The Idea of Perfection (32 page)

Late afternoon was easing its way into evening, out here where the sky took up so much space. The shadows were starting to lengthen and above her a flock of cockatoos was creaking along through the sky. Where the sun was lowering itself towards the horizon, small elegant clouds had lined themselves up and were preparing to turn pink.

There’s the view,
he had said, as if she might have overlooked it, and had made a grand undulating gesture of his palm like an opera singer.

Remembering, she laughed aloud.

FELICITY LIKED THE Defoliant Masque. You put it on and then you lay on the couch with the blinds drawn and behind it you could be somewhere else for a little while. She dabbed it on thickly, being careful not to pull at the skin of her face. The Masque smelled of avocadoes, but looked like plaster. The whiteness of it made her eyes look rather dreadful: yellow round the whites, and unfriendly. They stared at her coldly.

She knew it was her own face, of course. Who else could it belong to?

Alfred Chang, or Freddy, had been very cordial. He had not been
inscrutable
at all. He had a nice smile. You had to hand it to the Chinese, they always had good teeth.

Through the gap in the shirt she had not only seen his neat little navel, but also a feathery line of black hair coming up from inside the frayed jeans. Further down, behind the ragged fly, the hair would be thick, of course, like a little nest for what lay in it.

Above the basin the mask watched, staring back blankly from the mirror. She met its eyes boldly. No one would ever need to know what it was thinking. Not even herself.

He had kept on pulling up the zip on his jeans, where it was ragged, right in front of her. He had not seemed to know he was doing it. He did not even turn away. He pulled up the zip, and every time he pulled it up she could see the big bold bulge.

She had no idea why she kept on thinking about the zip on Freddy Chang’s jeans.

Her plaster reflection did not know, either.

Suddenly, for no reason at all, she remembered what Linda McLennan had told her at school about Chinese people. Actually Linda had not called them
Chinese,
but something else, but it would be racist to remember what it was. She had told her that Chinese
did it
through a hole in the sheet. Linda had made a circle with her thumb and finger, to demonstrate.
Just big enough, you know, for the man’s thing.

She cleared her throat and felt the Defoliant Masque crack.

You could put a patch over the ragged part, but it would be tricky, with the thickness of fabric in that particular area. It could be a mistake. A patch could have the opposite of the intended effect. It might actually draw attention to the zip, rather than the reverse. It might draw attention to the whole groin — or
loin —
area. A sort of codpiece effect.

Thinking about it, she felt something in her own
loin
area, a sort of heat or weakness, a little melting-away sort of sensation. The Defoliant Masque stared back. It did not know what she was talking about.

You would need to take off the jeans first, of course, if you wanted to patch them.

Even with the Defoliant Masque she did not like to meet the eyes in the mirror when she thought about the taking-off of the jeans.

She went to the fridge and got out two slices of cucumber and lay on the couch with them on her eyelids. They were cool and heavy and made you feel as if you did not want to move, as if your body was a large clumsy appendage attached to you.

Behind the eyelids, her blood ebbed and flowed, ripples and currents of greater darkness through the darkness. She had already set the little alarm clock. Now she could simply give herself up to the blind world behind the cucumbers. There was a ragged fly there that bulged, and when you touched it, it fell open, simply fell open, and there it was, the thing that had been making it bulge. She went through it again, just to be sure. There was the ragged fly, and it fell open, and there it was. She could feel it on her own body, pressing against her warmly, insistently, hard but soft as well. It moved against her and made her melt from the centre out, melt right away into the darkness.

 

 

Later, the cucumber slices were flabby on her face and the Defoliant Masque felt gritty. She filled the basin with warm water and splashed it up over her face, feeling the Masque running off, taking the dead cells and the
toxins
with it.
Exfoliation
was the technical term. She was
exfoliating
herself. She let the water out and without opening her eyes refilled the basin with cooler water, splashing again and again until she had washed away every last remnant of the old face.

With her eyes still closed, she patted her face dry with the special super-soft towel. Then she opened them. There she was in the mirror.

There was always a little moment of disappointment. It was never quite the transformation you hoped for, when the Defoliant Masque came off. It was simply her own face, still, and the eyes that stared back at her out of it knew all about her, all her little secrets.

 

 

 

He had told her to come back on Friday for the quilt. She would take William to school, and then go straight across, first thing. It would not look as if she was impatient. It was only sensible, rather than make two trips.

When she had given him the quilt bag, he had put one hand on her wrist and the other on his chest, where his heart might have been.
I’ll guard it with my life,
he had said, and she had laughed again as if it was terribly witty, to cover the funny feeling of his fingers holding her wrist.

She smoothed the moisturiser gently into her cheeks and around her mouth, stroking upwards on her neck. She was not going to think about him any more. In particular, she was not going to think about the frayed zip of his jeans.

THE SCONE, AND more especially the cream on the scone, had tasted funny in spite of being so small, and by the morning after the
date,
Harley had a fierce headache that had her left eyeball in a burning grip, and she had already been sick twice. It appeared that it was the
attack of gastric
that she had conjured into being the day of the barbecue.

She rang the Mini-Mart, and Leith promised to send a boy up with some tablets, and she crawled back into bed, a sick animal hiding itself away in its burrow. Outside, the cicadas whirred away indifferently, as if from another world altogether.

All she could remember of her
date
now, apart from the scone that was just about killing her, was how full of pathetic elation she had been, how she had behaved like a lovely young girl on a
date,
not an old trout too dangerous to be let out. She hated herself for that singing on the way home. Who did she think she was, some peach-cheeked girl?

She squirmed in the bed, feeling the sheets creased and tangled underneath her, punishing herself with thoughts of how she had taken his hand in hers and turned it over, looking at the ring. He had probably thought she was keen on him, and looking for an excuse to touch. He had been polite about it, and not snatched his hand away, but he must have wondered. Her face felt hot and swollen, thinking about it.

She could not get the picture of Douglas Cheeseman out of her mind. She tossed angrily in the bed, trying to erase his face. He had a little tuft of hair that stuck up at the back, where he could not see it. She couldn’t stop thinking about it now. You could see that he brushed the front part very carefully, but the tuft stuck up obstinately, like a little flag with a message he was unaware of. Throughout their conversation her hand had wanted to smooth it down.

There was no getting away from the fact that she had been
interested.
That was the banal truth of the matter, as smug and insipid as a Hallmark card. It was foolish and grotesque, and it was dangerous, too.

It was like starting to slide down a slippery-dip: there was a point where you could still stop yourself. She was at that point. It was not too late to pull back, before gravity took over and everything went wrong.

 

 

The details of what went wrong were different every time, but one of the things she recognised was the feeling that
this time will be different.

She had been
interested
in all of them at the start. With the first there had been a proper wedding, and a trip to the shops with her mother-in-law, a kindly woman puzzled by her son’s choice in wives, to pick out the dinner service. She had never looked at plates before, felt too big to be safe in the china department, had felt the need to pretend that she knew how you made a pot roast. On the day of the wedding, looking at her big plain face in the mirror, not
jolie
, not even
jolie laide,
the whole thing had felt like a play she had found herself in by mistake.

In retrospect, you could have seen it coming.

The second, the one Freddy Chang reminded her of, had had a smile that fascinated her, that started at one corner of his mouth and moved slowly across. She had thought she would never tire of it, but it had become a tyrant in the end. It went with the
looking deep into her eyes,
and she began to feel choked by so much adoration of a person she knew was not herself, so lacking as she was in adorable qualities. He had tried to encourage her with her patchworks, but she had refused to be encouraged.
It’s just craft,
she had said when he admired anything.
And anyway, it’s no good.

There was a certain logic in it when he put his hands around her neck and squeezed, one night, in sheer frustration. It was not a serious attempt at murder, but it gave them both a way out of a situation that had arrived at an impasse.

She had gone out and bought a big old car she had fallen in love with, glamorous but unreliable. It was in that car that she had met the third husband. Philip was inclined to be masterful. The car had stalled, yet again, on the middle of the Harbour Bridge, and would not re-start. She had got out in rage and smacked the bonnet with the flat of her hand, and kept on smacking it until Philip had stopped his car and got out and taken hold of her wrist.
I’m a doctor,
he had said in his fruity, confident voice.
Stop that at once.

She had married him for that fruity, confident voice, and for that calmness. He never got upset, never showed anger, never shouted. Even when she clumsily broke the special chair with the tricky turned legs he had half-made in the shed, or chipped his best chisel, he was never angry. It was almost unnatural, the way he never lost his temper. He considered it a sign of weakness.
Losing control,
he called it when other people did it.
Losing control
was something he never did, not even right up to the very last second. The way he kept such a tight grip, even on planning his own intricate death, had always been one of the worst things about it. In a way he was still in control, even now, having presented her with a fact she could do nothing about, the indigestible fact of his suicide.

Taking his own life
was the phrase people used.
He took his own life.
It made it sound almost reasonable. But they had not been there.

When the doorbell rang she sat up in bed and swung her feet out, dragging her way into her dressing-gown. The sleeve got stuck against itself and the more she dragged at the neck the more trapped her hand was against a blind dead-end of fabric. Her jaw clenched tight and her lips flattened. She growled in her throat as she jerked at the wrapper, hearing herself snarl, a primitive enraged sound like a thwarted animal.

Finally the sleeve gave and her hand slid through. She lurched up from the bed, grabbed the edge of the sunroom door, hurried to the front door and opened it.

She had just enough time to see that it was not the boy from the Mini-Mart who stood there, but Douglas. She had a moment to notice how his hair was kinked in at the sides from where he must have been wearing his hat. Then the colour leached out of everything. He stood there with the kink in his hair and a funny look on his face, but he was in black and white.

There was a sideways slewing in her head, like lying down drunk, a deep dangerous interior shifting and welling. It was like being a potful of jam after you poured in the sugar.

She felt her hand go up to her mouth, although the feeling was not quite localised in her mouth, or even her stomach.

If I close my eyes, she thought, it will be better. But closing her eyes brought the bright seething blackness closer and now her throat was somehow swelling, thickening. Beyond the man at the door she could see Lorraine Smart’s parched front garden, flaring out as if overexposed, and now everything was so brilliantly white it was black.

She pushed roughly past him and was violently sick on Lorraine Smart’s front path. She had wanted to get as far as the bush by the fence, but her body had had its own ideas.

He made her go back into the house, pushing her along with an arm around her.

I was sick too, he was saying. I just came. To see if you were all right.

She wanted to crawl in between her sheets and block him out, take her sickness and put it to bed in privacy. But he did not let her lie on the bed or put her head on the pillow. He had his arm around her and, somehow pushing with his hip, he was making her go over to the chair in the corner. He grabbed the back of it with his free hand and shook it like a dog so everything went on the floor: grey old bra, jeans, socks still in a concertina from where she’d ripped them off, a shoe that jumped and clattered.

You’ve got it worse than I did, he said. I’m terribly sorry.

She did not want to hear him being sorry.

Sit down there, he said. Go on.