Love and Other Perishable Items (14 page)

Lizey was the more mischievous of the two of us, had a shorter attention span and was also a keen dancer. I was Easily Led. These factors combined to result in one of our favorite Quiet Time games—the Beethoven Dance. The Beethoven Dance had its genesis when Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was the favorite, although the game was by no means confined to Beethoven alone. The furious pace, earnestness and intensity of the second
movement—and Dad’s heartfelt enjoyment of it—begged for some mild mockery.

The Beethoven Dance was choreographed by Lizey and relied on both movement and facial expression, as noise of any kind was forbidden. In exaggerated fashion, we would march in circles in time with the music, our faces masks of maniacal concentration, turning with a flourish this way and that. As the music increased in pace and intensity, we would break the ranks of the marching circles and break into a gallop on imaginary horses. We’d gallop around the room in a figure eight, keeping in time with the music, of course, and occasionally encouraging the horses with imaginary riding crops.

Lizey made up little extra moves for us to alternate, matching the musical flourishes. When the final notes of the piece sounded, we fell “dead” to the floor, laughing hysterically but, as per QT requirements, silently. At least 80 percent of the Beethoven Dance’s purpose was to raise a response from Dad. He usually feigned unawareness and studied his newspaper/script/
New Yorker
with great concentration and his specs perched low on his nose. But as the finale approached, a hint of a smile could sometimes be seen playing around the edges of his mouth and there would perhaps be a faint shake of his head.

“Girls,”
Mum would say, hiding her own smile in a sip of wine.

Tonight is Thursday and one of the two weeknights that I don’t work. Dad is home for at least the next month. Jess has been in bed since seven. Mum, Dad and I have finished dinner. It’s approaching eight-thirty. I push my chair back and adjourn to the couch. In our little house, the dining room is also the living room and the TV room. And of course the smoking room. Quiet Time
having long since fallen by the wayside, I settle down to watch my favorite hospital drama.

“Amelia,” says my father. “Can’t we have some nice music instead?”

I glare at him. “If I could record the show and watch it later, after the smokers have retired for the evening, I would. But seeing as we don’t have that capability, I have to watch it live.”

Our VCR-DVD player packed it in over a year ago and a new one has not been purchased. He doesn’t have a comeback for that but tells me to keep the sound down low. My back is turned to both of them as the opening credits conclude. I hear the hateful sound of him tapping a cigarette out of the pack, of Mum taking it, then of him tapping out another for himself. I brace for the click and flare of the cigarette lighter. When the acrid smoke wafts over to my nostrils, I sink my mouth and nose below my T-shirt collar. It doesn’t help. I concentrate on hearing the dialogue on TV over Mum and Dad’s voices.

At the first ad break I turn to give Dad one of my best glares. Glaring is the sole form of protest I dare to make about the smoke. As I wrote in my letter to Chris, Dad’s anger is to be feared and me “whining” about the smoking is a surefire way to incur it.

The first time I ever stared down its barrel was seven years ago, when I was eight. I hung NO SMOKING signs all around the house, like I told Chris. Then I pilfered all the cigarettes and lighters in the house (including two cartons of stashed-away duty-free Winstons) and threw them into a Dumpster in the alley.

Come six, Dad was angry. Angry, craving nicotine and in no mood to find his crusading eight-year-old daughter cute. He does shout—but it’s not the volume that is so terrifying. He somehow manages to strike a tone that decimates any opposition, that
saps your ability to fight back. The verbal equivalent of that paralyzing goo those dinosaurs from
Jurassic Park
spit into the faces of their prey. Once you’re immobilized, you know you are powerless, and that sucks. Strange too what makes him angry and what doesn’t.

Last time Lizey was home, she borrowed the family car and backed it into a pillar in a parking garage. Hard. She drove straight home and in faltering tones told Dad what had happened. She was scared shitless about what he would say. He calmly inspected the scratched paintwork, the smashed taillights and the huge dent in the back panels.

Lizey burst into tears and blubbered apologies.

“Now, darling,” he said, with a brief clap on her shoulder. “These things happen. You’ll know to be extra careful in future.”

And that was the end of the matter.

My glare during the commercial break doesn’t manage to catch either Mum’s or Dad’s eye. My father exhales smoke as he talks about the playwright of the play he is directing at the Brooke Street Theatre.

“—he comes to almost every rehearsal and watches me like a hawk. Interrupts the actors if he thinks they’ve stressed the wrong word or failed to stress the word he intended. Doesn’t seem to understand that once the play is written and printed, his job is done and mine begins.”

“Oh dear,” Mum murmurs, nodding slowly as she pulls in another lungful of smoke.

“In the third act, I’m trying to increase the pace as rapidly as possible, which is in large part achieved through the dialogue. If I follow every last comma he’s put in there, it interferes with the pace. So I tell the actors that increasing the pace and the energy
between them takes priority over following the punctuation and italics that this man has obsessively put in. Parts of his script seem to confound what I
think
he’s trying to achieve. Anyway, he’s up in arms about the dialogue being lost. The dialogue is everything! Well, of course it is to him, but I have to make the whole thing work on a stage.”

“Of course you do,” Mum says.

“
Good
dialogue is everything.
Effective
dialogue is everything. Not dialogue
per se
.”

“Quite right.”

“After rehearsal last night I had a couple of drinks with the cast in the foyer. He’s looking even more troubled than usual and he corners me and says, ‘Look, Robert, I can’t help but wonder, what do you really think of the script?’ ‘Well, Peter,’ I replied, ‘it
strains
for a crystallizing moment.’ ”

“Oh,
darling
!” Mum shakes her head, ashing her cigarette.

“Well, what a whiner! I’m being hounded by a twenty-six-year-old with a
lot
to learn about theater when I have a job to do. He’s holding me back; he’s putting the actors off, and we open in two weeks.”

“Yes, but why put him off? Why be incendiary? Especially to a man who is touted to become the finest playwright of his generation.”

“I don’t care what he’s touted as. He needs to let me do my job.”

“Hmmmmm.”

Mum’s disapproval is perfunctory, kind of like Dad’s disapproval of the Beethoven Dance. You can tell she likes that he won’t suck up to anyone. Even though if he had been nicer to the right people over the years, he might have scored a cushy residency
at a Sydney theater instead of having to travel all over the place, living production to production.

“Would you like another cigarette, darling?”

“Yes, thanks.”

That’s
it
. I stand up, punch the OFF button on the television and stalk out of the room. It was a crap episode anyway.

“Looks like Amelia got miffed and flounced out of the room,” I hear Dad smirk to Mum. That’s one of his favorite phrases. I give him plenty of opportunity to use it.

Upstairs in my little bedroom, I sit on my bed, leaning back against the thin plaster wall that separates my room from Jess’s. My clothes and hair smell of smoke. I am still fuming. So to speak. It’s interesting how fuming, or anger in general, is such a physical process, like a wave washing up on a beach and then receding.

There’s wisdom in not pissing certain people off
. It’s plain that neither of my parents really subscribes to that theory. Further to this wisdom, I think, is that cozying up to the right people can get you places that “being yourself” will never get you.

Or being
myself
anyway. Take Coles, for example. The ruler of that particular roost is Bianca. She rules socially and also practically, because she is the most senior service supervisor. There is a core group of minions that surround her—Jeremy Horan, Street Cred Donna and a couple of others. They are all in my year or thereabouts. They all adhere to a certain code of flattery, submission, and smoke-break etiquette involving varying degrees of flirtation.

Being a supervisor, Bianca gets to decide who has to work on the registers and who gets to come off them during quiet times, ostensibly to collect trolleys and put away stray stock, but really to
entertain her. Obviously, she favors her minions in this process and they get to spend a lot of time off the registers. They also get to spend a lot of time at Bianca’s parental manor, putting a large dent in her father’s wine cellar. Chris, Ed and Kathy are also “in,” but they exist
alongside
Bianca, rather than below her, because they are a similar age.

I occupy a certain no-man’s-land at Coles. I’m definitely not in with Bianca and her minions. I could argue that I’m of such pure spirit that I refuse to cozy up. Perhaps closer to the truth is that I just don’t know
how
to. In truth, a part of me longs to be huddled with them out at the back loading dock to the exclusion of everyone else, smoking and laughing and then off to the pub after work. The only reason that I am not a complete reject at work is because of my friendship with Chris, which is, I suspect, completely mystifying for most people. They skate around me with wary smiles and take care not to be openly rude or dismissive, unsure of the amount of social capital I might be hoarding. Chris doesn’t cozy up to anyone, as such. He just turns on his charm to full voltage and people like him because he makes them laugh and feel good. He’s confident. Where did he get that? Can
I
get it?

I’m tired. Tomorrow is Friday. Basketball practice at 7:20 a.m. Double history, double math. Work after school from four till nine. I’ll leave the house at 6:20 a.m. in my sports gear and take the bus(es) to school by 7:20. It’s too cold to walk now that it’s winter.

I pack my tote bag with my school sweater, white shirt, brown school shoes, skirt and tights. Then I pack my work uniform: black pants, black shoes, socks, red scarf and name badge. I battle to close the zipper, then test the bag’s weight. Ouch.

I assemble and pack my school folders and textbooks in my backpack: chunky math book, gargantuan history folder,
The Great War
, calculator, French and English exercise books, French dictionary,
Macbeth
. I struggle to close that zipper too and end up having to take the history folder out. I’ll have to put the schoolbag on my back, the tote bag over one shoulder and carry the history folder in my arms. I must remember to put my bus pass in my track-pants pocket so I don’t have to put everything down and fumble around in my backpack for my wallet when the bus comes.

I put my pj’s on, clean my teeth, wash and moisturize my face. Then I pad into Jess’s room to lean over her sleeping form and listen for her breathing. I reposition Prize Teddy next to her. They have never spent a night apart. I kiss her warm little cheek, inhale the delicious sleeping toddler aroma and pad out again.

Back in my room, I pause in front of the mirror long enough to ascertain that I look the same today as I did yesterday. In bed, I open my bedside table drawer, get out Chris’s letter and run my eyes over his handwriting. I rub my feet together to warm them. Curling up in a ball, I think:
Sun rises, sun sets, and still no Chris
.

The Sisterhood

I don’t know exactly how it happened, but some boys have been turning up where Penny and my group of friends sit at lunchtime. They bring their lunch. They sit and talk to us. Well, not to
me
, but to most of the others and always to Penny. The boys are all in our year. None of them are the rugby players I have mentioned before. My group would never qualify for a visit from them. I catch a few of their names. Daniel, Leonard, Sam, James. They are headed by a Scott that I don’t like. I’ve seen him doing the rounds of other groups of girls this year. I reckon he fancies himself a bit of a player, something special for the ladies. Some of the boys need a hair wash, some deodorant and some Clearasil. They try very hard to appear relaxed. There is a lot of unconvincing laughter. Some of them nod to Penny as if they know her. She gives a flicker of recognition back.

“How do you know them?” I asked her in low tones the first day they came over.

“They catch my bus,” she said, sitting straight-backed and unwrapping the sandwiches packed by her father.

Scott sits down on the other side of her and they talk for most of the lunch break.

I’m not quite sure how to conduct myself when Penny is otherwise occupied. I’m friends with the other girls in our group, but it’s strange not to be part of my usual double act. Disconcerting. I talk to Eleni and Nicola—who are another tight twosome within the larger group—but my mind is not really on the conversation. By the end of the lunch period, there is a spark of anger in my chest that I try to push away.

I have bigger fish to fry
, I tell myself.

When I arrive at work that afternoon, Chris is already on his register. Kathy is hovering near him, but I can see that the Kathy virus is in remission today, and hopefully for good.

I open my locker in the staff room to put away my backpack and tote bag. Inside is a folded-up piece of yellow paper that turns out to be several pages covered with Chris’s blue script. I smile and stand still except for my thumb, which moves back and forth across the paper. I imagine holding Chris’s hand—with fingers interlocking, not how your mother used to hold your hand—and moving my thumb across the join between his thumb and forefinger.