Addition (4 page)

The books are in alphabetical order, by title;
Gray’s Anatomy
snuggles next to
Great Moments in Mathematics
.
Biography Today:
Scientists and Inventors
caresses
A Brief History of Disease, Science and
Medicine
. In years past I have sectioned them by topic: science, medicine, mathematics. But now they are all together, mingling and flirting.

I have a small balcony. Staying home all day gives me more time for serious counting. I still do some tutoring; five kids, cash in hand. Maths. The parents know all about me; that I make each child sit in my small kitchen and do each exercise in his book 5 times and that I don’t let the kids advance until every exercise is done. One of the mothers came to the first two sessions to make sure I wasn’t going to drop Toby from my second-storey window. I can imagine her reporting back to the others. ‘She’s mad, that’s for sure, and she couldn’t look after a whole room full of children. But she makes him do all the examples and even if he gets it wrong she explains it in a quiet voice and makes him do it again. She never loses her patience like the other teachers do. She just sits there and watches him do his sums over and over.’ I can imagine what the parents say. What everyone says. She can’t work, can’t travel. She has no proper social life. I’m sure they could come up with numbered lists of the things I can’t do. And life would be different if I didn’t count, I know that.

But without it the world would be too big and too changeable. An endless void. I’d be lost all the time. I’d be overwhelmed.

Another busy week has flown by, filled with counting. Went to the café. Did housework. Spoke to my niece on the phone. Received a new book,
Handbook of Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders
, in the mail and read it. Twice. Had a weird craving for apple juice, which I don’t buy because it’s not on my shopping list. I don’t even like apples.

It’s Friday. 13 degrees. It’s exactly 10.30 a.m. I leave the house on foot, like I do every day. 150 steps to the corner, then 400 to the next corner. 20 to cross the street. 325 to the next corner, then 25 paces to the front of the café. At exactly 10.48 a.m. I reach the café. The café is right across the road from the park. It’s a nondescript kind of place with wicker chairs and glass-topped tables. It screams Parisian. On the wall are Monets, the same prints you see in every frame shop in High Street. At the back is a grainy laminate counter with a cash register, a cake stand holding 11 banana muffins stacked in 3 layers and a candy-striped bowl for tips. I’d like to know how much is there but from the door I can’t count it.

This is how it happens: I will walk in. I will take the first available table, starting from the top left-hand corner and proceeding around the room and inwards in a clockwise direction. I sit. Cheryl will see me from wherever she stands—behind the counter or clearing another table or delivering an order. She is tall and about fifty. (I’m working on a plan to find out, because it’s annoying not knowing how old exactly. I’m considering asking her
what moisturiser
do you use, because your skin looks so great for your age
. Then she’ll ask me
how old do you think I am?
Then I’ll say
about 40?
Then she’ll laugh and say
I’m actually 48!
) She has long dark hair worn loose swinging down her back. Not very hygienic for someone in food services. She has a smile she rations, with a tiny hint of gold filling peeking out on a left upper molar. She wears a black apron around her waist and a pen behind her ear. Then she speaks: a random choice between ‘Nice day, eh love?’ and ‘Shocking weather.’ It’d be nice if she could oscillate through these or even choose specific clichés for each day of the week, but that’s the trouble with small business. No systems.

Cheryl will say, ‘What’ll you have, love?’ as if there’s a question, as if there’s any doubt in my mind or hers. If we lived in New York I’m sure she’d say, ‘Usual, pal?’ but she never acknowledges that there is a usual. Perhaps she has a bet with her friends waiting for the day I order something else.

But I never order something else. I order a hot chocolate with 2 marshmallows and a slice of orange cake. While she’s gone I double check the tables. 17. The chairs. 59. 1 missing. Perhaps it’s in the kitchen so tired cooks can rest their feet. It takes between 3 and 7 minutes for Cheryl to bring my order, depending on the number of people in the café, and she says, ‘Here you go, love. You enjoy that.’

I do enjoy it. I dunk my 2 marshmallows in the hot chocolate and stir, and its layers swirl into consistency. It is hot and sweet with foam on the top like a cappuccino. The cake is my favourite part of the whole day. It is a flourless orange cake, moist and crumbly, with pieces of softened orange peel spread evenly through. It has a cream-cheese icing and is sprinkled, not coated but sprinkled, with poppy seeds. And the chef is not consistent—some days there are 12 tiny seeds spread out like ant hills in the desert. Other times there are 50 huddled as if there’s a stiff wind, or there are 75 squished on the small piece of cake like flattened children on the train coming home from the Royal Melbourne Show.

First, I count them.

Then this number, this number of seeds, is the number of bites I must take to eat the piece of cake.

Anywhere between 20 and 30 is no hardship—I generally take small bites while I sit here drinking my chocolate. Fewer than 20 needs some skill—mentally divide the piece, calculate how big each forkful must be, then eat it. More than 30 is a large number of bites, and once there was an incredible 92 poppy seeds and I virtually had to eat the cake crumb by crumb.

That’s how it’s supposed to go, but today when I walk into the café at 10.48 a.m., there are no spare tables. Full. Every one of them full.

No spare tables.

What do I do now? How do I leave? How do I get home?

No table. No table. No table.

There’s always a table.

No table. No table. No table.

Then I begin to hear a noise. I listen closely. It is the noise of my blood running through the small capillaries in my ears. It’s starting. It’s starting again.

I breathe quicker but I’m not getting enough air. My shoulders ache because my joints have unhinged and my arms hang, connected to my body only by the skin. My head spins, praying for an empty table. If I can’t sit I can’t order my cake and chocolate and if I don’t order my cake I won’t be able to count the poppy seeds and know how many bites to take and if I don’t eat my cake I won’t finish my cake and then how will I know when to go home? I’m loose now, there’s nothing to bring me back home. I’m loose and the wind blows through me and I could end up anywhere. I begin to feel cramps in my abdomen. Perhaps this is cholera. Soon all that is in me will leak out.

That’s when I see him, the man from the supermarket. He is sitting at the second table from the back on the right hand wall. He sees me. There is an empty seat at his table. He waves like he’s in grade three.

I wear a watch on my left wrist. It’s an old watch, a boy’s watch. It should have been my brother’s. Everybody has those times when it all becomes a bit overwhelming. When everything becomes too much, I look at my watch. I love its Roman numerals. Love the look of them, as if they are Roman buildings with all those I s like columns of a ruin. Roman numerals are very rarely used now, except for things like the date a movie is made so we don’t realise how old it is. Or to number items in a series, like boats or sons or
Rocky
s.

There are two things I like best about Roman numerals—firstly, it’s not just the symbols that matter, it’s where they are placed. I and V together should equal 6. But if you put the I right before the V, it’s 4. XL is 40, CM is 900. Also I like that there are no zeros. The Romans hadn’t invented them. That was up to the Hindus.

Sometimes I’d like to crawl inside the face of my brother’s watch. I’d walk around the numerals. Touch them. Balance on the hands. How long can I stand here thinking about numbers?

What is the proper length of time to stand in a café and consider a watch?

The mystery of Roman numerals is this—why do clock (and watch) faces have IIII instead of IV? Surely the Romans knew how to count in their own language? Even Big Ben has IIII instead of IV. The most common answer is that the IIII balances the VIII on the opposite side of the clock face. But I and XI don’t balance and no one worries about them. No, the most likely answer is that— despite our evolving strict rules for counting, to control the way the numbers are used, to make them conform—the Romans didn’t think that way. Probably IIII was okay because everyone knew it meant four and it wasn’t such a big deal. They had more to worry about, like getting good seats for the Colosseum and making sure their togas didn’t fall off. But maybe the whole IIII/IV business is the real reason the Roman Empire fell. Plenty of empires survive cross-border incursions. There’s no recovering from sloppiness.

Whatever the correct amount of time is for standing in a café looking at your watch, it’s passed.

Now I have to decide.

3

I can wait for the panic to rise until I can’t breathe or I can walk over and sit down. If I do that, Cheryl can come over and say something about the weather and bring me my chocolate and my cake and then I can count the seeds and eat the cake and then I can go home. But if I sit there I have to talk to him. That would be two conversations with one stranger. Unprecedented.

I go over. 12 paces to the table.

I pull out the chair.

I sit down.

He’s got sweet teeth, like the milk teeth of a child. At least the 6 I can see are like that. Creamy white with curves instead of corners and points. He’s wearing jeans again today, on a Friday. Great. Not only does he have no friends but he’s also unemployed. Still, he looks good in jeans. He’s wearing a black waffle weave short-sleeved shirt with 6 buttons up the front. The buttons are small and glassy—plastic pretending to be mother-of-pearl. His blond hair is messy. He’s offered me his table. I really should be gracious.

‘Are you stalking me?’ I say.

He’s mid-sip of his coffee, and snorts. ‘Um…no. Are you stalking me?’

‘Why on earth would I want to stalk you?’

‘I don’t know…to steal my fruit?’

‘It was one banana. I’ve moved on.’

‘So have I. Really. It’s…nice to see you again.’ He picks up the menu. He puts it down again. It sounds as if his brain is leaking.

I check my sarcasm detector. Nothing. Perhaps he means
It’s nice
to see you again
. Astonishingly, I start to blush. Not a delicate Austenesque two-dusky-pink-circles-in-the-middle-of-my-rounded-girlish-cheeks type blush. More like a swell when you are standing in the ocean, a rolling swell of heat and redness that starts in my toes, thunders up my legs and tickles my labia before finally crashing on the beach of my face. A violent pulsing red.

‘That’s because you’ve seen me walking towards you. I’m great at walking. The secret is’—I lean in, peering from side to side conspiratorially, my hand against my face to stymie eavesdroppers— ‘One foot in front of the other. My parents taught me many years ago now and I practise almost every day. It’s my pet event: walk across café.’

He opens his mouth to reply but Cheryl appears at my shoulder.

‘What’ll you have, love?’

Finally.

‘1 hot chocolate with 2 marshmallows and a piece of orange cake, please.’

‘No orange cake today, love. How about a nice piece of lemon tart?’

Fuck.

Fuck
.

Don’t panic, don’t panic, don’t panic.

No orange cake means no poppy seeds. No poppy seeds means no predetermined number of bites. How can I eat something with no predetermined number of bites?

I look at Banana Man. ‘How old are you?’

He doesn’t even have the grace to look surprised. People should look taken aback when strangers ask them how old they are while ordering food in a café.

‘Thirty-eight.’

I turn to Cheryl. ‘Yes, I’ll have the lemon tart.’

Cheryl grins. Not at me. ‘Anything else for you, Shamie?

Running late today, are we?’

Shamie. I’ve been coming here every day for two years and I’m just ‘love’.

‘Slept in. I had a late one last night. And yes, another coffee, thanks Cheryl.’

Cheryl gives him her juiciest smile. I’ve never had a smile like that, even on my birthday when I tipped her ten bucks. Suddenly I hate her. It’s her fault I’m sitting at someone else’s table and I can’t have what I always have. It’s her fault I’m surrounded by grinning idiots. She goes to get my orange cake. Playing the role of orange cake today will be lemon tart.

‘Running late today? What, she times you?’

He laughs despite the fact it wasn’t funny. ‘I usually run around the park first thing in the morning. Then drop in for a coffee.’

Something tells me it’s going to take Cheryl longer than 7 minutes to bring my cake today. At least it’s going to seem longer. I persevere. ‘What kind of a name is Shamie anyway?’

‘Seamus Joseph O’Reilly. You’ll never guess where Mum and Dad came from.’

19. Like me. ‘India?’

‘Aah…no. If they were from India my name would be Seamus Joseph O’Singh.’

Now that we are closer I can see his eyes aren’t brown after all.

They’re hazel.

‘Now your turn,’ he says.

‘My turn to do what?’

‘This is how people meet and become friends. I say my name, then you say yours. Then we shake hands.’

‘Really? This is a quaint ritual. Are you an anthropologist?’

My orange cake arrives. It looks suspiciously like lemon tart but I can ignore that. Much harder will be eating it in 38 bites. I’ve chosen a difficult task here. It’s a shame he wasn’t 14.

Lemon tart is much flatter than orange cake. I would say it has only one-third the height. I could easily manage 38 bites with a slice of orange cake but lemon tart will be difficult.

I start by dividing the slice lengthways down the middle from the point to the crust. Then crossways, but not bisected exactly because the part near the crust is much wider. More like one-third at the crust end and two-thirds at the pointy end. The 2 pieces that I now have at the pointy end I divide lengthways again, then each of these I divide into 3. This gives me 12 pieces at the pointy end. Now for the crust end. I need 26 here, which won’t be easy.