Sex and Stravinsky (19 page)

Well, it does sound a bit funny maybe, when you don’t hear Lettie saying it, but her Aunt Lettie is really nice, like the way she always drives the maid to the doctor for her diabetes check-ups and stuff and she’ll bake these amazing chocolate brownies, even though she’s got four kids and she works part-time as a bookkeeper for her husband and anyway she’s like really pretty.

But the good thing is, about the midget, it means that at least her mom’s eyes aren’t forever like following you to the lav, or squinting at you sideways if you’re eating Coco Pops, because, when they aren’t upstairs, then they’re like gadding off to the NSA Gallery, or the Stable Theatre, or the BAT Arts Centre, or somewhere else they think is cultured enough for them. So Cat’s feeling free to dawdle in the downstairs bathroom that faces over the back garden and she’s been in there for absolutely ages, but now she’s just brushing her teeth like mad before school, because, let’s face it, the getting-thin/chucking-up thing can leave you with like serious dog-breath.

Plus Cat’s buggered if she’s going to get those horrible rattly black teeth like she knows you can get if you’re really stupid about it, because of all the stomach acid. Anyway, she’s just having a swish with Corsodyl mouthwash when she looks up and out of the window she can see this person walking up the path from her dad’s new annexe and she thinks, Well, he’s just got to be the new tenant her mother’s been going on about while she’s been like trying not to listen. And, actually, more fool her, just this once, because, Jesus H. Christ – and just excuse me a minute while I swoon, OK? – this guy is, like er-MAZ-ing.

The tenant is like about one metre ninety – like, well, taller than her – and he’s like dressed all in black. Black long-sleeved T-shirt, black jeans, black lace-up shoes, but – really – so cool. I mean, not like trainers, or like school shoes or anything. Really classy. And he looks about like twenty-something, and he’s quite thin, but not all weedy or anything. Just narrow, like maybe about size 32 in trousers? And he’s like really muscly as well, and also a bit Afro-looking, with this short-short black Afro hair, so you can see this amazing head, just like so beautiful, the way it’s like all curvy at the back when he turns a bit sideways towards the vine with the passion fruit. Like he was an ancient Egyptian pharaoh or something. And like cheekbones and everything. And he’s got this fantastic mouth, and the beautiful dark skin – well, sort of halfway dark skin, anyway.

And he’s like so gorgeous that Cat wants to die of embarrassment because the bathroom window’s been open the whole time and – OK, so he’s still maybe about twenty metres away – but, oh my God, she thinks, he’s just got to have heard the sound of her chucking up, so now she won’t be able to face him – ever – because he’ll just know it was her. Oh, shit-shit-S-H-I-T! Especially as, from the very moment she sees him, she just knows for certain that Alan is like definitely yesterday’s news. Anyway, he looks like a slug and she wouldn’t go out with him now if he paid her. It’s like he thinks he’s so cool but he’s practically an albino, like with the ears that go neon pink when the sun shines through them and he’s forever having a quick dab with that Tea Tree Spot Stick on his so not gorgeous cleft chin, when he thinks you aren’t looking, plus his teeth aren’t that great either and the back of his head is too flat.

And, right then, Cat knows that she’s going out that same day and she’s getting like black hair dye and black eyelash dye and all her clothes are going to be black, black, black. Only by evening she’s kind of chickened out for the moment, because of how it would be at school next day, with Michelle and them. And maybe she’ll get a bit thinner first?

The tenant keeps regular hours. Cat knows this because over the next four days she’s always in the same bathroom at exactly seven-thirty in the morning, looking out. And then it’s Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday he gets up and does his laundry before he goes out at about ten o’clock. She knows, because after he’s gone she goes down the garden and she checks out the washing line. Then he comes home at midday with three carrier bags from Pick ’n’ Pay. They must be from the Musgrave Centre. She reckons he must walk everywhere because she hasn’t seen a car.

Cat’s wandered down the garden on the pretext of using the pool so she takes her towel and cozzie.

‘Oh good,’ her mom says. ‘You’re going for a swim, Cattie dear.’

Of course, the more she says ‘Cattie dear’, the more you know she hates your guts.

Cat goes out the back door in all her clothes – or, rather, all Jonno’s clothes – because if her mom sees her in her cozzie she’ll be sizing up Cat’s thighs and thinking how come they’ve got so much thinner when she eats all that chocolate and stuff. But Cat knows that her legs have got a lot thinner because she spends so much time in her bedroom without her clothes on looking at them – especially since she’s got her dad to put that bolt on her bedroom door, because otherwise her mom’s in there, gathering up all nineteen mouldy coffee mugs (she says) and yakking on about how leaving your pants on the floor when they’ve got blood on them is an ‘insult’ to the maid – like you do it on purpose or something.

Cat likes it that her legs are so long, but she can still see too much revolting fat and dimples everywhere. Still, there’s quite a lot less of it, she knows, because she’s been taking measurements with a tape measure like round her thighs and her boobs and everywhere. And at least she knows she can get as thin as she likes and it’s nothing to do with how much Coco Pops she eats.

But what she’d really like is to have proper sticky-out bones. Like real angles everywhere. Bones that would make her eyes look really big and her face not so round. And there’s something she knows sounds really pervy, but when they started doing the Second World War in history last week, and Miss Band showed them those pictures of people in the Warsaw Ghetto, Cat thought she’d really like to look like that, with the hollow cheeks and the deep eye sockets and everything. Plus, when she’s got some proper money, she’s going to have a boob reduction and not tell her mom. Or even Lettie, who thinks big boobs are sexy.

Anyway, it’s the weekend again, and, for two Saturdays now, Cat’s noticed the tenant has hung up his washing down the bottom of the garden, on his little private line, and all of it is either pure white or pure black. None of his stuff has got patterns or colours on it. All his bedlinen and his towels are white and all his clothes are black, except for his pyjamas, which are white, and he’s always got three white shirts on the line.

She reckons he does two washes, one after the other. He must do a hot white-wash and then a cold black-wash. He’s got black boxer shorts, black socks, black jeans, black trousers, black T-shirts that have either got long sleeves or no sleeves, and two lightweight black lambswool pullovers that say ‘agnès b’.

Cat knows the labels and the sizes and the washing instructions and the countries of origin of all the tenant’s clothes – well, the washable ones, anyway – because she’s taken a good careful look at all of them on the line and, anyway, she likes touching them. They say ‘Jean-Paul Gaultier’ and ‘Adolfo Dominguez’ and ‘Giorgio Armani’ and ‘Yves Saint-Laurent’ and ‘Ozwald Boateng’ and then they say ‘
Non usare caneggina di cloruro
’ and ‘
Repasser à basse température
’ and ‘
Laver et sécher séparément
’ and ‘
Lavar
a
mano en agua fria
’ and ‘
Lavage et repassage à l’envers
’ and ‘
Non torcere
o
strizzare
’.

Then she’s noticed that, for the one Sunday so far, he mostly didn’t leave the garden, but even when he did it was only for a really short time. Maybe he just went to get a paper? So now, anyway, it’s a Saturday when she’s watching out for him to go to the Pick ’n’ Pay, and then she goes down to the washing line again to touch up the tenant’s things and then she thinks she might as well go through the little gate in the bamboo hedge, like on to his little private terrace with the azaleas in pots.

Then she stares through the glass of the French windows, being really careful not to make nose marks on the glass. Inside, she can see that it’s all amazingly tidy and there’s definitely no one inside, so she tries the door but it’s locked. Shit. Anyway, after a while she thinks, So what? She might as well go and have a little poke around, and it’s not really a problem because she knows exactly where all the spare keys are. They’re in her dad’s work room, where he’s got them all labelled with little plastic tabs. And she knows, as well, that right now her mother is off doing her pirouettes and crap with the midget, so she’ll never even notice what Cat’s doing.

So she goes to get the keys and she comes right back, and slips out of her backless shoes and she goes inside. Hey! It’s all so fab in there, she can’t help just lightly touching everything she passes, like this row of little enamel saucepans and pots and the six white mugs on cup hooks and a little stainless-steel olive-oil can like a baby watering can and a small espresso pot with some coffee next to it in a silver tin that says ‘Illy’.

Then she looks in the fridge, which is nearly empty except that it’s got six eggs and a packet of mozzarella with a picture of a buffalo on it and some rocket in a bunch like a little bouquet of flowers and there’s a jar of pesto from Genoa.

After that she crosses to the far end of the room. She sits down carefully on the edge of the tenant’s bed, that’s all white, white, white, with just these three huge square white pillows in a fat white row, and then she tries lying down on it, on her back, straight out with her hands at her side, hardly daring to breathe. It all makes her feel a bit scared and excited, like Goldilocks in the three bears’ house. So she gets up and smooths it all over very carefully, and then she crosses to this wall of pale-birch-wood cupboards.

She opens all the doors, one by one, and stares inside. Some of it has got hanging things and some of it is like square pigeonholes full of folded stuff. Cat doesn’t dare to pick up any of the folded things because the tenant’s way of folding his clothes looks quite hard to do, but she takes out this plain white shirt on a hanger and holds it up against her torso, so she can see herself in the mirror on the back of the door. Then she takes out this cute black-linen suit and hooks it over the cupboard door. After that, she takes the jacket off the hanger and tries it on over Jonno’s baggy T-shirt. It looks pretty terrible with the shapeless trackie bottoms that are all sort of puffy and lumpy around her hips, so first she looks at her watch and then she quickly takes them off. She tries on the suit trousers as well, but, although she can just about half squeeze herself into them as far as just above her knees, they kind of stick on her thighs and she’s scared the zip will break, so she has to yank them off and just hold them up against herself, kind of like tucked under the jacket. Even so, because the jacket is so beautifully cut, Cat reckons she looks quite thin.

And then she’s just putting it all back in the cupboard when she sees one of her own long blonde hairs on the lapel. Oh shit. Panic stations. But she manages to pick the hair off and she checks like mad in case there’s more. Or maybe dandruff, or something. Oh yuk!

Meanwhile, all this time she’s sort of been trying not to look at the tenant’s desk, because she’s been saving it for best. It’s just that, all along, out of the corner of her eye, there’s been this amazing thing, like nothing she’s ever seen before, because it’s like a normal pedestal desk with two rows of drawers, except that it’s all kind of silvery and shiny. So finally she goes up to it and she can see that it’s veneered with chrome or silver, or maybe it’s tin that looks like silver? And it’s got these amazing glass handles on the drawers, like they were bits of chandeliers. Sort of pear-drop shapes. And, God, it must weigh about ten tons, she reckons. On the surface he’s got a fat grey stone jar with all these pens and pencils in it, so she picks them up, one by one, and puts them back.

Then her eyes move up towards the pictures that he’s put on the wall above the desk, because they’re all so fab. It’s just these three narrow black frames in a row, with drawings in window mounts of old-fashioned like actors in tall hats – or maybe like acrobats – wearing those like beaky masks. Then, on the next bit of wall, along from the desk, he’s got another row of four narrow black frames, just the same, only these have got like drawings of bits of horse’s armour, that look like maybe from the Renaissance, because there’s Italian writing on it, but best of all, on the opposite wall, all on its own, he’s got this exhibition poster in a frame, that’s also just black-and-white, and it’s a photograph of this fabulous skinny person – well, it’s sculpture, not a real person – and it says ‘Giacometti’.

Then her eyes are back on the desk, where there’s a pad of paper that says ‘Fabriano’, plus there’s this huge glossy book called
Africa Explores
that’s got these Benin bronzes of Portuguese soldiers on the dust jacket, as well as some sort of bird masks carved out of dark wood. Cat starts to flick through the book, which is quite fun, because it’s got a whole chapter on these kind of modern paintings that get sold in street markets like in Congo and Malawi and places, with people getting their shoes shined, or looking in a grocery shop with lots of tinned food in the window and Coca-Cola signs, and sexy-looking women wearing sort of batik cloths, and some of them have got speech bubbles above their heads with writing in French. Then there are all these kind of spiky sculpture things from Zimbabwe.

But what’s most amazing, Cat thinks, is this whole chapter where the tenant’s like put in a bookmark from a shop in Milan, and it’s all pictures of these incredible tall, tall, very thin people dancing, like in a kind of procession, all in a line, and some of them are looking even taller – like about four metres high – because they’re dancing on stilts. And they’ve all got these kind of red skirts that it says are made out of special hibiscus flowers, because the red colour is symbolic and everything. And these like mask things – well, like sort of weird tall headdresses and masks all in one that completely cover your face and there are lots of different kinds. They’re like birds or animals, or other things like hunters, or trees, or spirits and stuff, and the whole person is called ‘the mask’, not just the mask.