by Joy Dettman
Love and Hot Pizza
She didn’t go to Lakeside on Friday night. She looked for Matt in the lifts, but didn’t find him, so she drove to the flat and waited for him. He didn’t come. She didn’t go home on Saturday either. All weekend she waited and Matt didn’t come, but Ross called on Sunday night.
‘What happened to you?’ Accusation in his voice.
‘It’s been crazy this week. They needed me to work. How is she?’
‘They can’t get her out of bed. She reckons it’s gone to her back now. The doctor is going to do some more x-rays.’
X-rays. Blood tests. Brain transplant. Just give me one more week. Please, God, just let me see Matt one more time and I’ll live on it forever. Just one more night.
‘Have you given notice yet?’
Don’t answer that one. ‘I’ll be up next Friday. We’ll talk about it on Friday.’
Monday was a blur, but that evening Matt was waiting for her in the foyer. Wide smiles, a brief touch of impatient hands but no kisses and few words, then a fast drive in separate cars to her flat. And love. God, what love they made.
At twelve he dressed, picked up his briefcase.
‘Stay with me tonight.’
‘No clean shirt for tomorrow,’ he said.
‘I’ll wash it. It will dry in front of the heater.’
‘I’ll see you Wednesday, Sall.’ He kissed her hand.
Wednesday. So many hours between Monday and Wednesday. Ratsus wanted her to work late, but she left the office at 4.50 and was cooking dinner for two when Matt arrived at six. She was skilful in the kitchen. Tonight they’d be eating a stir-fry. The table was set with new placemats and a candle. She’d bought salt and pepper shakers, glass with silver – or chromed plastic – lids. They looked expensive.
The chicken was ready, the vegetables sizzling when he knocked on her door. But he couldn’t wait the five minutes until the chicken heated through. He turned off the gas and he picked her up and carried her to the bed, undressing her slowly, making love to her slowly.
They rang for pizza later and he fed her slices, hot, in bed. And they laughed because they both liked their pizza fiery hot. They kissed, and she drank wine and he drank Jim Beam. Then he turned on the shower and he carried her, protesting, in there.
She’d seen it at the movies, and hadn’t known how they’d managed, certain that they’d slip over, break their stupid necks. Now she knew, and it wasn’t so stupid. Soapy, slippery sex and no broken necks, just wet bodies and water and God in a rainstorm. She was an instrument he played with his fine musician fingers. She was an orchestra he conducted, making sweet new music on her soul.
But when the music ended and the soap was all washed away, he left her.
‘See you Monday, Sall.’
Alone, and only 10.30, all showered and ready for bed. She scraped the stir-fry vegetables and chicken into plastic bowls, and as she placed them in the freezer she thought of her mother, of the meals she’d prepared in advance for her mother.
No more, she thought. No more. Let Sleiman find a nursing home prepared to take her. This is my life. This is how the other half live life, and now I’m living it. Then she thought of Ross and she felt the pain of his disbelief. Didn’t want the weekend. Didn’t want it.
Thursday. Friday. Two more days and she’d have to go. Face it. Face Ross and tell him. Couldn’t face him. Couldn’t hurt him. Maybe she’d go on Saturday, early, and drive back. No flat now, no narrow childhood bed, and the Lakeside motels charged like wounded bulls. She couldn’t stay with Ross. What was she going to say to him? How was she going to tell him? What was she going to do with her mother?
More junk for the too-hard basket. So let it overflow.
She didn’t go to Lakeside on Friday night. Didn’t call Ross either. She went out with Sue to a singles bar. Sue’s hair was blonde and almost tame; even the nose ring was missing.
‘Haven’t had any for two months and my neighbour’s ten-year-old son is in moral danger,’ Sue said. All night she talked sex, or her ex, which was the next best thing to talking sex. She said her father had given her the house deposit as a wedding present, that she’d made all the payments on the mortgage but now the judge had ruled that she had to give her ex forty per cent.
‘The old fuck always called him a loser. Didn’t want me to marry him. Christ, I hate to admit he was right, but he was. And the bloody judge,’ Sue said. ‘He wouldn’t listen. I told him I’d paid all the bills, kept a lazy dickhead for seven years, then found out he’d been having it off with a sixteen year old up the road – and while I was out working. But did he care? I mean, how could any judge in his right mind . . . Jesus, I’d like to go back to uni and do law, give some of the stupid old fucks hell.’
Sally listened with one ear, she nodded, but her mind was on a seesaw. High. Low. High. Low. Guilt and love. Ross and Matt.
‘The manipulating old shit said he’d pay out my loan, if I go back.’ Sue was wound up tonight. Sally leaned, mind travelling, only listening with half an ear.
Her little flat was not so bare now. It smelled of Matt, and his coat sometimes hung with hers behind her door and for a while his shoes were on her floor. She found signs of him in her bathroom too. A black hair on a towel, or in her comb.
God, she loved him. Couldn’t think of him without wanting him. She wanted him now. Ached for him. Come in that door, Matt; take me away from this place. Tell me I don’t have to go to Lakeside and face her, face Ross. Make love to me until my brain turns to mush.
Sue finally ran down, started looking around. She had her eye on a blond, and he and his mate brought their drinks to her table. Steve, and leftover Jim. Sally wasn’t into leftovers. She had the pick of the crop.
‘Hey! Are you with us?’ Sue nudged her.
‘In the physical sense. Do you want another drink?’
Three replies to the affirmative. Sally walked to the bar and returned with two glasses of wine. A week ago she would have bought four drinks, wouldn’t have had the nerve to refuse, scared they wouldn’t like her. Not anymore.
The guys looked at the two glasses as one was placed before Sue, the other not leaving Sally’s hand. They stared at her hand, and at the wine, and at their empty glasses, then Jim gave up. He wanted to get going, and he was the one with the car. Steve was dithering, weighing up the pros and cons of Sue’s distant bed.
‘Can you give us a lift home, Sall?’
‘No trouble.’ But she ran into big trouble after she dropped the couple off at Sue’s. She turned down a wrong street and couldn’t find her way back. Lost in Dandenong on a one-way street, and if that wasn’t bad enough, she had a run-in with a Falcon that happened to be backing out with his lights off.
The driver bellowed from his window, couldn’t get out his driver-side door because her bumper bar was in it, so he crawled across the gear stick.
Late. The street was deserted. She wished a cop car would turn up and book her for going the wrong way. No cop car to save her. Only Sally. She shoved the Datsun into reverse and hit the accelerator, heard the rending of metal as the cars wrenched apart. He had the passenger-side door open, then he was out, grabbing at her door handle as she slapped the stick into first and rattled away. Probably ripped his fingers off. He was standing there bellowing abuse to the night; and he could have taught Sue a thing or two about brief yet descriptive sentence construction.
Her driver’s-side front wheel scraped around Dandenong until she found the freeway, then it scraped all the way home. A slow, slow trip, but the wheels kept turning and the little car carried her back to South Yarra and to her bed that smelt of Matt. She slept soundly, wrapped in the scent of his love, slept through the alarm, slept until noon, dreaming heavy dreams of love.
It was around two when she walked down to her car, which looked worse than it had sounded last night. She dragged at her front bumper. Couldn’t budge it.
The bikie, tinkering with his bike, placed his spanner down and stared as s
he wiped her hands on her jeans. Ross would straighten it, if it got her to Lakeside. The boot unlocked, her case tossed in, and she slid behind the wheel. Metal scraped as her wheels turned.
‘Turn her off.’ He was at her window.
‘I’m not going far.’
‘You’re not going anywhere in that. Turn her off,’ he repeated, squatting beside her mashed metal.
She stilled the motor and climbed from the car, watching yellow paint peel away as the rusting metal ripped like paper. With his hands and one foot, he levelled the bumper bar, then slid beneath the Datsun on his back.
‘She might get you where you’re going.’
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Feel free to use my parking space. As usual.’
‘Planning to, De Rooster.’ Long black hair hung to his waist, and his white T-shirt wasn’t white.
‘It’s De Rooze. Sally De Rooze.’
‘I got your notes. All of them. You buggered my paintwork with your glue.’
‘It wasn’t glue. It was Blu-Tack. It comes off. Anyway, thanks for the repair.’
‘Yeah.’
The little car, impatient to vacate its space between Camry and Commodore, almost collected the white kombi van, driven by the Asian guy from Number 13.
‘Have you got a death wish, De Rooster?’
‘No. Just a slow death sentence. And it’s De Rooze. D, E, space, R, O, O, Z, E.’
The Marathon Man
Ross was pacing the hospital car park when Sally drove in around five. ‘You’ve lost more weight,’ he said. ‘Do you eat anything down there?’
Living on love. Gormandising on it, she thought, but made no reply. He spoke as he walked with her to her mother’s ward, preparing her. ‘She had some sort of a fit.’
‘A fit. Screaming.’
‘A fit. Grand mal, or something, Sleiman said. No mention of sending her to Melbourne, though.’
She slowed her steps. ‘Why didn’t you call me?’
‘By the time I heard, she was okay.’ Then they were in the room.
Not the hint of a smile from her mother today, only the petulant, drawn face and a sketchy outline of bones beneath a gaping hospital gown. Cruel, faded gown.
But it was irrelevant. Sally didn’t fight the gown or her mother. She told herself it was because Ross was there and she couldn’t send him from the room while she stripped the outline and clothed it in lemon. But that was not the reason. She was seeing differently today, seeing as if from a distance.
She watched the nurse’s face, saw her professional attention, saw her mother respond to attention. She saw Ross’s jeans. Too tight. She saw Karen Matthews and her mother enter and sit beside the old lady in the opposite bed. She saw the way Karen looked at Ross. Hungry eyes, as her own eyes looked at Matt. She saw the way Ross walked eagerly to their side, how he spoke to them. Spoke of bulls and paddocks and Lakeside, because they were Lakeside. Sally and her mother were not.
‘We may as well go too, love,’ he said when the Matthews women left.
Go where? She couldn’t go home with him. Of course she couldn’t. ‘I’m going back, Ross.’ Next weekend she’d bring Matt up here. She’d have to tell Ross, but outside, in the dark.
‘You haven’t handed in your notice yet?’
‘I thought I’d wait.’
His huge hand rested on her shoulder. Heavy. Possessive. Matt’s hand was light.
‘She’s sound asleep. Let’s get out of here.’
‘She’s drugged. Her eyes looked glazed tonight.’
‘Sleiman said he’s got her on some new antidepressant. It takes a while for them to kick in.’ His voice was low. ‘Let’s go to the pub for a while.’
She shook her head and turned to the other beds, wondering why some people clung to life and others gave up on it. Her family had given up young. Her mother’s older sister, Bernice, had died in her early thirties. Her grandmother had been fifty-eight. Sally could barely remember her. Maybe the shape of her in the car, maybe the pretty on her dress.
Ross’s stomach broke the silence. It grumbled, growled. ‘The pub has changed hands. They do a good steak.’
At the hotel there would be noise, friendly faces, hot food. She’d have to eat somewhere. Maybe a glass of wine would lend her the necessary courage to tell him she’d been seeing someone else.
There were three hotels in Lakeside, but the Royal was their hang-out. Always had been. It wasn’t the biggest hotel, but it was the oldest. It had character, and an open fire.
Ross ordered a beer and a glass of chardonnay. Sally emptied the glass before he started on his beer. She walked to the bar and bought a refill.
They’d managed to have a life in Lakeside. Mrs Jenner, a single pensioner, had lived for years in the flat behind her mother’s. She was one of those sweet old ladies who make excuses for all. She did a lot of babysitting and had been pleased to earn a few dollars Mummy-sitting.
Sally looked at Ross, the words ready on her tongue. I’ve met another guy, she’d say, but she couldn’t do it. She was no good for him, but he thought she was. How could she hurt him? A tear rolled free, tickling as it trickled down the side of her nose.
I love him, she thought. I do. But I’m not in love with him and I never was. I am in love with Matt. She wiped at the tear and caught another on its way out.
‘Crying is not going to help much.’
‘I’m not crying.’
‘She’ll be okay. Try to get her off your mind for a while.’
Let him think her tears were for her mother; she couldn’t tell him they were for him, for his trust and his unconditional love that she no longer deserved, and because he was not Matt, and she couldn’t tell him about Matt. Not here. This had been their place for years. This had been their corner table forever. It probably still had her chewing gum stuck to its underside.
‘G’day Bertram.’ Familiar faces stopped to talk a while. ‘Hi, Sall. How’s the big smoke?’
‘It gets in your eyes and up your nose,’ she replied.
Then Deb and Greg walked in, saw them and brought their drinks to the table. Deb noticed her red eyes.
‘Allergy,’ Sally explained.
‘Guess who’s getting married?’ Deb said.
‘Not you?’
‘We’re finally pregnant.’
‘Wow!’ Sally had a reason to fill her glass again, and she did it gladly.
‘We waited until the danger period was over before telling the oldies. Mum’s disgusted with us. You could have waited until you were married,’ she mimicked in the carping tones of her mother. ‘So we’re doing it. Doing the whole big white wedding bit, just for her, and she wants it in a hurry. Want to hire a bridesmaid’s dress?’ Deb said.
‘Of course. When?’ How many times had she played bridesmaid? Becky, Gina.
‘The last Sunday in October. Steve and Toni are getting married on the Saturday and we didn’t want to be upstaged.’
‘Three times a bridesmaid, never a bride,’ Greg said. ‘Watch it, Ross. She’ll get away yet.’
‘Not much chance of that, I’ve got her furniture locked in my shed.’
She couldn’t eat her dinner when the waitress brought it to the table. She ate a chip and it stuck in her throat. She thought of hot pizza. Couldn’t have hot pizza. Couldn’t desert Ross now he had her furniture in his shed. She ordered a carafe of wine, eating little, drinking fast. The wine was good. It raised laughter.
Laughter and friends. What else was there?
They left at ten, the world spinning, but Ross’s arm supported her. She giggled and walked on air to the ute, where she had to step up before she stepped in. Her jeans were too tight, or she was too drunk. She giggled as Ross lifted her to the seat, did up her seatbelt, climbed in beside her and kissed her, kissed her long.
‘Drop me off at the hospital. I’m going back to Melbourne.’
‘Yeah, love. Right. You get behind a wheel tonight and the new cop will shout you bed and breakfast.’
&n
bsp; She didn’t argue. Her words had been a last-ditch attempt to remain honourable, to Ross, or to Matt. Which one? What did it matter? She was not honourable. She was dishonourable trash, and Matt would probably dump her next week anyway. Ross wouldn’t dump her. He had her goose girl in his shed. And he had to fix her car.
‘I had a bingle. On Friday. Mashed my bumper and front mudguard.’
‘We’ll pick it up in the morning, check it over.’
‘My nightie is in the boot,’ she said as he led her to the bedroom.
‘Sounds like a good place for it, love.’
She stepped out of her jeans, left them where they fell, she tossed her sweater onto the dressing table and slipped between freezing sheets, then he was in beside her and so warm. She let him kiss her. It didn’t matter. He loved her, and she loved him in an incestuous way, and it was three weeks since they’d made love. He didn’t cheat. She was the cheat. Poor sex-starved Ross.
‘Just one more dance with me. Just one more song,’ she sang, and she felt his smile against her face.
‘You’re tipsy.’
‘Tipsy gipsy, that’s me. A homeless nomad. These days I have to find my beds where I may. And I pay with sexual favours, sir. What is your pleasure?’
‘No payment necessary.’
‘Oh, I always pay my bills. Eventually. Just ask my dentist. Ask my agent.’
How many payments had she made to Ross? How much more did she owe him? How many times had they made love in the past eleven years?
She started multiplying while his arms held her captive. Too much of him, and not enough Sally. But her head so full of wine, if someone didn’t hold her down tonight she’d float away. Or had she floated away already? Was she on the ceiling looking down, or on the bed looking up?
She giggled against his mouth, familiar mouth moving incessantly against her own. Abrasive tonight. He needed a shave.
Her lips unresponsive, she did some sexual calculations on the ceiling, head disassociated from lips. Over eleven years since Mrs Bertram had died. She’d had a few months off when she was nineteen, a few more at twenty-two, at twenty-five, twenty-seven. She’d tried to tell him. Tried to get away from him back then. Tried not to waste his life.
