“Thanks,” he said, glancing briefly down at it. “My parents got it for me for my twenty-first. I know it’s kinda old fashioned, but they have some fixed ideas so it was pointless protesting. The girls get a bracelet, the boys get a watch, that’s how it’s done, y’know? And they live pretty simply mostly – the farm tends to eat up all the spare money – but these things are important to them so they plan ahead, they save, they make it happen.”
He shrugged. “My sister’s getting married next year so they’re at it again. Never ends I s’pose. Anyhow, at the time I’d definitely rather have had some money toward a better ride, but now…yeah, they were right.”
I was just at the point of getting excited, thinking, wow…this isn’t chat, this is sharing – when Quinn seemed to realise the same thing. He blinked, squared his shoulders, cleared his throat, re-setting…
“So anyhow, what do you do, Jeremy?”
Damn. Fuck.
I shrugged, grimaced. “Work for the government. Who doesn’t?”
“I don’t,” he said, putting away the last of his beer.
I was rapidly running through a list of other possibilities in my head that fit with the level of dress – not insurance or law, no tie…consulting? medicine? real estate? menswear? – when he added; “I work in retail…kinda.”
So…menswear.
“Where at?” I enquired. Because I will for damn sure start getting my stuff from there, even if I can’t afford it…
He raised his chin a little. “I asked first,” he said.
Ooh. A pushback. Delivered with a sly little smile, but definitely a pushback. Answer the fucking question, Jeremy..I had sudden visions of him ‘pushing back’ at me for real, us wrestling on the couch, the floor, winner takes all – would I want to win? Or lose…?
He was staring now, one brow raised. Right. Answer the fucking question, Jeremy.
“I, uh, work for the Ministry of Health,” I stuttered. “Forecasting. Before that I was at the Ministry for Social Development. Also forecasting.”
“You’ve got a degree, then?” Quinn prompted.
“Ahh, yeah?” I replied, shrugging. I mean, obviously. “Economics. Nothing fancy, just a bachelor’s…”
Quinn was nodding thoughtfully. “So you’re a numbers guy, basically?”
“I guess…”
“I’m not,” he said decisively. “Not a letters guy either, unfortunately. I’m dyslexic. But there was nobody to diagnose something like that at a tiny country school. I always just figured I was dumb, and I think probably everybody else thought the same. It wasn’t until I got to high school…and by that time it was a bit late to start catching up on shit. I left when I was sixteen and started a plumbing apprenticeship instead…”
* * *
When I finally got home it was close to ten – it had rained for ages and by the time it quit I’d stopped noticing the weather. I fed the cats, who were a whole other kind of demanding by that time, then changed into pyjama pants and sat looking out the window seat with my chin on my knees, watching car headlights winking along the highway northward, the fat crescent moon sinking toward the sea. And I thought.
I thought about Quinn. I saw him in my mind, little mannerisms, blunt square fingers transporting chunky-cut fries to his mouth, his easy unselfconscious habitation of that gorgeous body, with apparently no idea how desirable he was…about how that only made him cuter. Hotter. And I thought about how my supposedly diverse life experience to date was nothing but a phantom.
When he said to me; ‘You’ve got a degree, then?’ as though it was an actual question – I was thrown off balance. Because I knew left-wingers and right-wingers and anarchists, trans and polyamorous folk, Germans and Swedes and South Africans and Koreans and more besides, but I didn’t know anybody – socially – who hadn’t been to university.
Likewise, I’d met a couple of folk who came from what you might call farming dynasties, old money, but none whose bedroom growing up was in the porch of a leaky cottage on the frostbitten high plateau north of Taupō. I really only knew people like me, and he was nothing like me. I was confronted by the revelation – but intrigued. They kicked us out of the bar in the end, and I had to reluctantly end my interrogation…
He told me – after I went first – what he did, which was work in the showroom of a high-end bathroom and tapware company in Newtown. “It is unreal, that place,” he confided. “I mean, tapware’s expensive generally because metal things aren’t cheap to manufacture, but this…and it’s all imported from Europe, of course…”
He leaned in, lowering his voice. “Did you know you can drop twelve thousand dollars on a gooseneck faucet for your kitchen sink? And that people do? And a lot of the time I deal with architects or designers who don’t even enquire about prices, because they’re representing clients who don’t care. They just want what they want and the price is irrelevant.”
It was the plumbing that got him into it, obviously. When you’re the apprentice, you get to do all the shit jobs – including the ones involving actual shit – but also other little random low-status tasks. “I was errand-bitch most of the time,” he said, “fetch coffees and pies, go down to the wholesalers and grab whatever bits and pieces they were needing for a job…”
The guys at the local wholesalers got to know him and like him and when a job in their own showroom came free, he applied for it and got it and left the actual shit side of the plumbing world behind.
“I turned out to be good at it,” he told me. “I suppose I had the background knowledge, and I like talking to people – but also, the whole not being able to read thing meant I needed to remember in order to learn at school. All the time I thought that’s what everybody was doing and I was just worse at it than them, I didn’t realise there was, like, a system…but basically I was treading water and I could only cope by being tidy and on time and super-organised, because if I was panicking or distracted I couldn’t memorise.”
“It set me up pretty well in a way,” he mused, “because now I have the kind of habits that bosses like, and I can hold lists in my head for as long as I need, even if they’re just a bunch of random product codes.”
He pointed an accusative finger at me, smiling ruefully. “But you dudes who can read, you have no idea of the advantage you’re carrying. You can leave stuff to the last minute, you can blag your way through things, because you have access to all the cheat codes. Whereas I am a person who cannot afford to wing things. Ever.” He shrugged. “But at least I know this about myself.”
That stuck with me. By the time we went our separate ways I was hooked on a whole lot more than just the surface of him, and that knowing of himself was at the core of it. He was – I mean, apart from his looks – he was just an ordinary guy doing an ordinary job, but he seemed very centred, very grounded. He knew he had limitations, but he’d acknowledged them, accepted them, and moved on.
I thought I’d run into him again – I banked on it. I might easily miss him on the trains, given they were often full enough that you couldn’t see your own feet. But…at the station, around the village? Not a heap of places to hide in Paekākāriki…however after several weeks of no sightings I concluded he’d moved on from here as well.