Creepy and Maud (2 page)

My dad, deep down, feels out of control. He has a shit job as one of those booksellers who drive around to businesses and factories with a box of shit books and then have to try and flog as many as they can to make a shit wage. He really wants to be selling nuts and bolts, or modems and fax machines. But he is selling books and he thinks, again deep down, that bookselling is feminine. A girl job. He doesn’t even like books. He especially hates that some of the books he lugs around are cooking and craft books. So he feels out of control. People who feel out of control are always spoiling for a fight just to prove how in control they really are. They’re stupid like that.

Then there’s our neighbour. This fellow always looks like he has a mouthful. It’s because of his teeth. He has these big teeth. Big, waxy-looking teeth, and lips that stretch like custard skin and never seem to move when he talks. He’s always smiling with those custard lips, all smarmy and familiar-like, but you get the impression he’d just as quickly back over you in one of his limos. You see, that’s what he does for a crust. Drives limos. Mostly for weddings, but he’ll do a drunken twenty-first as well if you pay the surcharge for post-party cleaning. Therein lies the rub. No matter which way you slice it,
if you’re being paid to drive other people around town (and clean up their hurl and wee), you’re at the bottom of the food chain. Call it having your own business, or being self-employed, or whatever else you want, but you’re in service, my friend. People in service have no control. They’re all operating on someone else’s timetable. A man’s got to resent that.

So you’ve got two blokes living next door to each other, each wondering where and when during the preceding years they lost their balls. (I’m not sure my dad’s ever descended, but that’s another story.) There’s a proper word for it. I learned this word in a book. The word is
emasculation.
It means feeling as if your bits have been removed. That’s putting it very simply, of course. Naturally, the book I was reading at the time was not a schoolbook. I attend a pretty swanky religious college (we eat a lot of sausages to pay those fees, let me tell you), and there are no books in our library that make reference to testicles, attached or not. We’re not supposed to have sexual organs at my school. (Poor old Farley McMillan was expelled after finding his.) I check my jocks every night when I get home, just to make sure this expensive education isn’t emasculating me. (Talk about agendas.) So anyway, you’ve got these two emasculated blokes living right next door to one another, thumping their chests and screaming at each other like
banshees. Same agenda: control. You’d think they’d get along. Or at least get the same therapist.

Let’s face it. Neither of them would recognise their own bullshit. They just see themselves in each other, and that’s got to hurt. I feel sort of grateful to Limo-Lionel, though (that’s what we call him), just for giving my parents a bit of a joint venture. Something to focus on besides each other. It can warm my heart to hear Mum out there on the front lawn, supporting my dad like any other wife and helpmeet: ‘Don’t just pull his hair, Merrill! Punch him in the solar plexus!’ Unfortunately, Merrill thinks a solar plexus is some sort of new Japanese four-wheel drive. That’s my dad’s name, by the way. Merrill. (I know.)

There was a time when my parents had more in common than Limo-Li. A time when their agendas were similar, or not as well developed, or maybe even unformed. I know this because they used to hold hands. When they were at their beginning and their future was poking up just a little bit, dirty-faced and hopeful. I wonder if it was love or if they just knew each other the way you know a good comfortable shoe, or a toothache, or the view from a favoured window. I’ve seen photos of them holding hands. Mum keeps photos in shoeboxes in the bottom of her wardrobe. I found them when I was going through her stuff one day, these photos of
her and Dad holding hands. I’m in some of them. In my favourite, the three of us are walking and I’m in the middle and each of them is holding one of my hands and they’ve swung me up off the ground. We’ve all got our eyes and mouths wide and I bet our lungs were full, too, and I’m like this little bridge between them. It’s the beginning of the day in this photo. You can tell by the light. Beginnings are pitiless things; they are full of promise and hope that they never have to realise. I pinched that photo.

Every now and then, Dad will make a gesture that reminds me of that photo. Like sometimes when he and Mum are watching telly together, he’ll run his index finger along the back of Mum’s hand and her lungs will fill again. They don’t know I see that stuff. I sort of like seeing it, the same way I like seeing them fight. They don’t know I see anything.

As I said before, I am in love with the girl next door. Our windows are almost opposite each other’s, over the side fence. I happened to be looking out my window when I saw her standing in front of hers. She bolted. Then she went and got Limo-Lionel to tell him I was looking at her through the bedroom window. I didn’t mean to. I could just as easily have told Limo-Li that she was looking at me! But I didn’t. So when he came over to rant about me to my parents, I just stood there with my toes turned in and my heart thumping while he
called me a pervert and Dad cracked his knuckles.

I call her Maud. That’s not her real name but that’s what I call her. She’s sort of shortish and curvy. I’ve never liked that pipe-cleaner look in girls. I know kids at school who would even call my Maud fat. It’s the girls who mostly go there with the fat talk. Us guys are so consumed with avoiding random woodies in Health Ed that we don’t really care about extra soft bits on the object of our affection. What do you think is giving us the woodies in the first place? Maud’s got this friend that all the girls think all the boys are in love with. I suppose they might be. What do I care? All I know is that this girl has got so many bones poking through her skin, she looks like she might injure anyone giving her a bit of a squeeze.

Shortish and curvy. Titian hair. No freckles. A dark, smudgy birthmark about the size of a ten-cent piece on the back of her left calf. A nose piercing Limo-Li knows about and a bellybutton piercing I assume he doesn’t. Has a bald spot on the side of her head, which she hides with hats and headbands. Likes Jeff Buckley, Disturbed, Vivaldi. Has a large hardcover gift edition of
Alice In Wonderland
on a bookshelf and not much else. All right, so I have spent a bit of time looking in there. It’s funny how when you watch someone for a while, as you learn them, you begin to feel as if they’re complicit in the
observation. As if you have their permission. As if they actually feel you watching, and like it. That’s when I got careless, though. That’s when I got comfortable.

Am I sounding creepy? Love is sort of creepy. When you fall in love, you presuppose all sorts of things about the person. You superimpose all kinds of ideals and fantasies on them. You create all manner of unrealistic, untenable, unsatisfiable criteria for that person, automatically guaranteeing their failure and your heartbreak. And what do we call it? Romance. Now, that’s creepy.

Of all the things I watch when I’m supposed to be doing my homework (Merrill: ‘You’re not getting any smarter reading that goddamn book! Now get in your room and do your homework!’), it’s Maud’s hair pulling that I love the most. Her fingers are thin and white and her hair quite wiry. I know I’m supposed to say something like: ‘and her hair is like spun gold ablaze in the lamplight with an incendiary burnish.’ But most days it really looks like it could do with a good brush. She winds lengths of her hair around one finger (usually an index or middle finger) and then pulls quite hard, letting the hair slide down and off the finger in a smooth ringlet. I can feel my own scalp tingling, just thinking about it. Sometimes she pulls really hard, and thick strands come away in her fingers and she flaps
her hands wildly as if they are covered in cobweb. I find myself breathing through my mouth, watching her.

It’s called trichotillomania. I didn’t know that at first. It wasn’t until I noticed her pulling
all
her hair that I did some research. And I do mean all. At first I got really excited when she slipped a hand inside her knickers. I’ve never seen a girl do that before. But it didn’t take me long to realise there wasn’t a lot of pleasure involved, just concentration. And that same hand flapping. Well, I guess she’ll never have to wax. Once I watched her sitting in front of her mirror, tears streaming down her face, as she pulled out her eyelashes.

I went to the public library to do my trichotillomania research. I had to. You see, we don’t have internet access in our house. Mum still gets her sausage recipes off the backs of tins of condensed soup, and Dad still has porn delivered by the postie. Mum still pays bills with a cheque book and buys dresses at real shops, and Dad still plays golf on a real green with a real club. They’ll never go virtual. Or mobile. (Don’t get them started on the multifarious evils of mobile phones.) I don’t give a shit one way or another. I once considered using the computers at school to google some stuff I was interested in, until I realised we have higher security than the defence forces connected to our school computers. One errant keystroke, one digression
from the stated research agenda, and an alarm, a fucking alarm, goes off in the librarian’s office. I’m serious. Then teaching staff appear out of nowhere, as if they’ve commando-rolled from somewhere in the stacks, and some poor bastard trying to find out the symptoms of chlamydia is collared and spirited away. It’s a thing of beauty. Thing is, even at the public library, where access is unmonitored, I head for the books. I like the smell of books. It relaxes me. And you don’t have to sign up for a twenty-minute allotment of time if you’re there to read books.

So it was there in the stacks of the public library that I found out that trichotillomania is about stress relief. Poor Maud. Funny how anxiety affects different people in different ways. Funny how you can get addicted to your stress relief. Maud has her plucking. Dad has Dobie Squires. Mum has her wee nips. That’s what she calls them. Wee nips. ‘I’ll just have a wee nip,’ she’ll say. ‘Is the sun over the yardarm? Time for a wee nip.’ When the truth is she’s been nipping since the sun was actually up. I mean, no one really believes that plastic bottle she carries around is full of Ribena. When I was little, I used to find glasses sitting on windowsills behind the curtains, half full, with a couple of insects struggling on the grimy surface of cheap red. Mum would get caught when the doorbell rang or one of us came home early,
quickly stash the nip and then forget about it. I never said anything. Just washed the glasses and put them away. I don’t think Mum thinks of herself as a drunk, because she’s never descended into casks. Back when Mum and Dad used to have people over (when people would still turn up, if invited), she would look down her nose at people who rocked up with a cask. ‘What a pisshead,’ she’d say. ‘Wine in a fucking cardboard box!’

Sometimes I see Maud drinking. She has a bottle of Southern Comfort behind a doll’s house in her wardrobe. She pours a bit into a can of Coke. I found out about it when I started using binoculars. (I told you, love is creepy.) I have these huge binoculars that used to belong to my grandmother. When Merrill packed her off to a nursing home, her house was cleaned out and all her stuff divided up. For some reason, I was given this pair of binoculars the size and weight of a small bar fridge. I’m serious. If I use them for too long, I have to rest my elbows on my desk. They came in a black leather case lined with red velvet. Just awful. Anyway, I was trying them out one day and there was Maud kneeling in her wardrobe, adding a nip to her Coke. I’d never noticed that before. Prior to being given the benefit of a close-up (thank you, Nanna), I thought she was in there playing with the doll’s house. I’m sort of relieved about the drinking. Sitting in the dark, playing with a doll’s
house, seemed disturbing. I’ve also noticed she plucks at her hair more when she’s out of Comfort.

Of course, the big question is: what the hell was Nanna doing with binoculars? Especially these ones. She wouldn’t even have been able to lift them out of the case.

I am looking through the binoculars the day I first see Limo-Lionel hit Maud. It’s confronting, let me tell you. It feels right in my face, like he has hit
me.
She knows it’s coming before I do, so it has obviously happened before. I see her shudder before his hand leaves his side. Shudder, not flinch. A little tremor that flies up her body and into her face like a stiff breeze filling a windsock. Then: bam! Makes a cracking sound. Leaves a welt on her cheek. Then Limo-Lionel shouts:
‘You live in my house, you do things my way!’

I reckon that’s been said to, or yelled at, every kid at some stage. Not always accompanied by a slap. Merrill stopped hitting me the day I overtook him in agility and height.
You live in my house, you do things my way.
There are a couple of problems with this statement. The first being Maud doesn’t have a choice as to where she lives. She’s stuck there, just like I’m stuck here. She has no money, no friends, no choices. Hang on, I might be projecting a bit there. But it’s a safe assumption. If she had somewhere else to go, she wouldn’t be sticking around to be belted by Lionel. She wouldn’t be spiking her Coke and plucking herself raw. So that whole ‘you live in my house thing’, always hollered as if accommodating one’s own offspring is actually a huge favour to them, is a nonsense.