Perfect Skin by Nick Earls Read Free Book Online Page B

go into a bar . . .
    I lift up her top, blow a big raspberry on her front and get a whack on the face and a gurgly laugh. I get the shot – the gurgly laugh, the hand reaching out for a second whack, a big drool-string from the lower lip to the left shoulder.
    Nothing like physical comedy, is there? I say to her, and pull her hat over her eyes.
    She waves both arms, rolls backwards like a scuba diver leaving a boat. She’s not brilliant at the sitting yet, and visual input clearly means more to her than I’d realised. I’m near the end of the roll of film, so I take a few more photos to finish it off. I’ve taken far more photos of her over the last few months than I would have expected.
    There seems to be much more to photograph now than there was, but perhaps I’m also better at noticing it, more used to watching her. She seems to turn older almost every day. She amazes me sometimes. Not so long ago she was a pair of orifices with an unsophisticated mulching system in between, now she knows a thing or two about the world. Not much, but a thing or two, and more all the time. The Bean takes things in, sizes them up. I can tell. And I think she’s very clever doing that. Dote, dote. I think there’s part of me that genuinely believes I’m a co-inventor of the smart beautiful baby.
    I’m looking forward to things with her. Stories, making her laugh with words, telling her about things that she might never get to see. Typewriters, for instance. She may never see a working typewriter. That struck me yesterday, as I shut my computer down for the weekend. Not so long ago it would have been unbelievable.
    I want to tell her about typewriters and how, with them and other old machines, you could actually see how they worked. How you would push down on a key and it would make a tiny hammer hit a piece of ribbon with ink in it, and hit the ink off the ribbon and onto the page. And I can tell her about paper money, stamps you had to lick, the time before bar codes. It sounds like I went to school with Dickens. It sounds as though I’mgoing to bore the shit out of my daughter. When has a child ever thanked a parent for a long dissertation on the artifacts of the industrial age? Bad luck. That’s how it’s going to be. She’s not just going to be bought a Nintendo and left in a corner.
    And I can tell her about laser surgery, for that matter. By then it’ll be far less special. I can tell her that laser surgery and the Internet and CD players and a lot of other things weren’t always around. That I know how things were before them and when they were new, before they were commonplace and merged with the background. I knew them when they were part of current affairs, before they were history, part of the set of things already in the world. And history seems weighted somehow differently to the events of your own time. It’s as though you’re given it, and the things you store as your own memory are put somewhere else.
    I was too young to get Watergate at all, so I inherited it. I watched the Clinton impeachment day-to-day and it unravelled as a current event. They’re both impeachments of American presidents, but in my head they couldn’t be more different. I received the Nixon story afterwards, end first. I heard Clinton’s from the beginning, from the first denials.
    The death of Marilyn Monroe was world history. As a sixties child, one of the first things you got to know about Marilyn Monroe was that she was dead. So that affected every frame of her that you ever viewed. Before Kurt Cobain died, I owned two Nirvana albums. I think I can remember the first time I heard ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, the street I was driving on, not far from here. Even though I probably can’t, I think I can.
    I wonder when Lily will speak. Not for ages yet, but I still wonder. My first words were spoken to dogs, perhaps since dog affirmations get so much repetition.