Black Teeth Read Online Free PDF Page B

And it’s not even my real name.
    Steven Jones is the name on my phone bill, but not the one on my lease. Which is different again from the one on my electricity account. I once considered telling her all about my John Doe life, how my work makes me security-conscious with a hint of paranoia, how my real name is Jason and I’d like to kiss her on the mouth. But the moment passed. And it would only have made her smile that baffled smile.
    ‘Where’d you get them?’
    ‘The Chippery.’
    ‘Ummm…’ She considers it. ‘No, thanks. They use the wrongpotatoes for their chips. They should use colibans but they use desirees.’
    Raindrops spatter on the exposed side of the gallery. Marnie doesn’t seem to register the bergschrund misery out here; that long mop of hair might keep her neck warm but the rest of her is loosely draped in thin cotton pyjamas and she’s barefoot. Then again, if today is like any other day then she’s got the heating cranked up like a boss and it’s the nuclear dawn inside her flat, so right now that long body must be revelling in this cool air, even when this cool air is a frigid Melbourne winter.
    ‘Hey, ummm…’ she says, ‘I had something I wanted to ask you… Oh yeah, what are you doing for dinner?’
    ‘Nothing. You want to go out?’
    ‘Can’t. I have to work.’
    ‘What about tomorrow?’
    ‘Working.’
    Her eyes fill with pity and I bite my lip. Always I’m making this mistake—thinking she wants me to ask her out but when I do she turns me down. At first it left me red-faced and sleepless, but I’ve gathered over time that she only wants me to work a little harder.
    ‘Um…Wednesday?’
    And she looks at the roof in hectic thought.
    ‘I think that’s okay. I’ll let you know.’
    ‘Great.’
    She makes a face at the rain.
    ‘How rude is this?’
    ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I’m freezing. I’ve got to get inside.’
    ‘Fine then. See ya.’
    And bang, she’s gone. Like she can take a hint. I knew as I said the words that they would have that effect but they were out before I could stop. Now I’m the one filled with pity as I unlock my front door. Marnie’s had a lot of friends abandon her in her life and I suppose you can see why—she’s as defensive as the Battlestar Galactica and I’m just as bad. We’re two weirdos staring at the business end of our twenties and we communicate in tortured allusions: she sends up smoke signals, I answer in semaphore. And our respective hintsthat we want to be vulnerable, that we want more than to merely catch each other coming home to our separate flats, they’re like tiny planets in a big solar system: they only align every one hundred and fifty-seven years.
    We’ll go out on Wednesday, to the pizza place across the street where no matter how often we go the owner never seems to recognise us. Where he puts too much garlic into everything and his two teenage kids don’t want to work there but they do. I’ll order the bolognese pizza because I love all that garlic and Marnie the capricciosa because she long ago dispensed with being dainty around me. Then we’ll come back to her place and talk and dance the Fear of Rejection until I realise it’s not going to happen tonight, and I’ll hug her and come home. And this is all to say: I’m looking forward to it.

6
    I fasten my two deadlocks and the deadbolt and switch on the heater and hang up my coat which is damp from having borne the brunt of the outside world. Now it can bear the brunt of this miracle heating unit that gets up to speed in seconds and which prompted me to rent this flat a year ago, during the coldest month in Melbourne since they bothered keeping records. Of course, records topple so often now they can probably go back to not bothering.
    When the property agent demonstrated this wall-mounted godsend I thought the landlords had made a mistake. Who spends this kind of money on a rental? In her skirt and high heels, the agent seemed to have left home wholly