He might be old enough to be her father. Did this matter? Why should it matter, if your father was one of life’s good men? And watching Adam now, his broad back and rounded bum, the curve of his neck, she felt her nipples tingling, tried to settle as he walked towards her, drinks in hand, looking a bit shaky. He put the glasses on the table, sat down, gave her a sheepish glance. It was different now, sitting in this pretentious place, as he loosened the collar of his already loose white shirt. And while she didn’t want him saying cheers or anything in the least bit prosaic, she did want him to speak, to help break the rising tension.
Then she remembered what he’d told her. About his child.
‘So tell me about your son.’
Adam looked taken aback. ‘My son?’
‘You said he was the most important thing of all.’
He took a sip of wine, set down his glass. ‘So I did. Yes. Jessie.’
‘So tell me about him.’
‘Well, he’s four years old. Nearly five. But, well, are you sure you want to know?’
Hazel raised an eyebrow. ‘I asked, didn’t I? About Jamie.’
‘Jessie.’
Now it was her turn to blush. And why did this have to be so difficult?
‘So tell me about Jessie who’s nearly five.’
He nodded. ‘OK. Sure. Well, he’s a wonderful companion, the most engaging little boy. Who can also be a gigantic pain in the arse.’
‘So it’s tough then? Bringing him up on your own.’
‘Women do it all the time,’ he said, a little sharply, and then his face fell. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to snap at you. It’s just that, well, I don’t usually come to places like this. And I must be the only person here over forty.’
So that was it. The key to his shaking hands. The edginess.
‘You didn’t snap at me,’ she said. ‘And if you feel out of place—well, to be honest, I’ve never been here before either. It’s got narcissism written all over it.’ She took a sip of wine, plucked up some more courage. ‘Besides which, I’m sitting here with you, and as far as I’m concerned, you’re in exactly the right place.’
She couldn’t get more obvious, could she? But he didn’t say a word.
‘And so what if you’re over forty?’ she bumbled on. ‘You make yourself sound antediluvian.’
What if he didn’t know the meaning of antediluvian?
But he was smiling now and his eyes were bright, and again she felt that sweet rush of desire.
‘I bet you were one of those children who read the dictionary just for fun,’ he said.
‘I used to flip though the pages sometimes, but it doesn’t help if you don’t know the context. Although I do know a funny joke about the dictionary. How lumpy jaw comes just before lunacy, but in life there are no such clues. That’s by one of my favourite writers.’
‘So tell me, why do you like reading so much?’
What could she say? That didn’t sound like an undergrad essay?
‘It’s partly the pleasure of words,’ she said. ‘You know, the shapes they make, the stories they tell. It’s an aesthetic thing, the making. You admire the skill, the textures and rhythms. That kind of thing.’ She swallowed, because she was sounding like an undergrad essay. Except if he hadn’t studied literature, maybe he wouldn’t notice. And he wasn’t going to give her a mark, was he? B minus: get beyond the clichés, extend your argument, watch use of semi-colons. The usual comments from her tutors.
‘But what about ideas?’ he said. ‘You must get ideas from reading.’
‘Well, yes, of course. Certainly.’ Was he implying she was one of those belles lettres types, infatuated with style? ‘Reading can be dangerous,’ she pronounced, ‘because it can make you think.’ Then she laughed, remembering. ‘I said that in a tutorial once and the tutor told me that writers can’t make you do anything. They don’t have a gun to your head, Hazel. And he said it in bright red ink.’
‘The condescending school of pedagogy,’ said Adam.
‘Absolutely. Another time he told me there were no wrong answers in literature, but if there was one, mine would be it.’
‘And that didn’t turn you off reading?’ he said. ‘All the put-downs?’
She waved her hand, airily. ‘Oh, I tried not to take it personally. And I did say some dumb things every now and then. Only not as bad as Jemma Hawkins in high school. She asked the teacher once if Euripides had another name, and when he said Euripides You-buy-me-new-pair, she actually wrote it down.’
Adam laughed. ‘Poor Jemma Hawkins,’ he said.
‘I’ll never forget Euripides’ play Medea,’ said Hazel. ‘Have you read it?’
‘Isn’t it about a woman who kills her children?’
‘That’s right. But the worst part is the murder of the princess. She’s the one Medea’s husband runs off with, so Medea gets her kids to poison the poor woman, and the details are horrific. Not that you see it, thank goodness, it’s reported, because violence always occurs offstage in ancient Greek tragedy. Abskene, it’s called, offstage. Which is where we get the word obscene. You know, something that’s too shocking or sickening to see.’
‘Is that right?’
He was watching her closely, studying her, it seemed.
‘But most of all,’ she said, ‘I read to know I’m not alone. A famous writer said that. I don’t mean about me, personally, he was talking about all of us. I’ve always liked that idea. It’s comforting. Consoling.’
Still he was watching her carefully, as though waiting for her to say more. Was she sounding too obvious again, about loneliness? When she wanted to say that the famous writer whose name she couldn’t remember right now and maybe she should whip out her phone and google the quote, she wanted to say that the writer meant something much deeper, more profound. Existential loneliness, she wanted to say, but that would have sounded so phony. Like those private school nobs in her tutorial, proclaiming that choosing to give life meaning in the face of the void was courageous, heroic, before they jumped into their sports cars and roared off to the pub. One of those nobs had even worn a beret.
She tried again.
‘I don’t mean to say I’m alone. Not in the ordinary sense, that is. Because I’m blessed with some wonderful friends and I have two great parents. Well, of course I have two. Well, no, not of course, one of them could be dead. Which would make me an orphan. Because you only have to lose one parent to be an orphan.’ She swallowed. She was showing off again.
‘I didn’t know that,’ said Adam. Indulgently, she thought, as though he was listening to a chatterbox child. ‘So what do they do, your parents?’ he asked. ‘Apart from being great.’
And now he was definitely making fun of her. Wasn’t he?
‘My dad’s a carpenter and my mother does his books and they’re both good people.’
Was good any better than great?
‘Not good in the namby-pamby sense. I mean, they’re not churchy people. I just mean, well, we’re all atheists, actually, the three of us. The unholy trinity, my grandparents used to call it. Before they died.’ She heard herself sounding more and more like Beth. ‘Anyway, we all believe in reason,’ she said.
Adam began tapping his glass. ‘So you think believers are irrational?’ he said.
Oops. What if he trotted off to church on Sundays and helped out in soup kitchens in the name of the Lord?
‘I didn’t mean that either,’ she said. ‘Non-rational isn’t the same as irrational. But what about that bunch of Christians who reckoned the Boxing Day tsunami was god’s punishment on gays? That’s not only irrational, it’s appallingly cruel.’
‘But what about the other kind of Christians who believe in a god of compassion?’
‘You mean the hateful kind who’ll forgive gay people as long as they don’t have sex?’
Adam folded his hands on the table. ‘Of course there are religious extremists,’ he said. ‘We’ve got some in the government right now. But what about the churc
h’s position on asylum seekers? Anglicans, Catholics, the Uniting Church. They’ve all been very vocal, very active, trying to shut down the offshore detention centres. Do you know about them?’
Hazel drew herself up. ‘Of course I know about Nauru and Manus Island,’ she said. ‘I’m not one those young people who only cares about the Kardashians.’
‘What’s a Kardashian?’ he said, straight-faced. ‘Someone from a newly formed Balkan State?’
Hazel had to laugh. ‘You’re joking, right?’
‘I am. I saw them on TV once. There were three of them, and they all looked like nothing on earth. Entirely artificial.’
‘So you like your women natural, then?’
‘I don’t like women as a group,’ he said. ‘I mean, well, I don’t mean I’m gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.’ He looked down at the table, up again at her. ‘I like particular women and I don’t like others,’ he said. ‘It’s a matter of their values, their character. It’s very simple.’
‘Your guiding principle. Simplicity.’
He took in a breath, seemed to relax. ‘I know a famous saying too,’ he said. ‘About simplicity. All evil stems from our inability to sit quietly alone in a room.’
‘That’s Pascal. And it’s not evil, actually, it’s problems. You must have read a bad translation.’
Adam banged his head, playfully. ‘You mean all this time, I’ve been living a virtuous and noble life because I don’t know any French?’
‘Quite possibly.’
She wished she could say that two in a room would be much better. Companionable. Possibly exciting. But maybe he was only assessing her character. Just being friendly. Returning a book, making amends.
‘So what takes you out of your room, Hazel?’ he said.
She remembered her doomed attempt of—what was it—a matter of an hour ago?
‘I attend interviews for jobs I don’t get.’
He gave her a look, like a warning. ‘Tell me something hopeful,’ he said.
How to explain her more-or-less aimless life? ‘I meet up with friends and we talk about work, study, relationships,’ she said. ‘The usual stuff. And sometimes I go to parties, although I think I’m getting too old for parties, they’re mostly very superficial. Except’—she would be a woman of character if it killed her—‘the last party I went to, someone persuaded me to volunteer for the Greens. You know, the political party?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not that I haven’t helped them before,’ she said, warming to her theme. ‘I persuaded my parents to vote for them, when they’ve been rusted-on Labor supporters all their lives. Asylum seekers and climate change, I told them, the two big issues. The Greens are the only party with moral vision and evidence-based policies, I said. Plus I handed out how-to-vote cards at the last election.’
‘And how was that?’
‘Oh, I thought it might be a bit scary, that people would be aggressive or rude because they think the Greens are loony.’ She flinched. ‘Do you think the Greens are loony?’
‘Not at all.’
‘Good. It’s just that some people—obviously not you—they think the Greens will ruin the economy and flood us with refugees, that kind of thing. But I have to say it wasn’t too bad in the end, handing out the cards. I was in conservative heartland but the worst thing that happened was people turning up their well-bred noses at me. All those women wearing un-creased linen shirts. I mean, how do they do that? Linen always creases the second I put it on. And all those men with meaty faces and yachty kinds of shoes and probably a house by the ocean that I hope will be engulfed by massive, vengeful waves.’
He laughed, said she’d got it just right.
‘And now I’m going doorknocking,’ she said, trying not to sound too smug. Now that she’d proved her point, several times over. ‘You know, raising awareness about what matters. I don’t think the Greens have much money because they don’t take dodgy donations. You know, from fossil fuel companies, property developers, organisations like that. So doorknocking can make a lot of difference. It’s important to do your bit.’
‘That’s very commendable,’ he said.
‘And I’m supposed to be doing some training soon.’
‘So am I. I’m one of the trainers, in fact.’
‘A trainer? You mean, you—’
‘It’s what I do. I volunteer for the Greens. I’ve been doing it for years.’
‘And you let me gabble on.’ She could feel her cheeks burning. ‘You just sat there and let me make an idiot of myself.’
‘No, no, not at all. I was enjoying listening. You’re very funny.’
She stiffened. ‘Well, I’m glad you found me so amusing,’ she said. ‘If I believed in reincarnation I’d come back as a stand-up comedian.’ She saw his face drop, heard him rush to apologise, as she toyed with her glass, churned up inside by all her silly talk. ‘I didn’t mean to be prickly,’ she said. ‘I just don’t want you thinking…’
‘Yes?’
‘I don’t want you thinking I’m a ditz,’ she said. ‘You know. A waste of space.’
‘If I thought that…’ He was watching her steadily, holding her gaze. ‘I wouldn’t have asked you for a coffee. No, wine.’ He looked at her empty glass. ‘Would you like another?’
She hadn’t even realised she’d finished. ‘Thanks, I’m good, I’m not really a big drinker.’
And not a waste of space either.
‘So tell me more about you,’ she said. ‘You—well—you don’t talk much about yourself, do you?’
‘I’m a recovering narcissist,’ he said. ‘I take it one day at a time.’
‘Well, I’m going to make you lapse,’ she said. ‘Tell me why you belong to the Greens. Why you’ve worked with them for years.’
‘You don’t mind a long story?’
‘I don’t mind if it’s an epic poem.’
Because now that she knew he liked her, liked listening to her, even found her funny in a warm kind of way, she could sit there for hours, just looking into his eyes.
‘Well, I used to be a Labor voter, just like your parents,’ he said. ‘But then the party started wheeling to the right, trying to privatise everything under the sun, introducing uni fees. That was under Keating and Hawke. Do you know about—’
‘Keating was the prime minister who collected French antique clocks,’ she said. ‘A working-class boy who ended up being an art connoisseur.’
‘Did you read that somewhere?’
‘My dad told me. He also called him a wanker, not because of the clocks but because of his massive ego.’
Adam grinned. ‘He was never short on that. Just like Bob Hawke.’
‘Did he collect clocks as well?’
‘I think he preferred women.’ She could see his hands clutching his glass. ‘Anyway, I switched to the Greens because of asylum seekers. When I heard about a leaky boat.’
‘The Tampa?’
‘No, but it was around the same time. This one was called the SIEV X.’
‘I’ve never heard of it.’
‘That’s not surprising, Hazel. Both major parties have been keeping it under wraps for years. Anyway, SIEV stands for Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel. That’s a cracker of a name, isn’t it, for a boat carrying more than four hundred desperate human beings.’
‘And the X?’
‘It means the government hadn’t assigned the boat a tracking number. Because they were hunting down the boats, sending them back to whichever blighted country they came from. And they’re still doing it, of course.’
He said hunted them down as though he’d just seen something ugly creeping through the door.
‘It’s just a devastating, heartbreaking story,’ he said. ‘People throw the word tragedy around like confetti at a wedding. You know, some vacuous, pampered celebrity dies of a drug overdose and we’re meant to see this as some profound kind of loss. But the SIEV X was a genuine tragedy. Over four hundred people in a boat built for
forty.’
‘That can’t be—’
‘True? It’s absolutely true. And three hundred and fifty-three of them drowned at sea. Some Indonesian fishermen found the survivors a couple of days later. Imagine how terrible they must have felt.’
Hazel studied his earnest face. ‘Maybe the government didn’t know about the boat,’ she said. ‘All those deaths.’
‘That’s what they claimed. But it beggars belief, really, because they’d been doing intensive surveillance operations in the area for some time.’ He tapped his glass again. ‘There were four government investigations by both major parties. Four. But it’s the old game: set up inquiries with terms of reference that will let you off the hook.’
‘And so that the public forgets?’
He nodded. ‘And do you know the official name for all those deaths? A Certain Maritime Incident.’
‘That sounds like the novel 1984.’
‘It was two thousand and one, and entirely real.’ He gave a slight shrug. ‘So that’s my story,’ he said. ‘My conversion, if you like. And what about you, Hazel? What made you political?’
‘Well, I wouldn’t call me political, really. Not like you, I mean.’ She heard her voice sounding small when she didn’t want to be small. But not really big either, not self-inflating. ‘I didn’t have a moment,’ she said. ‘It was my mum and dad, really. They’ve talked politics for as long as I can remember, so I grew up listening about workers’ rights and women’s rights and Indigenous rights and, well, everyone’s rights except big business. Like that billionaire coal baron who tricked the workers into voting him into parliament so he could get even richer at their expense. That’s my dad talking, he can be a bit of a ranter and, well, you have to do more than rant, don’t you?’
‘Well, it’s not a bad place to start. And I wish I’d had parents like yours.’
‘So they’re…’
‘Dead. My father ploughed their Volvo into a bus. Which is wonderfully ironic, since they never made way for anyone. Loathsome people. Oh, don’t look so shocked, Hazel. I don’t believe in speaking well of the dead when they were rotten people in life.’
She was less shocked than saddened by this dismal revelation.
The Art of Persuasion Page 4
