Perfect Skin (7 page)

Then there are two from my father. One headed ‘Could be time to buy BHP?', and the other ‘NEW this week at Jim's Fractal Gallery!!!' My father, whose day-to-day life almost never calls for the exclamation mark, has almost as much judgement as George out in the parallel cyber universe.

George, who has today sent me a joke forward about the capacity of dogs to lick their own genitals, and one of those stupid games where you write down the numbers one to six and put various names next to them, and this somehow predicts your future. I did one of them once, I still haven't slept with my mother, and I really don't expect that to change.

No, email's essential,
George said, when we decided to computerise properly. And he demonstrates it almost every day, doesn't he?

I go back to Kmart, I beg them to reduce the one-hour wait to forty minutes, but the woman tells me the process is automated.

Once the spitting episode was over, the run went a little better. We found a pace I could maintain and that might have constituted some form of exercise for Ash. And from then on I spat early and decisively, and wore none of it.

You've got a baby seat in the car,
she said as she did a hamstring stretch on my bumper.
Does that mean you've got a baby?

And I told her, No, I'm just prepared for anything. I've got snow shoes in the boot. And that sounded dumb, so I said, Maybe I've got a baby, as though there might be some intrigue about the issue.

Could have been that previous owner,
she said, and looked down at the number plate.
MLB. But people don't usually leave baby seats behind, I guess.

And what an attractive baby she is, too, I'm thinking in Kmart as I look through the photos. What a thoughtful face, what a laugh, and could that perhaps be just a hint of tooth?

Katie's already in the cafe when I get there. She's reading a newspaper, but I can see her hair over the top of it, all foofed up and kept there with a limp, hot-pink bow.

Hey there, I say, when I get close enough to see her face.

And she says, Hi, as though she's been taken slightly by surprise. And she blushes – or does something that looks a lot like blushing – and tries to fold the newspaper in a way it isn't meant to go.
I've ordered already. It seemed like that kind of place.

It is that kind of place.

So I put my order in and sit down opposite her. I start talking – rattling on in the way I would at the keyboard – and Katie fumbles a few replies. She's still swamped by newspaper, probably wishing she'd gone tabloid instead of broadsheet.

Damn thing,
she mutters, giving up and setting it on an empty chair, leaving it like a half-made pirate hat.

My mother used to fold it that way for fire starters, I tell her.

What?

Old newspaper. She used it to start fires.

Pause. It occurs to me that I might be making my mother look like a pyromaniac.

In the fireplace.

Oh. We never had a fireplace.

Well, most people don't, do they?

Pause. Okay, now I guess I've gone for something rhetorical. Not a good choice. This isn't easy.

It's to do with coming from England, I tell her, pushing on. When we came out here my parents looked around for ages for a house with a fireplace. You'd
think that, after the first couple of dozen didn't have one, they'd have worked it out.

Yeah.

They don't have one now though. They're in a flat.

She nods. There's still no eye contact. I start to wonder if she's had a bad experience with a fireplace, or if there's something hanging out my nose, then I realise it's probably me who hasn't worked it out. We actually don't know each other very well. Not in a face-to-face way, and I'd forgotten that. Face-to-face we only know how to say ‘Hi' over coloured cake at kids' birthdays, and not much more. I'm going in with the mild detached boldness of text, Katie's hanging back, missing the modesty-screen of email now that she can see the person she's talking to.

And, if the talk troubles her, she seems even more tense in the pauses when no-one talks, as though they're abnormal, and that only keeps me trying to fill them.

I tell her about my tedious weekend, and ask about hers. It wasn't bad, apparently. And that's that out of the way.

I tell her about running with someone this morning and spitting all over myself, and she's supposed to laugh but instead she says – using a therapeutic low tone and sudden serious eye contact –
But how are you going, really? With everything? How are you going?

Fine. I'm going fine, I tell her. The Bean gives me plenty to do, though. Want to see some photos?

And, since she's already Auntie Katie twice over, this puts us into territory where she's altogether more comfortable. She knows baby photos, she knows the noises to make, she knows just when to make them.

Look at that stare, I tell her, glad that the photos have saved the conversation. Don't you think that suggests high intelligence?

I'm sure it does. I wonder what she's thinking about. Can you remember anything of what you thought about at that age?
She flicks through a couple more.
I can't remember anything till I was three. At least three. Can you remember when you looked like that?
She holds the photo up – Lily, the straining-to-poo face, the drool on the shoulder.

Well, yeah. About seven-thirty this morning, but I don't think I was thinking the same things.

I can't believe you spat on yourself,
she says, and shakes her head.
That is just so
. . .
unco. Did the guy you were running with notice?

It was a lot of spit. An unmissable amount of spit. I tried to put it down to a seagull, but that was never going to work.

She laughs, and says,
Hey, since we're sharing, how about this?
She rummages around in her bag and pulls out a photo of a very fluffy cat.
Here's Flag.

Which is an interesting name for a cat. Why Flag?

I just liked the sound of it, really.

You're aware that it's a noun, though? That out in the real world it's got some kind of meaning attached?

She goes red again, and says,
Do you have any pets, or anything?

Yeah. A dog. Called Elvis, actually. Which, out in the real world means big fat dead megastar often sighted in Seven Elevens.

She nods, stays red.

And my daughter was named after a flower, but I
seem to have got into the habit of referring to her as a legume. So I can't be too picky about nouns, can I?

I guess not.

She puts the photo back in her bag, nods again, looks at the door, seems to be enduring something uncomfortable. This time I hold off, figuring I've used words as Spakfilla for pauses more than enough in this conversation.

Wendy says things are a bit quiet this month for you. At work. Or did I say that already?

She pulls a tissue out of her bag, wrenches it slowly apart under the table.

Mid-afternoon I have a no-show. George passes my open door with coffee while I'm checking some lab results.

Hey,
he says, coming back and standing in the doorway.
How was the date?

Date? There was no date.

People say you've been lunching with,
he looks around, checks the corridor,
chicks with eighties hair.

I should never have said that. I should never have said eighties hair.

And you think if you hadn't no-one would have noticed?

Oh, it's all so
Flashdance.

So how was the date? You did go, didn't you? Remember, no-one leaves baby in the corner.

What?

It's a
Flashdance
quote.

Shit you're good with that stuff.

Hey, there were generations that quoted Shakespeare. I'm part of a long tradition.

And regardless of that, it wasn't a date.

Okay, but if it's not a date, why would Wendy mention it to me?

Why wouldn't she? It wasn't a secret. Did she mention it in any particular way?

Should she have?

She might have. I think you've got this one wrong, Porge. If Katie said anything to Wendy afterwards she would just have been calling to tell her she works with a fuckwit.

Can't see why she'd bother to do that. Wendy's known you for years.

It wasn't the best lunch.

What do you mean?

I think Katie doesn't get out much. I talked a lot. I think it's having a baby. It makes you disinhibited. I talked a lot, and she didn't. So I talked more. I told her about fireplaces. I told her about spitting on myself today. I told her I named my child after a legume. Those things would not have happened had it been either a reasonable social occasion or a date. I think we both know that.

I think we do,
he says, and laughs.
Spat on yourself, hey? You sure know how to get them horny.

It's a long story. And entirely without horn. And lunch was just lunch. You know lunch? I have lunch with you sometimes. And I think a lot of you, but it's no date. I have lunch with people. It's something I do.

No it's not.

Look, you tell me all the time, everyone tells me all the time. Get out and do things. Even if it's only lunch with people. Katie actually does something more
dynamic than the rest of you, we agree on a time and place and suddenly it's a date. You weren't there. It was no date. It was a casual suggestion made in an email. Lunch, coffee, casual. The suggestion, anyway. It was just a sort of coffee-friend thing to do.

Is that a category? Coffee friend?

Of course it's a category. And it's a nice, supportive, non-date category. And the fact that she went from coffee – which was the original suggestion – to lunch, just like that, actually shows how much of a big deal it isn't. I've been on dates, you know. In the eighties, back when Katie got the hair. I've been on dates, and they weren't like today.

No, this is the thing. You've been out of the loop a while. My guess is you were on a mid-thirties date. It doesn't work the same.

No, no. No date. We showed each other photos. Bean photos, cat photos. What does that sound like to you?

Oh, north African fruit, grows on a palm, dark brown, sticky, sweet. No idea what it sounds like to me. It's a mid-thirties date.

Oh no. If that's a date this entire demographic sucks. If that's what happens to you on dates, stick to the goodwill of your own two hands. George, that can't be a date. We can't be so bloody old that we accept that that's a date. What about even a minor undercurrent of seething sexual tension?

Hold out for it, Jon Boy. I want you in there batting for us. For the guys who hold out for dates the way they used to be when we were young. Or even partly young. That moment of date competence that hung there for a second or two between adolescent dysfunction and the mid-thirties photo-swap lunch.

But I don't even want that either. And I'm pretty sure I never had the moment of competence. Look, I'm not in the market for dates. I'm so not in the market for dates that I don't know how it'd be if I was. If I was, I wouldn't want the photo-swap date because it's just not a date, and I wouldn't want the eighties date, either. I do
not
have fond memories of eighties dates, even beyond the first half of the decade when I didn't get any. Eighties dates – and maybe this was just me – seemed to be about hanging around uninteresting people long enough to have sex with them a few times. They didn't necessarily know that, of course, and I might have pissed one or two of them off. So I'm hoping that's not the competence you've got in mind. It doesn't sound great now.

Sylvia appears next to George, holding files.

You both have dates,
she says.
And quite loud voices. Nigel's got everything ready to go, Jon. And I don't know if you're interested in my opinion, but I think you're probably a nicer man than you used to be. So I'm sure it'll be all right in the end.

At least George waits till he's back in his room to laugh.

His mid-thirties date concept preoccupies me most of the rest of the afternoon. It shouldn't, of course. I should be doing much more to take into account where these opinions are coming from.

I remember George had a crush on a girl at uni for months because she used an asterisk when she wanted to add something to the bottom of her lecture notes, but a cross of Lorraine if she wanted to add something else. The asterisk was an obvious choice, but the cross of Lorraine spoke to George. I remember him telling me,
Jon Boy, she uses a cross of Lorraine to mark something in notes. Like, how smart is that?

Fortunately, this was one of those rare crushes that you have the luxury of bringing to a close yourself. After a couple of months of sitting nearby hoping to be noticed, and a snatched second here and there of tense casual conversation, he actually dealt with it head on and asked her how she came to be using the cross of Lorraine in notes. She had no idea what he was talking about. So he pointed to one, and she said,
Oh, that. I guess I got it from somewhere.
And then he could get over her.

And in the end he was glad he'd never quite got round to showing her his own system (cross of Jerusalem, papal cross, cross of Saint Catherine). But George always footnoted far too much for his own good.

After work, we swim. Nigel's a regular, and George decided he should get into some kind of exercise, so he told Nigel we'd join him. How it became a ‘we' issue I'm not sure, but my parents said they'd be happy to have Lily a bit longer this afternoon, so it looks as though I'm in.

Nigel takes his shirt off to reveal a swimmer's kind of body, and one of those mystical, new-age tatts on his arm. George takes his shirt off, too, but it's not the same. The swimmer's body is lost somewhere deep inside George. Plus, he's a pretty hairy guy. For George, skin is just the biological equivalent of underlay, and he could hide a lot of tatts in there beneath all that fuzz. In fact, there was a time when he won a hairy-chest competition without having to show the judges anything more than his back.