Love and Other Perishable Items (16 page)

I help Jess with her tracksuit and socks. Her sneakers have Velcro straps (
very
exciting), so I leave her to put them on herself. Mum is blow-drying her hair in the bathroom as I go downstairs.

I am first into the kitchen. I pull open the venetian blinds and the sun streams in, highlighting the dust that has just been knocked off the wooden slats. I put the kettle on and place two slices of soy and linseed bread in the toaster. I get out a cup, a tea bag, a plate, a knife, the sugar bowl, peanut butter, jam and milk. I spread peanut butter on one slice of toast and jam on the other.
Savory first
, I think,
then sweet
. Mum likes her tea strong, with a splash of milk and between a quarter and half a teaspoon of sugar. Not everyone can pull it off.

I hear Mum and Jess fighting on the way down the stairs.

“I want to watch TV!” Jess is whining.

“No. No TV in the morning.”

“Yes! Watch TV!”

“No. I said no.”

Jess’s high-pitched yell gets louder and louder until it ceases and I hear the
Sesame Street
music wafting down the hall.

Mum appears in the kitchen, defeated. She bangs a few things around in the sink, then sits down to her tea and toast.

“I’ll be home a bit late this afternoon,” she says. “Staff meeting after school.”

One of Mum’s colleagues—and her closest friend at work—was threatened by a student with a knife earlier in the week. I’d come home to find Mum smoking in the backyard at four. She only ever does that when something horrible has happened at school. For years there’s been talk of Riley Street High being
closed down because there are so many problems with it. Whenever an incident happens—like the massive brawl with Enmore High at a basketball match—the politicians go on TV and say, “Riley Street High School is a blight on the face of Sydney and it should be bulldozed!”

They love that word,
bulldozed
. They reckon a lot of things should be bulldozed. Aboriginal housing projects. Youth drop-in centers. Safe injecting rooms. Lots of public high schools.

It’s as clear this morning as it is every other morning that my carefully considered savory-then-sweet toast selection and my painstakingly concocted cup of tea have not had the desired effect. That is, they have not in any way shifted the despair from Mum’s existence.
It wouldn’t matter what I made her for breakfast. I could serve up blueberry and ricotta pancakes with freshly brewed coffee and she’d still be miserable
. I hover about the kitchen helplessly.

“Do you want me to put Jess’s milk on?” I venture.

Jess refuses to eat breakfast—she will, however, accept a cup of hot Ovaltine. The milk has to be warmed in a saucepan on the stove. I have suggested the purchase of a microwave oven to warm up the milk in twenty seconds, among other uses, but this seems to provoke arguments with and between my parents.

“No, I’ll do it,” Mum replies. She stands up and bangs the saucepan down on the burner. Mum’s despair usually swings between two ends of a spectrum—Sad and Wordlessly Shitty. This morning it’s definitely swinging toward Wordlessly Shitty. There’s nothing for me to do but go to school. So I go.

After dinner that evening, I take the phone into my room, place it in front of me on the bed and regard it for several minutes. I’ve never rung Chris at home, never had the nerve. But I
have
to talk to him tonight. I count to three and dial the number.
Blood is thudding in my ears and all the muscles in my abdomen twist uncomfortably.

“Hello?” answers a young woman.

“Hi! Ah, could I please speak to Chris, please.” One
please
would have been enough.

“Certainly. Who’s calling?”

“Amelia Hayes.”

“Just a moment.”

There’s some scrabbling around and I hear her saying, “Chris, it’s for you. Amelia Hayes.”

I think there’s some mockery in the way she said my name.
Why the hell didn’t I just say Amelia? Think Street Cred Donna. Imagine you’ve got a stud through your bottom lip and a tattoo on your bicep
.

“Good evening, Youngster.” Chris’s blessed tones.

“Hi, Chris. What … what are you up to?”

“My sister and I are watching
Media Watch
.”

“Oh … should I call back?”

“Nah, it’s almost finished. What’s up?”

“Well, I was wondering, I … needed to run something by you … ’cause I don’t get it.…”

“What’s up, Youngster?” It’s his Patient Tone. He often adopts the Patient Tone when talking to me.

Here goes
 …

“What the HELL is up with the ending of
Great Expectations
?”

Backing up a tiny bit, at lunch that day I’d been sitting with Penny in our usual spot. The lunch period goes from 12:40 to 1:20. Right on cue at 12:55, the boys that have been blessing us with their company of late come ambling across the grass. They are led by that dreadful Scott, who is way more pleased with himself than he has reason to be. He’s taken to parking himself next
to Penny, reclining with legs outstretched, propping himself up on one elbow like Caecilius, the Pompeii dude from our seventh-grade
Ancient Rome
textbook, and regaling her with his wit. He never, ever acknowledges me, even though I’m always sitting next to Penny when he levers himself in. I keep expecting Penny to tell him he’s a tool and to get lost, but she doesn’t. So, lately, I’ve taken to reading at lunchtime. Surrounded by the forced laughter and novice flirtation of my peers, I bury my head in a book, signaling to all that I strongly disapprove. I wonder if anyone even notices.

Today I read the last five pages of
Great Expectations
. And I need to talk to Chris.

“Uh-oh,” says Chris.

“What the hell!”

“Now steady on—”

“
I saw no shadow of another parting from her!
What does that mean? It
can’t
mean that they’re going to get together. Tell me that’s not what it means.”

“That’s what it means.”

“Then what was the point of any of it? What’s the lesson that Pip learns, that
we
learn from him?”

“Well—”

“For 493 pages I put up with Pip’s shit, put up with him being cruel to the people who loved him and continuing to run around after those who didn’t. Put up with all the ridiculous ‘smoke and mirrors,’ the illusions, the false conclusions, the ‘Ooh, So-and-so is really So-and-so’s father; So-and-so is really Miss Havisham’s jilting fiancé; So-and-so was Pip’s true benefactor; So-and-so was actually the one who made Mrs. Gargery into a vegetable.’ I put up with it all in the hope that at the end the bullshit would be debunked and the characters would see things as they are. Pip
would finally see Estella and Miss Havisham for the cruel bitches they were. He would learn to accept his defeat gracefully, and—unlike Gatsby—get on with his life.”

“We don’t always get what we want, do we? Especially with, you know, wanting other people. But it’s worth something to finally see clearly, isn’t it?”

“Well,
I
think so.”

“Then what was Dickens thinking? What was the point of the whole series of events if not for the hero to mature?”

“Well—”

“
I saw no shadow of another parting from her!
What he should have said was:
I see plenty of shadows of another parting from her, because I choose it to be so. I have lingered long enough in this great ruined place, emotionally and physically, and it’s time for me to move on
.”

“Maybe Dickens was worried that his readers would revolt if they didn’t get a happy ending for Pip and Estella,” Chris offers, finally getting a sentence in edgewise.

“Then he should have had more respect for his readers,” I splutter. “If I want a happy ending I’ll watch
Pretty Woman
. Bloody Pip! He should have married Biddy when he had the chance, gotten a
job
and s
hut up
. Sure, we all want Estella, but we don’t always get what we want, do we?”

“No,” says Chris, with a hint of Gutted Tone. “We do not.”

“
I
had great expectations. Of that book.”

“Do you know that Dickens originally wrote a different ending for the book? One where they don’t get together?”

“No way.”

“Yes way. Pip and Estella go their separate ways. Pip goes off to work in various places. Estella gets beaten to a pulp by her brute of a husband, who eventually gets killed by a horse he is
mistreating. Then she marries the doctor who looked after her after one of the beatings. Pip and Estella run into each other in the street some years later and exchange civilities. Pip is satisfied that she has seen enough suffering to understand what he went through for all those years, but what he really means is that he’s satisfied that she’s had her comeuppance.”

“That’s a much better ending. What happened to that one?”

“He got persuaded out of it by Edward Bulwer-Lytton.”

“Who is Edward Bulwer-Lytton?”

“He’s the genius that originally came up with
It was a dark and stormy night
.”

“No!”

“Yes.”

“That’s depressing.”

“Yeah.” I hear him stretch and yawn. “So you had your heart set on Pip growing up, huh?”

“I wanted him to get
his
comeuppance. To realize he’s let himself be had all these years.”

“But he never got over his fear of Virginia Woolf.”

“He what?”

“Never mind. It’s from—well, I won’t tell you what it’s from. You’ll stumble upon it one day and think,
Ah
!
That’s what Chris meant when he said …
”

Brief silence. I get my breath back. I wish Chris would come and live with me in my little bedroom.

“Well, Youngster, I must go. Try sticking to twentieth-century texts. Lots of confronting reality there.”

“See you at work.”

“Ah.” He yawns again. “Yes.”

I hang up and ponder on my bed for a few minutes. Then I
get to my feet and descend the stairs, clutching my copy of
Great Expectations
. I pause in the downstairs hallway, craning my head toward the back steps leading down to Dad’s study. Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony wafts from underneath the closed study door. I am heartened—Sibelius’s Fifth means he’s in a good mood. It could make the stoniest of hearts tremble.

I knock softly on the door.

“Come in.”

And I do. He’s sitting in the big chair by the window, cigarette in one hand, a copy of the
Spectator
in the other. I turn the volume down a touch.

“Dad.”

“Yes, darling.” He ashes the cigarette with a delicate forefinger.

“What does it mean to be afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

He frowns. “What?”

I wave my copy of
G.E
. in the air.

“If I said, ‘Well, clearly Pip is afraid of Virginia Woolf,’ what does that mean?”

He smiles. Then he puts his cigarette to rest on the ashtray, lays the
Spectator
on the arm of the chair, stands up and scans one of his bookshelves. He takes down a slim paperback, browned with age, and hands it to me.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
? by Edward Albee.

“Read it and see,” he says, returning to his chair.

Bathurst

For the first time in ages I am not working on the weekend. I’m going to Bathurst on the train to visit Lizey. I’ve wanted to go all year but have been too afraid to ask Bianca, who does the roster, if I could have a weekend off. When I told Chris, he frog-marched me down to the service desk and stood beside me as I asked Bianca. She said yes.

Behind her, Jeremy was sitting on the glass counter, all boredom and carefully contrived sangfroid. His red bow tie was missing and his name badge askew. I was directly in his line of vision, but he managed to look right past me. I thought how funny it would be if the glass counter he was sitting on should break. Then he might have to have a facial expression.

“When do you leave, Youngster?” Chris asks as we walk toward the staff exit at the end of the night.

“Tomorrow morning. I catch the early train from Central.”

“Well, you be careful of those uni students. I wouldn’t trust most of ’em with a pretty fifteen-year-old girl.”

Pretty!
Me, pretty! Wait—he does mean me, right? Or is he just making a general statement?

“Yes, you,” he says, reading my mind.

I smile down at the steps. We walk outside and down the street toward Chris’s bus stop, where I’ll leave him and continue my walk home alone.

There is silence. My head fills with the sound of a strange, overpowering “inner Amelia” screaming,
I LOVE YOU! I LOVE YOU!

“Hey, Chris,” I say, in an effort to drown it out.

“Yes, tiger?”

“Martha is afraid of Virginia Woolf.”

“Wow, that didn’t take you long. Very impressive.”

“And probably most people are.”

“Probably.”

“You are.”

“I what?”

We stop walking and face each other. I continue bravely, “Well, you won’t give up the ghost. At least in the end George and Martha give up their ghost.”

“What ghost?”

Careful. Careful
.

“Well, how long have you clung to the Kathy ghost? Any fool could see that she ain’t all that.”

“What have you got against Kathy?” he asks, raising one eyebrow.

“Nothing!” I say hastily. “Nothing. Just, you know, she isn’t nice to you, is she?”

“No.”

“Neither was that Michaela chick.”
Daring, Amelia, very daring!

He gives me a sharp look, and I quickly change the subject.

“Did Kathy find out, you know, about the poem and flowers?”

“Don’t know. Don’t care.”

“It was a great poem.”

“It was a
terrible
poem. But I was counting on her not catching on to that. I doubt that textual analysis is her strong suit.”

“Oh.”

We’ve reached the bus stop.

“I knew you’d like
Virginia Woolf
,” he says.