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.Your hair sits lank and dried-out against your head.You’ve got to stop this.But you can’t help yourself.While you’re in the hair salon buying shampoo for colour-treated hair, you find yourself making an appointment for a leg wax.You will be hairless.Forty is the new thirty.You will be smooth, controlled, gym-toned, with the body of a woman in her late twenties, lushly in her prime and way ahead of the game.And the voice you hear now as you sit in the salon leafing through the magazines before your appointment will be a whiny, accusing one, nitpicking and obsessive, poking you on the shoulder saying: Look, Goldie Hawn, nearly sixty.Look, Sharon Stone, slim and elegant, had a baby at forty-four.The receptionist says, ‘This your first visit?’ Her fingernails are curved like talons, alternately purple and yellow, and you see they are fake and stuck on with superglue.They are so long she can hardly write — but she can hardly write anyway, breathing laboriously as she prints your details in big Grade Five letters.Then into the back room and up onto the crackling paper sheet.Butcher’s paper for a slab of meat.You make nervous small talk.‘Do you wax guys?’ you blurt.‘All the time.’ The girl stirs wax implacably, arranges things on the counter like a dental nurse.‘You’d be surprised.’ You lie back.She chats on.‘Guys come in here, want their backs waxed, their arses.’‘You’re kidding.’‘Nope.I do everything.You wouldn’t believe it.A week before Mardi Gras, or when there’s a bike race or the City to Surf, I’m booked out.’Suddenly there is a hot stroke of wax on your shin, a pause, then blinding pain.‘Ow.Jesus.’‘Haven’t had them done for a while, that’s why it hurts more.’‘Actually this is my first time ever.’‘Really? Oh well, it won’t take long.’Another rip that brings tears to your eyes.‘Brazilians are all the go now,’ she says.‘You want pain, boy …’‘Don’t tell me.’She tilts your leg, ices on some more wax, rips it away.‘Yep, everything.Completely hairless.Like a Barbie doll.’You shudder and lie back, willing it to be over.Like having a cavity drilled, you try to take your thoughts away.Paul, and what he would say if he could see you now.Think then about your first argument, the other night.‘Don’t tell me what I’m going to do next,’ he’d finally fumed.‘And Jesus, will you just relax and stop worrying about your weight? How much reassurance do you need?’‘I don’t need reassurance.’‘Yes, you do.It’s so bloody tiring.It’s like you’ve already decided to end it and you’re just waiting for me to slip up so you can blame me.’You’d opened and closed your mouth like a stunned fish.A wave of nausea.You’d clenched your jaw, saying nothing.Don’t cry, you’d ordered yourself, don’t you dare.Mascara running.Haggard.Lines.Ugly.Old.‘Let’s just light a candle then, if you don’t want the lamp on,’ he’d said later in bed, at his place.And you’d shaken your head, taken the matches from him.‘No,’ you’d answered.‘Let’s not.Really.I like the dark.’She’s up to your groin and you feel the wax getting daubed around your undies line.She holds the skin taut and pulls.It’s excruciating.‘Bloody hell!’ you gasp.‘Yeah, the pubic hairs always hurt more — deeper roots.’‘And people have the whole lot ripped out?’‘All the time.’You look down at the reddened patch and see tiny prick marks of blood appearing where the hairs have been yanked out.It feels like you’ve had a layer of skin torn off.Like you’ve been peeled.‘God, how could they stand it?’She considers, moving her chewing gum around her mouth.‘They reckon it looks clean.’‘Clean?’‘Sexy.Their boyfriends ask ’em to do it, they say.’Rip.She’s on the other ankle.Clean, you think.Prepubescent, more like it.Like pink latex, like a blow-up fantasy doll, that sickly plastic smell of Barbie.The rip across the knee works like a quick, stinging, sobering slap to the face, finally waking you up.‘That’ll do,’ you hear yourself say.‘But we’re only halfway through.’ She stops, staring, rotating a glob of slipping yellow wax slowly on the hovering spatula.‘That’s okay, I’ll pay for the whole thing.I just … that’s it.’‘It’s not hurting that much, is it?’You swing your tingling legs off the table and reach for your jeans.She’s looking at you, moving the chewy around in her lip-glossed mouth.‘Okay, then,’ she says with a shrug.And, half-finished, like someone released from custody, you’re out of there.Later that night, there’ll be tiny dark patches on your bare legs when you take your jeans off, where wax has stuck spots of lint to the skin, but you will pull a sheet over your legs instead of jumping up instantly and washing it off in the shower.Your energy for subterfuge seems spent now; like the tank’s empty.In the dark, all other senses are more acute; the brush of skin on skin, the scent of hair, a whisper blooming next to you on the pillow; risky secrets that cannot be taken back.You will feel things coast to a stop, sharpened into wakefulness, and steady yourself.You open your mouth and set whatever’s coming next in motion.‘I’ll be forty in a fortnight,’ you say.Impossible to gauge his real, unadorned reaction to that news.You’ll have to turn the light on for that.Angel‘You don’t say much, do ya?’ said the lady in the shop on the ground floor of the flats when I first came here.I shook my head and smiled.The tone in her voice was one I had grown to recognise.In Vietnamese, a slight inflection can change the meaning of a word entirely, in English this can apply to a whole phrase.As she scooped up my change her voice maintained that it was just being friendly, but there was an inflection in there meant only for me.In Australia many people take silence for rudeness, for not enough gratitude.If I were really grateful for being here, I would talk endlessly.Thank you, thank you, thank you for having me.That is what the feeling is, in the flats and in English class: an expressionless resentment at my failure to play my part.‘Talk about your new country,’ my tutor would say, reading that suggestion out of a book on how to teach people like us.‘I like the trees,’ the students would say, flat and careful.‘I like the sea.’I don’t like the sea, I would think to myself.I spent two months on the sea, waiting for my turn to sip the water, knowing as people vomited that they would be the ones to die.‘Let’s hear from Mai,’ the tutor would say, and everyone would turn, ready to watch my difficulties.Wanting to get the language themselves, this barely comprehensible thing that would allow them their driving licences and jobs in the T-shirt factory in Smith Street or Champion Dimsims in Ascot Vale.‘I like the sea, too,’ I would say, the obedient student.My father used to say I was the best student at the school in my town, the family scholar.I learned by keeping quiet, but this is not the way you learned in Australia.When I passed very well in my English class, my tutor looked at me with the same expression as the lady in the shop.‘You don’t say much, but you take it all in, don’t you?’ she said, an accusing finger on my diploma.Why is silence so worthy of suspicion? You can choose to talk or choose to not talk.But take it all in: yes, that part is true [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]