by Luke Horton
He wondered if he might be okay now, in the air-conditioning, in the anonymity of the collections. He moved through the many rows of tables, which were mostly empty, to the front desk. The woman at the counter directed him to the microfilm room, and he was making his way there when he realised it wasn’t passing, after all. He wasn’t calming down. He would need to find a bathroom.
Inside the cubicle, he took off his jumper, his shirt, pulled down his jeans, and sat on the toilet with his eyes closed. It was cold in there, his shoulder resting against marble that stung his skin. But it would take time for his temperature to drop. He would need to calm down first. Sweat slipped down his chest. He sat back up, wound toilet paper around his fist, many times over, and ran the wad down his chest, across his forehead, along the length of his spine, around the inside of the waistband of his boxers, and under his arms. The paper was sodden. He dropped it between his legs into the bowl, rested his head back against the wall, closed his eyes, and concentrated on the breathing exercises he had been taught. There were no distractions now. Each heartbeat was sick and sharp and racking. Against his eyelids pulsed a greenish, mouldering red.
He breathed, sweat sprouted, he sopped it up as it came, and, after some time, after twenty, thirty controlled breaths, counting down from ten in between each inhalation and exhalation, and throwing in the mantra every now and then for good measure, he shivered. His heart rate had slowed. The pit of his stomach — which, before, had vanished and been replaced by a terrible dragging sensation, as if each time he inhaled the air escaped back out through a stomach that had been slit open — was back. His blood had withdrawn from his skull.
The exhaustion he felt now was almost as overwhelming in its intensity as the panic had been. He had fallen into a kind of stupor — a heavy, pleasant, drugged kind of state. He had no strength. He opened his eyes, but could not keep them open. His whole body was leaden, as if, if he didn’t concentrate on holding himself up, he might slip off the toilet seat to the floor.
After he didn’t know how long, he finally pulled himself together. First eyes open, then upright on the seat, then standing to inspect his shirt. There was a line of sweat running down the back, and two more patches over his ribcage, but the biggest spread was from his underarms, the half-moons running over the seam onto the front of the shirt, and far down both arms.
He put the shirt and jumper back on, blew his nose, wiped at his underarms one more time, and left the cubicle. He checked himself in the mirror. It took a moment for his eyes to focus, but then he saw that while his fringe was wet and clinging to his forehead and his face was blanched white and at the same time faintly blotched — a weak, cell-like pattern bloomed in patches over his skin — fundamentally, as long as no one peered at him too closely, looked into his hugely dilated eyes, he was okay.
Carefully he walked back into the library. The room hummed and rustled. Everything in the room seemed so finely wrought: faces in concentration, pale necks bent forward, the dark wood of desks and shelves. A row of arched windows along one wall glowed dully with soft, whitish light, like in a cathedral.
Then, back through the foyer, under the Corinthian columns, out into the sunshine, sunglasses on, speeding up now, feeling stronger, and home.
It was bad around that time generally, he acknowledged. There were a few incidents, some sudden exits. But for some reason that day in the city was among the most memorable. Maybe because it involved Emily, the beautiful girl he’d known before Clara. The girl who had always made him feel uncomfortable, who he always had to prepare himself to see. But he had started teaching then, too, and was barely making it through classes.
That was when he finally spoke to his GP and got put on SSRIs. Started seeing a psychologist. He lasted about four or five sessions with the psych, about a year on the meds. After the first few days, when he was able to get back off the couch, he felt fine on them. His sex drive, already low, vanished completely, but he slept better, and overall he was maybe less anxious. On balance, he probably had fewer outright attacks.
But then he became worried about his liver. The SSRI he was on had an association with liver failure; while on them he was required to have his liver checked every six months. He continued to drink, and occasionally he felt a pain in his side. His test results were clear, except that one corner of his liver was fatty. Apparently it was common enough, but one corner of his liver had gone to fat. He was going to stop drinking, start running, get off the meds. Of the three, getting off the meds was the only one he managed. He barely noticed the difference.
8
The next day was what Tom thought of later as the best day. Later. When everything was ruined and the holiday had taken on a significance to him that he could not have anticipated.
They had settled in. The bad flight was way behind him, the next flight was a whole week away, but, more than that, he was having a good time. He had warmed to Jeremy, he had warmed to Madeleine and Ollie. No longer was he just being well behaved, putting up with them for Clara’s sake. No longer was he feeling anxious around them, either. They had broken the ice. They were friends now.
It reminded him of what it used to be like, being on holiday with friends — something he had not done for a long time, but which was once such a regular feature in his life. Weekends away, whole weeks during summer camping by the beach. Looking back, these times seemed to have stopped suddenly, but that couldn’t be right. Surely the end was gradual — so gradual he didn’t really notice it. Why had it happened? He knew and he didn’t know.
In truth, being with Madeleine and Jeremy reminded him what it was like to have friends in his life in any way. This had stopped, too, somehow. He made calculations. At twenty-two he had maybe four, five good friends. At twenty-eight, fifteen, twenty. At thirty-five, one — or two, if you counted Clara.
He remembered how, very early on with Clara, sometime in those first years, he had become hung up on the idea of friendship. It embarrassed him now to think of it, and yet if he was honest, he still nursed many of the same doubts and questions he’d had then. What it means, how it is done. He obviously banged on about it a lot because one day Clara presented him with a book she had picked up from an op shop called A Friend Is Someone Who Likes You. She thought it was sweet, funny; she was only gently mocking him. But he had been humiliated by that present, and he was as embarrassed thinking about it now as he was then: that he was preoccupied with something that was so obvious there was a children’s book that explained it to you in the very title. Of course, he thought then — and still did think, privately — it wasn’t actually as simple as that. Simply liking you did not make someone your friend, not in any meaningful way. People could ‘like’ you and not see you one year to the next. In what way was that friendship?
At the time, when Clara had given him the book, they were part of a tight little group, people from university, mostly, and a few of Clara’s older friends from high school who had also moved to Melbourne from the Gold Coast; Tom had happily let his hometown friends go when he moved to the city. Perhaps because of this, because they were her friends first, he always felt slightly on the outer of this group. He was uptight, paranoid. Everyone else — it was girls mostly and a couple of guys, boyfriends of the girls — seemed to see each other more often than they did him, and he wasn’t sure quite how this happened. But he knew he wasn’t always easy to get along with, he could be argumentative, prickly, and he always suspected he was tolerated rather than liked. Back then, he was often like this, moody, unpredictable. He slept about as badly then as he did now. He had a reputation for saying things most people wouldn’t — and to people’s faces, too. Certain people called him ‘acid tongue’. But he couldn’t handle the injustice of people walking around oblivious, not knowing what everyone thought of them. So he told them. An early girlfriend had said if there was a song about Tom, it was The Smiths’ ‘Big Mouth Strikes Again’.
When they first got toget
her, he and Clara would argue all the time about the smallest things, and did it everywhere — in front of her parents, in front of his — but he’d put a stop to that. He was agreeable, now. Mild. Quieter.
He’d been trained in the art of argument by his parents — trained to take offence, rise to the occasion, take the bait. To be thin-skinned and sharp-tongued. And it wasn’t good for him. He’d agreed with his therapist about that. He could give, but he couldn’t take. Besides, if his parents were how you turned out if you kept up with all that, he wanted no part of it.
So he was pleasant, now, and polite. You could just do that, it turned out: swallow it back down, roll with the punches. It was an anti-anxiety strategy, too, of course. If he could just not care about things so much, they wouldn’t piss him off or stress him out or make him paranoid, so he was trying to let things go. It might all come out in other ways, of course, like in your legs on a plane or in your hands as you raise your cup to your lips, but he was working on that.
After the present of the book, he’d dropped the subject of friendship, kept his thoughts to himself, and, over time, the preoccupation waned. Besides, only a few years later, when they were no longer in contact with most of the people in the old group, it became a moot point, because they suddenly found their people. A big, messy, amorphous group, introduced to them mostly by Trish, who was a girl who could go out on a Friday night and have a whole new gang by the end of the weekend. And, for a couple of years, they were busy with art openings, gigs, parties, spontaneous all-nighters. There was drugs, lots of booze. It felt late — he was twenty-seven, she twenty-five — but they’d had a quiet, supposedly studious, but in truth lacklustre period after their trip overseas, some of which had been especially lonely for him, as she had spent time away from him, and they entered this new world with a hunger they recognised in each other, but did not discuss. He was happy for the distraction from the PhD, which he had just started, but was already loathing, and she was yet to start hers, so had the time.
But it was short-lived. As quickly as it bloomed, it withered. Certain key people moved overseas — instigators, party-throwers, the glue between groups within the group — a few had kids and moved to outer-ring suburbs. By then, Tom himself had to knuckle down and get on with his research, Clara was finishing her honours thesis, and no one seemed quite in sync anymore. And something that had been so effortless, the spontaneous nights out that moved from openings to restaurants to bars to lounge rooms, even backyards the next morning, something that took no arranging at all, no need for texts or Facebook invites, became something that took work, was difficult to line up, and was never as satisfying. It felt prematurely nostalgic, elegiac, vaguely sad. Very few of these people actively kept in touch, and soon they hardly saw anyone.
He was aware this wasn’t the full story, and others might tell it differently. And he knew that if he’d kept going to the shows, the art openings, he would’ve kept seeing those people; it was as simple as that. That the anxiety played a part in this was something he found hard to acknowledge. He had concealed it even from Clara, as far as he could, and he spent so much time covering for it that he had himself half-believing the lies too: that he was just busy; that he had too much work to do; that he was old now, needed to knuckle down; and, to Clara, that he didn’t even like those people anymore.
Clara did better. Some of her older friendships endured, and the small group that had formed around Emily — Paula, Celia, Thuy, Chris — remained her friends, and by extension his. It came more naturally to the women of the group, friendship, it seemed. To talk on the phone, meet for drinks, coffee. The gendering of it was depressingly predictable. Not once had a male friend suggested anything like this.
He still had Barry, of course. Barry he saw because they played tennis together, itself something they had taken up semi-ironically as the classic buddy thing to do, but which soon became the most significant and regular contact he had with anyone. Barry was a leftover from the big group. But Barry didn’t go to parties much anymore, either; he worked long hours on the weekend in a bike-repair shop. As the only job he’d ever really enjoyed, he was doing all he could to hold it down. He was on a health kick, too, not drinking, and he’d lost weight. But he was still depressed, most of the time. Before Barry stopped drinking, they’d sometimes had a beer or two afterwards. Very occasionally it became five.
Being with Madeleine and Jeremy brought some of the old times back. All those times he’d forgotten about, when they’d spent whole days, whole weekends, with people without a second thought, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. It reminded him how much he liked it. How much he missed it. But he was rusty. Rusty as hell. He felt like he hadn’t spoken about himself to anyone in years — someone who wasn’t Clara or his mother or his therapist or Barry — not if he could help it, not in anything but the most cursory way. But Madeleine was insistent. That he not dodge the question — about his research, his teaching, what growing up the son of an architect and an artist in a small Victorian town was like. He found himself clearing his throat a lot. Telling them rambling stories that didn’t go anywhere, as if he had forgotten how to tell a story that made sense, that held shape — what it was about a story that kept people’s attention. Besides, his childhood seemed so quaint to him, like he was telling stories of some incredibly distant past.
One story he told was about his father’s architectural practice. How he’d semi-retired to the country when they were kids, but of course had started back up and designed people’s houses around the place, and how he would later, when he finally did retire, take them on tours, showing them his work, the few houses around the area that stuck out so obviously as architecturally designed. There were a lot of driving tours, as Tom’s mother got sicker, and got out less. They were, by and large, ugly houses, he told them. Ostentatious eighties builds. Busy proto-McMansions or too-big luxury beach houses with spectacular views. They’d be sparkling and bloated, with marble and stainless steel, ridiculously broad decks, and white curving roofs poorly mimicking the waves beneath them, like budget, mini Sydney Opera Houses. That was what led him to urban planning, probably, he said — although he wasn’t sure this was true at all. All that vanity. How do we kill that?
The others laughed along with his take-down of his father’s work, although they were somewhat distracted — by Ollie, by orders arriving, the general busyness of the boardwalk — and he had felt embarrassed for a moment for going overboard, for going so dark, laying it on a bit thick, and he decided he would not talk so much from now on. It wasn’t even true, what he had said. His father had designed as many nice houses as he had awful ones: the A-frame; the eco house now reclaimed by the national park; some early, uncompromising geometric houses after Roy Grounds in the seventies. The bad, later ones were a reflection of the tastes of his clients when he moved to the coast as much as his own. But his embarrassment faded quickly in the general atmosphere of good cheer, and later Jeremy picked up certain threads while they played frisbee, asking about his half-sisters, his mother, her art, and, more tactfully, later after a few drinks, her illness. What a person with emphysema could and couldn’t do.
But it wasn’t being able to talk about himself that he enjoyed particularly — he had no good answers to their questions, nothing interesting, or cogent, to say — it was that he was comfortable around them. And once all the preliminaries had been taken care of, once all the getting to know one another was out of the way, they could all sit around and talk about nothing. Or not talk that much at all. Eat; chat; watch the comings and goings along the boardwalk from their vantage in the cabanas; stare out at the water, grey and flat, but also glittering, reflecting the sun back into their faces; watch the prettily painted jukungs launch from the next beach over, the bigger catamarans heading off to the islands; and drift in and out of one another’s experience of it all. Madeleine continued to dominate conversation, but this meant that the rest didn’t need to worry about it so
much. A dynamic had established itself. And even she had quieter spells. Being a constant source of distraction, Ollie helped. He required some sort of attention so much of the time. But Jeremy was easy to be around, too, and the longer Tom spent in his company the more he liked him, the more he was happy, not resentful, to be spending his days with him.
Jeremy was as easygoing as he was quiet. It helped set a certain tone. He was also discreet. Tom had the feeling he could say whatever he liked around him, didn’t have to be constantly on guard or worry about being funny or clever or whatever, because Jeremy himself didn’t. Perhaps this had something to do with the fact that they were on holiday together. These were people he would never see again. It was freeing. After a tense first couple of days, when Tom did his best to avoid spending any time alone with Jeremy, he found he looked forward to seeing him each morning at breakfast. He was earnest, perhaps, mostly, but he had a sly wit that became more pronounced the longer you spent in his company. He didn’t try too hard, wasn’t a performer like Barry, which Tom decided was a good thing. His ego did not demand an audience, or competing wits to spar off, which was the default mode of most of Tom’s male friends. In fact, Jeremy made no demands. But he wasn’t entirely passive, either. He seemed to sense when more from him might be needed to make things run more smoothly, or to change a mood, but he did this without reluctance or any apparent sense of obligation. Tom wondered how much of this was the effect of being with someone like Madeleine. They seemed so perfectly matched: Jeremy happily leaving most of the social energy to her, but remaining present enough to pick up the slack when needed, as if he was as perfectly content being quiet as he was talking. Tom was slightly in awe of this quality, and then, increasingly, of Jeremy in general.
