The Idea of Perfection (36 page)

She tweaked at a pucker, leaving a convenient silence.

Harley felt herself warming visibly with a blush that started in her chest and spread evenly outwards like a stain in water. She remembered the way she had cannoned into the table, the way he had fussed about the tea, the silences that had fallen between them. Janelle could have made it into a good story.
Oh, yes, definitely made for each other,
she could imagine Janelle saying, and everyone laughing.
Definitely love at first sight.

Under new management, Coralie said at last. But Janelle says it’s just the same as the old lot.

There was a silence in which Coralie waited. The wind was snapping something against the roof.
Tap, tap, taptaptap.

I saw him, you know, Coralie said. Outside the pub.

Harley bent over the bedcover, smoothing down a lump that sprang back up as she flattened it.

Who do you mean? she said, although she was afraid she knew. He. Who, he?

Hearing herself, she wondered if the Pimm’s might have been a bit of a mistake.

The bloke from the Roads Department, Coralie said. That you went up to the Panorama with.

Again she held open an inviting silence.

You didn’t see him, she went on at last. But I did. I got a good look at the way he was watching you.

The tapping on the roof was irritating. Harley kept wanting to look around, even though she knew there was nothing there.

Oh, him! she said. That was nothing.

She went back to the table and sat down at the old typewriter.

It was nothing, she repeated, rolling one of the index cards in. Nothing at all.

It might have come out vehement, she was trying so hard to make it casual. The letters on the yellowed keys seemed supernaturally crisp as she concentrated on them. QWERTY. UIOP.

Coralie came over and put the Pimm’s away in the basket.

I better stop, that Pimm’s is knocking me right out.

She picked up their glasses, but did not go anywhere with them.

Seems a nice enough bloke in himself.

Behind her all the inquisitive citizens of Karakarook, all 1374 of them, were waiting to hear what she would say.

I helped him out, that was all, Harley tried.

The whole of Karakarook would know that he had come to the house, too, because of the boy from the Mini-Mart. She stopped herself explaining further:
but it was only to see if the scone had made me sick too.
That would make it sound as if it mattered.

He wanted to thank me. It was nothing important.

The hall seemed very quiet, the air expectant. The tapping was loud and urgent.

Coralie took off her glasses and polished them on the hem of her skirt.

Well, she said. In that case.

She put the glasses back on and looked at Harley.

In that case, you might want to come in with us on the petition. About the bridge.

She hesitated.

We’re going to go out there. In a body, type of thing, to give it to him. Plus a blockade, if we have to.

It seemed she was not satisfied with the glasses. She took them off, breathed on the lenses, polished them once more. Harley could see the way they shone in the light when she put them back on.

We thought, you know, it might put you in a difficult position, type of thing, if you and him, you know.

No, Harley cried. Not in the least!

In the gaunt space of the hall it sounded very loud and angry.

Well, Coralie said. That’s all right then.

Harley could feel another expectant little silence developing. She drew the list quickly towards her and started typing, keeping her head down.

SOUP LADLE, about 1890

A labour of love.
Without meaning to, she gave a scornful little snort at the idea, and felt Coralie look at her enquiringly. She kept her head down.

STEEL FILE, BRASS RIVETS, TIN.

Then she saw that the label was upside down, the lined side of the card showing. She ripped it out of the machine with a harsh ratcheting and tore it up.

Suddenly there was knocking, loud and peremptory, against the front door of the hall. Harley got up so quickly from the table that she hit her leg against the corner.

Whoops! Coralie said, and watched as she strode down towards the door.

She got her face ready for him.
No thank you, not today.
He had a nerve, chasing her all around town. Who did he think he was?

But when she opened the door, there was no one out there wanting to get in to talk to her, only the wind jerking at a loose piece of fibro. She stepped out and looked up and down the road. Parnassus Road gaped back at her. A drink-can rattled its way steadily along the gutter, driven by the wind.

She waited, but no one appeared in either direction. You could see for such a long way up Parnassus Road, you could be sure that no one was going to arrive at the Mechanics’ Institute soon, or at any time in the near future.

Just the wind, she called down the hall to Coralie.

Her voice sounded angry in the space between them.

No one there.

YOU HARDLY HAD to touch Freddy Chang’s zip and it fell open.

The first time, Felicity had sounded surprised.

Oh!

She had sounded surprised, and in a way she was, because Felicity Porcelline would never dream of undoing the zip of the Karakarook butcher. It was simply that, well, here they were, and his zip was undone.

After that first time, she had not bothered to be surprised. It could not be she herself who was doing it, but it was best not to look too closely at the mechanism by which the zip of the Karakarook butcher fell open.

Once the zip was open, Freddy Chang became all of a piece. The bulge of flesh over his hip joined with the V-shaped sling of muscle that ran down into his groin and held his soft organs. The springy hair of his pubic area ran up into a narrow black line of hair to his navel and tapered away up towards his smooth brown chest.

Naked, he was not untidy any more. It was an interesting fact that a naked person did not look untidy. Naked, Freddy Chang was no longer Chinese, either. She never thought about him being Chinese when he had no clothes on, even though she had never done it with anyone Chinese before.

They always did the poses before they did what she liked to think of, vaguely, as
the other thing.
The poses got her in the mood, and by the time she had done the poses for a few minutes, the
Felicity Anne Porcelline
who was
the wife of the Manager of the Karakarook Branch of the Land &Pastoral
Bank, whose floor was clean enough to eat off and who never, ever forgot to moisturise before she went to bed, was not paying attention.

What sat under the lights, doing the poses, was just skin. It did not go by any rules because it did not need to think. It did not seem to care about anything. It did not even wear a wedding ring. That was in the handbag, on the floor near the door, getting dust on the suede.
Felicity Anne Porcelline
would never put her good bag down on the floor like that to get dusty, but the skin took no notice of the dust on the suede, only arranged itself in various poses, one after the other, peach-like and perfect under the lights.

Marvellous! Yes! Perfect!

His photos were always excellent. Every time she went back, he showed her the ones from the time before.
You could have been a professional,
he always said.
Honest.

The face on the prints smiled back at her: winsome, thoughtful, surprised, serious. It could do all the expressions. And always young. In the photos, you would have thought she was no older than thirty. Younger even. Twenty-five.

 

 

It was nothing like
love.
It was not even that she
liked
Freddy Chang particularly. They certainly had absolutely nothing
in common.
He did not
make her laugh,
or impress her with his
sincerity
or his
good manners.
His body moving inside hers did not result in anything that could be given the status of
passion.
It was nothing to do with him, in a way. It was just two organisms, panting into each other’s mouths and calling out.

Out of the lights, with her clothes back on, there was no way to think about what was happening. Out of the lights, his jokes were not funny, and he needed a haircut, and there was no escaping the fact that she was a
married woman
having an
affair with the butcher.
Out of the lights, viewed cold, it was simply an act of madness. In a little place like Karakarook it could only be a matter of time.

There was a kind of sick ecstasy, knowing it was only a matter of time.

 

 

She glanced at the clock beside the couch. She had brought it from home, the little one with the unusual black-and-white striped face that usually warned her to take the cucumbers off her face.

The first time, there had been a little crisis, because they had fallen asleep on the couch. That is,
after.
It was surprising how comfortable that ordinary old couch was, when you opened it up. She had woken up in a fright, hot and sweaty, and seen on her watch that it was nearly ten minutes after school finishing-time. She had raced down the stairs still scrambling into her blouse. Freddy had gone with her to the foot of the stairs, just in his underpants, and given her a big kiss, right there in the doorway, and just as she turned away from him, she had glimpsed, through the open gateway at the end of the yard, a group of boys going along the lane. She had a feeling that William was one of them, although they were out of sight before she could be sure.

She had crammed the buttons into the buttonholes and raced up the hill to the house, and had managed to get there before him. That meant he must have dawdled with the other boys, and she had roused on him for that, and for walking home without her when she repeatedly told him not to. She had just been delayed very briefly, down at the shops, because Coralie needed to have a word with her. About the Museum, as a matter of fact. About Great-Grandmother Ferguson’s old quilt, actually.

It was only after he had gone off to his room, sullen and silent, that she looked down and saw that all the buttons of the little blouse were in the wrong holes.

Now, before she did anything else, when she first got there, she set the clock.

It was twelve oclock. The alarm would ring at a quarter to three. That gave her plenty of time. She left it vague just what it gave her
plenty of time
for.

What’s the time? Freddy asked.

Twelve o‘clock.

She preferred it when he said nothing, but she had found there was a way of having a conversation without really having one. Your mouth made words, and part of your brain even supplied them, but you did not allow any actual thinking to take place.

Nearly three hours, then, he said. Two and three-quarter hours.

Felicity Porcelline
would be embarrassed to be with someone stating the obvious like that. Hugh’s mother had taken her out to lunch before they were married and told her
Always start from the outside with cutlery, Don’t let your husband see you in curlers, and Never state the obvious.

It had been good advice, and had stood
Felicity Porcelline
in good stead over the years. But Hugh’s mother was not here to hear Freddy Chang stating the obvious, and
Felicity Porcelline
did not seem to be listening. The skin on the couch was the only one there, and it could not care less.

She swivelled on her hip to press herself against Freddy’s warm stomach. He was like a powerful little machine, generating its own heat from within.

Plenty, she said. Enough and to spare.

How many more weeks of term? he asked.

Two, she said. Then it’ll be the holidays.

Actually, the skin found it soothing to state the obvious. We’ll be right, he said. We’ll work out something.

He laughed in a vibrating burr that she felt through her own flesh.

In bank hours, that is.

The couch creaked with his laughter.

No bank holidays coming up, I hope?

He pressed himself into her. He was ready again. So was she.

LOOK, SAID PRINGLE, and nudged Douglas. A little cluster of cars and utes was gathered near the southern approach, and a clot of people was coming along the road, a small procession in the landscape.

Douglas had seen documentaries about Bolivia where processions like this straggled through the landscape. Religious festivals, harvest thanksgiving, that kind of thing. But this was not Bolivia. It seemed unlikely that this was a harvest thanksgiving procession.

The men were watching him. He could feel them behind him, not watching the procession but watching him. Someone coughed, a big airy cough. They knew what was happening. They were waiting to see what he would do.

The engineer. The one in charge. Whatever it was, he was the one who was going to have to deal with it.

The group of people stopped at the end of the bridge, but a small black-haired woman in red glasses kept on coming. She walked right up to him, flushed and stern-looking, and looked him challengingly in the eye.

We know you’re nothing to do with it, type of thing, she said.

It sounded as if she had rehearsed that part.

But we’ve done out this petition.

She held out a sheaf of papers stapled together.

Go on, she said, and shook the papers at him. It’s got to be seen by the high-ups, in at Head Office.

She bit her lower lip and he realised that in spite of her confident, rehearsed voice, she was nervous. Behind the red glasses he could see her eyes: hazel, flecked, not unfriendly.