Perfect Skin (14 page)

Katie, It's like this. I suspect Flag hasn't seen a lot of men weeing before.

No.

Katie, It's probably not possible to explain the events of Saturday night in a way that seems reasonable, or perhaps even plausible. (I'd settle for plausible.) I don't think I even told you how much I'd enjoyed the dinner, horrified as I was at the accident in the bathroom. Flag and I did seem to be getting on well and he is, as you know, a very playful cat. He happened to lunge at a rather unfortunate moment, and this created a small mess. When I tried to catch him so that I could clean him, he jumped out the window. I must have used an entire roll of paper cleaning up. I'm sure you can imagine how embarrassed I was, and that I just didn't know how to explain it to you.

I go on-line to send, and I have two new emails. A joke forward from George that I'm sure he forwarded weeks ago, but that must have come back around, and one called ‘calender-driven email' from a student at Queensland Uni. Nothing from Katie. That's probably for the best.

I open the student one.

Hey, just got my email access here sorted out. Trying to learn how to use it (not used to the software). Which is why my address has my student no. in it and nothing more friendly. I've tried attaching a document, just to see if it works. So let me know.

A

It works, it's Ash's uni timetable. I email her right back, and I tell her Tuesdays suck.

I send the Katie email, get off-line and decide I'd rather pick up the Bean from my parents than take on my in-tray. Wendy, who has stayed back taking on her in-tray, gets to the lift at the same time as I do.

Katie is emailed, I tell her. It took a bit of thought, but it's done.

And I'm up on the paperwork, so a big elephant stamp for each of us then.

No, I think you get the elephant stamp. I didn't do any paperwork. But then, you didn't wee on anything, did you? It does make a person start the week behind.

Well, you've done the email now. You've cleared the decks.

And I'm assuming Saturday night is something we can keep to ourselves.

There's a pause, and that can't be good. She jiggles her car keys in her hand.

Jon, you went over to my sister's place for dinner and you urinated on her cat. Was there one day in your life when you would have kept that kind of thing to yourself if it had been someone else?

It was the dinner. I was thinking it was a dinner party.
I was caught unawares. I'm not ready for this stuff, for nights like that.

Jon, that bit of it's fine. That stuff happens. Being not ready is quite okay.
I
don't plan to
go
there. You know that. The bit
I
want to tell people is the urinating bit. Let me put it another way. The bit I've been telling people is the urinating bit.

Tonight, there's more teething. It's probably more teething. Not much sleep, anyway. A grizzly baby, a worried dog and, out there in the world, who knows how many people who have already heard about my Saturday night.

The Bean works up a sweat with the effort she's putting in. I wipe her face and head with a wet washer, but the game I try to turn that into isn't good enough to end in sleep. It's time for the car, the soothing rhythm of driving, the aircon, the Lemonheads.

We drive, I sing, the Bean chews away at the wet washer. The CD ends, I talk. About the heat, about summer and winter, temporarily about the long-term implications of climate change, about traffic lights, about Ash's house where the lights are all off, about the rowing sheds at uni, about the City Cat ferry stop, the route I run every weekday, about the sugarcane farm that was here in this pocket of the river before they built the campus. About her mother.

Somehow I'm talking about Mel, about how we hardly knew each other when we were here at uni. That we really met afterwards.

I'm listening to some tour-guide voice telling Lily about Mel, and it's me and I want to throw up. I have to stop the car.

It's just the surprise of it. I was commentating, in the usual bland way, and she crept in. I take a few deep breaths. Usually I think advice to take a few deep breaths is crap, but this time it helps. I should pay more attention to what I'm saying. I hit the play button, and the Lemonheads come on. I sing, and drive.

I've got to watch for that sort of thing. I've got to handle it better. I have to work it out first, rather than just let it out. Kids take things in, even really early on, and I'm not ready to put that in the Bean's world yet. It's hard enough, anyway, fitting it into its place in a lot of other worlds, but I don't know when she'll know enough about life to understand it.

I took Wendy's kids to McDonald's a few weeks ago, and Emily started talking about birds, birds taking away babies. I think she was worried about Lily. It took a while to work out what she was on about, and it was only when I asked her if the birds were storks that I had a chance of fixing it. I told her not to worry. That birds never took babies away. That there's a very old story about where babies come from that says storks carry them here in their beaks. But even that's just an old story, and everything's okay.

I told Wendy and she said,
Bloody grandparents. The deprogramming I have to do
. . .

But that one was easy to fix. It was far harder months ago, working out how to explain why Mel wouldn't be coming round any more. Why it was me and a baby instead. Actually, it was impossible. Beyond me. I decided I couldn't see them, because I knew it'd be the first question and I knew it wouldn't go well.

But Wendy came over. She came over a lot anyway,
but one day she came over to talk about this – as though she could read my mind to tell me that Emily had been talking about Mel. Jon and Mel.
Where are Jon and Mel?

So
I told her,
she said.
I told them. And, I'm sorry, but I've done it in a kind of strange way. I couldn't work out how to do it. So, for the moment, I've told them Mel's gone away. And
–
I should probably have planned it better
–
Steve's the only person they know who goes away.
To
Mount Isa with work.
So
they're assuming Mel's in Mount Isa, and that's kind of where I left it.

And I said to her, That's fine. Lots of skin cancers in the Isa.

That's what I told her, and that way she smiled instead of crying. Crying was a distinct possibility, as though she'd let me down by being unable to find a tellable truth in what had happened.

She smiled and nodded. Asked how I was, and we both waited for the moment to pass. She said,
It's all 
so
strange,
and I said, I know. And she went into my kitchen, blew her nose on a paper towel and made us both coffee. She'd never made coffee at my place before. That was always a thing I did. And I couldn't believe that, in some peculiar way, I was secretly annoyed with her for making coffee, because it just made things stranger.

When she left, I said I'd go to their place for a barbecue the next day, now that we had a plan that would do for the moment, an explanation that could buffer, temporarily, the inexplicable truth.

And I wanted to say to her – then, and plenty of times since – How the fuck do you explain this stuff? If only the hassles with explaining it ended when the person was five or six or whatever age you needed to be to have
some comprehension of it all. As if it's something you can tell even the people who can understand what you're saying. I haven't told a new person for months. It's just too big. It's not like it's the size of a piece of information yet. It'd be more like turning myself inside out than telling a person something.

It's the shadow I'm standing in, a rock I can't push past. I don't have it down to tellable size, so I don't meet people. That's how I work. And it works for now, and I'll move on in my own time. So people shouldn't ask me to dinner and think it's some kind of date, particularly if they already know. They shouldn't muscle in on my runs and play with my baby and tell me about their thesis topics. And make me like them and want to see more of them. Because I'll lie by omission, and that's not fair to any of us.

I'm doing fine, in so many ways, but it's still so hard to tell people. And I'm terrified of the moment when Lily is suddenly old enough to understand it. This horrible injustice that's been done her. But that's not yet. It's telling people I meet now that's become the issue.

Ash. I mean Ash. Telling Ash. She's becoming a test of this, and some measure of how little I've travelled these last six months. Not that I have any compulsion to rush beyond the people around me. I just hadn't realised I'd been quite this insular. Lily keeps me busy. That's genuinely part of it, and a good part of it. And work is too, the re-imposed routines of work. Three half days and two full days a week. Not completely like it used to be, but the right amount for now.

We had to look at the business structure after Mel died, since I owned two quarters of it all of a sudden
and I didn't want to. We had to think about getting someone else to cover Mel's share of the work, and we had to decide whether we'd do that with part-timers or get a new person to buy in.

And I sat there, not really listening, and we'd stop the meetings when I'd visibly stopped caring, and we'd take it slowly. I'd sit there, remember a couple of years before, when we were putting it all together the first time, and it didn't make sense to be having to go through so much of that again so soon.

It probably wasn't easy for the others, either, but I can't say I noticed that.

If I think back now to the meetings a few months ago, I can see the strain on their faces. I don't think I'm inventing it, even if I didn't register it at the time. And it's different, still different here now. For them as well as me, and I'm not sure I knew that. They knew Mel too, after all.

I remember when we set the practice up and how, if we hadn't known each other so well, there might have been concerns about the structure, since a couple technically controlled half of it. But, from before we started, everyone knew it wouldn't be a problem. We knew Mel and I would disagree on most things, since that's what we did. It turned out that the four of us disagreed on plenty of things, but Mel and I had the advantage of being able to argue about it in the car afterwards, and at home for as long as we wanted.

And, as a business devoted to laser surgery of the skin, we argued most about music. We argued about sound systems, then the types of music that might be played, then their implications. George said it worried
him, that he could see where it was all heading. That, if we agreed on Vivaldi (to pick one extreme), someone some day could demand Metallica, and what would we do? Most of us would draw a line in there somewhere, but we'd all draw it in different places.

We're heading for middle-of-the-road,
he said.
We have to fight against that. We're negotiating blandification. It's the Classic Hits format. It's stagnation. It's a slow death. It's emblematic of a civilisation in decay. In the years before the Roman Empire fell, they reverted to a Classic Hits format.

And Mel said whatever music was played we had to be able to control the volume in each room, because she'd probably want it off most of the time.

Then there was the issue of whether Laser West would be one word or two. And if it was one, whether or not the W would be capped.

We agreed on which lasers we wanted without much debate, and they cost one hundred thousand dollars each.

Then, after Mel died and I went back, it wasn't like the same place. Patients weren't even like the same phenomenon for a while. I could do the surgical things. I liked the parts of the job where the people shut up and I was down there close to the skin, working in microns. It was the talking parts I couldn't handle. I'd find myself explaining and explaining before the procedure, working towards some kind of informed consent and suddenly I'd wonder why the hell these details mattered. And then I'd tell myself to stick to it, I'd remember the next detail and I'd be rolling again, with hardly a pause on the outside. It's normal for there to be some mild redness and swelling around the treated area . . .

I'd remember, you have to tell people things. You have to get them ready for the common things, and let them know the likelihood of others. Uncommon things happen. Medicine can be like that, sometimes even when it's almost guaranteed to work out well.

But it's not guaranteed, and even when the odds are something massive to one, there's still the one.

The first forty weeks of Mel's pregnancy were uneventful. It was the last hour when it went wrong.

There was commotion first. Or concern, then commotion, then desperate measures, then a time on life support. Academic signs of death while ventilation was going on. Automatic-piloted decisions, and a brand new baby. I was there when things stopped. I remember the Intensive Care guy who talked to me so long it must have been an explanation. But it was like tinnitus. Like a sound that was ugly and nonsensical. With its content so impossible to put together that it was already a blur when it left his mouth, incomprehensible noise. And I noticed his hair. I noticed that he could at least have combed his hair.

And we didn't know what she'd be called. Lily was Mel's choice, but I was never drawn to it. I don't know how many alternatives I'd suggested. And then she was born, and Mel was dead.

Months later I think I like it, even though I'm in the habit of something less formal.

And we're miles now from the uni campus, but she's asleep. The car clock says two fifty-two. I turn the music down, and head for home.

I run anyway. Usually I start so slowly after one of these interrupted nights that I don't even try to persuade my body to do anything at speed. I tell Ash about the teething, and not to expect much from me. She tells me she'll be gentle.