Perfect Skin (30 page)

You must follow the rules on this one exactly, otherwise it won't work. It's really scary how this works out. NO CHEATING!!!!

First, get a pen and paper.

Second, write the numbers one through six, leaving some space in between the numbers.

Next to number one, write any number . . .

Next to number two, write the name of anyone you are really attracted to . . .

Next to three, write down the first colour you can think of . . .

Next to number four, write the name of your first pet . . .

Next to numbers five and six, write down the name of a family member . . .

Remember . . . no cheating . . .

Keep scrolling down . . .

Don't cheat, or you'll be upset . . .

Here's the answers . . .

So why do I really have to do this one, after the trouble I've gone to not to do the last dozen or so?

I open the email from my father, and it's mainly about a particularly good unwooded chardonnay. As if I haven't had more than enough trouble with those lately. He tells me they'll be back tonight.

Out of routine, I check again as I'm going off-line. There's one from Ash that's just come through.

Hey Jon, thanks for including me last night. Had a great time. I think you've known your friends too long for your own good though. Particularly George.

I've been – maybe you noticed this, maybe you didn't – in a pretty bad mood sometimes the last couple of days. If I'm bugging you being around a lot, you have to tell me. I'm trying to meet more people down here, but it's not working out yet. So most of the time it's just me hanging round this big, old, crappy house. If I've pushed into your life you have to let me know.

If I'm getting this wrong, let me know that too.

A

I call her right away but she's still on-line, so I can't get through.

I take another look at the George email, the test
I really have to do.
I get a pen and paper and write the numbers one to six on it, and I keep hitting Redial. Eventually she answers.

You're getting it wrong, I tell her. As someone who spends a lot of his time hanging round a big, old, moderately crappy house, I know it's not the most fun thing to do. And you're not pushing in anywhere.

Good. That's good. I was just
. . .
hmmm, you know.

Well, don't worry. And don't stop bugging me, whatever you do.

Okay.

What are you doing this evening?

I've got lectures till six. I'm just about to go back to uni now.

Well, how about I meet you after that? After your last lecture. I think I've got your timetable on my desktop, so I should be able to find you.

There's a short silence, and then she says,
Yeah, that'd be nice.

Once she's hung up, I read through her email again. I want to be with her now, rather than wait till six. I click it shut, and George's test is sitting open underneath.

So I go to my piece of paper and I put six, Ash, red, Fish (I was very young then, and not good with names – if only Fish had been something other than a fish, the
whole process would look much cleverer), Lily, Jim, and I check the answers.

The number next to number one shows how many times you should be smashed over the head with a baseball bat for thinking that stupid emails like this actually mean anything.

The person named next to number two is someone who will never sleep with you because you're stupid enough to waste your time on something like this.

The colour you picked means nothing. It's a friggin' colour, for Christ's sake.

Number four gives you the name of a dead animal.

Numbers five and six represent family members who are embarrassed to be related to you.

Pass this on to everyone you know, so they can feel like a gobshite too.

Thanks very much, George.

But it's true enough, I suppose. At least in part. Fish didn't end up doing so well. My parents already had a cat before I came along, and Fish's tenure at our place was brief. Hubble was not a nice cat. He was tough and amoral and unfriendly, and could have worn the name ‘Motherfucker' better than any pet I've known since.

Okay, it's answer number two I'm steering clear of. She was on my mind at the time, the obvious choice.
And how could I not be drawn to her in some way? How could she not start to matter in some way?

Fuck. It was like a secret, being kept from me until I wrote it down. I could tell myself I wasn't thinking about her every day, because I was with her for part of every day, so it didn't count. You have to think about people you're with. George – I think about George practically every day.

Mainly, I wonder why he keeps emailing me this shit. But George doesn't cross my mind at night. George isn't part of the turbulence, all this wondering what I'm supposed to feel, entitled to feel, going to feel. George isn't someone whose happiness came to matter to me in three weeks. I am not, whatever happens, in any danger of falling for George at all.

I go back on-line, get to a search engine and find my way to Halliday Tea. I order a kilo, I click the Express box, I give them my Visa card number.

Then Sylvia's at my door.
Jon, you've been quite good all week.

Just checking emails, I say quickly, like someone who's been caught writing notes in class.

Ash's lecture is over when I get there.

Hi,
she says.
We finished at five to. Hi, Bean.
And she offers a finger for Lily's waving hand to clutch.
What am I doing? Am I getting anywhere with all this?
She waves to the huge sandstone buildings around the Great Court.
Do
you have days when you wonder that?

Plenty. Plenty of my days are the same as all my other days and therefore, by definition, get me nowhere. That ‘every day in every way I'm getting better and better' thing? It's not possible. You can't even keep it up till
you're a month old. I've had, like, ten thousand days now, and I must have improved on twenty of them at most. Three or four of them while at this campus.

And none in your first few weeks?

Exactly. Let me show you my favourite thing here, I say to her, as though I'll win the hand by playing an ace. Well, maybe that's creating a bit much of an air of excitement, but come and see it anyway.

I take her across the Great Court, to the Parnell Building, to the display case just inside the door. The pitch experiment set up in the twenties by the university's first physics professor. He mixed the pitch and sealed it until it cooled and was apparently set, then he upturned the funnel and began a 170-year demonstration that pitch isn't solid. That it looks completely hard, but it's still viscous and flowing. In the experiment it drips out of the bottom of the funnel, but years pass between drips.

I got my whole degree between the third last and the second last, I tell her. It often falls on weekends, and no-one's ever seen one fall. For the last year or so, it's been about to go.

So
what was he thinking?
Ash says.
He knew his physics. He must have known his great-grandchildren wouldn't see the end of this experiment.

I hold the Bean up to the glass, and she slaps it with her hands, and makes a noise that says she knows there's something going on. Something in the case that I think's worthy of attention.

So
was that to demonstrate the virtues of patience? Showing me this?

No. I'm not a demonstrator of virtues. It was me showing you something I liked.

Good. I like it. It's sort of like a very slow black lava lamp.

This was about the speed Professor Parnell liked his lava lamps, I hear. The sight of grass growing used to really trouble him.

She laughs at this try-hard joke.
Thanks. Thanks for coming out here. I'm going to sound like such a
. . .
I don't know. I come from a pretty small place, so people know each other there. Automatically. Sometimes too well, but
. . .
Okay, Cairns wasn't like that, but it wasn't like this. And it wasn't far from home, and I got to know people there. I come from a place with a couple of hundred people. Not even Atherton, which has a few thousand. And we didn't have famous hippy craft markets, or anything. It was agricultural. And my weekend tours were pretty simple. The only souvenir we sold was tea. We've been debating for a year now about whether there'd be enough business to make it worth doing our own postcard.
So
all this, down here, is taking more adjusting to than I'd expected. That's what I was trying to say earlier. Of course, now you've shown me the black blob thing, so
. . .

Okay, so it didn't fix much.

No, I'm kidding. I'm glad you showed me the black blob thing. I like it. Enough of my mood. What did you do today?

I'll show you. Let me show you.

I take her to work. I take her to Toowong and I buy a large hand of bananas in Coles, and then I take her to work.

Okay,
she says.
I'm guessing, but I think you played with a monkey today.

No, I had my usual kind of day, and this is how it goes.

I fit a new handpiece to the laser, give her glasses to wear and put mine on too, and I laser a banana.

It's what I started on, I tell her. This is what you get to do before they let you loose on humans.

She asks me how I know how deep to go, how to set the machine, what pattern to make, how I handle skin when it's a person rather than fruit at one ninety-nine a kilo.

I drop dots of laser of different sizes onto the banana and it develops a sheen where I hit it, and then it starts to brown up. I resurface one side till it's so smooth it's almost shiny, and it feels like an old, smooth glove.

Ash takes the handpiece, recoils when she zaps with it the first time. But she keeps going, working at it till she's got control. On her second banana, she gets me to narrow the beam and she writes her name, like the first proud word of a child with a crayon. I try to show off and tell her I'll do eighteen-point Times Roman with my name, but the end result isn't much like it. Our bananas are both more like the work of kids taking a knife to a tree trunk, or scratching into the paint on a station seat.

She takes another banana and writes ‘apple'. I take one and write ‘fish'. She takes one and writes ‘rama'.

I ask her if she means the Hindu god, and she says,
No, Bananarama. It's an eighties concept.

And by now the room is filled with the smell of scorched peel, and the Bean, in her capsule, is hungry.

Can I take them home?
Ash says, collecting the bananas.

Sure. But they mightn't look that way for long.

I was planning to eat them. I mean, I love them, but I was also planning to eat them. I don't get paid till next week.

On Friday morning, Wendy says,
We think Flag's going to make it, Jon. He'll never be quite the Flag he was before, but he'll be okay.

In the afternoon I take Lily to my parents' place, where my father's already racking the new wine in the garage.

It's funny, 
my mother says, as she gets out Lily's third or fourth present while we're drinking tea.
There seemed to be things that were just right for her, everywhere we looked on the whole trip.

It's probably better if you don't talk to him beforehand, I warn Ash, as we go into the West End bookstore for Oscar's performance. He can get a bit short with us before he goes on. We've learned that.

The bookstore is long and narrow, and it's hot and humid in there with a few dozen people fitted in, lounging against shelves, waiting.

George sees us and comes over, wearing black jeans and a black shirt, and looking defiantly not-quite-right.

Very Neil Diamond, I tell him. I like it.

Thanks so much. And good to see you tried so bloody hard.
He turns to Ash.
I suppose you made him
take the tie off after work, to give him that contemporary, casual, evening look.

Yeah, but he didn't undo the knot.

Seriously? You're not still
. . . He laughs. He looks like a man who just robbed the Roy Orbison museum for his clothes, but somehow he's the winner because of my tie habits.

So glad you're here, I tell Ash. How's the poet, Porge?

Tonight? Shocking. Not an easy night. New material, you know? He's been clearing his throat all evening and asking if I've taken his Scruffing Lotion 3½. As if I'm not more than scruffy enough.

George knows as much – or as little – about sophisticated male grooming products as I do. He's had three different minor skin rashes on his face in just the last couple of years, and he's treated each one as if it's nothing worse than an acceptable untidiness. After giving it its three-word Latin name. It's Oscar who gets stressed about it. Oscar with the multi-level trolley of grooming products, who's forever telling George he could make more of himself. Not much more, but more.

Just before start time, George points to the door as Justin sneaks in. Wearing a black beanie and with a jewel – probably a ruby – in the side of his nose. I didn't notice that the other night. I wonder if it's a regular feature, or something he holds back for special occasions. Maybe I never saw him from the left.

Justin,
George says, when he comes over.
I'm not sure you know Jon and Ash. You might have met Jon before, but you probably don't recognise him without one of his ties on.