Michael didn’t answer my emails, calls or letters in the weeks after I returned. Tony made it clear he was still interested in sleeping with me, in more than that, but I was too confused to take him up on it. Instead, we lived like an old married couple. We cooked and shopped together, went to the movies, and cuddled on the couch in front of bad TV.
One night we went to see Portrait of a Lady. I had loved the book and felt trepidation about both the film and another couple of hours in front of John Malkovich. I groaned when I realised one of the ads I had helped design was going to run in the trailers. A group of happy-go-lucky young people, barefoot, casually dressed, sit down to a pile of oysters on a boat that could be in Haloong Bay, or Lakes Entrance or the Blue Grotto. The vibe is comic, they are gorging themselves on food and drink. As they collapse, one by one, on comes the voiceover: At Freedom, the world is your oyster.
The audience guffawed and there were a couple of boos. A bad joke, I thought, but it’s got their attention. I leant over to Tony. ‘If they don’t like that, wait till they see the next one—“We leave no stone unturned.” ’
He laughed. ‘I do think you may be getting bored.’
‘I know. The tragedy is it’s the most successful ad campaign we’ve done. The less I try, the better things seem to go.’
It was clear that Marion and Tony had been discussing me behind my back. ‘How can you turn down Tony, who is there, for Michael who isn’t?’ she said to me on the phone one night. ‘That’s totally aside from whether Michael behaves himself when he is actually in the same place as you.’
‘It depresses me to admit this,’ I replied, ‘but I sometimes think that it is because he is far away that I love him.’ I paused. ‘I try, but I never get that intense about people who are close to me. Friends who support me. People like you.’
‘You’ll lose Tony,’ she said, ‘if you haven’t already. Will that worry you?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ I said. ‘I’m in this constant state of grief, and I call it Michael. But perhaps if Tony gives up on me I will call the grief Tony. Who knows.’
‘I’d call it Dad if I were you. Have you thought of seeing a shrink?’
I admitted that was a good idea but I never followed up on the name she gave me, or the one Tony gave me a couple of weeks later.
‘You’re sick,’ Tony said after he came home to find me watching some crap show for the fourth night that week. ‘Too much of your emotional life is vicarious or mediated by technology. Computers. Video. Pretend stuff. Let me put this as bluntly as I can: George Clooney is not your boyfriend. You do not work in an emergency ward in a Chicago hospital. A girl like you should be aiming for a real boyfriend.’
‘I’m used to relationships being in my head. And, given the hours I’m working, it’s useful I think like that.’
‘It’s true,’ said Tony. ‘Relationships ’90s style. Very cost-efficient. In the short term at least.’
‘Do you think it’s a government plot?’ I laughed. ‘To bring up a generation so hooked on the fantasy of perfection and endless possibility that we never have the kind of family life that may cut down on productivity? Perhaps it was something they put in the water along with fluoride. And I have to tell you, I have fantastic teeth. No fillings.’
‘We didn’t have fluoride where I grew up,’ Tony smiled toothily at me, ‘yet I also have fantastic teeth. I think this may be another of your dubious theories.’
I’d go down to the beach early every morning and launch myself, swimming further and further each day. For the first couple of weeks I could only make it one way across Bondi, could only get as far as the point where the floor of the ocean moved towards me. Soon after that rocks began, then the seaweed and fish darting in amongst them. Then, one very calm day, I got to the point where I could stand on the rocks beside the wall of the Icebergs pool. Soon I was turning at Icebergs and heading back north again.
Some days I felt so strong I could imagine I was swimming across the oceans of the world: the Indian Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean Sea. Some days the waves were so high I couldn’t see over them. I’d become disorientated and find I was swimming out to sea. While it was more dangerous swimming when the surf was up, it was more exciting as well. The water swelled underneath me and if the waves were particularly high they would drop me quickly back to sea level and there would be a flash of fear, followed by delight.
The repetition of strokes and the endless ripples on the sand below me would lull me as if I were meditating. I was no longer attached to the land, or the city. I was carried by the water, as well as moving through it like the fish I passed, the seaweed trails that traced the movement of currents.
If I didn’t swim I’d walk, as the sun was rising, around the cliffs to Bronte past the Icebergs pool where men had been swimming, literally, among iceblocks every winter since 1929. Walking this path, day after day, I began to relish its particular curves and quirks. The sea was sometimes calm and green, other times rough and grey. Some wild mornings I’d be caught out as the rain came down in sheets and I’d remember people talking about Black Sunday, February 6, 1938, a day when the weather turned and the surf became so huge that three hundred people had to be rescued and five people drowned.
Even if there was no rain I often came home wet from the foam and spray where the waves curled up the cliff back onto the path, heavy as a shower. At the point, the wind always hit with a force so great I could feel the full weight of the weather slapping my face and skin; I could literally lean out against it.
One day, when I was catching the train home in the evening, I saw an accident. There were some renovations being done at Central Station and metal dividers were placed at awkward angles everywhere, funnelling the peak hour push-and-shove in closer together than usual. As I was going up the escalators I looked down to the platform over the surging mass of people to see that an old man had caught his leg in the divider and fallen. He was lying at such a sharp angle I could only assume the leg was broken, but people were walking around him and someone even walked over him. He was a tough old bastard though; as I watched he reached out and grabbed a woman by the ankle. She stopped and looked at him.
‘You,’ he commanded. ‘Help me. I’ve broken my leg.’
I told Tony about it that night. ‘It was living proof of those surveys. The greater the numbers of people around the less likely people are to help each other. Everyone hopes someone else will sort out the problem. No one takes responsibility.’
‘Cities,’ Tony looked sad, ‘can be horrible places. Much as I love Sydney, I miss Melbourne. It’s smaller, things like that don’t happen as much. Did the woman help him?’
‘She did. She cleared the crowd away from him, called over some guards. But I don’t think she would have stopped if he hadn’t reached out for her.’
That night Tony and I drank wine and ate together. He flirted with me and did his best to dispel my bad feelings about Sydney. Yet still I went to bed wondering why it was I had moved from Melbourne, where people would look out for me. I pined for Marion and Raff, phoning them almost daily. We talked about Max, and tried to hold on to the inconsequential chat that bound us together.
The pull between the physicality of Sydney and the love of my friends confused me, just as Melbourne confused me. I didn’t know what to think of it. It was flat, it housed the people I loved, it made me claustrophobic. Other places…other places were where my family was from. Other places were where I found lovers. But there was something else as well. Like Michael, I needed distance to love people.
‘Darling,’ Tony said, ‘ I have something to tell you.’
It was a hot day and we were lying on the sand, drying off from a swim. Tony was scratching his thigh with his left hand, the pressure making his right hand twitch, like when a dog scratches itself. He was like a dog when he came out of the water too, when he shook his curls dry.
‘I think I should call you Fido,’ I said, not listening to what he was saying.
‘I ha
d sex last night,’ he announced with a smug look. I felt as if I had been slapped. I must have looked like it, too.
‘I didn’t mean to upset you,’ he reached out and touched my face. ‘I didn’t think you would care. After all, I’m not Phantom Man, he of the large penis and super brain.’
I burst into tears. ‘Stop it,’ I said. ‘I always hoped that when we were ready, one way or another, we might get together again.’
Tony kissed me on the forehead. ‘When are you going to be ready for that? I’ll be an old man.’
‘You are being cruel,’ I said. ‘You don’t need to rub salt into the wound.’
‘I want to,’ said Tony. He was angry now. ‘I want you to see how bad it is. What you are doing to yourself.’ My being upset, my revealing, too late, that I cared, had pissed him off completely. ‘Did you think I was going to keep finding you attractive the way you’ve been moping around, watching crap television and being miserable?’
‘I thought you liked crap television.’ I was hurt.
‘I was pretending,’ he said.
‘Fuck you. I’ve got the message.’
‘No you haven’t, that is what I’m trying to tell you. You haven’t got the message at all.’ He got up, shook himself free of sand, of me, and walked towards the ramp, away from the beach.
Tony was hardly home after that. Was it the loss of Tony or was it the months without any contact from Michael? Whatever the reason I was like a cat on a hot tin roof. I read magazines because I couldn’t concentrate long enough to read books. Everything seemed magnified, tick tick tick every second of the clock, the phone too loud, the phone didn’t ring enough. I would check the email once, five times, ten times a day. I would check the mailbox; I would check my messagebank at home and at work. I carried a mobile phone. Just in case. If I missed a call it could ruin everything. I might miss out on sex, I might miss out on love and marriage and a family. I was surfing adrenalin, underneath the waters were deep. Give way and I would sink into them. So I stayed up, skimming. Coffee, alcohol, dope, food. Stuff. I had to get stuff into me.
Friends asked me why I was like this and I sympathised. I didn’t understand either. Yes, Michael was smart, and charming, he was enticingly erratic, alluring, out of reach. But basically this thing, it didn’t make sense. I can only come back to this: the sex was extraordinary.
There was this too. Things in my body, in my brain didn’t feel right. It was not just other people who thought I was mad, I was starting to feel mad myself. I was starting to understand that other people didn’t feel anxious all the time. I knew that the rationality of scientific explanation would never do justice to my, or anyone’s, experience of longing, but I began to give up my insistence that what was happening was particular to me. To call what happened chemical was less poetic than calling it love, but it was starting to feel closer to the truth. I’d always called my attraction to Michael chemical, talked about it as if he was a part of my body—so perhaps I might expel him, like a toxin, out of my system.
‘Hi, you’ve called Michael O’Maera. I’ll be in Sydney until mid-July, but leave a message, I’ll be checking in.’
‘Fuck,’ I screamed, startling people around me. ‘You are un-fucking-believable.’ I slammed down the phone, banged my head against the side of the booth. I was standing at LAX, breaking the promises I had made to Marion and Tony not to call Michael when I got here. But they had had nothing to worry about: we’d passed in the air. He had booked a ticket to fly to Sydney the day I left. The past is another country, I was thinking, they do things differently there—that was the line that kept coming into my head. HSC English Lit.; The Go-between. But what the hell that was trying to tell me I didn’t know, or why all I could think about was a line from a book I had studied more than fifteen years before. Reader, I married him, was another one of my favourite lines and that wasn’t making much sense either. I’m one of the best-read people I know but it was clear from the fact that I was standing in an airport concussing myself in a phone booth that it had done me no good. No fucking good at all.
Sitting on the plane on my way to Chicago I watched Groundhog Day for the fifth time. Watched Bill Murray try and figure out how to get things exactly right with the appalling Andie McDowell. Leaving ice-cream on the window ledge, which flavour did she like, should he speak French, should he quote poetry, should they have a snowball fight and how hard should he throw the snowball, how many days and months of days and years of days would he try and figure out how to get things right before he stopped trying and got on with the endless day that was his life.
I couldn’t watch the film any more. I pulled out a book Tony had given me (‘Some light reading for your big fat hippy streak’). It was called The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and it looked like up-market self help. I had read all those. Women Who Love Too Much. Men Who Can’t Love. All that stuff which promised women if they just fixed themselves up everything would be different. But in the book Tony gave me I read a poem that made sense of things.
I walk down the street. / There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. / I fall in. / I am lost…I am hopeless / It isn’t my fault. / It takes me forever to find a way out.
I walk down the same street. / There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. / I pretend I don’t see it. / I fall in again. / I can’t believe I’m in the same place. / But it isn’t my fault. / It still takes me a long time to get out.
I walk down the same street. / There is a deep hole in the sidewalk / I see it is there. / I still fall in…it’s a habit/ My eyes are open / I know where I am / It is my fault. / I get out immediately.
I walk down the same street. / There is a deep hole in the sidewalk / I walk around it.
I walk down another street.
When I got to Chicago I sent Tony an email: ‘Hello my friend,’ I wrote. ‘I’ve begun reading the book you gave me. I think, I hope, I am at stage #3.’
I dragged myself around Chicago where there was an international travel conference. I spent my days in an exhibition centre that was like one long shopping mall. There was no light, no air, just a tomb a mile long with four thousand travel agents. As well as the stalls there was a series of morning focus groups where different travel agents ‘shared’ their global strategies. Buying entire islands seemed a particularly popular ‘strategy’.
‘More control,’ the head of Global Adventures beamed. ‘More flexibility to meet our clients’ needs.’
Freedom organised some seminars of its own for an hour at the end of each day where the company discussed ‘strategies for the new millennium’. There was a lot of talk of branding and the suggestion that the company move into travel guides to compete with the Lonely Planet-style guides. The manager of our Los Angeles office had ideas for a line of travel products: backpacks, little clothes lines, inflatable pillows, foil blankets for those who find themselves stuck in the Himalayas somewhere without shelter. Then there was a long angry session about ethics, and the company’s responsibility towards the groups they subcontracted out to.
‘It is not our problem that the trekking companies we deal with don’t pay their porters properly,’ said Justin, who ran the London office. ‘We’ve all heard stories about people who have given the porters down coats or good boots, only to see them for sale in the markets after they finish the trek. They choose to live this way.’
‘That’s bullshit,’ I said. ‘Poverty is never a “lifestyle” decision, but that’s what you make it sound like.’
Tom, from the Dublin office, joined in. ‘If we are to continue any pretence that we are an alternative company, we have to take the ethics of the people we subcontract to seriously.’
Trish, the owner of Freedom Travel, began to look animated. ‘You’re right, Tom. We are an ethical company. Frankly it is one of our assets, something we should be advertising.’
I knew my days in advertising were almost over. I was selling choice and I didn’t believe it existed. The global melding imagery in my early ads, the questionable
humour of my later ones, those days were over. Smallness and difference were back in, precisely because they were endangered. Being ethical was part of our branding and the idea of making sexy what we should all have been doing without hesitation made me feel sick.
‘Fuck the new millennium,’ I said to Tom over a beer in his hotel room later that night. ‘Fuck Freedom Travel.’
‘What kind of hard-hitting Aussie businesswoman are you, in your cups after only two beers? I thought you sheilas were big drinkers.’
I smiled at him. ‘I’m a hopeless drinker. Always have been. While we’re on the subject, what kind of Irishman are you, drinking lemonade?’
‘I’m a drunk,’ he smiled. ‘So I don’t.’
I hadn’t really given him a second glance before he’d got into the debate this afternoon, but now I was taking more notice—the brown eyes, the curly hair, the wicked accent.
‘Why is it,’ I went on, ‘that the more I have fetishised choice—sold it, packaged it, lived it—the less I’ve actually had?’
‘How much did you have to start with, I wonder? We’re all stuck with our own psyche, not to mention our national psyche. Most choice is marketing, always has been. Take Ireland. Five hundred years as a run-down joke; now we’re sexy. None of it makes much difference though a few of us get richer from it. The coffee’s got better, the Guinness has got worse. UK publishers make a shit-load out of a few Irish writers, but an Irish language writer is lucky to get published anywhere at all. Even if you do have a lot of choice, choice for its own sake is pretty meaningless. It’s depressing.’ He paused. ‘What’ll you do when the conference is over?’
‘Drive,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a ticket to Seattle to worship at the shrine of Kurt Cobain—don’t laugh—and from there I want to drive to LA. I want to do my own personal road trip, and heal a broken heart with wide open spaces.’
‘What’s happened to your heart?’ he asked and I told him, in as few words as possible.
‘How long did you say this has been going on?’ he asked.
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