Charlie and Pearl (8 page)

I liked that she was comfortable enough to undo her jeans button in front of me.

“Don’t tell anyone” she stage whispered, a finger in front of pursed lips. “It’ll be our little secret”.

To know something like that, something personal that was just between her and I and that no one else in the whole world knew, felt, well it just felt
pretty amazing
. I even caught a little glimpse of her stomach when she leaned back to undo the offending button.
A beautiful soft cream colour
and oh so smooth by the looks. Not that I’m a perv
ert
or anything, because I’m not.

It was hard to sit there all night and try to concentrate on conversation when the whole time all I could think about was that was that after that button there was only a zip left between the difference in jeans on or jeans off.

It was also hard to concentrate with Rangi sitting at a table behind us, Pearl with her back to him, and every time I looked his way he gave me the thumbs up and grinned like a dirty man. After a few more beers he started holding the salt shaker suggestively and making sex faces at me. Several times I didn’t hear something Pearl said because I was trying so hard to ignore him. Asshole.

I didn’t want the night to end.

She was....

Everything.

When she smiled at me my heart almost popped, it swelled so much with the pure joy of it all.

I read books almost every day yet I can’t find the words I need to say how Pearl makes me feel.

Ok I’ll try.

You know how sometimes, you have these moments when everything in your life just falls into place in one perfect moment and you look around and think, this is it; this is what life is about, this exact, perfect moment in life that I’m living right now. You may not be rich, or have a job you love. But something in your life, your family, a friend, your dog who loves you unconditionally, or your partner/wife/husband/lover, something or someone just occasionally breaks through the stresses of the everyday bullshit and makes you stop and smile and think....
oh yes
. This
, this moment right here, is
what it’s all about.

That’s
how I felt every second of every minute when I was with Pearl.

She is the stars, the sun, and the moon. The butterflies, the rainbows, the puppies, the music, the chocolate, the soft cushions
, spring flowers
. The jacket that keeps you warm on a cold winter’s day. She is everything that is beautiful in this world.

Not that I told her any of that.

I didn’t want her to think I was crazy.

PEARL

This morning, despite my headache and dry mouth and overall general tiredness, I feel...happy.

Life
here
seems pretty damn simple.

And although I know it can’t stay like this forever, suspended in an unrealistic moment of time, forever is a long way away.

I
decide
that in the right here and now
I’ll just
worry about
today.

Charlie’s mum is so ecstatically happy he has brought a girl home to the house that I guess I must be the first. It’s sweet. She fusses over me, and even though I say a polite “no thanks” to breakfast I am nevertheless presented 10 minutes later with a plate of fried eggs, bacon
, half a fried tomato
and a couple of hash browns.

“Just a little bit
of food
” she says, “you have to eat something, you’re far too skinny”.  And she plonks a glass of Just juice down in front of me. “Or would you prefer coffee?”

Charlie looks, fresh. He’s just out of the shower and his sandy blond hair is damp, curly at the edges. He obviously hasn’t had time to
style it with gel yet
. It’s funny, I had thought he was only about
twenty
or
twenty one
tops, but last night he told me he’s actually twenty
four as well
. Only a
few months
older than I but much younger in appearance, or at least that’s how it feels.
He has a vibrant sense of youth about him. The endless promise of time.

I know I’m too skinny right now. At my height it doesn’t suit
,
I look more like a scarecrow than a supermodel. And my hair has been falling out,
stress, according to my GP back in the city.
I haven’t been taking care of myself. I have been my lowest priority. For the first time I realise how I
have let myself go, how I must look next to Charlie. H
ow dry my skin feels, papery, and I feel the urge to dash out and invest in an expensive moisturiser.

“I’m so sorry we woke you up”, I tell Jacqui, Charlie’s mum
, while I stick my fork into the tomato and watch the juices bleed onto the plate.

“Oh it’s fine!” she says. “No problem at all”.

They are so comfortable together, these two. It’s clear they have a close mother/son relationship. She kisses him easily on the head as she puts his plate in front of him,
piled much higher with food than mine,
and he accepts it without complaint or embarrassment. They joke; she makes fun of the state he was in last night. He tells her she’s jealous
he has a life
.

Together they
seem so normal, so drama free.
I am filled with a yearning to belong here. To worry about nothing, no one.

“I’ll give you a ride to work” Jacqui says to Charlie. “And what about you love? Where would you like to go?”

I know what she means, but for a second I allow myself to misread the question. Where would I like to go?

I’ve always wanted to travel. Ever since I was a child and I learned to read. It’s why I
used to
collect travel brochures. Or, at least, the pictures from travel brochures.
Thinking about this
reminds
me
that
I haven’t looked at my dream book for a long, long time,
years in fact
.
So long
I’m not even sure where it is
.
Did I take it with me when I moved out of home?

I started my dream book when I was about fifteen. It’s a black and
silver
scrapbook (which I thought was seriously cool at the time), and on every page I have glued pictu
res of places I want to go to. At first I separated everything into
sections, like beaches, cities, small towns,
snowy landscapes,
European
Christmas markets,
but after awhile I just started sticking
the pictures in
wherever
I could find a space to fit them
, so
ended up
a bit of a jumble. I used to carry it in my bag and whenever I was having a bad day at school, or work, or was somewhere I really didn’t want to be, like the dentists waiting room, I could take it out and look through
the pictures and dream about that
day
, sometime
in my future when
I would be there.

I wonder again where my book ended up.
When I left home m
y mother threw a lot of my things away, bitter and feeling like I’d abandoned her just as my father had. She got over it, with the help of counselling and some meds, but my things were long gone.

I guess there’s only one option.

“Back to town
if you don’t mind
, to my car”, I answer Jackie
. “I’m in a shopping mood”.

“Oh yes, “she smiled
approvingly, “y
ou’re my kind of girl”.

CHARLIE

On the drive into town I was insanely conscious of Pearl’s knee a mere 10cm or so from mine in the backseat of mum’s car.

The whole situation was so crazy, so teenage like, I
had an irresistible urge to giggle manically like a cartoon crazy villain, even though I’ve never giggled in my life
.

The
irrefutable
facts:

Pearl slept in
my
bed last night.

M
y
bed
, and ok,
so I wasn’t in there with her, but I lay awake on the couch for ages thinking about her in my bed touching the same sheets I slept in the night before and which I probably wouldn’t wash ever again now. And I snuck in while she was in the shower this morning and, ok this is hard to admit because I know it makes me sound either like a real saddo or a bit weird, but I sniffed my pillow, and I could smell
a lingering trace of
her
.
It smelt a bit like coconut, exotic
.

She ate breakfast at MY table, in MY house, with MY mum.

And now she was in the backseat of mum’s car with me, because the front seat was overflowing with folders and boxes and other crap from mum’s work, and her knee, bony and with tiny stubbles of light blond hair (I can see
them
because the sunlight is
streaming
through
the window on
her side of the car and illuminating her skin like an angels) is close enough that if I reached out I could touch it without even fully extending my arm.

Shivers down my body at the thought.

Delicious shivers.

PEARL

I’ve made
myself
a new dream book.

The other day when Jacqui dropped me at my car I turned left at the roundabout instead of right and drove for 40 minutes to
Tauranga
, with the window down and the radio blaring.

Even though it wasn’t summer it was sunny enough for me to pretend it was, flashbacks to long hot days with Tania, driving to beaches close but far enough away that our mothers or Gran couldn’t see when we doused ourselves in baby oil and sunbathed with our tops off. Face down, not face up, we weren’t brave enough for that. Gran would have KILLED us
if word had got back to her
.
She was ahead of her time, our Gran, and
right
from
when we were
a young age she worried about the damage the sun was doing to our delicate, beautiful skin. She made us wear T-shirts over our bathers when we swam, and sit under a shade umbrella while other children baked themselves like potatoes in the sun. I suppose I have her to thank for my soft, relatively unblemished skin now.

I returned home
from the city
with:

-
             
A new, stylish scrapbook
,
h
ardcover, a gorgeous shiny royal blue colour
with a delicate border of scallop shells and starfish
. It called to me from a shelf filled with plain cream and cardboard covers.