Still, maybe this was going to be a good year. He stood up and stretched, slipped his thongs back on and started towards the bedroom door.
Tap-tap, tap-tap. Josh turned, looked at the window.
That bloody tree, it was going to smash into this place one day. He’d get on to cutting it back tomorrow.
Lou
Graduation Day
1 November, 2005
If Lou’s parents mentioned her brother Rob’s medical degree one more time, she was going to whip them with the tassel of her mortarboard.
‘Is your brother a heart surgeon or something?’ Gretchen hissed in her ear as Lou’s mum, just a few feet away, told the bored-looking parent of another graduate that the teaching department’s shindig was not a patch on the one over at the medical school.
‘Better class of finger food, if I’m being honest,’ Annabelle was saying, her English voice just one notch too loud for the setting – the glass annexe of the university’s great hall. ‘Not so . . . fried.’ As she said this, her eyes were passing over the tray of mini spring rolls being offered to her by a stoned-looking undergrad in a greying white shirt.
‘No,’ Lou said. ‘He’s training to be a GP. My mum’s never been so excited about anything. Ever.’
Lou’s dad Brian was on Lou’s other side, also talking about Rob, but with less focus on the canapés, more on the convenience of having a doctor in the family. He was telling Gretchen’s dad, a crumpled-looking ex-rocker in a biker jacket and five days of stubble, that it was ‘boys like my Robert’ who were going to save them all.
‘Cancer’s going to get sixty per cent of us, you know, um . . .’
‘Zeke,’ said Gretchen’s dad, looking past Brian’s right ear as if searching for someone less depressing to talk to. ‘I’m Zeke.’
Gretchen hissed at Lou, ‘He’s already had it. Throat. Too many ciggies. Speaking of which . . .’ She started rummaging in the shoulder bag she was wearing over her black graduation gown.
Lou groaned. ‘My parents are the most embarrassing people in the world. When will this fucking thing be finished?’
Gretchen widened her eyes and looked around with an exaggerated crane of her neck. ‘Your parents? Look around, love. This place is heaving with the people we’ve been hiding for four years. They’re at peak embarrassing. Today’s the validation of everything they’ve been bloody paying and praying for all our sorry little lives. We’re finally qualified to do something.’
‘Annabelle and Brian haven’t been paying for anything, Gretch; Rob sucked up all of that gravy. Haven’t you seen my student loans?’ Lou put her head on her friend’s shoulder and leaned a little, lifting one of her high-heeled feet off the floor. ‘How do people walk in these, like, all day?’
‘We’ll never have to know, Lou-Lou, we’re teachers.’
‘Darling . . .’ It was her mum, suddenly at her shoulder. ‘Don’t be showing everyone your stockinged feet. I think you can manage a proper pair of shoes for one day.’
Gretchen grimaced at Lou and began to move towards the door, waving her packet of cigarettes behind her back. Lou watched Zeke excuse himself from Brian’s cancer lecture and follow his daughter outside.
Annabelle slipped her arm around Lou’s waist, her fingers just a little too firm on the flesh above the waistband of Lou’s long, flowy skirt. ‘You feeling happy, BB?’
‘Don’t call me that, Mum.’ BB was Lou’s family nickname. Baby Bear. She hated it. Rob, of course, was Bear, the original. ‘I think we can all agree that I’m not a baby anymore.’
I’m being a bitch, she thought. To my mum, on my graduation day.
‘Oh dear.’ Annabelle’s arm tightened a little around Lou’s waist. ‘I’ve upset you again.’
‘Can’t do much right by you, can we?’ said Brian, at Lou’s other side now that his audience had fled.
The three of them stood together, looking around the room at all the other young women (and it was overwhelmingly women) in black, and all the family members holding drinks and eating the deep-fried spring rolls. For a moment, none of them spoke.
And then Annabelle said, ‘I suppose this is it, really, isn’t it?’
‘It?’ Brian wasn’t following.
‘Both of you, off. Gone into the world.’ Annabelle’s voice had dropped back to her ‘real’ English voice, not the one she’d been using on strangers, modelled on that of Princess Di.
The accent was all part of Annabelle’s obsession with reinvention, something she still hadn’t let go of in the almost three decades since she had left northern England in pursuit of sunshine and upward mobility. She’d worked hard to knock the flat northern vowels off her accent, to pick up her dropped H’s. And now here she was, with two children who’d graduated uni.
‘Mum, I’ve been living out of home for a year,’ Lou pointed out, irritated.
‘Yes, but now you’ll get a proper job. Meet someone. Start a real life.’
I’ve already met someone, thought Lou. And I can’t bloody wait to get away from this damn party to see him. Luca would be at the pub in an hour, waiting to see Lou in her cap and gown. He had some ideas about what he wanted to do with that, he’d told her. Luca said things like that. It made her blush. It was making her blush now, thinking about it.
‘Maybe another teacher.’ Brian was getting on board with Annabelle’s vision.
‘Or a deputy head,’ Annabelle added, aiming high, as always.
‘No, darling, they’re a bit too old for –’
‘Dad! Mum!’ Lou interrupted. ‘Can we not? I want to teach children; I’m not husband-hunting.’ She lifted her heels out of her shoes again. ‘This isn’t really such a big deal, you know. In fact, if you want to leave . . .’
‘Leave?’ Annabelle’s voice rose back up an octave. ‘But we’re taking you and Gretchen out for dinner! Rob’s coming too.’
Shit. Lou had missed this arrangement somehow. ‘But I’ve got plans. You know, with my friends.’
‘You can have plans with your friends after dinner,’ her dad said firmly. ‘Your brother has changed his plans to be with us tonight, so it’s the least you can do.’
Lou doubted that Luca was prepared to wait. In the three months they’d been seeing each other, she’d got the distinct impression that if she wasn’t available at precisely the moment he summoned her to his side, she would be swapped out for the next available candidate. And tonight the pubs of Sydney’s Newtown were going to be heaving with young women in the mood to cast off the shackles of parental expectation. Possibly in Luca’s direction.
She pulled free of her mother’s pincer grip and reached into the pocket of her gown for her Nokia. ‘Okay. I’ve just got to make a call.’
As Lou tottered away from her parents she didn’t miss Annabelle sighing to Brian, ‘I told her to cut that fringe before today, didn’t I?’
In the bathroom, Lou tapped away at the numbers on her phone until her SMS read:
Parent problem. Meet you 9.30?
She knew better than to expect an instant reply.
*
It was more like half past ten by the time Lou shoved her way through a thick soup of drinking, yelling twenty-somethings at the Bank Hotel. Her cap and gown were crushed into her canvas backpack, along with the heels she’d swapped for sparkly ballet flats.
‘That’s three hours of my life I’ll never get back,’ Gretchen was yelling into her ear as she was tugged through the crowd behind Lou. ‘And your brother is not hot, you liar.’
‘Had to get you there somehow!’ Lou yelled back. ‘Besides, from what he’s told me lately, you’re really not his type.’ And she pushed on, tunnel vision focused at the back of the pub near the pool table, where Luca could usually be found.
His response to her SMS – K – had only arrived an hour ago and even to Lou’s optimistic, and somewhat tipsy, mind it seemed like a tenuous arrangement.
‘As soon as we find the bastard, I’m out of here.’ Gretchen’s voice was gett
ing hoarser. ‘I’m missing an actual old-school rave to make your graduation dreams come true tonight, friend. A rave with hot DJs.’
‘Fine, I get it.’ They were nearly at the back of the bar and Lou had seen no sign of Luca’s signature bandana.
He was the kind of guy who had a few signatures. The tatty chequered rag tied around his close-cropped hair was one. His battered black mountain bike, which she was almost certain she had spied outside, was another. So was the ever-present Winfield Blue behind his ear or spinning in his fingers. And then there was his cunnilingus technique, which, to Lou at least, was a complete revelation.
Lou and Gretchen stopped by a crop of tall stools behind the pool tables and near the blue-lit entrance to the toilets. The group who’d been using them, sticky drinks in hand, graduation gowns now spun around as capes, were shouting loudly about where to go next.
‘Where is he?’ Lou’s stomach was churning and she felt jittery. She wanted to see him. She wanted him to see her. This was supposed to be a great night. The greatest.
Gretchen hugged her. ‘I’m going, babe. He’s not here, and this’ – she gestured to the heaving mass, pulled a shoe slightly off the sticky floor – ‘isn’t my idea of a good time. Why don’t you come with me?’
‘Nooooo . . . Just another five minutes, Gretch. He’s here somewhere and if you leave then I’m just going to look desperate waiting on my own.’
‘But you are desperate, Lou-Lou.’ Gretchen laughed. ‘Come with me to the ladies, then we’ll have one more look around. But after that, I’m going to the doof.’
To Lou’s frustration, the toilet queue was long, slow-moving and as raucous as the bar outside.
‘This place is so sad-sack,’ Gretchen was complaining. Always cooler than Lou, she had tired of student-filled beer barns just about the time Lou had started enjoying them, preferring obscure raves at deserted warehouses in suburbs too close to Lou’s parents’ house for comfort. But the two of them, tightly bonded from the first terrifying year of teacher training, tolerated each other’s tastes. Up to a point.
Gretchen sighed. ‘There are always some drunken fuckwits having sex in a cubicle.’
The door of one of the five cubicles had remained closed the whole time they’d been waiting. And as they got closer, it became clear that the shuffles and moans and bumps audible even over the churning guitar rock pounding from the bar were not the sounds of someone using the toilet for conventional purposes.
‘We can hear you, you dickheads!’ Gretchen shouted. She banged on the closed door. ‘Go and screw out in the back alley like normal people! You’re holding up the line. It’s unsisterly!’
‘Gretchen, shhh!’ Lou snatched at Gretchen’s arm. Awe and fear mingled in her stomach. ‘They might come out and deck you.’
The door next to the sex toilet opened and the pink-haired girl who came out made a vomiting face at Lou, who was next in line. ‘You might need earplugs,’ she said, moving towards the basins.
Lou shrugged and motioned for Gretchen to go first, but her friend pulled a face and shook her head. ‘I’ll wait.’
The instant Lou slid the lock across the door, she knew who was in the sex toilet; she recognised the particular tenor of the gasps and groans. For a moment, she held her breath. Then she dropped to her haunches and, holding her long hair up and out of the way, peered through the gap between the cubicles.
She saw a pair of men’s shoes facing the toilet. No women’s feet, because, as Lou had already guessed, the girl was standing on the toilet seat. The shoes were beaten-up black Converse sneakers with No Alibi scrawled on them in white-out. Another of Luca’s trademarks.
Lou straightened up, spun around and, still holding her hair back, vomited into the toilet.
When she was done, she wiped her mouth on the back of her hand and kicked the wall between her cubicle and the sex toilet with as much force as a ballet flat would allow, the crash immediately interrupting the moans next door. And then Lou burst out of the cubicle to gulp water straight from the tap. Seeing no sign of Gretchen, she shoved her way through the queue and back out into the bar. The only thing she could think, the only clear thought in her head at this moment, was that she must not see Luca – and he would be coming out of that bathroom door any minute.
She forced herself through the crowd, her breath coming in ragged gasps, her mouth sour and gritty, her face wet with what were certainly tears, even though she wasn’t consciously aware that she was crying.
It seemed that the pub was even more crowded now, that all these people were here, between her and the front door, specifically to block her from leaving this place.
‘Lou!’ She heard Gretchen’s voice calling above the racket. ‘Lou! Stop!’
But she wasn’t stopping, she had to keep going. It became clear that the only way to get through this mass of bodies was to throw herself at it. And so she did. She flung herself into the wall of sweaty people waiting at the bar. And bounced off, in a wave of indignant shouts and spilled drinks.
‘Lou!’ She turned and saw Gretchen, who was looking at her with wide eyes and mouthing, ‘What the fuck?’
And then, just behind her friend, she saw Luca. Standing by the toilet door, he was reaching for the cigarette behind his ear and coolly looking around.
Lou dropped to the floor. It was the only thing she could think to do in that moment: to hide. Heads were turning, looking down now, at the tear-streaked woman with long wild hair trying to crouch in the middle of a crowd.
I want to disappear, Lou thought. I want to vanish. How do I do that?
There were legs all around her, like trees in a forest – if trees uniformly dressed in black skinny jeans. Still squatting, Lou began to waddle towards the bar, where the crowd was thickest.
But far from making her invisible, her duck-walk was attracting attention. ‘What are you doing down there?’ and ‘What the fuck is your problem?’ people were asking as they shuffled out of the way.
‘LOU! Where are you?’
Among the knees and feet Lou could see Gretchen’s blocky graduation heels coming towards her, and behind them the tell-tale black-and-white Converse. Her breath was coming quicker now; she thought she might hyperventilate if she couldn’t disappear.
And then, suddenly, a pair of hands grabbed her shoulders. The grip was firm, but not painful. The hands were lifting her up, and all Lou could think was that any minute now she would be visible, facing the crowd, and she would be eye to eye with Luca, who for three months had been the only thing she could think about, but who had, three minutes previously, been bringing a girl who wasn’t her to earth-shattering orgasm in a toilet cubicle.
The hands pulled her to standing. Lou found herself looking up into a man’s face. He was tall. Pale blue eyes, an amused smile. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked her.
Lou could sense that, behind her, a pair of Converse approached.
So she reached up and put her arms around this stranger’s neck. And she kissed him.
She kissed him like it was her last kiss.
Josh
1 November, 2005
11 p.m.
She smelled faintly of vomit, and her hair was in his mouth.
Josh pulled away from the stranger who was kissing him at the bar, and held her at arm’s length.
She was small, this stranger, with a tangle of long brown hair falling across her face. Her eyes were ringed with smudged black make-up, the edge of her mouth was twitching a little. She glanced quickly over her left shoulder, then focused on his chest, his T-shirt. Well, it was vintage Ramones, who could blame her?
‘What are you doing?’ he asked her, still feeling the pressure of her kiss on his mouth.
‘Hiding,’ she said. And then she looked up into his face. Her eyes were wet, but she smiled.
‘Hiding?’
Just as he asked that, another woman fell out of the crowd and landed on them. She was tall, with one of those interesting haircuts that was long and short at the sam
e time. She was wearing a nose ring and a graduation gown. Students.
‘Lou!’ the woman shouted, because shouting was the only way. To Josh, reeling a little from the remarkable kiss he hadn’t asked for from a woman he’d almost tripped over, the music was almost oppressively pushing on him now. Newtown was proving too confusing to him tonight. And he’d only had two beers.
‘I thought you’d fallen down,’ he said to the stranger, at a normal volume.
She shook her head.
‘Lou!’ the nose-ring woman was shouting. ‘Why are you kissing this . . . T-shirt guy?’ She looked at Josh as if he’d been doing the unsolicited kissing, not her friend. ‘What the hell happened back there? Where’s Luca?’
Josh saw the kisser flinch at the sound of this man’s name. Jesus, he thought. Trouble. And he turned his body away from hers, back towards the bar. ‘Nice to meet you,’ he said, almost under his breath.
‘And you,’ she said quickly, quietly, just as the nose-ring friend pulled the kisser under one arm and away, into the crowd. He heard the tall woman say, ‘Let’s get out of this dump.’
Another strange night. Josh was getting sick of them. He’d only come out because his mate Mick had begged him to be his wingman on an internet date and Josh was curious to see how this new thing worked. It had been almost six months since Sinead, after all, and he was beginning to entertain the idea of what it might be like to be with someone else, for real. To talk to another girl for longer than a messy, drunken half-hour before sex. To kiss another girl, and feel something.
Well, he’d just felt something then, he thought, waving a ten-dollar note at the barman. But it was probably just surprise.
Mick and his date were playing pool, giggling and bumping into each other at every opportunity. Josh scanned the mass of bodies for other familiar faces, friends he’d spotted cruising the graduating class of 2005, who were getting drunk and sloppy all around him.
It was making him feel old. Ancient at twenty-seven.
This was his last drink, Josh decided. He needed to go home. Student piss-ups weren’t really his scene. He was probably two beers away from texting Sinead. Again.
I Give My Marriage a Year Page 2
