Addition (12 page)

‘We came out for breakfast to talk about you and I’ve done all the talking. What was it you wanted to tell me?’ He speaks like a man trying to coax a cat from a tree.

I look down at my plate. My breakfast is not muesli, low-fat yogurt and banana. My pancake is not surgically dissected into a predetermined number of bites. I am at the café and it’s not 10.48 a.m.

‘Nothing.’

‘What are you thinking about?’

I was thinking about numbers, of course, but also about those fingers, about where they could go and where I’d like them to go. And I’m thinking about all the clever women who choose men with long fingers.

‘Egomaniac.’ I say. He blushes.

After breakfast, we walk back to the supermarket where he left his car. Old white Commodore. Licence plate MDS 938. He kisses me, standing in the middle of the street. His kiss is less demanding than last night but more enticing. His stubble burns across my cheek. He gives me all his numbers and writes mine down on a tram ticket. I am listening hard, but he doesn’t say ‘I’ll call you.’

9

Now it’s Sunday night. 8.00 p.m.

‘Hello Mother.’

‘Hello dear. Have you had a nice week?’

‘Dandy.’ Sex with a spunky Irishman on the kitchen floor.

‘How’s Mr Parker’s rash?’

‘Better, better. I read this horrible thing in the paper yesterday.’

‘Yes?’

‘About these two boys, twins I think they were, five or six maybe and anyway they didn’t have a pet and they decided between themselves that they would play a game, that one would play at being the dog and the other would take the dog for a walk. So one of them, I can’t remember which one, went into their parents’ room and got this old belt of their father’s and before you know it he put it round his neck like a dog’s collar and lead, you get it? Well you can imagine—choked his poor wee self, they couldn’t get the belt off. It strangulated him. Horrible things they put in the paper these days, no regard for the feelings of the family. Makes me not want to read it anymore. What else do you think I could use for mulch, besides newspapers? Grace? Grace, are you still there?’

Still here. ‘Beats me. Junk mail? Magazines? Mr Parker?’

‘That’s funny, dear. No, I’m sure the colour of the ink wouldn’t be good for the soil. Perhaps I’ll keep buying the newspaper but not read it.’

Then, 19 minutes later: ‘Hello Gracie.’

‘Jill.’

‘Listen, I just wanted to let you know…I am going to China with Harry. The kids will be all right. Do you think the kids will be all right?’

‘They’ll be fine.’

‘They’re each staying at a friend’s place. So they’ll go to school just like normal. And they’re very mature for their age. So they’ll be all right. And it’s only for a week.’

Yes Jill. Everyone will be all right.

‘And Mum will be okay. Do you think Mum will be okay?’

No, Jill. I think flesh-eating aliens will land in your swimming pool and devour the lot of them. I tell Jill I have to go. Can’t talk. Busy thinking.

On Monday it’s raining and 12 degrees. Unseasonable rain and unseasonable cold. I love Melbourne, but Jesus. It’s the middle of summer and it’s pelting down, each drop hard like ice. Hundreds and thousands of drops. Millions. Trillions. It throws me, the rain. It makes my breakfast seem stodgy and chilling to my bones. Breakfast is always 40.00 grams of untoasted muesli (the amount of fat in the toasted kind is unbelievable), 200.00 grams of low-fat yogurt (rotated from the left of the supermarket chilled cabinet and bought only in 5 sets of 2s—not the six-packs, of course) and 1 banana, sliced into 10 chunks.

The rain makes me wish for toast soldiers dipped in boiled eggs.

Last year I bought a laboratory-grade scale. It’s almost impossible to measure muesli to 2 decimal places. It’s almost inhuman to eat the same food everyday without variation. It’s almost impossible to count your steps accurately in the rain because of an irresistible urge to avoid puddles.

I’m sick of this.

On Monday I didn’t want to eat my breakfast. I nearly didn’t go to the café, in favour of staying home in front of the heater. Then I didn’t feel like orange cake. The icing was drooping down the sides like it’d been sitting there all weekend. I had to force it down. 15 pieces. I didn’t even touch the hot chocolate. When I got home I watched some old movie with Greer Garson on TV and did 10 sit-ups in one ad-break then 10 squats in the next. I didn’t feel like dinner either. The chopping and slicing seemed boring and pointless instead of rhythmic and calming. And chicken. Oh God I’m so tired of chicken. I want to eat vegetable lasagne, puffed and browned and cheesy. I want to eat baked salmon sprinkled with lemon rind and capers and maybe a little dill, and potato gratin. Steak and kidney pie with a towering pastry crust 10 centimetres high that shatters against my fork. I want chilli con carne with a hint of cumin that lingers, and tacos and bread and butter pudding and watermelon. Not together. Separately. I have eaten muesli, yoghurt, banana, tuna and egg salad sandwich (alternating) and chicken and vegetables, every single day since I stopped working. The same food for 24 months.

Monday night. No call.

On Tuesday the rain dips to showers. 18 degrees. I clean between the keys of my computer with a cotton bud dipped in tea tree oil, then call Larry. She’s at a friend’s house, Jill says. Jill reminds me, again, that she is going to China. Jill does not ask if she can give the school my number as an emergency contact. Jill does not ask me to phone the kids to see how they are, or drop in on mother or water the pot-plants.

Tuesday night. No call.

I could ring him, you know. It’s not the bloody 1950s. I’m not one of those game-playing women; I just can’t decide when to call. Sunday night was obviously too soon. Monday night seemed a bit perfunctory, and Tuesday seemed like I had deliberately chosen Tuesday instead of Monday so as not to seem too keen. Then when he hadn’t rung by Tuesday night I couldn’t help wondering why. Perhaps he hated it. Perhaps I’m shocking in bed—too whorish. Not whorish enough? Sex too soon? Legs too hairy? Perhaps it’s because we didn’t have sex again in the morning. Perhaps that turned him off. Or perhaps he’s one of those men that want the conquest, just once. Or perhaps he thinks I’m like that.

Wednesday. I rearrange my bookshelf, dissolving my alphabetical arrangement in favour of categories. Biographies first, then fiction then history then mathematics then medicine. Science last. Outside it’s fine. 32. I clean the venetian blinds with hot soapy water and a sponge. 10 wipes on each blade. Wednesday night. No call. Thursday I scrub my skin with a loofah, 10 strokes each half limb. I exfoliate my face. 7 wrinkles around my left eye, 8 around my right. Not so long ago there were 6 around each. Would it be too much to ask for a little symmetry? The little bastards are breeding. Unlike me.

Perhaps I should do another proper spring clean, like my mother used to do. Although I’ve just done this; I spring clean twice a year, on the first of January for the new year and the first of September for the beginning of spring. Obviously it would be better if these two days were 6 months apart, but that can’t be helped.

Despite the fact that I clean very differently from my mother— consciously so—there is something about my actions that reminds me of her. When I clean the house, every inch from the top of the picture rails to underneath the doors, I can close my eyes and be nine years old. It was unbearably cold, as was every day in my memory’s childhood, and my mother was filling the incinerator and the warmth radiated in every direction. The smoke blew around the backyard like acid splashed in your face, towards the sheets waving on the clothesline and I knew that when she took them down they would smell like smoke instead of air and she would wash them again. Yet she didn’t move them or wait until the burning was over before hanging them on the line. Small bits of paper—fragments of colouring books, pieces of butcher paper—and even threads from clothing blew around the mango tree in an eddy. I poked in the ashes with a stick to find discoloured lumps of plastic and charred metal, pieces of GI Joe dolls and a train set.

Inside the house everything changed from a solid to a liquid. Instead of being in its place and dry, everything—furniture, cushions, curtains—flowed from room to room and place to place as she scrubbed floors and let them dry, and everything was wet. She had Jill and me pull sheets and old medicines and jumpers and the plastic Christmas tree out of cupboards. Even the tiny space where we kept the linen napkins we never used was cleared; my thin arm would snake into every corner where Jill’s chubbier one couldn’t reach. All the sheets and blankets were washed and hung, dripping and heavy, on the line. Bathroom cabinets were emptied, each tube and box checked. Kitchen drawers were upturned, washed and fitted with fresh paper. All the Tupperware was soaked and scrubbed and sunned. Armed with a bucket and sponge, Jill and I scoured the fly screens that my mother had removed from the high windows while teetering on the kitchen stool. She used the same stool to wash the light fittings, slopping soapy water as she went.

This went on from dawn and all day we ate only apples since they needed neither cutlery nor plates. Eventually, late into the night, naked since all our clothes were still drying, Mother would mop the floor starting from the farthest corner and ending at her bed, into which we three would collapse and sleep without sheets or pillowslips. My father had some precognition of Mother’s cleaning spells, like a farm animal sensing the coming of a storm. The day before she began, his car would fill with his fishing gear and a tent. If I’d been asked at the time I would have said he’d gone camping with friends. Now I’m equally sure he went alone.

Even as a child I guessed there was something my mother was desperate to wash away, something that needed to be burned or rinsed or scrubbed at any cost. She was blind to the fact that nothing needed cleaning because these attacks were so frequent, yet there was order and safe structure in her work. That energy is gone now from my mother and all that remains is the way she speaks continuously without breathing or thinking. As a child I would sit up at night to make her gifts—a photo frame edged with sea shells, a fired coffee mug I bought blank then painted. Once I embroidered
mother
on a pillow case in cursive pink script. I made these things to see the care on her face when she polished or laundered them.

I don’t clean that way. I divide the tasks into smaller jobs, writing them down on a small pad.

1. Remove articles from desk, 10 things at a time.

2. Dust desk.

3. Spray and polish desk.

4. Replace articles on desk, 10 things at a time. The best way is to break this up so that the steps are quite discrete—either by reading 10 pages of a book, then doing a step, then reading another 10 pages, or rotating the rooms. Usually I love it but this week even cleaning was beyond me, except the venetians. I couldn’t figure out where or when to start.

Thursday afternoon, fine, 36 degrees. 3.40 p.m. The phone rings.

For a minute I stare at it. Either Mother is dead, or it’s Seamus.

‘Hello?’

‘Um…hello, Grace? It’s Seamus.’

‘Seamus, Seamus…Oh I remember. Kitchen-floor-Seamus.’

‘As opposed to whom? Drive-way-Seamus? Kitchen-benchtop-Seamus? You’re not making me feel special, Grace.’

‘Not my problem. There’s a veritable St Patrick’s Day parade of Seamuses over here.’

‘I see. Well, is there any way I can improve my standing among your Seamuses?’

‘I’m listening.’

‘Just a sec.’ He gets a bit blurry. ‘
Mate, we don’t show those
kind of films. Nope. Nothing with talking fish or cars or rats. It’s an
anthropomorphisation-free zone. Try the multiplex at the top of Swanston
Street
.’

‘You’re at work?’

‘Yeah. It’s dead here today. It’s a shame. We all thought this Paul Cox retrospective would be huge.’

‘Imagine. Parents preferring talking fish to voyeurism and leprosy.’

‘Exactly. Just a sec.’ More mumbles ‘
Mate, you go to any cinema in
town and they all charge that. It doesn’t go into my pocket. Well you don’t
have to buy it. You could bring a sandwich from home.

’ ‘You tell him. A small Coke should cost thirty-eight dollars.’

‘You’d be great in here. Any time you’re looking for a job…’

‘Thanks, but I’ve been flat out cleaning today. In my French maid’s outfit and high heels.’

‘Let’s stop right there,’ he says. ‘Are you free Sunday, around eleven?’

‘I can be.’

‘Good. I’ll pick you up.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘Chinese.’

10

It’s Sunday, 24 degrees. It’s 10.30 a.m. but I’m ready, because this is my usual going-out time. I’m wearing a black cotton knitted shirt and an olive-green peasant-style skirt with drawstring waist. And black-heeled sandals. In my mind I’ve substituted ‘go for Chinese’ for ‘walk to café’. I’m even prepared to visualise the whole café experience—walk, ordering, orange cake—while I’m at the restaurant.

When I open the door, Seamus Joseph O’Reilly is standing there. Hawaiian shirt, pale blue jeans. Deck shoes. (I’m picking up a distinct eighties theme.) He looks gorgeous. He even smells gorgeous. I’m tempted to forget about going out and invite him inside, even though it’s now past my going-out time. But he kisses my cheek in a perfunctory way, and before I know it we’re in MDS 938, and we’re off.

The restaurant is overwhelming: tables, people, carts. Wall hangings. Children running around. So many things to count. I take my mind off it by thinking about being Chinese. I love Chinese everything. Fireworks, noodles. The Wall. I love the way they don’t compartmentalise their numbers but integrate them into daily life. I like the way that zero is the most complex pictogram of all the single digits. A big fat 0 like we use doesn’t sum up the magnitude of the concept.

I love lucky numbers. In Chinese culture they’re 6, 8 and 9. The reason they’re considered lucky is probably the sound that they make. 6 sounds like the word for ‘everything going smoothly’,
lui
. 8 sounds like
fa
, which means great fortune coming soon. And 9 sounds like
jiu
, the word for everlasting, especially when used about a marriage or a friendship. I remember reading about some Hong Kong millionaire who paid a fortune for a licence plate beginning with 888. These plates become a circular argument: everyone knows how expensive they are, so they treat you with more respect. And the more people bow down to you, the luckier (and richer) you get.