Millie and the Artichoke Hearts

CIARAN GREIG

Table of contents Executive Summary

Executive Summary…………………43

Context………………………………….. 43

Further Background………………. 44

Methodology………………………......44

Analysis………………………………..... 45

Findings……………………………........45 To Millie, those early breakups were like losing baby teeth: quick, relatively effortless, and often met with enthusiasm by her mother.

To the men she left behind, they were more like the extraction of a wisdom tooth: cavernous, aching, and something that should really have been done under anaesthesia.

Context

Over the past eight months, I have conducted an investigation into the heart and mind of one Ms Millie Lang (24). I would go as far as to say that we have become friends. But I don’t like her one bit.

I really do understand her a great deal. Accordingly, I now find myself in a position where I can’t help but love her like she is my own sister.

Even though I don’t like her.

Not one little bit.

Further Background

I first heard Millie’s name on the lips of a man I very nearly fell in love with.

I realised later that through the thick lenses of Simon’s sensible glasses, he was superimposing her image onto everything I was: my dark hair; the particular wine my palate craved; the way my thigh felt under his hand.

Millie, Simon told me, had recently extracted herself from his life.

She had made a habit leaving her lovers, he said. He took a hand to his face and rubbed at his cheek. He told me about the boyfriend she had before him, and the boyfriend before the boyfriend before him. I imagined a trail of men strewn over a darkened field. Millie in the distance, upright and stalking away.

Simon’s gums were bleeding profusely. The blood rushed from somewhere deep in his mouth and wept down his neck, sliding delicately over each ridge of his Adam’s apple. As we talked, the sides of his mouth frothed softly with weakly concentrated crimson foam.

That night we met, that night he said her name to me for the first time, that night he held me in his arms by the side of a busy road – that was the same night he leaned in and pressed his lips firmly against mine. The blood and foam spread onto my own chin, the sides of my face. Globules of red pigment seeped deep into my pores, staining my skin. I’ve been trying to remove the damn stain ever since.

I looked her up later – Ms Millie Lang (24). And that was where it started. A tiny whisker of curiosity that took root and grew. A central inquiry that twisted, thorn like, around each microscopic synapse in my brain. Why, Millie? For what reason?

I had a picture of Millie in my mind already, painted by Simon’s words. She was callous and reckless. Confused but decisive. Naïve but cunning with the weaponisation of her rosy cheeks. I didn’t understand her. I didn’t like her. I wanted to know more.

Millie and I were suddenly, haphazardly, unwittingly entwined.

Methodology

The research methodology used in the production of this report is grounded soundly in opportunity and luck.

It was an accident.

I was not supposed to recognise her when I saw her that day, skulking through the shops with an empty basket hanging from the crook of her arm. But I did. I knew exactly who she was.

I knew her from the photo I had seen of her online. I knew her from the way Simon had described her – short and pretty and brunette. I knew her from the way she walked: barely lifting up her feet. Purposeful, unbothered. Millie.

In my car, with the engine running and the aircon lazily grazing my neck, I waited for her to emerge from the supermarket.

Eventually, she slunk across the carpark carrying two heavy looking plastic bags, the weight of them straining the plastic. I imagined the burden of her purchases drawing out stretch marks on the bag’s handles.

As I drove home, my car stopped in traffic right in front of where Millie was waiting for the bus. It was a hot Saturday afternoon, and the bus shelter was hardly effective in protecting her from the heat. She sat there, squinting into the sun. I rolled down my window and asked if she wanted a lift.

She didn’t hear me the first time. ‘Want a lift?’ I asked again. She frowned at me then, considering my beat-up Barina, and, somehow deciding that I was benign, nodded.

She told me that we were driving to Birdwood Terrace, mumbled a quiet thanks, and pulled out a jar of –artichoke hearts? – from her shopping bags. As we rolled up to a traffic light, I watched as she loosened the tight lid of the jar of artichoke hearts open with one deep, round pop. She dipped her bare hand into the jar and brought an artichoke heart to her lips, swallowing it whole. As she wiped her fingers on her jeans, she caught me looking.

‘You don’t mind, do you?’

I shook my head.

We drove in silence over and down the hills of Jubilee Terrace, through the roundabouts of Bardon, and past Government House. As we reached Frederick Street, with Toowong Cemetery sitting meekly across the way, I cleared my throat.

‘I know your friend Simon, actually.’ She looked up for a moment before submerging her hand back into her second jar of artichoke hearts. The first one was rolling around on the floor of my car, empty after she slurped it of its preservative oil.

‘Oh, he’s not really my friend,’ she said.

Analysis

Millie told me that I should come in.

She lived in a dilapidated Queenslander rented from a great aunt. She didn’t seem to mind that it smelled of rotting wood and gecko poo. We sat together on wooden chairs on her back deck, feet submerged in a kid-sized paddling pool.

‘I know this is weird, but I just don’t understand you at all,’ I said.

Millie smiled for the first time. She looked me in the eyes kindly. She still said nothing.

‘I want to understand,’ I said.

She held my gaze. I felt a pain blooming somewhere in the back of my throat, as if I were about to cry. What was it about being so close to this woman whom I found so incredibly strange that made me want to weep?

Millie kicked her feet in the water. Her feet were more delicate than mine: long toes with delicately shaped toenails painted red.

I waited.

Findings

Sometimes, Millie said, she wondered why she did it. Over and over again.

She told me that her sister was getting married at Easter. Millie said she could have been married five times by now. She had even asked one of her boyfriends to marry her once, only

to break off the engagement five months later. She had proposed to him on impulse, one rainy afternoon when the thought occurred to her. She had thought she wanted it. She was wrong.

‘I don’t really know why I do it,’ she said, looking at me with her eyes the colour of shiny cockroach bodies. She didn’t say this with any particular concern or worry. It was just an observation. A neutral statement of fact. As in:

The sky is blue.

The grass is green.

Homebrand milk is always priced at a dollar-a-litre.

Millie makes men fall in love with her and then she breaks their hearts and has no clue why.

‘You’ve thought about it though?’

Millie shrugged.

She said the last time she had been on a date she had taken care to observe herself.

The way she smiled and made jokes and pushed her hair behind her ear and asked thoughtful questions and touched the man lightly on the leg. She monitored the way he responded, at first cautious, then enthusiastic. Leaning back, returning touches, smiling before she reached the punch line of her jokes.

Millie said she marked the date as a success the moment he tried to kiss her.

‘So maybe that’s why,’ she said to me. ‘Because I can.’

I looked at Millie. Of course she could. She was a cis-woman, young, and on the surface, uncomplicated. Millie was smart and kind and generous with her smiles. The men were attracted to her on a basic level, at a pheromonal, hormonal, physical level. All she had to do was dress herself, doll-like, and add a dash of enthusiasm.

Millie said that by the time she broke up with Simon, her friends had stopped calling and texting to ask if she was ok when they heard about yet another failed relationship. ‘And to be honest,’ she said, scrunching up her nose, ‘I actually prefer it like that.’ She said there was something about her friends’ tenderness, the way they handled her so carefully in the wake of a relationship ending, that made her feel nauseous.

The summer she broke up with Simon was the same summer she started eating artichoke hearts, she said. Jars and jars of them. ‘They taste like…nothing else.’ She considered the open jar sitting on the ground beside us.

She held out an artichoke heart for me, her hand wet from fishing a leaf out of the plastic pool moments before. I considered it for a second: the way it sat in her palm like some fantastic, wretched creature pulled from the ocean floor.

I took it from her hand into my mouth. It tasted salty, tender, slippery. Complex.