Perfect Skin (13 page)

Which is when I choke, and a chunk of dinner flies up into my nasopharynx.

I excuse myself, go to the bathroom. Choke and snort and cough, and eventually a rather soiled piece of prawn flips out of my nose.

From this point, the evening gets worse.

I return to the dining room and Katie stares at me, unable to come to terms with the beastly sounds I've subjected her to. I think I've spoiled her new bathroom, maybe forever. I drink more. So does she.

There are two things I can't believe. I can't believe I'm on a date and I can't believe I'm so bad at it. Three things. I can't believe she went to the trouble to try to translate her prawn dish into Italian, and I left the room to blow it out my nose. I didn't think it was going this way. I thought we were coffee friends. I thought there'd be Jungian therapists.

We adjourn to the lounge room. Katie brings coffee and a plate of little chocolates, handmade by a very delicate man from yet another part of town. If she had travelled any further to put this dinner together she'd have scored frequent-flyer points. She probably met the prawn trawlers on their way back in from the bay this morning too. If Katie came over to my place for dinner, I'd know just which Thai takeaway would be my first choice. It's not the same.

She puts the chocolates in front of me, presumably watching to see which orifice I bung them into, then which I blow them out of.

Shit, there's dessert wine,
she says. She fetches a bottle, and starts to drink it.
Oh Jon, I just want you to be happy,
she says, in a particularly melancholy way.
Should
I
have bought a cigar?

What? I'm not sure that's what my happiness is depending on.

No, I just thought, people are into them at the moment. Separate thought to the happiness. You have to move quickly.

Right. I don't smoke. It was smoking it that you were thinking about? It's like grape varieties. Even if cigars are temporarily in, I don't smoke. So no cigars was perfect.

Excellent.
The conversation pauses there. She looks at me, intently. Drinks more of the dessert wine.
You're not always an easy person to read, you know that? You showed me baby photos. You have to realise that.
She takes Sinatra off and puts on Men Without Hats, ‘The Safety Dance'.
Not a lot of people have this album, you know,
she says, implying some angry kind of exclusivity that I don't really understand.

I get up to go to the toilet, and Flag tags my ankle again. Twice, and then he follows me in there. I've had too much to drink and so has Katie, but she's kept pouring, making sure the evening won't fail through an insufficiency of wine. Flag winds his way between my legs, purring, and it's here, standing up in the glaringly bright bathroom, away from Katie's discourse on renovations and the big sofa and the mood-lit lounge, that I realise it's all too difficult, and I know I have to go
home. Apologise for the misunderstanding, for anything I've done wrong, and leave before anyone's dignity is put seriously on the line.

I wonder what's going on in Katie's mind out there, with the disjointed statements she's making that seem to add up to suggest I've misled her, and harmed her in some way. And that she was expecting this evening to go very differently. She'd gone for special, without knowing that special was never my thing. But it's overwhelmed me tonight. Katie and her eighties hair, conjuring up one gourmet moment after another and making the night feel like such a big deal. And completely the wrong kind of big deal.

Flag, being a cat, gets curious. He knows that something out of the ordinary is happening, involving a stream of yellow fluid flying down into a bowl.

Not a lot of men in the place, hey Flaggy, I say to him quietly, as he pushes between my legs again.

His tail flicks dangerously by as he passes. He circles, then stands up on his back legs with his front paws on the edge of the bowl.

Flag, be careful there. I know I've still got a young man's prostate, but what's happening is honestly not that impressive.

But Flag is impressed. And I'm mid-stream, so it's not as though I can push him aside. He's looking down into the bowl, looking up at where it's coming from, looking down into the bowl again.

Okay, Flag, stay right there and we all get out of here alive. No sudden movements.

He crouches down, and looks like he's about to clamber into the bowl.

No, Flag, I say in the no-shit, firm voice I've been practising for the day when Lily takes an interest in a power point.

And that's when he jumps.

Jumps for the urine stream and grabs at it with both paws, spraying it everywhere. This surprises him. He has no grasp of simple physics and obviously expected a different outcome. Worse, it makes me recoil backwards, changing the simple physics and directing the stream right at his head before I can stop it. He jumps away, shakes himself, manages to spread it around more. Tonight's dinner had not been going well. And now I've pissed on her cat. Every other grim moment seems inconceivably subtle in comparison.

Flag runs little catty wee footprints around the room as I try to catch him. And Flaggy, as Katie said, loves a game. It takes a lot of pursuit and two bath towels before I pin him to the floor near the door. He purrs like a buzz-saw, licks my face.

Katie doesn't play this one with you enough, does she? I say to him quietly, and he licks me again.

I wrestle him up to the sink to try to wash him. I get the water running, and that's when he goes crazy. Being urinated on he didn't mind so much, tap water could be the end of him. He wrestles, slips out of my hands, slurps out of the sink and into the bath and out the window.

Urine is dispersed over most of the bathroom. Fortunately, I've already ruined two towels trying to catch Flag, so it's not hard to work out what I should use to mop up. My pants and my shirt front are wet, but I'm telling myself it's at least eighty per cent water. I replace the towels with fresh ones from the cupboard
when I've finished, and I ball the urine-stained ones up as tightly as I can and fling them out the window, as close to the road as I can get them.

I do up my fly, I walk back into the lounge room and I tell Katie, Thanks, it's been great, but I might call a cab now.

Listen, Jon, this is going to sound kind of weird,
Wendy says, when I get to work at lunchtime on Monday.
But it probably needs to be sorted out.
She leads me into her room, shuts the door.
Katie called me yesterday. She's a bit worried about you. And maybe I'm a bit worried about her. Jon, I don't know where she's got this idea from
. . .
she thinks you might have urinated on Flag.
The look on my face is probably horror, since behind the look it's horror I'm feeling.
I know. It's all very embarrassing. Katie can get herself
. . .
worked up, if you know what I mean. But this
. . .

Yeah.

I don't know what we're going to do, Jon.

Yeah, I know. He just followed me in there.

And now Katie's got this idea
. . .

He just followed me in there, and I'd had a couple of drinks by then. A few drinks. And I haven't been drinking much lately.

Wendy's watching me. She's stopped interrupting. She's now taken over the look of horror. Just as I'm realising she thought this was all in Katie's head, Wendy works out she's hearing the preamble to a confession.

It wasn't intentional.

Oh god, Jon, I told her no way. I told her you didn't do that sort of thing.

Of course I don't do that sort of thing. I might not have been concentrating particularly well though.

She makes a teeth-gritting motion and nods.

I'd had a couple of drinks. And he moved very quickly.

She looks like someone who's about to up their level of care again. Someone who thought I was handling things all right, allowed her attention to lapse, and now look what I've done. Jon's not coping well at all. We thought he was doing okay, but . . .

It was the fucking cat's fault.

The cat's fault?

Totally. I was standing there, minding my own business, directing my stream with nothing less than the required competence. Not concentrating particularly well, as I said, but it is something I've done a few times before. But I don't think Flag's seen a lot of men in that position.

Men not concentrating particularly well?

Urinating. The standing-up version. He got a bit excited. And he sort of jumped me. And I tried to clean him up . . .

Now, wait a second. I think you've missed a bit.

The bit where I pissed on his head? Is that the bit? Or the bit where he waved his paws around in it first when he was trying to catch it?

Wendy starts to laugh.

Or the bit where I had to chase him round the room to catch him.

Oh, any of those,
she says, as the truth of it starts to
sink in.
I can't believe you pissed on Flag. Katie's had some bad dates before, but as far as I know you are the first to piss on her cat.

I didn't know it was a date.

Hardly seems to matter now, does it? Anyway, the date rhetoric's all just ridiculous Georgespeak. Call it what you want. It's the outcome that's the interesting bit. You think you know someone
. . . She laughs again.
You dark horse, you. You operator
.

Oh god, Katie was so intense, and she kept topping up my wine.

Well, you pretty much have to piss on people's cats if they're intense and they give you wine.

Do you have to keep saying it? In such a frank way?

I think I do. I think this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. You were dorky at uni, and I was worried over the last, you know, decade or so that you were getting your shit together. This is good. Hey, you should get a ping-pong ball to put in your toilet at home. It's great for the aim. I used it with Patrick when he was toilet training. Simple, but effective. And one of the many reasons to be glad you've got a daughter.

Thanks.

That's okay. Oh, sorry, one other thing. This is pretty embarrassing. I think 
–
okay, I get the weeing bit and the extenuating circumstances
–
but I think it's affected Katie's judgement. You know the way she can be a bit
. . .
Doesn't matter. What I'm saying is
. . . She stops to laugh, as though even she can't believe this story might have any more left in it.
This is just a small thing we'll have to sort out with her and I'm sure, when we tell her the rest of it, she'll realise she's got this wrong.
Katie thinks you steal things. She thinks you went back to her place yesterday morning and took a couple of towels.

Later, after my last patient has gone, I'm sitting in my room and telling myself it's not so much a lie as something that simply can't be explained properly.

Okay, I caught the cab home. I slept poorly, but there was nothing paradoxical about it, and no reading. My father is an early riser, so it was easy to get back to Katie's place while she should still have been asleep. And to thank my father for the lift, wave him off and foray briefly into her garden, pull the weed-on towels out of the bushes and drive away. They're in my bin now. And they're never going back.

Katie thinks she heard someone in her bushes around dawn,
Wendy told me.
And then a car driving off. Your car. She went to change her towels late yesterday and noticed there were two missing from the cupboard.

Fortunately, I know Wendy well enough that I got the sense she was presenting this to me as a piece of mad supposition on Katie's part. And when I said, Obviously the only reason I'd agreed to go there for dinner was to pick myself up a couple of towels, she said,
Exactly,
and apologised on Katie's behalf.

And as if she'd know what a Corolla engine sounded like.

I was in the Beemer, actually.

Well, there you go. She's getting bars on her windows now, you know.

Who wouldn't be, with all this towel thieving going on?

Oh, she'll find them in the laundry, or somewhere. She loses things all the time and thinks people have taken them. And she was way out of line when she asked if I thought you were somewhere in the kleptomaniac spectrum, or if it was just a personality disorder.

And with that excellent backhander, Katie was dismissed.

So I might get away with it. But it's hard to believe that I'm telling myself it's a good outcome, any kind of win at all. That I'm now known to a close friend and workmate as a cat-pisser, but not a towel thief, so that's okay.

I know I have to apologise to Katie, but how do I begin? With an email, obviously. I will begin (and hopefully end) the apology with a single well-composed email. It might not look as good as handling it face-to-face, but this is hardly a time to begin worrying about appearances.

Today, I get a weasel with attitude.

Hey. I don't know that I like you so much any more. I thought you were one of the good guys, Jon. Not one of those folk always expecting something for nothing. Now go click YES!! I LOVE MY WEASEL!! and you can register to use Window Weasel for life for only $30! Click LATER to register later.

So I'm no longer one of the good guys. As if that's news. I open one of the ktnflag emails in my in-box, and I hit Reply. I delete the text that's there, and then I'm faced by the large rectangular space that has to be filled by apology. Maybe I should try to keep it light.

Katie, Just a note to say thanks for Saturday night. Had a great time. Sorry for pissing on the cat though.

And if it sounded frivolous in my head – which it did – it looks simply stupid when reduced to the nuance-free, semi-formality of text.