TWO
In distress I had rung Jordan at eight o’clock this morning.
His housemate Angus had answered the phone. ‘Nope, not up yet, Beth,’ referring to his yawning self as well as that late riser, Jordan. I knew the guys would be recovering from the bucks’ night party, but this was an emergency.
‘Please wake Jordan for me,’ I pleaded, but Angus refused to do it.
‘Hey, he needs to catch up on his beauty sleep for tonight. He’s got a wedding to go to, you know.’
As I drifted around my villa unit in Chelsea, half expecting Jordan to return my call, my thoughts yielded to the prior commitment of the day. Though my doubts about my fiancé had by no means withered away, from another angle they seemed fantastical, like a dead cat splayed on the road that on closer inspection turns out to be a clump of old clothes. Why question the honesty of my fiancé because Tracy wanted me to?
Once I’d realised that Jordan liked an easygoing relationship, I had tapered my behaviour accordingly. He would want me to ignore Tracy’s letter, to shrug it off. I didn’t know how much in love with me Jordan was anymore, but I knew it wasn’t worth spoiling his good mood on our wedding day, and that would surely happen if I brought up the letter. On the other hand, it felt essential to talk to him to clear things up. Yet I was afraid to do that. If I spoke too harshly I might ruin everything.
At nine o’clock I shifted to automatic pilot and drove down to Portsea almost to keep myself out of harm’s reach. Forget the letter, Beth, forget you ever read the stupid thing.
But the little black cloud zoomed down and claimed me, and for much of the journey I regretted not speaking to Jordan first.
In the billiards room of the hotel, I clutched the bright red receiver and dialed the number I knew by heart.
‘Jordan speaking.’ My fiancé was upbeat. Not a bit sleepy.
I took a deep breath. ‘Hello, I’ve just got down to Portsea.’ I would save the hard stuff for the end of the call.
‘Portsea? I thought you were coming here first?’
He must have got himself really sozzled last night.
‘We altered that plan. Remember? Gus is driving you down after your haircuts.’
‘Beth,’ he said, rather more serious than usual. ‘There’s been an –’
Then the phone cut out. But it didn’t sound like Jordan had hung up on me. It sounded like the connection had been pulled out at the wall. Maybe a malfunction with the line? Beth, there’s been an –. What had there been? Jordan wasn’t ever flummoxed by trivialities, so he must have been going to say something important. I was taken aback as I was supposed to be the one arraigning him: Jordan, there’s been an unexpected change in the way I feel.
My heart was beating wildly as I slid two more coins into the slot and redialed. This time Jordan decided not to pick up. Or he was rushing out the door as he heard the peals of my follow-up call. I was let down but also spared – what if I’d been able to spit out my invective? Jordan, you dirty double-dealing scumbag! Worse still, what if he couldn’t refute Tracy’s scalding claim? How was I going to come to grips with that?
I put the receiver down and it clicked back into place. Stay rational, Beth. There will be a sane explanation for this. For everything, hopefully. The guys have probably gone down to the shops for a greasy hamburger and a fizzy drink. After last night they’d have queasy stomachs for sure. And then there were the hairdressing appointments.
‘When I turn up tomorrow, you’re going to find me a whole lot different,’ Jordan had warned with an air of petulance, twirling a strand of his hair meaningfully. Jordan has remarkable shiny brown hair, just like the singer Jackson Browne. He’s been growing it out this year, as he knows I prefer it long.
‘Just a trim for you tomorrow, Jordie,’ I told him yesterday with a smile.
‘Beths, you only love me for my hippie high school hair.’
‘Yes, and it’s almost grown back to the length it used to be.’
I drifted away from the phone, jittery but resigned to another deferral. It was only half past ten. I had loads of time to solve the quandary I was now in. Sitting down on a leather couch opposite the billiard table, I tucked my right calf beneath my buttocks in a childhood pose that was somehow reassuring. I mustn’t lose my resolve. But I knew full well that if I spoke up, the result could be dire. I had lost my Dad and I might lose my first steady boyfriend too. Nine months, we’d been together. Jordan had spent every Saturday with me for nine sweet months.
Never once had I taken him for granted. I had a calendar of Italian Renaissance portraits in the kitchen, and every time a month passed, I’d flip the page and look at the shiny new picture, saying with a sigh, ‘Still living the dream, Raphael (or Botticelli or Leonardo), still living the dream.’ Prior to this, the longest I’d spent with a guy was three months, then splat. They were minor losses, in retrospect – now I was really looking down the barrel. I might have to relinquish not just today’s razzle-dazzle but also the stretched-out safety of marriage, a cute grizzle-free baby, the whole shebang.
Judy, my bridesmaid, would be here around midday. I’d be able to tell her I was having second thoughts. I could imagine her wisecracking response: ‘It’s supposed to be the groom who gets cold feet on the wedding day, not the bride.’
That was the tradition. ‘I can’t go through with it, Pete (or Andy or Matt)’, the groom confides to his best man. But he gets talked out of fleeing by Pete (or Andy or Matt): ‘You gotta do it, mate.’ That’s what best men are for, aren’t they? And so the groom knuckles down to the concept of a knuckled-down life.
But surely some brides must also marry under sufferance, because on this day it was I who wanted to abscond. A sharp stick had pierced the big red balloon of my heart. Why did I blow it up so big in the first place? Until last night I had intended to wed Jordan at any cost, for who wouldn’t want to be married to Jordan Sinclair? If I didn’t snap him up when he was on offer, someone else would. I was jealous of every shopgirl he chatted to while buying bread and milk – and he liked to chat to shopgirls, believe me. His lips would curl when a slim girl materialised at the counter. All the pretty girls in Melbourne know where to find me, his eyes would glimmer.
‘Window-shopping. Jordan’s just window-shopping,’ Judy would console me. And she was right, because Jordan was equally attentive to me when we met after a short absence. So I forgave him his benign interest in shopgirls. Loving Jordan was a necessary debility for me. But how could such a longlasting attachment founder in the passage of a few hours? That I couldn’t explain. Last night had been a sleepless revelation. Tracy’s news had prompted me to reconsider all that had taken place between me and my boyfriend with agonising suspicion. I paced around my unit so many times I must have worn the carpet thin. When Jordan said that, what did he really mean? When Jordan did that, what was he really up to?
I had always known mine to be a somewhat perverse attraction, if also a powerful and sustaining one. Perverse because at fifteen I’d supplanted my pin-up idols with a real live heartthrob and stuck fast to my obsession. I hardly knew Jordan back then, and I actually preferred it that way. God knows what gibberish would have come out of my mouth if he’d started chatting me up. After leaving school, I continued to harbour my Jordan idolatry. Such an emotional tethering could come in handy. I believed in my university boyfriends while they believed in me, but my self-conjured genie Jordan could always soothe any wounds caused by these lesser guys. Jordan was my default position. The bastards who dropped me for being too contrary, or for laughing at the wrong moment, weren’t a patch on my ideal guy, so good riddance to them anyway.
I continued to daydream about a younger Jordan while getting to know the older one. When the real Jordan and I went for short periods without seeing each other, his illustrious fictive brother was still beating a path to my door. Self-indulgently, I could flick the switch and entertain myself with mindmovies set in a finishing school with a strong resemblance to Mornington Grammar, only now the classrooms were lecture theatres and the playing fields were those green lawns I was habitually lounging on with friends at teachers’ college. In these curative soap operas, Jordan always ended up in bed with me after I’d wrenched him from the clutches of the infamous baton-change girls.
The baton-change girls: that was what we called Tracy’s relay team at school.
Tracy and her classmates Binny, Pen and Mish ran the 4 x100-metre relay at most inter-school carnivals. Tracy’s heart was set on breaking every relay record in the book. When she was only thirteen her father had supplied her with some metal batons so she could practise with her friends whenever they liked. At some stage we began calling Tracy’s team ‘the batonchange girls’, and before long even the teachers were using this name for the wing-heeled quartet.
Tracy, Binny, Pen and Mish were retired from competition now and rather slovenly; they were resting on their laurels. They existed mostly in my imagination as we’d gone our separate ways since leaving school. To my surprise Jordan insisted on inviting them all to our wedding. The baton-change girls had been his athletics club friends, and they were still part of his extended group, if only tenuously.
After we became physically intimate I was bold enough to confess my schoolgirl crush to Jordan. He was dismissive, saying: ‘We’re adults making adult choices now, Beths.’ That was the first time he called me Beths, adding a playful s to my name that I’ve loved ever since. Referring to me in the plural.
What Jordan said about us being adults was true, but I was still carrying the carcass of my teenage self around with me, hoping to score teenage hits for it, to satisfy a long-lasting thirst. Saturday nights when Jordan slept at my place, I could pretend it was Jordan Junior who had his hand between my legs. I could have an orgasm really quickly.
Unlike my former boyfriends, Jordan seemed to find me a cohesive enough person. Never once did he whistle through his teeth and lament, ‘I can’t get a handle on you,’ or frown in irritation, ‘What was funny about that?’
Ours was a capricious courtship, entangled with the past from both our perspectives, it would seem. Facing each other in the booth of an Esplanade cafe, we drank caramel milkshakes in those big icy metal cups that made the milk seem vast and supremely cold. Jordan the milkshake bearer.
‘I never came here before,’ I said, fingering the letters and numbers on the plastic jukebox at my elbow.
‘We used to come here after St Moritz,’ Jordan noted.
‘Who’s we?’ I asked, though I could already guess.
‘Tracy and co. The girls were really into ice-skating for a while.’
‘I can ice-skate too,’ I said proudly.
Jordan nodded and suppressed a burp. ‘Hey, do you want to finish my milk? I’m not used to drinking so much of this stuff.’
Gaily I noticed his greenish pallor. ‘Are you going to puke?’
‘No.’ He winced. ‘Not if I can help it.’
‘Sorry. I don’t know much polite talk, do I?’
Jordan eyes opened wide, almost with surprise, as they often did when I put myself down. ‘You do okay, Beths. You’re a lot like the others, as a matter of fact.’
The others. I assumed he meant Tracy and co. But I wasn’t remotely like those girls. Not now and not back in school either. His memory was defective or playing tricks on him. It must have suited Jordan to think of me as one of Tracy’s clan. He was recreating the past like it was one of Harriet’s Fuzzy Felt sets. Jordan had picked up a felt cut-out of me and put it in the picture with the other flimsy adhesive figures and the blue lake and the tree and the brown cow.
Later, walking along St Kilda beach, he noticed a discarded condom lying on the sand. He skewered it with the end of a stick and held it up for my edification.
‘Yuck. Put it in the bin, please.’
Jordan trudged along the sand with the help of a gnarled piece of driftwood.
‘Why do you need a walking stick?’ I asked.
‘Because I’d go all wobbly as jelly without it,’ he insisted, and demonstrated his infirmity by collapsing on to the sand. No doubt he was amusing me with another of the crazy clown acts he performed for the toddlers at crèche to make them laugh at him. To make them feel like he was one of them. To make them love him more than the other childcare workers. Jordan was often asked, ‘How do the kids like having a male childcare worker?’ and he could always confidently answer, ‘I’m their favourite!’
‘Dodo.’ I teased, pulling him up. ‘You spend too much time with toddlers.’
‘It’s a full-time job. Can’t escape ’em.’
On St Kilda Pier we watched the dusk dissolve into night. I leant against Jordan for greater intimacy (or was it a possessive incline?) and he reacted by leaning the other way and dropping down on to the boards. How he packed up laughing when I fell on top of him. We lay there entwined for a few minutes, silently drinking in the sounds of cars and voices and moving water. From the inner suburban pier the Melbourne skyscrapers were upright dominoes. Patterned chinks of light emanated from the city offices.
Jordan whispered in my ear, ‘All those people up there are still at work, Beths. But you and I have escaped.’ Oh, he could make my heart melt with his unpredictability and charm. But wasn’t he also giving me a big fat clue that he couldn’t be relied upon? And I didn’t twig to it back then. Not until it was shoved in my face last night.
Jordan’s reverence for the suburb of St Kilda wasn’t because of the band mecca called the Prince of Wales that pulsed like a jumping castle on Saturday nights, or because of the Luna Park fairgrounds that crowned the suburb like a medieval castle sprayed by the sea. No, it was St Kilda’s association with his hallowed football team. Even though his team didn’t play their home games in St Kilda anymore, the suburb held immense patriotic appeal. ‘You mean to say you don’t have a footy team? That’s grouse – you can share mine, Beth.’
On Saturday afternoons Jordan put on his hand-knitted footy jumper, which had his favourite player Tony Lockett’s number 4 sewn on the back. Nothing embarrassed Jordan about the thick wool his mother had used to knit the jumper. It looked daggy but he didn’t seem to mind at all. I dared to imagine that Jordan was in love with me the day he gave me his treasured jumper to put on as we travelled home from a game in which our team was slaughtered by more than ten goals. It was a brute of a Melbourne evening, raining in gusts, the wind chill factor making it about three degrees. Ah, that Melbourne winter wind is cruel.
At Richmond station the platform was a sea of red, black and white streamers. Hordes of St Kilda fans had poured out of the stadium before the final siren sounded to avoid hearing the opposition team’s song being blasted through the loudspeakers. When we boarded the heated train I almost sweltered to death in that woollen jumper. But I would never have taken it off. Not for a million dollars. It smelt of the footy ground we’d just been in, it smelt of beer and meat pies and cigarette smoke, and best of all it smelt of Jordan. True to form, some female passengers looked at Jordan, and then at me, to see who’d snared this lovely feline lad.
It was only a matter of time before our lackadaisical rambles through that gritty suburb sucked us through the open mouth of Luna Park. We traipsed around the amusements, surrounded by flocks of animated kids. As a matter of course we went on a couple of rides that spun me around and made my hair stick up straight, but the ride I most wanted to go on was the ghost train. ‘Let’s save that till last,’ Jordan said indifferently, probably hoping I’d forget about it. Eventually he succumbed to my pestering, and we made our way to the ghost train enclosure.
We climbed into a two-person cart and the attendant warned us not to touch any of the exhibits inside the tunnel. He pulled the lever and our cart wheeled into motion, knocking apart the wooden doors and immersing us in darkness. The displays along the route were unremarkable: stuffed animals illuminated by red globes, fake medieval paintings, and a lone cadaver that sat up in a coffin. Those exhibits wouldn’t have scared anybody, though I did clutch Jordan when the cart headed straight for a wall, then veered right at the last moment.
Back in daylight Jordan said impertinently: ‘Well, whoop-de-do, Beth!’
‘That’s not how it used to be.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The ghost train. There used to be people in the tunnels and they would jump out at you. It was much scarier.’
‘But you were younger then,’ Jordan teased.
‘I’m sure it was different.’
‘You’re right,’ he conceded. ‘They changed it in the late seventies. Made it safer.’
I was still feeling weird from all the jolting up and down on the whizzy-dizzy rides so when I spied an empty bench I sat down. Jordan ambled off to get food.
Dad took me to Luna Park for a seventh birthday treat. It was just before he left to live in South Africa. Now my first ghost train ride with Dad came bursting through the trapdoor of my mind, as if it had only been waiting for me to return to the theme park to repossess me.
Dangling cobwebs were tickling my face as shrieks echoed through the tunnels. Shrouded figures approached, twisting beneath white sheets and saying, ‘Woo-ooh!’ A psychedelic goblin jumped on the back of our carriage and glowing green gloves rested creepily on my shoulders, making Dad laugh out loud. None too soon we screeched around the final bend, and the force of the moving carriage flung open the exit doors. ‘Wow, I’m glad that’s over. Were you scared, darling?’ Dad said indulgently.
The attendant offered us a second ride for nothing. ‘This kid’s too young to go by himself,’ he said, gesturing to a boy in a baseball cap. The kid seemed much older than me, though he was probably only nine or ten. Game and wily, he didn’t look too pleased at having us escort him, but Dad sat me on his lap and off we went again with the boy sitting beside us, contemptuous and silent. Oh dear, Dad had chosen all the scary rides to take me on, and time was running out for a visit to the famous River Caves, or Tracy’s favourite, the Giggle Palace.
Through the lurid labyrinth we rolled, hairy things dangling from the rafters and two ghosts moaning a duet, like musical wolves. Then one of the resident banshees pulled off her bedsheet and said: ‘Hey, Rod – it’s me, Shandy!’
Dad and I peered through the gloom. How did this lady know my father’s name? I had no idea who she was, but Dad raised a hand in recognition. Shandy began walking beside us and talking to Dad as our carriage trundled along the tracks. She had a mane of hair that fell below her hips. As she pressed her case, Dad warmed up. He manoeuvred me off his lap and for a moment we were both standing precariously in the moving carriage. Shandy held out a supportive hand and Dad jumped down. When they embraced I realised he must know her from elsewhere.
We left Dad and Shandy behind in the tunnels. I was confused rather than worried. What did Dad think he was doing? The goblin was behind our carriage and when he jumped up and pawed the boy in the baseball cap, the kid twisted around and began to tussle with him. The goblin groaned and the boy roared in combative mimicry. Eventually the boy thrust the groper off, and a couple of levitating corpses later, we sat blinking in the afternoon sunshine.
The attendant helped me out of the carriage. ‘Where’s your dad?’
I remained silent.
The boy in the baseball cap dobbed Dad in. ‘He saw a ghost he knew.’
‘That’s not allowed. Getting off the train when it’s going isn’t allowed. Can’t your dad read the signs?’ he said to me.
‘He saw a lady he knew,’ I reiterated shyly, feeling I was to blame.
‘Our ghosts are covered up. How did he know who she was?’
The cocky boy helped out. ‘The ghost took off her sheet. Her name was Shandy.’
The attendant shook his head as though he might have expected such behaviour from Shandy.
‘Can I get my money back?’ the boy asked. ‘Ghosts should stay ghosts.’
He was a real opportunist, this kid.
The attendant grumbled some more about my dad. He asked the people sitting in the next cart to wait, before locking the starter pulley and disappearing into the tunnel.
Then Dad burst through the exit doors. He was breathing hard and his lips were moist. ‘Come on, Lisbeth, let’s scat!’ Dad pulled me along faster than I could go. He picked me up and carried me towards the Luna Park exit. From up on his shoulders, I noticed Dad’s hair was covered in cobwebs and the back of his shirt was soaking wet. It might have been a hot day, or he might have been made hot and bothered by what had happened in the tunnel.
‘How incredible was that Shandy stuff!’ Jordan said on our drive home from Luna Park.
‘Mmm … Cherie didn’t tell me for a long time that she left Dad because of his infidelities.’
‘She didn’t want to kind of … work on it?’ Jordan asked without much conviction.
‘She did work on it for a while,’ I explained. ‘The affairs started when I was just a baby and they kept on coming.’
We were driving past the Brighton Yacht Club, where dozens of identical white sailboats were milling on the water, preparing for an afternoon regatta.
Jordan smacked his lips. ‘Shandy! What a cool name.’ Then he frowned. ‘How did Cherie find out about the other women? Men are usually good at covering their tracks.’
‘Dad wasn’t. He was like a cat that brings a dead mouse into the house. You know, flaunting his virility.’
‘To flaunt his virility,’ pondered Jordan. ‘That would be a form of cruelty, wouldn’t it?’
‘Or great insecurity,’ I said, hoping to impress Jordan with my astuteness. Did Dad have affairs because he cared so much and wanted to escape the intensity of his attachment, or did he have affairs because he didn’t care enough? The former theory can be credited to a psychologist who tried to get my mother to feel better about what had happened with Rodney.
I guess Dad would never enlighten us as to which version was correct. We rarely heard from him these days. The last time he spoke to me was on my twenty-first birthday, and I got a birthday card from him a short time later. Dad included a big cheque and some photos of my half-brother, Lyndon.
As far as my best friend Judy was concerned, that psychologist was speaking rubbish. ‘If you love someone you don’t want to hurt them,’ Judy claimed. Judy gets things wrong sometimes but she always thinks she’s right. That’s one reason I like her so much. She’s never in a muddle or torn down the middle like I am.
‘At least Rodney was honest,’ Jordan offered.
‘Um, initially. He became more cagey when Mum threatened to leave.’
I was enjoying quoting from the testimony of Cherie. I was sixteen when she finally told me her side of the story. By then I’d ceased sticking up for my missing dad.
‘Shall we pick up those two hitchhikers?’ Jordan nodded at a teenage girl and boy who stood at the side of the road with thumbs cocked. He slowed the car down.
‘Um, do we have to?’ I wanted to continue our conversation in private. Jordan had persisted in discussing the foibles of my father for my sake, no doubt. Growing up with faithful parents, he couldn’t see what I was up against. I didn’t feel this all the time, but sometimes it was as though half of me suffered from a mild form of paralysis.
I wanted to tell Jordan that throughout my childhood – and never more so than in my father’s absence – I had believed Rodney to be the most magnificent of men. When my parents split up, I adored the weekends I spent in South Melbourne with my intense and sociable father. The phone and the doorbell were always ringing. The women who flitted through Dad’s apartment in summer were proof of his superior being. He was a canny magician and those women in scant clothing were his alluring assistants, who would obligingly walk me down to the beach, splash with me in the shallows, bury me in the sand for fun, and see me emerge from the sand, born anew.
Jordan continued driving slowly, so it wouldn’t seem that he’d changed his mind about the hitchhikers. ‘They looked harmless enough,’ he rebuked me.
‘Someone will stop for them,’ I said, wishing now that we had picked them up. Jordan would find me ungenerous. Maybe I was, but I didn’t want him judging me critically on any score. I was greedy for Jordan’s attention. I pretended otherwise, but I wanted him all to myself.
Earlier this year I was flicking through some old family photos at Cherie’s place, and I found one of Dad slouching against his cream Chrysler Valiant. He was either coming or going, dangling his car keys. The photo must have been taken in my preschool days, when we were still living in South Melbourne as a family. Far out, I said to myself, tapping the photo with my index finger. Guess who my dad looks like? In the photo, Dad’s lovely sleek flyaway hair and narrow face were just like my boyfriend’s. But there the likeness ended. Jordan’s eyes and mouth are different: they express a chirpy, placable nature. In senior school the boys would damn him with faint praise: ‘Oh yeah, not a care, Sinclair’s all air.’
What made Dad look so dejected in this photo? Was his glumness due to the proximity of fractious four-year-old me? According to Cherie I had become more boisterous with each year I grew, until a prep teacher with a predilection for slapping knocked me into line.
Dad is looking at the person holding the camera and that person would almost certainly have been Cherie. He was unhappy with her then, not me. Of course the fault ultimately lay with Dad: no woman was going to make him content for long. Not with his roving eye. Not with his nice looks and his engineer’s income. It has occurred to me more than once that if my father had been the faithful type, I would never have been born. It was no secret he was married to someone else before he met spunky Cherie with her fresh Australian frankness. Ironically, his readiness to cheat was the quintessential fault that brought my parents together and also cast them asunder.
Jordan and I had a chuckle about my mixed fortunes when we were swapping family histories. ‘I’ll be your dad, and your big brother and your little brother too,’ he promised in his daffy way, as though he had a lollypop stuck in the corner of his mouth. He was adorable, but you couldn’t take him seriously – and perhaps I’d known that all along.
If I did know it, I’d never acknowledged it. In fact, I liked to suppose that I’d consciously selected Jordan as the antidote to my father. This guy Jordan had true emotional grit: he had more or less stayed attached to Tracy Breeze for the last four years of secondary school. As far back as I could remember, those two lovebirds were always making out somewhere in the wings. There they were, putting their spikes and trakky daks on in the locker rooms; there they were, sandwiched together on the back seat of the bus. Jordan Sinclair: the sweetest guy that ever tried to break the four minute mile. Now he had reinvented himself as a childcare worker who made funny faces all day long for a selfless rate of pay. At Community fetes he was to be found buying picture books and soft toys for his little crèche kiddies. Mr Nurture – that’s what you’d have to call Jordan these days. He’d grown up, and so had I.
Yet ever since reading Tracy’s cautionary words last night I had been feeling that Jordan’s resemblance to Dad was more than just physical. It was time I woke up to the fact that a strong degree of likeness had always played a part in my attraction.