Perfect Skin (3 page)

Hey, I'm a small man. A small phone works for me. It's a simple matter of scale. Nothing to do with my penis. And, anyway, look at me. I weigh forty-eight kilos. I wear schoolboy-size pants. Who's going to look at me and think there's a big penis?

Come on. George has got a point, I say, deciding to take him on. You weren't offering it that way. You were being size-ist again. Going down that ‘small is sexy' track. And how does that phone work style-wise for the guys who fight out of the flyweight division?

Medium-to-large guys, for instance,
George specifies.

Or large guys who used to be medium.

Without making this personal.

Hey, you were never medium, Porge,
Oscar says.

This is the phone equivalent of the small, sleek, throbbing red sports car that's all engine. And I can't get one butt cheek into those. This is what I'm saying.
You're turning small and sleek and intricate into something desirable, and where's the room for the big simple people in your new millennium? The people whose hands work best with a house-brick-size phone, who biologically need the Landcruiser-equivalent vehicle.

You big guys have had it your way too long.

And can I get a date any more? I'm emasculated by this. This phone,
George says, taking it between thumb and forefinger,
this is the new millennium penis. The ‘wow' penis. That's what it's about. Wow factor. And big things don't have it. Big is passé now. It's all about neat little things with flair, presentation, cutting-edge applications.

What, the penis that's also a corkscrew and nail clippers?

No, that sounds like the Swiss-army penis. And those applications, while they broaden the scope of the instrument, aren't exactly cutting edge. Maybe I'm thinking more about slinky contours, a funky range of colours.

Yeah, that'd be it,
Wendy says.
A funky range of colours'd be enough for me. That'd fix all the design flaws. How about we vote for penises in all colours and move on to the next agenda item? I think improving the penis is probably beyond us since, for a start, you'd have to try attaching it to some kind of brain. It does usually operate without much input from the cranial one.

You don't mean Steve?
George begins.

No, Steve's the exception. Now that he's trained. I'm talking generally. The people who think their idea of – what was it – flair? Who think that flair is some substitute for a second's consideration. And if it turns out that it's not biologically possible to attach the penis to a thinking body
part, some delaying device would be okay. A warning signal even, so you knew there was, like, a minute to go.

Or a seven-second delay, like live radio.

Now there's a very male time frame. Why does it so often get treated like speed reading? It's not better if it's faster. That only means you get to roll over and sleep sooner. And how do you think it is for women, reaching their prime at thirty-five when you reach yours at eighteen? You were all appalling when you were eighteen. No reasonable woman went near any of you.

As opposed to now, you mean?
George says.

Wendy stops, looks at us and laughs.
Good point. Nice phone, Oscar. That's what I meant to say.

Thanks, Wend.

So we begin our meeting. The four of us. Three of us associates in LaserWest, Oscar the hired-hand part-timer. It's a Wendy MBA strategy, regular meetings. Not that you need a degree to see the sense in it but, since Wendy's the one with the MBA, it's the kind of policy she gets to set.

Today, she talks through budgets and billing, how much we're spending on disposables, patient numbers, which have been down a little for this month and the last, exactly as anticipated with Christmas and the holidays.

But it's at least as busy as this time last year,
she says,
which means it should be busier over the next couple of months. So it's probably time to be looking seriously at getting another dermatologist in to take some of the load from George. What do people think about that?

She looks at me, and I nod.

Yeah.

It's easy to agree with. The numbers show we'll need
someone else, and with George the only one of us who's a specialist dermatologist (and referral patterns as they are), it's another dermatologist we need. But I'm tired today and I can't concentrate, and I'm looking past Wendy's head and out the window. So I agree and I tell her I'm happy if she starts asking around, and I leave it at that. It's still hot outside, from the look of it, and the window tint makes the sky a deeper blue. Lily didn't sleep so well last night, and she's on my mind today.

When the meeting is closing it's as though Wendy's aware of that, and she says to me,
Childcare's back on for tomorrow. The runny-nose emergency is over.
As though it's the last item of business.

Then she and George have their two o'clock patients to see and I have Nigel telling me,
The strawberry naevus from this morning's back and ready to go.

After work I go to Coles. At the start of the day I was carrying a list of things to buy, but it's elsewhere now. And when I lose my list I usually buy toilet paper, just to be sure. Sometimes I end up with an awful lot of toilet paper that way, but I never run out.

But I usually buy Designer Collection grey, which seems to be absent today. So I stand there, thinking about the cupboard under the bathroom sink. Trying to visualise it, to put a picture in my mind of its stock levels. Meanwhile, singing along to 10CC's ‘The Things We Do For Love' on the muzak, and only becoming aware of it a couple of verses in.

Can I help you, sir?
a woman's voice says next to me, just as I realise I'm putting in a significant subconscious effort to portray a mad bastard, standing quietly singing
a seventies hit to an empty toilet-paper shelf.

Yeah, I can't see the Designer Collection grey, I tell her as I turn, figuring that the singing's made it too late for dignity already and I might as well not hide my toilet-paper preference from the Coles staff.

Designer Collection grey? Toilet paper has names like that?
the student from this morning's run says, smirking at me, and then deciding what the hell, why not laugh?

Maybe.

She laughs again. If it wasn't at me, I think we'd both be having fun here.

You have to put thought into toilet paper, I tell her. You don't just pull off a six pack without slowing down on your way past, you know. And, if you'd seen my bathroom, you'd understand why it had to be Designer Collection grey. This peach, for instance, it'd send out all the wrong signals, design-wise.

Really?

Yeah. See?

I point to the packet.

This bit here. ‘Complement your bathroom', it says. Peach would be a radical departure for me.

You read toilet-paper packets?
She takes it from me.
Hey, it also says, ‘Try the unexpected and be adventurous. Use colours and objects not commonly found in bathrooms.' What's that about?

I don't want to know. I'm happy to go no further than point one – complement your bathroom. But it's possible that I could be a creature of habit. People might have said that once or twice.

So, is the running a habit too?

Yeah. It'd happen most mornings.

I
might see you out there. I run a bit myself. I'm Ash, by the way. Ashley.

I'm Jon.

And I've never met anyone while standing next to this much toilet paper before. Maybe that's what suddenly makes me feel awkward and wonder what I'm doing here. Standing with this student who must think I'm at least eccentric, hung up on very specific toilet paper and singing to the shelf when the toilet paper isn't there. I'm not sure what to do, where to look, where I should look at a time like this.

So I look down into her trolley and I find myself saying, No-one can eat that much sour cream . . . as though it's any of my business at all.

I've really lost it this evening.

It's those months without meeting new people. That's what I put it down to afterwards. After Ash has emphatically told me sour cream goes with anything. After she has asked my advice as to whether she should buy toilet paper based on complementing the peeling paint on the wall or the dark fungus on the ceiling. After she has thrown a six pack of peach into my trolley and told me,
Vibrant and contrasting
–
you'll thank me for it,
and we've both suddenly realised we don't actually know each other, and reeled off in opposite directions. And then, I suspect, scuttled up and down the aisles, doing our utmost to stay well apart.

I should concentrate so much more when I'm out. You change the way you operate when you're the only adult in a house with a six-month-old child, and I
should remember to change back to my previous well-monitored self in public. It's a critical age for communication – I have a book that says that – so you find yourself verbalising any thought that comes into your head, so that she gets to learn what words are about. You wander round the house talking about trees and birds and dog hair. About putting that dirty plate in the dishwasher. About tucking your own shirt in. All without any inhibitions.

You find yourself singing a lot, because all your life you wouldn't have minded singing a lot but you were so obviously crap at it that you didn't, and finally you've met someone who's far too young to know. So it's Lily's fault, all this. I have no qualms about scapegoating an infant.

And my workmates have adjusted to the fact that I almost always tell them when I'm going to the toilet now, and I try very hard not to get into the specifics of the trip. There are too many nappies in my life, and that and too much unmonitored commentating make for a dangerous combination. Somehow Wendy seems to have gone through this with two children and hardly blurred things at all. She's obviously better with boundaries than I am. There have been a couple of times when I've pulled up not more than a microsecond before telling Sylvia, when she's trying to thrust a patient on me, Hang on, I've just got to go and do a poo.

Things, therefore, could actually have been worse in Coles. Sometimes, in fact, they are worse in Coles. One of the checkout people is called Eileen, and what chance have I got of avoiding at least humming the only big hit of Dexy's Midnight Runners as I'm unloading my
groceries onto her conveyor belt? Sometimes I start to hear words muttering tunelessly out of me before I realise what I'm doing. And she looks at me. She knows I'm doing it. I'm sure of it. So I avoid her queue entirely now, even though she's a pretty slick operator.

When I park at my parents' place and open the car door, the heat slurps in and shows me the kind of day I've missed while I've been in airconditioning.

Just having a sleep,
my mother says.
So I'll make us some tea.

I go into the bedroom to take a look at Lily while the kettle's boiling, and she's curling and uncurling her fingers as though, somewhere off in a dream, she's doing something purposeful. Explaining the double-helix shape of a DNA molecule to someone, something like that.
No, Watson, no. It goes like this.

Then my mother's next to me, with a pot and two cups and a plate of mixed biscuits on a tray. We go back to the lounge room, and through my father's study door I can see his computer toiling away, its cursor having been set off in the morning on another chase around the Mandelbrot set, or whatever. Programmed to do something shapely and mathematical, so that when he finishes work and gets home at the end of the day there's something new on the screen. Now there's a man who knows how to live.

And it's not as though it has anything to do with his job. Management consultants simply have no need for recreational mathematics. He's even happy to call it a hobby, though that only makes other people think it stranger. I'm sick of telling him to stop bombarding people with his Jim's Fractal Gallery home-page
address. And I wish Oscar hadn't once sent him a polite email in reply, but he wasn't to know that my father would call it fan mail and take it as encouragement.

I think it started with an interest in chaos theory, years ago – when chaos theory was a concept still owned by mathematicians – but with improvements in technology it's got way out of hand.

Of course,
he said, a couple of months back when displaying that day's screen marvel,
now chaos theory's just some advertising term. Gives you better airconditioning, and the like. What are they going to grab hold of next and turn into a buzz word? The Feigenbaum period-doubling cascade?

Which only demonstrates that my father, for all his science and surprising Fractal Gallery marketing flare, doesn't have much of a grasp of advertising, and doesn't realise what it is about buzz words that appeals. That it's the simple juxtaposition of two paradoxical but normal words that sells. ‘Chaos' and ‘theory'. Fuzzy and logic. And the notion that there might truly be science that creates the buzz (however insurmountable the science might be for the everyday non-postgrad brain). And Feigenbaum won't get a look in. Heisenberg never quite fired the public imagination with his uncertainty principle – despite following the paired paradox rule and combining it with a solid German boffinesque name – so no way does Feigenbaum stand a chance.

So, any idea what's happening with the childcare place tomorrow?
my mother asks me.

Oh, yeah, didn't I tell you? Wendy said things are okay now, apparently. So everyone can go back tomorrow.

Lily, like her father, is a creature of routine. Except I
get to decide the routines for both of us, at least in principle. Monday and Tuesday she spends half the day with my mother (and sometimes my father) and half with me. Wednesday, Thursday and mornings on Friday she's at childcare at Indooroopilly. Wendy's daughter Emily goes there too, and it's through that connection that Lily got in. It's small, it's expensive, it's unduly cautious when there's anything viral about, but she seems happy there, and that matters more than most things.