Jo nodded. ‘Mm, I think by then I had lost the expectation that it was going to be a linear narrative with any kind of resolution.’
‘See that’s what I have a problem with,’ he said. ‘I like a beginning, a middle and an end. They don’t all have to make sense or tie up neatly, but I have to feel like I’m on some kind of journey.’
She was listening thoughtfully. ‘You’re right, that’s what it is. Maybe it’s because we’re journalists? There has to be a conclusion, the story has to wrap up.’
‘But isn’t that ironic?’
‘Is it?’
‘Well, in real life, which is what we deal with, how many stories are that neat?’
‘Yeah, I guess. But on the other hand, how many real life stories end up with a chorus line of grim reapers singing, “Whoops I did it again”?’
Joe smiled. ‘Just as well we’re not theatre critics.’
‘I’ll drink to that,’ said Jo, taking a sip from her plastic cup. ‘Or maybe not.’
They stood there, surveying the room. Jo mentally compared this mob to the gathering at Belle’s. Talk about a study in contrasts. Everyone here was clearly trying very hard not to look like anyone else, but there was definitely a shared aesthetic. Animal prints were big, one guy was wearing a knee-length giraffe-print coat that was so synthetic Jo would have been reluctant to light a match in his vicinity. And dyed hair was de rigueur; she noted blue-black, purple and green, as well as red, the shade of fake movie blood. Nearly all the girls were wearing tightly laced bustieres, a trend that had obviously passed Jo by. Which was just as well, her bosom was not worth showcasing, unfortunately. One woman had completed her outfit with a cheap nylon tutu, torn black fishnet stockings and big black Doc Martens lace-up ankle boots. Jo suddenly felt a little bland in her tasteful black and camel ensemble.
Joe was watching her. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘we can go now if you like. I think I’ve fulfilled my fraternal duty.’
‘But I don’t want to drag Angie away.’ Jo looked across to where her friend was happily ensconced with a group of the performers. ‘She looks like she’s having a ball.’
Will turned around, seeing them standing alone. ‘Hey, Joe, what’s crackin’?’ he said as he walked over to join them.
‘We’re just watching the world go by,’ said Joe. ‘You know in my day, arty types wore black, head to toe. Didn’t anyone tell these guys the dress code?’
Will shook his head. ‘Have you got used to his lame jokes yet?’ he asked Jo.
She smiled in response. She had the feeling that Will thought they were an item. Not that it mattered terribly. At least he wasn’t suggesting a double date. Yet.
‘So what happens now?’ Joe asked Will. ‘Are you guys going to tour?’
‘Smart-arse,’ said Will. ‘For your information, brother, this performance tonight will help our grant application to develop this site. If we can get council support, plus some arts funding, we can spruce up the place, put on more productions, and start charging admission, which will in turn fund us for longer. We want it to become a place where talent gets the chance to develop . . . something like the Pram Factory.’
‘Oh,’ Joe nodded vaguely.
‘You have no idea what the Pram Factory is, do you?’
‘Can’t say as I do.’
‘It was a groundbreaking performing arts space in Melbourne,’ Jo explained, ‘where David Williamson, amongst others, got his start.’
Will looked impressed. ‘Cute and smart.’
‘You know, Will,’ said Jo, ‘if you call me cute one more time, I may have to kill you.’
‘Loud and clear,’ he winked at her as Angie rushed over to them, bright-eyed, her face all flushed.
‘This is so great!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’m meeting all these people, making all these contacts . . . These guys have got a million things going on, my head is spinning . . . Oh,’ she said, noticing their cups, ‘I might grab a drink. Is that okay, you’re not in a hurry?’
Jo opened her mouth to speak but she bit her lip instead. She didn’t want to burst Angie’s bubble.
‘Oh, you do want to get going?’ said Angie, reading her expression.
‘It’s only that I’ve got an early start tomorrow,’ Jo winced. ‘You know how Saturdays are crazy at work.’
‘That’s okay,’ said Will. ‘You don’t have to go, though, do you, Ange?’
‘I guess not,’ she said.
‘Yeah, hang around, you’re amongst friends,’ he assured her.
Angie actually blushed, but it was with a kind of schoolgirl pride. She’d found her tribe.
‘How will you get home though, Angie?’ Joe asked.
‘Same way I got here. On the bus.’
‘Where do you live?’ Will asked her.
‘Ashfield.’
‘No worries, a bunch of us live out that way, we’ll share a taxi.’ He thrust his hand at his brother. ‘Thanks for coming, Joe. I’ll call you for a drink soon.’
He suddenly swooped to plant a kiss on Jo’s cheek. ‘See you again, no doubt.’
Yep, he definitely thought they were together.
They walked outside into the relatively fresher air.
‘We’ll probably get a taxi easier up on Oxford Street,’ Bannister suggested.
But Jo had other ideas. ‘Would you mind if we walked for a bit?’ she asked. ‘It’s not really that far, and I’m enjoying this fresh air too much.’
‘It’s okay with me.’
They turned the corner and headed down a narrow street, past a row of tiny terraces.
‘Can I ask you something?’ Jo said after a while.
‘Sure.’
‘What are you doing here?’
He looked a little confused. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘I mean, what are you doing here, in Sydney, working at the Trib?’
He still looked confused. ‘Well, you know I came back because of my dad.’
‘Yeah, I realise that brought you back to Australia. But why are you working at the Trib?’ she said. ‘You could sell your stuff to any paper, any publication for that matter, and you could work from the Blue Mountains, be with your dad all the time.’
‘Well, that’s still on the cards,’ he admitted. ‘But Leo had me committed before I’d really worked out what I wanted to do.’
‘Mm, Leo is certainly a force to be reckoned with.’
‘I don’t mind,’ said Joe. ‘I figured the pressure would be a lot less at the Trib. And I don’t really want to write about the war any more.’
‘But how can you ignore it when you’ve been so close to it?’
‘I’ve been so close to it for so long, I needed to get away. And Australia’s a good place to do that. You can ignore it, because everyone else is.’
Jo was frowning. ‘I don’t know how you can stand it. It’s like my sister and all her friends – they’re so frustrating, living in a bubble out in the suburbs. They don’t know what’s going on in the world.’
‘I think you’re being a little hard on them,’ said Joe. ‘It’s the same everywhere you go. When you travel a lot you realise that everyone, wherever they come from, only sees the world from their own limited perspective. We’re a lot less of a global village than we think.’
‘So that’s why we have foreign correspondents,’ Jo insisted, ‘to open our eyes to what’s going on around the world.’
He shrugged. ‘Sometimes I wish I didn’t know, or at least didn’t know so much.’
‘How can you say that as a journalist?’
‘It’s because I’m a journalist that I can say it. The things I know, the things I’ve seen . . .’ He shook his head. ‘I’m not convinced it’s made my life any better.’
She looked at him. ‘What kinds of things specifically?’
Joe thought about it. ‘Well, take Iraq . . . the level of mayhem that’s going on around you every day, it’s hard to describe. The tension is incredible. Everyone’s scared, not just the civilians, the so
ldiers as well, that’s why so many civilians end up getting killed. A car speeding down the street, ignoring warning shots, is probably just some guy terrified he’s been caught out after curfew, and he ends up getting shot because the soldiers think he’s a suicide bomber.’
‘You saw stuff like that happen?’
‘Sure.’ He took a deep breath. ‘One of the worst things I ever experienced was in Karbala, back in 2004. It was a holy day for the Shiites, there was something like a million people in the town at the time. We were out on the street this day when a bomb went off, not that far from where we were standing. We started to run towards it . . . that probably sounds stupid, but it’s an instinctive reaction, you want to see if you can help. But then another bomb went off, about ten metres in front of us. It wiped out everyone ahead. Everyone . . .’ He was staring into space, as if he could see it now. ‘We were all splattered with blood and bits of flesh . . . there were parts of bodies lying all around us. It was like standing in the middle of hell.’
Jo listened in stunned silence, her stomach clenched. ‘How do you live with something like that? It must affect you . . .’
He nodded. ‘Can’t stand fireworks.’
‘Fireworks?’
‘Yeah, close your eyes and listen sometime, they sound like mortar going off. An exhaust backfiring, sirens, a car tearing around a corner too fast . . . they can all scare the crap out of me.’ He paused. ‘My dad was never able to sit near the front window in a restaurant, he’d seen too many get blown out in Vietnam.’
Jo was confounded. ‘I realised it must be hard for the soldiers, coming home, but I thought journalists were more . . . sheltered, I guess – at least from the worst of it.’
‘We are,’ he said. ‘We don’t have to be out on the streets, for one thing, if we don’t want to be, or when it gets too dangerous.’ He paused. ‘But in an urban war like Iraq, you can’t always avoid it.’
She looked up at him. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know what I was talking about before.’
‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘But maybe now you understand why I don’t want to go back?’
‘And I’m starting to wonder how you ever managed to stay so long.’
He shrugged. ‘You go back and forth, you can’t stay longer than a couple of months at a time. I tried once and it did my head in. No, I reckon three months is the limit.’
‘I thought you said you hadn’t been home for a couple of years?’ Jo asked.
‘Yeah, but I wasn’t in Baghdad the whole time, though I was still working. I based myself mostly in London in between.’
‘Why London?’
‘I was seeing someone there,’ Joe said simply. ‘Actually, I was in a relationship.’
‘Oh.’ She was surprised. ‘You never mentioned.’
‘Yeah, we were together nearly three years,’ he said. ‘Sarah was with the BBC, she’s English, she came to Baghdad during the fall of Saddam. She was pretty green then, all gung-ho . . . So of course she was pretty shaken up by the reality. I helped her acclimatise, we got close. Then after the fall, there was a period of relative peace in Baghdad. You could go out to dinner, walk the streets at night. It was the calm before the storm.’
‘What happened to you and Sarah?’ asked Jo. She didn’t want him veering back on to the war till she got the whole story.
‘It petered out,’ he said. ‘When things got worse again, she wanted to get out of Baghdad so she had herself reassigned back to London. She was always at me to give up, take a post in the UK, settle down, but I wasn’t ready.’
‘To settle down?’
‘Partly,’ he said. ‘But mostly I wasn’t ready to leave Iraq for good right then, and I didn’t want to settle down in England, regardless. I always intended to come home.’
‘Did she know that?’
‘I think so, I think I made it pretty clear. She came home with me for a holiday once, the first year we were together. She seemed to like it.’
‘But not enough?’
He looked at her. ‘What do you mean?’
‘She didn’t want to move here, you didn’t want to settle there, is that what ended it?’
He was thoughtful for a moment. ‘It’s never really just one thing, is it? She ended up on a 60 Minutes-type program, so she was away on assignment a lot. We’d meet up whenever our schedules permitted, but we were seeing less and less of each other . . . Like I said, it petered out.’
‘So it was an amicable split?’
‘More or less.’
‘Are you still in contact?’
‘Nope,’ he said bluntly.
He didn’t seem inclined to go further than that, so Jo thought she should probably drop it. Her curiosity wasn’t quite sated, though; she wished men were better gossips.
They had come to Goulburn Street. ‘I guess this is where we part ways,’ said Jo.
‘Why?’ Joe frowned.
‘Well, I go further into the city from here, but you should head off up College Street, right?’
He shrugged. ‘Nah, I’ll see you home.’
She looked at him. ‘Joe, I can look after myself.’
‘I don’t doubt that you can,’ he said, touching her elbow lightly to steer her down Goulburn Street. ‘So what about you?’ he asked.
She frowned. ‘What about me?’
‘Your marriage, how did it end?’
Jo was perplexed. ‘How did you know I used to be married? Don’t tell me you found that on Google?’
‘No, you told me in the elevator,’ he said, watching her. ‘You don’t remember?’
‘No,’ she sighed. ‘I’d like to know what was in that drug. I’ve never blabbed so much of my personal business to anyone.’
He smiled. ‘It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it.’
‘There’s nothing much to say,’ she dismissed. ‘I was too young, it was over before the ink was even dry on the marriage certificate.’
‘That’s the line you gave me in the elevator.’
She glanced at him. ‘It is?’
He nodded. ‘Verbatim.’
‘At least I’m consistent.’
‘Consistently cagey.’
‘I just like to maintain a certain level of privacy.’
‘Yet you don’t mind interrogating me about my personal life,’ he pointed out. ‘What’s good for the goose, Princess.’
‘Did you just call me princess?’
‘I might have.’
Jo wasn’t sure she appreciated the inference. ‘Okay, go ahead, what do you want to know about my three-minute marriage from half a lifetime ago?’
‘Actually,’ he said, ‘if I’m getting a free pass, I’d rather ask you something else.’
She frowned. ‘What exactly?’
‘Promise you’ll give me a straight answer?’
‘I’m not promising anything of the kind.’
He smiled. ‘Okay, I’ll try anyway. Why are you having a relationship with a married man?’
‘Gee, Bannister, don’t beat around the bush, just come right out with it, why don’t you?’
‘I’ve only got one question, I don’t want to waste it.’
‘I thought we decided that was none of your business.’
‘Come on, that’s not fair, I answered everything you asked me. And we’re friends now. You’d tell a friend, wouldn’t you? I assume Angie’s got an opinion about it all?’
‘Which I assume she shared with you.’
‘She defended you, actually.’
Jo looked at him. ‘She defended my relationship with Lachlan?’
‘No, she defended you. Said something about you being too afraid to have a normal relationship.’
Jo felt uneasy, the kind of uneasy you felt when you dreamed you were in a public place with no pants on. ‘Yeah, well, Angie has theories about everything,’ she said, attempting to brush it off. ‘To this day, she believes that Diana didn’t die in the car crash but that aliens abducted her, and now she’s a revered g
oddess in a galaxy far far away.’
‘You ought to write crime novels,’ Joe said when she was finished. ‘You’re very good at red herrings.’
‘Well, you ought to write detective novels, you’re such a snoop,’ she returned. ‘Why are you so interested anyway?’
‘See, now you’re asking me a question and you still haven’t answered mine.’
‘Okay,’ she sighed in defeat. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘What’s the attraction?’
‘To Lachlan?’
‘To married men.’
She frowned. ‘You’re making it sound like there’s been a procession of them.’
‘Has there?’
‘Exactly which question do you want me to answer?’
‘Well, one would be a start.’
‘Fine, there hasn’t been a procession of married men in my life.’
‘God, you’re like a politician,’ said Joe, shaking his head. ‘You can’t answer a straight question.’
‘I answered that straight – I said quite plainly there has not been a procession of married men in my life.’
He considered her. ‘Has there been more than one?’
Cripes. ‘Maybe.’
‘So what’s the attraction?’
She sighed loudly.
‘That’s all I want to know,’ he said. ‘As your friend. So I can understand.’
‘So you can judge.’
‘I don’t want to judge you, that’s the thing. I want to understand you.’
‘Why?’
They had arrived at a pedestrian crossing and the lights were against them. He stopped to face her. ‘Okay, you really want to know? I have a stereotype fixed in my head. The scarlet woman. Which –’ he continued as she began to protest ‘– you clearly are not. You’re smart and accomplished and beautiful . . .’
‘Stop it.’
‘What? You are smart and accomplished –’
‘Okay, enough.’
‘You don’t think you’re beautiful?’
‘Oh yeah, I think I’m an absolute vision,’ she said dryly.
‘Good, then we agree,’ he said. ‘So explain to me why someone like you would choose to be with a married man, with no chance of a future.’
Jo sighed. ‘The future is overrated.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘People get together, and then they start having expectations about forever,’ she said. ‘Why? Why not just live in the here and now? Why do you have to promise that you’ll feel the same way for the rest of your life? It’s absurd.’
Crossing Paths Page 22
