Love and Other Perishable Items Read online

  Instantly I was somewhere else.

  I was in the one-room cottage in Leura, where Michaela and I stayed last March. Late afternoon, approaching evening. We are lying on the bed, the covers strewn this way and that on the floor. She is lying diagonally across the bed on her back. I’m lying with my head on her belly and one arm flung across her thighs. I listen to her steady breathing and watch the last patch of orange-pink sunlight on the wall fade, casting the room in dusky half-light. I take a deep breath of the skin on her belly, which rouses her from her sleep. She gently pushes my head aside, stretches luxuriously, then sits bolt upright and declares, “I’m starving!” She turns to face me. I push a lock of her teased-up hair away from her face. She bounds out of bed, pulls on her slip (birthday present from me) and sets about making a fry-up. I watch her. I love her.

  Then I’m back at Coles, a little disoriented, but definitely back. I’m cursed with an extensive and detailed memory, so I’m no stranger to being laid low by a vivid Michaela moment. I try to get them out of my head as quickly as possible and am usually successful. But this was different. It was reliving, not remembering. The sights, the smells, the feel of the linen, the warmth of skin on skin. Real. Immediate.

  Unsettling.

  I’m going to sit out the back with my beer. It’s after midnight, so it will be quiet, and there’s a moon tonight. Our backyard is pretty unsightly and uninspiring, but on a brightly moonlit night even the rusty tin roof on the garage seems to gleam, and Eastlakes bathes quietly.

  December 20

  Work is getting crazy. Four more shopping days until Christmas. I had better get off my arse and do my Christmas shopping. I am tossing around the idea of whether to send Michaela a Christmas card or present or anything. I saw a pair of earrings that she would love in the window of a shop called Kashgar. Are you crazy, Chris? The bitch broke your heart and hasn’t even called you for months! Sure, that might have something to do with the way you said—nay, snarled—something to the effect of “Don’t you ever call me again, bitch” last time she called, but surely she realized that it was just the bleeding red mess of my heart talking?

  Anyways, I’m off like a bride’s nightie to meet the gang in the city for Rohan’s farewell. He flies out tomorrow night.

  December 21

  I did a bad thing. I got home last night stinking drunk and singing the “Romeo and Juliet” song, rang Interflora and spent $400 on sending a huge arrangement of flowers to Michaela, across the country, mind you, with a very alcohol-induced Christmas greeting.

  And all on my sleeping mother’s credit card. When I came to this morning, I had vague recollections of doing it but hoped that it was just a dream. The credit card on my bedside table next to the phone indicated otherwise. I paid my mother back today, which leaves very little in my bank account. Fuuuuuuuck. Chris, it is high time you got over this girl.

  December 24

  Whillikers! It’s almost midnight. Just got home from work, which was insane. Why do people always leave things to the last minute? I did too. Of course. I was in Go-Lo today during my lunch break buying crappy little gifts for my family with what’s left of my money. I have very little remaining in the way of brain cells. What’s everyone else’s excuse?

  As testament to this, dear reader, I did something this evening that I cannot account for. I finished my shift an hour before closing time and hung around for a while wishing people merry Christmas and the like. I seized my chance to kiss Kathy on the cheek. She didn’t slap me or anything, which was nice, but that’s not the unaccountable thing. I was chatting to Vic as she was marking down some bunches of flowers and sticking the REDUCED FOR QUICK SALE stickers on them. I looked over Vic’s shoulder and saw young Amelia, who was up on register seven. While I was watching, she stopped scanning for a moment and wiped some sweat away from her temple with the outside of her wrist. The bloody air conditioner is broken. That’s another story.

  “Hey, Vic,” I said, “I’ll take one of them.”

  I wished Vic merry Christmas. Then my legs took me down to register seven, where I gave the flowers to Amelia. When I say gave, I mean I kind of threw them at her, mumbled something and bolted.

  Go figure.

  Anyhoo, Mum, Dad and Zoe are all out on the patio, having some relaxing ales after the frantic all-day Christmas preparations that I successfully avoided by being at work. Thank you, Land of Dreams! I’m going to go out and join them for what could be a rare moment of togetherness.

  Merry fucking Christmas.

  Harvey out.

  January 15

  The weeks are starting to blur. They consist of going to the beach with Mick and Suze, going to work, sinking a few coldies out back with Mum or Zoe in the evening, playing the odd game of tennis with Dad, reading my course-work texts for uni, reading the paper, staying up late watching crap TV, losing entire days to watching cricket and brain cells to the accompanying steady stream of beer. My dad and I live the cliché that men can’t relate to each other on an emotional or interpersonal level so they do it through sports. When we are playing tennis, we are comfortably absorbed in the game, and the fingernail-scratching-down-blackboard who-the-hell-are-you suspicion that we usually regard each other with is gone. Because he is so much better at tennis than me, there is no destructive competitiveness. We both enjoy letting him give me pointers and he is chuffed when they lead to a slight improvement in my play.

  Similarly, we can watch cricket together all day in companionable silence. No pressure to attempt conversations that are doomed to crash in a ball of flames. No speech whatsoever. We ask each other if we’d like another beer with either a grunt or a gesture. We quite happily occupy the living room together all day, day after day. If one of us has to leave the room or carry out some task around the house, he’ll periodically call out for a progress report from wherever he is.

  “Score?”

  “Seven-fa!”

  “Aaaahhgh.”

  “Clean-bowled!”

  “Ooraahhgh!”

  And so on.

  January 21

  Got a postcard from Rohan. He’s on Mykonos. Having a ball. Just as well I am at a point of maturity whereby I’m happy that he is having a good time, rather than resenting his good fortune. He’ll be back at the end of the month and has to start looking for a place to live in Newcastle—he got that graduate position he applied for. Of course he did. Some people seem to have their lives sorted out and are going about living them. And you know what? I’m happy for them. Really.

  Lonely Days Begone

  The Land of Dreams is abuzz with news of an upcoming social event. Next Sunday after closing, instead of the usual trip to the pub that I almost always don’t go on because of reasons well bemoaned above, everyone has been invited to a party at Bianca’s house in Rose Bay. Her parents are overseas. Bianca’s father, Chris confided to me, is the CEO of one of the big banks, and her mother is a “stay-at-home mum” despite the fact that Bianca is twenty-three. The three of them live in a huge harborside mansion, complete with tennis court, swimming pool and private jetty. Bianca’s failure to go to uni, her part-time job in a supermarket and the various Coles slackers she sleeps with are, it appears, part of a larger framework of rebellion against her parents. I have no idea what that’s about, but it does solve for me the mystery of how a twenty-three-year-old woman is able to support herself with a part-time job and spend most evenings out drinking. She doesn’t have to support herself at all.

  Bianca has always regarded me as one might regard a weevil in a rice jar, but I am invited to the party along with everyone else.

  We’re starting Great Expectations in English next week, having survived The Bell Jar and Othello. I am racing through it, which surprises me, because David Copperfield made me want to stick my hand in a blender. It makes sense to me that Pip falls in love with Estella as a child. Children don’t know any better. But I find it hellishly discouraging—as well as fascinating—that even well into adulthood he is as o
bsessed with her as ever, despite her atrocious treatment of him. Don’t we grow out of these things? She’s just married some total bastard, and Pip’s all cut up about it. I empathize with him a great deal because a big part of his misery in the whole affair is that he never felt he could properly compete for her. No matter how much of a gentleman he becomes, to her he’ll always be that poor, uneducated schlub from across town. He gets to live in close proximity to her and is the recipient of a bit of offhand titillation when she feels like it, but he never, ever has a real chance.

  Like me with Chris. Will I always be the Youngster who can’t shed her puppy fat, doesn’t know what a bong is and has no fashion sense? This could go on for years. What if I can never free myself from it? What if I find myself forty years old and giving Chris marital advice with similar anguish?

  The title character from The Great Gatsby (on the reading list for next term, but I read it over vacation) was in love with this girl Daisy for years and years even though she married someone else. Maybe not really love, but obsessed with this version of her that he had created. Boy, did he cling to it. He just couldn’t see things for what they were. To the very end, when he dies from a bullet meant for Daisy’s adulterous A-hole husband. In his beautiful swimming pool.

  Penny has suggested to me a few times that I might like to get a grip on reality. You know, accept that getting together with Chris is unlikely in the extreme and stop torturing myself. I wish I could. It would make sense.

  Our group at school is just starting to talk to some of the boys from our year in the boys’ school. Not the real alpha males, of course, because our group is only in the middle third of the social ranking system. Sometimes they drift over toward us at lunchtime and brief words are exchanged, almost always with Penny. It’s looking like we might even start eating lunch with some of them, and if we eat lunch with them, then that will logically lead to standing together at the bus stop after school. I might be able to find a more realistic target for my emotional energy.

  But it’s no use trying to stop loving Chris. That’s my virus.

  On the Friday before the party we have math for the last period of the day. I tell Penny that I’m worried I might have an aneurism or something if I don’t get my lips onto Chris sometime soon.

  “Man, my head hurts. It hurts; it hurts; it’s going to explode.”

  “Oh, sweetie pie,” says Penny.

  “If he would just kiss me once, just once, properly, on the lips, I think I could die happy. If God would give me that, I swear I will never ask Him for anything else ever again.”

  “You don’t believe in God,” Penny points out. “And I guarantee that if you ever did get that, you’d want more.”

  I fold my arms and sulk.

  As the day of the party draws closer, Chris seems to be less and less concerned with Sveta’s thighs and more and more flushed with an apparent relapse of the Kathy virus. I can see it coursing through his veins, dilating his capillaries and pupils. He’s hoping that this party will be the launching pad for a successful mission into “the Search for the Perfect Woman,” as he terms it during evening break.

  “You should see Bianca’s place. Beautiful view of the harbor, the city lights. I can put my arm around Kathy and say, ‘One day all this could be yours.’ The sun will be setting. I’ll have plied her with alcohol. It will be magic, Youngster. Magic will happen.”

  Magic. Kathy appears in the break room at that moment and starts to make herself a cup of International Roast.

  He eyes her as you would a big juicy steak after a six-day hike eating only dehydrated vegetables. I know the look.

  At the end of the shift, Chris and some of the other boys collect money to buy a few cases of beer for the party. Bianca frowns and says we can just drink her dad’s liquor.

  I begin to agonize about what I’m going to wear. The agonizing is short-lived, though, as the only casual clothes I own are jeans, T-shirts and boots. In cold weather I put a sweater on top. I can’t buy anything to wear for the party, as I have a raging phobia of fitting rooms, and in any case I’m absolute rubbish at picking out clothes. Liza has been known to lend me an outfit, but she’s taken them all to Bathurst. My mum is generally too exhausted after work to consult on such matters. Penny is about a foot taller than I am and none of her clothes fit me.

  So I resign myself to the fact that my big decision to make is gray, white, black or navy T-shirt. In the end I decide on the navy one. It doesn’t really matter, I tell myself. It’s not like he’ll have eyes for anyone other than Kathy. Pfuh.

  On the day before the party Chris confides in me that he’s decided to “throw his hammer at destiny” and make a grand gesture to Kathy, thus bolstering his chances for success the next night. The plan, as explained to me in the staff room, is as follows. He’s been working on a poem for her for a week and reckons that tonight he’s going to have it couriered to her house along with a bouquet of red roses. Anonymously. Then she’ll have twenty-four hours to glow and to ponder over who they’re from. By nightfall he’ll have her down on Bianca’s father’s private jetty, with the harbor bridge and the city lights blinking across the water, whereupon he’ll confess all and go in for the kill.

  “Lonely days will be gone, Youngster.”

  “Great,” I say, a little sourly.

  He actually passes the draft of the poem across the staff room table and asks me to read it and give him my opinion. The universe is against me, I think as I read down the page. Incredible. Here I am, able to treat myself to the words of longing, desire and downright worship in Chris’s funny handwriting, knowing that they are not for me and never will be. Thanks, universe. Thanks heaps. You bastard.

  “Yeah, great,” I say weakly, and hand it back.

  On the day of the party there is lots of whispering throughout the store about the mystery flowers and poem that Kathy received the night before. After we close up at the end of the day, everyone gets changed out of their work clothes and we pile into various cars to drive to Bianca’s.

  I end up in Kathy’s car with Chris, Street Cred Donna, Kelly and a checkout boy called Jeremy. There’s not enough room for me to have a proper seat, so I have to lie across people’s laps in the back. My head is in Chris’s lap.

  “Check it out, the Youngster lets her hair down,” he says, giving my hair a playful yank.

  I try to think of a response, but I can’t.

  Kathy drives like the grown-up she is. Her slim, bare arms turn the steering wheel gracefully. I’m not even old enough to get my learner’s permit. I’m bloody Pip.

  Chris looks like the cat that knows he’s about to get a big dish of cream. I stare up and out at the upside-down trees whizzing past.

  Bianca’s family digs are indeed spectacular. The sunlight is low and golden by the time we are all set up on the deck with music and beers. The water is ablaze, and there is not a breath of wind. I can’t help comparing it to the ramshackle little town house that my lot squish into.

  Andy, Stuart Green, Ed and Lincoln are playing pool on the pool table just inside from the deck. Bianca, Donna, Kelly and Kathy sit together, uniformly smoking in their sunglasses and red lipstick.

  I sit a little way from them with some of the other youngsters (dammit, he has me saying it now), including Sveta, of the killer thighs, and Jeremy. I gulp white wine and wonder when Chris is going to make his move. He is flitting from cluster to cluster, as he does at work, making everyone laugh, making everyone feel good. Bless him.

  I try not to stare too hard at Kathy. Jealousy swirls around my irises, probably flecking the blue with green. How will she respond to what is about to be offered to her? The thought of her and Chris getting together for real parts my insides like a hot knife through butter. Curiously, though, the thought of her rejecting him and hurting him is almost as unsavory. I know Chris well enough to recognize him for the drama queen that he is, and I know that, in that event, he will take it hard. But having read the poem, I reckon the chances of her
melting into his arms are pretty high.

  What are you gonna do? I take a generous swig of my glass of white wine.

  This is the first time that I have been in actual social proximity to Stuart Green. Stuart Green from Canned Goods and Vic from Perishables are the only two non-checkout staff that hang out with us, mainly due to their age and the fact that they both study at the same uni as Chris and Kathy. I think Stuart is about the same age as Chris. He studies chemical engineering. I don’t really have a feel for him, as he has never said a word to me or even made eye contact. He only ever comes down to the front end of the store to talk to Kathy. There is sometimes a curt nod toward Chris, Ed or Bianca. He is generally unsmiling and a bit formidable, but incredibly self-assured. From the little I know of him, he is the complete opposite of Chris. Chris is inclusive and extremely social, and his speech is so laden with in-jokes, self-deprecation and sarcasm you have to learn to decode it. Stuart seems kind of minimal. He is a large guy, broad across the shoulders, attractive if you like cruel-looking men. And people do. Liza did once.

  The other week, late in the evening shift, I’d heard squealing from down toward the service desk. Kathy was in a state of great agitation. It seemed that a mouse had run out from underneath a pyramid display of Vita-Weat. Three checkouts ahead of me, Chris quickly secured his register and started down toward the service desk. He was halfway there when Stuart Green strode out from aisle one, where he must have been stacking shelves. He carried a white polystyrene box, which he deftly brought down over the top of the offending mouse. With the mouse trapped, he put one steel-cap-booted foot on top of the box for good measure. Kathy breathed a sigh of relief. Chris had frozen in his tracks. There was a good few seconds when the three of them cut an interesting tableau. Kathy broke it first.

  “Thanks, Chris, you can go back to your register now. We’ll take it from here.”