Good Oil by Laura Buzo

blessedly warming the back of my neck. Looking forward to the summer break. I have decided to do Honours next year after all, because the idea of leaving uni in three months’ time and looking for a real job is quite frankly a little too much for me to contemplate in my (perpetually) delicate state. Seemingly as per, woke up hung-over this morning, fully clothed and feeling as if something had died in my mouth. Stumbled into the shower, too ratshit even to jerk off. Put empty wine bottle into my backpack (it upsets my mother to see empty bottles on my bedside table) and left for uni. After a couple of paracetamol tablets and two coffees I am almost a human being again.
    Woolies is shitting me. Now even Kathy has been made a Service Supervisor and no longer has to work on those godforsaken registers. I’ve been there as long as her! Bianca only beat me by a few weeks and she’s been a supervisor for months now. They think that giving me the Staff Trainer role is going to placate me. Well it’s not. It’s a gristly old bone and quite frankly they are going to have to throw me a better one. Yes, I get to torture, ridicule, perv on and flirt with (as appropriate) the unending stream of hapless teenagers that keep getting hired, but I still spend most of my time on the registers. Fuck that. If they don’t make me a supervisor by the new year I’ll either quit or ask Mr Albertella for a transfer to Perishables or something. As long as it’s not to Groceries with that fucker Stuart Green. Anyway, I digress.
    Uuuuum. Yeah. Stuff. Kathy wore a skirt and tights to work last night instead of her usual pants. So that was exciting. I was excited. I’m still excited. So excited I may have to go to Ed’s for a cone or three after work tonight. Take the edge off.
    It’s time for an update on the Search for the Perfect Woman. The Field is as follows:
    – Kathy (never in a million years).
    – She’s-big-she’s-blonde-she-works-in-the-deli Georgia Sanders (Ed and Lincoln reckon it’d be a done deal if I got off my arse and did something. They’re probably right – and a man is not a camel. However I have never, ever been interested in anything she has said).
    – Lauren from sociology tute. Pretty token though. I hardly know her. Funky necklaces. Hates Durkheim.
    – Michaela. (Never in a trillion years. Unbelievably unhealthy for me to have even written it down.)
    August 22
    Okay. Let me begin by saying I am pretty fucking drunk, and as the wine I quaffed just now cannot possibly have hit my bloodstream yet, I will get drunker still. The reason for my drunkenness is I got a phone call from Michaela today. I was flummoxed, to say the least, at her calling. I thought I made myself perfectly clear about this sort of thing at the airport. That grisly day. But no, she calls me from Perth, and starts making pleasant conversation.
    She asks me how I am. She asks me how uni is going; how Mum and Dad are!?!
    I ask her where she is calling from.
    She hesitates – then says she is calling from Brad’s place.
    ‘Oh, how is Brad?’ I ask with considerable Tone.
    She baulks, then recovers and says he is fine.
    ‘Well that’s great, Michaela,’ I say. ‘I can’t tell you how happy I am to hear that. Now why the fuck are you calling me?’
    She says she is still hoping we can be friends.
    Friends. Let me share with you, dear reader, or indeed anyone who will listen, why Michaela’s hope that we ‘can be friends’ is a vain one.
    When I think about her life in Perth, I feel jealousy like a sickness. I can taste it in my mouth and feel it pulsing through every cell in my body. It expands my capillaries. It thuds in my ears. I don’t mean just jealous of Brad. That’s not casting the net nearly wide enough. I am jealous of her family: her parents, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, who see her all the time, who get to celebrate with her every Christmas and birthday. I am jealous of all her mates, who get to go for walks on the beach