The Idea of Perfection (33 page)

She did as she was told, staring at the dust-balls eddying on the floorboards as he made the bed.

I thought it tasted funny, he said. I should have said something.

The bedclothes flew out smooth, cushioned on air, the way his wrists flicked at them.

It’s my fault, he said. I’m sorry.

No, she said. Thank you.

She meant
Go away.

There, he said. Get in there now.

He stood as she gathered the dressing-gown around herself and shuffled across to the bed.

I’ll be all right, she said.

He was about to say something when the doorbell shrilled again. She shut her eyes. She heard him leave the room, heard a rumble of voices at the door.

In a minute he came back with a box of tablets and a clean glass of water.

Don’t look after me, she said.

She had tried to think of a more gracious phrase. She thought she had thought of one. This was not what her mind had thought it had prepared, although it was exactly what she meant. But he did not take any notice. He put the glass down and went on pressing out pills.

No, he said.

He held out his hand and she took the pills from his palm and swallowed them.

I mean, she said, just leave me alone.

It seemed he had not heard her. Perhaps she had not spoken. He was gathering up the smudged glasses from the bedside table and going out of the room.

Now she could hear him out in the kitchen. She knew just what it was like out there: the greasy water in the sink from yesterday where she had suddenly given up, the grey scum, the wet toast wallowing, the canted piles of crusted dishes and the lines of black ants threading in and out of a crack in the window-frame and over to the sugar scattered on the bread-board.

She made herself small in the bed, hating the thought of him seeing all that. There was a silence from the kitchen. She imagined him looking, wondering where to start.
Go,
she thought.
Justgo.
It seemed unbearably intimate to have him looking at her squalor, fishing the wet toast out of her sink and smelling the rankness of her rubbish-bin. No amount of sex could ever be so intimate.

She heard him gently — so as not to disturb her, but she was tense, listening to the tiny noises — close the kitchen door. She could hear the little scratch as he unhooked the apron from the back of the door and the squeak of the cupboard door as he got out the detergent. The dirty water in the sink made a dreadful sucking sound as it ran through the plughole.

She listened as he washed the dishes. Then she heard him opening and shutting drawers, looking for a clean tea-towel. Then the clatter as he put everything away. Then there was another long silence.

She heard the scratch on the door again as he hung the apron back up, the squeak of the back door and the clatter of the rubbish-bin lid as he took the kitchen tidy outside to the bin and emptied it.

When she heard his steps come towards the sunroom door, she heaved over in the bed, pulling the sheet up around her ears. She was asleep, she was deaf, she was dead. He tiptoed over to the bed and leaned over looking down at her. She could feel his gaze like a physical thing, urging its attention on her, but she squeezed her eyes shut tightly.
Go away,
she mouthed silently under the sheets.

At last she heard him tiptoe down the hall, open the front door with the long melodramatic creak it produced if you did it slowly, and shut it behind him.

 

 

When she woke up she knew she was better. On the kitchen bench was a note.

Back later on,
it said,
to see how you are. My apologies again.

D,
it was signed, as if he was the only
D
she knew. It was like the note a husband might leave a wife. She stood looking at it
. How dare he,
she found herself thinking.
How dare he.

She screwed it up angrily. The kitchen was reproachfully clean. Everywhere she looked she saw he had been there, wiping, arranging, cleaning. She was dizzy with the closeness of him, giddy with the intimacy of it. She was better, but she had to cling to the table with her fingers, overwhelmed by the feeling of him all around her, like a vacuum sucking her into itself.

If he comes back,
she decided,
I won’t open the door.

But that would not work. He was the kind of man who would break the door down if he thought she might have fallen over unconscious in the bedroom. There would be no escaping him.

She felt hot, congested with the claustrophobia of it.

She would open the door, then, but only to say thank you. She would be cordial enough, but there would be no encouragement in the way she said it. If he tried to make conversation, she would go limp.
Yes,
she would say, and
No,
and
I’m not really sure.
She was not going to be rude. But she would not give him even the smallest sliver of herself.

He would get the hint eventually.

WHEN HE CAME back later, birds were gathering for the night in a big incongruous date-palm in someone’s backyard. He knocked and waited, looking up into the tree. The bird book had not seemed like such a good idea in the end. He found it quite easy to imagine the jokes Chook would make about
birds.

When she opened the door he saw straight away that she was better. She was civil enough, but did not ask him in. Actually, she did not even open the door very far, just talked to him around the edge of it.

Yes,
she said, and
No,
and
not really,
and she said
thank you
a lot, in various ways.
Thank you so very much,
she said.
Thanks very much indeed.
Gripping the edge of the door between them, she said it over and over:
thank you, thanks, thank you very much.
He had brought her a bunch of grapes — cling-wrapped and squashy, but the best he could do in the Mini-Mart - but she waved them away. I
don’t think so, thanks,
she said through the chink in the door.

Walking back down her path, he looked up into the date-palm again as if he was interested in the birds. He was, in a way, but not as interested as all that.

He had to take the grapes back to Room 8 and eat them himself, sitting on the side of the bed, thinking about her.

She had seemed to like him at first. She had listened when he told her about concrete, not
glazed over
straight away. She had seemed genuinely interested.

But he had gone on too long about it, as usual, and she had picked him for a bore. The Panorama had not been a good choice, either, the sticky silence that had surrounded them, and the woman with the mop. A man with more imagination would have come up with something better.

He wished he had not told her about the Port Gordon Bridge. When he’d got to the bit about the stretcher, she laughed, although she tried to pretend she was just coughing.

She would go back to Sydney, and the man who had taken her out to tea in a cafe full of flies and got excited about concrete would just become a funny story for dinner-parties.

 

 

 

It was the thing about a little place like Karakarook: you kept seeing the same people over and over, and being reminded of how you had got it all wrong.

He did not really mean
the same people.
What he really meant was,
the same person.

Standing beside a verandah-post outside the Caledonian — not exactly hiding, more just standing still — he saw her, the day after he had washed her dishes, coming out of the shop with the tins of paint in the window. He prepared a smile and even got his hand up for a sort of wave. But she got into her car without even glancing in his direction. He waved away a fly that was not there and stood squinting across the road. As she turned her head to reverse out he saw the strong tendon in the side of her neck and her stern profile. He watched the brown Datsun all the way down Parnassus Road, until it took the corner at St Brendan’s fast enough to make the pigeons flutter up in fright from the ridgepole.

A day or two later he’d seen her coming out of the Acropolis with the paper under her arm, frowning, the dog at her heels, and later the same day outside the Mechanics’ Institute, looking huge beside a tiny woman in tight jeans, waving away the flies and nodding at what the woman was telling her.

Today, here she was standing with the butcher outside his shop. He watched as she made some kind of big humorous gesture that made the butcher laugh, his black hair gleaming like onyx in the sun.

He could see that she had not wasted any time in making herself at home in Karakarook. He felt a sort of helpless admiration for the way she was able to have a conversation with the butcher that was obviously not about meat. It looked as if it was more fun than a conversation about creep.

He watched her hand draw the joke on the air and remembered the way those fingers had felt, taking his hand, turning it over, looking at his ring. He must have bored her silly about the ring. As if she would be interested. At least he had not gone on about Kipling.

He saw her, and on several other occasions he thought he did. He waved at a woman coming out of the bank one day, a man-shaped sort of woman, big torso, broad shoulders, skinny legs. He waved, and actually broke into a sort of eager trot, but as she turned to open the door of her car, he saw it was not her. He dropped his hand and stood watching as she reversed out and drove away, reading her bumper sticker: OUR BALLS ARE BIGGER, with a picture of a soccer ball.

It was not really anything like her, and he felt a fool, running.

He did not think she had noticed him, on any of the occasions he had watched her. He knew he was not a very noticeable kind of man, being more the kind who faded into the background.

Marjorie had always bought him neutrals.
So handy,
she had said.
Go with anything.
Now he was here on Parnassus Road, Karakarook,
going with
the peeling paint of the Caledonian. He had never minded, before, being such a neutral sort of man. But watching Harley Savage stride purposefully, gesture decisively, laugh in that big confident way, he wished he could find it in himself to be a different and less invisible kind of man.

ON FRIDAY, FREDDY was waiting for Felicity at the top of the stairs. It was funny seeing him again, after thinking about him the way she had been.

She turned her thoughts away quickly from the precise way in which she had been thinking about him.

He was smaller than she remembered, as if her mind’s eye had made him swell. She had started to think of him as quite a tall man, but here he was, smiling in that way he had, and not much taller than she was herself.

She had been right about how muscular he was, though, the way his shoulders were padded with little packets of muscle. And, although she was not even going to glance at them, she could see that he was wearing the same frayed jeans.

She was not quite herself with him today. She smiled her nice smile and said,
Oh, hello!
in the way she said
Oh, hello!
to anyone, but somehow there was a
Freddy Chang who
had taken up residence in her mind now, the personal, private
Freddy Chang
who made her melt away behind her cucumbers. But that
Freddy Chang
was not the same as this
Freddy Chang.
This
Freddy Chang
did not know anything about the things that other
Freddy Chang
got up to in the privacy of her own mind, and it was important not to mix the two of them up.

She would keep it cheerful, friendly, wholesome. He would never know, and she did not have to know either, really, about her own, private
Freddy Chang.

Mrs Porcelline, he said.

It was a kind of smiling sigh. He did not seem to mind being in love with someone he could not have.
Unattainable.
A lot of men went for a woman who was
unattainable.

Come along through, Mrs Porcelline, he said. Just stay close to me, it’s a bit on the dark side.

He went off fast ahead of her, chunky but nimble, like someone doing ballroom dancing:
step to the left, step to the
right. He did not look back to see if she was following. She tried to match him step for step, so close she could smell the chalky cotton of his shirt, and something warm and fleshy underneath it. He was so close she could have touched his back with her hand. When she followed him around a partition, the last dim light was cut off and in the total blackness she ran straight into his back.

Oh! Sorry!

My fault, Mrs Porcelline, he said, or whispered. Should have warned you what was coming.

Then there was nothing, just rustlings and small metallic noises and something that might have been a grunt. The darkness enclosed her like water, fitting itself snugly around every fold of her body. In the dead blackness it was harder to remember that the
Freddy
she had at home in her mind was not the same as the
Freddy who
was here with her now, somewhere, doing something. You could imagine —
one
could imagine, not exactly she herself — that he was taking his clothes off. There was the tiny dragging noise of the belt being undone. And now the rustle of the button at the top of the ragged zip.

Behind the zip was, well, the thing that lived behind his zip, that made it bulge, that wore it out from bulging, so that it needed patching. The idea of Freddy Chang’s zip had a very familiar feel in her mind, as if the thought had been used over and over again, in every possible way, up and down, quickly and slowly, in the dark, in sunlight, with talking, without talking.

She caught herself thinking about it now, but it was all right, because no one could see what she was thinking.