Addition (3 page)
So now I’m ready for breakfast. It’s 7.45.
As it’s Saturday, after breakfast I go to the supermarket. At 8.45 on Saturday morning in January in Glen Iris the supermarket is deserted—everyone is still asleep in their beach houses at Portsea or Anglesea or Phillip Island, dreaming about whomever it is they dream about while they lay beside their spouses. Waiting for me at the checkout is a handsome boy, twentysomething, with too much enthusiasm on his pink face. Either he’s still full of love for all mankind from last night’s ecstasy or he’s waiting for the right time to talk to me about Amway. Still, there’s no other checkout open. The boy smiles encouragingly. I feel a headache coming on. I push my shopping trolley over, squeaking with each step.
My trolley has 2 trays of chicken thighs, fat and glossy, each tray containing 5. A carton of eggs marked as a dozen. (Each week I assure ecstasy-boy or high-pain-threshold-girl, a Kiwi backpacker with seven piercings in each ear, that I have already checked the eggs. This is so they won’t open the carton and notice I have removed 2 and left them in the assorted spices.) Plastic bags containing 100 beans (that’s a pain), 10 carrots, 10 baby potatoes, 10 small onions. 100 grams of salad mix. (I refuse to shop in a supermarket without a digital scale.) 10 little tins of tuna. 10 orange bottles of shampoo. 9 bananas.
What?
Count again.
How the fuck did I get 9 bananas in my trolley?
This is impossible. I look behind the eggs, behind the bag of beans. This is
not
possible.
The drug-addled multilevel marketer is standing behind the counter, smiling. Those teeth are money well spent. He’s got a smile like a Scientologist’s. Well, I’m going back. I can’t buy 9 bananas. He can wait while I go back to aisle 12 and get another.
Just as I am about to excuse myself, someone comes to a stop behind me with a basket hanging over his arm; now I’ll lose my spot. And I was here first. What kind of a Nigel No-friends is at the supermarket this early on a Saturday anyway? Must have had a big Friday night with ‘Inspector Morse’ on DVD and a cup of hot cocoa. The Scientologist drug dealer is still standing there. His smile is fading. He folds his arms.
The guy with the basket is reading
Celebrity Nosejobs
, or some other Pulitzer-winning publication picked from the display near the checkout. He must be nearsighted because he’s holding the magazine about one inch from his face. All I can see is his forearms below shirt sleeves scrunched up to his elbows. His forearms are smooth on the underside. One has a tendon taut from the weight of the basket. Dark blond hair on the front. Not too much. Not extending to the back of the square, capable hands. Dangling over the edge of his basket amidst 2 trays of mince, 3 trays of sausages, a jar of chilli paste and 3 apples is 1 unfettered banana.
The key to an operation like this is nonchalance. I smile, piranha-like, at the Scientologist. He fiddles with his tie. I start loading my groceries onto the belt at the end furthest from the scanner. All except the bananas. The belt rolls onward, remorselessly. It could care less about the bananas.
‘I’m exhausted,’ I say.
He jumps. Whoever trained him should have mentioned that customers sometimes speak.
‘I spent all day yesterday collecting spare change for the Red Cross. Famine relief. For the kiddies.’ I wink. His smile returns. I beckon him closer with a crooked finger and wave my hand over the groceries. I lower my voice to just above a whisper. ‘Do you mind if I pay for this lot in five-cent pieces?’
His eyes bug and as he says, ‘I have to check with the manager,’ his voice breaks. He spins around looking for somebody, anybody. While he’s distracted I nonchalantly pick up the bananas from my trolley with both hands. Nonchalantly I rock back, then
ever
so nonchalantly I spin around, reach my arms full stretch, grab the shrivelled brown end of Nigel’s banana and lift it out of his basket. He can’t see a thing from behind that magazine.
By the time my prospective money-laundering cultist has looked back, all he sees is me smiling eerily, hands up like I’m about to crown Miss Universe with a bunch of bananas. A bunch of 10 bananas that I lay gently on the belt.
‘Never mind about the coins,’ I say, pulling a fifty from my purse. ‘Not everyone’s a cheapskate.’
Operation Restore Banana is complete. My groceries are bagged and paid for. I stop for a minute or two to scan the headlines of the pile of newspapers near the door. Humming the theme to
The Great
Escape
, I walk out of the store, 2 bags in each hand. In the car park I lean over for a moment to readjust the plastic bags before they amputate my fingers. I straighten. Someone is standing right in front of me.
It’s Nigel No-friends. In his right hand is an apple. He throws the apple in the air and catches it.
‘Yes?’ You learn imperiousness at teachers’ college.
‘I wondered if you’d like an apple.’ He smiles like we’re friends, and one eyebrow raises. Nice white teeth. Brown eyes with crinkles around them. 12 around one eye, 14 the other. On top of his head perch a pair of Wayfarers, circa 1986. He works outdoors, I’d say; thin-ish build but his biceps and forearms are defined. His shirt is red with some kind of logo. Smooth tan skin. Faded blue jeans. He’s 10, maybe 11 centimetres taller than I am. The small waves in his blond hair look damp, like he raced to the supermarket after getting out of the shower. Or perhaps he’s been sweating. Occasionally his nostrils flare.
I don’t answer. I put the bags down and fold my arms.
‘It’s a nice apple. Crispy. You could take this apple, and give me back my banana.’ He holds the apple out.
‘My banana? Did you say, “My banana”?’
He nods. He’s biting his bottom lip.
‘Had you paid for it?’
He laughs, head tilting back. ‘Not exactly. But it was in my basket.’
‘That “my” thing again.’ I roll my eyes and speak slowly. ‘It was the supermarket’s banana, because you hadn’t paid for it. And now it’s mine, because I have. It was also the supermarket’s basket. It was your…nothing.’
‘Well, this is my apple, because I have paid for it.’ He pretends to throw it up again, but instead hands it to me. ‘A small gift for your kind explanation of property law.’
The apple is smooth in my hand, and warm from where his hand has been. ‘That’s nothing. I can also explain microeconomic reform using two baguettes, an empty toilet roll and a mousetrap.’ I rest the apple on top of the shampoo. I pick up the bags and start to walk off. He starts walking with me. Like we’re walking together.
‘And all that shampoo? What does that explain—the stock exchange? Are you cornering the market?’ Hands, sans apple, are thrust in the back pockets of his jeans. His tight jeans.
I stop again. ‘Are you doing a survey?’
‘Just curious. You have vegetables and fruit and chicken probably for one week for one person. But shampoo for more. It makes me wonder.’
‘Supermodels. Me and twenty-nine other supermodels live in a big house together, painting each other’s toenails and having pillow fights in our pyjamas. So this is food and shampoo for one week.’
He leans a long arm into my left hand bag and uncovers the potatoes.
‘Don’t think I’m doubting you. You could be a supermodel. But I’m pretty sure that supermodels don’t eat potatoes. Also you don’t have any celery. Or sprouts. Or Perrier.’
‘You’re right. I’m kidding about the supermodels. Actually I’m stockpiling shampoo. The horsemen of the apocalypse are nigh.’
He shakes his head and frowns, momentarily saddened by the thought of the end of the world. He looks down at my bags again like the contents might have changed in the last ten seconds. ‘No water, though? Is this some kind of magic dry shampoo? Anyway, the horsemen won’t care what you look like.’
‘No water will be necessary, because the horsemen will be swimming in on rising sea levels. And they will care what I look like. I think the Bible says something about the meek and the blow-dried inheriting the earth.’
We say nothing for one millisecond longer than is comfortable.
‘Thanks for the apple. Next time I eat fruit salad I’ll think of you.’ I walk across the car park. I don’t look back.
I used to be good at flirting. A lot of people think that flirting’s about sex. Well, flirting’s about surprise, and surprise is about sex. If someone can be unexpected using words imagine how thrilling they could be using their mouth. Or their tongue. Or their teeth.
I’m good at flirting because lots of conversations run through my head all the time with lots of different outcomes. I’ve always been good at taking people by surprise. In fact the more nervous I become the more sentences and thoughts and numbers fly around my brain, looking for but not finding a way out. Take one comment that someone makes, and think of all the possible replies. How many replies would be logical? Well, if the comment is, what colour is the sky today?—the reply would be limited to, say, 15 or 16 choices. But if someone says ‘And all that shampoo? What does that explain?’ there could be 100, maybe 200, appropriate replies. And if each reply invites 200 other remarks already we have 40,000 possibilities in 3 sentences. And some conversations have 50 sentences, so it’s impossible to plan ahead. The trick is to say the first thing that pops into your head.
Back when I was teaching, after school on a Friday some of us would go to the pub up the road for drinks. One night, not long before it ended, we had all had a few and I was sitting at the bar chatting to a lovely man called Gav. All right, flirting. He was a brickie and he wore heavy boots dusted with cement, black jeans and a blue striped shirt. He had a nice smile. One of the other teachers was pissed. He came up behind Gav and whispered in his ear, but I could hear it clearly, even over the music. Don’t waste your time, mate. She might look hot but she’s a fucking nutcase.
I leave the apple on a fence halfway down the next street.
Tonight I dream of Nikola, except he has blond hair with small damp waves. After he saves me, after he kisses me, he puts his hand on the curve of my belly, his big hand spread flat. He slips his fingers under the band of my skirt. I can feel his breath in my ear. His hand reaches down my pants and he presses against my clitoris, sudden and steady and hard with his thumb rough from his experiments. I gasp. When I wake I lie very still. I can still feel it.
At Melbourne international airport there is no gate 13. The gates go up to 11 in odd numbers and to 14 in even numbers. They say I’m the fucking nutcase but everyone has it. The fear of 13 is deep inside people, in that part of them that’s more animal than human. Imagine the announcement: ‘Attention, please. Flight number 911 to New York City is now boarding at gate 13.’ How many people would get on that plane? Rational people. Educated people. The fear of the number thirteen is called triskaidekaphobia. Almost everyone has it. They work, they have friends, partners. No one tries to make them take drugs.
When I was teaching I always talked about fears. Kids love that stuff. They loved conquering long, tongue-twister words as much as I loved teaching them. I remember their favourites: ablutophobia, the fear of bathing; ailurophobia, the fear of cats; and of course, arachibutyrophobia, the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth.
As usual, I received complaints from the parents.
How will this
improve Bilynda’s scores at high school?
As usual, I couldn’t tell them the truth about their children’s lives, their own lives. That they are colour blind. They are tone deaf. They are ants racing across my balcony as the sun is rising only to race back as it sets. They will get jobs in offices and most will work well enough for their feed. They will meet another ant of the same or opposite sex and will borrow more money than their grandparents could imagine and use their freedom as collateral to buy a double-fronted weatherboard between a park and a train station. If they breed they will make more worker ants to guarantee economic growth and more taxpayers to pay for more politicians and poorer quality schools. When they retire they will receive not a gold watch but an indexed pension. Their children ants will move away to be spared their parents’ grasping, wallowing lack of productivity. The parents will spend their miserable pension on pills—for their arthritis, diabetes and heart disease, and the four-sided blue one so they can still get stiff or wet to remind them of when, for four minutes twice a week, their rutting made them feel alive. For their last few years they will live in a garbage dump filled with other refuse ants and they will stare at the walls and the ceiling till they know each crack and chip as well as they once knew their own ant face. They will die painlessly due to the advances of modern drug therapy, as numb and vapid as they lived. Their belongings will scatter and they will cease.
I never told the parents this.
Now I live on a sickness benefit. I’m incapacitated, everyone says, and I can’t work any more. So instead of going to school each day at exactly 8.00 to supervise the playground I stay home in my flat in Glen Iris. Typical sixties pale brick six-pack. Ugly. My neighbours are a doddering dementiac, a thirtysomething permanently attached to her mobile phone, a coterie of Asian students whose cooking can be smelt in the next suburb, and two dreary couples—one pair androgynously similar à la David Bowie 1976, and the other frighteningly different, perhaps a Hell’s Angel and a librarian.
My flat is on the top floor. I have a bedroom, small and crowded, with just my single bed and a chest of drawers. The cupboards are built in. I have a bathroom, an airy kitchen where I eat, and a living room with cream walls and dark green carpet and all my books. My books are mostly encyclopaedias and reference, although I occasionally fool around with fiction—Umberto Eco, Camus, Conan Doyle. I have a bookcase with 5 shelves and each shelf has 30 books. On some shelves, 30 is a real squeeze—the books are tucked in, buried next to their sisters until they cannot breathe. On other shelves 30 is spacious and there is room for a knick-knack from my childhood: a snow dome that says ‘Greetings from the Gold Coast’ or a peeling frame holding my parents’ yellow wedding photo. My parents have smiling faces from another age, smiling because they can’t yet know their future. Stop smiling! Run!
