Love and Other Perishable Items (3 page)

The Kathy Virus and Other Anomalies

“Fishing off the company pier,” as I have overheard Chris refer to it, is a common practice among the part-time staff at Coles. Bianca, for example, is twenty-three and has been going out with Andy from Canned Goods, age eighteen, for some months. This is in addition to the bow-tie adjusting she indulges in on a regular basis with most of the other male staff members. Like I said earlier, Andy is a pretty quiet guy. I imagine he just does what he is told. They must both get something out of the relationship—I just have no idea what it is.

“Sex,” says Chris when I ask him. “They both get sex.”

Lots of the younger girls have crushes on Ed, who, even I have to admit, is pretty good-looking. He is also aloof, adding to his appeal. Sadly for the girls, he is generally too stoned to take advantage of their attentions. Chris can frequently be seen leaning over the counter of the service desk berating him. “You have to be in it to win it, Edward!” and the like.

The yawning six-year chasm between my age and Chris’s is not the only fly in the proverbial ointment of this “loving Chris” business. I’m not even sure what “getting” Chris would involve; all I know is I want him. I want to be enfolded by him somehow, and to possess him. To have unfettered and exclusive access to him all the time. To feel how I feel around him all the time. To know that he loves being around me too. To feel more of his skin on my skin.

But Chris seems to be in perpetual pursuit of another girl from work called Kathy Rushworth. She’s twenty-two and studying
primary education at the same university as Chris. Like Bianca, she is a supervisor and so is sort of Chris’s boss. He refers to his long-standing crush as the Kathy virus, as it seems to take a relapsing-remitting course.

“Got a
raging
case of it today, Youngster,” he mutters, pushing a cart past my register with white knuckles, watching Kathy talking animatedly to Stuart Green from Canned Goods at the service desk.

The following week Chris declares, “It’s in remission!” and declines Kathy’s invitation to go to the pub after work. Instead, he hangs around after his shift advising me on my English assignment.

Kathy is dark, pretty, small—
elfin
even—and completely uninterested in Chris. Except, strangely, when the Kathy virus is in remission. Then she bombards him with a campaign of arm-touching (signature move), bow-tie adjusting (borrowed from Bianca) and leaning over his register giving him her undivided, head-cocked-to-one-side attention. An immediate relapse of the Kathy virus invariably follows.

That Kathy needs a can of reduced-for-quick-sale Spam pegged at the back of her head, and I reckon I’m the woman for the job. They’re stacked within easy reach of my register.

After glaring at the Chris-and-Kathy spectacle for the whole shift from my dress-circle vantage point at register seven, I walk home through the deserted mall and dark streets.

Fifteen-year-old checkout girls are in no position to compete with someone like Kathy. Even Street Cred Donna would be struggling to make serious inroads with Chris. (Which, by the way, I am totally convinced she is. I am not the only youngster looking up to Chris with a thumping heart. She just shows it
differently. I can spot a rival at twenty paces.) She has recently added a tattoo of barbed wire encircling her upper right arm (as a sixteenth-birthday present to herself) and has her mother’s name tattooed on her other arm. You can’t see her tats—her work shirt covers them. Chris told me about them.

My sixteenth birthday is months and months away. I have no tats. I don’t smoke. I have no idea how to wear makeup, and now that my older sister has moved away to live on campus, I have no one to teach me. I don’t stand a chance. I know this.

I turn my key in the front door and grunt a greeting to my mother, who is folding laundry in front of the TV. Dad is away this week.

I sling my heavy backpack to the floor next to the couch, sit down beside Mum and take my shoes off.

“How was your day?” I ask her.

She doesn’t answer. Never a good sign.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

I wait uneasily. “Bad day at work?”

“No.”

“Jess throwing tantrums?”

“No.”

Her movements folding the clothes are jerky and angry, and she slams every folded item down on its pile. Her face is tired, her mouth a straight line.

“What’s wrong?” I ask again.

“Nothing!”

I won’t get it out of her. I’m short on time anyway. Got hours of homework and it’s almost nine-thirty.

“Is there any dinner?”

“In the oven.”

I eat standing up in the kitchen, rinse my plate, collect my backpack and climb the stairs. When I reach the top, it is dark, except for the green glow of Jess’s night-light in the end bedroom.
English first
, I think as I snap on my bedroom light.

My English teacher, Mrs. Cumming, who I have for the second year running, has a very “interpretive” approach to the tenth-grade syllabus. She’s decided that the first text this year is Sylvia Plath’s
The Bell Jar
. I’m halfway through it. The main character has tried to kill herself a couple of times now. She’s also
really
uncomfortable with the fact that she’s a virgin. She looks around and divides people into two categories—people who have had sex and people who have not. That’s something I can relate to a bit. No one in my immediate peer group has crossed that Rubicon (I don’t think!), but still, I live in the world. And I’m in love with a twenty-one-year-old. So it crosses my mind. Whenever anything to do with sex comes up in conversation with Chris, he gives me this sympathetic look, like he doesn’t want to scare me, or confront me. Like I’m too delicate.
Scare me!
I want to shout.
Confront me! I’m not so breakable—go on, try!

I am nowhere near sold on
The Bell Jar
but keep plowing through it because Chris nodded his approval the week before.

He came into the staff room on my break and saw me reading it. “Sylvia Plath, eh? Hard-core.”

“Yes. Yes, it is hard-core.”

“This is the weird English teacher, right?”

“Yes. Yes, she is weird.”

“Want a coffee?” He got a stack of Styrofoam cups out of the cupboard and prized the lid off the massive tin of International Roast so generously provided. Yuck.

“Yes. Thank you.”

I closed the book and waited for him to sit down. A cup of International Roast with Chris at 8:15 p.m. on a school night. Plastic chairs in a windowless room. It was the high point of my day. It was the high point of my life.

The margins of all my exercise books are filled with letter
C
s in various colors, fonts and incarnations. I stare out of classroom windows, wondering what he is doing. I imagine him at university, taking lecture notes, hanging out with his friends at the uni bar, putting in his two cents’ worth at the sociology seminar he loves. And, of course, talking to girls. Grown-up girls at university. Girls who can go drinking with him after class. Girls his own age who he could confidently introduce to his family and friends. Girls who know how to dress and wear makeup. Girls who have had sex. Girls who study the same texts as him. Girls who stand a chance in hell.

I’m quieter than usual during the lunch period. I lie on my back on the grass, my head resting on my backpack, surrounded by the voices of my friends, and look up at the bright blue sky. Penny sits next to my inert form, talking to Ally and Eleni, but occasionally she waves a hand in front of my face and shakes her head, laughing.

“She all right?” someone asks.

“Sure,” says Penny. “She’s just in her happy place.” Penny drops her hand onto mine and briefly squeezes it.

The six lanes of traffic on the other side of the fence hum to my right. I close my eyes and imagine Chris brushing my hair away from my neck with warm hands. I open my eyes again. My lips feel like they are burning.

At work, I hear that Street Cred Donna’s dad has belted her
and kicked her out of the house. Egged on in large part by the stepmother. Her real mother remarried and moved to America when Donna was twelve. Up ahead of me on register twelve Donna is serving customers, her eyes puffy and her shirt un-ironed.

During my break, I walk out to the back dock, eating my granola bar, and happen upon Chris and Donna. She’s crying. Her face is streaked with eye makeup, her shoulders are shaking and she smokes with nicotine-stained fingers. Chris is gently stroking her back. Catching sight of me over the top of her bowed head, he wordlessly waves me away.

I wonder, despicably,
If I invent a similar crisis, will he stroke my back too?

Daylight

The next day I sit in math with Penny in our usual spot—far left, second row from the front. I knit my brows together and attempt to adjust to the hard, cold daylight. To the way things are.
It’s never going to happen
.

“Probably not,” says Penny, reading my mind and telling it like it is in her usual style.

I sigh and look out at the park on the other side of the road. I can see a PE class of unfortunates jogging up a hellish incline.
Unless
, I think, my momentary flirtation with reality dissolving,
I can somehow infiltrate the older set at work. Get him to associate me with his contemporaries. Maybe I could get hold of his reading list for uni. Maybe I could start smoking, get a fake ID and start going to the pub. Maybe I could learn to stomach beer and how to order it. Maybe I could buy some clothes aside from jeans and T-shirts. Maybe I could learn some new and super-impressive words. Convince him that I am a twenty-year-old trapped in the body of a minor
.

“I could do it,” I say to Penny. “It could be done. Right?”

“Oh, sweetie. I think it would be hard to pull off. And anyway, he probably likes that you are different from his usual world.”

She’s right; it
would
be hard to pull off. Observe this monumental fuckup from last week.

Against all the odds, Chris had run out after me into the street after I had knocked off from a Sunday shift. “Oi! Youngster!”

I’d turned to face him and instinctively stood up straighter at his nearness.

“Look, some of us are going back to Ed’s for a bowl. Do you want to come?”

“A bowl? A bowl of what?”

He rolls his eyes. “Um, I don’t know.… A bowl of ice cream. What do you
think
?”

Ice cream? I’m on a dairy-free diet because I’m lactose intolerant. And Ed lives several suburbs away; how would I get home afterward? Would Mum and Dad notice that I was late and want answers? Mrs. Hulme wanted chapters two and three of
The Great War
summarized by the next day. But this was the chance of a lifetime!

I agonized. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other and finally stammered, “I—I can’t.” (Eloquence is just one of my gifts.) “Too much homework … and … and I can’t really have ice cream. Just … just soy ice cream … since it’s non-dairy …” My voice trailed off.

“Um, don’t worry about it,” he said, edging away.

Bugger!

I could see Ed, Bianca, Andy, Kathy (damn her!) and Donna (heartsick) assembling at the staff exit, waiting for Chris. Bloody Donna has managed to get hip to their jive. Look at her, fumbling in her canvas satchel for a cigarette, lighting it, then Bianca’s, with her Zippo. The metallic clicking sound that it made when she flicked the lid back down against her palm seemed to encapsulate everything I was lacking. Then she took a drag and blew a steady plume of smoke, looking out from behind it with equally smoky eyes. (I had found some kohl in my mother’s makeup bag the week before and tried to re-create Donna’s look on my own eyes. It just looked stupid.)

“I shouldn’t have asked you anyway,” he was saying. “You go home and do your homework.”

I don’t want to go home and do my homework! I want to come with you! I want to be out late at Ed’s house and fall asleep on his couch with my head in your lap. I’ll eat ice cream! I’ll do whatever it takes!

“All right. See you.”

“See you.”

I must have looked crestfallen.

“Are you still studying World War I?” he asked, taking pity on me like the big baby I was.

“Yeah,” I replied in a small voice.

“You should read
All Quiet on the Western Front
. I’ll bring it in for you on Tuesday night, okay?”

“Okay.”

He turned on his heel and went back to join the others.

I’d walked home muttering curses and clenching my fists. When I arrived, the house was dark and quiet. I rummaged around for the phone number for Liza’s share house, took the phone into my room and dialed in the number.

It rang and rang before the beep and a female voice inquired somewhat uncertainly, “Hello?” over very loud music. I asked several times to speak to my sister before the female voice undertook to go off and find her for me. About five minutes later I heard fumbling and then finally Liza’s voice.

“Hello?”

“Lizey. It’s me.”

“He-ey, little sis! How’re you?”

“Yeah, fine. Look, I was wondering, um, what’s a bowl?”

Mystified silence
.

“You know, like, if people are ‘having a bowl’ … What’s a bowl?”

“Oh. It’s a kind of pipe thingy you use … you know, like a bong.”

“Oooooh,
right
.”

“Got it?”

“Yep. Thanks. Better go. Lots of homework. Bye.”

I hung up and sat motionless on my bed. Then I dialed the number again.

“Lizey? Me again. What … what’s a bong?”

“It’s a water pipe for smoking pot in.”

“Oh.”

“
Why
are you asking?”

“Um …”

“Are you getting on it?”

“No, no … I’m not ‘getting on it.’ ”
So
, so
not
, I thought.
Almost, but totally
blew it.

“Well,” mused Liza, “if you’re going to try it, you should come up one weekend and I’ll get some for you. That way I can keep an eye on you. And give you the talk.”