Love and Other Perishable Items by Laura Buzo Read Free Book Online

will hardly have time to scratch myself over the next month, I have so much work due. But then it will be three glorious months of holiday. Consisting of three essentialelements: beach, Land of Dreams and beer. See you in December. Provided I don’t die from caffeine-induced heart failure, which, let’s face it, is in the cards. It’s late. If you’ll excuse me, it’s time for me to get into bed and look at the ceiling.

December 2
    Welcome to the other side! I would say welcome to the season of love, but that might be a bit of an exaggeration, as will become clear when I get to the Field. Against all the odds, I got my essays in and sat my exams, proving for the third year running that there is a God and he loves me. My last exam was sociology—a three-hour nightmare. When the examiner said “Time” at twelve o’clock, the pen fell from my cramped fingers and I put my head down on the desk almost involuntarily. A curious montage of the year flashed through my mind, including lots of Michaela scenes from various stages of the whole sorry affair, watching Kathy holding court across the library lawn, fighting with my poor sister, who always seems to bear the brunt of my late-night seething, and, curiously, Amelia in the staff room at break, sitting on the chair with her knees drawn up to her chin, reading a dog-eared copy of Heart of Darkness and sipping tea from a Styrofoam cup.
    Then I went to meet Mick, Rohan and Suze at the uni bar. Then I drank a lot. Then I went home and slept for fifteen hours. And here I am!
    Right. Let’s take stock. On the upside, I have three months off uni. On the downside, the Search for the Perfect Woman has still yielded no fruit, and I have no girlfriend with whom to spend these three months. I also have no money and will be working about thirty hours a week at Coles to rectify this. I will try veryhard not to drink all my pay, but make no promises.
    Rohan has finished his bachelor’s in chemical engineering and applied for a job in Newcastle. It will be strange not having him at uni next year. He won’t be around much for the holidays either because his dad is paying for him to go to Europe as a graduation present. My dad, on the other hand, has offered to make a contribution toward the board shorts I want to buy for the summer. A contribution , mind.
    Rohan said he wanted to lend me his (parentally purchased) car while he was away, but his little sister kicked up a huge stink and he has to lend it to her now. I try not to envy Ro—the stuff his parents pay for, like the trip and the car, and the fact that he can spend so much more time studying because he doesn’t work, while I get to take the bus to the Land of Dreams seemingly every goddamn day. I try not to envy him. It’s disgusting to waste time envying those things when whole families, whole tribes, get slaughtered in their thousands in Africa, when leaky boatloads of refugees drown or starve in their hundreds in the open sea, and the children of those that do make it here have to grow up behind razor wire, watching their parents slide into insanity. When houses, families, towns get washed away in a day. I disgust myself when I covet things from Ro’s life. But then, we humans have always coveted each other’s oxen, haven’t we? In Mod. Aust. Lit. last semester we were doing a unit on short stories and my favorite one was by Kate Jennings. In it she is talking about a fellow writer who enjoys phenomenal success and acclaim way beyond the modest (I assumed) success of the narrator. “Envy,” says Kate Jennings, “is a grubby little emotion.”
    Anyways …
    The Field is as follows:
— Kathy Look, usually I’d write “Token—never in a million years,” but lately I seem to be gaining some mojo.
— She’s-big-she’s-blond-she-works-in-the-deli Georgia She’s been trailing around after me a bit since the “Tom who?” incident. The youngster Donna from work seems a bit keen too. It may be completely unrelated,