Читать книгу Drowning in the Shallows - Dan Kaufman - Страница 13

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Journos may be more hated than second-hand car salesmen, according to almost every survey ever conducted, but compared to mail boys – and unfortunately I was one at eighteen – we’re at least recognised as entry-level life forms.

Before becoming a hack I worked for a year in the bowels of a CBD skyscraper, pushing a trolley filled with envelopes that I’d hand over to suits who I’d envy. Not only did I have the most junior job in the entire building but, as an awkward kid with no social skills and an inferiority complex, I was worse than invisible – I was one step up from a disease-ridden leper (not that I’d want to skin shame anyone).

No-one, from seedy sales sharks in polyester ties to secretaries with photos of dogs on their desks, would talk to me except Eileen, a blue-rinse old woman who worked with me in the mornings. We’d sort mail, run envelopes through the franking machine and bitch about Joyce, our vile and vicious mouth-breathing boss.

Joyce was as disgusting as she was mean, and I loathed being near her. The repulsion was mutual and while she confided in Eileen, who would then tell me everything with disdain, Joyce only condescended to talk to me when she had a new order or insult.

But that’s more information than you need: my point is that of all the snide comments Eileen made about Joyce (who was promoted above her to become the firm’s stationery and mail manager) the one I remember most was when she made fun of Joyce for always imagining that she just saw her ex.

Apparently Joyce met some drunk guy one night at a beer barn, got knocked up and never saw him again – and became so obsessed that, even years after squeezing out her poor bastard of a sex child, she kept seeing, or thought she was seeing, men who looked just like her beer-guzzling Romeo.

“You’d think it was a great love affair and not some dirty one-night stand,” Eileen maliciously bitched one morning as we sorted mail. “It’s pathetic the way she carries on.”

Even though I’d never dated anyone back then ­– I was an Untouchable, and so to me a one-night stand from a beer barn seemed exotic – I nevertheless smiled and agreed, simply because Joyce made my life hellish. And yet here I am, fifteen years later, seeing Tori lookalikes everywhere I go.

Yesterday, for example, I was in Newtown when one of these doppelgangers entered my peripheral vision. Following/stalking at a distance, it took me ten minutes to realise she was a fraud.

Other times I see doppelgangers riding the bus, standing in the supermarket aisle, crossing the road, and I immediately have to do a double take – I once almost got into a car accident when a doppel drove past me.

It’s pathetic the way I’m carrying on.

Today I’m at Glebe Markets, which is filled with stalls selling hippie crap like those leather-bound notebooks no-one ever writes in (what, do they think they’re Hemingway in 1920s Paris?), second-hand clothes, candles and scratched records, and I see a young woman who, from the side, has Tori’s profile. That odd ski-jump nose, which on paper ought to make her less attractive and yet only makes her cuter …

I inch closer, like a hunter spotting his prey, while the doppelganger picks up a bead necklace at a stall. Her clothes are different and the body is a little chunkier than I remember but that nose, that hair …

She turns towards me: it’s not Tori at all, just a paltry imitation.

I’m pathetic.

I need human company, someone to talk to.

Anyone.

I take out my mobile and call the dirty old man.

“Start talking,” he says, his usual greeting.

“Want to see a movie tonight?”

There’s a long pause, then a drawn out exhalation.

“Yeah, sure. Whatever.”