Australian Love Stories

by Cate Kennedy

  I’d ordered; I waited, received, paid, thanked, looking all the while, as discretely as I could, at the other girl. There was a sense of something, but no clear recognition. She moved her hair fractionally out of the way of her face and I saw her profile. I walked away from the bar, fifteen or twenty feet, and like when you get that first smell and, no matter what the calendar says, it’s Spring, it blossomed in me: her.

  I turned; she was crouching down, getting a drink from below the bar. I experienced the image of her sitting forward on the tram seat, blood in her hair, a young girl in pain, and doubtless fear; and I looked at her here working the bar, smiling at her workmates, a woman in the world, whole and human; and for a moment, I cried. But I’d started to mistrust my drunken sentiment; so I wiped my eyes with the butt of my palm, abandoned my drink and went to her. She looked up with a smile, small, but unmistakeable, and said, in a nice, warm, working class voice, ‘You were quick. What would you like?’

  Strange—in all those years of lushery I never tried to chat up a barmaid. Guys tell me it’s a famously tall order. That’s not why I didn’t though—I just hate to interfere with anyone’s work. But now I looked at her and said, ‘I’d like you to come and dance with me. If not now, then later; but preferably now. And I’d really like, if you’ll let me, to buy you a drink.’

  That shouldn’t have worked. And it didn’t straight away. She was laughingly dismissive, friendly but common sense. And I persisted so long that her manager came up to us with a narrow look on his face and asked her if I needed removing; that’s when she said, ‘No, he’s an old friend of mine and he wants a dance with me. How early can I knock off? It’s slowing down anyway…’

  He wasn’t happy, but she got permission to knock off in half an hour. She poured herself a drink—she’d had a couple already—and I stayed closeish, occasionally catching her eye, when she’d smile at me, though with one raised eyebrow; what’s your caper, sunshine?

  The music’s not a clear memory but it was pulsing at a BPM roughly twice life speed. I do remember that she did this wonderful thing, she danced up to me, danced ahead, stopped, back to me, her back and bum swaying, touching me, then looked back across her shoulder at me—those eyes!—ahead again, and swung round quickly, putting her arms around my neck, laughing and pulling me so fast into her rhythm that I had no time at all for second thoughts.

  Is it possible I loved her then? Maybe what I felt was an overwhelming aesthetic gratitude; she was as beautiful and immediate as life ought always to be, a vertiginous contrast to the trudge of everything else, and I fell into the moment wholeheartedly, adoring the whoosh and the rush and the eight-centimetres-apartness of our faces in ways no-one who’d drunk that much could really have unravelled. Love, happiness, right then the distinction was for neurotics. Then—I think this is how it went—she kissed me.

  Her kiss was a labyrinth. All, all I wanted in the world, was to never find my way out.

  Then we were in a taxi. It was heading to Windsor. The gliding fan-dance of light and shadow stay with me, and her lips and hands, and my fingers on her and in her, and a distant, unkillable awareness that someone else was in the car, driving us, and we really ought to be behaving, but we couldn’t…

  …and her dark house was an explosion; we didn’t bother with the lights. We just erupted into nakedness, and though I kept gritting my teeth with how much I wanted to fuck her, I couldn’t take my mouth away from her quim, little nightingale, singing its midnight song to me in a voice of milk and tremors, there in the miraculous Berkeley Square of her bed. The crucifying nail of her tongue in my ear, skewering me, telling me, in a language older than words, exactly who I was, who I am, so deeply I couldn’t deny any of it. A long-seeming period of roiling tempest, rolling about her bed in the only half dark the city makes inevitable. The jump-cut imagery I still have of her pale body below me on the black sheets, her sloe hair, the always unbelievable fact of being inside someone; her riding along above me, mmming and swearing and sweating and hurting me with her nails, teeth, and what holds most in my mind—two things— putting my tongue in her arse, which I hadn’t ever done before, loving it, realising right then that absolutely everything I loved in her body was love itself; and later, at a stiller point in our grave, hilarious wrestle, seeing her sitting up, her eyes half closed with tiredness, her mouth fractionally open, her calves folded beneath her, made a child again, as I was, so pale in that half light, so white, and both of us so still, so burnt-low, heart in throat I knew, though she was no ghost, that we were in a spirit realm now, and I could pass my hand right through her, or she through me, because the physical barrier between us had been extinguished.

  Nothing was spoken. The body was our text; we had read it, accepted it, and borne out its truth. We two, were one, more innocent than Eden.

  It was very late when we got to sleep. I’d wanted to say something about knowing her before, about not forgetting her, about how the crewel of her scar had put a stitch in me I’d been unable or unwilling to unpick. But the moment hadn’t come. Nothing in our attraction had made it necessary; so she put her head on my arm, near my still wet armpit, and slid immediately into sleep. I followed close, though I was excited with adoration. What would I love about her? Her. But I slept instead of saying it.

  It could only have been an hour and a half later that I woke, my arm throbbing from her weight, and with a strong need to piss and to drink water. Dawn had slipped itself under the window shades, a letter of unknown intent; the false half light of the night before had become a true half light, grainy and textured, and the blackness of her hair when I looked that way was richer than it had been in the night time.

  She lay on my left arm, the right side of her face veiled by a kohl-black rift of hair, a long slow-sweeping S. I thought perhaps she’d grown it to hide her scar. There was still alcohol in my thinking. Deliberately, with the exaggerated care of one who knows not to trust his drunken actions, I reached my right arm across to touch her hair. I put out my little finger, and so slowly, so gently I might have been a thief, I hooked it round and pulled a tress aside. While she slept; while her face was unconscious of, unencumbered by, me, I wanted to see that evidence of her authenticity, her own hieroglyph, the notation of her single, ringing, all-encompassing note. The hair fell silently over her ear. There was no scar.

  It took more than a moment for me to believe it. I sat up, carefully, so as not to wake her; and it was true, no scar at all. I looked at both sides of her lip, though I was certain as death it was on the right; nothing. Her skin was perfect, virginal, Arctic. My eyes focussed with involuntary intensity, unable to accept or believe. It isn’t her… I drew back a little; my breath caught; my heart was like a stone; and I stared, astonished, at this complete stranger upon my arm, the various tastes of her body still on my tongue, my by-now immobile sperm still dying on her belly.

  I can’t find a way to say it that doesn’t sound Victorian. And I know, I know, it’s dark-midnight-of-the-soul stuff, and a terrible corny joke besides. I know. I knew it then. But there was no mirth in it. You know what it is to be soul-struck with your own pathetic folly, or you don’t; that’s all.

  At least I didn’t run away. Letting her sleep, I dislodged my arm and glided out of bed. Then I searched for the toilet, where I sat thinking about nothing for some time, just looking at the leaves outside waving mindlessly at me. Then I thought about Dean Swift, coprophilia, revulsion at the body. How we’re stuck between shit and Heaven. Then about the aloof nature of divinity; how it shows its face, trips you up, vanishes. Again, Nature’s cheap tricks, again.

  After a while I heard her footsteps outside the door. She was completely naked, I could tell from the sound of her footsteps, a sound where comfort and sleepy petulance somehow mixed. I got up and went to the sink.

  From outside she asked, in neutral tones, ‘Do you want coffee?’

  My body, and its weightless, tiring passenger, were not presently able to answer. My hands in the sink,
palms up, looked to me like the accused. After a while of staring at them I turned to the mirror. There was no bow tie; just my puffy, tired, drunken face, and behind it, showing through the eyes, a sense this wasn’t who was meant to be staring back from the glass. I wasn’t speaking to her when I said:

  ‘Who—are—you?’

  And she did this thing. She leant against the door and scratched it, once, twice, like a little cat that wants to get in. On my side, I leant my head against it; she put her lips to the keyhole and said, in a voice like quiet music:

  ‘You know—exactly—who I am.’

  O God, Eternity, Womanhead; put out your hand to me, teach me what I want; steal me back and give me to myself again; come to me in your daytime, in a dream that one of us is having, come to me when you will, on high, on low, on a rosy road ahead of me, rising and falling before me, made of what other men have crushed and thrown down here before me; O Girl, in your woman’s body, lead me on. Lead me on. Lead me on.

  ADRIFT IN SHARDS AND SPLATTERED FRUIT

  Gen Y Love

  DANIELLE MCGEE

  In 2006, Sydney had its hottest New Years Day on record: forty-five degrees. There were bushfires and power outages. Or so we were told, an aeroplane ride away in the lonely west. Courtesy of the Channel 9 news team, we had also heard that NASA launched its first mission to Pluto.

  I was seventeen. It all seemed very far removed from Fremantle, and from my Leavers plans in Dunsborough, to be honest. April 27 saw construction begin on the Freedom Tower of the new World Trade Centre in New York City: this had a bit more relevance.

  During my first year of high school, I could remember being shaken awake one morning in September and dragged through to the television by my gobsmacked mother to watch a loop of footage showing planes crashing into buildings.

  I went to school that morning with shaky hands and an empty stomach. My first class was history. Our teacher sat us down and told us about ‘terrorism’. I had never heard that term before. The sea of thirty pale faces staring back must have made Mrs Mac realise she’d overdone it on the gory details.

  ‘Wh…what if they bomb us too?’ one boy whispered. ‘Australia is an ally of the United States.’

  Mrs Mac snorted with impatience. ‘Oh yeah. And what are they going to bomb in Perth—the Bell Tower?’

  Miri was completely oblivious to my existence.

  Is There an Equivalent Word for ‘Freshman’ in Australia?

  Today was a big day for me. Waiting in the scorching heat to enrol for university. I began biting at my nails, like I always did when I got nervous.

  ‘No offense mate, but there’s no way she’d go out with you,’ Ryan said.

  She wasn’t the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. Not even close. ‘How do you know?’ I whispered, even though she was standing a good ten metres away.

  He rolled his eyes. ‘Because, idiot. The obvious.’

  I looked sheepishly at my peeling two-dollar flip-flops from Big W.

  ‘Come on!’ he waved a sunburnt hand impatiently toward a ring of crisp white tents, baking under the heat, ‘I wanna go check out the rugby club, see if they’re having tryouts for first years…’

  I followed Ryan across the springy grass, masterfully dodging a boy from the Christian Students’ Union.

  ‘Will you accept Jesus Christ as your saviour today?’ he yelled, as I stopped to yank off the thongs. They were giving me a blister, right next to the big toe.

  Mirabellla De Luca, I allowed myself a small smile, that I hoped only my sandy, smelly surfer’s feet could see…one day I’ll hold your hand again.

  Push-pops or Jaw Breakers?

  Did you know that 1996 was the first time anyone danced the Macarena? And the first time Java programming language was released. And the first time Germany ever held a Holocaust remembrance day.

  John Howard became the twenty-fifth Prime Minister of Australia. But I was only eight. Nintendo 64 went on sale. I was definitely more interested in Diddy Kong Racing.

  Mirabella arrived in my class. It was halfway through third grade.

  Her family moved to Fremantle from a tiny fishing village called Atrani on the Amalfi Coast in Italy. She flew back to visit their nonna every year. She would always be absent the same few weeks of term. Once, I heard her say she was going to move to Milan when she turned eighteen.

  When she first arrived in our class, I teased her on principle.

  Mrs White sat us together because our surnames fell one after the other. I wrinkled my face in disgust and wished that I could move back to Ryan’s desk.

  Mirabella was the girl with the thick, curly hair always pulled back in a high ponytail that looked too tight. I was sure glad I didn’t have long hair. The one with the huge brown eyes and glasses that she later swapped for different colour contacts, depending on her mood. The girl with the smelly spaghetti sandwiches for lunch. Yuck.

  Mirabella De Luca.

  Cooties.

  Yuck.

  Pokemon Cards

  In 1998 I got a new brother who cried all night. Mum was disappointed. She wanted a child she could dress up and take shopping. A ballerina. Instead, she was stuck with us. She had always said that two was her max.

  All the girls at school were obsessed with The Spice Girls. Ryan and I dutifully graffitied any posters, photographs or notebooks they foolishly left on their desks. Baby got a moustache. Posh got a monobrow. Ginger got a bad case of acne. Ryan and I got detention.

  It was fifth grade, so naturally things changed: I hit double digits. Ryan, who had already turned ten in February, felt it his duty to tell me that I had to start dating.

  I swallowed hard, trying not to let fear translate onto my freckled face. Ask someone out—no way! How could I ever have the guts?

  ‘Who do you want to date?’ he continued undeterred. ‘I’m going to get Stacey Stratton to be my girlfriend.’

  His tone indicated that Stacey wasn’t going to have much say in the matter.

  ‘Mirabella De Luca,’ I replied instantly.

  She and I had been assigned partners for our science project for the term: building a baking soda volcano. She was wearing braces by then, with pink and lilac rubber bands alternating on each tooth.

  She wasn’t new anymore. I was allowed to like her.

  Ryan’s eyes went round with shock.

  ‘But…but…you can’t? I mean she’s a…that’s impossible!’ he spluttered.

  I held my breath. Didn’t want to say anything to make it worse.

  ‘Oh you’re joking!’ he laughed a few seconds later, face flooding with relief. ‘That four-eyed metal mouthed freak! No one would ever kiss her! Yuck!’

  ‘Yuck!’ I agreed, rushing to cover my tracks, pretend like it was the funniest joke on the planet. That Mirabella was the ugliest creature since Jabba the Hut.

  May the Force be With You…

  Jabba the Hut. Jar Jar Binks. Ryan must seriously regret calling Miri those names now I thought ruefully, as I continued to bite my fingernails and sweat in the heat. Occasionally, I dared a nervous glance at the crowd of gossiping girls waiting to enrol. This university was beautiful, but it needed more shade, I decided.

  Mirabella De Luca wasn’t the prettiest one there. Not even close. But she had the nicest legs in Fremantle. Heads turned to stare whenever she strolled down the coffee strip, red glints flashing in her dark hair, as it bounced and swayed in the breeze.

  Even Ryan would kill to score a date with her now.

  But maybe the best thing about seventeen-year-old Mirabella was her perfect orthodontic smile.

  Airwalks vs Sketchers

  2000 was a New Year’s Eve like no other!

  Fun fact: the New Zealand town of Gisborne, population 32,754, was the first city in the world to welcome in the new millennium.

  It was seventh grade, and whilst listening to ‘All the Small Things’ by Blink 182, I first became interested in going to my school disco. I’d avoided it like the plague before:
I’d heard of a dance called the ‘Snowball’.

  Ryan filled me in. ‘So, most of the time they play that cheesy pop music that girls like. But the boys don’t dance. We just hang at the canteen.’

  ‘Forget it, I’m not going.’

  ‘Then like…every ten songs or so, they have a Snowball.

  Which means they put on a slow song and you have to ask someone to dance.’

  ‘No way.’

  He smirked at me, as if I wasn’t quite getting something. ‘If someone asks you, you have to say yes!’

  When I still remained unimpressed, he burst out laughing.

  ‘Chris! Think about it. I’m going to ask Stacey for a Snowball!’

  And suddenly, I understood exactly what all the fuss was about.

  ‘It’s too perfect,’ he rubbed his hands with glee, hands that I noticed were still sticky with tomato sauce from the meat pie he’d just inhaled for lunch.

  ‘I don’t think that’s the best plan to get her to go out with you…’ I began.

  ‘Of course it is! I’ll just stand close, and then as soon as the music switches, I’ll sprint over! I’m the fastest boy in year seven. I play for the year eight rugby team.’

  He could run laps around me. I wasn’t about to debate it.

  ‘But…um…Ryan,’ I pointed out tentatively. ‘Stacey Stratton…hates us.’

  ‘Details, details,’ Ryan waved his hand airily. ‘She has to say yes, or the teachers will give her trouble!’

  And so I found myself dropped off at school at seven o’clock on Friday by my teary mum, who told me she, ‘couldn’t believe I was growing up so fast’. Showered and sprayed with god knows what to smell nice and decked out in my ‘best clothes’ according to my dad.