Love and Other Perishable Items Page 12

  “Well-meaning waffle about sisterhood was replaced by more sophisticated but equally dubious pronouncements about “difference,” in the sense of plurality. It is easy, of course, to give lip-service to pluralism—politicians are forever conjuring up rainbows and mosaics, while feminists favour braids and quilts—another matter altogether to accommodate it.”

  Aren’t you excited about coming to university? You can sit around discussing this stuff all day—no math, no biology! Just don’t take the History of American Foreign Policy. It may kill you.

  Well, Youngster, I hope the above will come in handy for making you look smart in front of your English class, although I’m sure you do already. Here are my closing words on “difference” and “vectors of oppression,” seeing as how the thirdies have got us thinking about it. In a lot of sociology classes that I have been to and in a lot of scholarship in general, people illustrate “difference” by contrasting us folks from prosperous, “lucky” backgrounds with people from developing or war-torn countries. A blind man can see that there are huge differences between the prospects and experiences of people like us vs. people who live in daily fear of militiamen coming to bulldoze their homes, rape the women and children and then shoot everyone in the head. That’s too easy a contrast. You know what, Youngster? We don’t need to look nearly as far away. I’ll bet that when you think of Sydney, you think of the terrain of your life here. The suburbs where you and your mates live, your route to school and to work, the beaches where you go to swim in the summer, the city where you might go for shopping or movies and wherever else is on high rotation in your life. I bet you don’t think of the public housing ghettos in, say, Morton, with twenty-year-old mothers of three who have no idea about a life that doesn’t involve violence and welfare-dependent poverty. I bet you’re even saying, “Where the hell is Morton?” It’s a suburb between Mount Druitt and St. Marys, out west. There’s no train line or state transit buses, and a lot of private bus companies won’t operate there. Want to really do your head in? Spend a morning at the Morton drop-in center and then the afternoon at Kirribilli Yacht Club.

  You don’t have to look very far to see difference, Youngster. Don’t think it’s safely far away.

  Thank God. This guy is wrapping it up at last.

  Harvey out

  Overstimulated, I lean back in my chair for a few minutes. Then I take my empty bowl to the kitchen, rinse it and put it in the dishwasher. It’s almost ten. Homework time—although I’d love to read the letter again and again. I carry my backpack upstairs. It’s dark except for the glow of Jess’s night-light. In my room I switch on my desk lamp and unpack my books. The letter goes in my top drawer with the other one.

  It’s midnight when I get to bed. As I’m drifting off, I hear Dad arriving home from rehearsal.

  Maturity

  It’s seven o’clock. I am showered, dressed in my school uniform and in Jess’s bedroom beginning the process of getting her up.

  “Come on!” I clap my hands. “Let’s get this show on the road!”

  She frowns without opening her eyes, makes non-compliant sounds and tightens her grip on Prize Teddy.

  I open the curtains so the sun streams onto her face. “Jess, you’re going to make Mum stressed and late for work. We don’t want that.”

  No response.

  “I’m gonna pull the covers off in a minute!”

  “Nooooooo.”

  I look at my watch. I don’t have time for this. I have to get Jess dressed now so I can have Mum’s tea and toast ready by the time she comes downstairs. I go to the foot of the bed, grab hold of the covers and pull them off in one swift movement.

  Jess makes more non-compliant noises.

  I pull her up into a sitting position. She makes herself a deadweight. I turn to ferret her preschool clothes out of the chest of drawers. When I turn around, she has collapsed back onto the bed.

  I grab hold of her arm quite roughly and hiss, “Jess, you’re getting up NOW! Right now or Teddy is going to hang out the window!”

  That does the trick. She stands up on the bed and lifts her arms over her head for me to remove her pajama top. I feel bad, but what else could I do? Anyways, that’s lightweight stuff compared to some of the stunts that Liza used to pull on me. Like convincing me that on my sixth birthday Mum and Dad were going to give me to an orphanage.

  I help Jess with her tracksuit and socks. Her sneakers have Velcro straps (very exciting), so I leave her to put them on herself. Mum is blow-drying her hair in the bathroom as I go downstairs.

  I am first into the kitchen. I pull open the venetian blinds and the sun streams in, highlighting the dust that has just been knocked off the wooden slats. I put the kettle on and place two slices of soy and linseed bread in the toaster. I get out a cup, a tea bag, a plate, a knife, the sugar bowl, peanut butter, jam and milk. I spread peanut butter on one slice of toast and jam on the other. Savory first, I think, then sweet. Mum likes her tea strong, with a splash of milk and between a quarter and half a teaspoon of sugar. Not everyone can pull it off.

  I hear Mum and Jess fighting on the way down the stairs.

  “I want to watch TV!” Jess is whining.

  “No. No TV in the morning.”

  “Yes! Watch TV!”

  “No. I said no.”

  Jess’s high-pitched yell gets louder and louder until it ceases and I hear the Sesame Street music wafting down the hall.

  Mum appears in the kitchen, defeated. She bangs a few things around in the sink, then sits down to her tea and toast.

  “I’ll be home a bit late this afternoon,” she says. “Staff meeting after school.”

  One of Mum’s colleagues—and her closest friend at work—was threatened by a student with a knife earlier in the week. I’d come home to find Mum smoking in the backyard at four. She only ever does that when something horrible has happened at school. For years there’s been talk of Riley Street High being closed down because there are so many problems with it. Whenever an incident happens—like the massive brawl with Enmore High at a basketball match—the politicians go on TV and say, “Riley Street High School is a blight on the face of Sydney and it should be bulldozed!”

  They love that word, bulldozed. They reckon a lot of things should be bulldozed. Aboriginal housing projects. Youth drop-in centers. Safe injecting rooms. Lots of public high schools.

  It’s as clear this morning as it is every other morning that my carefully considered savory-then-sweet toast selection and my painstakingly concocted cup of tea have not had the desired effect. That is, they have not in any way shifted the despair from Mum’s existence. It wouldn’t matter what I made her for breakfast. I could serve up blueberry and ricotta pancakes with freshly brewed coffee and she’d still be miserable. I hover about the kitchen helplessly.

  “Do you want me to put Jess’s milk on?” I venture.

  Jess refuses to eat breakfast—she will, however, accept a cup of hot Ovaltine. The milk has to be warmed in a saucepan on the stove. I have suggested the purchase of a microwave oven to warm up the milk in twenty seconds, among other uses, but this seems to provoke arguments with and between my parents.

  “No, I’ll do it,” Mum replies. She stands up and bangs the saucepan down on the burner. Mum’s despair usually swings between two ends of a spectrum—Sad and Wordlessly Shitty. This morning it’s definitely swinging toward Wordlessly Shitty. There’s nothing for me to do but go to school. So I go.

  After dinner that evening, I take the phone into my room, place it in front of me on the bed and regard it for several minutes. I’ve never rung Chris at home, never had the nerve. But I have to talk to him tonight. I count to three and dial the number. Blood is thudding in my ears and all the muscles in my abdomen twist uncomfortably.

  “Hello?” answers a young woman.

  “Hi! Ah, could I please speak to Chris, please.” One please would have been enough.

  “Certainly. Who’s calling?”

  “Amelia Hayes.�
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  “Just a moment.”

  There’s some scrabbling around and I hear her saying, “Chris, it’s for you. Amelia Hayes.”

  I think there’s some mockery in the way she said my name. Why the hell didn’t I just say Amelia? Think Street Cred Donna. Imagine you’ve got a stud through your bottom lip and a tattoo on your bicep.

  “Good evening, Youngster.” Chris’s blessed tones.

  “Hi, Chris. What … what are you up to?”

  “My sister and I are watching Media Watch.”

  “Oh … should I call back?”

  “Nah, it’s almost finished. What’s up?”

  “Well, I was wondering, I … needed to run something by you … ’cause I don’t get it.…”

  “What’s up, Youngster?” It’s his Patient Tone. He often adopts the Patient Tone when talking to me.

  Here goes …

  “What the HELL is up with the ending of Great Expectations?”

  Backing up a tiny bit, at lunch that day I’d been sitting with Penny in our usual spot. The lunch period goes from 12:40 to 1:20. Right on cue at 12:55, the boys that have been blessing us with their company of late come ambling across the grass. They are led by that dreadful Scott, who is way more pleased with himself than he has reason to be. He’s taken to parking himself next to Penny, reclining with legs outstretched, propping himself up on one elbow like Caecilius, the Pompeii dude from our seventh-grade Ancient Rome textbook, and regaling her with his wit. He never, ever acknowledges me, even though I’m always sitting next to Penny when he levers himself in. I keep expecting Penny to tell him he’s a tool and to get lost, but she doesn’t. So, lately, I’ve taken to reading at lunchtime. Surrounded by the forced laughter and novice flirtation of my peers, I bury my head in a book, signaling to all that I strongly disapprove. I wonder if anyone even notices.

  Today I read the last five pages of Great Expectations. And I need to talk to Chris.

  “Uh-oh,” says Chris.

  “What the hell!”

  “Now steady on—”

  “I saw no shadow of another parting from her! What does that mean? It can’t mean that they’re going to get together. Tell me that’s not what it means.”

  “That’s what it means.”

  “Then what was the point of any of it? What’s the lesson that Pip learns, that we learn from him?”

  “Well—”

  “For 493 pages I put up with Pip’s shit, put up with him being cruel to the people who loved him and continuing to run around after those who didn’t. Put up with all the ridiculous ‘smoke and mirrors,’ the illusions, the false conclusions, the ‘Ooh, So-and-so is really So-and-so’s father; So-and-so is really Miss Havisham’s jilting fiancé; So-and-so was Pip’s true benefactor; So-and-so was actually the one who made Mrs. Gargery into a vegetable.’ I put up with it all in the hope that at the end the bullshit would be debunked and the characters would see things as they are. Pip would finally see Estella and Miss Havisham for the cruel bitches they were. He would learn to accept his defeat gracefully, and—unlike Gatsby—get on with his life.”

  “We don’t always get what we want, do we? Especially with, you know, wanting other people. But it’s worth something to finally see clearly, isn’t it?”

  “Well, I think so.”

  “Then what was Dickens thinking? What was the point of the whole series of events if not for the hero to mature?”

  “Well—”

  “I saw no shadow of another parting from her! What he should have said was: I see plenty of shadows of another parting from her, because I choose it to be so. I have lingered long enough in this great ruined place, emotionally and physically, and it’s time for me to move on.”

  “Maybe Dickens was worried that his readers would revolt if they didn’t get a happy ending for Pip and Estella,” Chris offers, finally getting a sentence in edgewise.

  “Then he should have had more respect for his readers,” I splutter. “If I want a happy ending I’ll watch Pretty Woman. Bloody Pip! He should have married Biddy when he had the chance, gotten a job and shut up. Sure, we all want Estella, but we don’t always get what we want, do we?”

  “No,” says Chris, with a hint of Gutted Tone. “We do not.”

  “I had great expectations. Of that book.”

  “Do you know that Dickens originally wrote a different ending for the book? One where they don’t get together?”

  “No way.”

  “Yes way. Pip and Estella go their separate ways. Pip goes off to work in various places. Estella gets beaten to a pulp by her brute of a husband, who eventually gets killed by a horse he is mistreating. Then she marries the doctor who looked after her after one of the beatings. Pip and Estella run into each other in the street some years later and exchange civilities. Pip is satisfied that she has seen enough suffering to understand what he went through for all those years, but what he really means is that he’s satisfied that she’s had her comeuppance.”

  “That’s a much better ending. What happened to that one?”

  “He got persuaded out of it by Edward Bulwer-Lytton.”

  “Who is Edward Bulwer-Lytton?”

  “He’s the genius that originally came up with It was a dark and stormy night.”

  “No!”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s depressing.”

  “Yeah.” I hear him stretch and yawn. “So you had your heart set on Pip growing up, huh?”

  “I wanted him to get his comeuppance. To realize he’s let himself be had all these years.”

  “But he never got over his fear of Virginia Woolf.”

  “He what?”

  “Never mind. It’s from—well, I won’t tell you what it’s from. You’ll stumble upon it one day and think, Ah! That’s what Chris meant when he said …”

  Brief silence. I get my breath back. I wish Chris would come and live with me in my little bedroom.

  “Well, Youngster, I must go. Try sticking to twentieth-century texts. Lots of confronting reality there.”

  “See you at work.”

  “Ah.” He yawns again. “Yes.”

  I hang up and ponder on my bed for a few minutes. Then I get to my feet and descend the stairs, clutching my copy of Great Expectations. I pause in the downstairs hallway, craning my head toward the back steps leading down to Dad’s study. Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony wafts from underneath the closed study door. I am heartened—Sibelius’s Fifth means he’s in a good mood. It could make the stoniest of hearts tremble.

  I knock softly on the door.

  “Come in.”

  And I do. He’s sitting in the big chair by the window, cigarette in one hand, a copy of the Spectator in the other. I turn the volume down a touch.

  “Dad.”

  “Yes, darling.” He ashes the cigarette with a delicate forefinger.

  “What does it mean to be afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

  He frowns. “What?”

  I wave my copy of G.E. in the air.

  “If I said, ‘Well, clearly Pip is afraid of Virginia Woolf,’ what does that mean?”

  He smiles. Then he puts his cigarette to rest on the ashtray, lays the Spectator on the arm of the chair, stands up and scans one of his bookshelves. He takes down a slim paperback, browned with age, and hands it to me. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee.

  “Read it and see,” he says, returning to his chair.

  Bathurst

  For the first time in ages I am not working on the weekend. I’m going to Bathurst on the train to visit Lizey. I’ve wanted to go all year but have been too afraid to ask Bianca, who does the roster, if I could have a weekend off. When I told Chris, he frog-marched me down to the service desk and stood beside me as I asked Bianca. She said yes.

  Behind her, Jeremy was sitting on the glass counter, all boredom and carefully contrived sangfroid. His red bow tie was missing and his name badge askew. I was directly in his line of vision, but he managed to look right past
me. I thought how funny it would be if the glass counter he was sitting on should break. Then he might have to have a facial expression.

  “When do you leave, Youngster?” Chris asks as we walk toward the staff exit at the end of the night.

  “Tomorrow morning. I catch the early train from Central.”

  “Well, you be careful of those uni students. I wouldn’t trust most of ’em with a pretty fifteen-year-old girl.”

  Pretty! Me, pretty! Wait—he does mean me, right? Or is he just making a general statement?

  “Yes, you,” he says, reading my mind.

  I smile down at the steps. We walk outside and down the street toward Chris’s bus stop, where I’ll leave him and continue my walk home alone.

  There is silence. My head fills with the sound of a strange, overpowering “inner Amelia” screaming, I LOVE YOU! I LOVE YOU!

  “Hey, Chris,” I say, in an effort to drown it out.

  “Yes, tiger?”

  “Martha is afraid of Virginia Woolf.”

  “Wow, that didn’t take you long. Very impressive.”

  “And probably most people are.”

  “Probably.”

  “You are.”

  “I what?”

  We stop walking and face each other. I continue bravely, “Well, you won’t give up the ghost. At least in the end George and Martha give up their ghost.”

  “What ghost?”

  Careful. Careful.

  “Well, how long have you clung to the Kathy ghost? Any fool could see that she ain’t all that.”

  “What have you got against Kathy?” he asks, raising one eyebrow.

  “Nothing!” I say hastily. “Nothing. Just, you know, she isn’t nice to you, is she?”

  “No.”

  “Neither was that Michaela chick.” Daring, Amelia, very daring!