The Idea of Perfection (34 page)

Suddenly light burst down from a high lamp. She cried out from the shock of it, flinched away covering her eyes.

Oh! she heard herself gasp. Oh, help!

But his clothes were still all done up tight, and he was not even looking at her, and turned away, reaching up to tilt the lamp so the hard white light burned down sideways.

They were in a space she had not seen before, an office in an alcove of screens. There was a desk and a filing cabinet, and a typist’s chair with a rip down the middle of the seat, and a couch covered in beige vinyl. He took a big manilla envelope from the desk and gave it to her. When he had finished giving it to her, and she had finished taking it, he went on standing very close to her, as if the envelope was made of glass and he was waiting to catch it if it fell.

Tell me what you think.

He was close enough that he really only had to whisper.

She tried not to fumble, getting the envelope open, feeling him watching her hands.

The photos of Great-Grandmother Ferguson’s quilt were very professional-looking. The quilt looked rich and sumptuous, and did not show a single pucker or shadow. He had laid out the scalloped edge so the slight irregularity did not show at all. Only someone who knew, such as Great-Grandmother Ferguson, but she was dead, and herself, but she was not telling, and now Freddy Chang, who had made sure no one would know, would ever guess that the quilt was not absolutely, perfectly square.

Lovely! she exclaimed. Perfect!

He had come around next to her, looking over her shoulder at the prints.

He was so close, he was almost cheek-to-cheek.

He did not seem to be aware of how close he was. He was innocently engrossed in the photos, a purely professional interest. She should not be thinking of the fact that if he turned his face towards her, he would be able to stick his tongue right into her ear.

In fact, she was definitely not thinking that.

Perfect, she said again.

She shuffled through the pictures, trying to think of what to say to fill the silence.

Not a single wrinkle, she said.

She had not really meant to use the word
wrinkle.
There was another word, but she could not think of it.

She heard herself laugh, that laugh she did with Freddy Chang.

Not wrinkle, she said. More, well ...

But having got so far, she could not think of any word but
wrinkle.
Somehow, the word
wrinkle
was stuck in her mind, and for some reason, along with the word
wrinkle,
was a picture of Freddy Chang‘s, well,
organ,
a neat little folded thing soft in its nest of hair, its
wrinkles
slowly smoothing out as it swelled and filled.

She peered more closely at the quilt and pushed her hair back behind her ear. It fell forward again and she was glad to feel it like a screen hiding her cheek. She smiled in the way she knew looked girlish, glad, innocent. From trying it in the mirror she knew it was the kind of smile that gave her a sweet little dimple.

A person with a dimple like that would only have the most wholesome thoughts.

Crease,
of course. That was the word she should have used. Not
wrinkle.

Crease, she said.

It sounded rather loud.

Crease, I mean.

There was a long silence. She could feel her fingers slimy on the gloss of the photos as she stared at the quilt and its lack of
creases.

Yes, he said casually, as if continuing an earlier conversation. I get a bit of use out of the couch, as a matter of fact.

They both looked at it.

The couch was a terrible old thing. The vinyl was the kind that stuck to the backs of your legs if you sat on it with a short skirt. At one end there was a small dingy cushion. It was quite safe to look at it, because no one would think
casting couch
of this cheap old thing. No one would think,
You would have to get on top of each other.

She could not seem to think about anything but two bodies on the couch. It would hardly be wide enough for two. The more she tried to think about something else, the more she thought about it.

But it was all right. No one would know as long as you kept on smiling nicely.

More relaxing than you might think, he said.

It was not that Freddy Chang was being suggestive. He was just talking about how you could have a nap there in the middle of the day when business was slow downstairs. Any other possible meanings were purely in her own mind. That mind of hers seemed to be getting away from her.

Suddenly he took hold of her elbow. She could feel his whole warm palm, cupping her elbow.

Know what
Karakarook
means? he asked.

His thumb was pressing a dent into the flesh of her upper arm.

Oh! No! she cried. How do you mean?

She was confused by the closeness of him, the way he was gripping her arm, almost hard enough to hurt, the heat coming up out of his palm, into her elbow. And what was he talking about?

Elbow, he said, and took hold of her other arm, cupping the elbow there as well. It brought him around in front of her, very close. It was as if they were about to start dancing, except there was no music to make it all right.

In the Aboriginal language. Karakarook — means elbow.

She could actually feel the heat coming off him, he was so close.

Oh! she exclaimed again.

She was blushing under the lights. Her whole body felt as if it was one big hot blush. But it was all right. He probably could not see, or if he did he would just think it was just blusher. He could probably not tell the difference between blusher and a blush.

She felt his fingers slide up her arm, under the sleeve of the pink blouse. His fingers pressed into the flesh there as if he was playing the piano, but his face did not show anything in particular, although he was not being particularly
inscrutable
either.

It was as if his fingers were secretively spelling out one kind of thing, while his face was doing something else.

She had replaced the buttons on this particular blouse with some that she had thought were more attractive and they had turned out to be just a little tight in the buttonholes. It meant that it had become a bit hard to undo the buttons.

She could not imagine why she was thinking about that just at this moment.

Because of the way the river bends, he said.

One of his knees was pressing against her leg, edging itself between her thighs. He seemed unaware of it, telling her the little detail of local geography. It would seem as if she had a dirty mind, if she told him to stop.
Stop what, Mrs Porcelline?
His face registered no knowledge of what his sly knee was doing, and what her sly mind was noticing.

Like an elbow, he said.

He was so close she could feel the puffs of air on her cheek as he spoke.

Know what I mean?

She was losing the thread of this conversation. What did he mean,
Know what I mean?

In spite of herself, her legs were slowly parting under the gentle insistence of his knee. It was as if her legs were no longer under her control. Part of her was busy trying conscientiously to work out what he meant by
Know what I mean,
but another part of her was doing this other thing.

My word it’s bright in here, she blurted out suddenly, loudly.

He let go of one of her elbows, leaned sideways and reached up roughly to switch off a lamp so it reeled on its stalk.

Better, Mrs Porcelline?

HARLEY WAS DRIVING the old Singer like a car with a dubious gearbox, riding it hard. The table shook, the floor rumbled from the hammering of the machine. Her knee shoved at the worn metal lever, her hands flew between the wheel at the side and the fabric, pushing it through, dragging the thread down against the blade at the back, snapping it off.

The patchwork was like a dark pelt spilling into her lap as she turned and flipped and folded. All the small squares and rectangles of fabric drank the light. Even the extra, yellow light beaming down over the needle did not make the fabric bright.

She had covered several of the mirrors with towels, but the room was still full of reflections like pools of glimmering water. Every time she moved she glimpsed an answering shadowy movement, a flickering from all around the room.

Something made a noise outside the window and she glanced around quickly, over her shoulder. Her reflections in the mirrors all glanced around quickly too, a crowd in the room with her, furtive, stopping when she looked at them. She sat rigid, listening. The reflections were still, but she knew they were there, watching.

She sighed and held up the patchwork. To her it was obviously inspired by the shapes of an old wooden bridge. But to anyone else it would probably just look like something gone wrong. Stitched up next to each other, the pieces all looked the same: the
lights
and the
darks
all looked dirty and drab under the yellow light. The whole thing was shapeless, puckered, a wounded creature with a sad brown look. It bulged along the edges, thick and lumpy. The seams did not quite line up. It was
on purpose,
of course, but no one in Karakarook was likely to know that.

Outside in the big rough country night, the dog was standing, waiting for her to feed it. It did not bark or whine, but she knew it was there, waiting to be fed, still patient, still optimistic, even though the square of the kitchen window was black now, all the noises and smells of dinner gone.

 

 

 

She had thought it was enough to be neutral with the dog. She had thought that was possible: to be neutral. She had never hit it, but she did not pat it either. It was true that she bought it dogfood, but only ever one tin at a time. She had let it rest its chin on the seat-back beside her as she drove, but she had never given it a name.

However, she could see now that there was no such thing as being neutral with a dog. A dog had an all-or-nothing approach, and to this dog,
just this once
was the same as
for ever and ever.

She could see she should have been firm with it from the start. That very first day, she should not have let it get into the car. She should have handed the problem to Coralie then and there.
It’s not my
dog, she should have said.
I don’t want it.

She supposed she had been flattered by the dog’s attention, the way it had chosen her, the way it seemed to like her. She told herself, grimly, forcing the fabric along under the needle, that it was naive to think it liked her.
Sucked in,
as the tough boys down at the school would say. It was just that she was the one who opened the tin of dogfood. As far as the dog was concerned, she was just an elaborate extension of the tin opener.

She had let herself be flattered, and now she was stuck with a situation she should never have allowed to develop. The thing was, there was no way you could explain to a dog. You could not say,
I was wrong to encourage you,
politely but firmly. You could not say, Thanks so much, but I have had
enough of you now.

The solution was to stop feeding it, and she was going to start tonight. For a while it would think that she had simply forgotten. It would wait patiently. She had learned how patient it could be. In the morning it would be hungry, and by tomorrow afternoon it would be extremely hungry. Some time tomorrow night, or at the worst the day after, it would finally get the hint.

There was a rustling close by outside, then a dull tap and a swish. Then nothing, only distant noises: the frogs again, some kind of plaintive honking, and far over in Karakarook North, a tiny distant squeal of tyres on a corner and a thin faraway car horn.

She felt herself straining to hear the small nearby sounds. When she turned her head deliberately to meet herself in the nearest mirror she saw how pale her face was against the room full of shadows behind her. Lit from below by the yellow light of the Singer, her face was stern with listening too hard: cruel, angular, her eyes shadowed, inhuman, unfeeling. She did not intend to look that way, but she did.

The roof gave a loud creak, then another. It was like slow footsteps.

She wished now that she had not mentioned the bridge patchwork to Coralie. Donna’s pieces had got her excited, but everything looked good in the beginning. It was only later, putting the pieces together, that it turned into something less than you had hoped. It seemed she would never learn that was the way things always were.

It made it worse at the end, if you had been eager in the beginning. It was better never to be enthusiastic.

Coralie would be understanding. She could imagine her coming close, putting her hand on her arm, the way she did.
Not to worry, pet,
she would say.
No worries.

But she did not want to be understood. She had to go on. There was no use hoping to make it different now, or better. It would simply have to go on being what it was.

She bowed her head to the Singer again, head down like an animal, feeling all her obstinacy driving her on. She worked quickly, fitting her corners together, lining up her seam allowances just slightly off, pressing the seams open. The shapes repeated themselves under the yellow light: light,
dark, light, dark.
She set her mouth hard round the pins and felt her cheeks shake as she jerked the threads down hard and snapped them off. She caught sight of herself again in one of the mirrors: her mouth was sardonic with the pins bristling between her lips, her face fierce, her shoulders angry.

She got up abruptly and went over to the black square of window to try to close the curtain that never worked properly. She felt exposed and ridiculous, standing in the window as if on a stage, pulling at it. She jerked hard, something gave with a bang, the way it always did, and the curtain slid reluctantly across.