Good Oil (9 page)

Instantly I was somewhere else.

I was in the one-room cottage in Leura, where Michaela and I stayed last March. Late afternoon, approaching evening. We are lying on the bed, the covers strewn this way and that on the floor. She is lying diagonally across the bed on her back. I’m lying with my head on her belly and one arm flung across her thighs. I listen to her steady breathing and watch the last patch of orange-pink sunlight on the wall fade, casting the room in dusky half-light. I take a deep breath of the skin on her belly, which rouses her from her sleep. She gently pushes my head aside, stretches luxuriously, then sits bolt upright and declares, ‘I’m
star
ving!’ She turns to face me. I push a lock of her teased-up hair away from her face. She bounds out of bed, pulls on her slip (birthday present from me) and sets about making a fry-up. I watch her. I love her.

Then I’m back at Woolworths, a little disoriented, but definitely back. I’m cursed with an extensive and detailed memory so I’m no stranger to being laid low by a vivid Michaela moment. I try to get them out of my head as quickly as possible and am usually successful. But this was different. It was re-living, not remembering. The sights, the smells, the feel of the linen, the warmth of skin on skin. Real. Immediate.

Unsettling.

I’m going to sit out the back with my beer. It’s after midnight so it will be quiet, and there’s a moon tonight.

Our backyard is pretty unsightly and uninspiring, but on a brightly moonlit night even the rusty tin roof on the garage seems to gleam, and Eastlakes bathes quietly.

December 20

Work is getting crazy. Four more shopping days until Christmas. I had better get off my arse and do my Christmas shopping. I am tossing up whether to send Michaela a Christmas card or present or anything. I saw a pair of earrings that she would love in the window of a shop called Kashgar. Are you
crazy
, Chris? The bitch barred you and broke your heart and hasn’t even called you for months! Sure, that might have something to do with the way you said – nay,
snarled
– something to the effect of ‘Don’t you ever call me again, bitch’ last time she called, but surely she realised that it was just the bleeding red mess of my heart talking?

Anyways, I’m off like a bride’s nightie to meet the gang in the city for Rohan’s farewell. He flies out tomorrow night.

December 21

I did a bad thing. I got home last night stinking drunk and singing the
Romeo and Juliet
song, rang Interflora and spent $400 on sending a huge arrangement of flowers to Michaela,
in Perth
mind you, with a very alcohol-induced Christmas greeting.

And all on my sleeping mother’s credit card. When I came to this morning I had vague recollections of doing it, but hoped that it was just a dream. The credit card on my bedside table next to the phone indicated otherwise. I paid my mother back today, which leaves very little in my bank account. Fuuuuuuuck. Chris, it is high time you got over this girl.

December 24

Whillikers! It’s almost midnight. Just got home from work, which was insane. Why do people always leave things to the last minute? I did too. Of course. I was in Go-Lo today in my lunch break buying crappy little gifts for my family with what’s left of my money. I have very little remaining in the way of brain cells. What’s everyone else’s excuse?

As testament to this, dear reader, I did something this evening that I cannot account for. I finished my shift an hour before closing time and hung around for a while wishing people Merry Christmas and the like. I seized my chance to kiss Kathy on the cheek. She didn’t slap me or anything, which was nice, but that’s not the unaccountable thing. I was chatting to Vic as she was marking down some bunches of flowers and sticking the
Reduced for quick sale
stickers on them. I looked over Vic’s shoulder and saw young Amelia, who was up on register seven. While I was watching she stopped scanning for a moment and wiped some sweat away from her temple with the outside of her wrist. The bloody aircon is broken. That’s another story.

‘Hey, Vic,’ I said, ‘I’ll take one of them.’

I wished Vic Merry Christmas. Then my legs took me down to register seven where I gave the flowers to Amelia. When I say gave, I mean I kind of threw them at her, mumbled something and bolted.

Go figure.

Anyhoo, Mum, Dad and Zoe are all out on the patio, having some relaxing ales after the frantic all-day Christmas preparations that I successfully avoided by being at work. Thank you, Land of Dreams! I’m going to go out and join them for what could be a rare moment of togetherness.

Merry fucking Christmas.

Harvey out.

January 15

The weeks are starting to blur. They consist of going to the beach with Mick and Suze, going to work, sinking a few coldies out the back with Mum or Zoe of an evening, playing the odd game of tennis with Dad, reading my coursework texts for uni, reading the paper, staying up late watching crap TV, losing entire days to the cricket and brain cells to the accompanying steady stream of beer. My dad and I live the cliché that men can’t relate to each other on an emotional or interpersonal level so they do it through sport. When we are playing tennis we are comfortably absorbed in the game and the finger-nail-scratching-down-blackboard-who-the-hell-are-you suspicion that we usually regard each other with is gone. Because he is so much better at tennis than me there is no destructive competitiveness. We both enjoy letting him give me pointers and he is chuffed when they lead to a slight improvement in my play.

Similarly, we can watch the cricket together all day in companionable silence. No pressure to attempt conversations that are doomed to crash in a ball of flames. No speech whatsoever. We ask each other if we’d like another beer with either a grunt or a gesture. We quite happily occupy the living room together all day, day after day. If one of us has to leave the room or carry out some task around the house he’ll periodically call out for a progress report from wherever he is.

‘Score?’

‘Seven-fa!’

‘Aaaahhgh.’

‘Clean-bowled!’

‘Ooraahhgh!’

And so on.

January 21

Got a postcard from Rohan. He’s on Mykonos. Having a ball. Just as well I am at a point of maturity whereby I’m happy that
he
is having a good time, rather than resenting his good fortune. He’ll be back at the end of the month and has to start looking for a place to live in Newcastle – he got that graduate position he applied for. Of course he did. Some people seem to have their lives sorted out and are going about living them. And you know what? I’m happy for them. Really.

January 25

The work days are long, especially when it’s sunny outside. Ed and I have set ourselves the target of making up a new in-joke at the beginning of the week and having it instituted across the casual staff by week’s end. Young Amelia is the quickest of the lot, by a long shot.

There’s this egotistical little shit of a checkout operator by the name of Jeremy. He’s all of fifteen or sixteen and doesn’t he reckon he’s a player. He holds court down at the service desk on Thursday nights to a seemingly unending stream of private-school girls. Sells them cigarettes, no doubt, and flirts like it’s going out of fashion. Bianca flirts with him shamelessly, which fuels his ego even more.

I always thought that being completely superficial was mostly the realm of girls. I can see that Bianca, Celene and, in my rare moments of lucidity, Kathy, are pretty plastic when you get down to it. Jeremy is their male equivalent. I can’t stand him.
He
doesn’t have a pair of breasts to redeem him. After work I see him hanging around the food court with his skanky minions, wearing a
baseball cap backwards
– no shit.

Amelia is Jeremy’s opposite. She’s real. She’s literate. I like her a lot. Or maybe I just like the idea of her. Because she’s so young that she’s out of the question, I can mentally make her into the Perfect-Woman-in-Waiting. Is that what I’m doing?

Moving swiftly on.

Yesterday morning I started work at 7 a.m., helping out in Perishables until the store opened at 8 a.m. I worked through till close at 9 p.m., by which time I was climbing the walls. At five to nine, I was minding the service desk while Ed was out for a smoke. Bianca was busy making some careful adjustments to Jeremy’s bow tie and gestured to me to do the closing message over the store PA system. It usually goes a little something like this: ‘Attention customers, the time is now five minutes to nine and this store will cease trading in approximately five minutes. Please conclude your purchases and make your way to the checkouts. Thank you for shopping with Woolworths, the Fresh Food People.’ I sometimes wake up at night saying it. Anyway, I picked up the microphone and instead of doing the closing message, I started belting out
Khe Sanh
. I got as far as there being no V-day heroes in 1973 before Bianca wrestled the microphone from me and spat chips.

While she shrieked at me with Jeremy smirking behind her, the PA crackled to life again and Ed’s voiced boomed through the store. He continued where I had left off for a good few lines until someone wrestled the back dock mic off him. Ed and I are as one.

It turned out there weren’t any customers left in the store.

January 30

Rohan’s back from Europe. Going to the pub with him, Mick and Suze. Now.

February 8

Uni resumes in three weeks. Rohan has found a flat in Newcastle and we are going up for his house-warming party next week. He starts the new job in two weeks. I’m still working twenty-five to thirty hours per week at Woolies, but really hope to cut it down to twelve when uni begins. Zoe has also found herself a graduate position at an accounting firm in the city and Dad is chuffed. She reckons she’s moving into her own place as soon as she saves enough money for bond and furniture. Good on ’er I say. She hasn’t told Dad and Mum about this plan. Dad will arc up big time and say she should stay at home until she can buy her own place. ‘Why throw your money away on rent?’ is his standard response. I see the payment of rent more as an investment in your own sanity and independence.

February 14

I’m writing from Rohan’s flat in Newcastle. The party is tonight. He, Mick and Suze have gone off on a final ice-and-tea-light-candle-buying mission. I begged off and have set myself up on Ro’s bedroom balcony with a beer. I can see glimpses of the harbour. There are several big tanker ships moored way out to sea, patiently (it looks like) waiting for their turn to come in to port. I wonder how long they have to wait. I wonder what the crew members do while they are waiting. In my imagination, they are playing cards. Opposite Ro’s block are six huge old terraces, complete with five-pot chimney stacks on every seam. They’re beautiful. It’s a quiet street. It won’t be tonight.

We drove up yesterday – Suze, Mick and me, in Mick’s dad’s 1987 Land Cruiser. What a beast. After the usual painful crawl along the Pacific Highway getting out of the city, we let loose on the F3, turned up the music and caned it to Newcastle. As we were driving down and then up the gully with those two huge windsocks, I had one of those moments when you get nostalgic about something as it’s still happening. Anticipatory nostalgia. We were driving fast. Somewhere around the Peat’s Ridge exit I had ferreted out one of Mick’s Kings of Leon CDs and we were chatting and singing by turns. Suze took the album jacket cover out of my hands and studied it. ‘They are some tight pants,’ she said to no one in particular. ‘Yessir, they are.’ We descended the gully, our heads flung back, singing at the top of our lungs. And then coasted up the other side on the speed we had picked up on the way down.

Years from now, when Mick, Suze, Rohan and I have all grown up, dispersed to the suburbs with our spouses and children, chins sunk deep into collars on the Long March of the fift y-year mortgage and hardly ever seeing each other, I will be going through some boxes of old CDs and will come across that Kings of Leon album
.
I will put it on and be hurtled back in time to the day when I was fanging along the F3 with my mates Mick and Suze, singing so loudly our voices cracked, on our way to Ro’s house-warming party in Newcastle.

And what an event it promises to be. The vodka jellies are in the fridge. When the ice arrives we will mix up a giant bowl of Blue Lagoon. There are three slabs of beer waiting to go into the bath. We’ve ordered a heap of Turkish pizza to arrive at about 8 p.m., and got chips and dips to last until then. Heaps of Rohan’s engineering friends are coming, including the lovely Stella who is impossibly petite and pretty for an engineer. Get this – she is now studying for a Masters degree in Chemical Engineering, after which she will be able to call herself a Master Brewer. Is there anything cooler than that? Is there?

Ro’s cousins and their friends from up this way are coming, and some other mates from uni might make it up too. Maybe the Perfect Woman is somewhere not too far away, standing in front of her wardrobe, flushed from the shower and clad in a bathrobe as she chooses what clothes to wear tonight. Godspeed, Perfect Woman.

It’s hot, damn hot. Late thirties. We spent the morning on Nobby’s Beach, surfing and throwing the frisbee, but had to hotfoot it out of the sun by eleven. Literally hotfoot it – the sand was too hot to walk on.

I’ll wrap it up now. I want to rock back on my chair and absorb the view. Thumbnails scraping at the label of my beer. A little black tug boat is chugging out to meet a tanker. There’s a grand old cathedral up the road – I can see the spires. The bells are ringing.

5 a.m.? There are traces of orange in the east.

Alone alone, all all alone

Alone on a wide wide sea

And never a saint took pity on

My soul in agony

Please God don’t let me chuck.

February 15, 11 p.m.

Back in my own bedroom. Tonight is my first alcohol-free night in I don’t know how long. My stomach has just protested at the mere
mention
of alcohol – oops, sorry stomach, I mean the a-word. It was a subdued drive back to Sydney. I don’t know who among us was more hung-over. We all looked as rough as guts. Uncle Jeff was here for dinner when I got back and wanted to start something with me. As usual he initially disguised this as seemingly innocuous
maaaaaaate
-like enquiries about my life or my opinion of some current affair. I offend something that runs deep in Uncle Jeff. More so since his divorce. Or maybe his divorce just coincided with when I started to grow a personality.