Our bedroom set
was the second least expensive in Ikea’s least expensive range, costing $289.99
on sale, and was called the ANDERS package. The set consisted of a four-post
bed – some reasonably nice lathwork had been done on the posts – and two
bedside tables, all made in Romania from Russian pine, possibly old growth
Russian pine if recent headlines were anything to go by, as well as a
‘medium-firm’ mattress which was made in China from Indian latex and cotton. The
bed was higher off the ground and more stately than I would have liked,
quasi-stately, and its slats were made of a paler, flimsier wood, almost as
flimsy as balsa. We’d also bought a pair of Swedish-made ELSA lamps on the same
day at $14 each. Sarah kept some plastic bags – made in China from linear
polyethylene granules – with department store logos under the bed with
out-of-season shoes in them and our king size doona draped right onto the
carpeted floor on both sides. The carpet pile was school classroom short, and
grey. The doona was red wine coloured and had black Asian lettering on it. The
table draws slid in and out on white plastic rollers that rolled like buckled
bicycle wheels. After using my table for three weeks I decided that it was too
small to accommodate all the things I liked to have near me as I slept, and too
cheaply finished to have to use or even look at, and so I had put it in the
spare bedroom – it was still the only thing in the spare bedroom – and taken
the sideboard from the rumpus room and placed it lengthways along the edge of
the bed. Being long and tall for a sideboard it meant that I had to get out at
the foot of the bed every morning and that it hurt if I rolled too far over in
the night. Sarah had neither supported the change nor opposed it.
There was a towel
between her legs now, slowly receiving the come I’d just left in her, and I was
brushing her hair. She had found this weird at the beginning of our
relationship, a bit “faggy”, that I
liked to brush her hair, so shockingly thick and black and angular, and to have
her lie between my open legs as I did so. But over time – more than three years
– she’d grown used to it and had, I thought, begun to enjoy it, even if it was
simply the noble enjoyment of giving me pleasure. Because resolving all the
tangles until I could bury my spread fingers to her scalp and slide them
effortlessly from root to tip gave me a huge amount of pleasure. There was a
practical reason why free-spirited people
often had long hair; tending to it was pleasurable, meditative. I was holding
the back of her right arm at the tricep; my thumb traced the contraceptive
implant in a kind of exultant caress. Swimming had broadened her shoulders and
made her back muscles bigger, more shadowy. Her waist was small, her hips hard
and wide. I looked down and could see the beginnings of her arse crack, the
allure of which had left me in tears the first time I saw it. It was still only
three in the afternoon.
“Steve’s going to
show tomorrow morning, isn’t he?” She asked.
I hummed in
assent.
“But how can you
know for sure if you don’t call him?”
“Babe, do you
have to call your boss every morning to make sure work’s on?”
“No,” she
replied, flinching as I brushed out a tangle too aggressively, “but that’s a
silly comparison. My work doesn’t just randomly not happen”
“Neither does
mine. He’ll show”
“Okay,” she said,
“but don’t blame me if you end up going on another walk”.
By the time I had
finished with her hair, Sarah had slid her underpants back on, and declined my
request that she accompany me to dinner with Lucinda the following night. Her
reasons for declining had to do with a Tupperware party, a baby shower, and the
fact that she knew I wouldn’t have gone either given the chance. Sensing that I
was upset, she turned around to face me, kneeling so that her knees just graced
my knob. We kissed twice. I cupped her stomach and teased her bellybutton ring.
Her hair was like the silhouette of a flame.
She spoke in
sensual, suggestive tones. “Why don’t we go out for dinner tonight, just you
and me? We could go to the Thai place in Greensborough, get a tonne of roti
bread and peanut sauce, those crazy chilli cocktails…”
I agreed and made
the earliest booking possible, five-thirty. That left two unfilled hours; Sarah
made baby clothes while I slept.
Infernally heavy,
the sideboard was walnut and two-toned: the frame and the hollow rectangular
legs were beige, as were the four draws in the middle of the unit, while the
cupboards on either side and all the handles were dark brown. It was, I’d
always thought, a beautiful object in the sense that it was clean. It was also the only piece of
furniture I’d inherited from my parents. Our neighbour from over the road, a
cabinetmaker called Neil Kenneth Jefferies, had built it for them cheap when I
was in prep. We lived on Lower Plenty then and I could still remember Jefferies
and my dad heaving it through the press of traffic, putting it down at both
median strips to sit on, exhausted and maybe a little strung out from playing
all that chicken. My sisters and I were gathered on the footpath with our
pyjamas on as if it was the only thing happening in the world at that moment, mum
standing behind us like a duck with her brood. I could still remember how big and
hairy our neighbour’s forearms looked, dropped down between his legs and then
akimbo because he was out of breath, forming bunches the size of garlic bulbs at
his bent elbows. Also how neat his bald head looked in the sunlight.
Cars beeped at
them. If a car beeped at something other than a sexy young woman or another car
then it was probably a bloke wearing a costume of some sort, or his birthday
suit, or just a plain-clothed bloke who was spastically drunk, or else a bloke
– or two – carrying something unusual.
Once safely
across, the sideboard was threaded through our front door without incident and
placed against the wall in the hallway underneath an ugly Kandinsky print. I
never understood how people could like or even tolerate Kandinsky. Then some
records were put atop it, and a record player that I never saw being used. But
for the profuseness of their thanks at the time, and the affectations of
gratitude on their faces, and the fact that it had been built to their own
specifications, my parents were never happy with the sideboard. They seemed to declare
their mutual antipathy towards it at every opportunity; maybe it made them want
to fuck each other more.
“It’s just too antique,” one would say.
“And the
sharpness of those corners – was he out to blind the kids?”
Once Neil Kenneth
Jefferies had left the neighbourhood the sideboard was relocated to the garage,
where it sat beneath a big blue tarpaulin until I’d picked it up and brought it
to Watsonia, less than a month ago. That equalled twenty years of concealment. Interestingly,
I was to see and hear the innocuous name of our former neighbour much later,
after my parents had died, during his much-publicised trial for child
molestation, in which my sister Sinead gave testimony, and subsequent twenty
year sentence. In no way did this affect my fondness for the sideboard, which
my parents had replaced all those years ago with a pine-finished Laminex one
from Ikea.
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