Vanilla Heath the Pinkeye Guy

Look, I got pinkeye and I decided it was a good prompt for a story.

Or not pinkeye - technically it was a stye, but that is far less exciting than pinkeye, so here we are. Poor fictional Heath and his horrendous eye infection.

This is a very unimportant story. It's just about a sad man with a broken eye who gets drunk and meets a girl at a house party. Like Pool Boy, it's an active channeling of Nick Earls - he does haphazard everyday like nobody else.

Without further adieu, meet Heath: our uninspiring yet loveable protagonist.

Vanilla Heath the Pinkeye Guy

I wake up and I have pinkeye.

And I think, sometimes, that whatever universal forces may exist have got it markedly out for me. I’m twenty-six and I’ve got pinkeye. What the fuck kind of luck is that?

I stare at myself in disbelief in the mirror. Between the toothpaste flecks and the splodges of Jen’s foundation that I haven’t had the heart to wipe off, my right eye has sunken into a wet mess of indistinct fluids and colour, and I can’t believe it. Pinkeye is something you get from sandpits and hostel bathrooms and public pools. I’m so far from the vague messes of youth, from shit-covered kiddie fingers and the festering experiments of share house toilets, that I refuse to believe this has happened to me. I’m well on my way to thirty and I share nothing with anyone. And yet here I am.

I’m meeting John for coffee at ten so I do what I can with a hot paper towel and some saline. I stare at myself again for a while after that. I wonder how I got here. I’ve just been brutally dumped and now I’ve got a pathogenic colony recreating the Napoleonic wars on my eyeball.

And I wonder how I get myself into these situations. I wonder how I manage to make myself so completely unlovable. Now is the time for pathetic breakup sex, where I get catatonically wasted in West End and make my way home with a girl drunk enough to ignore how boring I am, and we have disappointing sex that neither of us enjoy. We cuddle for a while afterwards but we’re strangers, and I cry quietly in the dark because I miss the person I used to be in love with, and that’s no good for anybody. And then I roll out of her house, regretting everything, hungry and starting to feel a hangover, and spend an hour struggling to walk home as I lace my way through the impenetrable fortress of Paddington suburbia. These are things you can’t do with pinkeye. No one would take this on.

I take my time walking down to the café, enjoying the simmering Saturday morning. In my sunglasses I am invisible. I’m just another dickhead in white linen and Birkenstocks.

When I get there, I receive no sympathy from John. Not that I was expecting sympathy. Men are very terrible with sympathy, especially between themselves. I was expecting to be uncompromisingly bullied, and I was not disappointed.

Jesus, what the fuck is that? He asks me as I sit down and prop my sunglasses up on my head.

‘I don’t know,’ I tell him, the chair scraping on the wood. ‘Pinkeye, I guess.’

You look like a Picasso painting.

‘Fine,’ I tell him, and he peers across the table at me.

That’s disgusting, he says, squinting at it like it’s some kind of medical phenomenon, like it’s something to be observed from behind glass at one of those outdated freak shows from the mid-twentieth century. Does it hurt?

‘Yes,’ I say, displeased. ‘It hurts a lot. Would you stop staring at me? I already feel vulnerable.’

You’re a walking disease. You look foul. I’d hide my children from you if I saw you coming towards me.

‘You don’t have children.’

Well, yes. But my metaphorical children. The future fruit of my loins. I’d never let them near you. Even now, I think I’m sitting too close. We’ll brush knees and it’ll travel to my balls and my future children will look like that.

And with that, he shuffles back. He’s still staring at me, or not me but my eye, the gluggy mess of it. I ignore him.

How are you feeling? He asks. Not with the eye. Not with whatever the fuck happened there. But with her.

And it’s funny how quickly someone can become a ‘her’. She-who-shall-not-be-named. She’s become the ghost of a past people are too afraid to mention, as if the three letters I’ve spent the last four years saying will break me in an instant. Is that how pathetic people think I am?

‘I’m fine,’ I tell him. ‘Really. There’s just so much time, now. I’ve forgotten how to just be with myself.’

John nods. I know, mate. I know. We’re quiet for a little while. Eventually, he says, oh, my basketball team is having a thing tonight. You could come.

‘A thing? What is ‘a thing’?’

A thing. You know.

‘No. You’re being terribly vague. A party? A barbeque? A dinner? A coup? These are all very different things. These are things I’ll need to prepare for differently.’

A thing. A party, I guess. But not a rager. Nothing with lights or loud music. I think we’re drinking and playing beer pong and smoking, probably.

‘So a gatho. You’re talking about a gatho.’

Am I? What a disgusting word. I prefer ‘thing’. I enjoy the vagueness of it.

‘You’re chaotic. Truly. You know me, my accountant ways. I’m the enemy of vagueness. Sometimes I don’t know how we’re friends.’

Well, you can come to the thing. The gatho. You’d like it. But it’s a very ambiguous kind of group of people. There are never plans. Things just happen.

‘That sounds terrible. I’ve told you how I do with vagueness and ambiguity. I like the solidness of plans. I need at least two business days to commit to anything.’

It’ll be fun. Come on.

‘We’re forgetting the pinkeye thing. This very obvious thing on my face. Going off your opening reaction, I’m not sure it’s such a good idea.’

Mate, no one will care.

‘I think they might.’

Well, whatever. Stop being a prick and just come, alright?

‘Fine,’ I tell him. ‘Fine.’

…

The house is what you would expect. It’s a uni share house which has forgone the rustic charm of an old Queenslander for the sinking pit of young poverty. The house sags on its supports, the old stairs creaking menacingly as we make our way up them. I stare down the long, narrow mouth of the place through the flyscreen. It’s just a runner, a long, faded runner and a wall clattered with odd frames someone’s probably gathered from various op-shops and garage sales. I follow John’s back up the hallway. I keep my eyes on the ugly cartoon on his shirt. I don’t even know what it is. A beaver? A beaver with a mullet? I think it’s that. And I realise at some point, he decided that was something he should spend his money on. Worse, he decided it was something he should wear in public. I think about this and I think we’re already screwed.

We make our way through an empty kitchen, where a fog of laughter and distant music rolls through from down below on the patio, crawls up the creaky old stairs and arrives at us, at me with my pinkeye and John with his mullet beaver shirt.

There’s a group of twelve or so smoking in a bunch of camp chairs in the haphazard yard below. I say haphazard because it’s badly mowed, like someone hacked at it by hand with a whipper snipper. A rusty hills hoist clings at a forty-five degree angle to the fence line, a garbled mess of yellowed pickets like a mouthful of bad teeth. I have to wade through a mountain of weeds at the base of the stairs and I’m thinking about snakes. Yet everyone here is monumentally peaceful. The chaos of the yard distresses me, but I remember I’m boring and old and this is the kind of thing you need to expect from uni students.

A few people say hi to John as he plonks himself down on a spare camping chair and takes a joint from someone. The only other spare seat is on the other side of the circle, so I take that. There’s a girl next to me. She’s not talking anyone, but she’s looking quite far into the distance, through at the hills hoist and the yellow fence.

It’s at least half a minute before she turns around to me. She’s pretty, I think. She’s pretty in an unexpected way. She’s in those baggy linen trousers white girls who’ve been to India wear, with a leather-cord necklace and a pile of dark curls half-up on her head. She’s got blue eyeliner along the bottom of her eyes. Bright, blistering blue. It makes her eyes look like the ocean, like you could dive right into them.

Hi, she says. I’m Phoebe. You’re John’s mate, then?

‘Yeah,’ I tell her. ‘I’m Heath.’

And as I say it, I can almost see the confusion on her face. Heath. What absolute assholes my parents were. Because when people hear the name ‘Heath’, they think immediately – and understandably – of the glorious Heath Ledger, long-haired mega-babe of the nineties. And then they are looking at me, never-babe, passably attractive in an efficient, white kind of way. My haircut is an obvious barber job, a cheap, twenty-minute experience with an unenthusiastic man called Phil at a shopping centre. I could never pull off leather wrist bands without looking like a British backpacker or a homosexual, neither of which are expressly bad things, but things which I am not. I’d be lying to everyone. One look at me and you could know the most exotic place I’ve been is the local Chinese takeaway. I don’t know how to come back from this. I think about addressing the problem. I think about it and then I’m suddenly doing it, and I can’t take it back.

‘I know,’ I say. ‘It’s unexpected. I don’t look like a Heath.’

You really don’t. You’re not hot enough to be a Heath. You’re a very vanilla Heath.

‘Right,’ I tell her.

And you’ve got that weird thing with your eye. What is that? A Heath wouldn’t have that.

‘Right,’ I tell her again, and I’m nodding, and I’m regretting ever coming here. I thought I’d maybe have a few minutes without being the ‘Pinkeye guy’. Without that being my thing, my identity with this knew group of people. Now I’m Vanilla Heath the Pinkeye Guy.

I’m definitely kidding, you know. I’m sorry. I can be a bit of an asshole without meaning to be.

‘It’s fine,’ I tell her. ‘At least you didn’t threaten to set me on fire or perform an exorcism. I was expecting worse with the eye.’

What is it? Conjunctivitis?

‘I think so.’

Nice. Nice. I like the way it leaks.

‘Look, I don’t normally look like this. I promise. I’m usually more put together.’

A shame, really. I’m usually really into men with eye infections. It’s an unusually specific fetish so it’s historically been quite hard to come across. I usually just hang around public hospitals and hope for the best.

And she’s trying not to laugh. I’m looking at her and those blue eyes are singing, and I’m wondering how I’ve managed to strike such luck. I’m on my way to wrangling a babe and I’ve done it with such a horrendous social handicap. I can’t believe it.

‘Do you want a drink?’ I ask her, rummaging around in the reusable Coles bag I brought, much to the dismay of John. Men don’t bring things in Coles bags, he told me judgementally as I’d arrived at his house. They use their hands. I hope Phoebe is quietly praising me for my sustainability. The India pants and the leather cord give me hope.

Sure, she says, shrugging. What’ve you got?

‘I’ve got beer. I’ve got about twelve beers and half a bottle of vodka.’

Beer, I guess.

I pass her a mildly warm stubby which she takes without complaint, and we sit in the quiet for a while. It’s mid-summer and the night is bath-like, the air thick with bugs and humidity.

So, how do you know John?

And so we do this dance, this dance of two strangers asking all the questions you’re supposed to. I find out she’s a nursing student in her final year. She’s on rotations at the PA at the moment, moving recently to the emergency department.

Some bloke came in on my first day with twelve boiled eggs up his arse, she tells me. She says it very seriously. Her eyes linger on that messy fence, and I imagine she’s thinking about the eggs, about the chicken who very carefully pushed them up only for them to end up a grown man’s rectum. They all crushed and started cutting him up inside, and he was asking if he can get AIDs from eggs.

‘Surely not. Surely that’s not possible. Imagine getting AIDs from a chicken. Imagine if that was the way you went.’

We both laugh, and she settles into a comfortable grin, dimples cutting neatly into her cheeks. She’s cute, I think, and then I remember what’s on my face. I remember she’ll be repulsed by me, thinking about how this came about. She’s a nurse. She’ll think I don’t wash my hands after I go to the toilet.

‘I wash my hands after I shit,’ I tell her unthinkingly. I should say I’m quite drunk at this point. We’ve decimated the beers in about an hour and I’m two vodka shots deep.

She looks understandably confused. What?

‘My eye,’ I say, pointing vaguely to it. ‘This. This car crash of fluids and pus on my face. I wash my hands after I shit. I don’t just wipe and go for the contact lenses. There’s a thorough wash post-faecal expulsion, I promise.’

She stares at me for a while, and then she laughs. Really laughs. Deep, wheezing, penetrating laughter that makes everyone else look at us. I close my eyes and I’m laughing too. I think I’m happy. I think maybe I’m having a good time.

You’re an idiot, she tells me, but fondly.

I pour us another shot. We talk more about nursing for a while, and she asks me about accounting, which is far less interesting. She tells me about her brother, who's living in London and working for Deloitte. She tells me how she hates capitalism but she's as sucked into it all as the rest of it.

We're dipping into marxism when I pour us another shot and then the vodka’s gone. She leans forward until her forehead is touching the glass, peering with a frown into it. She flicks it with one finger. We’re out, trooper.

‘There’ll be a bottle-o nearby.’

Nah. Anwar’s got a stash upstairs under the tele.

And suddenly she has my hand and we’re moving, I’m up and the chair isn’t beneath me anymore. I realise then I’m very drunk. I’m beyond the point of no return. The horizon of the black hole is grabbing me, it’s close enough I can feel myself rattling around, I can feel the end coming. The ground spins and the fairy lights on the deck above careen like a fairground ride, and I think maybe I’m falling, I think maybe I’ve hit the ground.

Oh, shit, she says, giggling. Come on. Come on, big man. They’re only stairs.

We stumble up the stairs, which are really just sticks of wood sloshing around beneath feet that don’t seem to be connected to my body anymore. What even are feet. What are limbs? What time is it? I have no idea. Things slide easily away. Everything is a little out of reach, including words and thoughts and movement, and I’ll regret most of this tomorrow, I know it.

She tugs me over to the television and I find myself falling again, and my shoulder hits the carpet and then my head. I groan. I’ve landed like a bad plane. I haven't tipped but I’ve skidded, and now I’m on my back and I’m looking up at a cream ceiling that’s spinning.

Phoebe is laughing again. She reaches around in the cupboard, pulling out a bottle of sherry.

This is good, she tells me, screwing off the top. She leans back on one hand, her shoulder up in her tank top, her hair pouring invitingly down her back.

‘What is?’

The drink, idiot. Sherry. I love sherry.

‘You love Sherry? How old are you?’

21.

‘Oh, Jesus. What kind of whack 21-year-old voluntarily drinks sherry? I can’t call you Phoebe anymore. From now on you’re only Ethel, an alcoholic pensioner who lives for her fifteen grandkids.’

Sure. Sure thing, Vanilla Heath.

‘Oh, stop calling me that. I know I’m vanilla. I know I’m boring.’

You’re not boring, she says, but now I’m drunk and vulnerable and on a roll, and the words come before I can help them.

‘I am boring. I’m alone and ugly. An unlovable freak of nature.’

Oh, stop being so dramatic. It’ll last a week, max. You’re fine.

‘It’s not just the eye,’ I say, and still I’m talking and I can’t stop. ‘It’s the whiteness of me. I’m so irreparably boring, Phoebe. I mean, Ethel. I’m average in every definition of the word. I’m not good at anything in particular. I’m not especially good-looking, I don’t have any interesting opinions on anything, and every night I come back to my empty flat and I watch David Attenborough documentaries with a bowl of rice and beans, and after dinner I masturbate for about thirty seconds and I feel really fucking sorry for myself, and that’s my life.’

She’s watching me as I say this and as I finish. I’m lying on the carpet and the world is still rotating rapidly but somehow she’s not, and those blue eyes are giving away nothing. I’ve ruined this, and I know it.

She looks away from me. Maybe she’s thinking. After a while, she says, I like rice and beans.

With that she smiles at me. She smiles and it eats up her whole face, and I think I could kiss her then. I think I could tell her she’s the love of my life.

…

We talk for a while. I don’t remember much. I’m sobering up by the time we go downstairs, one finger of her hand on my belt. She tells me Anwar has records down here. She tells me she wants to listen to music. Good music, she instructs me. Music by sad people. Music that makes you feel things.

We disappear down into the heart of the place, a swampy garage filled with mosquitos and lingering heat from the day. She turns the light on and it’s just a single bulb, a menacing thing that dangles from the centre of the room. There is, indeed, a record player. I stand by a festering mess of a Ford Falcon full of scratches and energy drinks as I watch her go over to it. I watch the hair down her back and how she moves, how she walks. She puts on a song I don’t know. It’s old, I think. It sounds old. It sounds like the kind of thing I should know.

When she comes back, she kisses me quickly. I was expecting it, but when it happens, it catches me by surprise. My mouth doesn’t know what to do. Her hands grip tightly at my back and I move mechanically against her, knowing this is terrible, knowing I’m still not quite okay.

‘I’m sorry,’ I tell her, pulling back. ‘I was just with someone. Someone for a while. For a long time, actually.’

Her face is still close to mine, closer enough I can feel her hot, wet breath along my cheeks. The fungal, wheat-like smell of beer and weed rolls off her, rolls off her open pink lips, parts from her soft mouth.

We don’t have to do anything, she tells me. Her fingers fumble down my arm, finding my hand, lacing their way into the damp cavities between my clammy fingers. She doesn’t seem to care that I’m sweating a lot. She sighs, keeling forward, plonking her head onto my shoulder. Her thick hair tickles the side of my face. Let’s dance.

‘Dance?’

Why not?

And so we do that. Her other hand finds my shoulder and we sway to the sounds of others, the faraway clamour of a party that’s gone on for too long, to this band I don’t know. We don’t touch. Not in the way I think you’re supposed to. Not the panicked, desperate touching of strangers who’ve been alone for too long.

I’m holding her and I’m not thinking about her breasts, or her hips or her thighs. I’m just thinking about how nice it feels to hold her. How warm she is. How her hair smells like lemon soap and smoke.

‘You’re really great,’ I tell her, and I mean it. I mean it more than I’ve meant anything in a long time.

I know, she tells me softly. Her hand is gentle but comfortable in mine, and I feel her voice up against the side of my face. I feel the shape of her words on my cheek. I am really great, Vanilla Heath. Now just hold me, okay? Just hold me and don’t say anything at all.

We stay like that for a while. Eventually, we stop moving. I couldn’t tell you when, or how long we stand there for. But here, with hardly any light and slow, quiet music, time seems to go on forever. Everything else is distant and faraway. I can’t remember who I am here in this stranger’s house with a girl I’ve just met. We just hold each other, two people who are happy for a little while.

I stand in front of her and I kiss her forehead, and she sighs.