Australian Love Stories

by Cate Kennedy

‘Oh my God,’ said Mallory. She felt winded by the shock of it, as though Emily had struck a lance into her gut, her primordial core, and something was splashing out.

  ‘But Em, who was—that woman he was singing to, at the folk festival?’

  ‘His sister, stupid. She moved in with him to help with the children.’

  When Mallory turned up at the midwinter party, she saw Karl with his guitar among the others by the fire. His whiskers looked positively Dickensian, but raying out from his eyes was that rare intelligence, that radiant curiosity. Within her was some muted, anticipatory trembling. When she checked in with it, she found its quality was not obsessive or manic like before.

  She greeted Karl with a smile, and sat on the space on the wooden bench beside him, and felt the usual awkwardness. He cleared his throat and she thought he was going to say something to her. Of course not. He was singing. Oh well, if there was no conversation, no connection, then so be it. She might as well sing along with the people. Their voices rose on old folk songs and Beatles tunes, which were becoming old folk songs, and Mallory surprised herself with how many lyrics she knew. At midnight, Emily brought out a warm loaf of bread from the oven, and people passed it around. Karl put down his guitar to take a piece. He offered it to her.

  ‘Who mixed the dough, and who set it to bake?’ he said. ‘I like this question.’

  Mallory’s stomach turned over.

  ‘Oh—’

  Karl’s eyes were both soft and bright under the extrusive brows, like a winter sea. Mallory felt the pressure of that same laugh she’d made when dancing with him, bubbling upwards, irrepressible and also called joy.

  Lover like a Tree

  J ANNE DESTAIC

  Rain runs the gutters, gathering leaves and plastic bottles, dumping them at the mouth of the pipe under the driveway. His tyres jolt over the pipe’s edge and the crack tells him that the weight of the car, its angle and speed, has broken off more concrete, made more rubbish to block the flow and send storm water billowing onto the road like liquid marrow from a cracked bone. His own bones ache for a storm runs through them too.

  He turns off the engine, sits in the car with the radio singing, hears her voice in his head:

  The battery will run down, don’t you know?

  I know, he says. I know.

  He takes the syringe out of his bag, flicks the tip, ejects a bubble of air, takes the butterfly needle from its packet and screws the two together. With a careful slow push the morphine reaches the needle’s tip and a round clear pearl bulges from its core. He winds the tourniquet around his arm, pulls it tight, wipes the side of his wrist with an alcohol swab and its fragrance hits him quickly as his veins draw like a map up his arm, wide highways painted blue, picked out against the flat plain skin.

  At the hospital they say he can find veins in his sleep. Deep veins buried under fat, thin-walled veins ruined by heroin and chalk, all these are easy for him. On buses and trains the first thing he notices about people is their veins, rivers with tributaries blue under the skin, red when his needles puncture.

  She has beautiful veins. When he licks the line of them drawn up her neck, her sigh is the sound of wind through a eucalypt canopy trunks and branches, his lover’s veins more tree than river, more intricate than these roads running along his arm. He slides the needle in expecting asphalt, expecting dust from tires and maybe gravel, but blood, red as the sunset burning over the roof, trails into the syringe. He pops the catch on the tourniquet, pushes the plunger, lets the drug run his veins, pump through his heart, speed arterial routes. He is the tiny man in a snow dome, picked up, shaken. Cool flakes swirl everywhere in gentle confusion and when they settle a wondrous light follows on, filling up his bones this time with the best of marrow.

  The afternoon is late, the sky full of rain yet to fall. She leaves work early, drives straight and hard up the motorway, swearing softly as her car crunches over the stormwater pipe. He is asleep in his car with the door open and the radio playing out to the new night. She opens her door quietly, walks lightly on the gravel to come and stand by his door; to see how young he looks in sleep, how pink, how beautiful; to whisper, ‘I love you’ and then wake him up.

  He is not beautiful. He is not even pink. The syringe in his hand is empty and its sharp, nasty needle has a bead of blood at its tip. His lips are blue. She lowers the seat back, extends his head, watches his face flush with colour and hears his breath deepen. Now her legs tremble. Now loud angry cries roll from her mouth ugly wet noises sending saliva dripping onto the car.

  The sun falls further through its clouds flooding them with late warmth and a strange tangerine glow. Bullet rain starts falling hard. She shakes him awake, enough to stand up, take his weight, stumble into the house and to the small pink bedroom by the front door. She pushes him onto the bed, rolls him on his side and bends his knee up then brings the syringe and tourniquet from the car and puts them on the pillow by his head.

  In and out he breathes, ribs expanding then collapsing like a flower unfolding and closing up, one long breath in for the coming sun, one long breath out for the night. He is a stranger, a character caught in his own private storm, his own lightening, his own rain raining down while all around is the warm summer blue, and the ordinariness of a sunset.

  Not all stranger though. There are some things she recognises: this ankle at the edge of his jeans, this knuckle of bone and sinew, an arched foot, the pearled nails of his toes. And this long leg with its heavy thigh and fat bellied muscle, this rosary line of vertebra and corrugated ribs and the sparse dark hair circling his nipples, spreading over his sternum, marking the place where his heart beats invisibly. Familiar too, this flow of soft skin down from neck to belly to the top of his jeans and underneath to the hair that is lush and thick and so much darker than eyebrows and lashes. She lies next to him, remembers the warmth of his breath on her mouth and the heat of his skin on hers when all that will fit between them is one layer of sweat. Her fingers roll over the sphere of his shoulder, trace the line of clavicle. Bones and knuckles and thumping heart. Add a punctured vein. Add morphine to his stormwater blood. He is not the stranger. He is her lover.

  His pulse speeds up to her touch. He opens his eyes, sees a syringe; a tourniquet. Sees no chance to lie. But the caress of her hand has the brush of leaves and twigs and her arm over him is a pale bark branch and her hair a canopy of blossoms and birds are sleeping there and butterflies rest in her cool green shade while her roots sink down through the bed and the floor and the earth to its rocks and he feels the rain sliding over him, dripping from her leaves, his lover like a tree.

  Trees line the road in even measure. Perfect lawns stretch away behind. There should be jazz on the breeze and elegant people dancing by the fountain. Or at least nurses in white dresses and red capes with fob watches bouncing over their breasts as they hurry up the steps. In reality she can’t tell the difference between staff and patients in this quiet pretty clinic until she is close enough to read the name badges pinned to t-shirts. Or to see the tremor of a hand. What will she say if he agrees to see her this time? That she loves him still? That love is not enough. That she is too ordinary to do this. She pushes the buzzer, waits for the voice to ask who she is then let her in. The curtains are closed. Reflected in the window she sees a man (right shape, right height) walking quickly across the lawn, past the fountain. He wobbles unevenly from windowpane to windowpane, then disappears. They let her in. She sits and waits till a phone rings and the receptionist has a quick conversation, then calls her over and explains: he left a message. He will not see her today.

  But the day is bright and clear so she dares to follow the reflected man, who is probably him but might not be, dares to step out into the lawn, walk past the fountain where jazz should be played, toward the first line of trees. Her heels sink backward in the wetter patches of grass, making her awkward. Taking grace from her bravery.

  His sits against the bole of a huge tree mostly hidden in the triangle space
made by the roots. She sees bare feet, nails, knuckles, an arch, long bones, and her hands are so helpless beside her, so desperate for something to hold that they reach out to him as he stands up and press against his chest and into his ribs as if they could slide between each bone, tear at the membrane and hold his heart. Now her back flattens against the tree, the crush of his body printing bark onto skin, gluing her to it with his sweat, while his breath is winter in her mouth and his dust and gravel stormwater is sticky down her thighs. A magpie warbles, taking off from the branches above them laughing at their pale featherless skin in the cold air, laughing at them pulling up pants and fixing zips.

  He sits again in the triangle roots, crosses his legs, takes off his shoes. Small pieces of bark and dry leaves shake loose from her hair as she runs her hands through its curls, walking away and not looking back. The needle slides into the short vein on the side of his toe, more laneway than road. He closes his eyes, injects, sees the flat planes of lawn ruche as her feet slow and spread; sees great cords of timber winding out from her soles, grabbing at the soil, sinking through its layers. The sun filters yellow shine and the sky glows blue through her spread out arms and canopy hair and now all of her is veined with brown sap and wet rain slips gloriously over her leaves, dripping off her tips, so cool, so calm, as marvellous as the morphine travelling round his veins.

  He has all he wants: morphine and a lover like a tree.

  Hooked

  TOBY SIME

  She wasn’t the girl. She was a whole other girl, riding a horse uphill on a rose-yellow road of crushed quartz and sandstone, between small green hills and a huge, still, baking blue sky. I only met her that day; her name was Eva. She was happy, partly, I knew, because I was following her, looking at her happy young hair and shoulders and arse as they rose and fell in the saddle, looking at one not more than another, happy myself even though I knew I was lost; lost, because although she was someone, Eva, she was also anyone, some girl I’d just met, and I knew that I’d follow that petite, smiling, ordinary vision over the edge of the world, if she’d only let me do it.

  My father was the same, happy enough being lost, but he sometimes felt the need to be coarse, even insulting, about the women he flaneured along behind. I don’t know why. In truth, he loved them. He just couldn’t live with them. But among the swill were a few pearls. He put me onto a quote from Goethe; according to him, a couple of days before he died Goethe wrote, in his journal, Eternal Womanhead leads us on high. I knew, though I wished otherwise, it was the story of my life; only, which way is high? There isn’t really an up or down, is there, because the universe is infinite; up’s an illusion caused by where we stand on the earth… I look at the stars, flowing in the gutterwater at night; I look at them up there, flowing through that other gutter, Time; one’s no more real, no more beautiful than the other. Only the vision counts, ahead of you on the road. Lead me high, lead me low, same thing, as long as you can lead; as long as I’m willing to be led.

  In St Kilda, in late summer or early autumn, there was another girl, the girl in this story. My tram was laid up in a shunting neck for an hour. My driver had gone for lunch and ciggies, I was probably doing chin-ups on the strap bar, a couple of passengers were waiting ‘till we got going. She was sitting quietly at the back; I felt she looked somehow wrong. When I went to her I saw she was crying—not demonstratively, but stilly, hopelessly. She had blood in her long black hair, and a little on the very fair skin of her forehead; and her eyes, when she looked at me, were deep, indigo blue. Irish colours. Eyes which faded minutely toward the outer iris; which, though they showed pain, focussed so intently on mine it was as if they held them with fingertips. At the bottom right corner of her lip was a scar, the size and shape of a small fishhook; it looked like it had been made by a stone in a ring. It looked like its healing would have been slow, like it would have torn again and again. It was a beautiful face in every way.

  I wanted to help her. She said, ‘I know you. You’re my connie.’ She had to go home, to her father, she couldn’t stay out. I asked what happened. She said he hit her on the head with a bottle, he was angry because she hadn’t cleaned the house.

  ‘Who did,’ I asked, ‘your father?’ Of course.

  Outraged, disbelieving, I said, ‘You can’t go home. We’ll get you to hospital.’

  ‘No, no, I have to go…’

  ‘Stay; I’ll get a policeman, they can advise you what to do; just stay, okay?’

  She nodded.

  I wasn’t supposed to leave the tram unattended, ever, for any reason; I ran up to Fitzroy St and there, as I’ve always found when I needed one, was a policeman. We jogged back. She was gone. The other passengers knew nothing at all.

  Quite apart from the sense of having failed a passenger—my charge—and a woman in distress, I thought about her a lot; her herself. I watched for her on my St Kilda run, and on the others too. A couple of times, on days off, I walked around, hoping to find her. She was too young for me, I knew, maybe seventeen, but maybe a tall fourteen, I honestly couldn’t tell, and I was in my twenties then. I told myself I needed to know if she was alright, but really, it was her face. It swam about in my inner vision, her face, her skin, her eyes. It hurt. I’ll admit, I fantasised about her. The scar at her lip was the hook in my mouth; my tongue made its shape on the back of my teeth.

  That’s just a young man’s life. Time goes by, there’s other people, your old obsessions come to seem a little silly, even to you; and your friends see nothing in it but prurience. Again, you fool, falling for nature’s old tricks, her rouges, glycerine, narcotic musks… Maybe that self contempt was what my father was really expressing. There were girlfriends, then I fell in love. It ended so badly I don’t want to spill it all out here; but looking back, the morbid cliché of my stupid behaviour, the fug of alcohol and ego and bad faith…well, you probably get the picture. I did some damage, and ended up on my scuppers, somewhat, living in a terrible house, working as a waiter in a pseud restaurant. Michel, the owner, was an arrogant disgusting pig, but I needed the money, so I put up with it and quietly hated myself. I suppose this was four or five years after the girl. Then, on a Sunday night, she came in.

  She sat in the other waiter’s section, so I didn’t see her at first, though the place was brightly lit and I’d walked by a couple of times. Then the man she was with asked me for more water; I asked if she wanted some too, and she barely looked up as she answered no—just a flicker of those indigo eyes. I felt—I mean, I really did, though it’s going to sound ridiculous—like javelins had pierced me and pinned me to the floor.

  The first thing to say—and I admit, it’s in my defence—is that I was enormously relieved she was alive. I’d often wondered whether her father had killed her, or she’d ended up on the street, or addicted, or prostituted by any of those dirty devices this world’s so replete with. But anyone could see at a glance she was healthy, un-fucked-up, beautiful; more beautiful than before. A clear memory: she wore a dress of indigo linen with an undyed strip of ecru down the front crossing her left breast from neck to hem.

  After that good start, it’s less edifying. I was full of shame, and didn’t want to be seen here, like this. So I hid, watching her when I could, looking at him to try and work out what kind of man he was, what he was to her. Absolutely indecipherable, I’m afraid, a sort of twenty-something George Smiley. I saw them touch each other’s arm once or twice, nothing more; could be lovers, could be friends. I don’t think they were siblings. The night wore on, they paid and left, I stole a moment to go onto the street and watch them; but they were gone. On the way back in I saw my face in the oversized Baroque mirror near the door, the door where, a moment before, a huge, artfully arranged bucket of failure had tilted and tipped its load all over me; me, standing there in my clip-on bow tie.

  That period—that bad time—I had shit on my hands. The stain and the stench of it went onto everything I touched. Grief and guilt; they make you insane, for a while, make you some
kind of unrecognisable monster. I shudder when I remember it; but it passed. There’s a threshold to our emotions, a bar across the bottom of the door, so that even when they seem to all be flooding away, spilling out, gone forever, some magical portion of them is held in reserve, the seed-stock of a future, happier self. Tidally, love returns. Hope. Self-respect. Joy. Mine just appeared again one day, rose up in me, a bubble in a glass of champagne. I even re-learned how to drink with pleasure, instead of vindictiveness—the surest sign, for an Australian, that things are looking up.

  Got a new job, got a new flat, got the same old haircut refreshed. A couple of friends had dropped me; I made one or two new ones, put some work into the others. It’s like one of those Paul Kelly songs…If drink becomes a problem, drink a little less…I felt ok.

  Late one evening I walked into a new club up near the old CUB site. I don’t like clubs much; live gigs at pubs were always more my thing, but I’d been catching up with friends earlier in the evening, drinking, talking, and they’d mentioned the place, and here I was, ready for whatever.

  This club was dark, seriously dark; it would be quite possible to trip over things or people, especially after a few drinks. Nowadays it would be full of light from mobile phones—that’s why people go to clubs now, to text people they texted three minutes ago—but way back in the dark ages—appropriate phrase—say, twenty years ago—darkness was essential set-dressing, a curtain the punters couldn’t ring up. And the music was louder than I’d have thought strictly necessary; that’s not because I’m old, either, I felt the same way at eighteen. It sounded good though, dancey, which was a relief—I wasn’t in the mood for a dirge.

  Once again I didn’t see her at first. When I went to the bar a girl served me; on her right was another girl, serving someone else, a girl with long black hair that swept down over the right side of her face. Although the bar was the best lit part of the place, its light was greenish, lurid, shining up from under the counter, reflecting drunkenly from the warped mirrors behind the shimmering intoxicants behind these brazen girls. It was an image from some Puritan homily: primrose, sulphur, sirens.