The Moscow night was still and quiet save for a TV somewhere. No neighbours talking nor any sign of the woman through the uncurtained glass across the way, just silent flurries of snow. A black phone that wasn’t connected. He sorted through Fin’s tapes—Joy Division, Boomtown Rats—flipped on the portable tape deck and lay on her bed in his underpants listening to the Divinyls’ ‘Boys in Town.’ The ceiling above him stained and peeling, pasted with roses and butterflies, and pictures from Soviet magazines. Antiquated blenders and appliances, dresses and hairdos. The raspy verse that ended with get me out of here. He tried not to believe in signs but the words had him wishing he still had his passport strapped against him.
There was no evidence of what she’d been commissioned to paint. Books lined a shelf in the headboard: The Wretched of the Earth, The Soviet Achievement, Nagorno-Karabakh and Other Nationalities. He picked out Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? Phrases underlined: The task of our Social Democracy is to subvert spontaneity. That didn’t sound like the Fin he knew. Maybe she had become a commo instead of just being left wing and chic. No wonder she’d lost her sense of humour. He flipped the pages. Only those devoid of principle are capable of change. Maybe that made sense; he wasn’t sure.
He nuzzled the familiar slightly stale bed-smell, smoky sheets that hadn’t been washed for his arrival. He reached for a narrow volume called The Meaning of Love by Vladimir Solovyov, a philosopher he’d never heard of. It had a chapter entitled ‘Love in humans is not akin to propagation.’ A possible vindication, he thought. He nestled his hand under the elastic of his boxers and conjured the soldier at the railway station in Prague, the falseness of that as intimacy, rutting hurried as primitives, then the euphoric recall of his recent visit to Sydney for New Year’s Eve stole over him.
He never even saw the Harbour Bridge illuminated with fireworks or homing pigeons released from the wings of the Opera House. The alternative had slipped over him as easy as skin. The car almost drove itself to Centennial Park, the paradise of his despair. Men marauded there in silent ritual, triceps tattooed, the shadows of a chain-link fence. Down in the Brambles there was Kleenex in the dirt. He skirted the edges like a fringe-dweller, the way he’d done before, following a man with clamps on his nipples, thin as a snake with arms. Darcy hadn’t seen the new virus up close. He imagined it twisting through veins as he watched the young man suction liquid with an eyedropper from a small brown bottle, squirt it into his mouth, then offer Darcy a sample. Darcy accepted with a cautious insatiability, as if to celebrate the end of life as he’d known it. A taste like wheat in his teeth, infusing him and making the darkness seem light. He thought of his mother, drunk and alone in Mount Eliza, watching the living-room clock as the New Year struck, looking for Darcy in the crowd on TV, but she’d lost him this time.
As the fireworks lit up the distant midnight, it was the dawn of 1984, the Orwellian era, but not as he’d expected. The poofter-bashers came through the trees like fluid, with Clockwork Orange nightsticks, and Darcy glimpsed his thin sick friend folded up in the paspalum, being beaten. Darcy ran blind through the park in a sort of paranoid fulfilment, strung on a line like a dress in the wind, there but far away. Even as he was escaping, tearing through branches in the dark, he knew if he stayed in Sydney he’d be back there again. Like a dog that returns to its vomit.
Darcy woke with a start to bolts being opened, Fin’s peasant dresses hanging above him and the radio turned up in the other room. She came in and switched off the bedroom light. Jesus, he said, you scared me.
Sorry. She lit a candle on the ledge beside the bed. Darcy looked at his watch; she’d been gone an hour.
Did you find food in the fridge? she asked. The candlelight wavered a shape on the wall as she took off her coat and clothes, went into the bathroom.
I was too tired to look.
The hushed sound of her peeing, brushing her teeth, cleaning off her make-up. She emerged without lipstick or eye shadow, slightly older-looking but lovely, ready for bed.
How did it go? he asked.
I’ll tell you about it in the morning. She lay on the bed and kissed him gently on the mouth. I hope I didn’t seem angry at the station, she said. I was just worried. I’ll get your passport back.
You should have told me if I was carrying something, he said.
She put her finger to his lips this time. I know. She turned her back to him, the nape of her neck pale where her hair had once covered it. He touched a small tattoo at the knobbly top of her spine: a red swallow, its wings spread and flying upwards. A sailor’s tattoo. She blew out the candle and moved closer to him in the dark. He traced the tattoo’s shape with his finger, the curve of the wings. If he’d ever wanted to be with a woman it would have been her. The apple shampoo scent in her hair, the muted whistle with each of her breaths reminded him of things. He hugged her gently from behind, his arm draped over her ribs.
When were you first with a man? she asked.
Darcy stared into the soft white nape of her neck, pretended he was asleep.