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Rosabel Tan

This Is Not About Freud

The first person I slept with after my father died was a hairy-knuckled dishwasher named Will who had a collection of Happy Meal toys dating back to 1992. ‘I used to work at the video store in Glen Innes,’ he explained, as I examined the plastic figurines on the shelf above his bed, ‘and McDonald’s was right across the road. So every now and then I’d pop over during my lunch break and git mah wee toy.’ He said this last bit in a Scottish accent, as if doing this would make the hobby not his but somebody else’s.

‘You have a lot of them,’ I said, gazing at them all.

He picked up a silver car and presented it to me in the palm of his hand. ‘This was my first.’ Leaning out the window was a wild- eyed man with fluffy white hair, his mouth open wide like he was screaming into the wind. ‘I’ve had it since I was six.’

I pressed my index finger against the bonnet and pushed it up his arm, the back wheels squeaking as they turned. ‘Who’s it meant to be?’

‘The Doc.’ He grinned. ‘Reckon we can get it to eighty-eight miles an hour?’

‘Probably not,’ I said.

‘No,’ he agreed, and then seeing my blank expression, ‘It’s the speed the car had to travel to go back to the future.’

‘How can you go back to the future?’ I pointed to his door and back at him. ‘Linguistically it’s all wrong.’

‘You just can,’ he said. ‘It’s a movie.’

Will lived in a two-bedroom apartment by the railway tracks with a web developer named Dan, but Dan wasn’t home because he was still at the bar where I’d just met Will. I’d been sitting in one of the booths with my back against the wall, still in the gray smock I’d worn to work. My boss had insisted I take bereavement leave, and when I told page 126 her I didn’t need it, she patted my hand with the flourish of someone who knew nothing about me but enjoyed thinking she did. ‘You need a few days, Sylvia,’ she said, her hand still on mine. ‘It’s important you give yourself time to grieve.’

‘I would rather stay at work,’ I said, realising as I did that it was the wrong thing to say. ‘No, you’re right,’ I conceded, ‘I should leave.’ The truth was I was coping fine, but it’s an impossible admission to make without sounding heartless or in denial. ‘Let me know if there’s anything I can do,’ she said, crossing my name from the roster. ‘You’ll be paid for three days, but you’re welcome to take more.’

‘Three should be enough,’ I assured her. ‘Thank you.’

Instead of leaving through the front, I took the stairwell, wanting to avoid the others. Ever since they’d heard about my dad they kept looking at me expectantly, waiting for me to say the right things and to cry. It made me feel like a fraud, like I wasn’t doing it right. Like I was weird for wanting to stay there, in my cubicle, telling strangers what buses to catch and when. ‘You’re in shock.’ That had been Paddy, calling from the cubicle next door. ‘Why are you here? Go home.’

‘I’m not in shock,’ I told her. ‘I barely knew him, and he barely knew me.’

She sighed when I said that, like I was breaking her heart. ‘We never do know them the way we wanted to,’ she said softly. ‘That’s the hardest part.’

‘Paddy,’ I said, ‘I have a call coming through.’

The call centre was next to one of the bridges overlooking the motorway, the kind with plastic barriers so high it’s impossible for a person to fall. This is the thought that passed through me each morning on my way to work. What came before, to prompt these walls. I thought I had a suicidal guy on the line once. Kept saying he didn’t want to be here anymore, that he was over it all. Turned out he was drunk and tired of waiting for the bus, but my boss said I handled it well.

On the other side of the bridge was a red-brick building with a neon-blue martini glass flashing on the door. The kind of building that blended into the surrounding townhouses so well that it was easy enough to miss. The Yellow Oyster. We had come here for staff page 127 drinks once. Despite it being three in the afternoon, it was open and serving seven-dollar meals, shoestring fries and butter chicken made from canned supermarket sauce. The only person already there was an older woman with a stringy perm who was squinting at the television and eating baked beans and mashed potatoes. There was nobody behind the bar, but I could hear the clattering of plates in the kitchen, and eventually a man in a red polo shirt walked out, his beer gut hanging loosely over his waistband. It would have been good advertising had he looked the discerning type. ‘We’ve run out of beans,’ he informed me, wiping his fingers on the front of his jeans,‘but we can do anything else.’

I ordered a pint. He pulled a glass from under the counter and held it to the light, though it wasn’t clear what he was checking for because he ignored the streaky finger marks on the rim. He seemed to work in slow motion, this guy, every moment so laboured you wanted to reach out and shake him. ‘Help yourself to some nuts,’ he said as he started pouring.

I glanced at the bowl, wondering how many saliva-coated fingers had pawed through its contents. ‘Would it be possible to get a fresh bowl?’

‘No problem.’ He winked, and I wondered if ‘fresh bowl’ was code for something else. ‘Grab a seat and I’ll bring it over with your beer.’

There were three booths lining the far wall, and the leather on all three had started to crack, webs of worn white lines threading their way along the seats. I headed for the one at the back, the one most hidden from view, and dropped my bag onto the table. I couldn’t see the television from here, but I could hear the excited applause of a studio audience as the presenter revealed that his guest was not a he, but a she! The kind of trash I used to watch with my dad, but never on my own.

I began sorting into neat piles the rubbish that had accumulated in my bag over the past week: gum wrappers, bus tickets, receipts. I still had the funeral programme in there. I wasn’t sure what I was meant to do with it, but it seemed wrong to throw it out. There was a photo of him on the front, sitting in his boat, holding a fish with both hands, the sea beneath a sloppy, cold blue. You couldn’t see he was balding because he was wearing a white bucket hat with a green rim.

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It was a nice photo, but there was something about the fish. The way he was gripping it by its gills, it made it look as though its head was separate to its body, like those mirror tricks at the museum where it looks like you’ve been decapitated and it’s just your head on a platter of fruit.

I had never seen the photo, though I’d been convinced that I had. It wasn’t until I saw the singlet he was wearing—bright blue with the word bugger in yellow print—that I realised I hadn’t. This one, Valerie had told me, had been taken six months ago. Cassandra had chosen it. She was their daughter.

The entire funeral had been filled with moments of recognition like this, memories that were yet weren’t mine. Valerie’s whole speech: about watching TV with him, about reading the newspaper together—those were my memories too. And when it was my turn to speak, I didn’t have anything to say. She had stolen my speech, altered the words to make them hers, and made them seem truer than if I’d been the one to say them. It was her right, I figured. We hadn’t kept in close contact, my Dad and I, not out of animosity but because we hadn’t had the need. So I talked about him meeting Valerie instead. How happy she had made him and how she had changed him for the better.

Afterwards, when we were walking up to the casket, the thought popped into my mind that it wouldn’t be his face staring back. That it would be somebody else’s.

But it was him all right.

I was still at the pub two hours later. I hadn’t meant to be, but somehow I was. The bartender had given me a free beer and I’d bought some fries, and now a guy in a tweed suit was sliding into the seat across from me. The whole place was filling up, casually-suited strangers trickling in and congregating in tight circles. ‘I’m Dan.’ He yelled, even though the music wasn’t loud enough to warrant it.

‘Sylvia.’ I continued dipping my fingers into the tealight, one by one, feeling the wax cling to my fingertips, cooling and hardening in the beer-soaked air.

‘You looked lonely over here, sitting by yourself.’

‘I wasn’t.’ I had three layers on each finger now. I tapped them on page 129 the table. Three dots. Three dashes. Three dots. Dan took a long sip of his beer, watching my fingers the whole time.

‘Hey,’ he said, his mouth open wider than it needed to be, spit bursting from his mouth like unnecessary punctuation. ‘You ever heard of a website called The New Zealand Herald?’

‘Yes. I’ve heard of the newspaper.’

‘Well I designed it.’ He produced a silver card case and extracted a business card, flinging it at me with a sharp flick of his wrist. It landed a few centimetres from the pile of receipts I’d made earlier that afternoon.

‘Congratulations on your website,’ I said.

‘Yeah. What do you do?’

With my thumbnail, I pierced through the wax on my index finger. It made me think of the earth’s crust, the way rock shifted when you drove a chisel down the middle. ‘I answer telephones.’

‘Like customer support? That’s cool. Can I buy you a drink?’

I was about to say yes when another guy walked over, taller and wearing a light blue shirt. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘is this man bothering you?’

I squinted at him. ‘A little.’

He laughed. He had a full-bodied laugh, the kind that forces the eyes closed and feels like a reward to the recipient. ‘You have to excuse my friend,’ he said, sliding into the booth. ‘He’s new to this.’

‘Not cool man,’ Dan said. ‘You’re cramping my style.’

‘What style?’ he said playfully. He turned to me and held out his hand. ‘I’m Will.’

By the time we left the bar, I was sobering up. ‘We could go to my place for a drink,’ Will suggested, hesitation cracking his voice, ‘It’s just around the corner,’ but as it turned out, it wasn’t. It was a twenty- minute walk across town. He lived in one of those developments that had sprung up around the time I moved out of Dad and Valerie’s and into the scummy basement flat in Grafton, gaps in the floorboards so wide you could crouch down and see the crumbly mass of dirt underneath. In winter I’d walk to the Domain, passing this tessellation of terracotta houses before taking refuge in the tropical glasshouse amongst the orchids and the lobster-claws.

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‘Nice place,’ I commented as we walked down the hall. It reminded me of a motel room: compact and clinical with matching kitset furniture made from cheap wood. The kind of place where you knew the apartments on either side were exactly the same, the lives of others lived out on the same stage.

‘Yeah and it’s close to work.’ He retrieved a handful of bottles from the fridge and instead of clearing the clothes off the couch—‘Dan’s washing,’ he explained, gingerly picking up a pair of silk boxers from the carpet and tossing it back onto the pile—we sat on the edge of his deck, flicking our beer caps onto the railway tracks. After our third beer, he looked at me curiously. ‘Do you like pelicans?’

I swilled the beer in my mouth and swallowed. ‘I guess.’

‘Have you ever seen one eat another bird?’

‘Not yet.’ He was one of those people, I had realised, whose conversational repertoire mainly involved game show-style questions and shared reminiscence. We had already asked each other how we would rather die (by shark, alligator, or ants) and which Planeteer had been our favourite (Heart, the underdog). ‘Have you?’

‘When I was thirteen.’ He leaned his forehead against the metal railing. ‘I was walking through Bridge Park when I saw one by the lake. I was going to feed it some of my cheeseburger, but before I had a chance, it waddled over to this duckling and swooped it into its mouth. One gulp. Boom.’

‘Oh my god.’

‘Its legs were sticking out the sides of the pelican’s beak.’ He reached back and pulled a carving knife from a pot of dirt in the corner, using it to jimmy open another beer. ‘It struggled for about twenty minutes before the pelican gulped it down. You could see it as it slid down its gullet.’ He exposed his throat, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed. ‘It was horrible.’

I shivered. He shuffled over and draped an arm around me, the heat from his body engulfing me in an unexpected warmth. ‘It was one of my first tattoos.’

‘What was?’

He slid his hand back and unbuttoned the top three buttons of his shirt. A yellow-ringed eye stared out from his chest, nestled in a sprig of brown hair. ‘I like its feathers,’ I said, examining the delicate white page 131 brushstrokes, the tips a deep black, as though they’d been dipped in ink.

‘I like your feathers,’ he said quietly, his fingers trailing up my arm.

My mother hadn’t gone to the funeral. She said she couldn’t afford to, not on such short notice, but we both knew the truth: she simply didn’t care. At the end of our phone call I asked if she remembered the last thing she’d said to him. It was the meanest thing I could say without her realising this was the case. ‘I don’t know, sweetheart.’ She exhaled, and without the courtesy of pretending to think about it she said, ‘Most likely it was something banal and fitting like goodbye.’

‘All right,’ I said.

She lived in Perth now, with Dale. He was the yoga instructor she left Dad for. My parents never married so there was no divorce, and the dividing of the assets went smoothly with my mother taking the car and my father taking me. To be fair, she paid for that car, and she asked me to stay, but back then she had Dale and Dad had nobody. The two of us moved into a studio apartment on Symonds St above a bakery with a B rating and bought matching jungle-print foam mattresses and a TV.

We developed a routine almost immediately: every afternoon when I got home from school he would microwave two cans of tinned spaghetti while I read him the classified section of the community newspaper, not with any real purpose but to give a sense of what was happening in the world. ‘A lot of people renting rooms,’ he’d murmur, as if he were on the verge of breaking a code, or ‘The price of electrical services is on the rise.’ After that, we retired to our beds. I would do my homework and he would watch TV, and when I was stuck on a question my gaze would drift eventually and inevitably over to him. It was always the same. He’d be sitting cross-legged on his mattress, his white singlet hanging off him, his face awash in a sickly blue glow. He would stay in that position for hours, chewing absentmindedly on the flakes of skin peeling from his fingertips.

We had arranged our mattresses so they were on opposite sides of the room—mine against the wall with the window overlooking the road, and his by the kitchenette—but sometimes the space between us felt like it was more than I could bear. He was there, but not really.

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Most nights he became quiet once the television was on. He would lie back and stare at the ceiling, and when he thought I’d fallen asleep, I’d hear him pick up the phone and dial. I didn’t have to look to know. If he dialled the numbers quickly, it was his sponsor he was calling, a council worker named Pete who hated his job. But if he dialled slowly, he was calling my mum. If Dale picked up, he would hang up straightaway, and if she answered, he would speak quietly but urgently, pleading with her to give him another chance. Those nights I tried to fall asleep before he hung up.

But some nights, some nights he would throw a burst of laughter my way, or an extended groan, followed by an expectant look to see if my curiosity had been awakened. ‘Look at this woman,’ he said, pointing at the screen. ‘For fifty bucks she’s letting them turn her into human fairy bread.’ She was standing on a patch of grass in one of the outdoor shopping centres, her face and hair and neck slathered in margarine. They were massaging more into her arms and down the front of her shirt. ‘They’ve used six tubs so far,’ he told me. When they were done, they showered her in hundreds and thousands, the colourful beads catching on the light yellow paste. ‘Amazing,’ he howled, patting the mattress in front of him, wordlessly inviting me to watch more. It was our main bonding activity. I didn’t mind. I liked it, and although I sometimes wondered why Mum hadn’t tried harder to keep me, I never wondered hard, because this was where I wanted to be.

‘What do you think?’ Will was gesturing at the ripples of blue surrounding us. ‘I painted the walls myself. Well, technically it’s cardboard that I’ve taped to the walls.’

I spun on the spot, taking it in. His bedroom was small: a double bed, a set of drawers and the shelf of Happy Meal toys. On the wall opposite his bed he had painted a small island, a mound of creamy sand with a palm tree erupting into the sky. ‘It looks tropical,’ I said, feeling the surface of the wall.

‘Fiji. It’s my happy place.’ He sat down on the edge of his bed and pulled me over to him. ‘Where’s yours?’

‘The Ponsonby Food Court,’ I said without thinking.

‘The food court,’ he spluttered, and I wondered if I should have page 133 said that my happy place was right here, babe or anywhere where I can be sexy. ‘Nah, it’s cool.’ He nodded thoughtfully. ‘I get it. Great food.’ He reached over and turned on his radio, which was tuned to a station playing classical music, and offered to give me a massage.

His pillow smelled like sweat and Old Spice, but in a good way, and when he began rubbing my shoulders I was reminded of the time I was sixteen and wagged school with my friend Campbell. It was one of my last days in the apartment. We were moving to Northcote to live with Valerie, and most of our things were in cardboard boxes, including the glasses, so Campbell and I sat on my mattress taking swigs from the bottle and gossiping about the kids from school. He gave me a massage that day too, clumsy like this one, hands reaching around my sides, sliding lower, and when I turned onto my back, that same look of surprise, like he hadn’t known what was coming.

A train came past as Will was putting the condom on, a low-pitched roar at first but as it crossed the bridge, it became a rattling drumbeat, the light from it strobing on the wall, making it feel like we were on it ourselves, rumbling past, continuing on. It felt romantic to me, imagining we were on a train, but when I looked over my shoulder I saw that his head was tilted upwards, his eyes half-shut, puffs of air shooting from his lips as if he were doing breathing exercises. I felt dismayed by it and didn’t look again, staring instead at the island in front.

When the next train came past, it rattled unceremoniously. An older train, perhaps, or a younger driver, but it was no longer transportive in the same way, and when I concentrated on the sound I had a flicker of a feeling I used to get as a child, when I would purposefully stand staring, at the mirror, at a painting, at the wall, until an icy, trickling terror would pass through my body and for the shortest of instants I would see another shadow beside mine.

‘Dad,’ I whispered.

The word escaped my lips before I knew it was there, before I could stop it. I pressed my eyes shut, hoping that Will hadn’t heard it, and when I turned around I knew for sure he hadn’t, his face still scrunched in that same unfocused way.

Afterwards, he flopped next to me, rolling the condom off and dropping it on the floor. I pulled the sheets up to my chest, suddenly page 134 aware of how cold it was. ‘Come here,’ he said, enveloping me in his body, his arm heavy around my waist. ‘Goodnight.’

‘Goodnight,’ I replied. I stared at the sea, at the crusts of white acrylic forming crests forever frozen, letting the warmth of his body drag me closer to sleep.

It was the year I started fourth form that Dad got a job washing dishes.

‘It’s a Malaysian joint in Newmarket,’ he said when I returned from school that day. He bought a second-hand bike, and on the ride home he’d balance polystyrene boxes of stir-fried egg noodles and spicy tofu on his handlebars. We’d stand by the sink eating straight out of the containers, the television murmuring behind us, the newspaper open on the bench.

One night he brought home a small woman. ‘I want you to meet Valerie,’ he said, draping her coat over the television. ‘She’s a waitress at the restaurant.’

We said hello and she sat on the edge of his bed, her head shifting slowly from left to right as she inspected her surroundings. I tracked her gaze, seeing our home for the first time through someone else’s eyes: the smudged aluminium bench, the blackened globs coagulating on the stovetop, the crumbs scattered on the tiled floor. I cringed, feeling embarrassed for him, for her.

‘This is a nice place,’ she commented. I looked down at my math book, feeling a rush of gratitude.

‘It was busy tonight, wasn’t it?’ my dad said, pulling a bottle of wine from his backpack.

‘Yes.’ She bounced her leg nervously. They were scaly and dry, webs of spidery white lines twisting up her calf. ‘But we work very hard.’

‘You work the hardest,’ he said sincerely. He turned to me. ‘Valerie and I were thinking of getting something to eat. Why don’t you come?’ We went to the Japanese restaurant down the street, the one with booths sectioned off by bamboo. After we had ordered, Valerie reached into her handbag and pulled out a package wrapped in brown paper. ‘Sylvia,’ she said. ‘This is for you.’

‘For me?’ I looked at Dad. He nodded encouragingly, so I took it from her and said thank you, you shouldn’t have, this is such a page 135 surprise. It was a bright yellow book, 101 Hamburger Jokes.

‘Your dad say you will like,’ she said uncertainly.

‘Why don’t you read us one?’ he grinned. The waitress returned with our tempura, the oily steam hanging heavily above the plate.

‘What is the hamburger’s motto,’ I read, trying to process the significance of my father recommending that this woman buy me this book, trying not to jump to the precise conclusion I had been hoping to jump to for months now.

‘What,’ Dad asked, his mouth full of crunchy prawn, exhaling with his mouth wide open. He could never wait for food to cool down.

‘If at first you don’t succeed’—I looked at Valerie—‘fry, fry again.’ She smiled politely. I’m not sure she understood the joke, but Dad cracked up. ‘That’s a good one.’

‘Yeah.’ Seeing her across the table again, she seemed uglier than she had seemed at the apartment. Her eyes were too widely set and her eyebrows too thin. I wiped my mouth with my napkin, realising only after that I hadn’t eaten anything yet.

‘I’ve saved you the kumara,’ Dad said. He turned to Valerie—‘It’s her favourite’—but in a pointed way that made it seem like an important fact.

‘I like also,’ she said, smiling at me.

‘You should have it,’ I said, pushing the basket towards her. She shook her head. ‘You have,’ she said. ‘You must.’

Neither of us ate it that night, and at the time it seemed a sign of good faith.

A couple of nights later they went out for dinner again, but this time Dad didn’t invite me. After they left, I unknotted the plastic bag he’d left on the bench and spooned some food into a bowl. Without bothering to microwave it, I sat on the edge of his mattress, staring at my reflection in the blank screen of the TV. My side of the room looked different from here. We had bought a folding screen for privacy, so all I could see were the cherry blossom trees on each panel.

I crawled over to my bed and flicked through the hamburger book. Dad liked jokes. Not me. So instead of reading them, I counted them. There were one hundred and one, just like the book said. I flicked to a page halfway through and rested it on my face, letting it block out the light on the bedside table, the paper cold against my forehead.

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When I woke again, the book had fallen onto my pillow. The back cover was bent from the way it had fallen. I stared at it, still in that half-asleep state, unsure of what I was looking at, the thoughts from my dream still running through my mind, before picking it up and putting it under my bed. Dad wasn’t home yet. I turned off my light and looked out the window, squinting in that measured way to make the streetlamps look like stars.

Dan was in the kitchen when I closed Will’s door behind me.

‘Going somewhere?’ he asked, noticing the shoes in my hand.

He looked so smug, standing there with his glass of water and his sandwich. It just came out: ‘I have to go. My dad’s been in an accident and he’s not going to make it. Can you tell Will I’m sorry?’

‘Shit.’ He gaped at me. ‘Are you serious?’

‘You think I’m lying?’

‘No of course not.’ He tugged self-consciously at his bathrobe. ‘Do you need a lift somewhere?’

It was too late to back down, I realised. ‘That would be good actually,’ I said. ‘I have to go home and get some identification.’

He nodded to himself and rushed into his bedroom, returning with his keys. ‘C’mon,’ he said, leading me to the garage, his robe flapping around his thighs. ‘Sorry about the mess.’

After seeing his washing on the couch I was expecting burger wrappers and junk mail, but his car reminded me of the cars that parents have, freshly vacuumed and scented with floral air fresheners. The only mess was a stack of DVDs on the floor by the passenger seat.

‘What happened,’ he asked as we pulled onto the main road.

‘He was riding home from work,’ I said, putting my seatbelt on, ‘and he—he had a heart attack.’

He inhaled through his teeth and looked anxiously in his rear-view mirror. ‘Shit,’ he said, ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Yeah.’ I swallowed and looked out the window, at the houses with all their lights turned off, at all the people who were asleep, or pretending to be, or who were waiting in the dark. ‘You know what’s weird?’ I said. ‘My favourite memory of him. It’s from when I was a kid. He used to go out a lot, and some nights my Mum would lock all the doors with the security chain so he couldn’t get in again, to punish page 137 him, because he wasn’t meant to be drinking. I mean, he wasn’t an abusive drunk, or a dangerous drunk. She just disapproved. So she’d lock the doors, and he’d have to sneak in through my window. And whenever this happened, he’d bring me a treat, like a pack of chicken nuggets, or a bag of lollies, or a bar of chocolate. And we’d sit on my bed eating whatever he’d brought home that night, and afterwards he would tuck me in and tell me stories. He had this one story about a group of kids who had special powers but they were just regular kids doing regular things.’ I paused. ‘I know how weird it is, that that’s the best memory I have.’

He shook his head. ‘It sounds nice.’

I lifted my chin and burst into tears, only one burst, like the honk of a car. I swallowed the rest.

‘There are some tissues in the glovebox,’ Dan said. He reached over and patted me awkwardly on the shoulder. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again.

When we pulled into my driveway, he turned the ignition off and said, ‘Are you going to be okay? Do you need a ride to the hospital?’

I shook my head as I opened the passenger door. ‘Thanks for the offer, but I can drive myself.’ As I picked up my bag, I turned back.

‘Thanks, Dan.’

‘Honestly it was no problem,’ he said.

I was almost sad to see him go. Walking up to the front door, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the toy car, the one with the old man leaning out of the window. I hadn’t meant to take it. Not really. I had planned to leave it somewhere in the house, somewhere where he’d eventually find it. Eventually.

I pushed it up my arm, the way I’d done with Will, the back wheels squeaking resistantly as it reached the inside of my elbow. I turned it over, inspecting it. On its black plastic underside a network of raised lines hinted at the inner machinery of the thing. None of it real, but you got the idea.