TaNkGiRly 的網路日誌

Lipstick



6 o’clock on Wednesday morning, I didn’t even want to get up.

What was the point, just another day at work. Well, you got up, shovelled whatever you instinctively grab from the pantry/fridge into your mouth (and if you were lucky they might be still free with dodgy smells) while getting dress, then if you managed to find the matching shoes and leave the house, you would have to fighting through the horrible traffic (and putting on lipstick and mascara as you were waiting for traffic light) across town, spend nearly a million year to find a parking space (let’s face it, most of us did, as we were not some kind of important business manager/CEO/something), and spending another million years to skilfully park your precious car into the damn space without bump into any of the surrounding equally/more precious car. By the time you actually sit in front of your desk, you’ve felt like 10 years older than when you got up this morning. Lots of poor cell died in these one.

The horrible part was you would have to repeat most of those again when you finished your work, and start it all over the next day.

So what was the point?

I had a glance at my watch, struggling the thought of call in sick for another day.

Well, I had a pretty good reason. I had some mild headache.

But I seriously doubt they would let me. I’ve had nearly four days in a role this week (plus three days last week, two days before and a whole week before that). No, producing medical evidence that I had influenza was dead easy. All I had to do was bullied my dear friend Lupe into it. It was just that no one on the planet would like a slack worker, spending longer hours sitting at home than actually doing some work and earning some money. Perhaps after today my poor boss would have enough and decided to sack me instead.

Hmm, maybe I should go.

I sighed and got up, half consciously manoeuvring across the room into the bathroom. A lonely looking toothbrush jumped in front of my eyes when I opened the cabinet.

That toothbrush, wasn’t mine.

It was Mazi’s, who just moved out three weeks ago.

All of the sudden all memory flooded back to me. I suddenly remembered why the hell I had this terrible migraine this morning and lost all meanings of just getting out of the door. My tears started welling up.

I put my toothbrush back and shoot the cabinet. Perhaps I should get a bottle of vodka and headed back to bed instead and forgot about the whole work thing. That was what I had been doing for the last couple of weeks.

Well, obviously that didn’t work very will. Looked like the damn sorrow that I’ve been trying very hard to drawn it with vodka had just learned how to swim.

Oh! Bugger.

Mazi and I had been together for six years. While all of our friends started wondering when were we going to get married, it took us all, including myself, by surprise that it would end. And what an end that was.

Let me tell you what happened, folks. Just in case you guys were curious.

I didn’t want you kill your cat because of me.

It all started with that stupid credit card bill.

Mazi and I shared the same credit card account. He was a builder and ran his own little building business and I was working at a makeup counter in the shopping centre. Pretty much what we spent and how much we spent on were about the same each month. But when I opened our monthly bill on Monday, something just wasn’t right. On 10 January, there was a USD$200 spending on dining in some weird restaurant that I had never heard of in my life.

The restaurant was in Paris.

Now, personally I had never, ever been to Paris. I knew Mazi was somewhere near there last month. He was in London for a building exhibition and was visiting some relatives there for about a week. I still have all those pictures he sent me stored in my laptop. But I didn’t remember he mentioned anything about Paris during his trip there.

Than there was another weird on just below it: 13 January, £185 on double room accommodation in Gresham Hyde Park Hotel.

Hmm.

As far as I knew, Mazi was staying at his friends place in London. He was never the kind of person who would splash our hard working money on some flashy place if he had a place to stay.

Curiosity was one of women’s great specialties. I went on and did a little bit of investigation (which involved in lots of sneak around, rummaging through Mazi’s opened mails, checking his cellphone records and our computers) (don’t tried this to your partners unless it was absolutely necessary, ladies. Otherwise I guarantee it would come back to haunt you). It didn’t take me long to find out Mazi had an affair with another woman.

That totally blew me away, I must say.

Well, of course I wasn’t happy. After a couple of nasty confrontations and several name-calling cursing and swearing, our relationship officially finished. I was terribly hurt. What could you expect? I loved Mazi and I had always thought he was the same. It turned out it wasn’t and he didn’t even have the guts to tell me. All of the sudden the world around me that I had built based upon this believe began to crumble, I started having doubt about everything in life.

The phone rang.

“Heeyyy! It’s only me.” It was my colleague Robin.

“Hi, me.”

“Are you coming to work today? Or you still badly bruised?” She joked. The unfortunate Robin happened to bump into us once when Mazi and I were in one of those shouting campaign, so she kind of knew everything.

“Don’t know.” I sneezed.

“Come! You have to come out of house somewhen.”

“Don’t feel like I need to.” I looked at the ceiling.

“Oh yes, you do! You will need money for the booze soon.” I had to say she got some point.

“………hmm………”

“Come on, stop being such a baby, it’s not the end of the world.”

“Well, I feel like it is.”

“Look, you don’t even have to drive to work, okay? I will come to pick you up on the way. Sounds cool?” Robin just lived a few block down the road.

“……..I want Macdee’s Breakfast.”

“Now that’s too much, young lady.” She pretended to be all serious: “I can only get you some coffee.”

Robin turned up in just about 10 minutes. She bullied me finished all the morning chores in record-breaking time, watched me taking some Panadol and then literally dragged me out of the house.

“Why are you doing these to me?” I asked while checking my reflection on the car window: “can’t you just leave me alone?”

“Because I happened to be your unfortunate friend, incredibly nosy and worrying sick about you.” Robin put her sungaggles on and handed over me my coffee: “not everybody is a ijet like Mazi.”

We finally arrived work about an hour and a half later. My boss seemed genuinely surprised. He probably thought I would stay another day off sick and he could have a perfect excuse to sack me (I bet he’s been wanting to do this for a very long time). I threw him a sweet smile. For the first time in weeks I felt slightly better.

Ahem, perhaps it was a good idea to leave the house after all.

My job was a sales assistance at the cosmetic counter in a department store. Everyday we had to serve at least hundreds of customers, mostly females and had some kind of insecurity hazards inside their scones, trying to convenience them there were some very serious problem about their face and there was only our produce that could librate their appearance. Of course there was absolutely nothing wrong with their bloody faces. It just that we human were greedy animals, particularly women. They always wanted to look younger. And the proportion between actual age and appeared age was always getting greater as they aged. At the end, they always left our counter with a huge bag of goodies and high expectation that all these were going to work wonders on their face.

Not in a million years.

Well, I honestly never believe that crap. No, I had to say I was no longer as young as those who could party and stay up all night long and still able to turn up at work the next day without dark circle on their face. I was thirty now, you see. I was way past that age. It was just that I was more believing in the untouched face was always the most beautiful face and I had always worn only mascara and a bit of lipstick.

I check the puffy eyes in the mirror when there was no one around.

Perhaps today I should put some concealer on, because those little devils did look pretty scary. It would be slightly difficult to sell something to those insecure customers.

At about lunchtime, there was this guy appeared at our counter again.

The “Lipstick” guy, that was how we called him.

Among all my customers, he was the doggiest. No, we did have a few male customers and some of them were quite regulars Mostly loyal bubbies, or unfortunately one who were being dragged into our store by their girlfriends/mum/sisters/daughters (human ATM), or very rarely, some drag queens. But this one was really weird. First, he always wore sunglasses indoors. Have you seen anyone who wore sungaggles inside? Well, for those of you who nodded your head, I didn’t. Second, he always bought one lipstick, only one. I had never seemed him using it, so I would assume he bought it for his girlfriends/mum/his female friends/something. But now this lead to another weird part: he came at weekly basis. Now who on earth would use lipsticks at such an amazing rate? How big could this female friend of his lips could be? If he got more than one female friend to give lipstick to, why didn’t he just bought the whole lot at once? This lad had come here for a while now, what on earth did he do with all those lipsticks??

“Psssss…” Robin sneaked over as I was wrapping up the lipstick (another weird thingy this dude asked me to do every time: wrap it up): “Is he only buying ONE lipstick again?”

“Ahah.”

“Crickey! Do you know he was here in the last two weeks?”

“He’s here every week, dear.” I gave her an odd look.

“But…have you noticed that he only came to you every time he visit the shops?” She pointed out.

Hmm. Now she mentioned it, I never recalled he actually asked anybody to serve him every time he visited us. I took a sneak look at him, who stood cluelessly at the counter.

“Is he really?”

“Yup.”

“What happened when I was away?”

“Let’s see…he was asking about you and seemed rather disappointing when we told him you were away sick.”

“Aye?!!” This was surprising.

I took another look at him.

No wonder he seemed a bit delighted when he spotted me as he walking in the door.

Perhaps I was out of my mind. Maybe this was a hangover thing.

Maybe I needed another drink.

“There you are.” I went back to the counter and gave this fella his perfectly wrapped lipstick: “Thank you.”

This man took the lipstick. He still stood there, didn’t seem like he was going to leave anytime soon. I was slightly amused when his face gone pink.

“Arrh…. I…I heard you were sick last two week.” He seemed struggle to squeeze out these words.

“Yes, I did.” I smiled politely.

“How are you feeling now? Better?”

“I suppose so, thank you for asking.” He’s already spoken more than he usually did. Robin behind me nearly raised her eyebrow to the ceiling.

No one would expect what he would do next. He pushed the wrapped lipstick into my hand and said: “……..this is for you, get well soon!” then ran off before any of us recovered from shocking state.

Now I had to say this was a bit out of blue. Not that I had never received any gift from anyone in my life before. For the past few years, Mazi showered me an awful lot of gifts. And we were not even talking about others prior to him. It was just that it was the first time someone gave me a gift with such shyness, as he was 10 years old. Well, as the matter of fact, I didn’t think a 10 years old these day would gave anyone gifts in such shyness.

Robin was right, there was definitely something going on here.

But why did he want to do that? It was not like I was worth anything.

Oh, I sincerely thought so; otherwise why on earth Mazi would decide to have an affair then?

Speaking of Mazi, I missed Mazi.

Sounded silly, wasn’t it? He’s been treated me like smock and I still hopelessly missing him, wondering what had he been doing all these days, was the woman with him, what did he do with that woman and felt my heart was aching with jealousy. I’ve repeated this self-torturing process unconsciously over the last couple of weeks and it looked like I wasn’t going to stop this any time soon.

Why did he choose this woman over me?

Why would our 6 years relationship couldn’t even stand on a silly frog’s flirt?

Would that be possible if he woke up one morning, realised he made a horrible mistake, and decided to come back to me?

Would I want him to come back to me?

Perhaps he would never come back. I thought as I stood in front of the door and rummaging through my purse to locate the goddamn keys. Perhaps he realised he didn’t really love me that much after all. What was I going to do then?

The corridor was a bit dark; it was quite a mission to find anything under this stupid dim light (who invented these silly miniature bags in the first place? Making everything incredibly difficult to find). I struggled for a while, got a bit frustrated.

Where was this goddamn stupid bloody keys?

Oh! Hell!

I was literally in tears. I turned the purse upside-down and shake everything out onto the floor. After the awful lot of noises, there were stuff everywhere. I bend down, tried to find my bloody keys. All of the sudden the loneliness and the achenes that I’ve been experienced over the last few months suddenly overwhelmed me.

Tears began to well. I set on the floor, ignoring whatever neighbour might think, weeping.

If only Mazi was here, he would pull out of the key before I made a fool of myself in front of my own flat, and gently teased me blind as a bat; if only Mazi was here, he would pull out of his own bloody keys and open the door, all I had to do was just walk straight in; if only Mazi was here, he would playfully cornered me up to the wall, saying something like: “Perhaps we shouldn’t go home tonight? Let’s run away, to Mongolia!!” and then bent over and kiss me; if only Mazi was here…

But Mazi wasn’t here.

Oh! Bugger. Why wasn’t he?

Why didn’t he love me anymore? Why on earth I still missed him after all these? Why was I so fucking useless by myself all of the sudden?

I set on the floor for hours.

After a while, I gathered myself and found the keys.

Along with the lipstick that thinkofmebob gave me.

I stared at this lipstick.

Did this guy know what he did this afternoon, perhaps just purely out of sympathy, would cause such a huge effect in my so far slightly pathetic life?

I still honestly didn’t believe this total stranger would fancy me. But I must say it did cheer me up a bit.

I got into the house. It looked empty without Mazi as usual.

I headed straight to the bathroom, opened the cabinet, took out Mazi’s toothbrush, chuck it into the rubbish bin and replace the spot with the lipstick.

That night, for the first time in months, I didn’t take out the vodka and flushed it down to my throat.

Quite an astonishment, I must say.

Perhaps I should talk to this fella next time he was here.

Hmm…