Love and Other Perishable Items Read online

  “It’s not horror, Youngster; it’s science fiction. Trail blazing science fiction.”

  Each conversation with Chris seemed to prompt an exhausting mix of excitement and forehead-slapping embarrassment at my inability to keep up with the references and in-jokes. Real or perceived. I go to an all-girls school where people are bent on studying. I wasn’t used to talking to boys at all, let alone grown-up ones with university essays to write and incredible charisma. So, so far out of my depth.

  Christmas

  I worked Christmas Eve, as did Chris and most of the other part-timers. He finished his shift an hour before me and spent a good half hour doing his man-about-the-supermarket routine: entertaining the girls; engaging in serious-looking talks with the managers, his arms crossed, nodding with a furrowed brow; counseling Ed at the service desk about his life choices, or lack thereof. It was amazing how he was able to talk to anyone and everyone with confidence. I wasn’t the only one who reveled in the easiness of talking to Chris. Everyone had a better shift when Chris was on.

  After the routine had concluded, he disappeared into one of the aisles for a couple of minutes and reappeared carrying a bunch of flowers. He walked past the checkouts on his way to the exit.

  I was focused on the task of maneuvering a huge frozen turkey into a plastic bag, but I was acutely aware of his movements. (It was a skill I’d developed. At any given time, in addition to performing my checkout duties, I could tell you where Chris was, where he had been and when he was due to finish.) It looked as though he was going to walk out without saying goodbye or merry Christmas or anything.

  At the last moment he paused at my checkout, threw the flowers down on the counter and muttered, “Those are for you, Youngster. Merry Christmas.” And barreled on out.

  I looked from the flowers to the exit and back again.

  I wiped the icy turkey residue from my hands onto my pants and moved the flowers underneath the register. They had a Coles staff-purchases seal on them and a sticker that said REDUCED FOR QUICK SALE.

  After work I walked home hugging my flowers with a queer fluttery excitement in my chest.

  “Who are those from?” asked my mother, in front of a gaggle of Christmas Eve relatives, as I walked in the front door.

  “Um … someone from work,” I managed.

  She raised one eyebrow. “Well. We’d better put them in a vase.”

  I was distraught when they died a few days later and Mum insisted they be thrown out.

  All December, I’d looked ridiculously forward to shifts when Chris would be working, especially if he was on a checkout within earshot of me, or better still in front of me, so I could watch him chatting to his customers, doing that thing he did. He could have a conversation with absolutely anyone.

  He was not to be messed with, though, for all his chumminess with the managers. The store’s air-conditioning busted a few days before Christmas, and several of us checkout staff almost fainted from the heat, thanks to the heavy felt Santa hats we were required to wear. Maybe those hats would make sense at the North Pole, but here in Australia, Christmas falls in the dead of summer. Most of us cursed and bitched as we wiped away the sweat that ran down into our eyes, but we continued to scan and pack groceries. Not Chris. He petitioned management to have the Santa hats abandoned until the air-conditioning was fixed. Management remained unmoved and said the Santa hats were an important part of creating a Christmassy atmosphere. Chris went to the union. Pretty soon the Santa hats were a thing of the past. Chris, the hero of the hour, personally removed the Santa hat from my overheated head, waved it triumphantly in the air and threw it under the counter. He winked at me, leaned in and whispered in my ear with playful conspiracy, “Rage against the machine, Youngster.”

  And, almost imperceptibly, his hand touched my arm before he returned to his own register. It was the first time that any of his skin had touched any of mine.

  Working alongside Chris transformed five hours of boredom into a wonderland of banter and laughter. I surreptitiously scanned the roster to see which shifts we were scheduled on together and always made sure my hair was washed and as anti-frizzed as possible on those days. When school holidays began, we worked a lot of the same shifts. That fluttery feeling in my chest felt as though it was starting to bruise my rib cage.

  The final nail in the coffin of my sanity came one night toward the close of business. Chris was lounging over my register, chatting. I think we were talking about social hierarchies in high school as compared to social hierarchies at university.

  “I’m not saying that Beautiful People don’t have the right to exist,” I remember saying. “I’m not saying that they should be rounded up and taken to an island. I’m just saying that they are never, ever to be trusted because they can never know what it’s like not to be Beautiful and their priority will always be being Beautiful with other Beautiful People.”

  “So you think that everyone should know their place and be happy in it, and not seek to have any congress beyond that?”

  Bianca (who was the service supervisor, and so the boss of us) barked at Chris from down at the service desk, where she was delicately adjusting the uniform red bow tie of one of the better-looking checkout boys. “Chris! Back to work!”

  He didn’t move right away. He looked at me and, with full eye contact for maximum impact, said, “You are the real thing, Youngster. I hope you will never change,” before moving slowly back to his own register.

  I know a compliment when I hear one, even if I don’t fully understand the nature of it. The hammer shot that last nail in with one strong blow.

  One afternoon in January, I sit on the couch watching TV with my little sister. Jess likes to watch TV snuggled up to me. All right, all right—I like watching TV snuggled up to her. We are watching Sesame Street. Apart from wondering whatever happened to Grundgetta, I’m not really paying attention. I’m mulling over the last few weeks at work, in particular thinking about Chris, when it comes to me. The whir and fog in my mind suddenly clear and leave three words standing tall and indisputable:

  I love Chris.

  My tummy feels weird. I sit there pondering for what must be a long time, letting Jess watch the older kids’ programs that are on later and later. Eventually my father comes in and starts making a whisky and soda for himself and my mother. Whisky and soda signals six o’clock and time for me to get up and set the table for dinner. In love or no.

  The Kathy Virus and Other Anomalies

  “Fishing off the company pier,” as I have overheard Chris refer to it, is a common practice among the part-time staff at Coles. Bianca, for example, is twenty-three and has been going out with Andy from Canned Goods, age eighteen, for some months. This is in addition to the bow-tie adjusting she indulges in on a regular basis with most of the other male staff members. Like I said earlier, Andy is a pretty quiet guy. I imagine he just does what he is told. They must both get something out of the relationship—I just have no idea what it is.

  “Sex,” says Chris when I ask him. “They both get sex.”

  Lots of the younger girls have crushes on Ed, who, even I have to admit, is pretty good-looking. He is also aloof, adding to his appeal. Sadly for the girls, he is generally too stoned to take advantage of their attentions. Chris can frequently be seen leaning over the counter of the service desk berating him. “You have to be in it to win it, Edward!” and the like.

  The yawning six-year chasm between my age and Chris’s is not the only fly in the proverbial ointment of this “loving Chris” business. I’m not even sure what “getting” Chris would involve; all I know is I want him. I want to be enfolded by him somehow, and to possess him. To have unfettered and exclusive access to him all the time. To feel how I feel around him all the time. To know that he loves being around me too. To feel more of his skin on my skin.

  But Chris seems to be in perpetual pursuit of another girl from work called Kathy Rushworth. She’s twenty-two and studying primary education at the same univ
ersity as Chris. Like Bianca, she is a supervisor and so is sort of Chris’s boss. He refers to his long-standing crush as the Kathy virus, as it seems to take a relapsing-remitting course.

  “Got a raging case of it today, Youngster,” he mutters, pushing a cart past my register with white knuckles, watching Kathy talking animatedly to Stuart Green from Canned Goods at the service desk.

  The following week Chris declares, “It’s in remission!” and declines Kathy’s invitation to go to the pub after work. Instead, he hangs around after his shift advising me on my English assignment.

  Kathy is dark, pretty, small—elfin even—and completely uninterested in Chris. Except, strangely, when the Kathy virus is in remission. Then she bombards him with a campaign of arm-touching (signature move), bow-tie adjusting (borrowed from Bianca) and leaning over his register giving him her undivided, head-cocked-to-one-side attention. An immediate relapse of the Kathy virus invariably follows.

  That Kathy needs a can of reduced-for-quick-sale Spam pegged at the back of her head, and I reckon I’m the woman for the job. They’re stacked within easy reach of my register.

  After glaring at the Chris-and-Kathy spectacle for the whole shift from my dress-circle vantage point at register seven, I walk home through the deserted mall and dark streets.

  Fifteen-year-old checkout girls are in no position to compete with someone like Kathy. Even Street Cred Donna would be struggling to make serious inroads with Chris. (Which, by the way, I am totally convinced she is. I am not the only youngster looking up to Chris with a thumping heart. She just shows it differently. I can spot a rival at twenty paces.) She has recently added a tattoo of barbed wire encircling her upper right arm (as a sixteenth-birthday present to herself) and has her mother’s name tattooed on her other arm. You can’t see her tats—her work shirt covers them. Chris told me about them.

  My sixteenth birthday is months and months away. I have no tats. I don’t smoke. I have no idea how to wear makeup, and now that my older sister has moved away to live on campus, I have no one to teach me. I don’t stand a chance. I know this.

  I turn my key in the front door and grunt a greeting to my mother, who is folding laundry in front of the TV. Dad is away this week.

  I sling my heavy backpack to the floor next to the couch, sit down beside Mum and take my shoes off.

  “How was your day?” I ask her.

  She doesn’t answer. Never a good sign.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.”

  I wait uneasily. “Bad day at work?”

  “No.”

  “Jess throwing tantrums?”

  “No.”

  Her movements folding the clothes are jerky and angry, and she slams every folded item down on its pile. Her face is tired, her mouth a straight line.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask again.

  “Nothing!”

  I won’t get it out of her. I’m short on time anyway. Got hours of homework and it’s almost nine-thirty.

  “Is there any dinner?”

  “In the oven.”

  I eat standing up in the kitchen, rinse my plate, collect my backpack and climb the stairs. When I reach the top, it is dark, except for the green glow of Jess’s night-light in the end bedroom. English first, I think as I snap on my bedroom light.

  My English teacher, Mrs. Cumming, who I have for the second year running, has a very “interpretive” approach to the tenth-grade syllabus. She’s decided that the first text this year is Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. I’m halfway through it. The main character has tried to kill herself a couple of times now. She’s also really uncomfortable with the fact that she’s a virgin. She looks around and divides people into two categories—people who have had sex and people who have not. That’s something I can relate to a bit. No one in my immediate peer group has crossed that Rubicon (I don’t think!), but still, I live in the world. And I’m in love with a twenty-one-year-old. So it crosses my mind. Whenever anything to do with sex comes up in conversation with Chris, he gives me this sympathetic look, like he doesn’t want to scare me, or confront me. Like I’m too delicate. Scare me! I want to shout. Confront me! I’m not so breakable—go on, try!

  I am nowhere near sold on The Bell Jar but keep plowing through it because Chris nodded his approval the week before.

  He came into the staff room on my break and saw me reading it. “Sylvia Plath, eh? Hard-core.”

  “Yes. Yes, it is hard-core.”

  “This is the weird English teacher, right?”

  “Yes. Yes, she is weird.”

  “Want a coffee?” He got a stack of Styrofoam cups out of the cupboard and prized the lid off the massive tin of International Roast so generously provided. Yuck.

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  I closed the book and waited for him to sit down. A cup of International Roast with Chris at 8:15 p.m. on a school night. Plastic chairs in a windowless room. It was the high point of my day. It was the high point of my life.

  The margins of all my exercise books are filled with letter Cs in various colors, fonts and incarnations. I stare out of classroom windows, wondering what he is doing. I imagine him at university, taking lecture notes, hanging out with his friends at the uni bar, putting in his two cents’ worth at the sociology seminar he loves. And, of course, talking to girls. Grown-up girls at university. Girls who can go drinking with him after class. Girls his own age who he could confidently introduce to his family and friends. Girls who know how to dress and wear makeup. Girls who have had sex. Girls who study the same texts as him. Girls who stand a chance in hell.

  I’m quieter than usual during the lunch period. I lie on my back on the grass, my head resting on my backpack, surrounded by the voices of my friends, and look up at the bright blue sky. Penny sits next to my inert form, talking to Ally and Eleni, but occasionally she waves a hand in front of my face and shakes her head, laughing.

  “She all right?” someone asks.

  “Sure,” says Penny. “She’s just in her happy place.” Penny drops her hand onto mine and briefly squeezes it.

  The six lanes of traffic on the other side of the fence hum to my right. I close my eyes and imagine Chris brushing my hair away from my neck with warm hands. I open my eyes again. My lips feel like they are burning.

  At work, I hear that Street Cred Donna’s dad has belted her and kicked her out of the house. Egged on in large part by the stepmother. Her real mother remarried and moved to America when Donna was twelve. Up ahead of me on register twelve Donna is serving customers, her eyes puffy and her shirt un-ironed.

  During my break, I walk out to the back dock, eating my granola bar, and happen upon Chris and Donna. She’s crying. Her face is streaked with eye makeup, her shoulders are shaking and she smokes with nicotine-stained fingers. Chris is gently stroking her back. Catching sight of me over the top of her bowed head, he wordlessly waves me away.

  I wonder, despicably, If I invent a similar crisis, will he stroke my back too?

  Daylight

  The next day I sit in math with Penny in our usual spot—far left, second row from the front. I knit my brows together and attempt to adjust to the hard, cold daylight. To the way things are. It’s never going to happen.

  “Probably not,” says Penny, reading my mind and telling it like it is in her usual style.

  I sigh and look out at the park on the other side of the road. I can see a PE class of unfortunates jogging up a hellish incline. Unless, I think, my momentary flirtation with reality dissolving, I can somehow infiltrate the older set at work. Get him to associate me with his contemporaries. Maybe I could get hold of his reading list for uni. Maybe I could start smoking, get a fake ID and start going to the pub. Maybe I could learn to stomach beer and how to order it. Maybe I could buy some clothes aside from jeans and T-shirts. Maybe I could learn some new and super-impressive words. Convince him that I am a twenty-year-old trapped in the body of a minor.

  “I could do it,” I say to Penny. “It co
uld be done. Right?”

  “Oh, sweetie. I think it would be hard to pull off. And anyway, he probably likes that you are different from his usual world.”

  She’s right; it would be hard to pull off. Observe this monumental fuckup from last week.

  Against all the odds, Chris had run out after me into the street after I had knocked off from a Sunday shift. “Oi! Youngster!”

  I’d turned to face him and instinctively stood up straighter at his nearness.

  “Look, some of us are going back to Ed’s for a bowl. Do you want to come?”

  “A bowl? A bowl of what?”

  He rolls his eyes. “Um, I don’t know.… A bowl of ice cream. What do you think?”

  Ice cream? I’m on a dairy-free diet because I’m lactose intolerant. And Ed lives several suburbs away; how would I get home afterward? Would Mum and Dad notice that I was late and want answers? Mrs. Hulme wanted chapters two and three of The Great War summarized by the next day. But this was the chance of a lifetime!

  I agonized. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other and finally stammered, “I—I can’t.” (Eloquence is just one of my gifts.) “Too much homework … and … and I can’t really have ice cream. Just … just soy ice cream … since it’s non-dairy …” My voice trailed off.

  “Um, don’t worry about it,” he said, edging away.

  Bugger!

  I could see Ed, Bianca, Andy, Kathy (damn her!) and Donna (heartsick) assembling at the staff exit, waiting for Chris. Bloody Donna has managed to get hip to their jive. Look at her, fumbling in her canvas satchel for a cigarette, lighting it, then Bianca’s, with her Zippo. The metallic clicking sound that it made when she flicked the lid back down against her palm seemed to encapsulate everything I was lacking. Then she took a drag and blew a steady plume of smoke, looking out from behind it with equally smoky eyes. (I had found some kohl in my mother’s makeup bag the week before and tried to re-create Donna’s look on my own eyes. It just looked stupid.)