by Luke Horton
Tom half-laughed before realising Jeremy meant it. Before remembering what Clara had told him. Oh, he said. Men get that?
Oh yeah, it’s pretty common, Jeremy said, and Tom felt foolish. Foolish, and that his tone had not been sympathetic enough. That he might just have shamed Jeremy there for a second, or like it might have seemed he was mocking Jeremy, which he hadn’t meant to do at all. His temperature was rising again.
We went to couples counselling, Jeremy said. They took it pretty seriously. It was good. It’s something they’re good about now, everyone’s postnatal mental health. They understand how tough it can be, on everyone.
That’s good, Tom said, and they let it drop.
They trod carefully over potholes on the sidewalk, and Jeremy put Ollie on his back as they took a short cut through an empty lot strewn with rolls of wire and crumbled concrete blocks. There was a sign indicating the firm in charge of security for the lot, and, Tom gathered from the symbols on the sign, warnings of jail time for being caught stealing from building sites.
How about you? Jeremy said as he put Ollie back down at the entrance to the hotel. Do you think you and Clara will have children?
I don’t know, Tom said, and couldn’t decide what to say next. He had become incredibly conscious of his body. The rhythm of his walk, or lack thereof; how he now had to hold it steady, his pace, effortfully. But thankfully he didn’t need to say anything else, because Ollie had started talking about going to the beach, and soon they were back at the pool, where they found Madeleine and Clara in banana lounges with untouched cocktails between them on a marble table.
Tom was happy to see them, happy to see the pool. Sweat was prickling his skin, sprouting down his spine. He sat for a moment on a banana lounge, unbuttoning his shirt deliberately, not rushing his movements, breathing deeply as inconspicuously as possible, counting to ten in between each breath. Then he felt something brush his elbow, and he was back on his feet.
It was Clara’s hand, reaching out sleepily from the banana lounge, her sunglasses on and her face partially covered in a muslin cloth. She wasn’t looking his way, she was nodding at Madeleine, who was saying something about the highly varnished woodwork penises they’d seen at the markets, bunches of them in bowls as keyrings, bottle openers. How graphic they were, how anatomically correct.
Clara’s hand hung in the air for moment, as Tom dropped his shirt on the banana lounge, took three steps towards the pool, and split the surface of the water.
Only as he pushed through, skirting the sky-blue tiles at the bottom of the pool, his eyes closed against the chlorine, did he allow himself to feel the shame. They were in Bali; he was allowed to sweat. No one would wonder why. And Clara was allowed to touch him. But he was caught off guard. It was the wrong moment. Besides, he couldn’t think of the last time she had done something like that — displayed affection publicly. It was always him, and it was always brief. A quick press of her shoulders with his hands; a hand slipped around her waist for a moment while passing. Only in private were they physically close. On the days when they both worked from home, they fell into each other in the hallway often, exhausted, standing perfectly still for minutes at a time.
7
One happened at the end of a longish walk into the city, to visit the State Library. There was microfilm there, historical newspapers he needed to consult for his thesis. It was November, one of those suddenly very warm days you weren’t yet expecting, the sun high and blazing, and he was already a little overheated. Ahead of him in the street he spotted Emily, walking in his direction. She had seen him, was smiling and waving. He had no choice but to greet her. He waved back.
She hugged him — a long, warm hug that sank his face deep into her hair. He worried about his clammy hands, worried about his body odour, a slight stickiness he detected in his underarms, but there was nothing he could do about it now. Her hair, long, shining, strawberry blonde, was pillowy against his cheek. There was a hint of vanilla about her, but her hair smelled of nothing so much as health and cleanliness, as if, instead of some product she used, this was simply the smell of incredibly healthy hair.
She arched back from him, still holding on to his arms, although more loosely now, and looked into his eyes.
How are you? she said, and for a moment, like always, he was dazzled by her eyes. So big and blue and clear, Emily’s eyes had a depth and a segmented complexity that other people’s eyes simply didn’t seem to have. Forever wet-seeming, her eyes gave her the appearance of being constantly on the verge of some emotional outpouring, as if her capacity for feeling, for sadness, compassion, for great pity, was something she was only just managing to contain. Beneath her eyes, in the shadow of her bangs, along the ridges of her cheekbones, there was a faint patterning of freckles; these he couldn’t remember seeing before, but must have. Then tips of white, good teeth between slightly parted lips, and a strand of hair that clung to the corner of her mouth. He tried not to look at that.
Emily was always like this. Very warm, very affectionate. She was very beautiful and very warm, and people loved her because she directed this beauty and warmth at you with an intensity of attention that was deeply flattering. It was always brief, this attention, because she was in much demand, and always busy, but this only intensified its effect, as well as the sense that it was being snatched away from you too soon. Snatched away cruelly — like good fortune, like actual warmth — and guided upon the next person, who didn’t deserve it as much as you and for whom you felt a moment’s hatred.
But Tom had become cynical about Emily and her shows of affection. He had suggested to Clara, perhaps Emily’s best friend — he had introduced them, but she was clearly now Clara’s friend, not his — that there was something suspect about the whole thing, something pathological. For instance, he asked her, had she ever noticed how Emily, after she had made such a big deal about seeing you, the long hug, the need to know how you were, what you’d been up to, and all the talk of catching up properly and all the rest, often didn’t speak to you again for the rest of the night? And then how when you parted ways there was another big, essentially empty to-do about having you around, et cetera, pleading with you as if it meant all the world to her, but it never happened? It was all just for show, he said. It was a performance, a seduction, and one that exposed a neediness on Emily’s part, to have everyone think well of her all the time. She needed everyone to be in love with her and she needed to feel she was a good, attentive friend — while doing very little of the work of real, actual friendship — so she could move on to whomever she really wanted to talk to in the room. It was contrived, political. It was public relations. Why did she need everyone to love her so much? She was insecure.
Clara told him he was being ridiculous. More than ridiculous, a shithead. Like she had in the warung. It was what she called him whenever he said things like this. It was shorthand for an assessment of him she had delivered in full a few times, and thereafter abbreviated to just the name: that he only ever saw the worst in people. That he assumed people to be acting with the worst possible motives, from the very worst impulses. That he was paranoid, and this made him mean. All that shit in his head made him capable only of shit thoughts, she said.
It was an assessment, and a name, that he tried to laugh off, but it stung. It didn’t stop him thinking those things about Emily, of course, and half-hating her for it — as a good, loyal friend, Clara was bound to defend her. What he had noticed, though, was that even though he had come to expect it, the big greeting from Emily and nothing more, until perhaps much later in the night when they were both drunk and they might fall into an argument about something stupid, he still felt the burn of it, the jealousy, and the desire for that attention so quickly withdrawn. That was the worst part of it. That he still fell for it, every time. He wondered if others felt the same way about Emily, but he had never broached the subject with anyone else, because he didn’t want to draw attent
ion to the way he felt about her, didn’t want people thinking about Tom and Emily and their relation to one another. Plus, no one would agree, he was sure, because everybody loved her.
People loved her also, Tom thought, as he withstood her gaze on the street, tried not to wither under it, for the simple reason that it reflected well on you to be seen with someone that beautiful, made you feel like you might be beautiful, too, or that there was something special about you for having a friend who was. As she approached him and flung her arms around him, for example, he was hyper-aware, without taking his eyes off her, of people watching them. Noting their closeness, her apparent affection for him. There was a certain grace that was conferred upon him by simply being in her presence. How immediately apart from everyone else it made him feel, to be the subject of their envy. But how preposterous at the same time. How ashamed. To be so easily taken in by it, so susceptible.
They determined they were going in the same direction. In fact, to the same location, more or less — she was meeting Esther at the cafe on the terrace of the library. She pressed his arm with both hands, one final gesture of affection as she untangled herself from him, a chunky bangle dropping down her arm, and together they moved up the street.
Weaving in and out of the stream of pedestrians coming the other way, steering around tourist huddles and clots of teenagers in school uniforms, she asked him about his research. He gave the briefest account of it, deflecting the question by shifting the focus onto her own research.
Oh, don’t ask! she said, raising her palms in the air and dropping them back down. Everything Emily said was like this: emphatic, deeply felt. When she texted him, which she used to do when they first became friends, the messages were littered with exclamation points, trebled question marks, signed off with long trails of kisses and hearts and elaborate emoticons that he often found indecipherable.
I’m asking, he said. You have to tell me.
Well, she said, sighing dramatically, I have bitten off more than I can chew, basically, I think. And she paused and looked down at the ground in front of her feet.
How so? he asked, before being forced off the curb for a moment by three teenage boys with backpacks coming the other way.
It gave him time to take stock. His underarms had fused. There was a stickiness elsewhere too now, along his spine, on his chest. And although he dared not test it with his fingers, he felt sure his fringe was stuck to his forehead. Silently, invisibly, he inhaled deeply and held it for as long as he could before letting it out. It wasn’t so easy while walking fast. As he held in the breath, his hands pulsed.
I mean, surely that’s how it feels all the time, at least to some degree, he said, rejoining her. It does with me.
Yes, I guess so, she said. And it’s just early days and everything. But I think I’ve been overly ambitious trying to be all cross-disciplinary about it or something, bringing in sociology, psychology, now neuroscience, and critical theory of course … at the moment Lacan, who is doing my head in … ‘Preserving farness, nearness presences nearness by nearing the farness’ … ‘Though never present, the thing is not absent.’ I should have just written about roundabouts!
Well, you are, aren’t you? Just going deep on roundabouts?
Too deep! she laughed.
Emily’s research, as he understood it, which he didn’t very well, or couldn’t remember as well as he should, although they had talked about it many times, was something to do with street design and mental health, or social cohesion, or something like that. Whether living in streets that ran along rectilinear grids was better or worse for mental health outcomes than living in streets and suburbs that followed the natural contours of the landscape, or organic streetscapes that were not planned at all. Or that’s where it had started. The focus on roundabouts seemed relatively new.
He was monitoring himself. As he deep-breathed, his heartbeats seemed to come in pairs, the first of each a suspension, an extending out, and the second a drop, a stepping down, further into his body. These he tried to really feel. Feel his body rising and falling naturally as it moved along the street, as if in there somewhere, deeper within his body, was a place he could retreat to and escape the pulsing. He didn’t feel anxious, didn’t feel panicked — his heart rate was relatively stable — but he knew if he didn’t cool down soon, he would begin to. He couldn’t think about it. He needed to keep the attention on Emily.
This helped in a couple of ways. It was distraction — concentrating on Emily’s work, her answers to his questions — and in this way related, he thought, to mindfulness, as far as he understood it, which wasn’t well. He had considered taking a class on mindfulness once, downloading some guided meditations, but had instead chosen to learn transcendental meditation, thanks to a recommendation from a friend, which he understood to be the much more intense of the two. At the time he reasoned the severity of his condition called for drastic measures. But he found it surprisingly easy to do — it was in essence a simple technique, once you got past the pseudoscience and spiritual nonsense that came with it — and he enjoyed it, practising it twice a day for twenty minutes, in the morning and the early evening, as instructed. He’d kept it up for several months, until he hit a busy period of teaching and dropped it, after which he never took it back up again. But one couldn’t do transcendental meditation while walking down the street, or not while holding a conversation.
Keeping Emily talking also meant the pressure was off him. By keeping her thinking about her own work, she would pay less attention to him, look at him less often, and he wouldn’t have to try to formulate cogent responses to any questions she put to him. If only he could escape. But she knew now where he was going, so there was no way out. The somewhat contradictory alternative would have been to have a longer walk with her. He could keep her talking and it would break, finally, like it always did, in its feverish way. He would grow hotter and hotter until, somehow, it crested and broke, and, without noticing the change, he would no longer be anxious at all, and almost instantaneously quite cool.
You’ll get there, he said.
Maybe! she laughed.
They fanned out either side of the agglomerate of people in front of Melbourne Central and fell back in step.
I have found my straw man at least, I think, she said.
Oh, good … who is that?
She told him about the straw man, some city planner from the seventies who made a specious link in a book — which most people weren’t aware of, admittedly, but which seemed to represent the consensus thinking on the subject — between the roundabout and mental health. He ignored class and race, and glaringly, she said, failed to acknowledge that the real problem wasn’t the way cars were directed around suburbs, but that suburbs were built around car use in the first place. She became exasperated. Once that is corrected, so many other problems go with it! she said. Communities would be more cohesive, and mental health stats, of which there was a modest drop in suburbs with non-rectilinear layouts, would fall off at a much faster rate.
He agreed, and, although he had become a little confused about her position on roundabouts, whether she was pro roundabout or anti them, he struggled to think of other questions to ask her. They moved on to other things, mainly Clara, how she was going with her studies, her sewing. He joked about the wonderful jumpers he’d now be forced to wear.
But no, seriously, Emily said, I’m so glad she’s doing that. It’s so good to have something else to do. I mean, of course Clara already has other things — she is such a good cook, and gardener, she loves bushwalking, doesn’t she, hiking — but something new, maybe, is good to get into, too.
Yes, Tom said. It’s great that writing a thesis has made her so depressed and broke she’s started sewing her own clothes.
He was enjoying himself, but he was being betrayed by his body. A river of sweat had opened up along his spine and was soaking into the waistband of his jeans. He tug
ged at his shirt, to let air in, swiped discreetly at his forehead, dreading it sprouting from there, too, where it was hardest to conceal, but he was losing the battle, he could see that. There was little chance of it just passing, now that anxiety about the anxiety was in play.
The heat of the day wasn’t helping. Light glanced off buildings, flashed off the pavement, cut into his eyes from windows. He was wearing a light jumper, but he dared not take it off. The sweat was surely visible through his shirt. But it was only another thirty, forty metres and then they were there, crossing the street to the library and moving through the tables on the terrace towards Esther.
Esther, long-legged, stylish in her work clothes, looking so much more grown up than the girl he saw on weekends at parties and shows, got up to hug them both. Tom leaned in from a distance.
Can’t stop for a coffee? Emily asked, putting down her bag and taking a seat opposite her friend.
From their seats, they both looked up at Tom, and he struggled not to flinch. But the way they looked at him. How strange it was. How slow. How dreamy. It was as if they were suspended in time, or the tape had been slowed down, and he could watch it in slow motion, the stretch of their smiles across their faces. Their wondrous, easeful smiles. So beautiful they were almost grotesque.
I should get in there, really, he said. Been putting it off for too long … If I find what I need quickly, I’ll come back out and find you.
No worries, Emily said, pouring herself some water from the bottle on the table. We’re not going anywhere … Esther’s just finished, and we’ve both got the day off tomorrow — we might have drinks next, who knows! she laughed.
Drinks! Esther said. Very here for that.
He ducked in under the awning and through the cafe into the foyer of the library. It was cool and dim and reverberant in there. It had vaulted ceilings and marble floors and air-conditioning, and, although it was a public space and wide open and busy, people streaming through the main doors and in and out of the foyer in various directions, he felt better.
