Love and Other Perishable Items Page 8

  “Cough up.”

  “Right now, Youngster, you remind me of a mosquito buzzing over what she thinks is a nice, normal, juicy vein, angling to swoop down, stick in the old proboscis and suck up some blood to take back to the kids. Little does she know that she’s hovering over an artery and when she sticks it in, she will be exploded by a back draft of arterial spray.”

  On the Formica lies the now-empty pizza tray. My mouth burns from the spicy pepperoni. I am sipping my second beer and Chris is finishing his third. My watch says it is eleven. On a school night.

  “Whillikers! It’s almost pumpkin time,” says Chris, gesturing to Rino for the bill. “You better drink up so I can walk you home, Youngster.”

  “I’m fine to go by myself. I do it every night after work.”

  “Can’t have you walking home alone at this time of night. You shall be escorted.”

  “Righto.”

  I am getting nostalgic about this night and it hasn’t even finished yet.

  Outside there are chilly gusts of wind—winter is coming on fast. We walk through the dark, still streets, our footfalls and voices the only sounds.

  “Will your parents be up?” asks Chris. “Should I prepare to field questions as to why I’ve had their prize-scholar daughter out on a school night?”

  “Definitely not Mum. Dad might still be up, but he won’t ask any questions. You don’t have to come with me to the door.”

  For a while we walk in silence. Then with slightly lubricated daring, I ask, “So who’s the girl?”

  “Girl is Michaela. She went to my uni for a semester.”

  “And what’s so great about her?” The darkness hides my pout.

  “It’s not something I can easily explain, Youngster.”

  “Pourquoi pas?”

  “Well, we just … I …” He gropes around for words. “Look. Tell me to bugger off if this is getting too personal, but you’ve never had sex, have you?”

  I gape in the dark. Should I lie? Would I score points? Would he see right through it? Maybe it would put me in with a fighting chance if he thought I had!

  “I … no.” Truthful old Amelia.

  “Well, depending on who you’re doing it with, you can go to this whole other place. Michaela and I went there. I haven’t been able to get back.”

  We walk in silence. Whole other place?

  “Why’d you break up?”

  “She went back to Perth. From whence she came.”

  “And it was just over? What about the long-distance thing? My friend Penny’s mum came over from the U.K. to be with her dad.”

  “She got back together with her boyfriend over there,” he says stiffly. “He’s called Brad, if you can believe it. Worst of all, on the day I put her on the plane home, I found out that they’d never really broken up. They were just on hold while she was over here. Believe me, if there was no Brad, I’d have moved to Perth as soon as I could raise the airfare.”

  “Crap,” I volunteer sympathetically, silently thanking the powers that be for Brad.

  “Certainly was,” he agrees. “Is, I should say.”

  “Like Pip and Estella.”

  “Except that Pip never actually got his leg over.” Chris grins through the darkness.

  “Well. We don’t think he did.” I gesture for him to stop. “This is my house.”

  Coming to a halt, we face each other.

  “Thanks for dinner,” I say. “It almost makes up for the bastardry.”

  “My pleasure. I’m just trying to teach you to be a discriminate kisser.”

  “That’s kind of you. Here I was thinking you were just being a complete A-hole.”

  “Tell you what.”

  “What?” I tighten and untighten my grip on my schoolbag straps.

  “You welched on telling me about your dad. I welched on reciprocating a whole conversation. Here’s what we do. We write each other a letter in lieu of the conversation.”

  “A letter about my dad.”

  “Yep.”

  “All right.”

  “Now. It’s time you were in bed.”

  We slip through the front gate. Fishing out my keys, I creep up to the window and peer through a crack in the curtains. My father is reading in his easy chair next to the heater, a cigarette and a glass of Madeira in one hand and a copy of the New Yorker in the other.

  “Good night then.”

  “Good night, Youngster.”

  I let myself in and quietly close the front door behind me. One of the tranquil moments from Liszt’s Concerto number 1 in E-flat Major wafts through the living room door. One of Dad’s favorites. It is nice.

  “Amelia?” my father calls out.

  “Yes,” I call back from the hallway.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Dinner with a friend from work.” I head toward the staircase. Just before I put my foot on the first stair, he appears at the other end of the hall, still holding his Madeira glass.

  “Good night then.”

  We regard each other.

  “Good night, Da.”

  The First XV

  I get to school every day in one of two ways. On nice days, I walk, which takes fifty minutes at a brisk pace. On crummy days, I catch the bus. Two buses, actually. One into the city, where I wait at Taylor Square among the social dregs of the night before for another bus to take me to school. That too takes fifty minutes, all up. Go figure.

  This morning I take the bus. Standing alone at Taylor Square, I shiver in my thin school jumper. Penny and I are not on the same bus route. She lives at Maroubra Junction and comes from the opposite direction. There is a metal bench next to the bus stop sign that I sometimes sit on to wait. Today there is a homeless man asleep along its entire length. He wears tattered black clothing, his skin is darkened with grime, his long gray beard is streaked with dirt and in his sleep he cradles a bottle-shaped paper bag. With a cold gust of wind, his stench of filth, despair and illness reaches my nostrils. I move several steps away and shift from one foot to the other against the cold.

  Later that day Penny and I sit on the grass among our group of friends, eating our lunch. We’ve always been a tight twosome within the larger group.

  “How’s Jamie?” I ask.

  “A bit better, I think. But he’s going to be there for a while longer.” Penny draws her knees up to her chest, pulling the hem of her sweater down to her ankles. “Apparently we all have to go there for ‘family therapy.’ Mum’s up in arms because she reckons it implies that she’s somehow to blame for Jamie. ‘It’s not all about you,’ I tell her, but it doesn’t get me very far.”

  “You said that to your mum?”

  “Nah.” She smiles. “But I think it all the time.”

  I wish I had something to say in return. I offer her an apricot bar (the sugariest treat you can get at our school’s health-food canteen), which she accepts, and we sit in silence for a moment.

  The First XV rugby team from the boys’ school is strutting out to the middle of the field. Wednesday. Scrum training day. Once assured that all eyes are upon them, they begin their warm-up exercise display. Bulging hamstrings are stretched languorously. Large shoulders are carefully rotated in their sockets, displaying to best advantage the pecs and biceps attached. The coach circulates, grunting encouragement and consulting on quadricep stretches and groin strains.

  “Frickin’ alpha males,” mutters Penny mutinously.

  Chris’s lament that girls like Kathy eat boys like him for breakfast is still fresh in my mind. These boys don’t eat anyone for breakfast—they don’t have to. They are secure in their position. Only some junior and senior girls are allowed to approach them, and only after being given certain cues. They have parties where there are burly boys on the door to prevent any gatecrashers from entering. No one from our group of friends has ever been to one. Girls who are invited to these parties are hand-picked. In my imagination, the parties involve smoke-filled rooms, kegs of beer, swimming pools, perfume an
d testosterone hanging heavy in the air, and pair after pair of folded strong male arms straining against their “fashion T-shirts.”

  Who is at practice today? I can see Ed Kennedy, Steven Harris and Jeremy Richardson. Luke Silburn, Monty Donachy and James Roberts. To name a few. The funny thing is how I know so many of their names. I have nothing to do with them. I’ve never even spoken to one. Yet somehow their names have seeped into the collective consciousness of the whole school. You hear whispers of their names along the corridors and across the school grounds at lunch. Information about which of them are dating what girls, who had a party last weekend, who was invited and who is casually mentioning that they went and did what to whom. I even know that Monty Donachy’s first name is short for Montague. Go figure.

  After warming up, the boys begin the somewhat comical routine of scrum practice on the scrum simulator thingy—a large hunk of metal that substitutes for the opposing team of hulking heads and shoulders. I wonder if there is a proper name for this contraption. They line up in formation and bend down to assume the position, arms around each other’s arses and heads hovering close to the two pads in front. Then, with a terribly masculine Hunh! they thrust forward, all heads, thighs, arms and arses interlocked. The boys at the front have slammed their heads between the padded struts of the scrum simulator, and straining and grunting, they all push push push to move it back a few inches. Coach roars encouragement for a few seconds, then they all break away. Repeat the process. You lose track of how many times.

  Every pair of eyes on the large school grounds, male and female, is unable to look away from this spectacle. Sometimes I think I can feel a silent alliance among certain groups who resent the privileged position that these meatheads occupy. To me, the whole exercise is just so visually ridiculous that I can’t believe the whole school doesn’t burst out laughing. But no one does. No one is brave enough to openly challenge the status quo. And maybe deep down we all hope to be invited to one of their parties one day.

  The bell for sixth period sounds.

  “What have you got now?” I ask Penny.

  “Double art. You?”

  “Study period. I’m going to write that letter to Chris.”

  “Ah. Well, if you need a break, come and wave at me through the art room window. I’ll strike myself down with indigestion and need to be excused.”

  “Will do.”

  Dad

  Dear Chris,

  In the cold light of day, I’m not really sure what to write about. We just said a letter “about my dad,” didn’t we? That could mean anything. Plus it could go on forever, starting from my earliest memory of him and finishing with the manner in which he said good night to me last night.

  I can be a pretty wordy lass (you may have noticed), but I seem to be struggling here. Let me tell you about my friend Penny’s dad first. It might be easier for me to describe my dad by juxtaposing him with another one. Having been friends with Penny since seventh grade, I have had ample time to observe her dad. He works at your uni. He used to lecture in history, but now he does something to do with advising exchange students. He likes it.

  When I first met Penny, I noticed that every day she’d pull out a lunch box. In it would be two sandwiches made with white bread, a piece of fruit and four crackers with peanut butter and margarine. Sometimes the sandwiches would be tuna, sometimes ham and lettuce, sometimes cheese and tomato, but the tomato was packed separately in foil so it wouldn’t make the bread go soggy. She was often ambivalent about the crackers and let me have them. Eventually I asked her how come she always had this packed lunch—surely some days you just can’t be bothered making it. I have those days. Or some days I’m running late and don’t have time to make it. “My dad makes it,” she said. And he does. Every morning he makes lunch for her and her brother, Jamie. Get this—when I sleep over on a school night, he makes it for me too!

  One time I was sleeping over at Penny’s and we were at the kitchen counter making brownies. Her dad comes in, puts an arm around her, hugs her, kisses her cheek and says something like, “What’s my girl making today?” And when I’ve been over on weeknights, he kisses Penny’s mum when he gets home from work. Like, openmouthed and with feeling. Did you ever see anything like it?

  On the mornings when Penny’s dad has to be at university early, he gives Penny and her brother a lift as far as the uni, and they join their buses from there. On the days that he works from home, he gives them a lift to the bus stop at Maroubra Junction to save them the twenty-minute walk.

  On the weekend he potters about the house in overalls, fixing this and that, washing all the school uniforms and hanging them out to dry. Penny’s brother, Jamie, plays on a soccer team—well, he did before he got sick recently—and Penny’s dad coaches the team! Seriously. One night a week he and Jamie go off to practice at Lambert Oval and they play against other teams on Saturdays.

  One night I was sleeping over at Pen’s and we decided to go to a movie. Once there we decided to see a double feature and were home two hours later than we’d said. Penny’s dad was waiting up in the living room when we got back and sprang to his feet saying, “Where were you girls? I was worried. You must call if you are going to be late.”

  It’s not hard to figure out that these things made an impact on me because it’s very different over my way. For starters, my dad is away a lot. He is a director. Plays, TV, film. One of the best. There is not a whole lot of work in Sydney, so he has to go where the work is. This means that up to five months of the year he is away, and it’s been that way for as long as I remember. Directing a play in a different city, touring with a play, doing an episode of a TV show on location. Last year he went to Perth for three months at a time to teach at the Academy of Performing Arts, and he has a semi-regular gig teaching at a drama school in Singapore. When he is home, he’s out rehearsing a lot, or in his study going over scripts and notes. Or worse, he’s between jobs.

  You’d think that when he’s away, it would be harder for my mum, as she’s essentially a single parent. But, in truth, there’s less tension at home when he’s away. As you might have gathered from my Betty Friedan “moment” the other night, my mum does almost all the housework, works full-time and takes care of my little sister, regardless of whether Dad is home or not. I help where I can, but I’m at work three weeknights myself now. I try to keep a low profile at home and not do anything that will (a) bring me to Dad’s notice or (b) add to my mother’s despair.

  When Dad is away, the yawning inequality in the “sexual division of labor,” as you put it the other night, is less obvious. When he is at home, I almost always feel angry with him and, it seems, he with me. So all our interactions—which are pretty few and far between in any case—are laced with anger. The ultimate insult comes in the evening, when he fills the family space with cigarette smoke. Well, they both do. Not only are they going to give themselves cancer, they’re going to take me and Jess with them.

  When I picture my mum in my head, she is coming in the front door at 5 p.m., holding Jess on her hip with one arm and a bunch of shopping bags in the other. She always looks tired. On days that I’m not working after school, I try to tidy up the kitchen a bit before she gets home, but more often than not she gets home to a complete mess.

  Which brings me to how I picture my dad in my head. About a year ago, I got home from school, hot and sweaty from touch football, and dived into the shower. It was the first time in ages that Dad had been home when I got home from school. He was back in Sydney and preparing to cast a new show. I was in my room drying off and getting dressed when there was a sharp knock on the door and my name was barked out imperiously. I pulled on the last of my clothing and opened the door. Dad informed me I was to “put away the breakfast and lunch things” in the kitchen before Mum got home. Then he disappeared in the direction of his tiny study at the back of the house. Breakfast and lunch things? I thought. It was after 4 p.m. I toweled off my hair and slouched down to the kitchen. The sight that gree
ted me immediately clarified my orders.

  On the kitchen table were the remnants of his breakfast and lunch. There were several dirty plates, a teapot filled with sodden tea leaves, a tea strainer bleeding brown into the pale wood, crumbs everywhere, some raw bacon rind, a heap of apple peelings, a dirty cutting board, a bread knife and the honey jar. The griller was open and displayed a layer of dirty congealed fat. In the sink were the three bowls that Mum, Jess and I had had our cereal in that morning, rinsed and neatly stacked where I had left them. I stood there, tasting my anger and outrage with an open mouth, wondering why on earth he hadn’t as much as thrown out the scraps. Where the hell did he get off thinking that the women of the house existed to clean up after him? I leapt down the stairs two at a time and knocked on the door of his study.

  When I was bidden to enter, I demanded to know why he hadn’t cleaned up after not one but two of his meals, and why I should do it for him. My father is extremely quick to anger. His anger is one of the things on this earth that I really fear. It leaves me in no doubt of how powerless I really am. A minute later I was back in the kitchen, disposing of food scraps, rinsing crockery, wiping crumbs and oozing those familiar tears of impotent rage. That is the image of my father that dominates at the moment. Between that and my mother’s despair, what do you do?

  Thanks for listening. I feel like I could tell you anything. And everything.

  Amelia

  I debate whether to add a row of x’s under my signature and decide against it.

  Eighth and final period is math with Penny. The worst time to have math. Penny proofreads my letter for me.

  “You know,” she says, handing it back, “I can’t remember what we used to talk about before you met this guy.”

  “Hmmm.” I stuff the letter into my backpack.

  After final bell, I get changed into my work uniform and hurry out to the bus stop with Penny. My bus has already pulled up.

  “See ya,” I call over my shoulder, running toward the throng. “Movies on Saturday night?”