Love and Other Perishable Items (6 page)

The other one is Amelia. When my sister and I were little, sometimes I would piss her off so much she’d take a few steps back and then rush at me, fists raised. I would stick my hand out and plant my palm on her forehead, stopping her in her tracks. Her arms would flail about, getting her nowhere. She’d keep flailing until Mum heard the ruckus, broke it up and sent me to my room. For some reason I think of that sometimes when I’m talking to Amelia. She wears her entire personality on her sleeve. Upon (uncharacteristic) reflection, maybe I see some of myself in her. Zoe and I seem to have changed roles as we’ve grown older—these days it’s me that tends to flail around while she stands composed.

Right. Beer o’clock.

October 22

The new youngster, Amelia, has acquired a bit of a cult following of late. Consisting of, well, me. It’s relaxing to be in her company because there’s no need for guesswork of any kind. I am going to try to push her in Ed’s direction. A girlfriend would sort him out, I reckon, especially one that can read and write, and Amelia can certainly do that.

This will probably be the last time I write in this notebook until the end of exams. I will hardly have time to scratch myself over the next month, I have so much work due. But then it will be three glorious months of holiday. Consisting of three essential
elements: beach, Land of Dreams and beer. See you in December. Provided I don’t die from caffeine-induced heart failure, which, let’s face it, is in the cards. It’s late. If you’ll excuse me, it’s time for me to get into bed and look at the ceiling.

December 2

Welcome to the other side! I would say welcome to the season of love, but that might be a bit of an exaggeration, as will become clear when I get to the Field. Against all the odds, I got my essays in and sat my exams, proving for the third year running that there is a God and he loves me. My last exam was sociology—a three-hour nightmare. When the examiner said “Time” at twelve o’clock, the pen fell from my cramped fingers and I put my head down on the desk almost involuntarily. A curious montage of the year flashed through my mind, including lots of Michaela scenes from various stages of the whole sorry affair, watching Kathy holding court across the library lawn, fighting with my poor sister, who always seems to bear the brunt of my late-night seething, and, curiously, Amelia in the staff room at break, sitting on the chair with her knees drawn up to her chin, reading a dog-eared copy of
Heart of Darkness
and sipping tea from a Styrofoam cup.

Then I went to meet Mick, Rohan and Suze at the uni bar. Then I drank a lot. Then I went home and slept for fifteen hours. And here I am!

Right. Let’s take stock. On the upside, I have three months off uni. On the downside, the Search for the Perfect Woman has still yielded no fruit, and I have no girlfriend with whom to spend these three months. I also have no money and will be working about thirty hours a week at Coles to rectify this. I will try very
hard not to drink all my pay, but make no promises.

Rohan has finished his bachelor’s in chemical engineering and applied for a job in Newcastle. It will be strange not having him at uni next year. He won’t be around much for the holidays either because his dad is paying for him to go to Europe as a graduation present. My dad, on the other hand, has offered to make a contribution toward the board shorts I want to buy for the summer. A
contribution
, mind.

Rohan said he wanted to lend me his (parentally purchased) car while he was away, but his little sister kicked up a huge stink and he has to lend it to her now. I try not to envy Ro—the stuff his parents pay for, like the trip and the car, and the fact that he can spend so much more time studying because he doesn’t work, while I get to take the bus to the Land of Dreams seemingly every goddamn day. I
try
not to envy him. It’s disgusting to waste time envying those things when whole families, whole tribes, get slaughtered in their thousands in Africa, when leaky boatloads of refugees drown or starve in their hundreds in the open sea, and the children of those that do make it here have to grow up behind razor wire, watching their parents slide into insanity. When houses, families, towns get washed away in a day. I disgust myself when I covet things from Ro’s life. But then, we humans have always coveted each other’s oxen, haven’t we? In Mod. Aust. Lit. last semester we were doing a unit on short stories and my favorite one was by Kate Jennings. In it she is talking about a fellow writer who enjoys phenomenal success and acclaim way beyond the modest (I assumed) success of the narrator. “Envy,” says Kate Jennings, “is a grubby little emotion.”

Anyways …

The Field is as follows:

—
Kathy
Look, usually I’d write “Token—never in a million years,” but lately I seem to be gaining some mojo.

—
She’s-big-she’s-blond-she-works-in-the-deli Georgia
She’s been trailing around after me a bit since the “Tom who?” incident. The youngster Donna from work seems a bit keen too. It may be completely unrelated, but Kathy has definitely been less withering lately. You never know your luck in a big supermarket chain.

—
Donna (token youngster)
Yeah, okay, she’s only just turned sixteen, but, like I said before, she’s sixteen going on thirty-five. She hangs out a lot after work. She never gets carded at the pub. There’s a certain enduring appeal in a young woman who sports tattoos, holds a cigarette and a glass of Scotch in one hand, lights said cigarettes with a huge-flamed Zippo, wears more pieces of jewelry than you can count and can beat you at pool. Could I consider going out with a sixteen-year-old? It’s a tough question. I’m pretty lonely and pretty desperate. Watch this space.

Yesterday I was standing at my register looking down toward the service desk at Kathy when Amelia piped up abruptly from the next register, “Hey, why does Gatsby love Daisy so much? She’s a superficial skank.” Then muttered more to herself than to me, “
She
doesn’t love him.”

She even takes the goings-on of fictitious characters personally.
These
are the things she thinks about when she is packing groceries.

December 14

Prepare for another well-lubricated sob story. It’s that time of night, I’ve come home from the pub and you, like Coleridge’s wedding guest, are as compelled to listen as I am to tell. Or maybe this is just drunken rambling that will never be read by any living soul. Even if my diaries are discovered after the apocalypse, people will trawl through the first few pages and say, “Who
is
this loser?” then, more importantly, “Who
cares
?” and chuck them on the post-apocalyptic scrap heap. Either way, I’ve digressed.

I had an odd experience at work tonight. It was about 8:45 p.m. and pretty quiet. I was chatting to young Amelia on the next register. At some point the chatting dwindled. She was tired. She’d been at school all day and it was the end of the week. She leaned both her forearms on the counter, bowed her head for a moment, then flung it up and exclaimed, “I’m
star
ving!”

Instantly I was somewhere else.

I was in the one-room cottage in Leura, where Michaela and I stayed last March. Late afternoon, approaching evening. We are lying on the bed, the covers strewn this way and that on the floor. She is lying diagonally across the bed on her back. I’m lying with my head on her belly and one arm flung across her thighs. I listen to her steady breathing and watch the last patch of orange-pink sunlight on the wall fade, casting the room in dusky half-light. I take a deep breath of the skin on her belly, which rouses her from her sleep. She gently pushes my head aside, stretches luxuriously, then sits bolt upright and declares, “I’m
star
ving!” She turns to face me. I push a lock of her teased-up hair away from her face. She bounds out of bed, pulls on her slip (birthday present from me) and sets about making a fry-up. I watch her. I love her.

Then I’m back at Coles, a little disoriented, but definitely back. I’m cursed with an extensive and detailed memory, so I’m no stranger to being laid low by a vivid Michaela moment. I try to get them out of my head as quickly as possible and am usually successful. But this was different. It was reliving, not remembering. The sights, the smells, the feel of the linen, the warmth of skin on skin. Real. Immediate.

Unsettling.

I’m going to sit out the back with my beer. It’s after midnight, so it will be quiet, and there’s a moon tonight. Our backyard is pretty unsightly and uninspiring, but on a brightly moonlit night even the rusty tin roof on the garage seems to gleam, and Eastlakes bathes quietly.

December 20

Work is getting crazy. Four more shopping days until Christmas. I had better get off my arse and do my Christmas shopping. I am tossing around the idea of whether to send Michaela a Christmas card or present or anything. I saw a pair of earrings that she would love in the window of a shop called Kashgar. Are you
crazy
, Chris? The bitch broke your heart and hasn’t even called you for months! Sure, that might have something to do with the way you said—nay,
snarled
—something to the effect of “Don’t you ever call me again, bitch” last time she called, but surely she realized that it was just the bleeding red mess of my heart talking?

Anyways, I’m off like a bride’s nightie to meet the gang in the city for Rohan’s farewell. He flies out tomorrow night.

December 21

I did a bad thing. I got home last night stinking drunk and singing the “Romeo and Juliet” song, rang Interflora and spent $400 on sending a huge arrangement of flowers to Michaela,
across the country
, mind you, with a very alcohol-induced Christmas greeting.

And all on my sleeping mother’s credit card. When I came to this morning, I had vague recollections of doing it but hoped that it was just a dream. The credit card on my bedside table next to the phone indicated otherwise. I paid my mother back today, which leaves very little in my bank account. Fuuuuuuuck. Chris, it is high time you got over this girl.

December 24

Whillikers! It’s almost midnight. Just got home from work, which was insane. Why do people always leave things to the last minute? I did too. Of course. I was in Go-Lo today during my lunch break buying crappy little gifts for my family with what’s left of my money. I have very little remaining in the way of brain cells. What’s everyone else’s excuse?

As testament to this, dear reader, I did something this evening that I cannot account for. I finished my shift an hour before closing time and hung around for a while wishing people merry Christmas and the like. I seized my chance to kiss Kathy on the cheek. She didn’t slap me or anything, which was nice, but that’s not the unaccountable thing. I was chatting to Vic as she was marking down some bunches of flowers and sticking the REDUCED FOR QUICK SALE stickers on them. I looked over Vic’s
shoulder and saw young Amelia, who was up on register seven. While I was watching, she stopped scanning for a moment and wiped some sweat away from her temple with the outside of her wrist. The bloody air conditioner is broken. That’s another story.

“Hey, Vic,” I said, “I’ll take one of them.”

I wished Vic merry Christmas. Then my legs took me down to register seven, where I gave the flowers to Amelia. When I say
gave
, I mean I kind of threw them at her, mumbled something and bolted.

Go figure.

Anyhoo, Mum, Dad and Zoe are all out on the patio, having some relaxing ales after the frantic all-day Christmas preparations that I successfully avoided by being at work. Thank you, Land of Dreams! I’m going to go out and join them for what could be a rare moment of togetherness.

Merry fucking Christmas.

Harvey out.

January 15

The weeks are starting to blur. They consist of going to the beach with Mick and Suze, going to work, sinking a few coldies out back with Mum or Zoe in the evening, playing the odd game of tennis with Dad, reading my course-work texts for uni, reading the paper, staying up late watching crap TV, losing entire days to watching cricket and brain cells to the accompanying steady stream of beer. My dad and I live the cliché that men can’t relate to each other on an emotional or interpersonal level so they do it through sports. When we are playing tennis, we are comfortably absorbed in the game, and the fingernail-scratching-down-blackboard
who-the-hell-are-you suspicion that we usually regard each other with is gone. Because he is so much better at tennis than me, there is no destructive competitiveness. We both enjoy letting him give me pointers and he is chuffed when they lead to a slight improvement in my play.

Similarly, we can watch cricket together all day in companionable silence. No pressure to attempt conversations that are doomed to crash in a ball of flames. No speech whatsoever. We ask each other if we’d like another beer with either a grunt or a gesture. We quite happily occupy the living room together all day, day after day. If one of us has to leave the room or carry out some task around the house, he’ll periodically call out for a progress report from wherever he is.

“Score?”

“Seven-fa!”

“Aaaahhgh.”

“Clean-bowled!”

“Ooraahhgh!”

And so on.

January 21

Got a postcard from Rohan. He’s on Mykonos. Having a ball. Just as well I am at a point of maturity whereby I’m happy that he is having a good time, rather than resenting his good fortune. He’ll be back at the end of the month and has to start looking for a place to live in Newcastle—he got that graduate position he applied for. Of course he did. Some people seem to have their lives sorted out and are going about living them. And you know what? I’m happy for them. Really.