New Australian Stories 2 (2 page)

And so I ordered for us again.

‘Where do you live?' His fingers rested on the damp cardboard coaster, as he tilted his head to flick his hair out of his eyes. He shrugged away my offer of payment, and this time I accepted.

We were looking for a place, I said. I reached for the drinks, unable to avoid touching his hand, his skin soft.

He told me I reminded him of someone.

‘An actor,' and he leaned towards me.

‘That's so corny,' and I shook my head in embarrassment.

‘Want to do something when I finish my shift?' His hand was on my arm. ‘It's only an hour away.'

I said I was busy, despite knowing it would soon be obvious I had no plans other than staying here and getting drunk.

‘I won't give up,' he told me.

And he didn't: the next Friday he asked me out again.

‘I have Tuesday nights off.' He held his hands in prayer position.

It had been a bad week. I had been called in by a magazine, only to be told by the editor that she had asked to see me not because she had work for me, but simply to give me some advice.

‘You're wasting your time sending a CV like this around.' She tapped my neatly typed pages with the tip of a long crimson fingernail. ‘You have no experience. None at all. Your whole approach is wrong. The way to get into this industry is either contacts, or you start at the bottom of a down-market publication.'

She was right. It had been a waste of time. Worse, she had succeeded in making me feel small, but I thanked her for trying to help me.

‘I could take you out for a meal,' the barman pleaded. ‘At least give me your number.'

I could see the back of his head reflected in the mirror, obscuring my own face. In the dim lighting, my arms appeared to come from his body, and I smiled.

‘That's yes?'

What would it hurt? It wasn't like my life was particularly good as it was. I took the pen he gave me and wrote my name and number on the back of the coaster, the ink barely legible as it bled into the damp.

A few weeks ago, when I was waiting in the airport lounge for the plane back to Sydney, I thought I saw him again. I don't remember much about him — the exact location of his flat, his name, and the finer details of how he looked are all gone. There is only a vague sense of his dark hair and the white of his skin. But as I sat there with my work files unopened on the table in front of me, a plate of wilted salad on my lap, I found myself staring at a man two seats to my left. He looked up and I glanced away. Moments later, he caught me staring at him again.

Embarrassed, I tried to smile. He turned back to his magazine. He was pale and slightly overweight, his shirt stretched a little too tight around his waist, his hair still falling foppishly across his forehead.

The announcement for the flight echoed through the lounge, and I stood, forgetting the salad on my lap. The plate thudded onto the soft carpet, the contents leaving an oily stain as I tried to pick up the mess.

I was one of the last on board, and in the cramped aisle I waited for another passenger to force her bag into the overhead locker. When I finally took my seat, I saw that he was sitting by the window.

I apologised while trying to extract my seatbelt from the gap between us. As he shifted his weight, I noticed the softness of his hands, a single gold band around his wedding-ring finger.

I was forced to tug the belt out from underneath him, and he looked across at me momentarily. I wanted to say then that I was sorry for having stared at him in the lounge, and that I wasn't sure if I knew him. The thought, however, of opening up what could be an awkward conversation, with no escape for the next hour, kept me silent; instead, I took the magazine out from the seat pocket and flicked through articles I had read on the way down a week earlier.

I had been covering a conference on global warming, filing stories on a regular basis and working on a feature for the weekend edition. As an industrial reporter, this was not a job I would normally have taken, but in the last month Jason had decided to return to his wife and children. It was a decision we had discussed for some time, moving from a bleak awareness that his wife's illness meant this could be necessary, to realising that this was, in fact, the inevitable place to which we had come. At first we had talked constantly, picking over and over the decision until, weighed down by the inadequacy of words, we had pared back all discussion to the cold practicalities. This was the week in which he was going to pack and organise a truck to clear out all he owned from our house. It would be easier if I wasn't there and he could just get the job done.

Now, at the end of what had been a busy five days, I was bracing myself for the return to Sydney. Ultimately I would be all right. But there was first the space between now and a time somewhere in the future when we would have either let each other go, or negotiated some form of friendship. That was what made me anxious.

Once again, I glanced briefly at the man next to me, wanting to distract myself from the thought of my homecoming. I was careful to keep my head lowered and my eye contact barely noticeable. He was gazing out the window at the tufts of cloud that wrapped us, grey and insubstantial, drifting like floss around the plane. I wished I could remember his name but I couldn't, and I knew I had no hope of even touching on the edge of what it might be. Nothing out of the ordinary, that was all I could recall. Robert, perhaps? His hands were resting in his lap, fingers curled tight into the palm with a tension that seemed at odds with the softness of his flesh. As he turned, I glanced away, careful not to be caught out again.

Robert, and I will call him that because it is a name as good as any other, phoned me the morning after I gave him my number. I had woken, my sheets pulled back to reveal the bare mattress on the floor. The lounge room where I slept still smelled of cigarette smoke and the sour wine we had drunk before heading out the night before. Through the gap in the curtains I could glimpse a sliver of sharp light that hurt my eyes.

When I first decided to move to Sydney, I thought I would find work almost immediately. I saw myself in my own house. I envisaged friends. Lately I wanted to go home, back to South Australia, but I could go no further than a general desire to return because there was, in reality, no family house to go back to, no work there, just a few friends who would welcome me but would probably not shift or adjust their lives to fit me once again within the fold. I had my sister, who lived with her husband and children in the foothills. They went to our church each week, and talked a language I had never understood, one of Christ and heaven and hell, and absolute rights and wrongs. My mother was in the granny flat at the rear of their house, although she would soon have to go to a home. Sometimes she knew who we were, sometimes she didn't. She sat in the lounge room and called the grandchildren over to sit on her lap, making up different names each time and wondering why they never answered. She was only sixty, but she seemed so much older.

Next to me, Loene stirred, snorting slightly as she rolled to one side, her hand flung out onto the floor; while upstairs Cate slept in the one bedroom, a narrow white chamber with a small window that looked over the back lane.

Outside, in the brightness of the courtyard, I sat on the step and drank a cup of tea, staring at the gate, loose on its hinges from drunks and junkies trying to break in.

We were meant to be inspecting a house for rent in less than an hour, and I knew I should wake the others, but I wanted to shower first, ensuring that I got some of the hot water from the small tank out against the back wall. I tiptoed into the darkness of the lounge, careful not to trip over the edge of the mattress, lurching for the phone as it rang.

Robert — he is becoming that name as I use it more frequently — wanted to meet me at a café in Glebe. I wrote the address down on a scrap of paper, although I knew the place he suggested.

‘What are you up to today?' he asked.

I told him we were house-hunting. ‘It's what we always do,' I said.

‘Whereabouts?'

‘Darlinghurst, Newtown, Glebe.'

He wished me luck. He said he was looking forward to seeing me. ‘Tuesday,' he reminded me. ‘Seven o'clock.'

I hung up and crumpled the paper in my hand.

‘Who was that?' Loene wanted to know, and I blushed as I admitted it was the barman. But she didn't wait long enough to hear my reply. She had pushed past me, closing and locking the bathroom door behind her before I had time to protest, leaving me waiting in the corridor.

When I arrived the following Tuesday, he was already at a table. I could see him through the window, and I felt only a desire to walk away and go home, but I stood there watching him turn the menu over and over, the plastic coating slipping between his fingers. He saw me and stood, beckoning me inside.

The café was crowded, and I had to squeeze past other tables to get to where he waited for me in the corner. As he tried to kiss me on the cheek I pulled back, but he held my hand firmly, drawing me close.

‘How is it all going? The house-hunting? The looking for work?' There was a wetness to his lips that I noticed as he slurped the soup from his spoon, leaving a fine coating of liquid over the metal.

I shouldn't have come. This, too, was not going to be what I had tried to fool myself into thinking was possible. I had never liked him in the bar and being alone with him in a café hadn't changed that. But still I continued to try, hoping that, at some stage in our conversation, a magical transformation would occur, lifting the veil to reveal a man whom I could find attractive.

When I told him I had had no luck with either, he sat back in his chair and wiped at his mouth with a paper serviette.

‘Perhaps I could help with one,' he said.

I didn't see how.

‘I was the personal assistant for the editor-in-chief of
The Australian
. I could introduce you or, at the very least, give him your CV.'

Why, I thought, had he gone from a job like that to working in a bar? Even if he was telling me the truth, an introduction or a CV into the right person's hands still wouldn't be enough. I had no experience. Not even volunteer or student work to suggest that I could possibly be a journalist. It was hopeless, I told him.

‘You can't think like that. Let me help,' he said.

‘Sure,' I replied, wanting only to end the foolishness of the conversation.

He ordered dessert. A cake to share, he suggested, and despite my saying I wasn't hungry, he asked the waiter for two forks.

‘When I first came to Sydney, I knew no one,' he said. ‘It can be a lonely place. I'd like to take you out. I know all the clubs. I can show you some fun.'

He named a few places I had heard of, and I told him I wasn't really into clubs.

‘I'm not a good dancer,' I confessed.

‘What about the theatre?'

I didn't like plays.

I was making it hard, he said, and I knew I was. Each time he tried to prise the door open a little I would pull it shut, unable to bear the thought of letting him in. Now, I wonder at my cruelty, but at the time I thought my behaviour was justified. He was too cocky, too smooth, and therefore not worthy of more gentle consideration.

At the end of our meal he offered to pay, and I let him.

‘Shall we go somewhere else?' he asked.

We stood outside the café, people walking past us on the pavement, cars slowing down in search of a park, the faint sound of music coming from the record shop two doors down. Across the road from us, a couple argued, her in the car, him still on the road. She slammed the door on him and he kicked at the bumper bar. Moments later, Robert asked me if I wanted to come home with him, the directness of his request throwing me off balance.

So, it has come to this, I thought, both surprised that he could think it was possible I would agree and yet also aware that this was, of course, the inevitable conclusion of our evening out. He wanted to have sex with me.

I'm not so sure, I tried to say, but my protest was feeble. If this was the place to which we had been headed, I might as well just give in and go there. Perhaps sex would finally bring the transformation I seemed to want to continue believing was possible, despite all evidence to the contrary.

He had parked his car, a dented old Toyota, in a side street. He cleared papers and cigarette packs and a jumper off the front seat before opening the passenger door for me, his body still stretched across the driver's seat as I sat down, his hand touching my leg. And then he opened his window to the night air as we drove, in silence, towards the apartment blocks that line what has now become a tangle of roads.

A few weeks ago, as I sat on the plane next to the man who I thought was Robert, I wondered at the loneliness of the person I had once been. I found it hard to recall the feeling. Even in the last few months, as it became clear to me that Jason needed to go back to his wife and that I was going to have to let him go with grace, I never felt the complete cold emptiness I had experienced in those early days of living in Sydney.

Robert was still staring out of the curved window, arms crossed, and I shook my head as though trying to dispel the shame of remembering the girl I used to be. It was then that the plane shuddered, suddenly losing altitude. In the aisle, the flight attendant tried to steady the drinks trolley. Her face was turned away from me, but there seemed to be no visible change in her posture, no reason to feel panic, and I leaned back in my seat. Moments later, the plane dropped again and the captain asked all passengers and crew to return to their seats as further turbulence was expected.