I am beginning to smell something veritably bad.
I first noticed it when I got home from doing the grocery shopping. The stench reminded me of a steak that had once been left to thaw—uncovered—for ten or so days in the back of the refrigerator.
Strong, rank and nauseating are just a few words to describe it; I bet I can think of a zillion more.
The smell was so strong, in fact, I wondered why on earth I hadn’t noticed it earlier. Days earlier. A week.
I didn’t walk into it. It found me. It engulfed me.
I threw down the grocery bags, effectively spilling their contents all over the kitchen floor. I lurched forward, spun back around, and dashed to the toilet to vomit.
That accomplished, I rushed back out to the supermarket.
Now, like a Buddhist temple or shrine, the entire house is redolent of opium-and lavender-scented incense sticks. I keep one burning in the lounge room, two at each end of the hallway, and one in my bedroom just inside the door. It creates a magical atmosphere, like a ritual for purifying the senses and casting out malevolent spirits. This second smell is sweetly sickening and just as overpowering, but at least it doesn’t make me want to regurgitate my food every time I breathe it in.
Problem solved, I guess. But it did get me thinking about the condition Dad’s body is currently in.
Funnily enough, for someone who has to live with death day in, day out, and who has always had an unhealthy fascination for it, I don’t know a great deal about it. I know what death is marked by—cessation of heartbeat, respiration, brain activity, etcetera—but apart from knowing what rigor mortis is (the stiffening of the skeletal muscles) and that putrefaction is caused by the action of enzymes and bacteria, after its death as a whole, I remain unenlightened on what fundamental changes occur in an organism—i.e. Dad.
I might have to do some more research on it.
For the beginning of winter it was an unusually bright sunny day. I walked to the lake, carrying a brown paper bag full of fusty bread pieces and dry sponge cake to throw at the ducks. I sat down at the bottom of a gently rising slope, several feet from the water. Wizened leaves tumbled and somersaulted about me in the strengthening northerly wind. Few clouds sifted like patches of self-raising flour across the sky, and a flock of birds drew imperfect circles across the clouds, like tiny kites governed by human hands and endless balls of string.
There were a lot of kids running about, flapping their bony arms and quacking, and many balding or overweight parents yelling at them to “Don’t go too near the lake! Come back!” I smiled at the really little ones, picturing them falling in. Picturing them getting spanked by their vexed mothers or fathers.
A young couple too busy smooching to see me drifted arm in arm by my feet. Shining wetly and obscenely in the sunlight, their tongues seemed inhumanly long. I thought they belonged in the misshapen heads of sideshow freaks.
The pair reminded me of Bain and Pander. The girl was skinny with a fashionably tapered haircut. From a distance she would’ve resembled a boy.
She looked so happy, so in love. They both did. Two weeks ago I would have been jealous of them, insanely jealous, but today I wasn’t. Today I just looked at them, looked through them, and daydreamed about Mr Grills.
I wondered what might have happened yesterday if Mrs Usher hadn’t interrupted us. “I’m saying …”
I’m saying that what you feel for me…it’s real, because I feel it, too.
He stood so close to me, I remembered. He acted like a man imbued with an uncontrollable desire to do something unscrupulous and immoral but at the same time so darn right!
I thought about how I couldn’t wait to see him on Monday. I wished I knew where he lived so I need not have to wait.
I prayed that he isn’t married or attached or—
No. No way. He can’t be. If he were, he would have told me so. Right from the start he would have made that crystal clear.
Besides, he doesn’t wear a ring. He doesn’t wear a ring because he’s not married, not because he is and doesn’t want people to know it.
I don’t even know his first name, I thought with dismay.
And then for a while I wondered about that, too.
The clouds amassed and darkened from a putty-grey colour to an indigo-black. I watched with scant interest as they chased the sun and inevitably snuffed it out. I threw the remainder of the bread at the ducks and headed on home.
I should’ve gone to the library, I thought. Too late now. What will I do tonight, unable to finish my essay?
I suppose I can study for my science class. I can prepare myself for Monday morning, when Mr Grills discusses the basic principles of sound. I’ll demonstrate once again how intellectual and astute I am. I’m bound to gain more of his respect.
But I admit to myself now that it isn’t just about gaining respect. It isn’t as simple as that.
I lit a cigarette. As I approached the southern end of Peachy Street, I couldn’t take my eyes off the house. I saw again how normal it looked, sitting there amongst all the other normal-looking houses.
Mr Token, the elderly gentleman who lives across the street—who’s real neighbourly, especially to Dad—emerged from his creaky porch onto the footpath to investigate whatever noise happened to disturb him. Or maybe just to look at something besides the picture box or daily classifieds. He’s what you might call roach-backed, and has to walk using a cane.
His double-fronted weatherboard house is about as antiquated as Hooke’s string telephone. It certainly looks old, the way geriatrics look. The way its owner looks: clapped-out, broken down, withering right before your eyes.
“Miss Marshall!” hollered Mr Token, a cold breeze stirring the thatch of hair on top of his shrunken head. “Long time no see! Where’s your old grumblebum of a father? Keeping more to himself these days?”
I stopped short before turning left into the driveway and replied, “You could say that.”
“Tell him to come visit me. You, too. No one’s getting any younger.” He turned away, covered his mouth with a hand and coughed. “Or healthier, for that matter.”
“Sure, Mr Token,” I said wholeheartedly, before disappearing inside the pleasant smelling house that is all mine.