The Way It Never Was (6 page)

‘Don’t you beat around the bush Chris,’ laughs Anna uncomfortably. I can tell even she, who prides herself in being as direct as possible, knows she’s met her match. Unfortunately, tonight he’s got the wrong dessert, because there’s everything bar the kitchen sink slopping about in here. His gag reflex is going to be very active.

‘So are you two friends from school?’ Chris looks at me as he gets busy pushing the pudding round and round in the bowl with one hand, with the other now clamped back onto my knee. Who’s going to answer this I wonder, where does one begin?

‘Sort of! We actually met before that at a local summer camp,’ volunteers Stan, prompting Anna to pipe up in a rather shrill voice.

‘Err, I didn’t know about this!’
That’s
because
you
have
never
ever
bothered
to
ask
.

‘Yup, Stan and I have a large repertoire of good acoustic songs,’ I embellish. ‘Give us a guitar and we’re away.’ We grin conspiratorially, and in those few seconds of silence, I’m overwhelmed with nostalgia for times gone by.

‘I suppose you’re going to now fill us in,’ sighs Anna. ‘What an interesting anecdote this will be.’

Stan and I met when we were ten years old at a local camp that took place for three weeks every summer. The lure of being able to palm their children off onto a load of enthusiastic youth volunteers was far too good an opportunity for a working parent to pass up. They happily took a chance and packed their kids off everyday without fail, factoring in this three-week camp into their general childcare routine. It could have been a cult for all anyone cared.

Stan was the boy with the spiky hair in the stripy shorts, wearing a t-shirt with Bruce Springsteen’s face emblazoned on the front. I was the girl with the sensible sweater and denim skirt, sporting a hairstyle that I was told made me look like the girl out of
Home
&
Away
(it didn’t). At the beginning, Stan and I barely spoke because you don’t when you are only ten years old. It was that lovely innocent time before irony and sarcasm ruled and you just took everything that was said at face value. There was not one arched eyebrow between us.

The next year I saw Stan I had my rehearsed conversation starter all ready. ‘Group leader Jackie wrote me a letter using different colours for every word.’ It was the first proper thing, I had ever said to him.

He just looked at me with a puzzled expression. ‘Jackie didn’t do that with me. Maybe she got bored.’

‘Oh,’ I replied. ‘Or run out of felt tip pens’. And that was our conversation for that year.

In fact, it was a summer camp friendship until we became teenagers. The year we turned thirteen, I asked Stan if he wanted to be in the same team for the ‘Fight the Tide’ competition, which always struck me as an odd game to play when it was always scheduled just as the sea was going out.

‘Okay,’ came the monosyllabic response and we just started digging. Walking home on our own, we realised we actually lived around the corner from each other in the ‘Chessboard’ area of Broadstairs, where retirement bungalows reign supreme. From then on, Stan waited on the corner every day for me to come down the road.

‘How come I never see you around the rest of the year?’ I asked Stan and he replied in this strangled pubescent voice that he went to a boarding school. We then started to sneak away from the summer camp activities and sit on the slipway where all the sailing boats launched, with my CD player blaring out chart music on these little speakers. They were good times.

‘Well that all sounds very sweet,’ Anna interrupts, as she always does when there’s an anecdote that doesn’t involve her. The spell has been broken but on a positive note, Chris’s hand is now nowhere near me and I’d go as far to say he is looking somewhat bored as clearly, my anecdote is of the ‘you had to be there’ variety. Seeing that it’s increasingly apparent that no coffee – or love for that matter – is going to be made, he now stands up.

‘Anna thanks so much for a delicious dinner.’ He’s got manners, I give him that, as he gives me a peck on the cheek and slips a business card into my hands. ‘Let’s go out again,’ he says in an upbeat way as I walk him to the door. He then leans in close enough for me to smell his trifle breath. ‘But just you and me next time. I’d like to tell you more about my travels.’
Yeah
I
just
bet
you
would
.

I make a mental note not to spend another precious evening politely listening to his anecdotes, only to then worry that by the third date he’ll think we’re soul-mates, when really, it’s because I just never got a word in edgeways. However, instead of saying any of this, I smile and murmur something encouraging, before quickly shutting the door in his face.

Walking back into the kitchen, I bump into Anna who whips out her tea towel with exaggerated fury as though she is going to swipe me with it. ‘Seriously, I don’t know who was more to blame, him or you Kate! That’s four dates I’ve set you up on. Four! All of them disasters! There’s a common denominator here! Don’t you want to meet anyone?’

Feeling like a sullen teenager, I steal a glance at Stan then sit down in front of the bowl of the congealed mush. Perhaps Anna has a point. Perhaps, one of these days, I can just go with it and see where it goes. The trouble is that as soon as I get the inkling it could lead to anything, I think of another man who is right now ten thousand miles way and I press pause. He’s the reason I don’t have a boyfriend. He’s the reason I don’t want a boyfriend. And the problem is, if I failed to separate the fantasy from the reality for the time we were together, cut to the present day and he’s now sat firmly on a pedestal in my head with a dry ice machine pumping away, becoming more perfect with each passing year. Whatever fate has in store, I’ve got more than just your average baggage.

CHAPTER 6 -
THE ROMANCE

To put it as eloquently as I can, Joe was the big love of my life – ‘the one’, the man who had ended my quest to find ‘it’, the person who made me realise why Michael Bublé had a thriving career, and why the Hallmark Channel was the TV of choice for people wanting soft-focus afternoon movies where everything ended happily. The fact he was and is the only man I think I have ever truly been in love with puts him into a special category of his own. And since he lost touch with me, not once in all this time have I touched on the giddy feeling I felt in a hostel over ten thousand miles away from home. In fact, the only proof I have that he once existed are a couple of photos and the two gifts he gave me – a cheap plastic model of the Opera House and a second-hand copy of
The
Alchemist
that had been knocking around the hostel all summer, the one that smelt faintly of wee. They were hardly the Crown Jewels.

Not that what we had was perfect, I mean, even in the depths of my infatuation I knew that. Never once did he refer to me as his ‘girlfriend’, or take me out on a proper date. He never so much as made me a cup of tea or forked out for birth control for that matter. Instead of moving out into a flat, Joe wanted to stay in the hostel, which made for a love life that consisted of missionary position on a bottom bunk behind a sarong. It wasn’t classy, it wasn’t private – in fact, much of the time it felt downright grubby.

However, despite the lack of five-star treatment, what Joe did do was make my heart positively explode with a feeling that I interpreted as something that I had a finite time to try and keep hold of. I believed that if I poured all my affection, my wit, my energy into this person then I would earn the title of ‘girlfriend’ and it might just develop into a lasting relationship. How wrong I was.

Up until that point, I had contented myself with never having to embark on something serious with a guy, as the option of saying no was more preferable with friends like Stan around. You see Stan had this calm and contained air about him that made me feel as though I could just be myself. I spent years using him as a benchmark while his love life eclipsed mine – that is, until I went ten thousand miles away. Suddenly, my old friend seemed very far away and a new me emerged wanting to be a contender.

The day I met Joe, I’d only been in Sydney two hours, although given how tired I was and how badly I smelt, it already felt like two days. I was lethargic from sitting on my arse on the train from Perth to Sydney, having discovered halfway across the Nullarbor desert that I had misunderstood the timetable and it was not a two-day journey but a three-day one. The train hadn’t been so terrible at first. I sat and contemplated the adventure I’d just had travelling around Western Australia on a three-week tour that wasn’t dissimilar to the one I’d done a few weeks earlier in New Zealand. I basically spent the majority of time sitting on a bus with a bunch of strangers for hours on end, only getting up when I needed the loo or was persuaded by the tour guide to take part in some random activity. When I wasn’t eating sausages on the never-ending highway cooked by a perspiring guide whose foundation kept sliding off her face in the heat, I was obliged to whittle yet another didgeridoo. I was building up quite the collection.

I then started the train journey to Sydney and any good intentions to contemplate the infinite soon petered out, only to be left with proper cold hard boredom. Yes, three full days of staring at mainly desert all day, combined with sleeping upright in a chair watching
Mr
Bean
episodes on a loop, this so-called ‘journey of self discovery’ had become mind numbingly dull. I was also slowly coming round to the crushing realisation that I needed to do a little bit more on the backpacker circuit than see the sights. I needed to make some money, fast.

On some random stranger’s recommendation at Central Station, the bus dropped me off at Coogee beach, right outside the ‘Sun of a Beach Bar’ café, where I got myself a coffee while I worked out my bearings. Having then staggered up the hill for as long as I could with a stupidly heavy backpack that I never usually wore, I happened across a large three-storey hostel called ‘CoogeeView’.

I was put into room number seven, the all girl dormitory at the front of the hostel, a really narrow room lit by strip lighting, with a large balcony at the end with (very partial) sea views. In addition to the usual assortment of backpackers passing through, the long-term regulars were Anna, who was the only one who’d managed to secure herself a single bed (courtesy of a broken bunk), a solemn girl called Hillary who just read self-help books all the time, a jolly Irish girl Tracy who responded with ‘grand’ to everything and Liv who said the ‘c’ word. A lot. After a while, there was no place else I wanted to be.

Being the only room in the hostel with its own telly, not surprisingly we started to find random boys hanging out there to flick through the channels for European football and smoke cigarettes on our balcony. There was Stuart who had a tongue piercing and a crush on Hillary who was too busy reading
Men
Are
From
Mars
to notice. There was another guy called Gazza who coincidentally I had been on a tour in Perth with but had barely said two words to. There was a man who went by the name of his favourite football team, ‘Man-U’, who looked like someone straight out of
South
Park
. And then there was Joe, my first impressions of him being that he was cute but quite short, with eyes that were a little too close together. I also remember thinking he would be better looking without his long hair, that judging from its impeccable condition was clearly his pride and joy in a ‘Samson’ kind of way.

However, what Joe lacked in height, he made up for in confidence – buckets of it – so much so that I, along with the rest of the hostel, was completely bowled over by his charisma. It wasn’t before I found myself joining everyone else sitting on the balcony, hanging onto his every word as though he was Justin Bieber and we were his ‘Beliebers’.

‘It was a Monday, no wait, maybe it was Tuesday, no I’m right first time, Monday,’ he would ponder, as though we had all the time in the world to listen – as the idle buggers we were, we err, did.

Initially, I assumed Joe liked Anna. She was the one girl who I’d yet to get to know properly, as she seemed more interested in talking to the boys than making friends with the likes of us girls. I’d often come across her and Joe whispering conspiratorially on the benches outside, or she’d be flirtatiously putting her arms around his waist while he stirred his pot noodle in the communal kitchen. With looks to kill, Anna had already bagged herself a fair few men in the hostel – and courtesy of one fling, a lovely Rolex watch that, having pawned, was now tiding her over for the rest of her travels.

Then one day, Joe and I were the only people in room seven. I had just got back from my first day waitressing at the Sun of a Beach Bar, still in shock at having a job that required me to do some actual work. Despite being tired, I agreed to sit with him on the balcony and found myself enjoying this effortless banter that went back and forth. I can only liken it to how it always was with Stan at home. Then, before I knew it, a whole hour had gone and with my roommates due back any minute, he leant forward and kissed me – not particularly well I might add – but with half a pint of tepid boxed wine inside of me, he seemed like a sex god. Okay, he still had that ponytail but surely that - and the kissing technique - was something I could work on, right?

After that, Joe was all I thought about, day in day out. At work, I’d absent-mindedly make coffees for those wanting cold drinks and juices for people wanting smoothies. Bumbling my way through the day, I would count down the hours until I saw him back at the hostel, only for him to give me another kiss tasting of beer and fags, and regale me with funny stories about bungee jumps or skydiving that went on for hours. And that’s how it continued: Me, working my butt off at the café and cleaning the hostel at the weekends – him, with a daily routine that consisted of going to the beer garden at the pub, then coming back to the hostel via the kebab shop to see who had thrown a sickie that day.

However, while I was busy asking people if they wanted sugar in their cappuccino, Joe seemed to be in no hurry to find work, as he was in between banking contracts and was waiting for a new one to start. I went along with it, suppressing my irritation at him only knowing the day of the week by the drinks deals at the bar, or telling me that money didn’t matter while sponging off the rest of us.

In the months that we lived and worked in Sydney, I want to say that I made the most of memorable events and sightseeing, but to be honest I totally took it for granted. I figured there would always be another opportunity, another chance, another outing, so never mind New Year by the Opera House, coffee in The Rocks quarter, the Crowded House Concert or the ferry trip over to Watsons Bay. Even on sunny days, I was happy to stay in the hostel with Joe doing whatever he wanted to do, namely watching action films with lots of sequels, or sitting on the balcony and listening to him play over and over the same two rifts of ‘Free Falling’.

Instead of taking my general apathy as a huge warning sign, with no one really knowing me that well to tell me off, I dared to go there, my attitude being, ‘see what happens’. Low and behold, I found myself completely and utterly infatuated. Quite frankly, I was miserable with it.

Looking back, there were obvious warning signs that the relationship wasn’t really definable in any way shape or form and wasn’t based in reality. There were conversations, where under the influence of lukewarm chardonnay, I would offer to stay out there while he worked out his contract, only for him to immediately dismiss the idea as though it was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard.

‘Err, no Kate. My destiny is set, you know that,’ he’d say, employing this kind of Paolo Coelho speak that dominated every conversation at the hostel, what with that dog-eared copy of the
The
Alchemist
that was making the rounds. This book prompted one and all to talk about ‘dreams’, ‘treasure’, ‘paths’ and ‘signs’ – or in my case, it made you interpret quotes about wanting things and the universe conspiring you to achieve it, as though it was personally aimed at you. It turns out the universe was doing no such thing.

After a year of communal living and more lost flip flops than I knew what to do with, I decided that enough was enough and I had to go and see some more of Australia. Even though I had secured myself some time off work, Joe didn’t want to come, nor did he stop me from going. In fact, he positively encouraged it, which only served to make me even more heavy hearted and distracted. Meanwhile, Anna stayed behind at the hostel, as did Liv, as they were busy squirrelling away their pennies and giving each other filthy looks on a daily basis.

At first, it was okay being away from Sydney as I loved the whole feeling of moving from A to B, physically putting some distance between me and hostel life. It wasn’t long though before I was going backwards in my head, because there is something rather addictive about being able to tell the same story over and over again to a different crowd. For the first time in a long time, I phoned Stan for no other reason than I just wanted to hear his voice, to have that familiarity that I didn’t have with these new friends.

To my surprise, Stan was a little curt down the phone. ‘You’ve not replied to any of my emails. I even phoned your hostel a few times.’ Currently single, it turns out that he was in need of some TLC too his pride wounded, having found his girlfriend, Diana, in bed with the same mechanic who’d serviced her car. Having told me the sorry tale from start to finish, punctuated by me intermittently making noises of sympathy and avoiding the obvious double entendre, we were both then quiet. I didn’t really know what to say to make him feel better as I was feeling pretty crap myself.

‘You will come home, won’t you?’ he asked, a question so strangely out of step with his usual patter, it then occurred to me that Stan must seriously have the blues as he sounded like he was missing me. Hanging up, I made a mental note to send him a few more postcards.

For three long weeks, I travelled around on buses with no air con, keeping the company of strangers whose contact details I wouldn’t be asking for – in stark contrast to the previous trip where I’d get someone’s email if they so much as asked me for directions. Like I had been in Sydney, I was apathetic to a tee, rushing through all the Australian landmarks as though I was at some enormous shopping centre ticking things off a list. Climbing Ayers Rock, carving out
yet
another
didgeridoo, crocodile watching in Darwin, sailing on the Great Barrier Reef, snorkelling on the Whitsundays – all these just became things I had to do before I could get back to Sydney. I don’t know what exactly happened or over what period of time, but it wasn’t long before I had this horrible realisation that it wasn’t about my travels anymore. It was about Joe.

‘I didn’t expect you back so soon Katie Kate. You’re infatuated with him aren’t you?’ Liv asked me as we were dangling our feet in the bathing pool with the sun frying our epidermal layer.

I just didn’t have the heart to tell her that there is absolutely no point in travelling if you are distracted, as you really don’t see anything at all. Having returned to CoogeeView to find my bed in the all girl dorm given away to some girl with super hairy legs, I was now living at another backpackers down the road as I decided against staying in a sixteen-person mixed dorm. Clearly, I was tiring of communal living by now and was starting to crave an en-suite bathroom.