The Paper Round

I got the job at Mr Wilson’s shop just after my tenth birthday. Well, not in the shop specifically. I did the morning paper round, which meant I only had to turn up to collect the stuff for delivering - rolled up newspapers covered in impossible plastic film, magazines in clear plastic sleeves. Then, with my bike basket full, I would pedal away, happily unsupervised. I had the job for five years before I had to give it up.

A paper round can be a gracious job in the way that all hard work is gracious. You have to push through a thick layer of reluctance to begin. It is five am when you leave the house. It is freezing. The lawns on your street are dusted with proof of the cold. On some subtle level, it just hurts.

But then something happens.

You notice that the sky is full of ropy clouds woven with light. The cold makes you feel your body in a way you never can at any other time. You are all alone, and the streets belong to you and your feeble K-mart bike light.

$7.80 an hour was considered a generous rate. It all went into a bank account I couldn’t touch. Mum bought me the basic things I needed. Pens for school, endless grey lever-arch folders, t-shirts, undies and, later on, the unavoidable sanitary products. I would wait and wait and tell myself I wasn’t earning anything. If I wanted to buy something I would roll the idea over in my mind for ages. Breaking the spell, I’d finally check the balance, and the sum would have grown miraculously. I discovered that if I saved, I could buy things. That if I was patient, I got to have the things I really wanted.

Every Friday, my paper round went through the hill on the other end of the long strip of main street. It meant a ride in the newsagency van with my black and gold BMX in the back. Loaded up with papers, I would head out in the flat hush of dawn to follow the weavy fluorescent marker line drawn by Mr Wilson on the photocopied map. (I have been good at reading maps ever since. Much better than my brother who I still tease mercilessly. I tell him his penis couldn’t find its way out of a vagina if it wasn’t attached to the rest of his body. He responds with something I won’t repeat here.)

The last house on the round was enormous. It had decking and a large uninterrupted plate glass window that provided a view down onto the whole length of the main street and further to the hills beyond. Clipped miniature trees stood on either side of the front door in pots too heavy for lifting. A lady named Mrs Carsons lived there. Once I’d reached her place, it meant I’d come to the end of the fluorescent line. I didn’t have to report back to the newsagency unless I had leftovers. Otherwise I would just meander my way back towards home along the main street, which would be still pretty deserted except for the Tradies’ utes stopped in front of the handy teller, or getting hot pies for breakfast at the milk bars.

Mrs Carsons liked me a lot. She was often pulling weeds out of her landscaped garden when I showed up. Apparently she suffered from insomnia. We had clumsy, whispered conversations in the bite of morning. Whenever she bent down to wrap a surgical-gloved hand around onion grass or a fibrous thistle, her gold necklace crucifix would dangle down in front of her smooth, goldy cleavage. I would look up at the trees then. Her front yard had a Japanese maple, a round-leafed gum, and another huge tree I still don’t know the name of. Her husband, who had an important job, was regularly inter-state. In fact, I only ever saw him once.

The first time she invited me in for breakfast, we had bowls of Lite Start with regular milk and tinned peaches on top. As the breakfasts became more regular, the meals gradually became more elaborate.

One day, with some papers leftover, I pedalled up to find Mrs Carsons in the garden as usual. She called out to me in a loud whisper because it was still just dawn and all the street was asleep. She was dressed in particularly nice pyjamas that I hadn’t seen before. Technically I should have gone straight back to the shop with the remainder copies, but Anne – as she liked me to call her – was quite insistent that I stay and eat with her.

When we walked into her kitchen, the table was all set. There were four fat croissants on a glass dish. A bowl of strawberries chopped up with pineapple. A tub of the really good yoghurt that has all the fat still left in. Nice-looking cutlery arranged next to thick paper serviettes. I could smell coffee.

‘School holidays’, she said, shrugging. I nodded, thinking about the drive to Melbourne planned for the following day - the day when I would meet the specialist with the bad hair-part and vomit into the top of a metal bin near the elevators, my bile mixing horribly with the ash of too many stubbed out cigarettes.

There was a big clock hung above the Carsons’ German-brand stove. Flat matt aluminium with no numbers so you had to guess. It matched everything else in the house, which was somehow faultless and soothing. I remember glancing at the clock and wanting the hands to stop moving for a couple of weeks.

Mrs Carsons wasn’t very old. She seemed older to me then, but when I look back she was probably in her late thirties. She was – as people say – extremely well looked after. Her skin was always shining and her teeth very white. She wore loose-fitting pyjamas in the morning made of various floaty materials and usually a fluffy hotel-style robe over the top. Her bare feet always looked dewy to me and I would note the particular colour her toenails were painted that week.

We sat together in silence. I kept my eyes down mostly and concentrated on chewing without making mashing noises. I can still see the flakes of croissant scattered around my placemat and the dainty bowl of berry jam that she kept filling because I ate piles of it on top of the buttery pastries. An unusual feeling of shyness hung between us.

Outside the sky was getting clearer and bluer.

The coffee was strong and shot caffeine into my body like a fever. I pretended that I drank it all the time, but the truth was I had never even thought of liking it until then. I didn’t look up at the clock once. I thought of the five Border Mails and one Giant Cryptic sitting in my basket, and took another half croissant. Mrs Carsons didn’t each much. She seemed to prefer watching me eat. It made me nervous, but I was hungry.

When the eating was over, both of us dallied. It wasn’t a school morning. Mum was at her porcelain painting class and dad would be already at the office. My brother had gone camping with a friend’s family. At home all I had waiting for me was a stack of videos I’d hired the night before and a really messy bedroom.

I remember Anne picking up the remote control and the stereo coming on. I didn’t recognise the style of music, but it was rhythmic and foreign and seemed to match the day outside which was warming up as the sun rose higher.

Funny how sometimes there are blank sections in memory. I have no recollection of what happened in the next few seconds. There was music playing. I am certain of that. We had been talking about me. We had been talking about the planned visit to Melbourne. I had been getting little sparkles around the edges of my vision and the local GP, Mr Everett, had given mum a referral to a clinic in Melbourne. Mum had been weird that day and had taken me out for a milkshake and bought me Cheezles which she never did. I explained all this quite matter-of-factly, but when I looked up, Mrs Carson’s eyes were opened wide, with shiny crescents of wetness in the pale of their rims.

And then she was cradling my head. I could smell her body, which was intensely warm and slightly downy next to my cheek. She pressed her lips into my forehead over and over. Not like the impactless kisses I had felt before from Aunt Lilly or my parents. Anne’s kisses were definite, backed up with the pressure of teeth, and with tongue somewhere behind them. They made their way down my temples, to my cheeks and to the arch of bone behind my ear. I moved my mouth as if I was talking, encountering the air, which gave me an ache because it wasn’t something else.

Then the CD ended, I think. And Mrs Carsons didn’t notice. She had her hands cupped around my shoulder blades. I swooned in her smell, which had changed and was a mustier savoury-sweet.

When our mouths accidentally bumped into each other, it was the wetness that surprised me the most. The changing of texture from the dry of outside lips to hardness of teeth, to wetness again and again. I felt like I was flying, skating across ice, or falling. Our mouths were probably only together for a couple of seconds before a hopeful voice came from the next room.

‘Anne!’

Mrs Carson’s pulled away. I caught a glimpse of what I think was a nipple as she straightened liquid pyjamas and scrambled off her knees. The edges of the room were sparkling more than they had been.

Jesus Christ! was all I heard next, and when I turned my head I saw a tall man with a rugged face hanging on to a wheelie travel case.

I fled the house, pulling the paper serviette out of the band of my cords where I’d tucked it in, letting it fall on the immaculate front steps. Croissant-flecked, I rode-stumbled down the driveway and out into the blaring sunlight, blaspheme ringing in my ears.

His voice had been deep and commanding. I’d loved the way it had sounded. And in the flash of his face that my eyes had been able to catch, I’d seen the day-old stubble, grey from age and experience. I hoped I hadn’t got her into trouble.

I pedalled hard the whole long length of the main street. I thought about them. I imagined his fingers sliding knowingly past the elastic of her pyjama pants, cradling her bottom gently in his palm and then finding her already warm and runny in that place.

I lied to Mr W. the next day and told him there were no leftovers. I’d stuffed the papers and magazine into the neighbours’ recycling bin, as if their mere existence were as revealing as being caught with my brother’s magazines.

Tango. The music had been Tango.

And her toenails that day, which was the last time I went there, had been purple.