Her dad would really love to have another massive blitz on the house, she can tell. She reckons maybe that’s why he goes away so much, because of the ‘davenport’ factor. It’s started getting on his nerves. Because now he’s sent an email saying he’s got to go to Accra, for God’s sake. I mean, it’s thanks to her dad that their house is like really nice – that’s apart from the ‘whatnot’ and the crap chairs that come to bits in your hand. Like Michelle and Alan and them – they were always like saying how fab her house was, with the swimming pool and the open space and everything. Well, it is. Like it’s got all this glass that makes it look like those photographs of the Pyramide at the Louvre, and the sanded floors and everything. And her dad’s got this agreement with her mom about how this Persian rug in the big sitting room is allowed to spend six months on the floor and six months in store. Only now, because he hasn’t been around, the rug is still on the floor when it should be in the storeroom and she just pretends she hasn’t ‘got round to it’. Like if it weren’t for her dad they’d probably have those horrible carpets everywhere, like in the pictures you see of Buckingham Palace, that looks like a tart’s boudoir with all the gold and stuff, and the hideous oil paintings.
And her mother would probably be sending Cat to that snobby girls’ school, like with the bonnets and the boring green uniforms, like what she went to herself. But at least her dad believes in co-ed. Cat’s decided that, when he gets back, she’s going to make him send her to another school. Like a boarding school, where no one knows her, and she’s going to make sure that, before she goes, she’ll be the thinnest girl in the class as well as the brainiest. Well, she nearly always gets top marks for everything.
Meanwhile, before that happens, she’s just got to do her long art project, and her mom keeps nosing in, like dropping oh so casual remarks about it, like you don’t already know that you’ve got to hand it in, like in three weeks’ time, and you haven’t done anything yet, not even thought of a subject, and you’re pissing yourself.
‘Oh Cat, by the way, that project of yours. What about masks? Just a thought.’
Like thinking has ever been a big thing with her. Stupid cow.
What’s more, Cat knows that her parents would probably be divorced if it weren’t for her because Suz and Jonno told her that once, when she wouldn’t stop pestering them to let her play when she was little. That’s because they were always so ‘together’ and a bit older, so she was the odd one out. So now you can tell her mom’s really sorry she never had an abortion – so much for ‘dearest Cattie-pie’ and ‘sweetheart’ and ‘the Campo Sant’Angelo’, and all that bullshit.
What’s really even more of a piss-off is that Michelle and them have started ringing her cell phone and then just cutting out whenever she picks up so she’s stopped picking up, only now they ring from a call box so she can’t tell from the numbers who it is, which means she can’t even answer her own phone any more.
Anyway, it’s like a week on from when her dad last emailed about going to Accra and meanwhile something slightly weird has been happening at home because first of all her mother’s been twittering on about this ‘charming young man’ that’s come to live in her dad’s new annexe, and how she really must have him in to dinner, if only she wasn’t so ‘busy’, because she’s got ‘a deadline’, and how she just knows Cat will find him really interesting, etc – as if you’d give a shit about anyone she thinks is charming or interesting.
‘Charming’ probably means he’s like pretended he’s heard about all her Lola books, or something. Plus he’s probably about thirty-five. ‘Giacomo’, she says. That’s the tenant’s name. ‘Giacomo’, because he’s just come from Milan. But, as well as that, her mom’s been banging on about how she’s got to do this ‘presentation’ at ‘a conference’, if you please, and she’s pretending like she wants Cat’s advice – well, that’s until she’s started suddenly staying out all hours, like from about three days ago until yesterday, when she comes home with this weirdo bloke who’s about as much of a midget as she is – i.e., he’s about twenty centimetres shorter than Cat – and they’ve got these takeouts from the Italian deli that they spread out all over the kitchen table for supper, like about a million calories per item when she usually eats like a bird, and she’s saying, ‘Do tuck in, Cattie-pie. Join us, sweetheart, do,’ and pretending that they really want her to stay and eat with them, but she’s buggered if she’s going to sit there and watch her mother being embarrassing with the midget, who, she says, is ‘working’ with her on a mime sequence about that ballet she was banging on about last week.
‘Oh Cat,’ she says. ‘This is my dear old friend Josh Silver from way back. He’s here for the conference, you see. We’re planning a mime to illustrate my talk. So now you and I have both got projects with deadlines.’ Ha. Ha. Then she says, ‘He’s got a daughter called Zoe – a bit younger than you.’
Yeah. Right. I mean, so what? Does she want Cat to alert the media about it, or what?
‘It would be so nice if you could meet one day,’ she says.
Anyway, then she and the midget start munching all this lasagne and stuff and drinking all her dad’s red wine and then they disappear upstairs and start moving furniture around and Cat reckons any day now her mother will be prancing round in the sweaty black tutu with the hole in the crotch. Especially as, three days later, the midget has become a bit of a fixture and they’re forever talking and laughing about shit all and she’s even heard her mom tell him that mean little story she loves, about Cat’s favourite aunt, Lettie, her dad’s sister, who’s been going to a Zulu class to make up for how ‘badly’ she’s always treated black people in the past. Or that’s what Lettie’s told her.
‘Shame,’ her mom is saying, and she’s trying to mimic Lettie, but she’s like seriously crap at doing accents. ‘To think we’ve always expected “them”, with their low intelligence, to learn both our languages, and us, with our high intelligence, we haven’t bothered to learn theirs.’
Well, it does sound a bit funny maybe, when you don’t hear Lettie saying it, but her Aunt Lettie is really nice, like the way she always drives the maid to the doctor for her diabetes check-ups and stuff and she’ll bake these amazing chocolate brownies, even though she’s got four kids and she works part-time as a bookkeeper for her husband and anyway she’s like really pretty.
But the good thing is, about the midget, it means that at least her mom’s eyes aren’t forever like following you to the lav, or squinting at you sideways if you’re eating Coco Pops, because, when they aren’t upstairs, then they’re like gadding off to the NSA Gallery, or the Stable Theatre, or the BAT Arts Centre, or somewhere else they think is cultured enough for them. So Cat’s feeling free to dawdle in the downstairs bathroom that faces over the back garden and she’s been in there for absolutely ages, but now she’s just brushing her teeth like mad before school, because, let’s face it, the getting-thin/chucking-up thing can leave you with like serious dog-breath.
Plus Cat’s buggered if she’s going to get those horrible rattly black teeth like she knows you can get if you’re really stupid about it, because of all the stomach acid. Anyway, she’s just having a swish with Corsodyl mouthwash when she looks up and out of the window she can see this person walking up the path from her dad’s new annexe and she thinks, Well, he’s just got to be the new tenant her mother’s been going on about while she’s been like trying not to listen. And, actually, more fool her, just this once, because, Jesus H. Christ – and just excuse me a minute while I swoon, OK? – this guy is, like er-MAZ-ing.
The tenant is like about one metre ninety – like, well, taller than her – and he’s like dressed all in black. Black long-sleeved T-shirt, black jeans, black lace-up shoes, but – really – so cool. I mean, not like trainers, or like school shoes or anything. Really classy. And he looks about like twenty-something, and he’s quite thin, but not all weedy or anything. Just narrow, like maybe about size 32 in trousers? And he’s like really muscly
as well, and also a bit Afro-looking, with this short-short black Afro hair, so you can see this amazing head, just like so beautiful, the way it’s like all curvy at the back when he turns a bit sideways towards the vine with the passion fruit. Like he was an ancient Egyptian pharaoh or something. And like cheekbones and everything. And he’s got this fantastic mouth, and the beautiful dark skin – well, sort of halfway dark skin, anyway.
And he’s like so gorgeous that Cat wants to die of embarrassment because the bathroom window’s been open the whole time and – OK, so he’s still maybe about twenty metres away – but, oh my God, she thinks, he’s just got to have heard the sound of her chucking up, so now she won’t be able to face him – ever – because he’ll just know it was her. Oh, shit-shit-S-H-I-T! Especially as, from the very moment she sees him, she just knows for certain that Alan is like definitely yesterday’s news. Anyway, he looks like a slug and she wouldn’t go out with him now if he paid her. It’s like he thinks he’s so cool but he’s practically an albino, like with the ears that go neon pink when the sun shines through them and he’s forever having a quick dab with that Tea Tree Spot Stick on his so not gorgeous cleft chin, when he thinks you aren’t looking, plus his teeth aren’t that great either and the back of his head is too flat.
And, right then, Cat knows that she’s going out that same day and she’s getting like black hair dye and black eyelash dye and all her clothes are going to be black, black, black. Only by evening she’s kind of chickened out for the moment, because of how it would be at school next day, with Michelle and them. And maybe she’ll get a bit thinner first?
The tenant keeps regular hours. Cat knows this because over the next four days she’s always in the same bathroom at exactly seven-thirty in the morning, looking out. And then it’s Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday he gets up and does his laundry before he goes out at about ten o’clock. She knows, because after he’s gone she goes down the garden and she checks out the washing line. Then he comes home at midday with three carrier bags from Pick ’n’ Pay. They must be from the Musgrave Centre. She reckons he must walk everywhere because she hasn’t seen a car.
Cat’s wandered down the garden on the pretext of using the pool so she takes her towel and cozzie.
‘Oh good,’ her mom says. ‘You’re going for a swim, Cattie dear.’
Of course, the more she says ‘Cattie dear’, the more you know she hates your guts.
Cat goes out the back door in all her clothes – or, rather, all Jonno’s clothes – because if her mom sees her in her cozzie she’ll be sizing up Cat’s thighs and thinking how come they’ve got so much thinner when she eats all that chocolate and stuff. But Cat knows that her legs have got a lot thinner because she spends so much time in her bedroom without her clothes on looking at them – especially since she’s got her dad to put that bolt on her bedroom door, because otherwise her mom’s in there, gathering up all nineteen mouldy coffee mugs (she says) and yakking on about how leaving your pants on the floor when they’ve got blood on them is an ‘insult’ to the maid – like you do it on purpose or something.
Cat likes it that her legs are so long, but she can still see too much revolting fat and dimples everywhere. Still, there’s quite a lot less of it, she knows, because she’s been taking measurements with a tape measure like round her thighs and her boobs and everywhere. And at least she knows she can get as thin as she likes and it’s nothing to do with how much Coco Pops she eats.
But what she’d really like is to have proper sticky-out bones. Like real angles everywhere. Bones that would make her eyes look really big and her face not so round. And there’s something she knows sounds really pervy, but when they started doing the Second World War in history last week, and Miss Band showed them those pictures of people in the Warsaw Ghetto, Cat thought she’d really like to look like that, with the hollow cheeks and the deep eye sockets and everything. Plus, when she’s got some proper money, she’s going to have a boob reduction and not tell her mom. Or even Lettie, who thinks big boobs are sexy.
Anyway, it’s the weekend again, and, for two Saturdays now, Cat’s noticed the tenant has hung up his washing down the bottom of the garden, on his little private line, and all of it is either pure white or pure black. None of his stuff has got patterns or colours on it. All his bedlinen and his towels are white and all his clothes are black, except for his pyjamas, which are white, and he’s always got three white shirts on the line.
She reckons he does two washes, one after the other. He must do a hot white-wash and then a cold black-wash. He’s got black boxer shorts, black socks, black jeans, black trousers, black T-shirts that have either got long sleeves or no sleeves, and two lightweight black lambswool pullovers that say ‘agnès b’.
Cat knows the labels and the sizes and the washing instructions and the countries of origin of all the tenant’s clothes – well, the washable ones, anyway – because she’s taken a good careful look at all of them on the line and, anyway, she likes touching them. They say ‘Jean-Paul Gaultier’ and ‘Adolfo Dominguez’ and ‘Giorgio Armani’ and ‘Yves Saint-Laurent’ and ‘Ozwald Boateng’ and then they say ‘Non usare caneggina di cloruro’ and ‘Repasser à basse température’ and ‘Laver et sécher séparément’ and ‘Lavar a mano en agua fria’ and ‘Lavage et repassage à l’envers’ and ‘Non torcere o strizzare’.
Then she’s noticed that, for the one Sunday so far, he mostly didn’t leave the garden, but even when he did it was only for a really short time. Maybe he just went to get a paper? So now, anyway, it’s a Saturday when she’s watching out for him to go to the Pick ’n’ Pay, and then she goes down to the washing line again to touch up the tenant’s things and then she thinks she might as well go through the little gate in the bamboo hedge, like on to his little private terrace with the azaleas in pots.
Then she stares through the glass of the French windows, being really careful not to make nose marks on the glass. Inside, she can see that it’s all amazingly tidy and there’s definitely no one inside, so she tries the door but it’s locked. Shit. Anyway, after a while she thinks, So what? She might as well go and have a little poke around, and it’s not really a problem because she knows exactly where all the spare keys are. They’re in her dad’s work room, where he’s got them all labelled with little plastic tabs. And she knows, as well, that right now her mother is off doing her pirouettes and crap with the midget, so she’ll never even notice what Cat’s doing.
So she goes to get the keys and she comes right back, and slips out of her backless shoes and she goes inside. Hey! It’s all so fab in there, she can’t help just lightly touching everything she passes, like this row of little enamel saucepans and pots and the six white mugs on cup hooks and a little stainless-steel olive-oil can like a baby watering can and a small espresso pot with some coffee next to it in a silver tin that says ‘Illy’.
Then she looks in the fridge, which is nearly empty except that it’s got six eggs and a packet of mozzarella with a picture of a buffalo on it and some rocket in a bunch like a little bouquet of flowers and there’s a jar of pesto from Genoa.
After that she crosses to the far end of the room. She sits down carefully on the edge of the tenant’s bed, that’s all white, white, white, with just these three huge square white pillows in a fat white row, and then she tries lying down on it, on her back, straight out with her hands at her side, hardly daring to breathe. It all makes her feel a bit scared and excited, like Goldilocks in the three bears’ house. So she gets up and smooths it all over very carefully, and then she crosses to this wall of pale-birch-wood cupboards.
She opens all the doors, one by one, and stares inside. Some of it has got hanging things and some of it is like square pigeonholes full of folded stuff. Cat doesn’t dare to pick up any of the folded things because the tenant’s way of folding his clothes looks quite hard to do, but she takes out this plain white shirt on a hanger and holds it up against her torso, so she can see herself in the mirror on the back of the door.
Then she takes out this cute black-linen suit and hooks it over the cupboard door. After that, she takes the jacket off the hanger and tries it on over Jonno’s baggy T-shirt. It looks pretty terrible with the shapeless trackie bottoms that are all sort of puffy and lumpy around her hips, so first she looks at her watch and then she quickly takes them off. She tries on the suit trousers as well, but, although she can just about half squeeze herself into them as far as just above her knees, they kind of stick on her thighs and she’s scared the zip will break, so she has to yank them off and just hold them up against herself, kind of like tucked under the jacket. Even so, because the jacket is so beautifully cut, Cat reckons she looks quite thin.
And then she’s just putting it all back in the cupboard when she sees one of her own long blonde hairs on the lapel. Oh shit. Panic stations. But she manages to pick the hair off and she checks like mad in case there’s more. Or maybe dandruff, or something. Oh yuk!
Meanwhile, all this time she’s sort of been trying not to look at the tenant’s desk, because she’s been saving it for best. It’s just that, all along, out of the corner of her eye, there’s been this amazing thing, like nothing she’s ever seen before, because it’s like a normal pedestal desk with two rows of drawers, except that it’s all kind of silvery and shiny. So finally she goes up to it and she can see that it’s veneered with chrome or silver, or maybe it’s tin that looks like silver? And it’s got these amazing glass handles on the drawers, like they were bits of chandeliers. Sort of pear-drop shapes. And, God, it must weigh about ten tons, she reckons. On the surface he’s got a fat grey stone jar with all these pens and pencils in it, so she picks them up, one by one, and puts them back.
Then her eyes move up towards the pictures that he’s put on the wall above the desk, because they’re all so fab. It’s just these three narrow black frames in a row, with drawings in window mounts of old-fashioned like actors in tall hats – or maybe like acrobats – wearing those like beaky masks. Then, on the next bit of wall, along from the desk, he’s got another row of four narrow black frames, just the same, only these have got like drawings of bits of horse’s armour, that look like maybe from the Renaissance, because there’s Italian writing on it, but best of all, on the opposite wall, all on its own, he’s got this exhibition poster in a frame, that’s also just black-and-white, and it’s a photograph of this fabulous skinny person – well, it’s sculpture, not a real person – and it says ‘Giacometti’.
Sex and Stravinsky Page 14
