A New Tense. Jo Day
this: I’ll look at some flights and email you the details. You can let me know if you’re coming tomorrow, or the next day, if you need to.” “Okay. at sounds good.” I couldn’t think of what to say and didn’t want to make small talk, and I didn’t want to talk about my feelings, either. “Um, I think I’m gonna go now, is that alright?” “Of course. I’m very sorry.” “It’s okay, really.” “Anytime you want to talk, just call us. I’ll call you tomorrow to see how you are.” “Yeah, I will. And thanks.” We hung up. I sat on the edge of my bed, looking at my big feet encased in their dusty and smelly woollen socks. My torn stockings ending mid-calf, hairy legs peeking out underneath, bruises scattered amongst the tattoos. A car crash. That was it, then, an end to the vague idea of some reconnection between us. I tried to remember her face, but all I could get was her hair pulled back severely, blue eyes, high collars. The rest was a blur. Which wasn’t surprising, considering we hadn’t talked in nine years, and of course I knew how long it’d been since we’d talked. Although I guessed when I thought of years now it would be how many years since she’d died, instead of how many since she kind of kicked me out, or how many years since the last phone call we’d made. We must have been comfortable around each other at some point — stories read in bed, trips to the pool, movies under a blanket on the couch, kid stuff — except that I couldn’t remember any of that. When I thought of her I thought of the arguments, I thought of her sternly telling me that no, there was no other food on offer, of waiting until she’d gone to bed before I snuck into the kitchen and stuffed myself on Weet-Bix piled with sugar substitutes. When I was young she didn’t let me dress in anything other than little girl dresses, and I never felt anything other than uncomfortable in them, like I was constantly in costume. I thought of her version of a sex-ed lesson, which was to line up a bunch of vegetables on the counter and ask me to draw them. And I could draw, the teachers at school said I could draw, so I was excited for mum to see — doing it meticulously, getting all the detail, and then going back to replace the object with a new one. At the end, she didn’t look at my drawings, but said So, why did you only draw the new objects? Why didn’t you use something you’d already drawn? Because I’d already drawn it. I wanted something new. Exactly. You wanted something new, something you hadn’t touched before. That’s what boys think of girls. I know what she was getting at, except she got in too early, I’d only been nine or ten. I recoiled from men touching me for me years, in any context. Girls were safe though; she hadn’t said anything about girls.
I’d told Julia about my mum. She was one of my favourite people here, cool on the outside but so warm once you got to know her, always up for a beer or a line or an adventure or a day spent in bed watching movies. I had a bit of a crush on her when I first moved in, and I think she felt the same, but at least we were smart enough not to start anything while we were living together, and besides, when I got there I was still in ruins about Pete and I was fucking anyone I could to make myself feel temporarily better. I liked her too much from the first night to want to use her in that way.
I sat on the bed in Steff’s room and Max opened new beers and I told him a little about it, not much, just enough to take the shocked look from his face. Skinny Max from some little town in the south, wearing scrub-pants from his work and an old hoodie, cigarette hanging from his mouth, tattoos of tentacles curling over one hand. Max with scars over his left eye, faded but still noticeable, spider webs from his eye to his lip from when a car had hit him when he was sixteen. Another scar he had running down one hip pointed to where the metal started, I saw it in the summer when we all walked around the at in our underwear. It hurt him sometimes, he said, in the cold. I’d said, Still? and he’d said, without self-pity — while I looked at the scars on his lips — I nearly died. I got him to translate. Ich bin fast gestorben . “But are you upset?” he asked now. “I don’t think so,” I said. “I don’t know. I’m going to go to bed, I think.” “Me too,” said Julia. “Do you want to sleep with me?” “Yeah,” I said. I saw Max nodding. They were used to it by now, Max and Steffi, used to coming into one of our rooms and seeing us together. We spent a lot of time lying in bed with beers, talking until one of us would go to sleep and the other would remove the beer that we were holding, even though both of us had the ability of being able to not spill a drop from the bottle while we slept, which probably said more about passing out drunk than any kind of talent.
I woke the next morning to Julia snoring next to me, at on her back. She was wearing a baggy shirt with the sleeves cut off and at some point it’d twisted so that both of her breasts were revealed, which was no big deal, I’d seen them so many times before, but still before I got up I pulled the blanket over her.
Somehow I wasn’t hungover, or at least not yet, but my mouth was furry and I needed water, a lot of it: a bucket; an IV. I tiptoed out of her bedroom and went into the kitchen where I turned on the tap and, when I couldn’t find a clean glass, stuck my face under the flow. I stood near the window and watched the snow come down.
I opened the fridge door, ostensibly to look for soy milk for coffee, and saw instead that there were a few Sterneys left in there. I deliberated for all of a second, and then — “Fuck it” — took one and popped the top with a lighter from the kitchen table. I went back into Julia’s room to get my tobacco, and she stirred when I got my feet tangled in a bra and skidded against the bottles of beers lined against the bed. Groaning, she sat up, her bleached blonde hair standing up around her head, electrified, one eye closed, hand up against the wintry light coming in through her windows.
“Morgen,” she said sleepily, her eyes half-closed. “Everything okay? You need me to get up?”
“Nah, go back to sleep, it’s early.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. I just opened a beer.”
“Fuck. That’s intense.” She lay back down in bed, eyes closed, and said, “I’ll be up in no time, wake me for the next one.”
“Yup, will do.”
I got my tobacco from her equally dirty desk, picked up a notepad and pen from my room and went to the kitchen. Boiled the kettle and put coffee in the French press, mostly for the order of it, the early morning smell. I took a sip from my beer and thought about writing a list of stuff I needed to think about if I was leaving, but there wasn’t much, actually. Our band, well, we had a couple of shows coming up but nothing too serious, and we’d gotten a bit lazy anyway, none of us willing to make the long trek from the S-Bahn to our rehearsal space in the cold. There was work, but that would be easy, too. I had a job in a bar in Neukölln, but my workmates were desperate for shifts, and besides, as excuses went I reckoned that dead mother was a pretty good one, I didn’t need to say estranged dead mother.
I didn’t want to say yes just now, though. Instead I rolled another cigarette, put my feet up, and found myself drifting there anyway, back to Melbourne, back to the house that Pete and Jones and I shared.
I’m walking home. I’ve had a shit day: first reason is because I found out that my tattoo artist, Jake, can’t finish the piece on my back because of the second reason, which is that he and my girlfriend, Sophie, want to be exclusive. The fucking was fine; I knew about that. He’d been awkward about it, but I thought it was just because he was weird about me being fine, when actually he was weird because they were at the hand-holding, wouldn’t-this-be-great-if-we-could-close-everyone-else-out stage, everyone being me, the person she’d been with for two years. My longest relationship. I was going to Europe for a couple of months, and she’d been acting weird, and I’d thought — god, how stupid — that it was because she’d miss me.
I’m walking home from seeing her. She didn’t give me any good explanations, and she was cold and horrible, like I should’ve known that I was just a stand in for The Real Thing.
I get home and see Pete on the porch. I give him the quick run-down. His eyes get huge and he stares at his beer and yells, “Je-sus, this is the last one! Wait a minute,” and he thrusts the beer at me and runs up the street. I wait for him on the porch, drinking his beer, and a few minutes later he’s running back from the shops, huffing and puffing, his scant muscles bulging from the strain of carrying a carton. He’s doing such a stupid shuffling run that I can’t help him because