Back in her flat at Peking University she sat with the heater turned up for about a week, in a full padded black ski outfit. She didn’t own any skis but before coming to China she had been told that it was cold, so in Wagga Wagga she bought a ski jacket and pants. She thought she would wear them in public and no one would care because it was a communist country and communists tended to wear dour pillowy winter clothes – at least they did in the pirated DVD television series her mother watched in Australia. In these interminable series, they donned furry Russian caps with ear flaps and were always fighting an endless army of Japanese soldiers. So at the market she’d also bought one of those olive-green hats to keep her ears warm.
Oh, how wrong she was. This was one of the most stylish cities in the world, yet on her feet were a pair of children’s Aussie Bush Tracker boots, which were not walking anywhere.
She had come to Beijing to write and find her roots. Instead she had become a black larva with a puff of fake fur around her head. Waiting for something to hatch. Waiting to grow legs and arms, searching for an authentic feeling to bring home. But no such luck. Her mind was a mollusc, and her mouth a small suction pump. Things would go in, but not much came out. Most of what went in was the complimentary jasmine tea that came from the university guest house, and she drank so much of it that she was sure her internal organs were dyed khaki by now. A few more months and maybe her skin would be entirely camouflage, but it was no use being olive in a city of steel and glass.
*
The first time she had seen snow in China, she was outside on one of her aimless five-hour walks. The sky was grey and hung low. Snow came down like grotty soapsuds, and when she wiped her face with a tissue, the tissue was smeared brackish grey. She dragged her feet through pavements dotted with dirty ice and showed her pass to the security guard standing at the west gate of the university. When she had first arrived, she thought these guards standing at every gate were members of the Chinese Communist Party. They were dressed in what looked like green military uniforms, with matching caps. She felt as though she should salute. She was also scared of them, but she realised that she automatically feared anyone in an official uniform, even ticket inspectors in Australia, even when she had a ticket in her hand. She wondered whether her parents had passed on this fear through their genes, in the same way that some people passed on the fear of spiders and snakes.
The fear evaporated early one evening when she watched two of the guards heading home balanced on one bicycle. The boy at the front had his hands on the handlebars and his friend behind him was clinging on tightly. They had flung their hats off and were hooting with laughter through the quiet wide driveways of the university. She noticed how young and brown and lovely their faces were, how their features were bent blank with delight, how their hair whooshed in all different directions. Hello, Officer! In Australia no one wore a uniform if they could help it. Uniforms were for schools and gags.
*
The last time she had seen Teodoro was two months ago in Melbourne when they parted, but what she remembered most was the feel of him, even more clearly than what he looked like. He became a series of textures beneath her fingertips. Parts of him felt like sandpaper softened in water, and other parts were hot velvet. She remembered seeing not in colour, but in gradients of heat. It was then that she knew, without a doubt, that desire was the accelerator of life, and that she would speed along its trajectory while she was with him.
All men were literally foreign bodies to her. She had been twenty-four when she first saw a man in his birthday suit, and that was only because she had secretly arranged to take life-drawing lessons in the evenings at the university. Those men quickly became planes and lines and light and shade. The older the subjects were, the more interesting pictures they made because there would be more grooves and hollows, and very quickly she began to get used to the idea that the human form was just a subject to be captured in charcoal.
But then the storm of pheromones wiped out the smug self-restraint which had grown in her after day upon day of drought. She had always thought the word ‘pheromones’ made it sound as though molecules were floating in the air, shaped like little fluted horns, ready to attach themselves to the nearest target. Microscopic Edison phonographs flying about, their brassy mouths puckered to sucker onto bare unsuspecting skin. These were what he sent out to her. The pheromones. The eyeless babies of energy.
She learned about his arms, his upper deltoids, his face, like Helen Keller learning about water. What a thrill to sense on her fingertips the growth of stubble. The Adam’s apple at the throat, and the difference in their shoulders. ‘Yours slope downwards,’ he said to her. She would have made a nice aristocratic concubine because she had read somewhere that the Emperors liked sloping shoulders in a woman, but unfortunately she was born in this century, ‘born in a nun’s habit’, as he once joked to her.
It was as if all the air had been sucked out of the room and had collected in mean little hordes between the fibres of the clothes he had left discarded on the floor. She tentatively walked up to him and put her arms around his waist and her face against his chest and stood there feeling faint. She hadn’t realised it would have such a visceral effect on her. It was like the legend of Aphrodite and Hermes: how the girl saw the boy by the pool bathing and was so struck by his perfect form that she couldn’t help herself and ran up from behind and grabbed him and clung so hard that she became bonded to him, and the gods smote them and melded them into one person.
*
He was a generous lover, there was no doubt about it. It was just that the two of them had very different ideas about love. When he said I love you, he meant it with absolute conviction at that moment. It was a feeling that swelled and needed release. But perhaps he might feel differently the next day, week or month. You had to find someone to make you more acutely aware of your own feelings, was the way he saw love, to take you back to your essential self.
Teodoro was an artist living in Macau, a painter. He’d moved there because he had been commissioned to do work in Hong Kong, but one day took the ferry into this former colonial island owned by the Portuguese and found its quieter ambience and old buildings charming. So he stayed.
They had exchanged letters long before they met. When she first started writing to him, she didn’t think of the possibility of their meeting any time soon because he lived overseas. She’d write to him from her writers’ festivals and interstate school visits, clean convivial letters about books she had been reading, things she had been doing, and ideas that preoccupied her mind.
But then he came to Melbourne for a week. She remembered what they talked about: John Keats, Sisyphus, Cyrano de Bergerac. All their metaphors and references were from Western culture, and there they both were, different shades of non-white. His was a body so close to hers in colouring and everything else, and yet so different in its maleness, that she felt he was her corresponding puzzle piece.
‘People say that our faces are flat,’ he said to her, ‘but they are looking at us from only one angle. See, from the side, and from up above, and beneath the chin, we have more contours than Ayers Rock.’ She liked his sense of humour and his rugged Australian accent. Although his mother was Timorese, he had grown up in Darwin.
‘When I go back to Southeast Asia, I don’t identify at all,’ he told her. First they used up all their A-grade conversation, and then the B grade, and then C and D, until they were scraping at the bottom of the barrel to find things to say to each other.
Once, he told her, he had stayed in a farmhouse when he was younger, with his parents. Every morning he’d wake up and go outside, and the ground would be covered with dead bees.
Once, she told him, she and her brother held a funeral for a ladybird that they had kept in a Ferrero Rocher box for three days. They’d carried it around from room to room until its wings were bruised, and until one day it didn’t move anymore.
Once, he said, his pet turtle died, and he wanted to free it from its trapping of armour. When his mother came home and saw him in the kitchen, standing by the sink, a porcelain bowl filled with turtle limbs and him still trying to pull out the face, she burst into tears.
They spent a week together. She knew this was impermanent, but when she also realised how good it was, and how blissful and alive she felt, as she had never felt before, then that sealed it. There was nothing wrong with an action if deep in the heart it made a person feel so alive, kept alive in them a dream of ephemeral affection.
She had once thought she was so self-possessed, prided herself on this self-possession, but he taught her that she didn’t understand the first thing, at twenty-seven, about what it meant to be self-possessed, and how it began with possession of your own self – your fingertips, your face, your hands, your feet – all the parts she had not been aware she owned, but had carried around for years like a thing trailing a few steps behind her mind, forced to serve it. Just a rickety painted barrow to cart around her thoughts. Now he breathed this knowledge into her, let her know she was alive, alive and living and young too.
The language of lovers was so complicated and self-important, but the language of touch was simple and magically self-effacing. She wanted to kiss him until her kisses had rubbed down his skin to the colour of her lips, the colour of a fresh graze, the consistency of seedy jam over hot toast. Why hadn’t she done this in seven years? Sometimes she looked at him and looked at him like a psychopath, as if the craters of her eyes could swallow a man whole.
Then at the end of their enchanted week, Teodoro told her that he was planning to move to Melbourne.
‘That might not be such a good idea,’ she replied tentatively. Her heart was racing. This would bring him closer to her than she had ever anticipated. He wasn’t taking any of this slowly.
He told her he was in love.
It was definitely not a good idea.
They had been two unattached people suspended in the strange state beyond home and family and thoughts of money and mortgage. There was the pure joy of eating chocolate and going for long walks in parks and in the city and seeing museums and theatres and feeling in love. But in the gaps, her belief in this romantic hedonism started to get a little shaky. What they seemed to have, she suspected, was the essence of love without its attendant responsibilities and woes.
‘But I’m soon going away for three months to China,’ she told him.
‘I’ll come with you.’
She couldn’t understand this strange need to plummet into immediate action based on a blind feeling. Did he not realise that feelings changed at least five times in the course of a day? If all love was about was clinging to good feelings, then things might not work. He was a solitary wanderer, but she came with a thousand attachments. ‘You might want to be with me for a couple of years and then decide you’d rather be with someone else,’ he once told her. ‘That’s all right. At least we would have spent that time together.’
But it was not all right. That was not how she wanted to be with someone, yet she couldn’t explain why. And because she could not yet explain why, she slowly started to reconsider her experience – maybe love was not a matter of life and death, but could be imbued with a sense of playfulness, a sense of joy for its own sake; not cold comfort derived from surviving, from sticking together, from not losing anything or anyone.
So when she went to China on her residency she decided to take a short detour from Beijing to Macau, a warm reprieve in the middle of the cold winter, to see if she had been wrong. Perhaps she could live a different life, a daring one; perhaps she could even become a completely new person and shed her old skin.