. Of course, it might not take me as long, so I’ll probably have to go a bit further.

  Thanks. Hey, how’s your car?

  I have to call them tomorrow.

  You’re starting work today, aren’t you?

  Yeah, this afternoon.

  I start at two, so I could give you a lift before then, if you’d like. If the time works out for you.

  Um, yeah, that’d be great, if it’s no trouble.

  No, it’s no trouble. I’ll be in the neighbourhood. I’ve got a few things to do, so it’d be easy to drop by.

  A few things to do. Mid-morning I’m in the neighbourhood, at the uni libraries to read some Erikson. And I didn’t know half of it when I was talking on the weekend about how much this place had changed.

  For a start, where I’m sitting is underground and surely used to be dirt below a path when I was studying here. Back in a time I’m now thinking I should be referring to as the old days. The old days when the microfiche machines were cutting-edge technology and everyone got a tutorial on how to use them.

  I sit inconspicuously at a terminal around the middle of the fifth row. I stumble through the catalogue, trying out key words that take me off on tangents. Remembering the name of the book would help. In the distance I can see librarians sitting at a counter and I wonder if I should email them and identify myself as the person floundering back here, needing to be saved. I’m prepared to wave to direct them to me if it’d help, even though it’d be an uncommonly public admission of my ignorance.

  Eventually I stumble upon Childhood and Society, and I remember that’s the name Ash mentioned. I click in the box that offers geographical directions, and I send the directions to print. Somewhere.

  I listen for the noise of printing. No. Of course there’s no printer nearby.

  Somewhere near a printer, someone is being told where the library keeps its copies of Childhood and Society, while I’m staring at the screen, memorising each step of the directions and the first bit of the call number. Good planning. I didn’t even bring a pen. Why? Would it have made the process too formal? As if, without a pen, I’d be doing something casual that I do all the time, dropping in here for a bit of a read?

  But at least I get there. Through places that are so new they even smell it, up stairs I walked up in my first year here, through a doorway I’ve never seen and finally among shelves that smell just as they always have, and books.

  And what am I doing here, anyway? What am I on about with this woman? If I was putting on any more of a performance I’d be obliged to do curtain calls. Yak’s milk and notches, and why the fuck do I need to know a thing about Erikson on the off-chance that he’ll come up again in conversation?

  Conversation. We’re good together in conversation. I get to use my brain with her, actually use it, think. And of course I want more of that.

  On Saturday, Ash said, Do you think all disease occurs at a biomolecular level? and I almost said something like, You should get out more, before I realised she wasn’t George and she genuinely wanted to discuss it. And then I wanted to as well, more than I wanted to tell her she should get out more. And we talked about the biochemistry at nerve synapses, the molecules that send signals, the immune system and clotting mechanisms, each as a series of molecular events. She said she’d wondered about the question for a while, since she’d been sick once, but she’d had no-one to ask before.

  There was a time when I had conversations like that with George and other people. When more of our talk was actually about things than it has been lately. Maybe we’ve known each other too long, talked them all through too many times. Maybe it’s just where we are now.

  It’s the reading Proust joke. At uni, George would have loved it if we’d all read the big stuff and talked about it. Debated it all night over cheap wine, sitting on someone’s lounge-room floor. Now, our book club that reads Proust but reads nothing is only a game we play with Wendy’s mind.
And the wine is much improved, and we go to bed early. I haven’t had an argument about a French film, or a Czech novel or the cultural or biological or sociological significance of anything in years.

  Erikson says – I know he says it because I’ve got it in front of me – that the adolescent mind is an ideological mind positioned between the morality of childhood and the ethics of adulthood. So maybe the ideological stage was the time when we had to talk everything through, when the big questions were worth asking, and now we’re just cruising ethically along. Or maybe that’s not what Erikson means at all, but Ash did suggest he was applicable to everything.

  None of which helps explain the several seconds when I wanted to kiss her. When I clunked back a stage or two myself and nearly made the move. I’m almost expecting to break out in acne and bad clothes, just sitting here thinking about it.

  Stage One is basic trust versus basic mistrust. Forms of comfort and people associated with them become familiar. And teething is perhaps the first crucial test of that trust, and where mistrust begins.

  And didn’t I need to learn that right now? I thought it was just a few tough nights we were having. I didn’t realise we were creating mistrust during this lost sleep. I have the Bean with me now, sound asleep in her pouch. I can’t believe there’s any mistrust, even if I couldn’t fix the teething completely.

  I think it’s Stage Six where things went wrong with Mel. Intimacy versus isolation, in which the young adult, having won identity, looks to fuse that identity with others. So maybe we were both looking for fusion and picked the nearest feasible identity. We should have paid more attention to Erikson then. There are dangers in Stage Six, and he doesn’t hold back from spelling it out. First, when intimate, competitive and combative relationships exist between the same people. And that certainly sounds like us, though we wouldn’t have admitted it. And also the ‘isolation à deux’, where – if I’m reading it properly – two people share the avoidance of contacts that would lead to a commitment to intimacy, and thereby protect themselves from addressing the big Stage Seven issue, generativity. Establishing and guiding the next generation.

  Of course, we ended up addressing it by accident. Or putting ourselves in a position where we were about to address it, at least. And maybe Mel’s houseful-of-kids scenario was a desperate hope that we could stake some claim to Stage Seven, while leaving Six in a shambles behind us. But, shit, we tried so hard, and does Erikson give us any credit for that? We must have believed in something, believed at least some days that the intimate would outlast the competitive and the combative. But maybe it’s not so easily negotiated, and trying hard doesn’t always fix it. Maybe I’m too Stage Six for any plunge into Stage Seven to have worked, even though I was genuinely prepared to try to force myself there.

  I think Ash is Six as well. How long can you be Stage Six?

  Or maybe I’m not. I haven’t felt any biological need to establish the next generation, so technically I’m not Seven, but there’s something about having the Bean around that’s different, and that I’m growing accustomed to, and that I’d fight a lot to keep.

  Perhaps I shouldn’t get too hung up on the numbers. Perhaps this is all a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. And it scares me, looking at the early stages, to see how much of an issue parenting is when it comes to getting through them intact. I wonder how Mel’s death will mess Lily up developmentally. I wonder how I’m going to tell her, how I’m going to measure it out in the right doses. Erikson doesn’t let you know that, and neither does the baby book. There isn’t a chapter called ‘How to explain that the other parent has always been dead’.

  Lily doesn’t even have a concept of life yet. That’s years away. And maybe you get to understand life and death together, and before then you just assume. Food will come, nappies will be changed, you will be kept from harm. Then you’re out in the world, learning things one at a time. The noises blocks make when you whack them together, how rain feels on your face, words, simple maths, impermanence. How old are you when you realise for the first time that some of your assumptions have let you down, and there might be harm out there?

  Can I guess the phases Lily will go through? Can I guess how she’ll feel about Mel’s death, even some of the time? The bits she’ll tell me, and the bits she won’t? The times when she’ll blame herself? Can I pre-empt any of it at all? What’s it like to win the Electra war on day one? Or am I getting that wrong too, just fooling around with Freud and Jung and Erikson, and plenty more names I don’t know?

  How do I even feel? I have to keep my own head straight to be much good to her.

  Wake up, I whisper down into her ear on the way out of the library. Wake up. Let’s play now.

  We’ll make it up as we go along, I decide. That’s what we’ll do most of the time.

  We sit under the shade of a poinciana tree, and Lily flaps a seed pod around. The dry seeds rattle inside it, and that’s enough to give it toy status. She’s happy.

  I call Wendy on the mobile to follow up a few things while she’s got some scheduled admin time, in case we don’t get the chance to talk between patients later.

  I should check your emails, she says, about someone who hasn’t called back. They might have tried that way.

  Yeah, good idea.

  Hang on and I’ll go to your room. She puts me on hold – thirty seconds of something that might be Tchaikovsky (another issue of pointless partnership dissent) – and then she picks up my phone. Okay. What’s your password?

  Oh, yeah, I’d forgotten about that.

  Too many letters.

  Okay, um, it’s B, I, G, B, O, Y.

  And you’re thinking that by spelling it I won’t know that your password is bigboy?

  Well, they have to be six letters long. Or six alphanumeric characters, anyway. And I needed to have a word I’d remember.

  And ‘dahlia’ or something would have been beyond you.

  Definitely. I’d never remember dahlia.

  Bigboy. Short for big boy who’ll never grow up, I suppose. You all probably have passwords to do with your penises, don’t you? And you think it’s so subversive. Okay. First there’s something about a Window Weasel.

  Yeah, skip that.

  Should I? It’s not happy with you.

  Just hit LATER.

  Okay, now on to your emails. I’m dialing in, typing in bigboy, and here they come. You’ve got a few, but I don’t see anything like what we were looking for. You’ve got a couple of joke forwards from George. I got them too. Nothing particularly new. Another New Zealander’s fucked a sheep or something, but been caught out by a holidaying Australian ventriloquist.

  Some of these things don’t really deconstruct well, do they?

  No. And they’re not always brilliantly funny, either, but he keeps on sending them. You’ve got a couple of notifications of web-site updates. Looks dull. One’s a laser one, the other’s about airfares to New York. When are you going to New York?

  I’m not. That was ages ago. There’s this complicated unsubscribe process you have to go through to get them to stop.

  Okay. There’s one from your father with the title ‘made good time heading south’. I might leave that one for you. And there’s one from Katie. No title. Let’s have a look. She double-clicks. And it says, ‘Jon, I know the timing’s not right, but I can’t keep it to myself any longer. I’m developing strong feelings for you and there’s no denying it’ . . . Etcetera, etcetera . . . ‘Please, please tell no-one. Particularly Wendy’ . . . So, what do you want me to do with that one?

  Probably better leave that for me to take a good look at later, as well.

  Sure. Now, one from Southside Surgical about a discount on cotton buds this month. Do you think you’re up to that?

  Depends how they’re feeling about me, I suppose. Do you think there’s any chance we could keep the Katie one to ourselves? It’s not the same as weeing on the cat, is it?

  No, it’s not. It’d be the kind of thing I’d carry
to my grave, except . . . There’s a noise, somewhere in the background. A human noise, being muffled.

  Um, are you alone at the moment?

  No. George is standing right here. Heard the whole thing. That’s the laughing sound.

  Doesn’t he have lectures this morning?

  Apparently not. There’s a pause. What? Wendy laughs. He says he thought you’d done enough to put her off by pissing on her cat. And I’d have to say I thought the same. Perhaps you really did need to steal from her as well.

  I have to fix things with Katie. I know I have to fix things with Katie, and soon. I pick Lily up and we go to the car.

  Why does it get complicated? I say to her, as she pokes the seed pod into my chin. Wasn’t I minding my own business enough?

  I drive to Ash’s place. There’s music on when I get there, I can hear it from the path.

  Hi, she says from inside, when I get to the top of the steps. What’s the time?

  I’m early. Sorry. I was nearby, so . . .

  Early’s fine. You had me thinking I’d be late for my first shift for a second. It’d be pretty sad to get sacked from a bagel joint on your first day.

  Sorry. There’s plenty of time. I thought we could have lunch before you start work, maybe.

  Yeah, good. I just have to change into my . . . um, overalls, first.

  Overalls? That’ll be a nice look. Heavy work, bagels.

  At least there’s no tie, she says, when she’s in her bedroom with the door shut. Couldn’t stand to have one of those jobs.

  The CD player randomises, picks another track.

  I should work out how to get to the airfare site and unsubscribe, rather than just trashing the emails unopened out of habit. New York was my plan. Travel was not uncommonly one of my fixing-things strategies. Mel would happily have stayed at home if I hadn’t pushed her into it most years, but she liked it once we were on the plane. She was big on galleries. They gave us a chance to argue about art, instead of life. And there was something – temporarily – very okay about arguing about art. Never have I seen one person get so shitty about another person’s view of Jackson Pollock, but for once I could laugh at her shittiness and she’d laugh back.