Cover image: Love Objects by Emily Maguire
Nic’s shoes had always worn unevenly. Pigeon-toed was what the ballet teacher, who was actually just an ordinary mum who had lived in France for a year when she was younger, had called her. Such a pretty face, but those feet! the fake-French ballet teacher would cry, patting six-year-old Nic’s smooth cheeks and gazing not at the terrible feet but away from them at the school hall rafters. What would she say now? Nic wonders, watching each foot press its inside into the asphalt as it stepped. Such a sagging face! At last a match for your sloppy feet!
Sagging face, sloppy feet, arse outgrowing its pants, right hip which has, in the three years since she’s turned forty, woken her most nights with its urgent ache. Not all bad, though, or else Jase from the stockroom, who goes to the gym every morning before work and wears tight shorts and tighter singlets to show how well that regime is working for him, wouldn’t whistle appreciatively and call her gorgeous when she passed him, and Reg the store’s night manager wouldn’t stand far closer than polite in the break room and ask her for the thousandth time if she wouldn’t consider joining the night shift so he’d have something good to look at during the long quiet hours between six and closing.
Night shift is better money, but aside from having to dodge Reg there’s the matter of transport. Nic isn’t a panicky person; not like her sister Michelle, who sees rapists and meth heads where there are only passing motorists and harmless neighbourhood kids. Still, even the calmest and most reasonable woman doesn’t take twenty-minute walks alone after midnight. Or accept the no-doubt-insistent offer of a lift from the creepy manager finishing work at the same time.
Still, even the calmest and most reasonable woman doesn’t take twenty-minute walks alone after midnight.
Besides, if she got home after midnight she wouldn’t get to sleep before one, but would have to rise at six anyway to make sure the cats didn’t howl the neighbourhood awake in hunger.
Besides, if she didn’t walk home in the bright, clear light of afternoon she would miss so much.
Like the newly pasted telegraph pole poster telling whoever passes to LOSE WEIGHT NOW!!!! She tears a tab off and slips it into her uniform pocket to nestle with the SECRETS OF YOUR SOUL TAROT business card she picked up from the shopping centre information desk this morning and the kebab shop receipt with today’s queue number 14 in thick black texta on the top. On second thought, she unsticks the whole poster, working carefully so the bits of tape come away with the paper. Folds it in three so the tabs are safely tucked away.
Like the way this pair of sneakers looks ready to chuck on the inside edge and yet near new on the outer. Is it time to swap them with one of the pairs she bought in Kmart’s January sale or should she wait until the canvas wears right through? First sight of skin, that was the marker.
Like the fact the diamond chip in Mum’s engagement ring is not sparkling as it should in the late afternoon sun. Michelle, who wears Mum’s plain gold wedding band, told Nic to keep it sparkly with a monthly bath of half hydrogen peroxide, half Windex solution, but that was typical Michelle over-fussiness. Dishwashing liquid, warm water, soft toothbrush, good as new. She’ll do it tonight while watching Married at First Sight.
Like the peeling polish on her left index fingernail. A raw pink spot at the edge of an otherwise perfectly glossy lavender finish. How long had it been that way? All day she looks at her own hands without seeing them. Product-scanning robots. Only on the walk home do they become part of her again; only now can she see their messiness and feel the shame of it. She should have expected this. The lavender polish had been gloopy and her usual solution of acetone drops had not sufficiently thinned it. She’d known it and now look!
All day she looks at her own hands without seeing them. Product-scanning robots.
Like the mustard-coloured envelope slipped under the windscreen wipers of a shiny black Jeep in the no-parking zone outside of the nursing home. Some people had so much money they treated a ticket as a minor fee for the convenience of parking wherever they damn well liked. Never used to see those kinds of people in Leichhardt. The owner of this car probably didn’t even know anyone in the home. Another scavenger tracking which old ladies were due to die next, leaving their unrenovated 1960s houses to be bought cheap, flipped and sold within a month for millions.
Nic plucks the parking fine from beneath the wiper blade and drops it into her handbag, next to the empty Coke bottle from lunch and the Thermomix pamphlet from the pop-up stall outside the shopping centre toilets.
If she walked home at night she would not see treasures like the doll’s bonnet (she at first thinks baby’s bonnet, but not even a newborn’s head could be so tiny, surely?) that winks at her from under the swings in the pocket park three doors from her house. It must have been dropped only that afternoon, so unblemished by dust or dog piss or cigarette ash is the white brocade. When she holds it up close, she can see that a length of shiny satin ribbon meant to act as an under-chin tie has been attached to each side, but unevenly and in a jagged stitch. A handmade bonnet, imperfectly made but so clean and crisp it hurts her heart to think how the one who sewed it would feel about its casual discarding. She pulls a scrunched plastic bag from her jacket pocket, shakes it smooth and gently places the bonnet inside.
So much she would miss if she were to walk home in the dark with only the too-far-apart streetlights to guide her.
This is an extract from Love Objects by Emily Maguire (Allen & Unwin). Love Objects is available now at your local independent bookseller.
