Addition (24 page)

Larry comes over almost every day after school. Jill doesn’t mind— doesn’t press her as to what we do, or ring to check everything is okay. We sit at my kitchen bench and gossip about the girls at school and rattle on about popular culture and the misogyny of fashion designers and hairdressers. She tells me about the boys she likes and those she doesn’t, and bands and TV stars I’ve never heard of. Occasionally we walk in the park or sprawl on the couch and take turns reading Sherlock Holmes aloud.

One Wednesday afternoon in the middle of August, it’s 11 degrees. At 4.13 p.m. we are in my kitchen making sultana cakes dyed purple. Larry’s idea.

‘Do you have another boyfriend yet?’ she says.

‘I’m waiting until the queue outside my door gets a little longer. Then I’m going to get one of those numbered ticket machines they have at the deli.’

‘So, you’re not going to get back with Seamus?’

‘I’ve moved on. It’s a shame Prince Frederik of Denmark is taken.’

She leans her elbows on the bench, cradling her chin in her hands. ‘Dad says you were mad to let Seamus get away. He says you’ll never find one like him again.’

I drip the purple mix into the patty cake liners. ‘Yes. Well.’

‘I liked him.’

‘If you eat all the mixture we won’t have any cake.’ I say.

‘I like the mixture better anyway.’ She licks the spoon and leaves a purple dollop on her nose.

I love my new job. I should have done this years ago; who would have guessed it was so easy to become a contributing member of society? Monday mornings a uniform-clad courier delivers a new-smelling cardboard box stuffed with a raft of paper—bills, invoices, spreadsheets—each in a coloured manila folder labelled in a neat hand. Squarish letters in black, flat on the bottom as if they had been written against a ruler. I sit at my desk, in my lumbar support office chair that I bought over the internet. I log into a central mainframe, find the particular job number and type each sheet into the relevant page. In my new morning routine, I start at 8.30 a.m. At exactly 10.30 a.m. or after I finish 50 sheets, whichever is sooner, I go to the coffee shop for coffee and cake, counting my steps as I go. I start work again at 11.15 a.m. Another 50 sheets later, or at 1.15 p.m., I stop for lunch. (No more salad sandwiches because the time it takes to count sprouts is too impractical for my new working-girl life. Now, cheese, ham and tomato on wholemeal. Not wholegrain. All those seeds!) 2 more hours or 50 sheets, then afternoon tea.

Count the hours, count the sheets, then clock off. Most of my invisible colleagues/competitors are either hopelessly unskilled semi-recovering addicts who work from home because it’s nearer the scotch, or brain-dead mums with a squawking baby wriggling like a tapeworm off one breast as they type. In a remarkably short period of time, I am the longest-serving employee of the data-entry firm. My fingers fly across the keyboard like Chopin and I complete the work in half the time it takes the average typist. Naturally I make no errors.

The salary is poor but it’s more than the sickness benefit which I no longer receive. As well as the meagre weekly deposits into my bank account, the company gives generous monthly bonuses designed to motivate the other typing monkeys to go faster. Sometimes they are cash, sometimes movie tickets or restaurant dinners or picnic sets or bottles of wine. I win the bonus every month and keep the cash and prizes. Jill buys the movie tickets and dinners from me, pity clothed as compassion. It seems I will never be rid of this.

Now I have five men in my life. I see more of my Indian boys these days. I know their names (Eshwar, Vandan, Gagan, Mahendra and Murali) but I’m not certain which one’s which. I think Vandan is the tall one. Several times a week they bring me sweets—habshi halwa, chewy and nutty; pistachio barfi, delicate like fudge—their mothers have sent from home and samosas they have made themselves. They drop in to see if I need a light bulb changed or if they can pick up anything for me at the shops. Mahendra and Eshwar (I think) rig both my broadband connection and hard drive to go faster. They ask for nothing but occasional help filling out a government form and once asked me to call a belligerent council employee who had refused one of them (Gagan?) a parking permit—an experience I found both cathartic and amusing. Had I known that giving away a TV would earn me a helpful Hindu taskforce I would have done it years ago.

I’m glad I have the Indian boys, because I miss the Germphobics. In some ways they were so right: their rejection of hypocritical greeting handshakes and kisses, their stylish gloves and flowing sleeves. Daria’s right; it’s not that hard to flush the toilet using your foot. In other ways they were badly wrong: never eating in cafés, never reading a public library book. And, as both my sexual fantasising and masturbating skills have returned with renewed vigour, refreshed after their little holiday, I wonder how the Germphobics survived without even the thought of sex. I may never hold another man in my arms, but at least I have my imagination.

Nikola stars in my fantasies again. He does. If, while I’m imagining myself as a tight-bodiced serving wench in medieval England, I notice the hair of the tall stranger astride his horse seems lighter than before, I resolutely darken it. And perhaps occasionally the mouth I imagine hot on my inner thigh is framed by sharp, unshaven whiskers instead of a clipped moustache. With some concentration, Nikola’s features remain fine and sculptured. But sometimes my visions need a firm hand.

Francine I don’t miss, because somehow she is still with me. I think of her when I see flowers or count rubber bands or hear a New Age guru on the radio. I wonder what will become of her; with her sweet, Swiss-cheese brain I fear the influence of years of Germphobics will pull her under. She’ll be sitting on the other side of the circle, scrubbing hands and chairs, in no time.

Sunday night. 8.30. 12 degrees. Larry is on the phone.

‘So,’ she says.

‘So, what?’

‘Do you have another boyfriend yet?’

‘Larry. Are you opening a dating service?’

‘I’m not nagging. But I’m in the school play next month. And it would be great if you could come.’

It would. I remember her violin recital. Holding hands. ‘The trouble is, no one can compare with Nikola.’

‘Are you still banging on about him?’

I curl my feet up on the couch. From here I can see his picture beside the bed. I could swear he was smiling.

‘Me? Never.’

‘Grace, he went broke. You told me yourself.’

‘Well.’

‘And that stupid tower? It never worked, did it?’

I stretch out on the couch, moving aside the book I’d been reading. ‘Not worked as such. During World War I the government blew it up. They thought German spies would use it to track American shipping. It was sold as scrap metal. For $1750.’

‘See? And what happened to Nikola?’

‘Well…not a lot. He lived the rest of his life alone in a hotel room, broke. He started releasing kooky statements about communicating with other planets, and told everyone he invented a death ray gun.’

‘That’s the only cool part of the story, a death ray gun. The rest is a downer.’

‘It isn’t a downer, Larry. This is a terrific story of the power and the burden of someone who thinks differently from the rest of us.’

‘Doesn’t sound like it to me.’

I try to think of a better way to say this. It’s important she understands.

‘Look, it’s easy to think that, if only Nikola had been more realistic and practical, his story would not have ended this way. He would have been wealthy beyond his dreams, and his fortune would have financed more research. If Nikola Tesla had been wealthy, the world today would be unrecognisable to us.’

‘That’s what I think. If he was so smart why couldn’t he get it together?’

‘An awful lot of smart people don’t have it together. The fact is this: if he had been more realistic and practical, odds are he would have stayed at home on the farm in Serbia and become a priest like his father wanted him to. He would have married a hard-working, practical farm girl, and raised sturdy, practical children.’

He would not have been the most famous man in the world for a time, or been honoured with a Yugoslav stamp and banknote bearing his face. He would never have invented radio—a claim vindicated by the US Supreme Court in 1943 when it ruled that Marconi’s patent was a deliberate copy of Nikola’s. He would not be remembered with a statue at Niagara Falls, where his genius allowed electricity to be captured, and the unit of magnetic flux density would not be known as the tesla.

‘But he died like one of those crazy recluses, like Leonardo DiCaprio in that movie. Howard Hughes. He…Look sorry, Grace, but he was a bit of a loser, wasn’t he. ’Cause he was so nutty.’

He’s still smiling at me from beside the bed. He’s okay with this. He was never ashamed of how he was. Nikola died of a coronary thrombosis on January 7 1943, alone in his bed at the Hotel New Yorker. Suite 3327. He was 86 years old and so obsessed by a fear of germs that he received few visitors. But his eulogy was read live over the radio by the mayor of New York and thousands of people came to his funeral. Serbs sat on one side of the cathedral and Croats on the other, all there to farewell the greatest of their countrymen.

‘Larry, Nikola was not a loser. He was different. That’s what made him special. It was his gift. Unlike those average people, he will never be forgotten.’

‘What do you mean by average? We’re doing that in maths.’

I don’t know. Medium looks, works at the box office, likes football and barbeques. Lives in Carnegie. ‘You know. Average. Normal.’

‘Average doesn’t mean normal.’

I sit up so quickly that
Guyton’s Textbook of Medical Physiology
clatters to the floor. ‘What?’

‘Average doesn’t mean normal. The average means you divide the total of something by the number of things in it. So the average can actually be unique.’

I can feel a vein throbbing in the side of my face where I’m resting the phone. Of course. She’s right. ‘“The average can actually be unique.”’

‘I just said that. I’ve got an exam in this tomorrow. Do you mean the median, which is the thing that’s in the middle? Or the mode, which means the most common thing?’

All this time. It wasn’t only that he was taller. It was all the little things, like the way he made me laugh and how his eyelashes fluttered when he slept. How he put up with living with his brothers. The way he tasted. The way time would slow down when I was waiting for him to come over. How he was always so proud of me.

‘Grace? Are you there?’ I can hear a wobbly elation; all these years of being told things by adults, of asking questions, of listening, and now she has taught me something. Something important. Yet I don’t know whether to be grateful.

The next Saturday morning, 9.15 a.m. 15 degrees. I walk home from my new supermarket with plastic shopping bags slicing my fingers. This is the worst of my shopping days, a day that comes rarely but I still dread. Washing powder. 10 boxes of washing powder, 5 in each bag, as well as my food for the week. Every 100 paces I stop and release my fingers so the blood can return to the red strangled flesh.

I am walking High Street when I see him. Seamus. He’s standing at a tram stop on the other side of the road.

For a moment I stare as though he was an actor from a medical drama I used to watch on TV: familiar, but so out of context that I couldn’t place him without his lab coat. For another second I don’t believe it’s him, I’m that used to seeing his doppelgangers wherever I look. Now his face jolts me and my heart thuds. He is wearing a navy polo shirt and those pale denim jeans with the faded knees.

Boat shoes fresh out of ‘21 Jump Street’. Someone should tell him it’s no longer 1988. Perhaps I should, but my legs barely move. I lean against a fence. At first he does not see me. Perhaps I fall outside his field of vision or he’s concentrating on something else. But the human mind has a talent for ignoring what is inconvenient for it to notice. A built-in delete key to soften the blows of regret or guilt.

Or, and this is more likely, he doesn’t see me because I look fabulous. Had I still been fat, frumpy and half-asleep, he would have spotted me straight away.

His tram comes and he climbs on, solicitously allowing an old lady in front of him. Through the windows I watch him find a seat. It isn’t until the tram begins moving that he sees me. He stares and his mouth opens wider. Then he holds up one palm against the window, fingers spread. The tram rattles away.

I lean against the wall, head in my hands. It takes a few minutes before I can pick up the groceries again.

Exactly a week later, 27th of August, it’s my 36th birthday. Jill hosts a family dinner. Somehow I manage to attend. In the morning I walk to Glenferrie Road and buy a party dress: a dark green jersey wrap with long sleeves. This is now my official Winter Function Dress, to be worn during the months of June, July and August to all events that are outside of my normal routine. Not that there’s a lot of these. I’m glad I bought it too; everyone dresses up. Even Harry strives to reflect his personality. He wears a suit.

Jill throws together a simple meal of paté de campagne with cornichons, saffron seafood pot-au-feu and passionfruit crème brulées with poached quince. My single crème brulée has a single sparkler sticking out of the top. Jill must believe I would find a cake with 36 candles depressing. I bring a bottle of wine I found in the wooden bin in the front of the liquor store on Burke Road. When I give it to Harry, he grimaces and tries to hide it down the back of the wine rack without my noticing. Jill gives me a jar of vanilla-scented bath salts wrapped in soft pink tissue paper from her and Harry and Bethany. It has escaped her that a) my flat has no bath, b) even if it did, in these times of water rationing it would be immoral to take one, and c) I would be the last person on earth who would want to smell like vanilla. What does she think I am? A gulab jamun?

Larry, glorious, wonderful Larry, gives me a new biography of Nikola she ordered on the net. Perhaps she is a little sorry that she judged him so harshly last time we spoke. Harry junior gives me a gorgeous clutch purse in reds and golds made from an antique kimono material. He is proud of his choice, pointing out the detail in the fabric and the design of the clasp while his father squirms. I am so delighted I whisper later that if ever he feels like sewing he can come over to my flat and no one need ever know. I have been meaning to buy a sewing machine anyway—anything to avoid visiting shopping centres. He hugs himself with excitement.