Odyssey In A Teacup (30 page)

‘Good idea.’ It had been two hours since breakfast and I was also hungry.

We found a little café on Hastings Street, the main drag. After our double shot lattes and friands arrived, Vette turned to me.

‘So, apart from you wearing the wrong thing, or the right thing at the wrong time, how was the party?’ Both she and Maxi knew Lenny from our younger days.

They were in stitches as I told them every little thing. Then, just after the waitress handed us the bill, I casually announced, ‘I want to have a makeover.’

The trendsetters rubbernecked, and then Ralph gave me a Mona Lisa smile. Vette cheered me on with ‘Yay!’ and Maxi air punched,
‘Yes!’
She stared at me for a bit, squinting her eyes and drumming her fingers.

‘Okay. First, the hair. We gotta do something with the hair.’

As the waitress came back to clear the table, Maxi asked her for the name of a good hairdresser in the area. We paid and Ralph went off to buy a sunhat while we three girls found the recommended salon across the road on the next block down, and tried to secure an appointment. Troy had a cancellation for two o’clock; we grabbed it and briefly conferred with him and the colourist, Helen. I wore my hair long—about six inches past my shoulders and side parted—in a sitting-on-the-fence shade of brown. The five of us pored over the colour chart, and after the four of them agreed on a colour, they turned to me.

‘What do you think?’ Vette asked.

Although this was an open question—the kind that begins with
what,
why
or
how
and expects, or at least allows, a long-winded response—it was only dressed that way. It was actually a closed (do-you-like-it?) question—one that requires a short answer: yes or no. Even more than this, it was an open-and-shut ‘Sylvia’ question—non-negotiable, demanding only one acceptable, monosyllabic answer. This time, I rebelled! I stretched it out to four syllables.

‘Um, yeah. Why not?’

They were all thrilled, and decided I could also lose a couple of inches off the length.

We caught up with Ralph, and he and Maxi went back to the hotel for a swim. Vette and I dropped into a couple of the little boutiques to check out the clothes. She vetted everything I chose, and we settled on two statement-making dresses. Now, with time to kill before my appointment, she and I went back to the pool. Ralph and Maxi had reserved two extra chaises longues in the far corner of the pool area.

‘There’s nobody here; plenty of chairs around. Why are you sitting so close to the toilets?’ I asked.

‘Just in case you need to take a dump; wouldn’t want you doing it in your pants on the way there,’ said Maxi. The three of them roared with laughter.

‘I was six years old!’

‘Well, I had totally forgotten about it. You shouldn’t have reminded us, and now it’s come back to bite you on the bum.’ More laughter.

‘Speaking of bums, do you remember when we used to play doctors and nurses at your place?’ I segued.

The house Maxi grew up in was on a deep block. Its enormous, untended backyard was a wild, tangled mass of vegetation. Maxi’s father said he loved walking out the back door and looking at his ‘primitive forest’. We just thought he was a lazy gardener, but he was probably too wasted to tend to the grass because he was smoking it. He was no doubt stoned when he built the large cubby house in the far corner of the yard for Maxi and Ronnie. Ronnie had already lost interest in it when Maxi, Vette, Ralph and I were playing doctors and nurses down there. And when Maxi and Ronnie’s younger brother, River was old enough to enjoy it, he couldn’t. He had allergies, and he was an indoorsy type of kid, anyway.

This cubby house of theirs was an arresting, sturdy structure on stilts. Built for cyclonic conditions, it was maybe a little over-engineered, but it was something that the three little pigs would have been proud of.

‘Hmm ... ’ Ralph obviously felt the need to comment at this juncture. He paused and rubbed his chinny chin chin. He was ‘ralphulating’ (Ralphulate [ral-fyoo-late] verb [intransitive]: to ralph + to speculate
—
to throw up an idea that you’ve chewed over). Because Ralph did this so often and in his unique way, we finally decided it needed its own name. He looked at Maxi.

‘It’ll always be a special place for me. It’s where we devirginised each other, remember?’ Ralph continued before she had a chance to respond. ‘It really was a most appropriate setting, you know.’ He paused again before the delivery; we waited. ‘This hidden cubbyhole surrounded by the thick bush of virgin woodland ... As I recall, I huffed and I puffed. But then I blew and brought the whole erection down.’

Maxi, Vette and I laughed, rolled our eyes, shook our heads and then left it at that. Sometimes Ralph’s cleverness stunned us into silence, and sometimes there was just no point in indulging him too much because then he wouldn’t shut up (this hadn’t changed over the years).

This cubby at the edge of Maxi’s backyard forest was also a most appropriate setting for our doctor-nurses games. Ralph fittingly nominated Vette and me as ‘scrubber’ nurses. He always played the doctor because ‘I’m male’ he’d said (all of us were advocates of equality: each equally suckered into gender stereotyping because he decreed and we agreed). And Ralph always insisted that Maxi should be the patient. She was already his secret love interest even though he had planted a caterpillar on Gwen’s pudenda a year earlier, and still did things to her in that little clearing. ‘I like to play the field’ he said of his
al fresco
sexual explorations (maybe a precursor to his
al frescoing
in front of the relatives five years on).

As the concerned doctor, Ralph felt it was his duty to give Maxi a thorough physical,
sans
clothes. She had no problem with this; she’s always been comfortable with her body. And according to Ralph, a thorough physical included taking the patient’s temperature. Neither Maxi, Vette, nor I were aware that you could put a thermometer under the armpit or tongue (our mothers used to take our temperature rectally). Ralph knew about the alternative methods, but kept them to himself. We had a toy medical kit that was missing a thermometer, so Ralph improvised with a soursob stalk as a makeshift thermometer that he placed between Maxi’s butt cheeks.

‘Doesn’t the nurse usually take the temperature?’ Vette had asked Dr Ralph.

‘A good doctor is hands-on.’

So, courtesy of Ralph, Maxi got the soursob stalk, and courtesy of Maxi, Ralph got wood.

‘Just as well you didn’t end up becoming a doctor,’ said Maxi. ‘You’d have been accused of sexual misconduct and struck off.’

‘We’re talking about a time when I was approaching puberty! I think with my head now.’

‘So ... what’s changed?’

Vette groaned and picked up her magazine, leaving them to their thrusting and parrying. And I tuned them out, disappearing into memories.

I’m glad Ralph didn’t become a doctor; I don’t like them. My aversion to doctors started when I was eight and Dr Patrick Bloody McGinty fouled up my chances of wearing red jelly sandals. Not that I ever had a chance; Sylvia wouldn’t buy them for me.

‘They’re too common!’ This, from a homogenised woman who worked hard at homogenising and producing a milky me.

Seems Dr McGinty didn’t give two craps about ‘common’. He wore socks and sandals with his rumpled suit (maybe it was a trend in Ireland, his birthplace, but not here), so he would not have made poster boy for the medical profession. Dr McGinty also had a distinct appearance, and not one that he had much of a say in. He was kind of irregular looking: exceptionally tall and exceptionally skinny, with bouffant, messy, mousy hair; a narrow, crooked nose; thin ruby-red lips (I’m convinced he wore lipstick); ruddy, prominent cheeks (wore rouge, too); and droopy jowls. His mirror must have been forgiving, although it probably wouldn’t have been if it could have detected his halitosis. I mentioned Dr McGinty’s rotten breath to Sylvia once and she told me it was why he could not be a dentist.

Sylvia has truly phenomenal powers of deductive reasoning. A dentist would never have bad breath, she said, which was the same as saying a beautician would never have a pimple. Based on this premise, I figured that a doctor might have bad breath, but he would never, ever get sick. Well that all went to shit a couple of months after that fateful day when Dr McGinty practically ruined my life.

The only reason I had seen him was because he was serving as a locum for our regular doctor, Dr John Pearson, who was on holidays when Sylvia decided the growths on my feet needed attention. Dr Pearson, a kind and gentle man, had been the family GP since before I was born. I was relieved that he was back consulting when Sylvia took me to the surgery with a deeply cut finger. Dr Pearson stitched it up but a day later, he topped himself. I heard Sylvia whisper to Joe that he had slit his wrists. Made absolutely no sense to me. None.
I
cut myself because I was eight and ran with scissors. But never mind that a doctor wouldn’t get sick; if you’re handling sharp instruments all day, how could you possibly cut yourself?

Eleven days later, when Sylvia took me back to the surgery for Dr McGinty to remove the stitches, she made me say ‘I’m sorry about Doctor Pearson’ to the receptionist. The receptionist smiled and thanked me but didn’t bother to tell me it wasn’t my fault. What could I have done that would cause him to cut himself and die? I was wracked with guilt. I believed that my appendicitis two years later was punishment for this.

Given my experiences with doctors, it made little sense then that I would apply for that job in the medical practice years later. At the time, I put it down to a means of easing my guilt over Dr Pearson’s death. Ralph put it down to my ‘latent masochistic tendencies’ and suggested I was better off acting out those tendencies in the bedroom.

‘I should have listened to you.’

‘What?’ Ralph started. I’d roused him from his sun-worshipping catnap. Probably did him a favour—he’d been moaning lustfully. ‘You thinking out loud again?’ he asked, glibly.

Really? This coming from you, making animal noises from the raw sex you’re not actually having!

‘I was thinking that you were right; I shouldn’t have taken that job with those doctors.’

‘Yeah ... you did it for the wrong reason.’

Ralph and I hadn’t talked much about it or the way it had ended. I felt the need to now.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN:
DROPPING(S)

Doctors Dooley, McIntyre and Black had a busy practice. There had been twenty applicants for the job, but I got it because I was the only one who could decipher Dr Dooley’s illegible scrawl. As their new secretary, I was one of the three people manning the office. Maude was the office manager and Sandy was the receptionist. Sandy was a tall, plumpish, attractive girl who wore her long auburn hair in a neat ponytail. She was sweet-natured and bubbly, and was not long out of school. But Maude was very old—sixty to be exact. That’s not so old anymore, although at the time, it looked like one foot in the grave.

Maude was a widow. She looked a bit like a horse, but nonetheless, a good-looking horse—a thoroughbred—stylish and ladylike in appearance. She also had a deep voice. On someone else, it might have been considered a smoky, Veronica Lake-like voice. On Maude, it sounded vulgar, because when she opened her mouth, this thoroughbred morphed into a nag. It felt like a home away from home.

Maude was probably descended from the
harpies
(Mr Kosta had talked about them in one of his lessons). They had the body of a bird, but a human face. The great unwashed, literally, because they stunk to high heaven, these foul-tempered eyesores had appetites like Zelda’s—so hungry they could eat a horse. Instead, they gave birth to a couple of them (after having sex with the West Wind,
Zephyros
). Maybe out of a sense of loyalty, the harpies didn’t eat horses, but they swooped down on pretty much everything else. Mr Kosta had told us that the harpies snatched people and things away from earth, and did whoopsie on anything left behind (although, because they had a thing going on with the West Wind, they probably Whizzpopped first, but silently, seeing as westerlies are mild winds). Anyway, nice
. Real nice
.

Mr Kosta interpreted the harpies’ MO symbolically. He said that it was about snatching a person’s soul. I didn’t give any thought to the idea of soul back then, but in hindsight, I could see how Maude tried to devour my soul, and Sandy’s, through constantly undermining us.

In Maude’s favour, she was clean (but she stunk of perfume overload). Her ancestors might have been unsightly, but they had lovely hair, and Maude did have quite a mane on her. Her dressage was also very stylish. She loped in one morning wearing an elegant cream skirt and matching jacket over a plain cream blouse that tied at the neck. The suit had a nice pattern of woven red, navy and green widely spaced horizontal and vertical intersecting lines, and the jacket had gold buttons and a stitched navy trim. I told Maude that when she was at lunch the day before, a patient had come in wearing the exact same suit.

‘What!’ she shrieked (her ancestry got the better of her and she became flappable). ‘How d-hare you! This is Chanel haute couture. It’s a one off!’

‘Umm, she was a big woman, though.’

‘They do
not
make haute couture for fat people!’

Maude spent the rest of the week and most of the following one educating me in the ways of the various designers to ensure that I didn’t d-hare make the same mistake again.

‘
This
is a Balenciaga,’ she pointed out on Wednesday. On Thursday, she wore Lagerfeld; Friday, de la Renta; Monday, Valentino; Tuesday, Dior; Wednesday, Versace; and Thursday was Yves Saint Laurent’s day. I pretended that I understood because I’d learned it didn’t take much to piss Maude off. But unless the tag was hanging out, I couldn’t pick the difference (Maxi and Vette would have been able to, but I just couldn’t). And I wasn’t too conversant with other things, either.