The Party

My housemate has stolen my rosary. Not only that, he’s also left all the taps running. The cereal box is filled with cat litter, the kitchen sink is plugged up with a condom, and the bathroom walls are coated with hair. When I walk around the house, I have to look out for thumb tacks strewn about the floor, not helped by the copious amounts of vegetable oil he’s unleashed in a swastika pattern in the lounge, stretching from the TV, now turned into a fishbowl, to the couch, now hollowed out to an eskie storing half finished cans of beer and tepid lukewarm water. The walls have been vandalised with lipstick, drawing out various civil engineering concepts and hypothetical supply and demand graphs for clip-on razors for pink iPod nanos. His room, well, what used to be his room, smells strongly of cloves and cinnamon. In fact, the smell is so strong the entire house smells of it. I’m walking round a property that stinks like a holistic spa, and there’s only one person to blame.

I enter his room and, of course, it’s blacked out by aluminium foil on the windows. There’s aluminium foil everywhere, with a little alfoil bowl in the middle presenting what must be three kilograms of cloves. I crunch my way towards the bowl; it’s still burning. The cloves, some black as night, some glowing orange beneath the blanket of spice. I go to the kitchen to grab a towel to pick up the bowl, and find they’re all gone. I’m not surprised, really. I look out the window and see the towels haphazardly stuck onto what best can be described as a monument. I cautiously step outside.

The monument, first things first, is…I think it’s a fat man. It’s covered with the towels, and a good deal of grass, evidently coming from the backyard; someone’s gone and cut the grass, all of it. There must be about a hundred pairs of scissors littering the ground, some stabbed haphazardly into the only tree. The poor tree. Crucifixion would have been better. There are flags, British, French, Czech, Turkish, Chinese, Egyptian, Malaysian, Israeli, hanging limp off its branches. I notice a slipper nailed into the fence, my slipper, with a grocery list carved into the sole, badly, presumably with a pair of scissors.

I hate my housemate. This is just one of his ‘installations’. He does it alone, you know, and completely silently. I know this because he’s done it before while I’d be sitting at home reading a book. And I know for a fact he doesn’t have any friends. How could he? I mean, he’s crazy. He’s like a ninja with the wrong personality disorder. But ninjas don’t smell of cloves, and they don’t steal your clothes and replace them with ill-fitting Teletubby suits. Ninjas don’t rearrange all the keys on your keyboard, and steal your email account password to email your girlfriend recipes for steak and recommendations for circumcision centres in New York, Budapest, Paris, Rabat and Cape Town. Ninjas especially don’t leave bright red footprints on your ceiling while casting superglue coated M&Ms onto your bed to ‘enhance the effect of the swirl of the shadows of the moon of the elephant of the venison humpback rider of the far east’. Whatever.

The man’s replaced my shaving cream with whipped cream, my whipped cream with beer, my beer with Pepsi, my Pepsi with Coke, my Coke with tea, my tea with coffee, my coffee with brown sugar, my brown sugar with white sugar, my white sugar with flour, my flour with talcum powder, my talcum powder with sulphur, my sulphur with cous cous, my cous cous with rice, my rice with breadcrumbs, my breadcrumbs with fried onions, my fried onions with fried garlic, my fried garlic with chalk, my chalk with permanent markers, my permanent markers with glue sticks, my glue sticks with pens, my pens with pencils, my pencils with crayons, my crayons with laser pointers, my laser pointers with paper weights, and my paper weights with shaving cream.

What a fucker.

His name’s Boaz by the way.

I’m a pregnant woman at a cocktail party,

I’m a pregnant woman at a cocktail party,

I’m a pregnant woman at a cocktail party,

How in the world can this happen to be?

- Twenty-two

It’s seven months later and I’m still chasing my housemate for my rosary. That is how it could happen to be. I’ve tracked him down to this party in the hills, run by the elite of society. I have to say, it’s quite a treat to be here. The main room is lit by a brilliant chandelier, hanging above a long table with every single article of finger food imaginable. There’s sausages, caviar, blue cheese, Swiss cheese, fondue, strawberries, sushi, sashimi, octopus, salmon, tuna, swordfish, Peking duck, scallops, smoked chicken, kiwifruit, dragonfruit, coconut, coconut juice, tiramisu, brownies, biscuits, olives… I could go on for ages. The sandwich bar was a tiny room by itself. And the cocktail bar, well, suffice to say it had everything. Margaritas, Hurricanes, Coolers, Singapore Slings, Daiquiris, Martinis, Caipirinhas, Screwdrivers….going from red to green to blue to yellow, to gold and violet, shimmering and refracting invitingly like a psychedelic mirage.

“Good evening colonel,” I greet the big man in green, “having a good night?”

“Splendid, splendid,” he says, in a voice disconcertingly squeaky considering his bulk and rank in the army, “I’m having a whale of a time. And you, my dear lady?”

I take a sip out of the tequila sunrise and place my other hand on my pregnant belly. “Absolutely marvellous, Colonel. It’s an effort not to devour all the food and drink all the alcohol”, I declare, “I do thank you for inviting me!”

“Oh, not at all, not at all. It’s a pleasure to be in the company of a woman as strikingly beautiful as you,“ he says, with a twitch of his moustache.

I laugh softly, graciously draining the last of my cocktail and grabbing a tray of ham sandwiches from the table. I’m so fucking hungry. “Oh, you flatter me, Colonel, you really do. One can only wonder at the number of fair maidens you have bedded in your lifetime.”

As the Colonel ever so slightly tickles my pregnant belly, I catch a whiff of cloves in the air. That despicably sweet smell, like a lizard dipped in chocolate, permeating itself across the main hall. I devour another ham sandwich in rage and place the half-eaten tray of sandwiches in the outstretched arms of the Colonel. I spy his moustache twitch in military surprise, and beeline my way towards the cocktail bar.

The cocktail party is stuffed to the corners with a tiny population of peculiar characters. The Colonel, quite obviously, being one of them. There are others, too. Between me and the cocktail bar, there’s a woman dressed like the sphinx, with her boyfriend the Empire State Building, some idiot with a doughnut stuck onto his cheek and right wrist, another one dangling red yellow blue rubber balls from his neck, presumably to match his ridiculous sunglasses, yellow and red and green like a confused traffic light. To add on, there’s a guy whom for all intents and purposes looks like an orthodox Jew, a man in full Hawaiian getup, his wife the Pineapple, and a dapper-looking Englishman, monocle and top hat included, chatting with a skinny jeaned man with severe glasses, wearing a shirt with the word “FASCIST” emblazoned onto the front in courier type.

I push my way between the Fascist and the Englishman, belly leading the way, with blind determination, grasping a Bloody Mary, and draining its contents in four gulps. I turn around and the Fascist is staring at me, severe looking glasses encasing a pair of stupid looking blue eyeballs. I restrain myself from laughing, concentrating instead on the stench of cloves spreading itself about the room like airborne leprosy. I tightly flash my two front teeth at the fascist, turning to leave, and catch my belly in the waistcoat of the Englishman.

The Englishman, he’s wearing a top hat with an emerald green, lightning blue feather on top, a black waistcoat, with white trousers and a white collarless shirt, and is holding a pair of black felt gloves in his right hand, a Tia Maria on his left. I stare dumbly at the crumples in his shirt, and shift my gaze upwards to his monocled, clean-shaven, pencil-browed, brown-eyed, sharp-nosed face. The Englishman returns my stare with a blank gaze, cosmic in its emptiness, and I think I’m in love.

“Are you really a fascist?” I blurt out. There is an awkward silence, and the Fascist sticks his pale freckled face with the bovine eyeballs into the conversation, explaining in rapid-fire jagged English that he’s not really a fascist. Not quite. Not a fascist at all to tell you the truth. He only wears the shirt to be ironic, to make a humourous statement in a party as diverse as this.

He’s got a point, I’m thinking, imagining myself and my gigantic belly and my gigantic daisy chain pregnancy skirt through someone else’s eyes. The Fascist doesn’t stop, he just keeps talking. He wants to know if I like Virginia Woolf, if I share with him a fascination with Russian culture, if I have a strong opinion on the films of Almodovar. He wants to know if I believe in the unifying power of religion, if I understand the political ramifications of Charlotte’s Web and if I agree with his judgment of a tenuous, at best, connection between that book and the military conquests of Alexander the Great. The Fascist shows me a Live Strong wristband, with the ‘LiveStrong’ crossed out and replaced with an ‘I heart Ass’. I introduce myself, and wait for a normal reply.

“My name is Jeremy, and this is my friend Giles Thomas Orford Berry. I am thinking very seriously of planting vegetables in my backyard. Maybe I’ll start with lettuce and go on to spinach and sprouts and beans. I don’t trust vegetables from the supermarket, or even the market, anymore. You never know what’s been drowned in pesticides or what’s been genetically engineered. It’s just not right to eat, say, a tomato, of the size that you see these days. Years ago, you could’ve gotten vegetables at cheaper prices, and not have to worry about them being dipped in chemicals or made to have redder or greener by a man or woman with sterilised tweezers and forceps. Years ago we could’ve prevented global warming.”

Giles Thomas Orford Berry, bless him, is completely immobile.

“Pretty crazy party hey?” I ask.

Giles Thomas Orford Berry parts his lips.

“Yes,” he pronounces.

I stand there, me and my pregnant belly, nodding like a lucky charm, waiting for more.

I venture, “So what do you do?”

“I work in an art gallery.”

“Oh? A curator?”

“Yes. But I’m more of a guard. I direct people around and make sure they don’t do anything against the rules.”

“I think I’ve seen you at work!” interjects the Fascist, “it’s the one museum where there’s this piece where the UV rays shine on the drawing depicting monks copulating with Jesus while George Bushes and Ghandis dance a jig in stereoscopic stickers placed in the periphery.”

“Yes,” says Giles Thomas Orford Berry.

“That sounds like it’s worth a look!,” I laugh. “What other pieces are there in the gallery?” I thrust my belly into his crotch.

“I don’t know.”

I momentarily look past Giles Thomas Orford Berry’s shoulder, and catch an orthodox Jew glaring at me, bowler hat and dirty white beard, mouth agape, his yellow teeth and purple tongue mocking me from afar. And then it dawns on me, the man dressed as an orthodox Jew is Boaz. Boaz, running around, cloves in pocket, chewing on erasers, replacing cranberry juice with rose syrup.

I glance around and, true enough, some faces appear to be happily dissatisfied with their drinks. I drain my Appletini; it’s fine, at least. I ask distractedly, staring back at Boaz, “Do you look at the artworks much?”

“No.”

The Fascist asks, smacking his lips, “Are you alright?”

Boaz knows I’ve recognised him. He begins to make a move. My resolve tightening, I drain my Bloody Mary, grab a plate of cold Ramen, balance it on my belly, and snatch a Pina Colade from the Fascist.

I explain quickly, smiling quickly at Giles Thomas Orford Berry, “That man there, dressed like an orthodox Jew, used to be my housemate. He’s stolen my rosary, and he’s doing something devious with the cocktails.”

“You mean he’s not a Jew?” cries the Fascist, facetiously.

Giles Thomas Orford Berry’s pretty mouth gurgles out a chuckle, as I push my way past the Fascist towards Boaz and his obscene disguise, drinking and eating simultaneously. Boaz runs through the swinging doors that lead towards the kitchen. I clobber my way after him, shoving lizards, gentlemen, pineapples, Indians, ladies, and virgins out of my way.

Leaving a stream of multilingual vulgarities in my wake, I enter the kitchen, where the servants point towards the pantry in unison. I fling the pantry doors open, and Boaz is hunched in the corner, clutching a fish.

“Where did you get that from?” I yell.

“Not from here!” Boaz screams, slapping me full in the face with a freshly scaled salmon.

I hit the ground dazed. Spitting out a molar, holding my belly, I stand up and give chase to my ex-housemate back to the party. A pathway amongst the guests presents itself, a trail of breadcrumbs leading to the man dressed as a Jew. Taking the path, I run belly-first into the errant Pineapple, whom proceeds to vomit her cocktail onto my dress. As she apologises, I look to the path, and notice Giles Thomas Orford Berry, at the other end of the room, sucking face with the Fascist. Two slugs in coital bliss.

I feel a welling-up in my stomach, and I push the Pineapple to the ground and straddle her, as I release pasta, sushi, ramen, ham, rye, pickles, chilli sauce, Ribena, milk, ginger ale, green tea, olives, cherries, vodka, champagne, rum, whiskey and whatever else I’ve ingested onto her screaming face.

I resume the chase, staggering past the shell-shocked and nauseous crowd, and the two enthusiastic lovers, making my way to the open side door where the Jew had disappeared.

On exiting the mansion, a wave of calmness washes over me. The claustrophobia and chatter of the crowd fades away as I limp around a dark, silent garden, accompanied by crickets and owls, and the exotic stench of cloves. I retrieve a tiny pistol from my bra, and commence searching for Boaz.

It’s a cold night, and the frost scrunches under my feet. My eyes adjust to the darkness, and the image of dark green foliage and silvery white frost, illuminated by a full moon, resolves. I follow the trail of cloves into an enclave of white-barked eucalyptus trees, and there I see a silhouette of Boaz, sitting cross-legged on a ball-shaped shrub.

I tighten my grip on the pistol, and scrunch my way towards him. Boaz looks up and drops something from his mouth. I point the pistol directly at my ex-housemate.

“What have you done with my rosary?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he answers in mild panic.

I’m tired, pregnant, hungry, cold, covered in vomit, and at a loss for words. I stand completely still, continuing to aim the pistol at him. Boaz cautiously reaches for his beard, and pulls out an eraser, which he places in his mouth. And then he starts chewing. We remain at this stalemate for about, oh, two minutes, and then I relent and lower the pistol. I feel an inexplicable warmth creep up on me, and I flutter my eyelids as a sharp little kick drums from within the hollow of my belly.

- Andrew Cheah, September 2008