So much water. By the end there was only water.
‘If you think you are drowning,’ I replied, ‘imagine that I am there beside you, holding your head up so you can breathe.’ Despite the fact that he had spent the last few years in that state of panic drowning can induce, grabbing at me when he was desperate, almost taking me down with him.
That Christmas Michael came back to Sydney to see his family, as he always did.
‘Are you nervous about seeing me?’ I wrote.
‘Maybe,’ he answered. ‘A bit. We can cross that bridge when we come to it.’
He asked me to a Christmas party but then was uncomfortable having me in the room. He spent much of the night talking to women who flirted with him, their hands placed flat and proprietorial on his chest as they talked intensely to him. I wondered if they thought, like I had once, that they were special to him. As I watched him that night he at last seemed ordinary to me. As he had got older he had become thinner, frailer and that was how he seemed: insubstantial, feeding off women’s admiration in an attempt to fuel himself, puff himself up.
I felt light. His dismissiveness didn’t hurt. I had expected it, I realised, because in our final emails we had finally developed a real intimacy, and that was something he could never abide. The betrayal of our last months of friendship finally made me lose all respect for him. This is something I did come to understand over those years. That friendship was the most important thing of all.
I left the party early and he saw me out then tried to kiss me. I turned away from him. ‘Can I come by tomorrow night?’ he asked and I said yes. There was something I needed to do.
After he arrived at my flat the next evening we went for a walk on the beach. ‘I have offered again and again to come to Los Angeles and you have never told me why you didn’t want me to come,’ I said.
‘That’s a bit intense, isn’t it?’ he said.
‘I don’t even want to any more,’ I said, ‘I just want you to answer the question I’ve been asking for years. Why didn’t you want me to come to Los Angeles?’
He cocked his head, quoted Hemingway. ‘Oh Jake, we could have had such a damned good time together.
’ And at that moment I saw clearly what others had seen for years, what Michael himself had told me more than once—that he was incapable. The relief, of seeing clearly, of understanding, washed over me like a wave of joy.
He sat staring at the water for a time. ‘You know, whenever I’m sitting at Bondi at night, looking across to the lights on the other side of the bay, I feel sad.’ He turned back to me. ‘I suppose that doesn’t answer your question.’
I slept with him that night, to see if it was true, that I had been released, and it was. So many times when I had been with other men, or simply talking to friends, living my life, I had drifted off into another world, the world where Michael and I made love. Now that I was with him I just wanted to be alone, with the sound of the surf.
At one point he moved up behind me, crossed his arms around my breasts and pulled me towards him, kissing the back of my neck. A moment while he slept when he was tender. I lay there and felt his heartbeat, and his breath, against my back. I watched as the sea mist coiled in through my window like a fat white snake. It comforted me, the solidness of the air here, in this suburb I loved. It was practically stroking me.
There was a morning two weeks later when the sky was heavy and grey, the water the colour of steel. It was cold on the beach, not like summer at all. It was a relief to dive into water that was warmer than air and I cut through the Bondi surf as quickly as possible so I could warm up. I swam to the Icebergs then back again. Just as I was about to enter the rock pool and get out of the water Michael swam past me in the other direction. If I’d reached out I could have touched him. He moved through my space, past me, as I had so often dreamt him doing. It was as if I was dreaming him still. Back on the land, where the light was hard and things were solid, I never saw him again.
So that is my story. Water runs through it. So do dreams and seasons and light. There is Hollywood and blood; once, twice, many times. There is family and friends. ‘Seinfeld’ ended shortly before the last time I slept with Michael and the last episode was, appropriately, a disappointment. There are beatings and police, earthquakes and fires and, at the end, the death of a princess. There is the World Wide Web and planes connecting lovers and family together. There is also the fantasy that we live in a global village and distance makes no difference. It does make a difference, I learnt. Distance makes all the difference in the world.
What I can say is, ‘This is what happened to me in the nineties.’ I suspect that some of the things that happened to me are not so different from things that happened to other people. My story is neat in another way as well. There is a wedding. Just like in all those novels I used to read.
‘Catherine?’ Finn called me around ten p.m. I was up, watching the news. It was the night of the Sydney hailstorms on April 19, 1999. I was to find out later that they destroyed twenty-eight thousand house roofs and sixty thousand cars. Not that I knew all the statistics when Finn rang. All I knew then was it had started with a sound like thunder that built to a roar. The roar engulfed the flat, the suburb and the city, as hail clattered and smashed into metal and asphalt and tiles. After it was over I ran outside, along with everyone else, to see piles of hailstones the size of tennis balls and bigger.
‘Guess what?’ I said. ‘There has been this amazing hailstorm that’s practically wiped out the city. Hail the size of footballs. I’ve never seen anything like it.’
‘I rang you,’ Finn said. ‘It’s me that gets to say “Guess what?” Any damage?’
‘Not to me.’
‘Good,’ he paused. ‘Guess what? Anna and I are getting married in July. I want you to be my best man.’
The gathering of the clans was held on a rooftop in Manhattan. For both Finn and Anna it was the first time their scattered and various families had come together in the one space. There were mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, stepfathers and mothers, half-brothers and stepsisters. My mother flew in from Adelaide with her third husband and one of his four daughters. My first father travelled from Paris with his second wife and three sons. My second father came in from Bangkok, with his third wife and her children.
Anna’s parents had divorced some years before and they paced opposite sides of the rooftop, eyeing each other warily. Anna’s sisters had come from Chicago and Los Angeles. Her Italian relatives on her father’s side were all there, enjoying themselves despite the unconventional nature of the affair. Food was piled metres high: fresh salmon and salads, chicken, caviar and beef. There were cakes, pastries and melted chocolate to dip the strawberries in, strawberries that were as large as mandarins, but sweet, none the less. It was a hot evening but just before the guests arrived buckets of rose petals were strewn on the concrete. Finn’s contribution had been to place waratah—God knows where he found them—at regular intervals along the roof wall.
I had never seen Finn so nervous. I stood by him as he waited for Anna to arrive. ‘Do you think I’m mad?’ he asked. ‘To do this surrounded by the wreckage of so many marriages?’
‘Not mad. Brave. You two are right for each other. You have taken longer to make your choice than these guys did first time around. You’re practically ancient compared to all of them when they first got married.’
‘Less ancient than you. And less fat.’
‘But so much more mature.’ I kissed him.
The ceremony was simple and afterwards there were speeches. We all had our turn and when I had mine I read a poem by Raymond Carver:
And did you get what
You wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
Beloved on the earth.
It was the solstice and the twilight lasted till after ten. Once it got dark we lit tea light candles between the warat
ahs. Everyone began to dance drunkenly, as they always do at the end of weddings. That part of the evening is inevitable and awkward, but as I watched my family moving among and around each other I felt a certain pride that despite living all over the world, despite history, we had all known this was important. Had all managed to be here, in this one place at the one time to watch Finn build a family of his own. It was that night I decided to move back to Melbourne. To move closer to the people that loved me most.
‘It took so long,’ Ruby sighs melodramatically. Taunting me. ‘I thought grownups got smarter.’
‘People do learn as they get older,’ I reply. ‘It just always, always, takes longer than you’d like.’
‘Anyway, it’s a happy ending,’ Ruby says. She is lying on her back, on the bed, arms spread out. ‘With the wedding, and sense of resolution and so forth.’
‘Yes.’
It has been a long day, what with wading back to our hotel to find it was sodden, then moving our things to a hotel that hadn’t flooded. The rain has receded, leaving Madurai like a steam bath.
We are lying together on a king-size bed in the luxury of our new airconditioned hotel. It has cable television and we have BBC news on in the background. It is the first time I’ve watched television in three months, and three months is the longest time I’ve been away from it for fifteen years.
‘So what stage are you at now?’ Ruby asks.
‘Stage four,’ I say. ‘I walk around the hole.’
‘You mean you don’t have sex,’ Ruby laughs.
She’s right. I’ve avoided it for more than two years now.
‘You’ve got to get to stage five,’ Ruby says, doing her theatrical thing, talking to me in an even, pleasant voice, like some kind of new-age guru. ‘You’ve got to walk down a different street.’
‘You’re a dork,’ I say. I look at the cable channel guide.
‘Let’s watch Groundhog Day. It’ll be my eighth time.’
‘It’s an old film, isn’t it?’ Ruby says. ‘1993?’
‘1993 is not old,’ I say.
‘In seven years every cell in your body has regenerated,’
Ruby says. ‘There is not one part of you that is around now that you had in ’93. Not one little cell or one bit of mitochondria. Cool, huh?’
‘Cool.’
We both turn back to the TV. ‘Look at that,’ we both say at once, because the image on the screen doesn’t make sense. One of the towers of the World Trade Center is on fire and the other has a plane heading straight towards it.
‘That looks bad,’ she says.
‘It does. But there is a world of time for bad news and we are only travelling together for a short time more. Let’s turn off the TV.’
We do. Ruby swigs on her beer. ‘Do you still love Michael?’
‘He’s just a story now. Some things I’ve told you probably aren’t even true, you know what memory does to things.’
‘So, is there room for someone else?’ Ruby asks.
‘There is room,’ I say, my chest feeling tight. I’ve wanted this conversation but now I can feel my panic descending. I need time to think. More time.
‘Would it ruin your story if you found love again?’ Ruby rolls from her back onto her stomach, wriggles towards me on the bed. She puts her head on her arms and looks at me and it is like the two of us are lying beside each other on a towel on a beach on a hot Bondi day. She smiles at me, mischievous.
‘You’re flirting,’ I say. ‘And I think my story’s narrative structure requires me to stay single.’
‘I know we clash,’ she goes on, ‘but the way I see it we rub up against each other because we spark.’ She pauses for breath, a bit nervous. ‘So, would it really ruin your story,’ she repeats, ‘if you fell in love with a friend? Would people say you had sold out by giving the heroine a person to make her even happier? Rather than allowing her to struggle on, independently, bravely, having found herself etcetera etcetera.’
‘I suppose I could live with their disappointment,’ I say after a while, in a sweat.
She smiles at me again, teasing. ‘I could teach you those things we talked about at dinner that time. Sexy lesbian things. Those things you couldn’t imagine.’
Suddenly I am having no problem with my imagination at all. I imagine my fingers inside her, the intense heat of her, the way her cunt clenches at my hand as if she wants to take me all in. I imagine how very wet she is and how silky that feels. Thinking of this, I am beside myself. I am in myself.
She is so close now that we are almost kissing, and I find that I am having trouble thinking of saying anything to her, of doing anything but kissing her. So that’s what I do. I lean forward towards my beautiful friend, my gorgeous friend, and kiss her. On her broad mouth. On her soft hard full lips.
‘Are you sure?’ she is breathing the words right into my mouth.
I hesitate for a second because I don’t know where this is going. Then suddenly it occurs to me that not knowing is good. All I do know is my travels, this is where they have brought me. I say to her: ‘I am.’
Acknowledgments
‘Late Fragment’ from All of Us: the collected poems of Raymond Carver, published by Harvill Press. Copyright © Tess Gallagher. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.
‘The Cinnamon Peeler’ by Michael Ondaatje, The Cinnamon Peeler. Picador, 1989. Copyright © Michael Ondaatje.
‘California’ by Joni Mitchell, Blue, Reprise Records, 1971. Copyright © Joni Mitchell.
Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of material in this book. However where an omission has occurred, the author and publisher will gladly include acknowledgment in any future editions.
Thanks to my agent Jenny Darling for support, editorial feedback, friendship, and, for a few months there, some office space. Thanks to my publishers at Text Publishing, Patty Brown and Michael Heyward. Thanks to Amanda Brett, for jokes and editing.
For a cover and friendship, thanks to Chong Weng-Ho.
Thanks also to my dear friends and colleagues who endured endless conversations about, and gave much needed feedback on, Geography, most particularly Tony Ayres, Kate Cole-Adams, Emily O’Connell, Jane Gleeson-White, Greg Hunt, Daniel Joyce, Kim Langley, Christine McMahon, Helen Murdoch, Meredith Rose and Leigh Small. Thanks too to all of the writers I have worked with over the years who allowed me to edit them, and talk about the writing process.
For help with obscure (well, obscure to me) facts, thanks to James Button, Saul Cunningham, Gideon Haigh, Adrienne Nicotra and Matthew Stephens.
For providing a place to write, thanks to Peter Bishop and Inez Brewer, and the Varuna Writers’ Centre.
And finally I would like to thank Virginia Murdoch for many, many things—including her editorial work and IT know-how.
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