Love and Other Perishable Items (23 page)

She and I hugged briefly.

“Easy does it, Ripley,” she said softly in my ear.

Next she hugged Dad, and then Mum. She and Mum had tears in their eyes.

“Right,” she muttered, fingering the car keys. “Bye.”

She got into the old white Commodore, started the engine and switched on the lights.

We raised our arms in salute as she pulled out from the curb.

Later—5 p.m.

Oh, all right. Here’s why I feel sheepish in the wake of the party last night.

It was, as always, a pleasure to attend Bianca’s harborside mansion. Ed and I caught buses over together.

“What about Alana?” I said to him as we jumped off at Rose Bay. Alana is seriously chasing Ed. He shrugged.

We walked in silence. I’ve wondered lately whether Ed might be gay. I had a sudden rush of courage and faith in our friendship.

“Ed, are you gay?”

He turned to look at me out of his reddened eyes and shook his head.

“What about Donna?” he asked me pointedly.

“Donna!”

“Donna,” he said calmly. “She’s into you; you must know she’s into you.”

“I’m not into
her
,” I said. “I’m lonely and I’m horny, but I’m just not that into her.”

“She’s an attractive girl.”

“But is she? Or is it just a lot of jewelry, piercings and attitude?”

Ed shrugged again.

“Your call,” he said.

We walked for a while in silence.

“Amelia’s not coming tonight, is she?” he said, sly as a swagman’s kelpie.

“Amelia? Nah. Bianca wouldn’t have invited her.”

“She might’ve if you’d said something.”

“I doubt it. She suspects, quite rightly, that the Youngster knows too much.”

“Too much about what?”

“About Bianca. That she’s a vacuous, parentally funded phony boho who enjoys manipulating youngsters to fuel her own ego.”

Ed laughed.

“That’s our hostess you’re talking about.”

“I know. I feel terrible.”

“Are
you
into Amelia?” Ed asked, with the same trying-to-sound-calm tone that I’d used when I asked him if he was gay.

I laughed. “Am
I
into her?”

“Are you?”

“She’s very young.”

“Answer the question.”

I struggled. I flailed.

“Yes. No! Kind of. In
theory
, mind.”

“Righto.”

We turned onto Bianca’s street.

Bianca had set Alana and Jeremy to work making cocktails with a huge, gleaming blender. She circled, carrying a large jug of whatever batch they had just made.

I wasted no time getting into a well-lubricated comfort zone. I even had a half-civilized chat with Kathy. She was looking fetching in one of those crossover top things that accentuated her neat collarbone and those perfect breasts that I will never get my hands on.

“How’s your practicum going?” I asked.

“Oh, all right. Actually, this is my fourth week, so it’s wearing pretty thin,” she laughed. “But, you know, all right.”

Crikey
, I thought.
She can’t
wait
to find some financially solvent backer to marry so she doesn’t have to work
. I reckon she only chose primary school teaching because it’s non-threatening, even attractive, to the banker types who want a pretty, low-maintenance wife to run the house, raise the children and please—but not
titillate
—the business associates. Primary school teaching. A
suitable
occupation for a young lady. Just until the babies come, of course. Then it will be all designer strollers, Peter Pan kindergarten, mothers’ group in a well-heeled part of town and four-wheel drives for the bumpy road to and from the beach.

“Are you seeing anyone?” she asked sweetly, draining her glass of passion fruit
caipiroska
.

“Little old me?” I replied, without embarrassment. “No. No, I’m not. You?”

“Actually, yeah. I just started seeing a guy from uni. James Lyon. Do you know him?”

James Lyon, James Lyon. Yes, vaguely. He’s one of her library-lawn gang. I’ve met him at the uni bar a few times. He’s in his last year studying commerce. Already has a paid internship at a big accounting firm. Very, very tall and alpha-race-looking. He could well be the one! Good luck to ’em. Of course, what really I mean is fuck them both. But I finally feel I am “on the level” with Kathy—with who she is and what she wants. And where a guy like me fits into her worldview, which is nowhere. I could have provided strawberries, poetry and orgasms, but James, on the other hand, will provide a house in Vaucluse and a six-figure salary.

I can see clearly now. Amelia would be proud.

Anyways, the evening progressed and I found myself in the pool room, playing doubles with Ed, Donna and Bianca. We all drank from large glasses of something lethal and red. Ed and I won the first game by one ball. The second game came down to the eight ball and turned into twenty minutes of frustrating stalemate, broken when Ed sank the white after the black. Ed was disgusted with himself and went off to smoke a joint on the balcony. Bianca excused herself to go and check on the alcohol supply, closing the door behind her. Which left me looking at Donna in the dim light of the custom-made lamp hanging over the pool table. She leaned against the table’s wooden edge about a yard away from me, with her arms crossed and her pool cue between her thighs.

“Want to take me on?” she said smoothly.

“Sure.”

It was somehow understood that I would ferret the balls out from underneath the table and pack them in the triangle while she sat down on the window seat to roll a cigarette.

“You want to break?” I asked her.

“You break,” she said, lighting the cigarette with the huge flame from her trademark Zippo.

You know
, I thought as she blew a large plume of smoke and flicked the Zippo shut,
I don’t much care for smoke
.

“Where’d you get that?” I pointed to the Zippo.

“America. When I was visiting my mother a couple of years back.”

I broke, and sank nothing. Donna sank two stripes with powerful shots. Then she tried a softer shot and missed. She wore several chunky pendants around her neck, all on long pieces of black cord or leather, with the metallic features coming to rest at nipple latitude. Before she bent over to take a shot, she’d pull the pendants around to hang behind her shoulder so they wouldn’t spill onto the table.

When I stepped up to survey my next move, Donna sat again at the window seat and produced a small and beat-up looking tobacco tin from her pocket. She extracted from it a rectangular hand mirror, a tiny plastic bag of speed and a key card.

“Want a line?”

“Sure.”

With a veteran’s dexterity she emptied a quantity of the brownish-white crystals onto the mirror and began to chop at them with the key card’s edge. She expertly separated them into two neat lines.

I sank two solids while she pulled a ten-dollar bill from the tin and rolled it up tightly.

“You’re up,” she said. She held the mirror for me in her palm—at about pendant (and hence nipple) height—while I bent down and inhaled one of the lines through the ten-dollar note.

“Ah,
fuck
,” I couldn’t help but whimper as the harsh chemical
burned through the back of my nasal passages. I sniffed several times.

“Stings like a bastard, huh?” said Donna. She pointed at the other line. “That’s for you too.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll cut more.”

I tested for my clearest nostril and bent my head again.

I chalked my cue and took two more shots while she cut a couple more lines and hoovered them up herself.

“Your shot,” I said.

She picked up her cue and surveyed the table before bending over to take a shot a few inches from where I was standing. I could see a short expanse of pale skin between the waistband of her jeans and the black and white stripes of her top. She missed.

“Damn,” she muttered.

I felt invincible as I strode around to the other side of the table. I sank the rest of the solids in quick succession and then, with a satisfying thwack, the eight ball.

“All over, Red Rover,” I said suavely, draining the rest of my glass and smiling.

“Sure is.” She dumped her cue on the expensive-looking green-felt tabletop. Then she walked around to the other side of the table and did the same to mine.

“That was good … um.” I motioned to my nostrils. “Good.”

“Yeah, it’s not bad.”

“I’ll give you some money.”

She’s standing rather close
, I remember thinking.

Then she grabbed hold of my front jeans pockets, pulled my pelvis in to lock with hers and kissed me with openmouthed, smoke-flavored fervor.

My poor sex-starved body kissed back immediately and responded particularly well to the pressure of her pelvis. Like I’ve often said, Donna seems sixteen going on thirty-five, which she well and truly confirmed last night. Her hands were all over my crotch in a matter of seconds, rubbing and squeezing.

Chris
, I thought weakly somewhere off in the distance,
come on man, don’t have sex with the sixteen-year-old. You can stop this now
.

But then she took hold of my hands and put them inside her top. And then there was no stopping. Once a man gets his hands on a couple of breasts, he’s not going to stop himself—at least I wasn’t about to. Especially if he’s full of amphetamine energy. But when she started undoing the buttons on my fly, I caught her hand.

“What if someone comes?” I whispered.

“That’s the whole idea, Chris,” she said in a normal speaking voice.

“No,” I said, gesturing to the door. “Comes through the
door
.”

“They won’t,” she said.

In retrospect, I think she and Bianca must have planned the whole thing and Bianca was guarding the door. Donna undid the rest of my buttons with unnerving precision and adjusted my boxer shorts until I sprang out of them. I kissed her again before she lowered herself onto her knees on the expensive creamy carpet. I gripped the edges of the pool table and looked out over the harbor at the bridge lights.

And that’s how Donna came to be performing unmentionable acts on me, and then I on her, in the pool room of the harborside mansion until the small hours of the morning.

And now I suspect I might be in a bit of a pickle.

Zoe’s here for dinner. I’d better wrap up.

I’m so not hungry.

June 12

I’m pretty sure I don’t want to go out with Donna. I’m due at work this afternoon, as is she, so I figure I’d better have a plan of action. Maybe I could talk to her during her dinner break, if I can take mine at the same time. There’s another thing: dis one of Bianca’s chums and you dis Bianca. I wonder if there will be ramifications. But I’m not afraid of Bianca and she knows it. It does mean, however, that I can’t just not speak to Donna ever again the way I did with She’s-big-she’s-blond Georgia. It’ll have to be handled in some way. I’ll report back tonight.

11 p.m.

Turns out I didn’t need to worry. Perhaps young Donna can sense a “We need to talk” coming from miles away and is particularly good at saving face. Or perhaps I’d wrongly assumed that because she’s a youngster, she’d go all gooey and want to walk around holding my hand after Saturday night. Either way, she played it extremely cool.

At the start of the shift she nodded at me as if nothing had happened. I took my dinner break at about eight when I noticed she was taking hers. I found her having a smoke alone outside the staff exit, leaning on the wall. Some people use their dinner breaks to have something to eat. Not Donna.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” I said. “How’s it going?”

“Peachy. You?”

“Yeah, I’m good.”

She nodded, tilting her head back and blowing smoke.

“Um, Donna,” I said. “About Saturday night—”

“Let’s not do that,” she said abruptly and without eye contact.

“What?”

“Let’s not do ‘about Saturday night.’ Okay?” She threw her cigarette on the cement and ground it out under her black boot. “See you back in there,” she said, and disappeared through the door.

And that was that. What a load off. I picked up her cigarette butt and put it in the bin before going back inside. Amelia’s register was closed. I found her in the kitchenette with a cup of tea and a half-eaten granola bar in front of her.

“Where’ve you been?” she asked, and pushed out the chair opposite with her foot. “Do you know that granola bars are apparently worse for you than chocolate bars? We’ve been
had
, Chris,
had
by the Quaker Oats man. Turns out he’s even dodgier than your uncle Jeff.”

I sat there until we heard Bianca’s voice over the PA system: “Amelia Hayes and Chris Harvey, please return to your registers.” She only uses surnames when she’s pissed off.

June 17

The Search for the Perfect Woman is not turning out the way I’d imagined. I’m catching myself having to curb drunken impulses to call Amelia from the pub at three in the morning. I wrote a letter to her from a boring lecture the other day. I want to tell her stuff. I look forward to hearing whatever she’s got to say. I like helping her with her schoolwork. Her funny little thought processes provide hours of entertainment. There’s … affection there. I’d rather her company after work than going to the pub
with the others. It’s the beer I go to the pub for and the silent, routine camaraderie of being around Ed. I don’t go to hang out with Bianca et al.

And people are talking. These things don’t go unnoticed. There are snickers and raised eyebrows that prompt me to analyze whether there’s a sexual component to how I … well,
conceptualize
Amelia. But that’s a fraught issue with a youngster, and my analysis never seems to progress.

I’m sick of my life and I’m sure it’s getting sick of me. A big change is in order. Let’s throw a few ideas on the table.

1. Transfer to Perishables department at work, full-time. Convince Ed to move out with me. Do that for a year and ponder next move, which could include travel, further study, or—gulp—looking for a real job.