I met Vern Lund because his mother died. Vern had always promised himself that the moment he could liquidate his mother’s share portfolio, he would do something about his hair. He was frank about this, surprisingly so. I found most of the men who came into the hair transplant clinic where I worked didn’t venture near the topic of their own vanity. They often had innocent, bewildered expressions, as though they hadn’t realised they were bald, as though they had wandered in by mistake.
Vern, on the other hand, bent down like a bull about to charge in order to show me his pate.
‘What do you think?’
I looked at Vern’s scalp. The top of his head was absolutely denuded. He wore the surrounding mousy hair soft and straight, falling just below his ears.
‘I’ve been using a silk pillowcase,’ Vern said. ‘To reduce the friction. I hope it’s not too late. Do you think it’s too late?’
I didn’t reply. Part of my job was to instil in potential clients a sense of optimism. It was my own hair, lush and thick and shining, that achieved this. I was never to claim that my hair was Dr Gosse’s work, but if a potential client assumed it was, I was not to disabuse them of this notion.
I handed Vern a leatherette book filled with glossy before-and-after photographs. En masse, they created a kind of family album where the family was entirely comprised of self-conscious middle-aged sets of twins. In each case, one was notably more hirsute than the other.
‘Wow,’ said Vern. ‘Makes me wish my mother had died a long time ago!’
Vern came back two weeks later for his procedure. He lay in the reclining chair while Dr Gosse went about his work. Dr Gosse often said that one of the things he disliked about his job was that the procedure required only a local anaesthetic. This meant that the patient was awake, and chit-chat, small talk, was needed to keep him at ease. That’s where I came in. I had no medical qualifications—I was the concierge, meaning I manned the front desk and answered the telephone and took the before-and-after photographs. But during procedures, Dr Gosse had me sit next to him. I watched as he directed his little hand-held punch, extracting one follicle after another and dropping them into the active plasma solution where they collected like maggots.
I asked Vern about his plans for the weekend.
‘I’m supposed to be clearing out mother’s house,’ he said. ‘I’m dreading it. Last time I tried, I wound up just sitting there, staring into space. I couldn’t touch anything.’
‘It must be very difficult for you. All the emotional labour.’
Dr Gosse looked up at me. Despite the binoculars attached to his face, I could tell he was rolling his eyes. The light bounced off his scalp. Dr Gosse was glossily, fastidiously bald.
‘It’s not that,’ Vern said. ‘Mother wasn’t sentimental, and neither am I.’ He sniffed. ‘It’s just…what do you do with it all? Part of me wishes someone would just come along and set the house on fire and then—whoosh.’
He flicked his hands to indicate the hungry wash of flames over a house.
‘And mother was always so fussy about her things,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why. I was always saying, “Get rid of this junk, Mama. Get something practical. Go to Ikea.” That old furniture was hell on her back. But she refused. “If I ever set foot in an Ikea,” she said, “shoot me right then and there.”’
I pictured an elderly woman splayed out dead in an Ikea, columns of people moving around her body like ants around a stone. But something else had struck me in what he said. That old furniture.
I licked my lips. ‘Your mother had a lot of old things?’ I studiously avoided the words that connoted value: antique, vintage.
‘You can say that again,’ said Vern. ‘Hardly bought a new thing after she was married.’
‘When was that?’
‘1965.’
I felt a rush, my heart constricting with excitement.
Over the years I’d worked for him, Dr Gosse had gained a sense of my tastes. He paused with a follicle hovering to say, ‘Joshua here is fond of old things.’
‘Really?’ said Vern.
‘As it happens,’ I said, ‘I’m looking to furnish a little place.’
Vern was only too happy for me to come over and have a look. I could have whatever I wanted, he said. I would be doing him a favour.
*
This exchange with Vern cheered me considerably. Prior to it, I’d received an unsettling email. It was from the workshop of Signor Tocci, maker of bespoke men’s shoes. Signor Tocci was nearly one hundred years old and lived in a tiny monastic town in Italy. He’d been a cobbler of choice to the European intelligentsia of the 1960s. I’d read an article about him, which was accompanied by photographs of starkly lit chisels and shoe lasts. The spirit of each man, Signor Tocci had said, can be seen in his shoes. Is the man a maverick? A lover? A diplomat? A general? His shoe must communicate this. A shoe can orient a man towards his destiny. Yes, I’d thought, nodding. I have a destiny, and to reach it I require a pair of Signor Tocci shoes.
I knew I should wait until I had the money, but with each passing day there was a real risk Signor Tocci would die. The article disclosed that he still smoked a packet of unfiltered Gauloises every day.
To have the shoes made required a long and tortuous series of emails between me and the workshop. One of Signor Tocci’s assistants had asked me to not only measure my feet but to send photographs of them. Overexposed and in extreme close-up, they seemed distasteful, even obscene. I saw that my feet looked like they were attached to the end of a maniac, or worse, like they may have been the source of his mania.
Your feet are not a good shape, the assistant wrote. Your feet are bad.
Signor Tocci made the shoes, despite my bad feet. They were double monks in a tobacco-coloured leather: supple and shining and handsome, and when I wore them I was supple and shining and handsome. No one would know about my maniac feet or about the humiliating process I had undergone to acquire a disguise for them. I wore them every day. Every day, I could look down and think: Finally, I am in control of my life.
I had been queasy, however, when I received the invoice. I resolved this feeling by making the first two payments on a new credit card whose limit seemed dizzyingly capacious.
This was my third credit card. When I wasn’t filled with dread, I was almost impressed at how much debt I’d managed to accrue. It was astonishing to me that I’d been given one credit card, let alone three. With a certain amount of nimble thinking and timely movements of modest sums of money, I was managing to keep all of my credit cards alive with minimal demands from the banks. I’d even received an offer for a fourth card, which I was seriously considering.
But the tide of my debt was rising. I didn’t have enough credit left to pay the final, and largest, instalment on the shoes. I was now receiving regular emails from Mr Tocci’s assistant, which, while unfailingly polite, had a distinct and escalating sense of menace.
Mr Veal, said the one I received on the day of Vern Lund’s transplant, the time has come for you to pay.
*
Dr Gosse’s clinic was located on the sixth floor of the Pacific Gardens shopping centre. Pacific Gardens was vast, and the sixth floor was an upmarket floor—floating serenely above the food courts and fast-fashion outlets selling their various polyester and nylon blends. Still, a shopping centre is a shopping centre, with its recycled air and meandering, bovine visitors. On the way home, before I got on the bus, I liked to cleanse my psyche by stopping in at Dansk.
Dansk was a store specialising in mid-century furniture and décor. Quiet and cavernous, it was based in a former warehouse. It was only a few blocks from Pacific Gardens, but it felt like a different country, one unpeopled by the Vern Lunds of the world.
I couldn’t afford anything in Dansk, not that this had stopped me from buying a few modest objets that caught my eye. But I appreciated all of it. I especially appreciated Elise, the woman who worked there. So compact she looked like you could fold her in half, so chic in her asymmetric layers and heavy clogs. Elise was so plainly my aesthetic match that I was sure she would one day, somehow, become my wife. I imagined us together, living in a place that looked a lot like the Dansk showroom, blowing thoughtfully on cups of tea and discussing methods for dissuading wood borers.
‘A Mieke Dessler. New this week,’ said Elise, approaching the tan sofa on which I sat. Its lowness and wide angle made my posture seem suggestive. I tried to sit up but found I lacked the abdominal wherewithal. ‘God knows where Benny sourced it from.’
Benny was the store’s owner. Elise told me that he’d had the idea for his business while still an undergraduate. Mid-century furniture in Denmark was inexpensive back then—he’d imported shipping containers full of it and sold them for inflated prices. In fact, Elise had told me, the more he inflated the prices, the faster things sold. I’d never met Benny but imagined him to be lithe and sharp, someone with feet that the Tocci workshop would hasten to service.
‘It’s a dream,’ I said. This was true. The leather was beaten into tender pliability, the arms a warm, smooth teak. I didn’t look at the price tag. I was a believer in that old adage—if you need to look, you can’t afford it.
‘I know,’ she said, perching on its edge. ‘I feel bad even sitting on it. It’s a museum-quality piece.’
I allowed myself a little riff of the imagination: Elise and I, arm in arm, donating the couch to a design museum. Our names would be on the plaque next to it: From the Collection of Joshua and Elise Veal.
On the wall opposite the couch hung an assortment of mirrors: sunburst mirrors and etched mirrors, mirrors framed in yet more teak. In each of them were fragments of Elise and me: glossy hair, folded arms, knees, elbows, and then her clogs and my double monks side by side.
‘Joshua?’ Elise said.
I felt a surge of hope; maybe she was making the first move. I feigned coolness.
‘Yes?’
‘I’ve got to close up.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Oh, sorry.’
Elise smiled. ‘Unless you were going to buy it?’
‘Not today,’ I said, and then I gave a little laugh. But it came out as a gurgle—the sound of someone in deep water, trying not to drown.
*
There was a certain irony in my taking a bus home. As it happens, I lived in a bus. It had been outfitted as a unit, of sorts; it lay among the grass in a spacious vacant lot. Both the lot and the bus were owned by the man who lived in the house next door. I rented the bus cheaply and unofficially. Electricity came from a propane generator. Wi-fi arrived patchily from the main house. There was a kitchen, if you can call a single gas ring and a kettle a kitchen. There was a bathroom, if you call the rudimentary sink and septic system a bathroom. Most mornings I elected to urinate outside.
When I asked my landlord about a shower, he said, ‘You’ll have to make your own arrangements.’ Fortunately, Dr Gosse, who likes to ride his bike into work, has had a shower installed in the office so that he can shower on arrival. I did not ride nor own a bicycle, but I invested in a bike helmet that I carried into the office most mornings. Dr Gosse not only allowed but encouraged my shower-taking, and after a few hasty googles, I could converse about cleats and elevation gains. Dr Gosse took cycling seriously. Most of his clients would never know it, but his calves were as bald and moisturised as his head.
The bus was freezing in winter and baking in summer. It smelled stale, like the degradation of its plastic fittings, which were no doubt shedding toxic particles that I inhaled while I slept. I was adept at wedging things into a mini-fridge. I was adept at washing my laundry in a bucket—I had taken to squelching it with my feet, like a Provençal peasant crushing grapes.
But any thief who thought the bus worth plundering would have found there were treasures on the inside. I thought of them as my investments. There were Tocci’s double monks. There were a few works by promising emerging artists. My collection of rare vinyl, my 1973 Yamaha record player with auto return belt drive. And there was my substantial cache of clothing and fine gentlemen’s accoutrements—belts, pocket squares, watches—as well as some lamps and vases from Dansk.
I stayed warm by swathing myself in blankets and entertained myself by going to YouTube and watching my favourite thing: house tours.
Here was a barefoot person in linen or cashmere opening their door in a desirable arrondissement, or out on a moor, or in a little village unsullied by tourists. Here was someone talking about diffused light, Moroccan textiles, the provenance of this or that fainting couch or pouf. ‘Vertical space,’ they’d say. ‘I wanted texture. I wanted layers. I wanted depth.’ I’d nod along, shivering. I wanted those things too.
*
The text messages began hours before I was due to arrive.
I thought I’d make us some sandwiches.
Oh, I wrote. Thank you.
Are you a baloney man?
Not exactly.
Chicken loaf?
To be honest, I wrote, I’m a pescetarian.
This was a lie, my clumsy attempt to avoid ingesting a Vern Lund sandwich altogether. There was a pause before the three dots appeared again.
Tuna fish?
I grimaced, then sent Vern an impersonal yellow thumbs up.
I had my doubts on the bus to Vern’s mother’s house. But then I saw it. The place gave me a feeling. There was something alluring about it, about the stucco walls, the brick archway and the graceful arc of the path that led to it. I drifted towards the door like I was under a spell.
The spell was broken, however, by a loud quacking. I looked down to see a statuette of a duck, its fluffiness rendered crudely in concrete. It had a sly smile around its beak.
Vern Lund opened the door.
‘I see you’ve met Quacky,’ he said.
I did my best to look amused. ‘Your mother’s?’
‘God no. My daughter put him there. Mummy hated it. She abhorred whimsy of any kind. Anyway, come in,’ said Vern.
I stepped into the darkness.
‘You’d love her,’ said Vern as my eyes adjusted.
‘Your mother?’
Vern frowned, but his smile bounced back quickly. ‘No. My Casey. She’d be about your age. She’s a scream.’
He winked.
In the hallway, the temperature seemed to drop a couple of degrees. The effect wasn’t unpleasant; it was one of preservation, a museum coolness. And preservation was the word. Even in the foyer, there was promise. There was so much promise that my eyeballs started to throb. Following Vern, only half-listening to him, I snatched glances—amber glass, a turned cigar leg, blue paisley, black leather. Oh my god, I thought. Oh my god.
Then we were in the kitchen, where the detritus of Vern’s sandwich-making was all over the benches. He handed me a plate of not one but two tuna sandwiches, on which I could see the dents of his fingerprints.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
Vern began lustily tucking into a ham sandwich.
‘I had to google “pescetarian”,’ he said. ‘Lucky Mummy had a can of tuna. I hadn’t thought to buy anything…exotic.’
So it’s come to this, I thought. I am eating a dead woman’s tuna.
‘Is that your mother?’ I asked, referring to a portrait that hung next to the rosewood cuckoo clock, which was decorated with intricately carved birds pecking at one another.
‘It was her. A long time ago,’ Vern said.
In the portrait, the mother wore a turtleneck and cat’s-eye spectacles. She looked shrewd and displeased. It was understandable. I would have been displeased, too, if I had given birth to someone who turned out to be Vern Lund.
Our silence was ruptured by a quack-quack-quack.
‘Ah!’ said Vern. ‘That must be Casey. She mentioned she might come by.’
*
Casey entered the kitchen, and it struck me that she had a face like a dinosaur. Not that it was scaly, but there was a sloping way that nose connected to brow bone that suggested something primordial, an adjacency to sludge. She smiled at me, and I saw not only that she had braces but how hard they were working. Bright yellow elastic bands formed squares on either side of her mouth, attaching the upper and lower teeth.
‘Hi,’ she said. She offered her hand, and I took it. ‘You’re the nurse from the clinic?’
‘I’m not a nurse,’ I said.
‘Well, what are you?’ she said.
There was tuna in my teeth; I could feel it.
‘I’m the concierge.’
‘I thought you were a nurse,’ said Vern, patting his head. ‘Casey’s a nurse. I thought you two might have a lot to talk about.’
Casey was holding a near-empty bubble tea. She drank from the wide plastic straw, slurping the last of the tea from between purple tapioca pearls.
‘Oh,’ I said. Then I added, ‘I’m sorry about your grandmother.’
Casey gave a dismissive shrug. She was wearing thongs, and her toes reached over the edge. They were knobbly, and the second toe was longer than the big one. Maniac feet, I thought, glad that my own were ensconced in the double monks.
‘How about a tour?’ said Vern.
Walking through the house was like walking through the rich saturated colours inside a kaleidoscope. One room was all in moody Rothko blues; another was like being an insect trapped in amber.
The next room was all in green. Moss, lime, forest, electric. Even the green floral carpet was glorious, deep and refreshing, its concentric circles like lily pads.
‘The good room,’ said Vern.
‘Your mother had wonderful taste,’ I said.
Vern shrugged. ‘She had plans,’ he said. ‘For soirées and such. But the truth is we never had any guests.’
‘Once she locked me in here,’ said Casey. ‘And she told me I was never going to get out.’
We all stood in silence for a moment.
‘Anyway, what do you think?’ said Vern. ‘Can you take this stuff off my hands?’
He was still carrying his sandwich. He dropped a glob of mayonnaise on a bookshelf, stuck his finger in it and ate what adhered. My god, I thought. He doesn’t know what he has. He doesn’t know how good it is.
‘I’d love to,’ I said. ‘What would I owe you?’
I swallowed, waiting for him to say it: nothing. He’d said as much at the clinic.
But before he could answer, Casey said, ‘Tell you what. You can buy me a drink.’
She was looking at me, looking me over. Her expression was sly, amused—not unlike Quacky’s.
‘Great idea,’ said Vern. ‘I can leave you two kids to work out the details.’
‘Sure,’ I said. My toes curled, and I willed them to relax. ‘Where did you have in mind?’
*
Of course she brought me to Pacific Gardens. Of course she wanted to go to O’Funsies, the Irish pub on Level Two. This was a place of reproductions. Reproduction leadlight windows, reproduction olde worlde bar with a gold rail; reproduction Guinness advertisements featuring leering toucans and red-cheeked men huffing as they pedalled penny farthings.
On the escalator on the way up, Casey pointed to a shop. ‘That place is the best,’ she said.
The place was called Kooks. It was on Level One, and it sold gifts for the undiscerning—figurines of shy milkmaids or grinning beavers munching cigars, a magnet depicting an elephant in bloomers that read ‘Fridge Pickers Wear Bigger Knickers’, matching mugs that said ‘Mr Right’ and ‘Mrs Always Right’.
‘Oh,’ I said, choosing my words carefully. ‘I’ve never been in there.’
‘I’m a collector,’ said Casey. ‘So I go there a lot.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘What do you collect?’
‘Veggie Friends,’ said Casey. ‘I’m a Veg Head.’
I looked at her, mystified.
‘Veggie Friends? Hello? Have you been living under a rock?’
I thought of the bus and flushed a little.
‘I can’t say I’m familiar with them.’
‘I just got the new one, Teddy Turnip. Here, I’ll show you.’
We’d entered O’Funsies. I took out my newest credit card and bought Casey a drink, relieved when the tick appeared to show that my transaction had been approved.
When we were seated on green vinyl stools, our drinks on leprechaun coasters, Casey followed through on her threat to show me the Veggie Friends.
‘That’s Teddy,’ she said. ‘He’s sold out everywhere. He’s going for a fortune on eBay.’
The photo showed a figurine, a bulbous lump of acrylic in an ombre that ran from white to purple. Its legs were elastic strings, with little white sneakers on the ends. Its eyes were googly. Its plastic mouth was open in a kind of primal scream. It had sharp teeth—I’m not sure why the Veggie Friends posited a world where a turnip was an apex predator—and a recoiling pink tongue.
‘I’ve got them all. Well, almost all of them—I’ve never managed to score an Owen Onion. Here. Check it out.’
Casey pulled out her phone to show me photographs of her collection, lined up across several shelves on a white melamine bookshelf devoid of books. There were dozens of them. Each Veggie Friend shared Teddy’s plump body and string legs, and their faces had exaggerated expressions of madness or drunkenness or lust. Casey pointed out Claude Capsicum, Eddie the Eggplant, Paolo Pumpkin—twirling his skinny mustachios—and the only female of the gang, Tina Tomato, whose most striking attribute was a set of knobbly red breasts bursting out of a gingham bikini.
She then opened the eBay app and showed me what they were selling for.
‘That’s absurd,’ I said.
‘Veg Heads don’t muck around,’ she said. Then she shut the app and looked up at me.
‘What’s it like being a concierge?’ she said. ‘Interesting?’
At first I thought she was being insulting; there was nothing interesting about being a concierge. Then I had the terrible realisation that she was flirting with me.
I assured myself that I wasn’t on a date, that I had never agreed to be on a date, that it was just a drink, that my body language conveyed general amiability but no particular interest, that soon it would all be over.
But I stayed for another drink, and then another. I told myself that I was shoring up my investment by staying; things were more likely to proceed smoothly if Casey liked me. But, whether it was due to the alcohol, the warmth of the place, or the glow of potential acquisition, I gradually felt my mood improving. I realised I was enjoying myself. I ate a plate of something called ‘wingettes’. I stayed until the bar became a karaoke venue. I watched Casey sing the duet of ‘A Whole New World’ by herself while the patrons of O’Funsies, in their polos and thongs, sang along and applauded wildly. And before I knew it I was in the blank grey elevator at Casey’s apartment block, and she was still sweaty from her on-stage exertions, and the door to her faceless new-build apartment had shut behind us, and she was kissing me, and I was kissing her back.
In her bedroom, she put her hands in my hair, grabbed it by the roots and pulled hard.
‘Ow,’ I said.
‘You don’t like that?’
To my surprise, I heard myself saying, ‘No, I do, I do.’
That’s how it was with Casey. She clambered onto me, and when I tried to bring my face to hers—I’d decided I liked the taste and feel of her braces, the metal on my tongue—she recoiled a little, using one hand to turn my face into the pillow and hold it down. I liked that too. I liked the swagger of her little paunch, and I liked her smell: artificial strawberry, artificial peach, and actual Guinness and sweat. There was, I assured myself, very little resemblance to Vern, or his mother.
Afterwards, I padded to the bathroom and revelled in the luxury of peeing indoors. I was so happy I actually sat down to urinate, letting my head rest against the tiled wall behind me. On the way back to Casey’s room, I passed Teddy and the rest of the Veggie Friends, clustered on their shelves. They stared at me with their maniac eyes, judging me like a jury of my peers.
*
Casey was fine with me taking as many of her grandmother’s things as I wanted. I hope I never see any of that junk again, she said. I hired a rattling old van and made three trips. I also hired a man to help me, someone on a website offering his services for ten dollars an hour, who wore a cap low on his face and said very little. Together we stacked everything in the field behind the bus, covering it all with plastic sheeting and then covering the sheets with tarpaulins anchored to the ground with tent pegs. My landlord watched me from his window and dropped the curtain when he saw me looking. I hadn’t asked his permission. I hoped he wouldn’t demand I remove everything, or increase my rent. By the end, I was filthy and exhausted, and regretted wearing the double monks. I knew it was stupid, but I’d developed something like a superstition about them. I only took them off to sleep, and even then, I liked to keep them close. I’d reach out and touch them in the night, the way a mother might blindly reach out to check on her sleeping newborn.
*
I brought Elise a vessel from Vern’s mother’s house, the way another man in another era might have brought her a dead leopard or the head of her enemy. Which is to say, I brought it with a sense of great ceremony and produced it with a flourish.
It was brown and orange glazed ceramic, West German, thin at one end and bulbous at the other. She turned it in her long tapered fingers, looking thoughtful.
‘There’s more where that came from,’ I said. ‘A lot more, actually.’
‘It’s exquisite,’ she said.
I hadn’t really meant to sell the things I’d acquired from Vern’s mother’s house. I was just full of a pressing need to tell someone, show someone, my treasures—and not just anyone, but someone who would understand the value of what was now in my possession.
Of course Elise assumed I was there to sell it. She told me what Dansk could offer me for it, and I tried not to show my shock. I nodded.
‘We have margins,’ Elise said apologetically. She let its weight sit in the palm of her hand. I took what she offered me. But before I’d left Dansk, I spied a pair of bookends, American walnut, carved to look like theatrical masks—comedy and tragedy, their expressions crude and exaggerated.
‘Lovely, aren’t they?’ Elise said, a blade of light shining along her straight, clean hair. ‘I probably shouldn’t do this, but I could give you a better price for them. Like a trade-in. For the vessel.’
She held her finger in front of her mouth and blew a shhhh.
She wrapped the bookends in brown paper, with the corners tucked sharply and pressed flat. I went home and put the bookends next to one another on top of my mini-fridge. Before I lay down to think of Elise, her mouth rounding into that shhh, I turned their faces to the wall.
*
I started to think seriously about where to house my new collection. I decided I did need an apartment. And with my debts being what they were, what I really needed was a raise. At the end of a shift, I asked Dr Gosse for a moment of his time and made my request.
‘No,’ said Dr Gosse.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I said, “No”,’ said Dr Gosse. ‘Don’t get me wrong, you’re a very competent concierge. But what you’re paid is ample, given the skill level required to perform your job. Which is not nil, but is reasonably close to nil.’
In the silence that followed, I thought of how Dr Gosse had recruited me for this job. I’d been standing at a bus stop. ‘Excuse me,’ he’d said. ‘Is that your real hair?’
I assured him that it was.
‘Can I touch it?’
I went from flattered to unsettled.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘This isn’t a sex thing.’ He held up his hands. ‘See? I’m not molesting anyone.’ He stepped forward, tentative, took a lock in his hand and tugged it. ‘How would you like a job?’
I would come to learn how much Dr Gosse loved hair. He said on the company website that he was in business to give men back their confidence. But really, he loved hair for its own sake. In my first week on the job he’d had me order cushions for the office from India. He’d found a supplier who made cushions stuffed with hair that came from pilgrims who’d tonsured themselves at temples.
When he interviewed me, he’d said, ‘You’re probably wondering about the state of my own hair.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘Not at all.’ But this was a lie.
‘It’s better this way,’ he said. ‘It sends a message to the clients.’
‘That you’ve…sacrificed your hair?’
‘That I transcend hair.’
He sat back and put his hands behind his head. His shirt was translucent enough that I could see the white singlet he wore beneath. In the armpit there was no shadow, no hint of hair.
‘I feel I add a lot of value to this business,’ I said, sounding pathetic even to myself.
‘You have enough,’ Dr Gosse said. ‘The problem with your generation is that you have no regard for delayed gratification. No consideration for the long term. If I gave you more money, you wouldn’t be prudent with it. You’d fritter it away.’
Dr Gosse ran the pads of his thumbs in circles on his shining scalp.
‘Lifestyle creep,’ he said. ‘I’ve read about it. When people get more money, they become accustomed to certain luxuries they wouldn’t have missed if they’d never had them to begin with. Well, I’m saving you from it—I’m doing you a favour.’
‘Okay,’ I said, hating how compliant I sounded, how in a hurry to be agreeable. ‘Okay, well, thank you, I guess.’
‘My door is always open,’ Dr Gosse said. But I closed it on my way out, because I knew he liked it like that.
*
Casey and I were not a couple. At least, I didn’t think we were. The way I saw it, if we were a couple, there would have been a public element to our relationship. There would have been restaurants, hand-holding, introductions to our respective social circles. Casey seemed happy enough to allow everything to occur behind closed doors; specifically, the closed door of her apartment.
The closest I’d come to leaving a trace of her in my life was signing up to the Kooks ‘Veg Head Alert!’ mailing list, which would inform me if there was a ‘drop’ of a rare or ‘archival’ Veggie Friend. These ‘drops’ happened without warning and often sold out in minutes. Casey had urged me to sign up—you had to go to the store in person to secure one of these rare Veggie Friends, and she reasoned that I had an advantage, as I worked in such close proximity to Kooks. I’d been happy to humour her. I deleted the emails as soon as they landed in my inbox.
I’m not too proud to admit that I was enjoying my fling with Casey. I would recline on her Ikea sofa, eating mac ’n’ cheese, ensconced in a giant hooded fleece robe, baby blue and patterned with large white spots. She had purchased it for me after I’d started wearing her pink one all the time. It gave me static shocks when I went to put the kettle on, but I didn’t care. It was nice to be warm. It was nice to lather up with Casey’s apricot scrub in her functional shower. It was nice to sleep through the night instead of waking up every time the bus creaked, worrying that some or other local miscreant was prying open the windows and coming in to murder me, or steal my double monks.
When the time came, when I had my own place, I planned to bid her a fond farewell. It seemed to me she wouldn’t mind. I could picture it. I could picture her slurping the dregs from her bubble tea and saying, ‘Well, so long,’ then absent-mindedly flicking one of the tiny elastic bands in her mouth.
Given this, I was shocked to find myself telling her about Signor Tocci.
It was one night when I was scrolling my phone in bed. A new email arrived. It was from the workshop of Signor Tocci. My heart skidded and I felt a cool acid drip in my stomach.
Dear Signor Veal, it began. We have been very patient… I closed the app, locked the phone and put it face down.
‘What?’ Casey looked up.
‘Nothing.’
‘You look pale,’ she said. ‘I mean, paler than usual.’
She put her hand to my forehead then, first the palm, then the back of her hand. It was that gesture, the motherly futility of it, that cracked something open in me. I let out a horrifying sound—something between a gasp and a sob.
‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Casey,’ I said, ‘I’m in trouble.’
I only meant to tell her about Signor Tocci. But I ended up telling her everything. About the credit cards, about the bus, about my terrible wi-fi, about my difficulty in digging new latrines when the weather got cold and the clay soil froze.
Casey didn’t admonish me. She didn’t ask what I’d spent the money on or why I’d been so stupid. She didn’t even ask where I was keeping her grandmother’s things. She held me, in silence, for a while. Then she handed me a tissue and said, ‘Blow.’
I obeyed. When she asked for my phone, I obeyed. She looked at my screen, then at her screen, and then tapped a few keys and handed my phone back.
‘There,’ she said.
It was perhaps gauche to check what she had done, but I couldn’t help myself. I needed to know how much reprieve I had. I saw, and sighed heavily in relief. One credit card was down to zero. It wasn’t enough to pay off Signor Tocci, but it would buy me some time.
‘I’ll pay you back.’
‘Don’t worry about it.’
She lay on her side, and I spooned her. This was not something I usually did—to be honest, I preferred to sleep alone—but given the circumstances, it was the least I could do.
Thank God, I thought, kissing Casey’s shoulder. It was an odd thought to have, because I didn’t believe in God. If I was thanking anyone, it should be Vern, or perhaps even Dr Gosse, who had brought Vern, and therefore Casey, into my life. I thought of Dr Gosse, remembering something he’d told me on the day his cushions arrived. He told me that Christian monks tonsured themselves so that God could see more easily into their minds.
I reached up and patted my own hair. Reassuringly thick. Nothing to see here, God, I thought, and then I switched off the lamp and went to sleep.
*
Several weeks passed, and then Vern reappeared at the clinic looking pleased with himself and wearing a leather jacket. His long hair had been cut to match the length of his implants.
‘What do you think?’ he said.
‘It’s very nice.’
‘It was on sale,’ said Vern. ‘Real leather. Vero Cuoio. Want to touch it?’
I felt it would be politic to touch it, so I did. It was indeed real leather, but of the tough, grained variety. It was not a leather Signor Tocci or Mieke Dessler would use.
Dr Gosse was very good at his job and had done what could be done with Vern’s scalp. At first glance, his hair did not look suspect. It was only when you looked closer that you saw how the follicles were a little too neat, too orderly in their placement; the hairline a little too straight. It’s difficult to imitate randomness, Dr Gosse had told me once. The human brain was too inclined to impose order, he said. Chaos is something you have to strive for.
But Vern was delighted. ‘I use women’s shampoo,’ he told Dr Gosse. ‘Keeps things silky.’
Next came the moment Vern had been waiting for. I pressed the button that made the blue, cloudy backdrop unroll from the ceiling, took a photograph of Vern and printed it from the photo printer behind the desk.
I slipped it into the album next to the before photo. Vern looked better, younger, more confident, but in the earlier photo he’d looked more approachable. Now he looked capable of meanness; he smirked, like he knew he occupied a place in the world from which cruelty could be dispensed. I saw even less of a resemblance to Casey, but in that expression, I saw more of a resemblance to the portrait of his mother.
When he’d gone, Dr Gosse asked to see me in his office.
‘I wanted to speak to you,’ he said, ‘after our little discussion the other day. I don’t want you to think I don’t value you as an employee.’
He reached beneath his desk and produced a sleek white shopping bag.
‘I wanted to get you something,’ he said. ‘Some token of my appreciation.’
He slid the bag across the desk. I picked it up and looked inside. There, nestled, was a black bike helmet, shaped like a bird’s beak, gleaming and vicious.
‘I hope I got the size right,’ he said.
I felt compelled to remove the helmet from the bag and attach it to my head.
‘Now you don’t have to use that awful cheap helmet anymore,’ said Dr Gosse. ‘And I don’t have to look at it. Win-win.’
I knocked on the helmet three times, picturing my head cracking open and my thoughts falling out for all to see.
*
It was one of the few occasions that Casey and I went out. We’d been bowling at the alley inside Pacific Gardens. I’d allowed myself to be talked into this; it had been an error. I’d forgotten I would have to abandon my shoes behind a counter. I spent the afternoon in a state of heightened anxiety.
‘What if they get stolen?’ I’d asked the teenaged attendant who’d confiscated them.
‘Then I’ll call the police,’ he said, but I could tell he was being sarcastic.
We were walking back to the car in the balmy dusk outside Pacific Gardens. I was looking down at my shoes for any evidence of manhandling. That’s why I didn’t see her, at first.
‘Oh, hey,’ I heard. ‘Joshua?’
I looked up. That soft voice, those frail ankles above those massive clogs: it was Elise.
‘Hey,’ I said.
She stopped. ‘I’m really glad I ran into you, actually. That vessel you brought us sold super-fast. You mentioned you have more, I think?’
She then registered Casey’s existence. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe we’ve met.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘Elise, this is Casey.’
My cheeks burned with embarrassment. Casey’s T-shirt read, Namaste, Motherfucker!
‘Lovely to meet you.’
‘Yeah, you too,’ said Casey, loudly and flatly, and Elise furrowed her brow for a moment. ‘Anyway, you should come by the shop again soon. It’s been a while. I’d love to see what else you have.’
I swallowed. ‘Of course,’ I said.
‘Lovely to meet you,’ she said again to Casey, giving a little wave.
Casey watched Elise retreat, then said, ‘Why didn’t you tell her?’
‘Tell her what?’
‘That I’m your girlfriend.’
I watched the double monks move my body closer to the car park.
‘I mean, I don’t actually know Elise that well.’
‘That’s not what it looked like.’
We walked in stony silence for a minute.
‘What did you sell her?’ Casey asked.
‘Nothing. Nothing much, I mean. Just something from my private collection.’
*
The drive to Casey’s apartment was frosty. I was hoping that we could sink into our fluffy robes and forget about the whole thing. There was a new vanilla-scented body wash in Casey’s shower that I was looking forward to using. Lose yourself in a vanilla cocoon, the bottle said. That’s all I wanted, to lose myself in a vanilla cocoon.
But when we got into the apartment, Casey said, ‘What’s the name of the shop?’
‘What shop?’ I asked.
‘Where your girlfriend works.’
I blushed. ‘Don’t be childish. She’s not my girlfriend. It’s just a place that sells décor.’
‘Well,’ said Casey. ‘I might like to go there. I enjoy décor.’
‘You wouldn’t like it.’
‘Oh really? And why is that?’
‘Let’s just say it’s just not your taste,’ I said, walking past the shelf of Veggie Friends. I flicked Teddy Turnip’s shoe, and his foot swung back and forth on its string leg.
‘Don’t touch that.’
‘Oh, pardon me. How could I forget? Your priceless collection.’
Casey licked her lips. Her next question was calm, measured. ‘Have you told anyone about me? About us?’
‘I haven’t not told people,’ I said.
‘Does your family know?’
‘I haven’t spoken to them lately.’
‘Do you plan on telling them?’
‘Of course,’ I said. I folded my arms. ‘It’s just never come up.’
Casey shook her head. Then, as though she were saying it to herself, she said, ‘I am so sick of your pussyfooting bullshit.’
Teddy Turnip’s leg kept swinging, in and out of my peripheral vision.
‘Look,’ I said in a reasonable voice. ‘I just don’t like to be pressured. I need my own space. Is that so hard to understand?’
Casey laughed, an exaggerated har-har of a laugh that grated my nerves.
‘Your own space? Your own space?’ She laughed again. ‘No, that’s not hard to understand at all. You’re happy to live with me, to fuck me, to eat my food, to take my money—but not to introduce me to anyone.’
‘Don’t be absurd,’ I said.
Her fury reached a silent plateau. She came forward until her dinosaur beak was right under my chin. I looked at her sloppy T-shirt, her thin hair, her braces. I stepped back and accidentally kicked the edge of the bookshelf which held the Veggie Friends. I looked down in panic. There it was—a deep scratch on my double monk. I gasped.
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ Casey looked genuinely concerned for a moment, as though my distress might allow the fight to be forgotten. But then she realised what I was looking at.
‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ she said. ‘It’s just a shoe.’
‘How can you say that?’ I said. Then I shook my head. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘I bet Elise would understand.’
‘Yes,’ I said seriously, ‘Yes, I think she would.’
Casey nodded.
‘So that’s why you didn’t introduce me,’ she said. ‘You’re ashamed of me. Admit it. You think you’re better than me. You think you’re better than this.’ She gestured around her gormless apartment. ‘You’re just waiting until something better comes along.’
This struck a nerve. I felt myself turning red and looked down at my beautiful, scarred shoes. I had been trying to repress my anger, but it welled up and surged forward. ‘Or maybe,’ I said, ‘I just want things to be beautiful—or at least useful!’
As I said this, I snatched Teddy Turnip from the shelf. I am not a violent man, but all in a rush, I swung my arm up.
‘Teddy!’ cried Casey.
But it was too late. My arm had come down, and Teddy had been flung onto the engineered floorboards.
His body was too sturdy to really take much damage. But I saw immediately that I’d succeeded in disfiguring his hideous face. His nose was gone, and one flat googly eye stared up at me from the floor.
The rage dissipated. I thought of the cold draughts that run through the bus in winter, making it shudder. Oh God. What had I done?
‘Casey,’ I said. ‘Casey, oh no. I didn’t mean to do that. I’m so sorry. God, I’m so sorry. Please. I’ll replace it.’
‘You can’t replace him,’ hissed Casey, kneeling, cradling Teddy’s body to her chest. ‘He’s sold out everywhere.’
She picked up the eye and tried to restore it, but it fluttered back to the floor.
‘You’d better go,’ she said, not looking up.
‘Casey—’
‘Get out of my house,’ she said.
And so began what was, if not a dark night of the soul, at least a dark night of the vertebrae, the scalp and the groin. I would lie on the fold-out bed in the bus, feeling the way my shoulders and hips and knees were troubled by the sagging mattress. I tried to resign myself to a life without peach shampoo, a fluffy robe or an indoor toilet.
But there were other things I missed about Casey. I missed her long acrylic nails raking through my hair. I missed the way she gave herself over to sleep completely, spread out and untroubled like a child. I missed the general lack of neurosis with which she seemed to live her life.
No matter, I told myself. It was for the best. I had the contents of her grandmother’s house. I had what I’d come for. And though I’d half-expected to hear from her or from Vern, demanding the return of their chattels, there had been nothing.
Over time, though, that nothing grew in scale. I realised I had expected Casey would call, that she would relent. But her silence was perfect. It was as though I had never existed to her. I lay in the bus and wondered whether I existed to anyone. I thought of Dr Gosse eyeing my hair on the day he offered me a job, and then I thought of God, and Vern, and Vern’s mother, seeing into my head and reading my thoughts. If Casey misses me, I thought, send me a sign. But nothing happened.
*
Finally, I called her, but there was no answer. I called again, and then again. Over the course of my workday, I left three voicemails. I sent a text message, and then ten more.
Late at night, I received a reply: it was a photograph of Teddy Turnip, his nose glued on, his eye wonkily reattached. I couldn’t help but notice that his expression wasn’t the same. It was uncanny, the way his face seemed genuinely changed, as though the experience had left him with psychic damage, as well as physical injury. ‘Well, fuck you, Teddy Turnip,’ I said, to the bus’s empty air. ‘This is all your fault.’
Then there was the day it rained. It was summer; I suppose I had been banking on the weather holding until the cooler months set in. I thought I’d have found somewhere to live by then.
But the rain came, hard. It came while I was at work, and I had to sit in my chair at Pacific Gardens watching men come in with drops of water on their shoulders and glasses and comb-overs. I ate lunch in the food court while water slid down the frosted glass roof which covered the atrium, trying to quell my rising panic.
I wanted to get home quickly, but there was the issue of the double monks. Once I’d disembarked from the bus, I had to untie them and secure them in my satchel to protect them from the deluge. By the time I’d picked my way home from the bus stop, I was soaked to the skin, my shirt clinging to my chest, water running down my back and into my trousers. I squelched my way barefoot across the field, winced when I stepped on something sharp, then hobbled my way to the tarpaulins. Had they held? And to the furniture and vessels and vases and dishes and cuckoo clock, I said, ‘I’m so sorry. Shhh, hush, it’s going to be okay.’
I could only check on them properly hours later, in the dark, once the rain had stopped. I stood outside, shivering, my hair still wet, and slid my hands in under the tarpaulins, under the plastic sheeting, until I felt timber, and velvet, and leather. Everything I touched felt dry. I sighed heavily with relief and then sat down in the mud. Casey would be watching something on television, flicking the elastic bands on her braces, drinking vodka premixes, wearing one of those sheet masks that made her look like a psychopath. My god, I missed her. I missed her so much.
*
It was masochism, I think, that made me tell Elise the truth about where I lived. I was very specific with her. ‘That’s the address,’ I said, ‘but I’m not in the house. I’m in the bus.’
There was a pause.
‘Did you say bus?’
I stood in the grass in the midday sun using my hand as a visor and waited for them to turn up. And then there they were, in a white truck with DANSK printed on the side in black. Elise, in her black linens, slipped out of the cab. A man who was both muscular and fat, who wore the unlikely combination of T-shirt and woollen beanie, got out from the other side. He had a ginger beard and a general air of confidence that made me itch with dissatisfaction.
We exchanged greetings. The man pumped my hand.
‘Benny,’ he said.
‘How do you do,’ I replied.
He clapped his meaty palms together. ‘I hear you’ve got some great stuff.’
‘I think so.’
‘This one thinks so too,’ said Benny, slinging a ginger-furred arm around Elise’s neck. ‘And she’s never wrong. Are you, baby?’
Elise smiled up at him, and then looked at me. I looked back at her, and I hoped my look conveyed what I felt: that I didn’t blame or judge her for enduring a relationship with this man. She was just doing what she had to do. Here was a man who had his own truck and enough money to buy things to fill it with, over and over again. Our little chats, our shared tastes, our fine-featured faces and compact bodies—what hope did they have against the sheer might of material comfort?
I helped Benny to remove the tarpaulins and the plastic sheeting. He didn’t say anything about how I’d stored the things; he just directed me to help him spread it all out on the lot beside the bus.
When we were finished, we were both sweating. Benny whipped off his beanie and wiped his face on it, and I had a brief moment of satisfaction when I saw how thin his hair was on top.
I surveyed everything on the lawn. It was a rough reassembly of the rooms of Vern Lund’s mother’s house.
‘Very nice, said Benny.
‘It’s in great condition,’ I said.
‘Mint,’ Benny agreed.
Then he named a price so embarrassingly low I couldn’t look at him. I pretended I hadn’t heard for a second. I stared straight ahead into the grass, a high-pitched sound in my ears.
When I didn’t reply, he added, ‘It’s worth more, of course. I know it, you know it.’
‘You have margins,’ I said.
He clasped my shoulder. ‘I’m so glad you understand.’
As he handed me the money I did my best to look uninterested, to seem as though the money was a mere formality and he was in fact doing me a favour by taking the furniture away. But it was too late for such dissembling; they’d seen the bus. I could only hope that neither of them requested the use of a bathroom.
When everything was in the truck—the tables and chairs, the bar, the cuckoo clock, the floating shelves, the little bookcase, even the portrait of Casey’s chic, disapproving grandmother—Benny shook my hand, crushing my fingers in his.
‘Thanks, mate,’ he said.
I said, ‘You’re welcome,’ but I doubt he heard me over the truck’s roller door slamming shut.
*
In the end, two things happened that more or less sealed my fate. The first was that I sent back Signor Tocci’s shoes. I wrote an email, my hands trembling. Dear Signor Tocci, I wrote. Mea culpa, mea culpa.
I bought a polyurethane pair of double monks online for $24.95. No one seemed to notice the difference, but I felt it, felt my coming down in the world, felt how my maniac feet, no longer soothed and able to breathe, grew sweatier and smellier and more desperate than ever.
Eventually I got an email from Signor Tocci’s assistant. It described the cellar in which my shoes would live, waiting for me. It is a den of shame, he said. Think of it as a kind of debtor’s prison. Pay your debt and your shoes will be freed.
I wrote back: Grazie mille. You have been too kind.
If I shopped at Kooks I might have owned a fridge magnet that read ‘Karma is Real’. And though I balked at any and all Kooks-level wisdom, there was perhaps some truth in this particular slogan. Because once I’d finished my acts of contrition, my email pinged. KOOKS VEG HEAD ALERT. Subject: FLASH DROP!
I opened the email.
We’ve got ONE Owen Onion in store—RIGHT NOW!
I didn’t ask Dr Gosse’s permission. I ran from my post, the money from the sale of Vern Lund’s mother’s furniture in my pocket. I sprinted down the escalators, my feet slipping on the trapped perspiration in my shoes.
Finally, I made it to the store. I didn’t elbow the little girl who was going in ahead of me out of the way, I just nimbly cut in front of her.
Owen Onion had his white-gloved hands clasped together and his eyes rolling back, as though caught in a moment of religious ecstasy. I asked to have him placed on gauze, in a gift box I paid extra for, while the little girl whimpered behind me.
‘Perhaps the nice man will give it to you,’ said her mother hopefully.
‘I’m sorry, I need it more than she does.’ I looked at the child. ‘Don’t get too attached to things,’ I said.
While I was walking up to Casey’s building, Owen Onion in my arms, I felt my maniac feet squelching in their polyurethane and thought: These shoes will last long after every pair Signor Tocci has ever made has rotted away, long after the feet inside them have rotted away. I imagined a museum of the future as I was kissing Casey and smelling, with great relief, the peach shampoo scent that clung to her hair. Centuries from now, I thought, the difference between mid-century and today will be nothing. Casey opened her mouth wider to deepen her kiss and one of her bands snapped. I picked it out of my mouth and let it fall to the floor. It was comforting to me to think, as we tumbled onto the yellow chevron-patterned sheets, that after she was dead, and I was dead, only certain things would have the tenacity to last. I pictured a diorama in a design museum of the future: Mieke Dessler pieces, if they survived, would be sharing space with my Payless Shoes and her Veggie Friends—and no one would know that there had ever been a difference.
