I have been back to Jimmy Irish’s house more than once. Mary has not been back, but there have been others. I am losing count. But I want more now, there’s something missing and I think it might be conversation, someone I can talk to, relate to, a girlfriend. Someone black. She has to be black. The white girls confuse me. They flirt. They tease. Not the black, well, Dorothy Sogata teases me at the enquiry counter, but it’s different. Would it be the same back home? Would I want to be with an Aboriginal girl? There was one, once, a tall, elegant Aboriginal woman I thought was Indian. I watched her at parties. She always looked so sad, so angry, yet worldly, experienced, way too much for me, the little virgin boy from the bush. All I ever did was watch her. One night at a party, someone found her in a bathroom, lying in the bath, with her wrists slashed. Jesus, I cried, I should have said something, let her know that I thought she was beautiful. I didn’t go to her funeral. None of my friends did.
Although they were there first, in Australia, they are a minority. Up here, the whites are, and because we are few in number it makes it all so much easier, and so much more dangerous.
Dorothy Sogata and I talk in the bank and what once seemed good fun is now frowned upon by Watkins, the accountant, and Jenson, the manager.
One day Watkins says: Jack, we understand you and Dorothy Sogata are getting along very well. She is a lovely young woman, but we all have our place up here in the highlands and ours is not the same as theirs. We are here to do a job. You are here to do a job. We don’t want a scandal. Remember, we have our place, and they have theirs.
I want to say: You’re a fucking racist, Watkins.
But I say nothing. I nod. And then, I’m not sure how it happens, if it is because Watkins has warned me off, or because I am genuinely falling for her, it’s on, me and Dorothy. Does it start one day because of the way she looks at me, or because she whispers in my ear as I walk past her in the street? Or because I am no longer a virgin, but ready, a man of seed and confidence? Now I am in Dorothy’s little house, where she lives alone, and I am naked, she is naked and we are rolling through her three rooms, and bouncing on her bed and off her bed and she is showing me things I have not known, had not dreamt about and she never makes fun of me or says I am young and inexperienced, she helps me, goes with me, takes me, caresses me, shakes me, tosses me, and oh, she is strong, but she never lets me kiss her. I forgive her that, because of everything else. I can live without a kiss, but I can no longer live without the rest, all that Dorothy is teaching me. She builds in me a fire for learning.
I am in Dorothy’s house every night, but when she comes to the bank we greet each other in a normal, formal manner, except for our eyes, they climb into each other and say things like: Tonight? Yes, tonight you will enter me with a leap that will take you into the deepest bit of me and I will hold you there and work you with my inner juice and bounce you from the ceiling. I am in love with Dorothy, with her muscular, athletic body, with her smile, her courage, her willingness to ignore the colonial racist pigs who want to keep us apart.