Australian Love Stories (9 page)

I wanted to help her. She said, ‘I know you. You're my connie.' She had to go home, to her father, she couldn't stay out. I asked what happened. She said he hit her on the head with a bottle, he was angry because she hadn't cleaned the house.

‘Who did,' I asked, ‘your
father?
' Of course.

Outraged, disbelieving, I said, ‘You can't go home. We'll get you to hospital.'

‘No, no, I have to go…'

‘Stay; I'll get a policeman, they can advise you what to do; just stay, okay?'

She nodded.

I wasn't supposed to leave the tram unattended, ever, for any reason; I ran up to Fitzroy St and there, as I've always found when I needed one, was a policeman. We jogged back. She was gone. The other passengers knew nothing at all.

Quite apart from the sense of having failed a passenger—my charge—and a woman in distress, I thought about her a lot; her herself. I watched for her on my St Kilda run, and on the others too. A couple of times, on days off, I walked around, hoping to find her. She was too young for me, I knew, maybe seventeen, but maybe a tall fourteen, I honestly couldn't tell, and I was in my twenties then. I told myself I needed to know if she was alright, but really, it was her face. It swam about in my inner vision, her face, her skin, her eyes. It hurt. I'll admit, I fantasised about her. The scar at her lip was the hook in my mouth; my tongue made its shape on the back of my teeth.

That's just a young man's life. Time goes by, there's other people, your old obsessions come to seem a little silly, even to you; and your friends see nothing in it but prurience.
Again, you fool
, falling for nature's old tricks, her rouges, glycerine, narcotic musks… Maybe that self contempt was what my father was really expressing. There were girlfriends, then I fell in love. It ended so badly I don't want to spill it all out here; but looking back, the morbid cliché of my stupid behaviour, the fug of alcohol and ego and bad faith…well, you probably get the picture. I did some damage, and ended up on my scuppers, somewhat, living in a terrible house, working as a waiter in a pseud restaurant. Michel, the owner, was an arrogant disgusting pig, but I needed the money, so I put up with it and
quietly hated myself. I suppose this was four or five years after the girl. Then, on a Sunday night, she came in.

She sat in the other waiter's section, so I didn't see her at first, though the place was brightly lit and I'd walked by a couple of times. Then the man she was with asked me for more water; I asked if she wanted some too, and she barely looked up as she answered no—just a flicker of those indigo eyes. I felt—I mean, I really did, though it's going to sound ridiculous—like javelins had pierced me and pinned me to the floor.

The first thing to say—and I admit, it's in my defence—is that I was enormously relieved she was alive. I'd often wondered whether her father had killed her, or she'd ended up on the street, or addicted, or prostituted by any of those dirty devices this world's so replete with. But anyone could see at a glance she was healthy, un-fucked-up, beautiful; more beautiful than before. A clear memory: she wore a dress of indigo linen with an undyed strip of ecru down the front crossing her left breast from neck to hem.

After that good start, it's less edifying. I was full of shame, and didn't want to be seen here, like this. So I hid, watching her when I could, looking at him to try and work out what kind of man he was, what he was to her. Absolutely indecipherable, I'm afraid, a sort of twenty-something George Smiley. I saw them touch each other's arm once or twice, nothing more; could be lovers, could be friends. I don't think they were siblings. The night wore on, they paid and left, I stole a moment to go onto the street and watch them; but they were gone. On the way back in I saw my face in the oversized Baroque mirror near the door, the door where, a moment before, a huge, artfully arranged bucket
of failure had tilted and tipped its load all over me; me, standing there in my clip-on bow tie.

That period—that bad time—I had shit on my hands. The stain and the stench of it went onto everything I touched. Grief and guilt; they make you insane, for a while, make you some kind of unrecognisable monster. I shudder when I remember it; but it passed. There's a threshold to our emotions, a bar across the bottom of the door, so that even when they seem to all be flooding away, spilling out, gone forever, some magical portion of them is held in reserve, the seed-stock of a future, happier self. Tidally, love returns. Hope. Self-respect. Joy. Mine just appeared again one day, rose up in me, a bubble in a glass of champagne. I even re-learned how to drink with pleasure, instead of vindictiveness—the surest sign, for an Australian, that things are looking up.

Got a new job, got a new flat, got the same old haircut refreshed. A couple of friends had dropped me; I made one or two new ones, put some work into the others. It's like one of those Paul Kelly songs…
If drink becomes a problem, drink a little less…
I felt ok.

Late one evening I walked into a new club up near the old
CUB
site. I don't like clubs much; live gigs at pubs were always more my thing, but I'd been catching up with friends earlier in the evening, drinking, talking, and they'd mentioned the place, and here I was, ready for whatever.

This club was dark, seriously dark; it would be quite possible to trip over things or people, especially after a few drinks.
Nowadays it would be full of light from mobile phones—that's why people go to clubs now, to text people they texted three minutes ago—but way back in the dark ages—appropriate phrase—say, twenty years ago—darkness was essential set-dressing, a curtain the punters couldn't ring up. And the music was louder than I'd have thought strictly necessary; that's not because I'm old, either, I felt the same way at eighteen. It sounded good though, dancey, which was a relief—I wasn't in the mood for a dirge.

Once again I didn't see her at first. When I went to the bar a girl served me; on her right was another girl, serving someone else, a girl with long black hair that swept down over the right side of her face. Although the bar was the best lit part of the place, its light was greenish, lurid, shining up from under the counter, reflecting drunkenly from the warped mirrors behind the shimmering intoxicants behind these brazen girls. It was an image from some Puritan homily: primrose, sulphur, sirens.

I'd ordered; I waited, received, paid, thanked, looking all the while, as discretely as I could, at the other girl. There was a sense of something, but no clear recognition. She moved her hair fractionally out of the way of her face and I saw her profile. I walked away from the bar, fifteen or twenty feet, and like when you get that first smell and, no matter what the calendar says, it's Spring, it blossomed in me:
her
.

I turned; she was crouching down, getting a drink from below the bar. I experienced the image of her sitting forward on the tram seat, blood in her hair, a young girl in pain, and doubtless fear; and I looked at her here working the bar, smiling at her workmates, a woman in the world, whole and human; and for a moment, I cried. But I'd started to mistrust my drunken sentiment; so I wiped my eyes with the butt of my
palm, abandoned my drink and went to her. She looked up with a smile, small, but unmistakeable, and said, in a nice, warm, working class voice, ‘You were quick. What would you like?'

Strange—in all those years of lushery I never tried to chat up a barmaid. Guys tell me it's a famously tall order. That's not why I didn't though—I just hate to interfere with anyone's work. But now I looked at her and said, ‘I'd like you to come and dance with me. If not now, then later; but preferably now. And I'd really like, if you'll let me, to buy you a drink.'

That shouldn't have worked. And it didn't straight away. She was laughingly dismissive, friendly but common sense. And I persisted so long that her manager came up to us with a narrow look on his face and asked her if I needed removing; that's when she said, ‘No, he's an old friend of mine and he wants a dance with me. How early can I knock off? It's slowing down anyway…'

He wasn't happy, but she got permission to knock off in half an hour. She poured herself a drink—she'd had a couple already—and I stayed closeish, occasionally catching her eye, when she'd smile at me, though with one raised eyebrow;
what's your caper, sunshine?

The music's not a clear memory but it was pulsing at a
BPM
roughly twice life speed. I do remember that she did this wonderful thing, she danced up to me, danced ahead, stopped, back to me, her back and bum swaying, touching me, then looked back across her shoulder at me—those eyes!—ahead again, and swung round quickly, putting her arms around my neck, laughing and pulling me so fast into her rhythm that I had no time at all for second thoughts.

Is it possible I loved her then? Maybe what I felt was an overwhelming aesthetic gratitude; she was as beautiful and
immediate as life ought always to be, a vertiginous contrast to the trudge of everything else, and I fell into the moment wholeheartedly, adoring the whoosh and the rush and the eight-centimetres-apartness of our faces in ways no-one who'd drunk that much could really have unravelled. Love, happiness, right then the distinction was for neurotics. Then—I think this is how it went—she kissed me.

Her kiss was a labyrinth. All, all I wanted in the world, was to never find my way out.

Then we were in a taxi. It was heading to Windsor. The gliding fan-dance of light and shadow stay with me, and her lips and hands, and my fingers on her and in her, and a distant, unkillable awareness that someone else was in the car, driving us, and we really ought to be behaving, but we couldn't…

…and her dark house was an explosion; we didn't bother with the lights. We just erupted into nakedness, and though I kept gritting my teeth with how much I wanted to fuck her, I couldn't take my mouth away from her quim, little nightingale, singing its midnight song to me in a voice of milk and tremors, there in the miraculous Berkeley Square of her bed. The crucifying nail of her tongue in my ear, skewering me, telling me, in a language older than words, exactly who I was, who I am, so deeply I couldn't deny any of it. A long-seeming period of roiling tempest, rolling about her bed in the only half dark the city makes inevitable. The jump-cut imagery I still have of her pale body below me on the black sheets, her sloe hair, the always unbelievable fact of being
inside
someone; her riding along above me, mmming and swearing and sweating and hurting me with her nails, teeth, and what holds most in my mind—two things— putting my tongue in her arse, which I hadn't ever done before,
loving it, realising right then that absolutely everything I loved in her body was love itself; and later, at a stiller point in our grave, hilarious wrestle, seeing her sitting up, her eyes half closed with tiredness, her mouth fractionally open, her calves folded beneath her, made a child again, as I was, so pale in that half light, so white, and both of us so still, so burnt-low, heart in throat I knew, though she was no ghost, that we were in a spirit realm now, and I could pass my hand right through her, or she through me, because the physical barrier between us had been extinguished.

Nothing was spoken. The body was our text; we had read it, accepted it, and borne out its truth. We two, were one, more innocent than Eden.

It was very late when we got to sleep. I'd wanted to say something about knowing her before, about not forgetting her, about how the crewel of her scar had put a stitch in me I'd been unable or unwilling to unpick. But the moment hadn't come. Nothing in our attraction had made it necessary; so she put her head on my arm, near my still wet armpit, and slid immediately into sleep. I followed close, though I was excited with adoration. What would I love about her? Her. But I slept instead of saying it.

It could only have been an hour and a half later that I woke, my arm throbbing from her weight, and with a strong need to piss and to drink water. Dawn had slipped itself under the window shades, a letter of unknown intent; the false half light of the night before had become a true half light, grainy and textured, and the blackness of her hair when I looked that way was richer than it had been in the night time.