“Hi, Penelope, bit windy, isn’t it?”
The doll just smiles.
“No sign of spring yet.”
I turn the doll around, and her crying eyes face me. This is my cue to stop the conversation. I go into the bathroom and wash my hands with a fresh bar of soap in preparation for a handshake with Penelope. I feel like saying some kind of prayer or performing a ritual dance—the occasion feels this big—so I stand in the living room and roar “Gaaaaaaaaah!” from the bottoms of my lungs, and slap each hand in turn across my chest. I put my notebook in my bag, leave the house, sprint past Bernie’s and then turn the sprint into a calm walk. I huddle and tighten myself against the wind, and think up ways to describe it to Penelope. Is “a rape of a wind” too strong for the first sentence of a first meeting? I push the door of the café and the bell jangles. There are men in navy overalls eating fried breakfasts and elderly people sitting alone or in pairs. I walk up to the counter and order coffee and a coffee slice.
“Normally I wouldn’t double up,” I say to the lady in the white uniform with the white cap, who looks like a medieval wench. She stares at me.
“Double up how?”
“A coffee drink and coffee-flavoured bun might seem excessive, but today’s a special day.”
“Yeah, okay, love,” she says. “I’ll bring them down to you, have a seat.”
I have wasted this topic on someone who doesn’t like it, but no matter, I can reuse it on Penelope. I sit in the corner table facing the window. The lady brings my coffee and cake, and I squash the coffee slice flat so that the cream oozes out the sides. Then I scoop it up and add it to my coffee. A couple of pastry flakes poke out of the cream, like planks of wood in a miniature snow scene. I look out the window. Potted plants and huge tubs of paint and garden ornaments are laid out on the footpath in front of the hardware next door. A woman comes up to the café window, a thin woman who should be fat, with the kind of face that looks like an empty sack when it’s not smiling. Her clothes are red and yellow and screaming. This must be Penelope: only people with three “E”s in their names could dress so loud. I wave. She smiles, the kind of smile that could reheat cold coffee, with yellow gappy teeth in need of a power hose. She bustles into the café, sweeping in leaves with her long skirt. A net bag swings from the crook of her elbow, and she is carrying a melon. In two giant steps, her feet eat up the floor and reach me.
“You must be Vivian, I’m Penelope.”
She grabs my hand and thrusts the melon into my chest, as if playing some kind of new fruit sport.
“Hold this, I’m going to get some tea. You’re alright for everything?”
I open my mouth to speak but she is gone, and I’m left holding the melon. It’s yellow, the kind of yellow that seas should be made of, or swimming pools at least. I sit down and put the melon on Penelope’s chair. She scuttles back in a breeze, squeezing between tables and knocking a salt cellar off a table: smash! Penelope doesn’t look surprised; smashes must soundtrack her every move. I take a breath to warn her about the melon, but she sits straight down on the yellow hump and doesn’t seem to notice.
“So, Vivian, what possessed you to go on a Penelope hunt?”
She guffaws and her breath hits me, a stench so powerful it could fell trees. It’s too soon for this question. I hadn’t prepared for it, so I stick to my original conversation plan.
“Bit of a nip in the air, isn’t there?”
Penelope’s forehead bunches and warps, and she squints at me. “I wanted to know why Penelope doesn’t rhyme with antelope.”
“Right.”
She stares somewhere above my right eyebrows and nods. Then she shifts in her chair, raises one haunch and pulls out the melon as if she has just birthed it. She takes the little packets of sugar out of the bowl on the table and balances the melon on top of it, like a golden fairytale egg in an ordinary egg cup. She looks like she does this kind of thing every day.
“What’s your favourite colour?” I ask.
“Red.”
The lady brings Penelope’s tea. She looks at the melon, but says nothing.
“Favourite animal?”
“Cat.”
I feel a twinge of unease, as if a cat has slunk between my ankles and curled its tail around my leg.
“I don’t like cats,” I say.
“Oh, you’re one of those.” She narrows her eyes and spits out “those.”
“Those what?”
“Cat bigots. Catists. Member of the anti-cat brigade.”
I start to sweat. We haven’t spoken many sentences to each other and an argument is already forming. I jerk my arm and knock over the remains of my coffee. A grease-bubbled liquid flows across the table; Penelope grabs a napkin and wipes the stream. The cat conversation has vanished.
“Do you work?” I ask.
“Not a suit-and-desk job,” she says. “I paint.”
“What do you paint?”
“Cats, mainly.”
She grins at me, and my eyes are drawn to her tooth gaps. A piece of corn is wedged between two particularly wonky teeth.
“Did you have corn on the cob for breakfast?”
“I had it for dinner yesterday.”
“It’s in your teeth.”
“Oh.”
She digs it out and puts it on her saucer.
“Sometimes I forget to wash my teeth. I believe hygiene is overrated.”
The way she drawls her “L”s rips through my ears, but I allow her this fright of a vowel, because we have found common ground.
“I agree,” I say.
I look at the piece of corn—it’s yellow and inscrutable.
“Do you think it’s lonesome without the rest of the cob?” I ask.
“Probably. It’s like separating thousand-tuplets.”
“Are frogspawn called million-tuplets?”
“I don’t see why not.”
This is the kind of conversation that I’ve been dreaming of, or half-dreaming of, in that part of my brain that conjures up the nicest most suitable things, things that never enter my mouth or my waking brain, things that I feel for a few seconds somewhere on the edge of my eyeballs, on the edge of my waking.
“What do you do, Vivian?”
I haven’t prepared this question and I start to feel sticky.
“I had a job once but the company put me out of my desk.”
“I’m sorry. The job hunt can be a bit grim.”
“I used to hunt,” I say, “but I’ve had hundreds of silences from employers, so now I regard my job seeking as more of a hobby, rather than an action that could produce results.”
Penelope laughs, the sort of laugh that makes me think of wolf cubs being reunited with their mothers: it’s the tail end of despairing. I think about how to end our meeting and my heart thunks faster. I hate arriving, but I hate leaving even more. Penelope gulps down the rest of her tea and claps her hands.
“Must rush, Vivian, I’ve to bring one of the cats to the vet. Come over to my place next week?”
“Yes, please.”
She says her address and I say mine and she says, “It’s in the computer,”