Good Oil (7 page)
August 5
Time: 2 p.m.
Location: Uni library
Hours rostered at Woolies this week: 22
Uni essays to research and write: 3 (and one tute presentation)
Health: head hurts, shoulders hurt
Cars owned by myself, Christopher John Harvey: nil
Hours spent waiting at bus stops this week: 4.2
Status report on the Search for the Perfect Woman: fruitless but ongoing
Money saved from Woolies job this year: $250
Money spent on random shite including alcohol, caffeine,
paracetamol, angsty music and one or two items of Young
People’s Clothing:
the rest of it
.
Mum and Dad were asking this morning if I’m going to have a twenty-first. Hmm. This would probably involve assembling the usual suspects and having a party in the backyard. I’ll undoubtedly get tanked, as will everyone else, and it might be rather a pity for the parentals to have to see me in such a state. So I’d just as soon do all that at the pub and have a night I will try to remember rather than one I wish I could forget . . .
The uni bar, bless it, has a special on Long Island iced tea this week. I have to work after class this afternoon, but tomorrow afternoon I’m fucking going. I’ll be there as soon as they roll up the metal shutters, demanding my value-for-money oblivion in a tall glass. I have my History of American Foreign Policy double lecture in the afternoon and I’m sure as hell not going to it sober.
Now, dear reader (of whom there are none but I can’t seem to stop writing that), it is 2:45 p.m. and time for me to leave for my history tute. If I leave right now, and take a circuitous route via the Physics building, I may run into Kathy. For the benefit of the new notebook, Kathy is at present – once again – the focus of my Search for the Perfect Woman. She seems to look hotter every day, and while she pretty much ignores me at uni, I do seem to be able to engage her at odd moments when we are at work. She’s dropped down to two shifts per week though, so that’s a bit crappy. The upshot is that I pretty much don’t have a chance with her. And, you know, thank God, because if I did I’d have to give up my lifestyle of soul-wrenching loneliness and sexual frustration. I’m too good at it to quit now. I could brood for Australia.
Harvey out.
PS I didn’t think about Michaela for a good several-hour stretch today. Go figure.
August 14
I’m writing outside on the lawn today as the sun is out and blessedly warming the back of my neck. Looking forward to the summer break. I have decided to do Honours next year after all, because the idea of leaving uni in three months’ time and looking for a real job is quite frankly a little too much for me to contemplate in my (perpetually) delicate state. Seemingly as per, woke up hung-over this morning, fully clothed and feeling as if something had died in my mouth. Stumbled into the shower, too ratshit even to jerk off. Put empty wine bottle into my backpack (it upsets my mother to see empty bottles on my bedside table) and left for uni. After a couple of paracetamol tablets and two coffees I am almost a human being again.
Woolies is shitting me. Now even Kathy has been made a Service Supervisor and no longer has to work on those godforsaken registers. I’ve been there as long as her! Bianca only beat me by a few weeks and she’s been a supervisor for months now. They think that giving me the Staff Trainer role is going to placate me. Well it’s not. It’s a gristly old bone and quite frankly they are going to have to throw me a better one. Yes, I get to torture, ridicule, perv on and flirt with (as appropriate) the unending stream of hapless teenagers that keep getting hired, but I still spend most of my time on the registers. Fuck that. If they don’t make me a supervisor by the new year I’ll either quit or ask Mr Albertella for a transfer to Perishables or something. As long as it’s not to Groceries with that fucker Stuart Green. Anyway, I digress.
Uuuuum. Yeah. Stuff. Kathy wore a skirt and tights to work last night instead of her usual pants. So that was exciting. I was excited. I’m still excited. So excited I may have to go to Ed’s for a cone or three after work tonight. Take the edge off.
It’s time for an update on the Search for the Perfect Woman. The Field is as follows:
– Kathy (never in a million years).
– She’s-big-she’s-blonde-she-works-in-the-deli Georgia Sanders (Ed and Lincoln reckon it’d be a done deal if I got off my arse and did something. They’re probably right – and a man is not a camel. However I have never, ever been interested in anything she has said).
– Lauren from sociology tute. Pretty token though. I hardly know her. Funky necklaces. Hates Durkheim.
– Michaela. (Never in a trillion years. Unbelievably unhealthy for me to have even written it down.)
August 22
Okay. Let me begin by saying I am pretty fucking drunk, and as the wine I quaffed just now cannot possibly have hit my bloodstream yet, I will get drunker still. The reason for my drunkenness is I got a phone call from Michaela today. I was flummoxed, to say the least, at her calling. I thought I made myself perfectly clear about this sort of thing at the airport. That grisly day. But no, she calls me from Perth, and starts making pleasant conversation.
She asks me how I am. She asks me how uni is going; how Mum and Dad are!?!
I ask her where she is calling from.
She hesitates – then says she is calling from Brad’s place.
‘Oh, how is Brad?’ I ask with considerable Tone.
She baulks, then recovers and says he is fine.
‘Well that’s great, Michaela,’ I say. ‘I can’t tell you how happy I am to hear that. Now why the
fuck
are you calling me?’
She says she is still hoping we can be friends.
Friends. Let me share with you, dear reader, or indeed anyone who will listen, why Michaela’s hope that we ‘can be friends’ is a vain one.
When I think about her life in Perth, I feel jealousy like a sickness. I can taste it in my mouth and feel it pulsing through every cell in my body. It expands my capillaries. It thuds in my ears. I don’t mean just jealous of Brad. That’s not casting the net nearly wide enough. I am jealous of her family: her parents, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, who see her all the time, who get to celebrate with her every Christmas and birthday. I am jealous of all her mates, who get to go for walks on the beach with her after uni, who play soccer with her on Sundays, who drink with her at the session afterwards, who come over to watch
Buff y
every Monday night. I’m jealous of the bus drivers whom she buys tickets off, for their moment of proximity when she dips her bus ticket into the ticket reader. I’m jealous of the sales clerks who get to sell her packets of chewing gum and newspapers, for the momentary greetings and brushes of skin when she hands over her money. I’m jealous of the hot water from the shower that slides over her skin and soaks into her hair. I’m jealous of the mirrors that reflect the brilliant brown warmth of her eyes. I’m jealous of the pillow on which she lays her cheek at night. Bastards, all of them. They have so much and I have nothing.
Did I mention that I have Jeff Buckley playing as I write? I do. It’s certainly not hosing down the fire. And I’m not going to be wrapping this up anytime soon, let me tell you.
Her shoulders. That collarbone.
Brad gets to kiss her shoulders at will. He can have an all-you-can-kiss buffet of shoulders anytime he likes, and I can’t bear to think about it. But suddenly I can’t think of anything else.
That’s
why I can’t be friends with her – as she
dared
to suggest at the airport, and by letter, and now by phone. The hide of her!
I really miss you, Chris. We were always such great mates, Chris. Let’s at least salvage one part of what we had, Chris.
She’s just trying to salve her own conscience.
How does she think it would work, this friendship gig? So, Michaela, my
friend
, my buddy, tell me, how did Brad fuck you last night? Mmmm-hmmm, Mmm-hm. Yes, and tell me more, old
pal
– tell me from the very beginning. ’Cos you know,
mate
, I just can’t stop visualising a variety of scenarios. Were you sitting on the couch together watching TV after all the other flatmates had straggled off to bed? Maybe you were curled up together on the couch and the program you were watching finished. As the credits rolled, he turned your beautiful face to his and kissed your soft, perfect lips. Maybe then he raised the remote up over your shoulder and turned off the TV. You climbed the stairs to his room with your arms about one another. Did he undress you on the bed, lying down, helping you struggle out of item by item of clothing, a painstaking but delicious progress? Or maybe it was too cold for that and you both just quickly took your own clothes off standing up and then dived under the covers. No, come on Michaela, you can tell me, we’re all friends here! Give me the details, go on! Think of me as one of the girls. What have
I
been up to? Um, let’s see now, bit of this, bit of that. Going to uni, going to work, jerking arrhythmically like a fish on a jetty, suffocating in the vacuum left by your departure, having half-waking dreams about the time we made love for three days, hallucinating that your lips just touched my neck . . . The usual. So messy. Holding the pen is not as easy as it was. And I’m crying.
Michaela. It costs me a lot of what I used to consider my manhood to say this, but your pleasure was more of a pleasure to me than mine. Shit, if someone had taken me aside a year ago and told me that sex could be more than the relentless search for somewhere to get off, I’d have laughed them out of whatever seedy twenty-four-hour bar they’d found me in. And then you come along with your perfect skin, your freckled shoulders, your glorious laugh, and you lay my entire life to waste. Ignorance suited me fine.
You spoke like me.
You got my jokes.
You got
me
.
You fucked me senseless.
Then you left.
The shadows on your face are flickering in the light of that candle we bought in Leura.
I see them every day.
So don’t ring me up from your boyfriend’s house on the other side of the continent, bursting with contentment from your great life over there, and ask me to be friends. You’ve made your decision, that’s the end of it. I will never, ever want your friendship. I want only to possess you completely. Like it was for those three days at Leura. Nothing went bump in those nights. Nothing.
My hand hurts.
I pass out now.
Michaela.
Where are you?
I know where you are.
Fuck.
August 23
Jeez, take it easy, tiger. Don’t hold back or anything, Chris.
We wouldn’t want you to keep the pain bottled up inside.
You pussy.
Please accept my apologies for that disgraceful performance. So many f-words. What will my grandchildren think?
Probably that their grandpa had his heart ripped out, bloody and still beating, from behind his shattered rib cage by a wily Western Australian. Which is pretty much what happened.
Last night was just a temporary setback, a stumble, a blip in the ‘getting over it’ process. I really was doing a bit better. I was dealing with the pain. Or, at least, successfully medicating it with ever-increasing amounts of alcohol and caffeine. When I read back over what I’d written I seriously thought about ripping out all the pages. It was a pretty poor showing all the way through, but when I got to the bit where I was writing out the lyrics from the Dire Straits
Romeo and Juliet
song I had to rip that out.
But then, I really want to be more honest in this diary than I have been in past ones, so everything else stays in. It’s bad enough that I present such a heavily edited version of myself to my friends and family; if I start editing my diary it will reinforce my already overwhelming tendency to be gutless. But let us
never
speak of it.
For the record, she really did cry when we made love and said she loved me like the stars above and would love me until she died. But, you know, people say shit in the moment.
All in all there have been better days for one Christopher John Harvey.
September 2
I’m on the bus on the way to work. It is 7.05 a.m. It is also Saturday. It’s just wrong, I tell you. So tired. So profoundly underwhelmed. Five more hours of my life spent at Woolies, pretending to be friendly to customers, making half-hearted attempts to flirt with Kathy, being rebuffed in said attempts and rescuing fifteen-year-old checkout staff who have jammed their registers. My sister, Zoe, came into my room the other night after I got home a bit worse for wear. It was not long after the disastrous phone call from Michaela. She leaned on the door frame and did her raising one eyebrow thing. Then she said,
‘You’re pretty passionate about your unhappiness aren’t you, Chris?’
I looked right back at her and said, ‘If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.’
She just stared back, treating me to a full-strength dose of her nostril-flaring superiority. I suggested that she close the door on her way out. She banged it.
I’d better wrap up. Woolies is shimmering and beckoning at the end of this block. Who can resist its siren call? It is the Land of Dreams.
September 7
I am officially struck down with the Kathy-virus again. Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the staffroom for your tea break . . . She’s cute; she’s smart; she’s wearing a fitted shirt; she plays pool pretty well for a girl . . . It’s
Kathy-virus Part IV: The Revenge
.
I would normally be cursing my stupidity for succumbing to yet another exercise in futility. In this case though, if I could somehow manage to convert my Michaela-angst into Kathy-angst, it would be much easier to bear. Wanting Kathy but not having her is a lifestyle I could adjust to. It’s not like I hunger to inhale the amazing smell of the skin on Kathy’s neck and clavicle, because I have never experienced it in the first place. Hell, I don’t even know whether she has one.