Perfect Skin (6 page)

You're kidding,
she says, and laughs, clearly not sure if I'm kidding.

Well, one stopped. The other just hung around at the bus stop a bit longer than usual. But I waved him away. I wasn't going to stand for shit like that.

At work, the Window Weasel says:

Hey Bud! We're having fun aren't we?? So go click YES!! I LOVE MY WEASEL!! and you can register to use Window Weasel for life for only $30! Click LATER to register later.

I click LATER, send the weasel off and decide I don't like much of the false bonhomie people program into
automated messages. The weasel is a minor irritant. It is not my ‘bud'.

There's another email from Katie.

Re coffee – another weak spot for the wok, by the way (and if you make it in a wok at your place, I don't want to know) – my best breaks tend to be middle of the day, so how about lunch? Which I assume is at least semi-regular for you, too. So suggest a day, if feasible.

And Monday would be feasible, since I start work after lunch on Mondays, so I suggest it.

Today at lunchtime I go to Coles again. I've got nappies to buy. And, yes, disposables, even though I have cloth nappies at home. I'm very over them now. My baby book tells me to expect four thousand nappy changes before the Bean can get better organised sphincter-wise, and I have a serious attraction to convenience. No, a need for it. We've thought it through –
 
the Bean and me – and we choose disposables.

I know all about the landfill issue. I know that I'm responsible for a couple of cubic kilometres of it, and I know that the plastic parts of the Bean's disposables might outlast us both by thousands of years, but that's the way it is. Build on it.

I imagine that I'm not the only parent in town who's made this choice. And that in the outer suburbs, new housing developments are being built on quietly settling piles of grungy nappies, plus non-biodegradable packing material, betamax VCRs, lava lamps (from both times they were in), toasters that were fine until the catch stopped staying down, fungoid futons, coffee makers
that seized up because no-one ever cleaned them.

I can imagine aliens landing quietly by night, core sampling this in someone's backyard and leaving, analysing what they've got and wondering if it's a treasure trove or a very sad fallen civilisation (stricken by bad appliances and worse bowel control). And I'm thinking this while I'm gazing at the nappy shelves, imagining the aliens deciding that our planet sucks, and I'm quietly singing the Lemonheads' ‘It's a Shame About Ray'. Great song, but I've really got to lift my game.

I pick up a couple of thirty-six packs, and go to meet the Bean at childcare.

On Saturday I take the Bean down to the uni lakes. I want her to see the ducks, but when we get there she's less excited than I'd hoped. I'm not sure that she's up to wildlife yet.

There is one thing I like about that, though. An upside to her not giving a shit about the ducks. It shows that she can tell me apart from them. She looks at the ducks with a minor version of her straining-to-poo face, and she looks at me as though I'm one of the good guys. The reality-checking device, the one that'll see her right. An entity she can trust. Of course, I'm not unique in that. I think she trusts Elvis, too, and while I'm tossing bread to the ducks he's going insane about a medium-sized stick.

Soon he's flopped beside us, panting, since it's simply too hot to keep up any reasonable level of stick madness today. He looks at me with his big eyes, checks all's well.

I think you've got them under control, buddy, I tell him.

Then I talk more about the ducks, the trees, the buildings, as I hold the Bean in a standing position and use one of her hands to point. One day the content will count for something, and there's plenty I'll be able to tell her, all kinds of things to explain that she doesn't understand yet.
And about much more than scenery, when the time is right. But for the moment she's just propped up there, bow-legged and pale and passively pointing. The Bean and her silly flowery hat and her perfect skin. Her chubbed-up pale limbs, yet to be shaped by any serious function. Soft all over, other than when she head butts. The Bean and that excellent musty baby smell.

I try to mop up some drool and she puts my hand in her mouth and bites. There's something tiny and sharp in there, and when she lets me look I can see the white point of a tooth coming through a raised, red bud of gum. I get a little excited, she thinks I'm an idiot, Elvis jumps up and comes back with a stick.

I've brought the camera with me, so I sit her down and try to line up something that will capture the moment of tooth discovery. Even though I know it'll probably end up as nothing more than a picture of a baby with spit down her front. But I guess you can never have too many of those.

Smile. Smile, I say, and earn a look of great curiosity. You have to smile now, I urge her, but she reverts to the straining-to-poo face.

No, smile. Just a quick smile first. Please. What can I do to make you smile? Okay, there's three bits of string and they go into a bar . . .

I lift up her top, blow a big raspberry on her front and get a whack on the face and a gurgly laugh. I get the shot – the gurgly laugh, the hand reaching out for a second whack, a big drool-string from the lower lip to the left shoulder.

Nothing like physical comedy, is there? I say to her, and pull her hat over her eyes.

She waves both arms, rolls backwards like a scuba diver leaving a boat. She's not brilliant at the sitting yet, and visual input clearly means more to her than I'd realised. I'm near the end of the roll of film, so I take a few more photos to finish it off. I've taken far more photos of her over the last few months than I would have expected.

There seems to be much more to photograph now than there was, but perhaps I'm also better at noticing it, more used to watching her. She seems to turn older almost every day. She amazes me sometimes. Not so long ago she was a pair of orifices with an unsophisticated mulching system in between, now she knows a thing or two about the world. Not much, but a thing or two, and more all the time. The Bean takes things in, sizes them up. I can tell. And I think she's very clever doing that. Dote, dote. I think there's part of me that genuinely believes I'm a co-inventor of the smart beautiful baby.

I'm looking forward to things with her. Stories, making her laugh with words, telling her about things that she might never get to see. Typewriters, for instance. She may never see a working typewriter. That struck me yesterday, as I shut my computer down for the weekend. Not so long ago it would have been unbelievable.

I want to tell her about typewriters and how, with them and other old machines, you could actually see how they worked. How you would push down on a key and it would make a tiny hammer hit a piece of ribbon with ink in it, and hit the ink off the ribbon and onto the page. And I can tell her about paper money, stamps you had to lick, the time before bar codes. It sounds like I went to school with Dickens. It sounds as though I'm
going to bore the shit out of my daughter. When has a child ever thanked a parent for a long dissertation on the artifacts of the industrial age? Bad luck. That's how it's going to be. She's not just going to be bought a Nintendo and left in a corner.

And I can tell her about laser surgery, for that matter. By then it'll be far less special. I can tell her that laser surgery and the Internet and CD players and a lot of other things weren't always around. That I know how things were before them and when they were new, before they were commonplace and merged with the background. I knew them when they were part of current affairs, before they were history, part of the set of things already in the world. And history seems weighted somehow differently to the events of your own time. It's as though you're given it, and the things you store as your own memory are put somewhere else.

I was too young to get Watergate at all, so I inherited it. I watched the Clinton impeachment day-to-day and it unravelled as a current event. They're both impeachments of American presidents, but in my head they couldn't be more different. I received the Nixon story afterwards, end first. I heard Clinton's from the beginning, from the first denials.

The death of Marilyn Monroe was world history. As a sixties child, one of the first things you got to know about Marilyn Monroe was that she was dead. So that affected every frame of her that you ever viewed. Before Kurt Cobain died, I owned two Nirvana albums. I think I can remember the first time I heard ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit', the street I was driving on, not far from here. Even though I probably can't, I think I can.

I wonder when Lily will speak. Not for ages yet, but I still wonder. My first words were spoken to dogs, perhaps since dog affirmations get so much repetition. Maybe she'll be the same. Maybe her first recognisable sound will be
Elvis.
Maybe her first sentence will be,
Go away and leave me with my Nintendo,
some day when I barge into her room to tell her about the world, and some useless ancient notion that's offering me a moment's fascination.

And I wonder where Ash is today, if she's around. We're near her house. What's she doing on her first weekend in Brisbane? I'd like to think – not that it's any of my business – that she's got friends here, even if she's new and I already know she's got no-one to run with in the mornings. A big, lumbering, sedentary boyfriend even, or one who sleeps in and gets athletic later. She looks very fit, so my guess is that's the kind of guy she'd be with. Maybe they even transferred here together.

But enough mindless speculation. I'm in need of adult conversation, and we're due soon at Wendy and Steve's. A swim and a barbecue. Wendy and Steve mastered suburban summer weekend rituals a while back. After lunch the Bean can sleep there, and as long as I don't run any theories about history by them, or reach a point where I'm unable to suppress my urge to explain the typewriter, everything should be fine.

We can't run together, I tell Ash on Monday morning. You've no idea what it'll do to my self-esteem.

I'll be gentle with you,
she says.
Promise.

We run, she chats. And that alone is enough to tell me there's only disgrace for me out here. She chats, and I can't find a fraction of a second when I'd fit a word in around the mechanics of breathing.

And I'm wondering, did we organise this? Did we arrange this last week, or is it just happening? Is it a simple overlap of habits? Of her habits with mine, technically, since I've been running here for months now.

I know now why I run by myself. Why I don't buy special clothes for it. Why I boast about my running only to the morbidly sedentary and the genuinely elderly and people with chronic lower-limb ailments. I'm crap at it. Sure, I'm the fittest I've ever been in my life, but I'm coming off a very low base.

And I need to spit. Runners spit. I spit all the time when I'm running. It's okay to spit, isn't it? But suddenly, probably since I've never run with someone before, this seems as much like a social event as it does like running. Ash helps that along by talking, of course. Long, effortless unpunctuated sentences of talk, damn
her. Pointing things out along my running track and talking about them – the City Cat ferry, the huge river-bank houses at West End. This is the kind of activity I usually conduct with someone who's six months old, but I get to be the talker then. And there's no simultaneous running going on.

So, with the talking, it seems wrong to spit, as though it could kill the mood or something. Not that there should be a mood. Suddenly, though, it would feel strange to spit. No matter how much I need to. No matter how much saliva has built up in my mouth. No matter that I'd normally be at least six spits into my run by now, and there's no way I can swallow it all. But she's made a mood out of all this chat, and spitting now would be like sitting under the umbrella of a street-side coffee shop and hoicking one over my shoulder.

She turns to her right at the end of a sentence. Spits. Neatly, onto the base of a palm tree. She really is a runner.

And I'm in the clear. I turn to my left. I spit. Or, rather, I let loose a huge gob of stringy saliva that loops out of my mouth, travels a very short distance, becomes aware of its own vast mass and flops onto my shoulder. And manages to be stringy enough to stay connected to my mouth.

Perhaps I'm teething, I think, as the run stops for a laugh break on the part of the more efficient runner. If I was thirty-four years younger, I'd be looking pretty cute right now. Perhaps a photo would be nice.

Ash stands leaning forward, with her hands on her thighs, laughing so much that most of her shakes. She looks around at my shoulder, squawks again, looks away. The spit gob clings on.

Damn seagulls, I say, since it's a moment long past saving.

I should mail Saturday's photos off for cheap processing, but I want to see them now, so I go to Kmart as soon as I get to Toowong. Somehow even the hour wait for one-hour photoprocessing seems like a major imposition.

Since I have no affinity with shopping, I figure I might as well drop in on work to check my emails. And the Window Weasel says:

Yo! Sleepy! People pay for this, you know. So go click YES!! I LOVE MY WEASEL!! and you can register to use Window Weasel for life for only $30! Click LATER to register later.

Okay, I don't like the tone, I don't even know what it is that the people are paying for and, to be honest, I'm pretty sure I hate being called Sleepy. No way do I LOVE MY WEASEL.

And what an email harvest I get. There's an update from a laser surgery web site, but when I go there it's not much more than an ad for someone's latest attempt at the laser-that-does-every thing. Which is actually just a new version of the laser that does a couple of things and costs a lot.