Perfect Skin (2 page)

First she drove past me slowly down the street, obviously looking for something, her old red Pulsar loaded with junk and going slowly enough for me to notice it and to see a bumper sticker advertising tea, and another with the name of a Cairns car dealer and a phone number two digits too short to be up to date.

Uni starts in a week or two. And the bumper stickers stuck in my head because they were part of – maybe even the basis of – my assumptions about what she was doing. Moving cities, a thousand miles, to study. I still don't think I'd find that easy, even though I'm twice as old now as when I started uni. I still don't know if I could drive a thousand miles with everything I own in the car and set up a new life somewhere, away from everything I'm used to. Of course, that's an assumption too, the untested assumption of an idling mind, out running along a street it's been down plenty of times and that doesn't often present something new to think about.

She got to the end of the street, U-turned and came back and stopped to ask me for directions.

Oh good,
she said,
I was worried for a second,
when I told her there was another section to the road, just over the creek, and that whatever high number she was looking for was probably there, and three easy left turns away.

Near my car, coincidentally, I realised a couple of hundred metres later as the path dipped at the end of the street and I hit the concrete ramp and saw her car again, stopping, behind mine. And I can remember seeing the water flowing out from under the ramp as I ran over it, and seeing that it actually looked like a creek today rather than an empty open drain. Somehow I couldn't tell her she'd rented a place near an open drain. That doesn't seem like a fair introduction to the neighbourhood.

I watched her get out of her car as I ran towards her. She swung her legs out, lifted herself from the driver's seat and stood there, looking at the house, her hands on
her hips. She didn't even shut her door, as though she might still have changed her mind, driven off. Turned north again, and gone.

With our cars parked end-to-end, conversation two was unavoidable. But maybe I would have said something to her anyway.

I said something like, It's not what you were expecting, is it?

And she said,
It does look a bit more condemned than I'd hoped.

I told her there were students living in it last year, and it looked just as condemned then. She laughed, but in the polite way of someone whose situation has not been improved by the joke. The house is in bad shape, and the fact that I park near it often enough to know that it's in a relatively stable state of decay wasn't going to be much help to her. There are tiles missing from one end of the roof, the verandah leans like an old man badly in need of a Zimmer walking frame and the only new feature is the large rezoning application sign at the front.

She said,
Maybe it'll be lovely inside,
knowing it wouldn't be.
I'm not paying anything for it, at least. It belongs to a family friend. I think he hasn't been down here for a while. They're putting units up. Some time.

She was hoping for more, for something different. She'd driven a long way with a different house in her mind, a different beginning to the year. And I felt sorry for her – I still feel sorry for her – but it didn't seem to be my place to do anything. I couldn't think what to do. It would have been easy if there had been some emergency going on, but this was just bad luck, disappointment.

But the moment might have been handled slightly more sensitively if I hadn't right then pressed the button that unlocked my car doors. The doors of the navy BMW parked in front of her old red Pulsar. And they unlocked with a flash of the lights and a smug electronic tone that made me feel like a big middle-aged Beemer wanker.

I remember she looked at the car, then at my hand. I always run with the keys in my hand. I didn't mean to press. I probably press all the time, and spend my whole run locking and unlocking the car, if it's in range.

Mine looks a bit incongruous parked behind that,
she said.
But at least it goes with the house, I suppose.

And that's when I said the BMW wasn't actually mine – which I figured I could, since it wasn't and it won't be, even though I'm driving it now. And conversation two became about that.

No, I wasn't the MLB on the personalised plates. I kind of inherited the car when some things got sorted out. There's a grey Corolla at home. Which I actually own. I just can't see any reason to add distance to its odometer until the lease runs out on this one and I hand it back. And the grey Corolla's got regular plates.

How I came to be explaining this in any detail at all to someone I'd never met, I don't know, but that's what made me late for work. A student who'd found the falling-down house she was to live in and didn't want to face it, and wanted to talk about anything else instead. And the inexplicable lie she thought she was being told about car ownership was simply the first topic going.

And no, MLB doesn't want the car back, or the plates. Personalised plates are so . . . eighties. Anyway,
I think she got them as a twenty-first present from a bunch of people she'd stopped liking by her twenty-second. Something like that. Something very MLB.

That's what I told her. And then I said I thought she must have a lot to unpack and I was going to be late for work if I wasn't careful. I wished her luck with the house, as though that's a thing you do with houses, and as though her luck with the house hadn't already declared itself to be bad, and I got into the car.

Got in and drove without stopping to arrange the towel on the seat first, in the way that I usually do. Drove and sweated right into the BMW upholstery and took the first corner faster than I meant to, while pushing the Lemonheads CD into the player. Getting my head into work, singing along and wondering why the Lemonheads fell out of my brain the moment my feet hit bitumen. I would have felt quite good about myself, running with the Lemonheads going through my mind.

And the running's easier now, much easier than it was when I started months ago. I pass more people than pass me now. I get the chance to be amazed at just how slowly some people can run. Not that the fast people aren't still way out of my league, and that won't change. But it doesn't have to. That's not what this is about. I'm fitter. I've never been this fit. That's good. It's enough. This is about fitness.

So it's important to make time for it. Around the baby things, around work. And it's enough that I have to try to make time for all that, without getting into conversations about number plates, or whatever. Useless attempts to offer some kind of reassurance to someone whose luck you can't change.

It's strange. That was probably the first time in months that I've had a conversation with someone I don't know, other than a patient or one of the childcare people. And that seems like it should be a bad thing – keeping to your own small world to that degree – but why should it? It's having a baby around, partly. It changes things, particularly how you spend your time.

Sylvia's at my door again, wondering what's got into me today, but making her point with nothing more vocal than raised eyebrows. But they make it clearly enough. I'm well used to interpreting her eyebrows now. Not that there's anything subtle about them. They're a pretty fiendish pair of eyebrows, but that's Sylvia. From certain angles she looks a little like Robin Williams in
Mrs Doubtfire.
From other angles she looks more like the regular Robin Williams, but with a well-tended bun and, fortunately, less arm hair. She's fifty-something, and treats us all like children who aren't quite behaving. Particularly George, who gave her the job in the first place. It's a system that works better than I might have expected.

Sorry, yeah, I'm ready, I tell her. Let's have him. Her.

Her. The name's on the file. Like the others.

I've seen my twelve o'clock patient before.

It's not getting lighter,
his mother says, about the red lump of a strawberry naevus on his forehead just above his nose.
And I've thought about it, and I'd really like to do something before he starts school.

I take the photo from last year out of his file, and we compare. I go round to their side of the table and crouch down next to Tom. I hold a mirror up to let him see his lesion, and I hold the photo next to it.

Okay, I tell him, what we hoped was going to happen was that this would just start to fade away. And then we wouldn't do anything. But it doesn't look like it's going to, does it? So we can do something to make it go away. How does that sound?

Tom looks far from convinced.

Remember?
his mother says.
Remember what we talked about if you promise to do everything the doctor tells you?

McDonald's?
Suddenly things look up.
Okay.

So we can make it go away?

Yeah.

Good. Well, I'd better tell you how we're going to do that. And it's pretty clever, and it should all go fine. First – and this is the funny bit – I'm going to put a sticker on your head.

A sticker?

Yeah. I'm going to squirt something on there, then put a sticker on. And we'll leave that there for a little while, then when you come back and I take the sticker off, it'll be numb. Do you know what numb is? Numb is when you can't feel anything. So I can fiddle round with the lump, and you won't feel it. And you just have to lie really still for a little while, then it'll all be done. And we might have to get you back a couple more times to do that all again to make sure it's finished. But all you have to do each time is stay still. Sound okay?

Yeah.

And how does it sound to you? I ask his mother. Can we get you back in an hour or two, once the local's taken effect? What I want to do is use some local anaesthetic cream, rather than anything that might be uncomfortable.

That sounds good. And coming back would be fine.
We go into the treatment room for me to put the local on and she says,
How's your baby? You were going to have a baby not long after we were here last time.

She's fine. She's really good, actually. A lot of fun. A lot of work too, but a lot of fun. She's six months now.

What's her name?

Lily.

That's a nice name. You should have a photo on your desk. You and your wife and Lily.

Yeah. I keep thinking I should take more photos of her. She's only this old once, I guess.

The first thing I do at lunchtime is call my mother. I ask her how Lily is and she says,
We've been having fun. Lots of rolling round, some sucking of feet.

I think that started a couple of days ago.

Could be teething.

Do you think so? She seems pretty calm, most of the time.

She is six months.

Yeah, I know. And that's kind of hard to believe, isn't it?

George sticks his head around the door and tells me lunch is here.

There was a time when Lily would almost fit on my hand. It wasn't long ago, but now that it's gone it almost seems like something I've made up.

Salad roll, large,
George says, when I get round to the lunch room, and he throws it to me like a quarterback.

Would you treat your own lunch that way, Porge?

Would it ever be a salad roll, large? They GladWrap
them good and tight, Jon Boy, just for throwing.
George has three pies in front of him. He picks one up, takes a bite, and through a full mouth says,
Lentils,
as though he's therefore got the healthy food pyramid totally under control.

Wendy comes in and takes the other salad roll (small) without having to demonstrate her catching prowess. She sees me as a convert to the salad roll now, though all it actually shows on my part is a lack of imagination. I decided a while back that I could do better than cheap Chinese and sloppy lasagne, and suddenly I was a regular with the salad roll (large) simply because I hadn't given lunch enough thought to come up with two healthy options. And it's such a seventies high-school tuckshop choice.

Oscar claims the last pie – the other lentil pie – and starts on it carefully with a knife and fork. Despite having seen him eat plenty of times, it can be hard not to notice his neatness as he goes about it. Particularly when he's sitting next to George, who treats each pie like a mortal enemy and attacks. It's like eating in a Hall of Mirrors – each of them embarking on the same process, but one of them turning it minute and the other beastly. Wendy knows it, I know it, and they don't.

Oscar lives at George's place and they always split the takeaway bills evenly, since each of them gets a whole meal from his portion. Two satay sticks would do Oscar most nights, but it really is as though they haven't noticed the disparity. Oscar is the definition of compact, the last person I know to wear panther-print Bata Scout school shoes. He got so annoyed when they stopped putting the compass in the heel – when he was in his
twenties – that my father made him write to the company and complain.
There's a lot you can do with a compass, lad,
I think my father said, getting on side. Not that any of us could ever think of a second thing you could do with a compass. But I think the letter scored Oscar a free pair of compassed shoes that someone found in the warehouse. They wouldn't reverse their decision, though.

Today, mid-pie, he says,
Hey, check this out,
and takes a very small phone from one of his pockets.
Pretty cool.

Oh god, you've gone and bought it,
George says in an exaggerated groan.
I knew you would. Why couldn't you get one the size of a phone? Nanotech as virility symbol, episode sixty-four. A definite step beyond the big car for the small-penised man.