Perfect Skin (21 page)

Okay. On the right I think you've got . . . a notch. And on the left . . . a foramen.

That's what I thought. A mirror image of you.

Yeah. I think our parents could still tell us apart, though.

Very funny,
she says.
So what does it mean?

Oh, lots of things. Both of us can expect a visit from aliens, probably.

Oh no,
she whispers.
Not the anal probe.

And my left hand has moved down to her shoulder, and we're still close, closer than a social distance apart. And as I'm looking at her, strangely, as I'm watching her mouth say ‘anal probe' so conspiratorially – as I'm watching her blue eyes watch me – I could kiss her. I could travel the last short distance between us and kiss her. It's an urge that comes upon me, not from any place of reason, not a thing I can anticipate. But then all the reason comes in, comes back, battens the rush down and I'm in control.

Anything but the anal probe, I say to her, and take my face back a little, and move my hand.

I'm looking at her differently, and I shouldn't. I still want to kiss her. I want to tell her about Mel, I want to pretend several years of my life never happened, I want to put it all in its place, but I don't know what its place is. I want to shake all this out of my head. I want her to stop looking at me, or kiss me, or something.

And Lily?
she says.
Where does she fit in with this?

So I test the Bean's eyes, and she treats it like a new game. Takes the approaching finger with both hands, as though she's steering it down and it's some lever, making her more and more cross-eyed as it approaches.

Okay, I think foramen and on the other side . . . also foramen. Hard to tell, but that's what I think. So that means we don't have to have the talk that my parents – had they been half-reasonable – would have had with me, immediately before that age when you think asymmetry means you've either been abused or the anal probe is just a matter of time.

It's amazing. Really. It feels so obvious, when you feel it. It's surprising what you don't know, just because of skin.

Most of the time it's probably a good thing. Our bodies would look pretty bizarre without it. Without an opaque outer layer there'd be a lot of distraction. We'd be showing each other all kinds of things that are better left unseen. Facial muscles, laid bare, would look very mechanical. It'd take all the real, subtle purpose out of expression. There'd be no mystery.

She laughs.
And there's just not enough mystery in the world, is there?

No way. I think we spend far too much time trying to make things obvious, and not enough appreciating the chance to discover them slowly. Skin is good for that. It's expressive, but it doesn't give it all away. And it has many properties people take for granted. It can heal itself, and that's not easy. Have you noticed how, most of the time when you injure skin and it has to grow to fill a defect, it not only knows that it has to grow, but it knows when to stop? So that's why lasering it isn't like stripping paint from a door. The skin is waiting. Waiting
for an attack and ready to fix up the damage. So you use that when you're working on it. You know how far you can go and keep the skin on your side. And if you don't know that, you'll damage it so that it'll scar when it doesn't need to, or scar more than it needs to. So there's a second useful thing from all that time at uni. Now, how about you?

That second one sounds to me like a work issue. So I think I only have to come up with one to match the notch discovery.

Okay. You can start with one, but I'm assuming it's going to be good.

Okay. Erikson.

Erikson?

Erik Erikson.
Childhood and Society.
Part three, chapter seven. I did a child development subject, and the lecturer was big on Erikson. And when you look at it
–
when you look at the eight stages part
– 
it applies to everyone. And just when people tell you adolescence is the turbulent time, bang, you sort it out
–
Stage Five, identity versus role confusion
–
and suddenly you're into Stage Six, intimacy versus isolation. But you would have done that at uni too, wouldn't you? Erikson?

Yeah.

So you know what I mean, then.

It was a while ago but, yeah, I think I know what you mean.

Good. So, we're even. Unless I have to come up with a work-related one too. Hey, I meant to tell you
–
I got a job. At Bagelos at Indooroopilly. A few shifts a week for a few hours each, starting Monday afternoon. Making bagels.

I think I know what you mean.

So how long has it been since I did Erikson? Mid-eighties. I can vaguely remember it, but not even enough to drop his name in conversation. Therefore I probably shouldn't go round pretending I know what people mean when they start talking stages.

Why can't I just admit it when I don't know something? Is there something unresolved in one of those early Eriksonian stages (and who knows which one) that means I can't admit it when I don't know something? In case people might like me less? I even hated it – quietly hated it – when I got the century of the Battle of Agincourt wrong. And no-one ever liked anyone even slightly less for that, surely.

It's probably my parents' fault. Those kinds of things usually are. They were probably too supportive, gave too much reinforcement to me when I got things right or did well. Plus, I have to remember that I was a notch child, stricken with a secret asymmetry, living in fear that my fate was always just one wrong answer away.

I should never go into therapy (real capital-T, couch-based therapy, as opposed to the relationship-fixing kind). I'm sure it'd only do me harm. My poor parents. They were so encouraging when it came to me knowing things. As if you can be critical of people for that, for fostering a chronic sense of excitement at having the right answer. I think my father once even gave me fifty cents for knowing the capital of Zaire.

But Erikson's stages are lost somewhere, back in the huge vault of early uni knowledge that got archived at the end of each semester. The only stages of anything I remember from the recent past were in an email from
George a few weeks ago, and they were stages of drunkenness. Stage one was something about becoming an expert on every subject in the known universe, and wanting to pass your knowledge on to anyone who will listen. To which George had added some
Who needs alcohol?
kind of remark.

Bread. I also learned to cut bread when I was at uni. This number two non-work-related useful thing crosses my mind as I'm slicing into a fresh loaf on Sunday morning.

We were generally a sliced-white family back then, so I didn't cut much bread at the time, but I picked up the principles of cutting when I did surgery. One of the keys to a neat incision is never cutting a moving target. Hold the skin to cut it, put it slightly on the stretch and ensure that the only moving thing is the knife. Same with a big crusty loaf of bread, or the knife finds its way anywhere.

But what do I know? I try to impress a girl by poking her in the eye, and she comes back at me with comments on the uneasy transition between Erikson stages Five and Six.

I know I should have planned ahead more effectively when my parents told me they were going away, but I didn't. So it's not until late Sunday night that I work out I haven't made any childcare arrangements that would allow me to keep up the usual running plans over the next couple of days.

I call Ash just before I'm due at her place in the morning.

That's okay,
she says.
I think I know the way by now. Of course, it might not take me as long, so I'll probably have to go a bit further.

Thanks. Hey, how's your car?

I have to call them tomorrow.

You're starting work today, aren't you?

Yeah, this afternoon.

I start at two, so I could give you a lift before then, if you'd like. If the time works out for you.

Um, yeah, that'd be great, if it's no trouble.

No, it's no trouble. I'll be in the neighbourhood. I've got a few things to do, so it'd be easy to drop by.

A few things to do. Mid-morning I'm in the neighbourhood, at the uni libraries to read some Erikson. And I didn't know half of it when I was talking on the
weekend about how much this place had changed.

For a start, where I'm sitting is underground and surely used to be dirt below a path when I was studying here. Back in a time I'm now thinking I should be referring to as the old days. The old days when the microfiche machines were cutting-edge technology and everyone got a tutorial on how to use them.

I sit inconspicuously at a terminal around the middle of the fifth row. I stumble through the catalogue, trying out key words that take me off on tangents. Remembering the name of the book would help. In the distance I can see librarians sitting at a counter and I wonder if I should email them and identify myself as the person floundering back here, needing to be saved. I'm prepared to wave to direct them to me if it'd help, even though it'd be an uncommonly public admission of my ignorance.

Eventually I stumble upon
Childhood and Society,
and I remember that's the name Ash mentioned. I click in the box that offers geographical directions, and I send the directions to print. Somewhere.

I listen for the noise of printing. No. Of course there's no printer nearby.

Somewhere near a printer, someone is being told where the library keeps its copies of
Childhood and Society,
while I'm staring at the screen, memorising each step of the directions and the first bit of the call number. Good planning. I didn't even bring a pen. Why? Would it have made the process too formal? As if, without a pen, I'd be doing something casual that I do all the time, dropping in here for a bit of a read?

But at least I get there. Through places that are so new they even smell it, up stairs I walked up in my first
year here, through a doorway I've never seen and finally among shelves that smell just as they always have, and books.

And what am I doing here, anyway? What am I on about with this woman? If I was putting on any more of a performance I'd be obliged to do curtain calls. Yak's milk and notches, and why the fuck do I need to know a thing about Erikson on the off-chance that he'll come up again in conversation?

Conversation. We're good together in conversation. I get to use my brain with her, actually use it, think. And of course I want more of that.

On Saturday, Ash said,
Do you think all disease occurs at a biomolecular level?
and I almost said something like, You should get out more, before I realised she wasn't George and she genuinely wanted to discuss it. And then I wanted to as well, more than I wanted to tell her she should get out more. And we talked about the biochemistry at nerve synapses, the molecules that send signals, the immune system and clotting mechanisms, each as a series of molecular events. She said she'd wondered about the question for a while, since she'd been sick once, but she'd had no-one to ask before.

There was a time when I had conversations like that with George and other people. When more of our talk was actually about things than it has been lately. Maybe we've known each other too long, talked them all through too many times. Maybe it's just where we are now.

It's the reading Proust joke. At uni, George would have loved it if we'd all read the big stuff and talked about it. Debated it all night over cheap wine, sitting on
someone's lounge-room floor. Now, our book club that reads Proust but reads nothing is only a game we play with Wendy's mind. And the wine is much improved, and we go to bed early. I haven't had an argument about a French film, or a Czech novel or the cultural or biological or sociological significance of anything in years.

Erikson says – I know he says it because I've got it in front of me – that the adolescent mind is an ideological mind positioned between the morality of childhood and the ethics of adulthood. So maybe the ideological stage was the time when we had to talk everything through, when the big questions were worth asking, and now we're just cruising ethically along. Or maybe that's not what Erikson means at all, but Ash did suggest he was applicable to everything.

None of which helps explain the several seconds when I wanted to kiss her. When I clunked back a stage or two myself and nearly made the move. I'm almost expecting to break out in acne and bad clothes, just sitting here thinking about it.

Stage One is basic trust versus basic mistrust. Forms of comfort and people associated with them become familiar. And teething is perhaps the first crucial test of that trust, and where mistrust begins.

And didn't I need to learn that right now? I thought it was just a few tough nights we were having. I didn't realise we were creating mistrust during this lost sleep. I have the Bean with me now, sound asleep in her pouch. I can't believe there's any mistrust, even if I couldn't fix the teething completely.

I think it's Stage Six where things went wrong with Mel. Intimacy versus isolation, in which the young
adult, having won identity, looks to fuse that identity with others. So maybe we were both looking for fusion and picked the nearest feasible identity. We should have paid more attention to Erikson then. There are dangers in Stage Six, and he doesn't hold back from spelling it out. First, when intimate, competitive and combative relationships exist between the same people. And that certainly sounds like us, though we wouldn't have admitted it. And also the ‘isolation
à deux',
where – if I'm reading it properly – two people share the avoidance of contacts that would lead to a commitment to intimacy, and thereby protect themselves from addressing the big Stage Seven issue, generativity. Establishing and guiding the next generation.