Something Special, Something Rare (14 page)

He saw suddenly the garden around the hospital, pretend bushland that had probably once been landscaped, stunted banksias and eucalypts, forlorn paths of grey sand, a picnic table and benches that nobody ever sat on. Still, it had a certain delicate, unassuming serenity. After rain you could smell the eucalypts. Freesias appeared in early spring and magpies chortled around the car park.

Inside was its own world, a lonely place, and yet there was no face which did not smile at him. You sometimes glimpsed children in pajamas running down the corridors, bald-headed sprites surrounded by a sort of hush as all the adults held their breath for them. Once he walked into a waiting room full of women, old and young, in pastel floral gowns, and it seemed to him as they looked up that their faces were like flowers. Strangers told each other their stories, sitting together in gowns. They went very deep, very fast. Cancer had humbled them. Nothing had protected them, not virtue or intelligence or good looks. There was nothing left to separate them, nothing left to protect. A young Chinese woman called Mrs Cheng, sitting next to George, told him she had the Lord and that was all she needed. When she received her diagnosis, she'd reached into her handbag for a tissue to wipe her eyes and pulled out a little handcard, nicely printed, which said
The Lord Will Save Y
ou. She had no idea how it got there. It was like a blinding flash, she said.

Sometimes he felt he
had
died and woken up.

How could he tell Ulla that to the end of his days (an end on which he now reflected daily), he would never pass a bus stop without looking for her, waiting in her dusty sandals?

He was growing sleepy. He reached out one arm and switched Kancheli off. Out of music comes silence. Once he fell asleep (after listening to one of the Russians) and dreamt that he was walking down a snowy street at night, lit by glowing, old-fashioned lanterns. How could he tell them that what he remembered most was the pull he felt, strong as love or nostalgia, to give up, lie down in the snow, and close his eyes.

FORGING FRIENDSHIP

KAREN HITCHCOCK

Hannah replied to my Facebook request for friendship by email.

Hey Keira, she said in the email. What's it been, one year, two?

She was no longer with Thomas, had moved interstate, was making a short film and she'd prefer – she wrote – not to use Facebook. She would close her account any day now, it was a nightmare, she knew way too many people, and they all wanted to friend her. Nothing personal; she hoped I didn't mind. She hoped she'd bump into me one day. We should catch up sometime, when she was in town and wasn't so crazy busy.

Which to my mind was a fancy way of saying: Please fuck off.

So I wrote back: I totally understand, Hannah, thanks so much for finding the time to respond to me, because I do appreciate how extra precious your time is. I know that you really should have a PA to handle all this Facebook rejecting for you; how horrible it must be to tear yourself away from your city-slicking, vegan-shoe-and-blood-red-lipstick-buying, la-de-dah filmic machinations just to compose little Facebook rejections designed to make everyone else feel like a piece of crap. I mean, HOW TAXING for you, Hannah.

*

Switching pages, I see that Xanadu658 is selling a silver crochet evening purse lined in pale-blue silk. It is ‘no longer suitable, due to a change in lifestyle.'

What kind of lifestyle precludes evening purses? I check the other items Xanadu has for sale: three diamante belts (all size XS), red kitten heels (a bit scuffed), a six-pack of baby booties (NWOT).

I'm watching a couple of dresses, their prices creeping, I don't need them, I probably won't wear them, and yet … Maybe I should invest; maybe I need an evening purse. Who knows what the future may hold. Maybe this evening purse holds my future of evenings out clutching purses against perfect frocks over flawless skin, all clutched tight by a companion.

*

Hannah has dark brown eyes. We were once friends. Now we are not even ‘friends.'

I have a lot of ‘friends.'

I mean, we all know, or knew, or knew of, or wished we knew (like the-guy-from-the-bookshop), way too many people, don't we? I'd even found my dad listed on Facebook: the first time I'd seen him since I was eight. Late one night, call it the bottom of the barrel. He looked fatter, smaller and dumber than I remembered. Barrel bottom or not, I didn't ask him to be my friend.

What I really wrote to Hannah was this: Cool, Hann. Give me a call sometime if you're passing through town and we'll have a coffee and catch-up. Ciao xx

I don't need to tell you; she'd never call, kiss kiss, how are ya babe.

*

Hannah moved from South Africa to my school in year eleven. Something about the end of apartheid and its impact on cattle farming? Her dad – despised, pined after – went to New Zealand. Hannah and her mum came here.

Her first week at school she caught me smoking by myself, behind the woodwork shed. She asked for a light and said my tobacco was grown in Zimbabwe. I looked at my burning cigarette, then back at Hannah, unsure if she was taking the piss.

She lit up, blew smoke out of the corner of her mouth. ‘I'm Hannah,' she said, as if I didn't know.

I made no assumptions, but from that moment on she'd find me each lunchtime and peel me away from my book. We'd nibble our crappy sandwiches, make fun of the other students and smoke our guts out. We never hung out on the weekends; she was seeing some older guy named Frank who took up all her time. But in year twelve they broke up and Hannah and I made the transition from smoking buddies to out-of-school buddies and she started sleeping over at my place.

Weekday, weekend, it made no difference to us, we'd stay awake half the night, gulping hot chocolate and leaning out the bedroom window to smoke. Hannah's appetite for hot chocolate was insatiable; we'd go through a litre of milk each night, at least. Hannah's mum would only allow cocoa made with water and a splash of skim milk, so when she got to my place – where my mum slept heavily and didn't give a damn what we drank – she'd cut loose, heat the full-cream milk in a saucepan till it boiled, add half the box of cocoa and an avalanche of brown sugar. Each week I'd scrawl cocoa and milk on the shopping-list notepad on the fridge.

‘The amount of cocoa you girls go through,' my mum would sigh in her distracted way as she tore the list from the pad and rushed off to the supermarket on Friday night.

Hannah's hot chocolates. Her mother was one of those petite, pointy-nosed women for whom eating nothing was a sign of refinement. The world was a great and mysterious place where nothing was certain except the superiority of looking like an old bag of bones. Hannah inherited her father's large frame and appetite and made her mother look like an icy-pole stick. As far as I could tell, Hannah's mum had spent Hannah's entire life trying to whittle her into a twig.

One morning towards the end of the school year we were walking to the bus stop when Hannah told me that I held her in my sleep. I would – she said – wrap my arms around her waist, press my head into her chest or her back and hold on tight. She said she didn't mind, but wondered if I was aware that I did it.

No, I told her, I was not aware.

Then I said: Jesus Christ, how embarrassing, I'm so sorry, I'll try to stop.

She said not to worry about it, she didn't much mind.

She sort of liked it, she said.

She found it sweet.

*

I once read that the reason we are able to walk down a crowded street without continually colliding into others is because we detect subtle movements in the eyes of the people coming towards us – movements that somewhere deep inside our brains we understand as an intended direction and make the necessary adjustment in our trajectory. We make way for each other through a mutual understanding. Perhaps this is why we can feel comforted by a crowd.

Our eyes send signals so we avoid the barest touch. Perhaps this is why we can feel so lonely in a crowd.

Hannah? It had not been what, one year or two. It had been twenty-eight months plus three weeks. And Hannah? Never mind.

*

Facebook makes me sick. Hannah and I used to meet up in the flesh and walk along a real street and enter real live shops, staffed by fragrant, embodied individuals who – if you reached out and touched them – would feel warm and smooth, as human beings do. In such establishments we would try on clothes that were new and available in most sizes, including ours. And we would choose a frock from a rack and slip it on and spin for each other, our backs to the cool, hard mirrors. Then Hannah and I would sit face to face, look across the table into each other's eyes, and lips, and down into our coffees, slowly stirring the froth in, as we spoke words with pitch and waves that hit each other's tympanic membranes and sent physical signals of chemico-electric form zinging through each other's brains.

‘Keira?' she'd say.

‘Hannah?' I'd say. And we would answer each other – ‘yes,' or ‘yes?' – without the use of emoticons or excess punctuation. Without the need to ruminate over the difference in meaning of ‘oooooooo' and ‘oooooo!!!' and ‘oooohhhhhhh.' We used gesture and eyes and sounds. We sat face to face, and a single look transmitted the equivalent of three hundred posts on Facebook. None of which rendered me sick.

That saying ‘catch-up' makes me sick.

That saying ‘I hope you don't mind' makes me sick.

Sometimes, people streak so far ahead that there can never be any catch-up and too bloody bad if you mind.

Other things that make me sick: hot chocolate, long macchiatos, catching buses, the smell of burning fabric, dark brown eyes.

One time with Hannah I bought a pale-blue silk dress from the Vintage Clothing Shop. It gripped my tits like a cold fist but made my arse irresistible. Around the neck was a ring of pearlised sequins. It was cut at just the right length, highlighting both the bones of the knee and the curve of the quadriceps, which for some reason always screams vagina. Hannah made me buy it, although its price was such a stunner that I had to pilfer money from my mum's purse to pay. But I wore that frock dressed up with fish-net stockings, and down with bare legs, with scarfs and brooches and belts, depending on whether we were going to a club or a show or a café. I wore it with jackets on top and skivvies underneath, I wore it with hats and long socks and gold sandals and gloves. I wore that dress with Hannah.

Also, eBay makes me sick. And spastic and insatiable for things just out of sight. It fuels something frantic, then leaves me gutted. Without getting out of bed, with the rhythmic twitch of one finger against the return button on my keyboard, I can have frock after frock. None of which, poured out of their post-packs, caught warm in my fingers, satisfies anything. Although, according to the vendors' descriptions, every dress on eBay is ‘stunning.' They are stunning with tiny flaws, or stunning and unworn, or they are stunning and would look fabulous with heels and golden eyeshadow or equally so with ballet flats and a leather jacket; they are NWOT and stunning. You don't need to ask why the vendors are auctioning off their stunning crap because – like a con man – they tell you before you ask. There are three stories: wardrobe clearout; fluctuation in body weight; change in lifestyle. No one ever says that they are auctioning their kids' toys because they need a carton of fags or a crate of VB, or because the bank's about to foreclose. No one's selling their shit to raise funds for a holiday or to build a herb garden or a gazebo or buy a pet dog. No one's selling their shit because it's shit. They all regret horribly the necessity of the sale. They expect us to look at this detritus and be stunned.

Nothing to lose, I sign in.

There are currently seventy-four thousand, five hundred and thirty-one dresses listed for sale. Five thousand six hundred and twelve of them are pale blue. Seven hundred and forty are pale blue and vintage. I survey the capacity of my room. I turn back to my computer, flip pages.

Nothing to lose, I sign in.

I have a friend request from Nicky Winch, the guy in grade four who had the set of seventy-two Derwent pencils in a tin. I wonder if that's enough to forge a friendship. Nothing to lose, I accept, and the face of another stranger joins my library of friends.

*

So the pale-blue silk dress I bought and wore with Hannah was sleeveless? And it started to unravel under the armholes? At the part they call a gusset? I sewed the edges together, but I'm not much good with a needle and a gusset is a triangle of reinforcement that can only bear so much reinforcing. And then I ran out of pale-blue thread, used up all my white, moved on to pale green and et cetera until the underarms of the dress looked like psychedelic spiderwebs. At special events or where the light was quite bright, I tried to keep my arms pinned to my sides. Someone might flick a glance at my armpit during conversation and this served as a reminder for me to clamp that arm back down. Hannah told me to relax. She said the mass of threads were scary-beautiful. Those were her words: scary, beautiful.

Then, a few weeks later, she said the mending seemed desperate, overly optimistic, why didn't I just get another dress? Desperate, overly optimistic; a cause and its effect.

I'd seen Hannah ruin two striped tops from her prized collection: one with blue-black hair dye; one behind the bus stop where a rusty nail stuck out of the fence. Both times she did the exact same thing, no threads involved: she just chucked them in the bin, like wet tissues.

*

There are three hundred and seventy-three pale blue + vintage + sleeveless dresses for sale on eBay. Forty-four are ‘Buy it now!' The rest are up for auction. All bids end between one minute and eight days from now.

*

The plan was that we'd both do nursing and then volunteer as aid workers abroad. That's what we called it: abroad, which to our ear was far more sophisticated a term than overseas. We enrolled – and then spent the summer around town, me in that dress, Hannah in ballet flats, red lipstick and one of her striped tops. We talked about moving in together as soon as we got part-time jobs. Meanwhile she stayed over at mine. Full-cream milk and cocoa. I held her warm body at night and pretended to sleep.

*

I log in, compelled by the old What if?

Nicky Winch the Derwent boy has sent me a message.

Unusual. Normally you accumulate ancient artefacts and never exchange a word. Befriend, read their inane and desperate and overly optimistic daily updates, voyeurism, despair.

The Westgate sucks, sooooo happy Masterchef's back, shiny, happy, kid topped the class.

But here in the stream was a message just for me. For a fraction of a second, a tiny boy in a crowded school photo, his pursed little lips, calling across years.

Kieiria wots up? Remember the day you fell from the monkey bars landed on me and stuffed my knee my knee still kills me and I might need an op. Work in a sign shop which is pretty shit. Usual stuff, 2 kids, don't have much contact tho. How goes?

He'd spelt my name wrong and I did not remember that monkey bars incident.

Then I did remember the incident and the attending ambulance and the fact that it was a girl called Sonya Murne, the netball champion of the school, who landed on his knee, not me. I hated the monkey bars. I hated netball. I liked coloured pencils in tins, and books and other quiet stuff. Hello? You think you know me? I'm not fucking Sonya Murne.

*

Somehow that summer between school and uni, bisexual had emerged as the new normal, so unless you were a Nazi Christian you said you were bisexual. We discussed it. In theory, Hannah said, she could definitely be in love with a woman; love was love, after all; male, female, what's the diff? Keep in mind that it was me she was sitting with when she said it. She said it to my face, looking into my eyes. Then she said, ‘And woman on woman avoids all the problematics of submission that go with penetrative sex, the prescribed male/female dynamic, et cetera, you know?'