Five

‘Do you know,’ Ruby says, ‘that Bill Gates thinks the South Indians are the second smartest people in the world?’

‘Who’s first?’ I ask.

‘The Chinese.’ She laughs. ‘He is a man with his eye on the global market.’ We are driving down to Poovar Island and India flickers by through the car windows. I cannot understand why it took me so long to return.

Kerala is a Communist state, and hammer-and-sickles are painted on the sides of people’s houses. The locals wear white to fend off the heat. The coconut palms are so thick that the light is filtered to a greeny-gold. There are Christian churches scattered at regular intervals through the trees as well as temples and the occasional mosque.

Everyone warned me that India would be more crowded, more polluted and more of a hassle since I was here last. But at this moment it seems utterly perfect. We catch a low wooden boat through the waterways to our hotel. There are fireflies darting about, and the glow of lamps from the villages scattered among the trees. It is hard to believe there is solid land in under there. In the twilight it seems that the trees are floating, that the water extends forever.

After we unpack and have dinner, we go for a walk along the beach. It is a narrow strip of sand, with the sea on one side and a lagoon on the other and there are brightly painted fishing boats beached for the night above the water line. The sea is full of phosphorescence and the surf is wild, making a continual play of fireworks, a constant sprinkling of stars.

‘They are living creatures, you know, that are glowing like that. They light up when they’re disturbed. Look.’ Ruby runs down the beach a few metres, landing as heavily as she can on each foot, shooting stars into the air.

‘You have diamonds on the soles of your shoes.’

‘I love that album. You see, just because there is an age difference doesn’t mean we can’t like the same music.’

‘On that subject, don’t feel obliged to hang out with me while we’re here,’ I say. ‘Full moon is coming. Keralan beaches are famous for their raves. I don’t want to cramp your style.’

‘You won’t,’ Ruby says. ‘I might just disappear at any time. But I’m trying to be a good girl. I haven’t been so into the drug thing since I had a bad reaction to the anti-malarials I was on. I had like five anxiety attacks a day and couldn’t stop crying. It was foul. And let’s not mention the very recent head-shaving-on-hash incident.’ She runs her hand over her scalp. ‘Anyway, I like being with you.’

With her clothes on and no hair, Ruby looks like a boy. But now that she is in her bathers I cannot miss her curves. Her curves—and mine, I suppose—are the reason we are sunbaking on a secluded section of sand out of sight of the fishermen. We don’t want to offend them with our uncoveredness.

‘I don’t usually travel like this,’ Ruby says, her voice muffled because she is lying on her stomach with her head cocked into the crook of her elbow. ‘Normally I spend time with the locals. Work with them, if it’s possible.’

‘I’ve come to accept that I’m fooling myself if I think I can be anything other than a tourist,’ I say. ‘That’s one of the things I like about America. I can work with people, live there. I don’t feel like such a voyeur. Here, it’s more complicated.’

‘You’re being defeatist,’ Ruby says. ‘You sound like my mother. It’s not as hard to engage as you make out.’

‘Well you sound like a naïve rebellious daughter.’ I’m sharp with her. Her certainty about the world, about what’s right and wrong with it, suddenly irritates me. ‘But I’m glad you think you’ve got it all sorted.’

I’ve upset her, which I suppose is what I wanted. She gets up and walks down to the water without looking at me. She spends some time there, pottering in the shallows because the rip is so strong.

I get up too and move under the palms to get some shade. Ruby joins me there.

‘You know,’ she says, ‘this heat is bringing back a memory, the first really scary thing I can remember: Ash Wednesday. Not so much the fires as the build-up. The dust storm. Did you live in Melbourne then?’

‘I was in Bali,’ I tell her. ‘I was with my brother Finn and the day we were leaving to fly home was February 14, 1983. I remember the guy serving us in the bar saying, “Your country is on fire.” We didn’t believe him, but the next morning, when we were coming in to land at Melbourne airport, the air was thick with smoke.’

‘I was only five,’ Ruby says. ‘I can remember my dad calling from work and saying we had to close all the windows because a lot of dust was blowing towards us. He asked to speak to Mum and I was suddenly scared, spooked by the urgency in his voice. I remember that more vividly than the storm itself. Later Dad told us about friends of his that stood in their driveway at Mount Macedon with wet towels over their heads while their home burnt down around them, waiting for the flames to claim them as well. And a woman who put all her possessions in a boat in a dam, only to have the fire pass over the house and burn the boat, destroying everything that was precious to her.’

‘I only heard the details when we got to the airport. The dust storm was over by then but my parents told us it dumped a thousand tonnes of sand on the city in a single hour. They told us what it was like when the smoke rolled over the city, and the stories they’d read in the papers or heard from friends. All the firemen who got burnt in their trucks as they were trying to escape from the fire front.

‘Then, whenever I turned on the radio over the next few days there was the voice of the journalist who reported on the burning of his own house. His broadcast was replayed again and again, you know the way they do—I’m watching my house burn down. I’m sitting out on the road in front of my own house where I’ve lived for thirteen or fourteen years and it’s going down in front of me. And the flames are in the roof and…Oh, God damn it. It’s just beyond belief…my own house. And everything around it is black. There are fires burning all around me. All around me.’

‘You remember what he said?’ Ruby asks, ‘word for word?’

‘It’s a grid thing.’

When I got back from the States my contact with Michael was erratic. A few days after my return to Melbourne I was still flushed with him. I sent him a long fax full of excitement about our time together. I said, ‘I am pleased we have met. I think we are going to know each other a long time.’

His reply was brief. ‘Know each other a long time? I’m not sure about that. I can assure you, I’m not worth it.’ When I read that, standing by the fax machine at work, I flinched. I felt as if I had been slapped in the face. I got it wrong, I thought, blushing with the shame of presumption. I am an idiot.

I did not fax or write or phone—all the things I had been planning to do as I had flown the twelve hours from LA to Melbourne. But complete withdrawal was not what Michael wanted either, it seemed, and after a few weeks he began to send me postcards and brief faxes. They were so affectionate I began to believe that his rudeness had been a misunderstanding and I started to send him postcards in return. I would search out increasingly ridiculous images of talking koalas, kangaroos and girls in seventies bikinis. I wooed him with kitsch.

‘It’s not like we’re in a relationship,’ I said to Marion. ‘It’s not like I’m ever going to see him again, despite the occasional postcard. Sometimes I wonder if it wasn’t Los Angeles that swept me off my feet. The romance of Hollywood.’

‘Well if you’ve fallen for the myth, he must’ve too,’ said Marion. ‘He’s the one living there. Anyway you will see him again. He comes back to Australia every year.’

That night I got out a video of Legends of the Fall and forced Marion and Raff to watch it. ‘You know this is crap, right?’ Raff said ten minutes into the film, having seen enough fur coats, bears and men with long hair to get nervous.

‘I think it’s good,’ I protested. ‘This is the third time I’ve seen it.’

‘Sometimes,’ Raff said, ‘I have serious concerns about your judgment.’

The second time I was with Michael it was very hot. It was the summer of 1994 and fires were raging everywhere. He was home for the Christmas holidays so I decided to go up to Sydney. The first night I was there I planned to go to a homecoming party Michael was throwing even though I had not, despite receiving a postcard only a few days earlier, been invited. In fact Michael hadn’t even told me he was returning to Sydney for the holidays.

‘It’s a dubious situation, Cath,’ Marion said. ‘I know I told you he would be coming back. But he hasn’t told you. That’s not good.’

Raff was blunter. ‘He’s fucking you around.’

‘I like a challenge,’ I said. ‘I think of him as a kind of Bermuda Triangle for women.’ I was laughing, but Marion and Raff were not.

‘Sounds like that game we used to play in primary school,’ Raff was sarcastic. ‘Would you rather hang yourself, shoot yourself, or drown?’

‘Drown,’ I smirked, ignoring the warning in his heavy-handed irony. ‘It works in with the Bermuda metaphor.’

I got to the party late, hoping to suggest I felt casual about it. I knew a lot of people there and spoke to them as I worked my way through the crowd to Michael. When I looked at him it hurt, I felt him in my whole body. This is what is hard to explain to people—how physical my response to him was. All I could think of was his skin and how I could get it close to mine.

Whenever I glanced up from a conversation he was watching me, his eyes upon me. But whenever I went to approach him he seemed to slip away into another room. His technique was hypnotically simple: interested, inattentive, present, absent.

As I was about to give up and leave the party Michael came out to me. ‘I’ve been looking for you,’ he said. ‘If I’d known you’d be in Sydney I’d have asked you to come along myself. Do you have to go so soon? I can’t leave, I have to clean up.’

‘I’ll be here a few days,’ I said. ‘Call me.’

He called first thing the next morning and came over to the flat I was staying in. He stood in the doorway of the living room, arms stretched up, hanging off the jamb. He was still lean and lined and, to me, sexy. It had only been eight months.

‘Are you seeing anyone?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I assume you are. Is that why didn’t you tell me you were coming out?’

‘Not at all. I thought a girl like you would have a lot of options and I’d be down low on the list,’ he was cocky now. ‘I’ve sent you a few postcards, haven’t I? I’m hoping that will count for something.’

‘It takes more than that,’ I lied. ‘And I want you to know I don’t send bum titty bum bum postcards to just anyone. Have you got time to go out for breakfast?’ I was anxious to get him out of the flat. All I wanted to do was touch him but it seemed to me that was a bad idea. I wanted to see if there was something real between us, something that sex couldn’t cover up.

‘Of course,’ Michael looked disappointed but was gracious. ‘Coffee would be good.’

Being with him in a public place just made things worse. I could barely concentrate on the menu, or the view of Bondi Beach. Michael seemed in the same state. He was shaking. Our hands brushed against each other as we reached out for our coffees and it was like an electric current ran between us. Finally, after what seemed like hours, but was probably only ten minutes, Michael reached across the table and tentatively stroked the inside of my wrist with his forefinger.

‘Catherine,’ he said, ‘I…Could…I still feel the same about you. I didn’t know that I would, but sitting here, it’s driving me crazy.’ His voice was quavering.

‘So it’s not just me?’ I asked, and he grinned.

‘It’s not. It’s me too. It’s us.’

We walked home holding hands and kissed as soon as we got back in the door. We kissed, nothing else, for a very long time. I drank him, I was drunk with him. I was full of feeling and empty of it at the same time. I looked at the clock to find an hour had passed and we were still standing in the hallway with our arms wrapped around each other.

‘That’s to make up for missing all that foreplay in our mad desert fucks,’ Michael stroked my cheek. ‘But now, now I want to get dirty.’

We undressed each other slowly; I felt that I was floating. By the time he was inside me I was outside myself. This is what I need to say, again, to try and explain all that happened: no one else had ever made me feel like this. No one. When I was with him, all thought stopped. I cannot remember what we did, or what we said, only that hours passed and I was in a state that I think must have been ecstasy.

You are my church, I thought to myself, but didn’t say. I knew how strange it would have sounded; the thought itself felt strange but how else to explain the feeling between us? I chased this moment, precisely this feeling, for the next six years. Michael looked into my eyes. He said, ‘You have no idea how often I have thought of you. I toss and turn, you lose me sleep.’

Despite the heat, we made love all that day and into the night. After the hours of gentle we became rough. He hurt me like I wanted to be hurt. I was swollen and sore but this just made everything more beautiful.

‘We should get up and get something to eat,’ Michael said, after dark had fallen. So we did. We ventured into the night to buy some Thai takeaway and some cold beers. We ate in bed and I can’t remember falling asleep, but I did, heavily, and I didn’t wake until morning.

Michael was stretching. When he saw I was awake he said, ‘I think that might be the best night’s sleep I’ve had in a decade.’ Before I could answer I realised I was bleeding, though I wasn’t due.

‘Shit,’ I said. ‘I’ve destroyed Rebecca’s sheets.’

Michael laughed. ‘Won’t you be their favourite house guest,’ he said, before kissing me on the forehead and getting out of bed. ‘I’ve got family stuff to do,’ he said. ‘But I’ll see you tonight.’ He paused. ‘I mean, if you’re around. If you want to.’

‘Both,’ I said. ‘I want and I’m around.’

My friend Tony rang me when he heard I was in town. ‘A few of us are going to the movies,’ he said. ‘Join us?’

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘I’ll meet you there.’ But I never turned up. I was waiting for Michael to call, which he eventually did, around nine that night, asking me if I felt like dinner. I said yes despite the fact I’d already eaten.

Tony called again the next morning. ‘Where were you last night? Waiting by the phone?’

‘I was tired.’

‘So you were. Waiting, I mean.’

‘No,’ I lied.

I lied a lot over the next few days. I only had time for Michael, for the idea of him. I stood up friends, cancelled arrangements at the last minute. I hung around a flat that was not my own. I waited for him to have a moment to drop by. For the rest of the time I was in Sydney, I didn’t go anywhere, do anything with anyone other than Michael.

In his absence I spent my time in Bondi, falling in love with that place. One day I went to the beach and there was a flotilla of bluebottles, thousands and thousands of them, floating in to shore. They were bright and shiny blue, so pretty it was hard to imagine they were dangerous. I’d had one brand me down my thigh the first day I swam there, a line of scarred skin that bubbled and itched for the next six months. Later, one wrapped itself around my wrist when I was paddling my surfboard and I had to pick the tail off delicately, fighting my instinct to panic and brush the sting and its poison across me.

Each night Michael would arrive later and later for our date. One hour, two hours, three, and I’d sit on the balcony, waiting, looking out over the water. When he did arrive he would often talk to me about Sydney, how beautiful it was, how much he missed it. Other times we wouldn’t talk much at all, he would come over and walk straight into my bedroom. It was always hot, it was always humid and I would lean over the windowsill into the evening air while he held me by the hips and fucked me.

As the fires got closer to Sydney the air became thicker. We would wake up in the middle of the night, coughing in a smoky room. There were two hundred fires burning around New South Wales; it was as if everything was swimming in a sea of smoke. Each night on the news there were fire stories and, one night, a shot of a reporter in the centre of town gesturing to the fiery suburbs behind him with a broad sweep of the arm. Houses were burning; the city was ringed by fires. A man in a torn, blackened singlet was filmed in front of the wreckage of his house. He shrugged.

‘Everything is ash,’ he said.

There were stories of heroes, of fifteen thousand fire fighters from New South Wales and volunteers pouring in from around Australia. Of people abandoning their cars on the highway. Of a family pet exploding into a ball of flame as it tried to escape. Of fire cutting people off so they couldn’t drive out backwards or forwards. People in outer suburbs started to clear their gardens of dead wood, clear the land around their houses and hose everything down. They stood on their roofs with their hoses; waving them at the flames as if they could shoot the fire, kill it dead. Five houses in a Sydney street burnt down and the tabloids went crazy, running photos of the charred remains of a little girl’s Christmas presents on the front page.

‘It’s Christmas,’ the people who had lost everything said on the news. ‘Things like this shouldn’t happen at Christmas.’

But things like this always happen at Christmas. I thought of my friends whose father had walked out on them on Christmas Eve. Remembered getting up to fetch the newspaper on Boxing Day when I was a little girl and seeing the photo of a city, Darwin, obliterated by a cyclone. The stories of people’s legs guillotined by flying iron; of a nursing mother being blown out of her house into the yard and crawling, on her hands and knees over broken glass, to find her newborn wedged under the front tyre of a car; of a couple and their cat jammed in a cupboard for five hours as shards of glass formed a mini-tornado inside their house, turning it into a giant blender. Christmas, I thought, is exactly the time of year shit like this happens.

The heat over those days was oppressive. Whenever we had sex we would drip with sweat, the smell of each other was strong. Michael would lift me up; we would fuck on the couch, on the kitchen bench, on the floor. He would talk while we were doing it but once our bodies were apart he said little, and what he did say was meant to hose me down, to deny the intensity between us.

‘This is not a good idea,’ he might say. ‘I’ll be leaving in a week or so.’ Or, ‘I have to go soon. You know what it’s like when you are only in a place for a short time. So many people to catch up with.’

He talked a lot about moving back. Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t. ‘If only I could get a job here as good as the one I have at UCLA, I’d move back in a flash,’ he might say. ‘And you are here.’ Or, ‘I could never move back. Too much history. In LA I’m free of all that.’

One morning he rang me and said, ‘I won’t be able to see you today. It’s the fires. They’re getting close to my uncle’s house.’ That night the fires turned the full moon red. It seemed to me that the moon was always full when Michael was around—that it would be hot, that I would bleed and the moon would be fat. This night it seemed the moon itself was bleeding. Other things also kept happening when Michael was around, but I found it harder to remember them: he was always late, I was always waiting; as soon as he arrived he would talk of being gone.

The next time I saw Michael we went to dinner with some friends of his. They assumed I was a friend, not a lover, and began to make jokes about the number of women he was seeing.

‘How many has he got in the queue here?’ one of them said to me.

‘I’m probably the wrong person to ask,’ I said. ‘I’m in the queue.’

After a moment’s awkwardness talk turned to the bushfires.

‘I’m sorry about that,’ Michael said later as we walked back to the flat.

‘Don’t be,’ I said.

That night when we made love Michael talked nervously over the rhythms of our touching. ‘Have you come yet? What do you want me to do? Tell me what you like. Tell me how you like it.’ Michael had got so he couldn’t tell the difference between using words to turn himself on and using them to keep me at bay.

‘What I’d like,’ said I after a few minutes, ‘is for us to be quiet with each other.’

‘Whatever,’ he said. ‘It’s too hot for this anyway,’ before rolling away so no part of our bodies was touching.

The two of us tossed and turned in the heat. The wind was high, fuelling the fires as well as rattling all the windows in the flat. This was a special quality Bondi had. The wind would come off the sea and rail against the windows, shaking them in their old, loose frames.

‘That noise is driving me crazy.’

‘Well, do something about it.’ But Michael had drifted off to sleep again. I got up; rifled through my bag looking for business cards I could fold and jam between the window and the frame. An hour or so before dawn I fell asleep, but was woken by the sun around 5.30.

Michael moved back towards me. ‘Let’s make the best of this,’ he said, ‘and go for a swim.’ By six o’clock we were diving in water that the wind had made broken and choppy, scattering it with foam. Michael was a strong swimmer and I watched him move through the ocean, ash raining around him like black snow. It was cool in the water, it woke me up, I couldn’t maintain my bad mood. Michael swam back to me and I duck-dived underneath him a few times, leapt on his back as a wave hit him.

‘What’s this about?’ he shook me off. ‘What are you doing?’

‘It’s called playing.’

Michael looked at me, embarrassed. ‘Oh,’ he said. I wondered what it was that had happened to him that he did not know joy.

‘Should I be worried about these other women that your friends were going on about?’ I asked when we were back on the beach.

‘No,’ is all Michael said, as he towelled himself dry. And the truth was I had such a feeling of certainty about what there was between us I did not think other women were important, I did not take them into account. This is how I saw things: I was special. This is how others saw it: I was not.

I spoke to Marion on the phone. ‘It doesn’t worry me.’

‘It should,’ was all she would say.

In English novels women sit by windows, constrained by etiquette, weather, class and clothing. If they’re lucky there’s a bay window with a bench set into it for that very purpose: waiting. The unlucky ones stand bolt upright by the glass, hands folded before them. Me, I was a modern girl. I sat on the balcony with a beer in my hand. Michael and I had planned to go and see a new print of The Misfits at a cinema down the road. So, yes, I was waiting, but I was not wearing a corset. I wore a short white linen shift that hung loose on me. I enjoyed the way the sea breeze moved over my skin, cooling me down as I sweated.

Michael walked in the door, found me outside. ‘Am I too late?’ he asked. ‘Have we missed it?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘But we’d better get going now.’

Before the film began, one of my ads came on: an aerial shot swung along the Great Ocean Road and around the Twelve Apostles, and then cut in a smooth arc to the craggy outcrops of Haloong Bay in Vietnam. The sweep of the camera continued over the barren outcrops of the Skelligs, off the west coast of Ireland. Trance music spun it all together. ‘Freedom. Choice. It’s the same thing.’

I whispered in his ear, ‘That’s one of mine.’

‘Right,’ he nodded.

‘So,’ I asked, standing in the foyer afterwards. ‘I know what you thought of the film. What did you think of my ad?’

‘It was fine,’ said Michael, ‘for an ad.’ Then leant down and kissed me on the mouth, his hand brushing my breast. ‘I suppose it’s too public to make out here, huh?’

The last night I was in Sydney Michael was four hours later than he’d said he’d be. At 10 p.m. I took Tony up on his offer of a drink and a late-night swim. When I got home at one o’clock there were three messages on the answering machine from Michael, asking me where I was.

He came around early the next morning before I left for the airport. It was only eight o’clock but it was almost forty degrees. The heat. This is the main memory that will be left of that time, when I am old, when everything else is a haze.

I answered the door and tried not to react when I saw him. That physical response was always there, no matter how badly he behaved. For his part, he averted his eyes slightly. He seemed embarrassed. He started talking, quickly, before I could protest.

‘I’m sorry,’ he looked genuinely flustered. ‘I couldn’t get to a phone earlier. I rang late last night and you were out. Here, I’ve brought you a present.’ He held a book out in front of him, cautiously, like he was unsure I would take it from him.

I did.

‘Do you want a coffee?’ I asked, walking down the hallway and into the kitchen, filling the kettle.

‘Thanks,’ he said. Then, ‘I haven’t got much time though.’

‘Surprise me.’

Michael sat on the couch looking nervous, sipping from the mug and looking around the room. ‘I’m really sorry,’ he said, again. ‘I’m just not good with punctualness.’

‘Punctualness?’ I asked. ‘Is that even a word?’

I was angry, which felt a little like being horny; at any rate I’m not sure I could tell the difference. As I straddled Michael on the couch he tried to push me away.

‘There isn’t the time to do this properly.’

‘I don’t care,’ I said, lifting my dress over my head.

We rolled off the couch and onto the floor, which was hard and cool, and didn’t give way when Michael pushed into me. The sweat pooled under me and made a sucking sound against the boards. When we were slick with it, Michael picked me up and carried me into the bathroom, lifting me up onto the bathroom basin. He turned the cold tap on and scooped water onto my back, and in the space between our bodies. He bit my breasts, my chest. It hurt. I liked it. The bruises took weeks to fade; by the time my skin was fresh again we were in different countries.

‘Is this too uncomfortable for you?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said, despite the awkward angle and the way the taps dug into me. But in a fleeting second of clarity I realised the physical effect he had on me, the thing I called chemical, was a bad thing. The words flashed through my head, ‘You are a virus.’ Then the knowledge that would have saved me was gone, disappeared by the feeling of Michael inside me, outside me.

‘You’re lying, darling,’ he said as if he’d read my mind. He pulled out of me. ‘I told you there wasn’t time for this. I’ve got to leave.’

He kissed me on the forehead and left me there, sprawled. I sat still on the basin for a few minutes then went into the shower and stood under the cold water. When I went back into the living room I saw the book he had bought me sitting on the arm of the couch. It was Seinlanguage and he had written an inscription on the inside leaf. ‘Here’s to all the laffs we would have if we lived in the same town.’

I yelled, ‘Happy New Year,’ to Raff and Marion when I got back home. The two of them came down the hall and into my bedroom where I was putting my bags down. ‘Happy New Year to you, too,’ Marion put her arms around me and I gave her a big hug.

‘Hi hon,’ Raff leant over and kissed me on the cheek. ‘We were sure you’d been burnt up, by fire or passion.’

‘Both,’ I smiled. ‘I’ve buggered my shoulder carrying these bags. I need to go to the doctor.’ I paused, before launching into what was really on my mind. ‘Look what Michael gave me after he’d been late for about the tenth night in a row.’ I threw the book on the bed. Raff picked it up and read the inscription.

‘“Laffs”? Marion’s right, the guy’s a wanker. What did you buy him?’

‘Actually, I found a beautiful old hardback of Les Liaisons Dangereuses but then decided it was too good for him and kept it to read myself.’

‘I was joking,’ said Raff. ‘Why did you get him a present in the first place? You’re not still interested, are you?’ He looked at me. ‘Jesus, you are. Women, I’ll never understand them. It’s the nice men like me that always get passed over.’

‘What am I?’ Marion threw a pillow at him. ‘Dead meat?’ Then turned back to me. ‘Why that book?’ Books were a serious matter to Marion. I knew where she was taking this. My choice had to mean something. ‘I thought you hated the film.’

‘I did,’ I said. ‘But Michael has written on it. And I love writing letters. So does he.’

‘Ah,’ said Marion. ‘You are still turning you and Michael into a great romance. Are you Swann and Odette, or Jake and Lady Ashley?’

‘Aim higher,’ said Raff. ‘We’re talking Heathcliff and Cathy here.’

‘Whatever. Michael would love to imagine himself as a great, tragically flawed hero. Just as long as you don’t see yourself as some kind of Madame de Tourvel. She died of grief. She hesitated, a big smile on her face. ‘Raff and I have something to tell you. It’s important.’

Suddenly I knew. ‘You’re pregnant.’

Over the next day or so the pain in my shoulder became excruciating. I felt like I was falling apart at the seams. The doctor put me on painkillers and into a sling.

Michael had called to say he would visit me in Melbourne. I did not really know what I expected, and the drugs made me so out of it I felt like I didn’t care. Even those intense blue eyes of his were fading in my imagination. Briefly I thought perhaps he was nothing to me now, and the feeling was a pleasure. He arrived at my house several hours late. Even when he was on my turf he had this capacity to stretch me thin, create distance.

‘What’s with the sling?’ he asked, when he finally arrived. ‘Looks kind of kinky.’

As we lay in bed he stroked the curve of my stomach, my full breasts. ‘You’re like ripe fruit,’ he said. ‘Ready for babies. Ready to drop.’ And I wondered if perhaps he meant that he wanted to be there to catch me, to break my fall.

The next morning we went for a long walk through the gardens and streets of Fitzroy. I showed Michael the places I had lived and worked. ‘Brunswick Street is one of my favourite places in the world,’ I said. ‘I used to live in that terrace there. And my boyfriend at the time lived just around the corner, next to that pub.’ We kept walking. ‘Here,’ I said, ‘is where you get the best maple walnut ice cream in the world. But it’s disgustingly rich.’

I pointed out various landmarks as we walked. Rhumbarallas café was freshly painted in greens and reds with blobby shapes hanging around the place. ‘You see those kind of amoebic shapes?’ I asked. ‘They are spreading through the street like some kind of viral infection. There are more of them outside Polyester Records,’ I pointed. ‘And the nursery.’

‘I like it,’ said Michael. ‘It’s changed since last time I was here. It feels less parochial.’

‘Do you see that giant hamburger hanging off the building there?’ I said. ‘I slept with the guy that made that.’ Michael pointed at the giant doner kebab across the road. ‘And what about the guy who made that?’

‘No,’ I laughed. ‘There are only so many makers of big things a girl can sleep with. Though I must say I found the guy who designed the giant earthworm in South Gippsland very attractive. Not to mention Big Prawn man.

‘Let’s go to the Black Cat. You must have been here before you left for LA. It was the first real café around here.’

We went in, sat by the window and ordered a coffee. Michael looked around the café which was furnished with bits and pieces of fifties detritus. Several very old cats were lurking around, missing either a limb or an eye. There were pot plants everywhere.

‘This is nice,’ said Michael, ‘this city. Being here with you. I could live here.’

We got back to my house in the middle of the afternoon. Michael sat on the couch and pulled me down onto his lap. ‘I’m not sure I’ll have time to see you again while I’m here,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘I’ll write,’ he said, holding my face, kissing me on each cheek and then softly on the mouth. ‘I’m sorry.’

Then he left. As he shut the door behind him I started to shake. It became harder to breathe until, panicky, I called Marion at work. ‘Is there any chance of you coming home early?’ I asked.

Marion was gentle with me at first, holding my hand while I sobbed. ‘This shouldn’t surprise you,’ Marion said, smoothing my hair away from my face. ‘He has other lovers. You told me that yourself. You even thought he had someone else on the go last week when you were in Sydney.’

‘No one has ever made me feel the way he does,’ I spoke slowly.

‘On edge, strung out, needy, horny? Darling, he’s fucking with your head.’

‘But the sex…’

‘Good sex doesn’t last. And you had to wait eight months for it, so no wonder it felt good. That’s probably his tactic—keep several women on the go around the globe so no one twigs to how limited his repertoire is.’

‘Maybe I could get used to it,’ I said. ‘Maybe I could handle this.’

‘Maybe you could. If you wanted to bend yourself out of shape.’

I felt better after Marion talked tough to me and made me a cup of tea. ‘I have to go out again,’ Marion said. ‘Raff and I promised we’d meet friends for dinner. Do you want to come?’

‘I’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘I think I’d rather be alone.’

‘Okay, but promise me you won’t phone him.’

‘I won’t.’

I wasn’t fine. When I was alone anxiety swamped me. I knew he was staying in St Kilda and I drove over there around midnight, pacing up and down the street trying to summon the courage to call or go in. I paced till two a.m., till only a mad woman would have thought it was okay to ring, and then phoned him from a call box across the road.

Michael came to the phone. ‘You’ve woken everyone up,’ he said.

‘Can I come up?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ll come down.’

We stood together in the street, not touching or talking, looking at each other. ‘You can’t end things so casually,’ I said finally. ‘This is important. We are important.’

‘I don’t want to be pining for someone a long way away. I’ve been doing it with my wife. My ex-wife. I have no intention of doing it again.’ He sounded formal and awkward like he was reciting something out of habit.

‘Then why have you kept in touch with me?’ I asked. ‘Why have you kept things going as long as you have? You could have slept with anyone while you were here. Picked someone who didn’t care about you.’

‘I do like you. More than like you. I like you more than anyone I have met for a long time.’

I was silent.

‘Are you satisfied now?’ he said.

‘No.’

Michael shrugged his shoulders in frustration. ‘I’m going back to bed,’ he turned and walked up the stairs.