Walking Shadows. Narrelle M Harris
Of everything that had happened this evening, this was what had rendered me speechless.
"It's the invitation thing," he expanded as silence reigned, "What I've done. Do. At your place."
I felt stupid. It had been happening for months without my recognising it. I'd known him for only a short time before that first uninvited step into my home, so I took it for granted. He had seemed so frustratingly dispassionate and emotionally clueless, when clearly these things were relative.
Walking into my house uninvited had changed him. I'd kept saying I couldn't define how. Well, here it was, defined for me. Gary had defied his nature, and his nature had changed.
It was my turn to be barely articulate.
"So you... Do you? Is it...?" Well, that was getting us nowhere. "How does it feel?"
"I don't know," he confessed. "I hardly knew what I felt most of the time I was alive. And now, it's weird. It's like it only gets so far and then it stops. But it's, you know, there."
"Are you okay with that?"
"Yeah." A lopsided smile.
"You said you liked the not-feeling part of being a vampire," I recalled from a long-ago conversation.
"I thought so too. I'm getting to like it better. It's not so bad. You explain things and help it make sense."
"I do?" I would have thought I was the least helpful guide to being human on the planet.
"Yeah. I can't make things add up. You're like... you're all the missing values in the equation and when I'm with you it makes sense."
"Oh." What else was there to say? That maths-geek line was probably the nicest thing anyone had ever said about me.
"So that's what it's all about," he concluded, "What they're saying. It's the threshold and being friends with you and all that." Gary waited for me to have something to say.
Impulsively, I reached across and ruffled his hair, grinning. He pulled away and dragged his palm over his fringe. "You're messing my hair!"
"As if you could tell the difference." I mussed his fringe again and he batted at my hands. Paul used to do the same, when we were teenagers, only he used to be much more annoyed and hit me a lot harder. Gary's hands simply darted around mine, barely making contact, then he ran his fingers through his light brown hair, yanking the front of it down.
"You're a pest," he said. A grin played at the corners of his mouth.
"Watch your movie."
"Drink your tea."
Later in the evening I ordered pizza. His keen sense of smell made the meal an olfactory delight for him, but one cruel twist of his condition was that he had almost no sense of taste, and he could ingest nothing except blood. Instead, Gary watched me eat while I gave him a running commentary on the pizza's flavours and textures.
Anchovies were something of a mystery to him, though they were easier to describe than olives to someone who had grown up in the culinary wastelands of 1960s Australia. Who hasn't eaten kalamata olives? Seriously?
And not just anchovies and olives; a whole world of edible delights were a complete mystery to him. Thai food. Avocados. Feta cheese. Hummus. Korean barbecue. He'd never even eaten a Golden Gaytime ice-cream. In the last few months I'd been making a point of trying cuisines he wasn't familiar with. Sushi had been fun, with that look on his face - half disgust, half wistful that he wasn't able to try it himself - when I explained that the fish was raw. He'd been the same about chicken's feet when I took him to yum cha once. I wasn't that keen on them myself, but he dared me to try them, so I did.
I'm not sure when it stopped bothering me, this food voyeur thing he has going. The way he watches me eat, and asks for a blow-by-blow account, used to be very unsettling. Somewhere along the line it became fun. I wondered if he remembered the taste and texture of things, the sensation of heat or cold, the sting of spicy food, the salty satisfaction of hot chips.
He told me the main food he remembered was his mum's Lemon Delicious. She used to make it for him on his birthday because it was his favourite. I suspected I would have liked her.
Between flavour adventures with Gary and finally eating properly at home with Kate, I'd managed to put on a little weight, which accentuated my natural pear shape. That didn't bother me as much as it used to, when my ex-boyfriend had provided a daily critique on the things he didn't like about my figure, personality, habits and intelligence. I had long since concluded that being single was a significant step up from being with a jackass.
I fell asleep on the lounge during a 1950s musical featuring someone improbable as the love interest and a glorious amount of tap dancing.
CHAPTER 7
Gary must have carried me to bed at some point. I woke up briefly as the bedroom door closed, then promptly burrowed into the bedclothes and fell back to sleep. Having done me a courtesy, he didn't really deserve the incoherent abuse he got when he knocked on my bedroom door at about 6am. He had to knock three times before I dragged myself, cursing, out of bed.
I emerged, still wearing last night's clothes, and skulked past him into the kitchen. Kettle on. Coffee cup out. I didn't offer him one.
My distorted reflection in the stainless steel kettle was woeful. My hair was all over the place, like I'd stuck my tongue in a live socket. To be fair, it looks like that most of the time. I also had creases on my face from my pillow. Great. Not even the undead should have to see what I look like first thing in the morning. A refreshing shower was in order.
After a quick wash, I strategically squirted on a scented body spray, then dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. The shirt was dark red and had "Shhhhh!" written across it in big black letters, next to a picture of an index finger held in front of a pair of lips. A birthday present last March from my library colleagues.
Lastly, I grabbed my voluminous satchel and considered throwing it in the bin. The bag had taken on gross-factor 10, having recently contained receptacles that had harboured a severed hand.
On the other side of the scales, it was a fantastic bag. It had lots of compartments which nominally made it easier to find all the things I carried, like my wallet, headache tablets, lip balm, some old receipts, an MP3 player, my current reading matter, keys, pencils, notepad, unpaid bills and my mobile phone.
The gross factor was trumped by the useful factor, and I kept the bag.
I gulped down a glass of milk and a muesli bar while Gary waited quietly on the sofa, no doubt suppressing disappointment that I hadn't made something that looked or smelled more interesting for the morning meal.
Ready to face the world, I turned to him. "Northward ho, Gaz!"
Far from being energised, Gary simply began to put the teen-girl emo-romance back into his pocket. I held out my hand and he wordlessly passed it to me, along with his new DVD, so I could put them in my bag.
"Ahh… You've got milk…" Gary wiggled his fingers vaguely to demonstrate where. I dragged the back of my hand across my lips, feeling unkempt, then he sniffed and said: "You smell nice. Is that jasmine?"
"Yes." Both impressed and bemused.
"My mum liked jasmine."
Nice save, Gary. "Let's get to Ballarat."
Despite the hideous much-too-earliness of the hour, there were plenty of people around. I wondered if any of them were on errands as mysterious as ours. Gary seemed marginally more relaxed this morning, but as the tram deposited us at Southern Cross Railway Station, his tension returned.
The station is very spacious and the curved roof has a futuristic cathedral feel to it. Gary promptly got confused trying to find the ticket counter for rural destinations - the station had been totally rebuilt in recent years and he confessed he hadn't been near it since 1983.
I reassured him that mere mortals also got lost trying to find the ticket counters.