Perfect Skin (18 page)

I know you do. And I bet you never trash emails.

Why would you trash emails?

I pour more wine and we sit down. I decide that tonight a glass and a half will be the limit. I don't really know what's happening here, but it wouldn't be improved if I went to the toilet with Elvis and weed on him.

‘My Sharona' has been around at least twenty years,
she says.

All right, it's a classic.

About 1977, I think.

Surely not. It's not even their best song anyway.

No. ‘Good Girls Don't' was their best song.

Okay, we agree on something.

Elvis climbs onto the sofa next to Ash and stares at her again.

A ‘My Sharona' fan from way back, I tell her. Don't worry. It's a whippet thing. I spent years trying to work out if he was being really thoughtful or just intensely blank. Then someone pointed out to me that his brain is actually the size of a walnut. So I think it's better to err on the side of not brilliant.

I
don't know,
she says, taking his face in her hands and pushing his ears back.
He looks kind of smart.

He looks like a seal if you do that, maybe, but I don't think he looks terribly smart. Just one example – he blames me for rain.

He blames you for rain? How do you know?

It's the way he stares when it rains.

He's got more than one way of staring?

You get to work these things out after a while. You work out most about the mechanisms of the walnut brain if you take him for a walk. If you go along just behind him and imagine watching the world through whippet cam. Motoring along, with your ears back, all these instances of unexpected distractability, when one tuft of grass that looks just like any other tuft of grass compels you to sniff. And rub yourself in it. And then chug along like the smallest freight train in the world to catch up with your human again. It seems to be fun, but I don't think it's sophisticated.

When Ash has finished her wine, I drive her back to her place.

I'd better get going,
she said as she drank the last mouthful and put the glass down on the coffee table.
I've got a few things to look at for uni tomorrow.

When I'm home again, and the Bean's out of the car and back in her cot and I'm loading the dishwasher, I wish the evening wasn't over. Over in the car outside Ash's house with her calm,
See you tomorrow.
Over back here with the silence, the sleeping baby and the quiet, watching dog. The weight that had lifted all evening without me knowing is back on me.

I couldn't tell her about Mel tonight, even though it's the one crucial thing about me that she doesn't know.
I could show off, I could go on at length about the dog, I could embarrass myself with the Bonio game and be embarrassed by my ancient pre-knotted ties, I could find myself sitting there listening to that biscuit story. But not just listening. Being drawn in by it and thinking, does she know how that kind of thing appeals to me? So could she please stop? But I couldn't tell her about Mel.

What am I doing? How do I get to be playing this game without thinking it through?

I didn't expect to be here, playing anything. I didn't think my life would be like this. As naive as it seems, when I was at uni I think I assumed that everything would be sorted out long before I was thirty. And by thirty-four I'd be years into marriage, I'd have two children, all would be going well and we'd be happy that two was enough.

I suppose I thought my big stresses would be how long the grass got between Saturday mowings, and people not turning the light off when they left the room. That's how much it looks like an uncontested assumption that I'd be replicating my parents' lives.

So it was wrong from the outset. But even if it hadn't been, it would be far too simplistic to say that it was Melissa's death that stopped it. The whole situation was much more complicated.

In so many ways, it just wasn't working. I don't know if I can say that it never worked, but it stopped working. I think it was in England that we decided we'd be together, share the pursuit of the lives we expected, and bad jobs and a shitty winter that got us thinking that way. But maybe that's too dissected, too clinical. Maybe I should be remembering something properly passionate,
but it's long ago and there's too much in between. I can remember days and things we did and things I said, but when I try to remember how I felt, I can't quite get there.

Mel was doing a year of her dermatology training in Cambridge. She'd always planned that, since before we started going out. We'd talked about it as though it gave us the safety of something finite, a relationship with an end point. We weren't committing. We were clear on that with each other. We were filling in time. Six months. I kept telling myself not to get attached. But at the three-month mark, when she said something like,
What are your plans for next year, really? You don't seem to he making any,
I realised she was right. I'd gone into general practice, doing locums. I'd decided I wouldn't do that forever. That was the extent of my plan.

I suppose I could come over to England for a while, I said. It's been a few years since I've been back there.

I think I even called it a change of scene.

I went with her. I stayed. I did GP locums, so it wasn't much of a change of scene. Then a non-accredited laser surgical position came up at the hospital. Temporary Clinical Assistant to the Director of Dermatology. There were weeks when I did more laser work than Mel did. Those also tended to be the weeks when she'd tell me about rare diseases that she'd seen (and that I'd never even heard of), or some small technical point she'd discussed with someone important.
While you're doing the hack work,
she never actually said.

But I liked the work. I'd found a kind of work that I liked and, surprisingly, it was the focused practical challenge of it that I liked best. And I knew I'd never care that I didn't know the three-word Latin name for yet
another skin rash, so I was happy for her to put me in my place. I even recast it as a plus, being with someone who had that kind of ambition. I decided to see her as assertive, positive, a more positive person than me. I told myself it was a good thing, and that I respected it. And that it wasn't a competition.

And any time it really shitted me off, all I had to do was wait until she'd finished the last long Latin word of the disease name and then say something like,
Doesn't it just respond to steroids?
as if, for the veteran locum GP, it was all everyday stuff.

But it wasn't like that all the time, and it's wrong to remember it that way.

There were times when we were on the same side, like the morning when the heating had gone out and I was outside long before dawn, shovelling coal and thinking, Why the fuck am I here? and wanting to kiss my father's balding head for accepting that job in Australia in the early seventies. I went back into the house to find that Mel had got up as well, and made hot chocolate. She had woken with the cold, as I had not long before. She had heard me outside, my vigorous swearing and my almost as vigorous shovelling. And she had decided, at a time when it would have been more than reasonable to roll over, close her eyes and wait for the heat to kick back in, that she'd get up and heat milk on the gas and have hot chocolate ready for me. And we'd share the moment of acute homesickness.

It snowed that same day, and we ran around in it like kids, built a dirty knee-high snowman and laughed at how shitty I'd been just hours earlier. There are photos somewhere. Mel, rosy-cheeked in the beanie she'd bought
for skiing, poking an old, discoloured potato into the snowman, round about mid-face.
There's his nose,
she said.
He's that actor, that actor from the forties, with the voice.
She meant WC Fields. She was wearing her entire ski wardrobe and making a grubby mini-WC Fields.

We only went skiing once. She didn't like the way the boots felt. She probably also didn't like not being good at it right away, but she didn't say that.

By the time it was spring and the weather was sometimes better, we seemed quite sure that we were together. So we were together when we got back to Brisbane, in a way that we hadn't been when we'd left.

We rented a flat, and started looking around for a place to buy. And we decided – we both decided, as far as I can recall – that we didn't want people to think this was something we had stumbled into. We wanted to show them it was more than that. We decided to get married. It went exactly as expected. Mel had clear ideas, I had none, so it suited us both to go with hers. My mother gave up her hold on calm in stages. First, there was,
It's your wedding, so you make all the decisions.
Then there was,
It's your wedding, so you make all the decisions,
but said accompanied by the sound of grinding molars. Then we moved to,
It's not quite how I'd do it
. . . and finally to her strident decision that the cut of Mel's dress was
morally wrong.

And next your head spins, I told her, and green vomit comes out.

My father brokered a fragile peace the next afternoon. It was all very odd. My mother and I weren't used to arguing at all.

And I don't know if my edginess on our wedding day
was more than the average and, if it was, I don't know if my mother's madness was to blame. Again, I'm looking for signs. Signs that all was not quite right. But it's too late, far too late, to look back fairly on the day we got married. And perhaps the certainty and uncertainty of it all was nothing more nor less than normal.

Mel did dermatology locums when we got back from the UK, and was still doing one when we got married. I got a job with a laser surgery group, but it was mainly cosmetic work and that wasn't really the direction I wanted to take. Meanwhile, George was thinking of setting up his own dermatology practice, focusing on laser, and Wendy – who was a year or two older than us – was finishing her MBA, about to have Emily and aiming to resume her clinical career the following year.

So we got together and planned. Wendy and Mel seemed to get on pretty well from the start and, in a way, that counterbalanced the fact that George and I had been friends at uni in the eighties and had enough in-jokes to last us for years. With two of the four of us being married to each other, we'd all started off wary that that relationship would intrude but, when each meeting began, it seemed easier to leave the marriage at the door than George's projectile vomiting stories. I can remember Wendy arguing with him, and insisting that the Med Ball of 1986 couldn't possibly be as legendary as he was making out, and George coming back with something along the lines of,
You graduated in eighty-five, didn't you?

Mel and I were on the same side that day, the side that could remember the legendary Med Ball of 1986, but valued neutrality a little more. And we were already putting any problems we had – and they seemed to be
small problems – down to the stress of investing large amounts of money in a business together, and taking on a new mortgage, and any other good reason going.

Maybe that's when we started to agree on less and less. In the context of setting up the business, a context in which we'd all made it clear that we had to speak our minds, be up front, hold nothing back. But Mel and I would go home and do the same, and it came to characterise our interactions. We both dealt with any issue as though the argument concerned only the issue itself, and the incompatibility that was starting to gape between us became something we were good at turning away from, a big dark space that we put our backs to and pretended wasn't there.

And you can't do that forever but, by the time we started looking at it seriously, the relationship was used up, all of it. If I'm going to be honest. Long ago we'd used up all the affection. We'd used up most of the arguments. We'd used up even the simple differences of opinion.

We'd used up each other's faces, senses of humour, presence in the house. We had become blanks to each other, each of us the only person in the other's life who had taken on a kind of invisibility. A heartless, but not cruel, invisibility.

We had descended to the mathematical part of the relationship. The co-ownership of things. The arithmetic of partnership, mortgages, leases. Documents to do with money and bearing both our names.

Punctuated by desperate attempts to take history by the collar, pull it around, stare into its eyes and change its mind. Therapy, consideration, compromise on the smallest things. Cooking Mel's noodle dish when she
was feeling big and tired in the late weeks of pregnancy. But that's not love, however decent it might be for an evening. However much I might have wanted to fix the situation as she paced with her hands on her sore back and the unbalanceable bulge out the front and the near desperation some nights that it all be over soon. And she'd slump into the sofa and put her feet up and look down at the bulge and tell me there must be a better way. I'd do what I could to help and that only led to misunderstandings, the idea that things might be better than they were. An idea that always had its wings clipped soon enough. She'd find some energy somewhere and we'd discover the capacity to argue again, or talk differences up instead of down, or simply not like each other and do separate things.

It's all that normal stuff that happened to us – two people who have made a simple mistake and actually shouldn't be together, who are drawn together by things that don't work in the long term. Back then I blamed it on Mel, but therapy genuinely made me realise I wasn't as right as I'd thought. We were just different, and it had become problematic when put to the test. Mel did hold views dogmatically, and it did make arguments hell. And I did avoid conflict about anything that mattered, and I also stirred it up sometimes to prove the contrary, and to prove that Mel was the unreasonable one.