Читать книгу A New Tense - Jo Day - Страница 5

There was some problem with the booking, I didn’t know what, I couldn’t understand. I don’t know why I spoke in German, I could barely speak it and my accent was awful. I tried anyway, but instead of saying I wanted to get my ticket I used Muschi instead of möchte. The woman hid a smile and shook her head and I felt like a fucking idiot. I’d been learning German for months, that was a mistake I thought I’d gotten over. My face burned, I imagined school kids chanting on the oval: Laurie wants pussy! Laurie wants pussy! “I have to go home,” I said in English. “My mum died.” I didn’t say it to make her feel guilty, it just kind of came out, and she looked sympathetic. She told me that she was sorry and spent a few minutes frowning at the screen before she smiled at me sympathetically. “Everything’s fine, you can go through,” she said. The flight was in a few hours. I changed most of my remaining money, which was fuck all, to Australian dollars. Spent the rest of my euros on whiskey at the bar, anything to cover last nights ‘one beer’ in Neukölln, which of course turned into all the beers and three hours sleep. I’d hoped to sleep as soon as I got to my seat on the plane but the man next to me was snoring and farting in his sleep. I welcomed the distraction of food but it quickly became a toxic mass in my stomach and the days of drinking caught up with me and I had to clamber over the snorer so that I could vomit. There was a stopover in Abu Dhabi. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror in the toilets and almost recoiled. I went into duty- free and sprayed myself with various perfumes, rubbed lotion on my dirty sticky skin until I didn’t smell anymore, or smelled less, which was something. Put on all the makeup I could and and looked at the result, matte skin, red lipstick, mascara. I wiped the lipstick off, smeared the eyeliner. Bared my teeth in the mirror to inspect the nicotine stains that’d been multiplying for a while. Still there, zigzagging the fangs that betrayed the stereotype of my English heritage. The red lips contrasted with the yellow of my teeth well, it was kind of nice to look at. The first molar on the right was missing from a cavity I hadn’t bothered to get filled in until it was too late and I sat in a dentist chair in Prenzlauer Berg feeling it pulled from me. I’d felt like my privacy was being invaded, as though the dentist had taken something from me that she had no right to take. I thought of that sensation whenever I tongued the much-tongued space. Behind me a woman stood holding some miracle wrinkle potion in her hands but she was looking at me. Her expression was almost concerned. I grinned at her in the mirror, our eyes meeting, and she jumped, put the lotion down and quickly walked away. I bought an expensive beer and brought it with me to the smoking section. Found a spare seat and sat down and started to read “I Love Dick” by Chris Kraus. My eyes were gritty from the smoke and I was having trouble concentrating on the book. Not that I needed to, I’d read it so many times, it was dog-eared and covered in various stains. I noticed suddenly that there was someone standing over me, a guy, a little older than me and attractive in a generic, boring kind of way. It was obvious from his expression that he was waiting for a response from me. “Sorry?” “Do you mind if I sit here?” He sounded Australian, Australian with a hint of something else. I looked at the clock above the bar and saw that I still had an hour before I had to be at my gate. “Go ahead.” He’s going to sit down, I thought, and say something gross about the title. He sat down and looked at the book. “What’s it about?” I thought for a moment. “Feminist art and obsessive love.” “Not about dick, then?” Ugh, fuck off, I thought. “It’s the name of a character,” I said coldly. “Yeah, I’m sorry. I regretted that as soon as I said it. I’m so fucking tired. It sounds interesting.” I thought the hint of an accent might be Polish. “Yeah, it is. It’s one of my favourites.” I started to talk about it and my brain disconnected from my words so that I was stumbling through sentences. I was fucked, totally fucked, had shifted between drunk and hungover so many times that I couldn’t remember what being sober was like. After a few minutes I saw the smile on his face was becoming a little fixed and I stopped. “Man, I have no idea what I’m saying. I’m fucking tired, too.” “Fair enough,” he said. After that I relaxed a little. I put my hand out. “I’m Laurie, by the way,” I said. He shook my hand. “I thought so.” “Sorry?” “ I thought I recognised you. I’m Thomas, Thomas Balsonowski.” I shook my head. “We only met briefly. You took photos at my sister’s wedding a few years ago.” “Oh, right.” My brief stint as a wedding photographer, something I’d stumbled into, doing it cheap for the family of a friend and then charging more when I realised how much I could charge. I didn’t enjoy the work at all, and I never got to work for friends because none of my friends got married, but the money was too good to turn down. “Would’ve been three years ago, I think. Her name’s Natalia Anders.” “I barely remember my own name right now.” “It was at the Botanical Gardens, that summer day we had that was about forty-five degrees. My uncle got drunk and did some fucking horrible speech where he said, ‘poon-tang’. The bridesmaids’ dresses were tie-dyed. It was pretty bad.” Suddenly I remembered. Everyone drank the champagne like water and bucketed sweat and a couple of hours in everyone was shit-faced. The mother of the bride — Thomas’ mother, I guess — had kept trying to set me up with everyone, she was relentless. I finally told her that I had a girlfriend and there was a pause where I wondered if she was going to get all haughty on me, but then she said I should invite her. And I was so hot and bordering on pissed off that I called Sophie and she came. She’d tapped on my shoulder and she was wearing a blue dress and her big boots even with the heat and I’d — well, shit, cliché and everything, but I’d been so fucking happy to see her, so bowled over by her brown shoulders and the sweat beading her hairline, knocked out by the fact we’d been together for two years and she still made me grin like an idiot when she looked at me. She’d helped me that day, fanned people with paper, laughed, pulled faces at me when the men who hit on her turned their faces away for a moment. “Yeah,” I said slowly, “yeah, I do remember that, actually.” Thomas smiled. “Yeah, it was something, huh? ‘Something’ in this case not necessarily meaning anything good.” (Sophie’s smile across the marquee, her eyes not cutting away from mine, even though by then I guessed she’d have started having let’s-go-steady talks with Jake.) “You’re lucky you left when you did. Things started to get really messy after the food ran out.” (We held hands in the taxi on the way home. As soon as we got through the door Sophie had taken off her dress, had lifted her hair to fan her neck and I’d put my hands around her waist.) I sipped my beer and tried to focus on Thomas. It was just drunken sentimentality that made me remember her in such nice terms, or at all. I didn’t usually care. Get it together. “Oh, yeah?” And he told me the usual, as I drifted in and out of the conversation, drunken uncles, vomit in hilarious places. I wanted to excuse myself, but I couldn’t quite do it, I was so tired, and besides that, I guessed he’d be on the same flight as me. He was a nice enough guy — or, at least, nothing overtly problematic in these first few minutes of talking to him — but I wanted to be around my female friends, I wanted Julia here with me, we could cackle in the corner. There was a silence between us, not completely comfortable. “Where have you come from?” I said. I hoped that he hadn’t already told me. “I came from America.” “Whereabouts?” “I was in Illinois. For a competition.” “What kind?” He paused for a second, and then said, “Well, I’m a taxidermist. They have a worldwide convention and competition there. They call it a championship.” “You’re a taxidermist? Really? I don’t think I’ve ever met a taxidermist before.” “Yes, I’ve heard that. A lot of people think it’s gross, or weird.” “Well, yeah, maybe a little, but still, it’s interesting! Do you do all the gutting and stuff?” “Yeah. My father was a butcher so I grew up around it.” I’d researched it once, I tried to remember what I’d learned. “So do you make the models from scratch, or do you have, like, bulk ones? But then they’d all look the same, I guess.” He paused, his beer halfway to his mouth, and raised his eyebrows. “You know about taxidermy?” “Not really. A little. I saw a video in a museum of an artist working on an animal. e tape only looped for about ten minutes but I stayed there for ages. The eyes were the best, the eyelashes. I did a little research afterwards. Not a lot, though.” “What was he working on? The guy in the video.” “Um...fuck. Something with antlers. A little deer? No. Something African. I don’t know, I was so focussed on the process that I didn’t pay attention to the finished product. That’s probably not what you want to hear, is it?” He smiled. “You just called me an artist, you can say whatever you want.” “Yeah,” I said, waving away the possible flirtation, “so where do you work, exactly? What stuff do you do? Oh, you don’t work for hunters, do you?” He shook his head. “No, not for hunters, no. Not even because they don’t often eat what they catch but because most of the time they’re big fucking arseholes.” He said assholes, not arseholes. American-learned English. “I spend most of the time working with museums,” he continued, “using their labs, and I also have...” he shook his head. “No, never mind.” “No, what?” I sipped my drink. “Oh, wow, you have your own lab, don’t you?” “Yeah, except we call it a studio. But, you know, when I’m talking to people I usually hold off on the fact that I have a studio in my house where I gut and mount animals. It’s not the greatest of icebreakers.” “Nah, it’s the ultimate icebreaker! Who wouldn’t be interested in that? I’d love to see it.” He raised his eyebrows again as he drank his beer, set it down and wiped his mouth. “Yeah? You’re going back to Melbourne now too, right?” “Yeah. Would you mind? I could take some photos. I wanted to ever since I saw the video.” “What would you do with the pictures?” “Oh, I mean, it wouldn’t be for anything, probably. Just interest. I couldn’t pay you.” He laughed. “I wasn’t asking what the rate was! I was just curious. I got an award in the competition—” “You mean the championship.” “Sorry, yes, the championship. So I don’t need your money. Take my number, let me know when you want to see it.” He wrote his number down on a coaster and then, afer a moment, his name at the top. It was a good move. I’d already forgotten it.

We went to the gate together. We weren’t sitting near each other which I was thankful for because I was nearing the end of my ability to be able to make small talk. Still, I stayed awake until the plane had taken off and levelled out so I could get another drink, a nightcap. I tried my best to make it last, sipping the beer slowly from the can and looking out of the window with my knees up and my head resting against my rolled-up hoodie. The clouds parted and there were waves of desert with highways cutting across it, highways to massive skyscrapers and high rises. I wedged the can of beer between my knees as I started to drift off, jerking a little through the layers of consciousness.

I was thinking about mum, about when we’d seen each other last. It was about six months after Jones and I moved in with Pete. We were out shopping, Pete had driven us to the supermarket in his old van. I’d gotten into cooking, I was pretty good at it, and Jones and Pete were constantly taking advantage of this. I didn’t mind so much, except that I didn’t do the dishes because I didn’t want to do all the cleaning and they didn’t do it because they were lazy shits. I didn’t want to have to ask them constantly to clean up because I thought it was gendered until I realised that yelling at them for being lazy shits wasn’t me falling into gender roles, it was just not wanting to live in squalor.

I’d seen mum in the refrigerated aisle, just her back at first, and then her profile as she turned to look at something else. I’d wondered about what would have happened if I’d gone up to say hello. I’d lost a lot of weight at that point, better eating and bike riding but also forgotten meals and too much speed. Of course I didn’t know at the time that it’d be the last time that I’d ever see her. I didn’t chastise myself now for not going up to speak to her, because what could I have said?

Hey? How’s it going? Why haven’t you spoken to me in a year? We saw each other when Pete was driving us out of the parking lot. Probably had the same expressions on our faces. We didn’t wave but we didn’t look away, either.

The sleeping tablet I’d gotten from Max was starting to kick in when the German woman next to me asked if I’d been to Melbourne before, and did I know how much the rent was?

I thought of the cheapest place I’d lived in, the first, when I wanted to get out of the Jones’ for fear that I was taking advantage of them. I was only there for one rainy winter, housemates always asleep on the couch, running late for work. Flu constantly on rotation, sniffles and allergies to the dust in the house, we were drunk or high constantly which was fine because we were young. After a few weeks used needles started to appear in the bathroom bin, nestled among the bloody tampons. Nobody knew where they were coming from, or said that they didn’t, and I didn’t care so much. Beer had always gone missing from the fridge, and that was okay, except after a couple of months nobody was replacing it. Our house had always been the party house but now there were strangers sleeping on the couch, and strangers shooting up in our kitchen, and visits at all hours. I started wondering about what it would be like, found myself pissed as a bandicoot on the phone to Jones, telling him about it. Silence on the other end, and then: Jesus, Laurie, get a fucking grip. I’d just been rambling, no real idea of what I was saying. No, you don’t understand what it’s like... Silence on the other end. I’m kidding, I’d said, too quickly. Right, he’d said back. The conversation had ended pretty quickly. When I got off the phone I looked around properly. House messy, but this wasn’t the mess of kids living out of home for the first-time mess, this was serious. Ants and mice and fat spiders that watched the flies buzzing around the rotting dishes in the kitchen, too stuffed to move. Later that night, when we were all stoned or drunk out of our minds on the couch watching RAGE, a mouse had sprinted up a leg of my track pants. I’d yelled in shock and jumped and had nearly given everyone heart attacks. When they realised what had happened, that I hadn’t lapsed into some kind of psychosis (there’d been a few freak outs in that house before) they started laughing, nothing malicious, probably just relief. I’d gone for a shower, and when I was bending down to inspect the little scratch marks on my thighs I saw that there were mushrooms growing under the sink. It dawned on me a little then that the way we were living wasn’t anarchic, or anti-conformist, or even artistic. We were just a bunch of kids, burned out even though we were too young to be burned out, talking about all the things we were going to achieve, things that would always start tomorrow. One day after Jones’d turned up in his beat up old Datsun Sunny, and after one conversation we’d packed my stuff into the car and he was driving me back to his parents’ house. To the woman next to me (blonde, glasses, younger than I was by some amount), I said, in my best British accent, “I’ve never been.”