Ruby and I sit down to eat a Keralan curry: fish and coconut milk infused with other, subtler, flavours like coriander and lime. We try and figure out what all the ingredients are as we eat, so we can repeat this back home. The taste is so delicate that all travel’s frustrations slip away.
‘Enough of food,’ Ruby says, after a while. ‘Tell me more about the boyfriend grid.’
‘It has fallen into disuse in recent years.’
‘A system failure?’
‘Exactly. It was another of my organising principles. I’d talk about who I was going out with like I was announcing a series of monarchs. “Hawke was prime minister when the geography teacher was reigning,” or more recently: “That was the time the Catholics took power: Paul Keating on one hand, Michael on the other.” Then I’d genuflect and go down on one knee. Tell me about your boyfriend grid.’
‘I have no such grid,’ Ruby says. ‘As you say—it’s a flawed system.’ She hesitates before she goes on, ‘And if I did have a grid it would be a girlfriend grid.’
I am surprised because I hadn’t thought about it. I’d just assumed. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I didn’t know.’
‘Sorry?’ she asks, sarcastic. ‘Why sorry? It’s not cancer.’ She looks at me and suddenly she’s furious. She gets up to leave. ‘I’m going for a walk. I know you didn’t mean to be hurtful but I hate the way you looked at me just now. As if I haven’t had to listen to stories of your heterosexual obsession for weeks now. As if your heterosexuality is normal when it’s totally fucking nuts but I don’t care because you are my friend and I love you anyway.’
I’m confused because I don’t know what she saw in my face that upset her so. I felt flustered, that is all, because it changed things for me. Not how I felt about her but… something shifted. I reach out and take her arm. ‘I didn’t mean…’
She shakes me off, bursts into tears and walks into the night. I suddenly feel a lot older than her, which I suppose I am. I remember what it is like to be so distressed and angry but I don’t know what to say that will make her feel better. I’m uncertain about words these days; uncertain as to whether they mean anything. I stay at the table and gesture for a waiter. I need a beer.
When I get to our hotel an hour later, Ruby is in bed already, reading. She is red-eyed, but smiles at me when I open the door. I go to speak but she lifts her hand. ‘Don’t,’ she says. ‘I overreacted.’ Suddenly she is Barbara Stanwyck, her voice low and mysterious. ‘Let us never speak of this again.’
We are in the city of Kochi, which is a series of small islands linked by ferries and bridges. It is on one of these islands, Fort Cochin, that we visit St Francis. The church is so old that no one knows when it was built. Tombstones from an early graveyard form the floor of the church. The medieval script and illustrations on the tombs are worn down to shadows, the merest suggestions in stone. Here the famous Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama was buried but also, as I discover when I see her tiny gravestone, the unknown Bunny La Cruz. I become fascinated with Bunny. I try and imagine what she might have looked like dressed in the formal baby clothes of the sixteenth century.
‘If I ever have a daughter,’ I say to Ruby, ‘I’d call her Bunny La Cruz.’
‘Bunny La Cruz Monaghan? Sounds good. If I ever have a son I’ll call him Vasco. Vasco Miller.’
We walk to Jew Town and down the bluntly named Jew Street. We hover around overpriced but irresistible antique shops, which used to be run by Jewish merchants but now are run by Kashmiri refugees. When we get to the end of the street we visit the 450-year-old synagogue. It is a small wooden building with a floor of disparate Chinese tiles and a ceiling dripping with nineteenth-century Belgian glass chandeliers.
‘Now this is what I call globalisation,’ Ruby says.
In the early evening we go down to see the Chinese fishing nets. They look like enormous string clams and it takes four men to open and close them. We pick fish to eat from one of the stalls and it is grilled for us while we stand there.
‘Did you catch that fish here?’ I ask.
‘No,’ the fishmonger nods his head. ‘There are no big fish left here. From out deeper,’ he gestures out behind the nets to the open sea.
As we are returning to our hotel a beggar puts his hand out to us. I shake my head. ‘I have no change.’
He gets angry. ‘You are rich,’ he yells. ‘Give me money.’ Which is when I see the hole in his face, his caved-in nose. He has leprosy. Ruby takes my hand and we walk quickly, but he keeps pace with us, grabs our arms and tugs at our clothes. Ruby is crying by the time we get to our hotel courtyard.
‘Sometimes I hate this place. I don’t know how you stand it,’ she looks at my tearless face accusingly. ‘You are too thick skinned.’
‘That’s not fair. We didn’t have any money, there is nothing we could have done.’
‘That’s because we spent it on antiques,’ she jerks her laden bag towards me. ‘That is because we are staying in this hotel. No wonder the guy thinks we’re full of shit.’
I’m tired of this, of her, of her big emotions. I’m beginning to wonder if we should keep travelling together. If the age difference is a problem. But I do the right thing; I lean forward to comfort her. For the second time in twenty-four hours she moves to avoid me and goes ahead of me to our room.
I give her a few minutes, and when I get to the room she is in the bathroom. She hasn’t shut the door, which I take to be a gesture of forgiveness, and I watch her as she scoops the water out of the tiled tub and pours it over her head.
‘You are getting goose bumps,’ I say. ‘I can see them from here.’
‘It is nice to be cold after so much heat,’ she says. ‘I can’t wait for the rain to begin. This build-up—it’s making me so tense.’ She rubs herself down with soap, seems unselfconscious about me standing there, talking to her as she scoops water between her legs, over her head and back. Suddenly she hesitates, lifts her head and smiles at me, before closing the door.
When she comes out of the bathroom she smells of jasmine oil. ‘Smell this,’ she says, tipping her head towards me. ‘It’s what the women rub into their scalps. I bought it today.’ I lean down and put my face to the top of her head to breathe in the smell of jasmine. I get oil on the tip of my nose.
Geelong was in the 1994 Grand Final. I sat down to watch it with three-month-old Max draped across my chest like a large cat. He snuffled, he was heavy with abandon and as he breathed against me I fell asleep and missed the whole match. This was, as it turned out, no bad thing. Geelong was slaughtered, scoring 8.15 to West Coast’s 20.23. I woke up to find Marion asleep in the chair beside me, the television off, and a note from Raff on the coffee table, ‘Fuck this for a joke. Gone for a walk.’
This was a time of open fires and shared meals. I’d cook and Marion would sit in the kitchen, breastfeeding. She said less than usual, seemed too happy for words. ‘I never expected it to be so good,’ she said to me one evening. ‘I never knew I could feel so much.’
Raff was more practical. ‘I’m giving up dope,’ he said to me. ‘It makes me too anxious. Things are so good that I keep expecting them to go wrong.’
I knew that feeling. That feeling of not trusting happiness to last. It almost made me want to leave this house, where I had been happy for so long.
Raff took some months to forgive Geelong, so in early ’95 we found ourselves going to see other teams. Around the time the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma was bombed on April 19, 1995 we went to see the first Essendon–Melbourne game at the MCG. The papers were full of photos of young children killed in the blast; also body parts of some of the other 163 who died. There were photos of Timothy McVeigh, the young man from Kingman, Arizona, in leg irons and handcuffs. The bombing happened two years to the day after the raid on Waco. Statistics. If you like football you’ve got to like stats.
The match was huge, more than sixty thousand people in the crowd. It was autumn, which in Melbourne usually means perfect weather but on this day it was cold, the sky a steely grey, and it was sheeting rain. Nonetheless when we got to the ground my excitement rose, as it always did, when I saw the green of the oval, the jumpers of the players and all the people within the stands spread out before me.
As charged up as I was about the match, I was having trouble concentrating. I had something to tell Raff—that I was moving to Sydney. It had taken a while, but finally I’d convinced work to transfer me there and it was only now, now that I had to break the news to my friend, that I realised I didn’t really know why I was going.
When I spat it out he looked at me blankly from underneath his rain hood for a moment. ‘What about us? What about Max and Marion and me?’ Then he turned back to watch the game.
‘Raff,’ I touched his arm, but he shrugged me off.
‘It’s pathetic,’ he said, ‘moving there so you’ll be closer to him. And you’re going to change teams again, I know it; you’ll defect to the Swans.’
‘Closer to who?’ I asked. ‘I’m going for the beach. I’m going for the weather.’
‘You know who,’ he said and I realised with a shock that this hadn’t occurred to me. That I might be harbouring hopes of seeing Michael more, of him moving back to Sydney.
‘You’re wrong,’ I said, but once Raff put the thought in my mind I became terrified he was right. ‘I couldn’t live with you guys forever,’ I said. ‘I need to make something…a family. One of my own.’ Raff wasn’t interested in hearing this. He just shrugged again; perhaps he knew that it was more than that. The three—now four—of us had got too close. I was starting to feel claustrophobic, starting to feel like I couldn’t breathe.
I was barracking for Essendon that day; the match was slow, they were losing and we were stuck sitting under an umbrella in the rain. Then, in the second quarter, Michael Long was caught holding the ball. The free kick went against him, provoking a groan of disgust, especially from a bloke sitting three rows in front of us.
‘You black bastard,’ he yelled. He was about fifty-five, big, clean cut and well dressed, with hair short enough at the back of his neck to see that it was, in fact, red. ‘You stupid black faggot.’
Raff turned to me. ‘Did you hear that?’ he said. ‘Did you hear the FUCKING racist in front of us?’ Raising his voice to make sure the people in front could hear. The man who had been doing the taunting turned around. ‘You talking to me? If you’re calling me a racist I’ll punch you in the fucking head.’
Raff pitched his voice lower, angry, making sure the guy had to strain to hear him. ‘But you are mate, you’re racist scum.’
The next thing I knew this man had leapt over three rows of chairs and, before I even had time to think about what he might be about to do, he’d done it—slammed his fist into Raff’s face and sent him sprawling back in his seat. Then I was on my feet waving my own fist in the guy’s face. I wanted to punch him. I wanted to hit him as hard as he’d just hit Raff, but the woman he was with grabbed his arm and dragged him away.
Raff sat down and fiddled with his mangled glasses. People were slapping him on the shoulder to see if he was all right but he wouldn’t look up. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. A few minutes later I peered at him and saw that there was blood running down his face from where his glasses had cut into him on the bridge of his nose. He was trembling and there were tears running down his face. I didn’t know whether that was because his nose was hurting or from sheer distress.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, putting my arms around him. ‘That you are hurt. I am sorry people behave like that.’ We leant together so our faces were touching.
Sydney is a place that gets under your skin. The way it smells, the way its moist heavy air pushes against your skin. One of my very first memories is being taken there as a tiny child and staying up late, sitting on a hill watching the lights of the racecourse, the movement of the people and the horses caught under them, going round and round. I know now I was at Harold Park in Glebe where they run the trots, but then, as a child it felt like somewhere very exotic and exciting. Warm air, and lights and movement. It was the same when I went to live there; this body-response to the place. I loved the rocky coast and harbour. Loved the weather. I was a pot plant that had finally been given enough light.
I moved in with Tony. He was a journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald and many years ago, when he had been one of my journalism lecturers, we’d had an affair that was truncated by one of my extended trips overseas. He had quite a strong Italian accent that he was embarrassed by; he was ambivalent about his homeland but it informed everything he did, the friends he made, the politics he wrote about. He would tell me sometimes that the rocks and colours around Bondi reminded him of Sicily.
He was recently divorced from a woman that none of us had ever liked, though we all tried to be polite about her. He needed someone to share his apartment on the tip of Ben Buckler in North Bondi. The wall of the building merged with the cliffs that plunged down into the ocean below. The wind was always wild there—at the point there was a boulder that had been dumped onto the rocks and the little metal plaque on it read: ‘This rock weighing 235 tons was washed from the sea during a storm on 15th July, 1912.’ Apparently two rusty mermaids used to sit perched on this rock, but they were gone by my time.
Everything I owned that was metal—my stereo, my car, my fax machine, my computer—was soon rusted by the salty air. The paint peeled and all the furniture was covered in a coating of sticky salt. Everything was permanently damp.
‘That’s the price you pay for living in one of the most beautiful places in the world,’ Tony said. It didn’t seem such a high price. I loved it there.
Tony was weathered, like the cliffs he lived on. He had curly silver hair and dark olive skin. He would swim each morning at Bondi beach and each evening at Bronte pool. Perhaps that is why he looked so fit. He’d been a champion sprinter as a schoolboy in Italy. ‘For this reason,’ he told me with no modesty at all, ‘my thighs are very strong.’ And it was true, they were like tree trunks. In contrast, his hands were tiny, they flitted around as he talked. He was less proud of these. ‘Kind of poofy, huh? Or do you think they are artistic?’
To celebrate my first week in Sydney we went to have a drink at a place near where we both worked. It was a revolving cocktail bar on top of the Australia Building, once the tallest building in the city. The décor hadn’t been changed since the seventies, a fact that was starting to make it fashionable again but had not, at this time, completed the process. We sat, cocktails in hand, and slowly inched our way around the sweep of the city and harbour.
‘I shouldn’t complain,’ I said. ‘My office is right in the middle of the Rocks. I get off at the station at Circular Quay, I walk past the MCA and through the Argyle Cut. That has to be one of my favourite bits of city in the world, the way the ferns grow in tufts from the cracks of those hand-made bricks.’
‘They are more than 160 years old, those bricks, you know,’ Tony told me.
‘So it’s all good. Except they hate me in my new office. One of the other workers thought she was up for my job, but instead she’s working for me and giving me a hard time. My office isn’t set up. I don’t have furniture. The computer guy still hasn’t got around to setting up my email.’
‘Aahhh, that is why you’re so jumpy,’ said Tony. ‘Email withdrawal syndrome.’ He was joking, but he was right. I felt anxious without email. I had become used to the notifier flashing in front of me dozens of times a day, holding the promise of Michael.
Three days later I got to sit down at a desk, with a computer, and log on. An email from Michael greeted me. ‘You’ve arrived! I’d welcome you home properly if only I still lived there. Enjoy and take care—M.’
The next day he emailed me again to give me the names of people I should make a point of meeting. He put me in touch with his family—his parents, his sister—and several other friends. He trusted me with people he loved, and they made me feel welcome. I liked them. Over the next few months there was a flow of invitations to birthdays, the movies, dinners. ‘It is as if,’ I wrote to Michael, ‘I have become the sister-in-law, or the daughter-in-law, without having the husband. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or bad thing.’
‘Trust me,’ he answered. ‘You’re getting the best part of the bargain.’
What I didn’t say to him was that his family’s kindness entangled him and me further. Nor did I say that Raff had been right. It seemed that in moving to Sydney I had moved closer to Michael, just as I had come to know my geography teacher by going to India. Sydney was where he had lived, and grown up. Everybody knew him. He no longer seemed so far away.
There was also the Sydney I discovered with Tony. ‘The only way to really know this city,’ he said to me soon after I arrived, ‘is to kayak. I’ve got a five-week plan for you. We’ll paddle around Middle Harbour and Pittwater. A different kayak trip every Sunday.’
I agreed to the plan. The mildness of Sydney’s weather meant you didn’t have to put on a wetsuit, like you did when you kayaked in Victoria. We would put on our rashies—Tony’s was black and mine was blue—and smother our faces in fifteen plus, put on baseball caps and sunglasses and off we’d go. By Melbourne standards we looked like dorks. In Sydney, dagginess resulting from sporting paraphernalia was more acceptable.
That first weekend we paddled around the edges of Middle Harbour and Tony, an enthusiast when it came to architecture, pointed out all the best houses on the waterfront. Another weekend we went to Pittwater and, despite the wildness of the coves and beaches, we found ourselves at sea with hundreds of other boats, including one that sold us lattes and good muffins.
Sydney has this great ability to appear, in all its glorious cliché, more beautiful than you can imagine, and that physical beauty becomes addictive. One day we pushed out from Watsons Bay and headed for the national park that fell, blooming and green, onto the beach at Obelisk Bay. The sea was calm and the water sparkling.
‘Be careful,’ Tony warned me. ‘All the rain this week has forced raw sewage into the harbour. It might still look gorgeous but just make sure you don’t fall in.’
The harbour had a particular kind of beauty, Bondi had another. It was a place where informality had been ritualised. People never arranged to meet. When the weather was warm, which it was until close to winter, they simply hung around their chosen bits of the beach and waited for others to show up. I met lots of people like that. Vague acquaintances who, over the weeks of morning swims, coffees and walks, became friends. It was a bit like Venice beach, or Venice beach was a bit like it. Lots of flesh and sun and sand and parading. The weather shapes your day in both places, you have to give yourself over to it, though the weather got wilder in Bondi. And while Sydney was a large and difficult city, Bondi, if you learnt to move around the constant stream of visitors, was like a village. I didn’t interact with the tourists and talked about them with the same disdain that all the locals did, but their presence made Bondi the perfect suburb for someone like me who always liked to imagine they were living in other places.
Every morning when I went down to the beach to walk and to swim, buses full of Japanese and American tourists would be lined up. I’d watch them removing their shoes, feeling the sand between their toes, taking photos of each other. When I went overseas myself everyone I met knew Bondi, had seen the photos of this crescent moon of beach—the beach, and its famous surf. But I loved it best when the water was as flat as a mirror and I could swim, seeing clear to the ocean bed that was laid out below and before me.
Dolphins surfed the waves in the morning, playing with the surfers, while people watched from the beach and smiled and nodded at each other. One morning Tony and I were sitting out the front of a café that overlooked the water.
‘Does my nose look big?’ he asked. It had become a running gag—his nose was huge and he thought it was ugly. He would say to me, ‘It makes me look so Italian,’ and I’d say to him, ‘You are Italian. I think it’s sexy.’ Then he would say, ‘Do you really?’ and smile; like it was the first time I had said it.
It was a warm winter’s day and half a dozen Bondi-ites sat in their dark glasses and Mambo tracksuits reading the papers. I turned to look out at the ocean and there, fifty feet away, a whale was rolling lazily, holding its flipper aloft. I had never seen a whale before though I’d spent various holidays over the years on rocky outcrops with binoculars in my hands, jumping at every shadowy shape in the distance, every smudge on the horizon.
‘You see,’ Tony leant towards me. ‘There is everything you could possibly want, right here, in this suburb. That is why people never leave.’
On warm nights, Tony and I would take a drink down to the beach, just before we went to bed. In early summer the water was at its coldest because winter caught up with it three months after the season itself ended. As far as I was concerned, that just made it more exhilarating. One night the surf was high and I decided to swim out to catch a wave. Tony stood on the beach, yelling at me.
‘Do you have any idea how many pissed tourists die each year doing what you’re doing?’
‘I’m prepared to risk it.’
‘Well I’m going back to sit in my car and put the headlights on. Promise me you won’t move out of the spotlight.’ He walked up to his car and put his lights on high beam while I attempted to bodysurf. ‘Stay in the lights,’ he kept calling, which was impossible, as the beam dropped into the water about two feet from the shore.
‘I’ll die of sand rash, not drowning, if you keep carrying on like this,’ I yelled.
‘I can’t take it any more,’ Tony yelled back before he jogged back down to the beach, then dived into the water and swam out to me. When he got to me he manoeuvred me, half-joking, half-seriously, into a lifesaver’s grip, then started to sidestroke me back to shore.
I couldn’t stop laughing. ‘You remind me of a sheep dog,’ I said. ‘Always trying to round me up.’
‘And you remind me of a sheep,’ he said. ‘A wet one.’
I didn’t think about what was happening with Tony, about the time we spent together, the comfort I felt around him. It just made sense to me that, as the nights got hotter, we did what housemates sometimes do, what ex-lovers often do. We would lie in bed and talk until the small hours of the morning. And as we talked we would touch each other, and sometimes the touching would turn to sex. There was a sweetness to our times together, but I would always go back to my bedroom for a few hours of sleep. We never woke up together.
One night it was different. We’d been to a friend’s birthday party on a Bondi rooftop. It was a hot, sticky night and we’d danced with, and talked to, each other all evening. I was touched by the shy way he danced, by the fact he was dancing to be close to me, not to show off to other people. We kissed in public at the end of a sexy dance to, embarrassingly, ‘Sexual Healing’. Now questions would be asked.
We left the party early to make love. That was hot and sexy and slow as well, like the whole evening. ‘Do we need to talk about this?’ I asked afterwards, after the sex was over. ‘This seems to be becoming a weekly not a monthly event.’
‘I don’t need to talk,’ he said, ‘I’m happy. Do you? Need to talk, I mean.’
‘I’m not good at casual,’ I said. ‘But I’m not available either, so I don’t know what to do.’ As the words came out of my mouth, I realised what I’d said.
‘Not available?’ Tony still had his arms around me, but I could feel his tension. ‘I didn’t know you were seeing someone.’
‘I’m not,’ I said. ‘Well I am. But he’s overseas.’
‘That Michael guy? You haven’t seen him for over a year and he’s not even calling himself your boyfriend.’
‘It doesn’t make sense. I know that.’ Now I was tense. I got up, ready to go to my own room.
Tony grabbed me, pulled me back and put his arm around me. ‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘I was just surprised. But I’m still fretting over the evil Julia, so I’m not really available either.’
‘So,’ I hesitated. ‘Fuck buddies?’
‘I hate that phrase,’ Tony said. ‘It’s disgusting. This is how I see us. Like two planes circling beside each other waiting to land. We are doing the same thing at the moment but perhaps we are going to land in different places.’ He kissed me on the forehead. ‘We’re airport buddies.’
‘Sometimes I think,’ I said to Tony over dinner one night a few weeks later, ‘that I’m not a nice person.’ I was smarting from a comment a new acquaintance had made when we had met for lunch. Intimidating, she had called me. Reserved.
‘Of course you are a nice person,’ he said, waving his hands around even more than usual. ‘But you have edges, people injure themselves on you. You know those coffee tables at the Adelphi in Melbourne? All metal and sharp corners, and everyone who stays there damages their shins? You’re like that. You sit in the centre of things in everyone’s way looking shiny and gorgeous. Then you are surprised when people fall over you. You think you’re the wallpaper, but you’re not, you’re the coffee table.’
‘Ah-ha,’ I said. ‘Pop psychology meets interior design. Very Sydney.’
‘But,’ he went on, ignoring me, ‘if what you are asking is whether it makes sense that you are oblivious to me because there is a chance that you might get laid by a man who lives in another country some time in the next year, I’d say no.’
‘I thought we were circling planes?’ I said nervously, not sure whether Tony was seriously trying to discuss our relationship or was just continuing in his generally flirtatious style. ‘I didn’t think you wanted more.’
‘What would you say if I did?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Good? I think.’ And as I said it I meant it. Michael was becoming a blur; it was Tony who was coming into focus.
‘Well, if we are still enjoying each other’s company come Christmas time, why don’t we go away for a week or two? To Byron Bay.’
‘It’s a deal,’ I said.
Michael’s sixth sense was up and running and the next day an email arrived: ‘What are you doing over Christmas? Going to go to New York to see Finn? Why don’t you come through Los Angeles first? We could have some fun. Drive to Mexico or something.’
‘I have nothing planned,’ I typed, not even waiting a full minute before I answered. ‘I’d like to come over.’
It took me a week to tell Tony that I had booked the flight, and even then I was evasive about it. Even worse, I brought it up when he had his back to me doing the dishes, so I didn’t have to look him in the eye.
‘You know how we talked about Byron over Christmas? I have to go to New York for work, so I wanted to take advantage and stay on to spend Christmas with Finn.’
‘Are you stopping in LA?’ There was a pause. ‘For work? To take advantage?’
‘Yes. I mean not work. I mean…’
There was another awkward silence, then I said, ‘I’m sorry; it’s just that I don’t really know what it is between us. We’re not really an item and…’
‘You and Michael are,’ he paused, then went on scathingly, ‘an item?’
I said nothing.
‘You’re a fucking idiot,’ he said, throwing his candy pink dishwashing gloves onto the kitchen bench and walking out of the room.