Good Oil (19 page)

June 12

I’m pretty sure I don’t want to go out with Donna. I’m due at work this afternoon, as is she, so I figure I’d better have a plan of action. Maybe I could talk to her during her dinner break, if I can take mine at the same time. There’s another thing: diss one of Bianca’s chums and you diss Bianca. I wonder if there will be ramifications. But I’m not afraid of Bianca and she knows it. It does mean, however, that I can’t just not speak to Donna ever again the way I did with She’s-big-she’s-blonde Georgia. It’ll have to be handled in some way. I’ll report back tonight.

11 p.m.

Turns out I needn’t have worried. Perhaps young Donna can sense a ‘we need to talk’ coming from miles away and is particularly good at saving face. Or perhaps I’d wrongly assumed that because she’s a youngster, she’d go all gooey and want to walk around holding my hand after Saturday night. Either way, she played it extremely cool.

At the start of the shift she nodded at me as if nothing had happened. I took my dinner break at about eight when I noticed she was taking hers. I found her having a smoke alone outside the staff exit, leaning on the wall. Some people use their dinner breaks to have something to eat. Not Donna.

‘Hey,’ she said.

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘How’s it going?’

‘Peachy. You?’

‘Yeah, I’m good.’

She nodded, tilting her head back and blowing smoke.

‘Um, Donna,’ I said. ‘About Saturday night—’ ‘Let’s not do that,’ she said abruptly and without eye contact.

‘What?’

‘Let’s not do “About Saturday night”. Okay?’ She threw her cigarette on the cement and ground it out under her black boot. ‘See you back in there,’ she said, and disappeared through the door.

And that was that. What a load off. I picked up her cigarette butt and put it in the bin before going back inside. Amelia’s register was closed. I found her in the kitchenette with a cup of tea and a half-eaten muesli bar in front of her.

‘Where’ve you been?’ she asked and pushed out the chair opposite with her foot. ‘Do you know that muesli bars are apparently worse for you than a chocolate bar?

We’ve been
had
, Chris,
had
by Uncle Toby. Turns out he’s even dodgier than your Uncle Jeff.’

I sat there until we heard Bianca’s voice over the PA system.
Amelia Hayes and Chris Harvey, please return to your registers
. She only uses surnames when she’s pissed off.

June 17

The Search for the Perfect Woman is not turning out the way I’d imagined. I’m catching myself having to curb drunken impulses to call Amelia from the pub at three in the morning. I wrote a letter to her from a boring lecture the other day. I want to tell her stuff. I look forward to hearing whatever she’s got to say. I like helping her with her schoolwork. Her funny little thought processes provide hours of entertainment. There’s . . . affection there. I’d rather her company after work than going to the pub with the others. It’s the beer I go to the pub for, and the silent, routine comradeship of being around Ed. I don’t go to hang out with Bianca et al.

And people are talking. These things don’t go unnoticed. There are snickers and raised eyebrows that prompt me to analyse whether there’s a sexual component to how I . . . well,
conceptualise
Amelia. But that’s a fraught issue with a youngster and my analysis never seems to progress.

I’m sick of my life and I’m sure it’s getting sick of me.

A big change is in order. Let’s throw a few ideas on the table.

a) Transfer to Perishables department at work, full-time.

Convince Ed to move out with me. Do that for a year and ponder next move which could include travel, further study, or – gulp – looking for a real job.

b) Transfer to Perishables full-time for six months, bite the bullet and stay at home, save every cent I earn and go travelling for . . . who knows how long. God, I hunger for a foreign streetscape.

c) Call Michaela and tell her I am ready to be friends. As above, stay at home and work for six months. Find a postgraduate course in Perth, move there and do the friends thing with Michaela until she cracks and wrestles me into bed. Never, ever come back.

d) This one’s a bit out there, but I saw an ad in the paper for an adult English school in Japan, looking for native English speaking university graduates to be teachers. That would certainly be a foreign streetscape.

e) Get together with Amelia. Accompany her to her Year Ten formal. Fruitlessly try to convince her family that I am a perfectly decent chap. Ignore raised eyebrows from family and friends. Content myself with holding hands and kissing. Accompany Amelia on the upcoming round of her friends’ Sweet Sixteen birthday parties. Attempt to smuggle her into licensed venues for my friends’ birthday parties.

I need a drink. Then I need to seriously consider my bedroom ceiling.

Later –

Ease down, Ripley! You’ve blown a transaxle, you’re just grinding metal. That’s it, ease down.

August 3

The thing about the youngster is that she makes me think. Example: she’s got this flawed but intensely held take on feminism that comes from deep within her fifteen-year-old breast. It involves how women get continuously screwed in the domestic realm, or as Amelia puts it, ‘the hard-won right of women to earn money in paid employment, take out the garbage, do the housework, gestate, give birth to the children, nourish the children, care for the children, bear the professional penalties for having the children, take out the garbage again,
and
do battle with the local mechanic over the cost of servicing the car.’

‘You know,’ I said to her a few weeks ago, ‘I never really thought about it that way.’

‘Of course you haven’t!’ blustered the fifteen-year-old. ‘Why would you, you’ve been raised to take your place in the patriarchy!’

‘I never!’

‘It’s a
subtle
process, Chris. You wouldn’t even have noticed your own complicity.’

‘Youngster,’ I said, ‘I have studied feminism at university level. I think I’d know if I was complicit with patriarchy.’

‘All right then,’ said the little firebrand, ‘when was the last time you defrosted your fridge, went through it and threw out everything that was no longer usable, put all the stuff you wanted to keep in the esky while you wiped out all the spillages, crumbs and bits of unidentifiable food, pulled out the crisper drawers and ledges, washed them up in detergent and hot water, dried them, and then put everything back?’

Okay, I’ll admit she had me on the back foot with that one.

‘I’ve never done that.’ I’m not even familiar with the task. I’ve never considered that a fridge would ever need to be cleaned.

‘Well you can bet
any
money that it’s your mother that does it. You could bet your own life.’

She went on to reel off several other tasks whose existence I’d never even conceived of but the completion of which is integral to a household’s functioning. Then she demonstrated that of course my mother did them, as did hers, and my ignorance of their existence was the proof in the pudding of my contribution to patriarchy.

‘Well, I mow the lawn,’ I said, with a touch of attitude.

‘And I bet you want kudos for it too; don’t you, you bastard! Hats off to you for mowing the bloody lawn every few weeks!’

At this point it’s best to back down and try to steer the conversation towards calmer climes. Like me, the youngster has a vein that pops out of her forehead when she gets excited, and sometimes I’m afraid it will burst.

But she did get me thinking. So much so that when I got home I looked out one my Kate Jennings books. Amelia had reminded me of a particular passage. It’s from a short story, and the narrator says

I am forty years old and women who reach that age and are still suspicious of feminism have to be wearing blinkers meant for a cart-horse. By the time a woman gets to Oneida’s age, any residual illusions about who is running the show and the interests they have at heart will have been stripped clean away.

I keep encouraging Amelia to read Kate Jennings. Actually I want to give her a whole reading list. I want to see her learning and thinking and analysing. I want to see a more mature analysis of whether her mother would be any better off as a 1950s housewife. I want her to really think about who’s in charge and the interests they have at heart. I want to be around for that.

I’ve just written a whole diary entry about her.

That’s true procrastination. I originally sat down to work on my long essay.

August 25

Not much to report. If I were to take stock, I’d tell you that I’m spending all day and most of the nights in my room working on my long essay, due in a fortnight. Except when I’m working. I work Tuesdays twelve till nine, Thursdays four till nine and Sundays twelve till four.

At home I am seldom out of an old pair of black tracksuit pants, my flannelette shirt and my ugg boots. Exercise is my reward – if I have a productive day I am allowed to go for a walk at about 4 p.m. I walk along the reserve path, breathing in the winter air.

Sometimes I emerge from my room at about 10 p.m. and have a glass of red wine with Mum. She misses Zoe terribly, but we don’t say as much because Zoe’s a grown woman and it’s a bit silly to moon over an adult child. I miss her too, but I’m trying to see her departure as a motivating factor for me to get my act together and do the same.

These late-night glasses of wine with my Mum are something new. They are due to several factors, methinks. Firstly, with all the written work I have due I am mostly home in the evenings, whereas I used to be out at the pub and not home until Mum was in bed. Secondly, there is the unspoken, but inevitable, approach of the day when I leave home, so we both have a Last Days appreciation of one another’s company at the kitchen table late at night. And thirdly, there’s the insidious influence of the youngster.

My conversations with Amelia have sparked off some kind of change in my thinking. For the first time I’m curious about Mum’s experiences, along suspiciously Ameliaish lines. For example, I asked her about when she married Dad – how easy was the transition to living with him? How happy has it been? I asked her about when she had Zoe and me – did he work through her pregnancies? Was she sick? What was the split of domestic labour like with her and Dad? How much did he share responsibilities? When did she go back to work? How did she manage work alongside having two small children? And when I asked her that, it struck me with full force that I would never, ever ask my Dad the same question. Or any bloke.

One particular story she told me has stuck in my mind. When I had just turned two and Zoe four, Mum was on unpaid leave from her job as a primary-school librarian. She would do a casual day here and there when her sister was able to look after me, but was still essentially on maternity leave. One day she received a curt letter from the Department of Education telling her that unless she returned to her position full-time within the month she would no longer have it and the next posting she was offered could be anywhere in the city.
Oh shit
, thought Mum. The school she had been working in was in the next suburb – it would be awful to lose that posting. Zoe was already going to preschool nearby three days a week and she loved it. The women who ran it were sympathetic to Mum’s plight, and made room for Zoe to go five days a week, so that was her taken care of. But I presented a challenge. Zoe’s preschool only took kids aged three and four. Mum was loathe to put me into day care for five days a week but there didn’t seem to be an alternative.

‘
My little man
,’ she said in a pained voice, across the table from her shiraz-sipping now-adult son. ‘You and I were inseparable then,’ she explained. ‘We had nothing but each other all day most days, with Dad at work and Zoe at preschool.
My little man.

’ She scoured the local day-care centres and found that the task of finding a place that would take a two-year-old for five days a week, on three weeks’ notice, was very difficult. Some could offer two days, some three – all useless. Finally she found a council-run day-care centre a couple of suburbs over. They could take me immediately. It was a dingy place and had an air of unhappiness about it. But there was no choice.

I remember it. They made me eat boiled spinach for lunch. When it was sleep time, they put us on fold-out beds that were too high for us to get down from without assistance. I remember wetting myself a few times because I couldn’t get down when I needed to go to the toilet. Anyway, we both remembered that every morning when she’d take me there, I’d cry and cry and try to stop her from leaving me. I’d run out into the yard and plaster myself against the chicken-wire fence next to the exit walkway, crying and screaming at her to come back.

When she’d come to pick me up in the afternoon, I’d be plastered against the same piece of fence, still crying and looking out for her return. Mum says that leaving me at that place was one of the hardest things she ever had to do.
Awful
, she said.
And your father didn’t seem to understand just how awful.

Amelia reckons that these stories are important. Look no further, she says, the answers are in our homes. When I think of ‘oppression of women’, I think of Mary Wollstonecraft , I think of things in the past or elsewhere, like women being denied the vote, women being forced to seek backyard abortions, women being denied entry into universities, women having to obtain their husband’s written consent to leave the country, women being hung as witches, sold as sex slaves or living under sexist, oppressive regimes. I don’t need to look so far away. It turns out my Mum
does
defrost and clean the fridge.

I once wrote Amelia a letter and told her that she doesn’t have to look very far to see difference – despite the narrative that is spun by the prime minister and co about how swell everything is. I encouraged her to look close to home.

She’s got me to do the same thing, hasn’t she?