Maybe it was the sex. Maybe it wasn’t. She had always thought that sex might be able to give her more of a physical presence that she could feel, as though it could switch something on inside of her so she could stop feeling as though she was never fully awake. She wanted it to bring her back into her own body, to connect her in a sharp, focused way to the world. Clare had always thought that she would find sex less boring if she found the right person to do it with in the right way. After she went through that phase of letting herself get picked up at The Clock most Saturday nights, she realised it wasn’t true. Even in books, sex was boring or at best laughable – no matter what the author intended or the character said it felt like. But at least it wasn’t messy; at least you could turn the page and not worry about cleaning up afterwards.
And then there was Richard. He was an old sometimes-habit like chewing your nails. Richard sat up in her bed, stretched his arms over his head. His back was long and freckled and the bones stuck out from his thin frame. Clare watched him slide his hand from the top of his skull to the base of his neck. He was looking away from her and at the wall where she had a poster of Ernest Hemingway reading in bed.
‘Hemingway,’ Richard said to no one but himself, reading the word out slowly from its lettering at the bottom of the poster.
Clare scooped her shirt off the floor with her right hand without even looking down and pulled it over her head.
‘Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk.’
‘What?’
‘Hemingway. It’s Hemingway’s famous line. “Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk”.’
‘Ah,’ he smiled a half-smile, scratched his belly softly. This was the point at which she wanted him to leave. She wanted him to get out of her bed and put on the crumpled pair of jeans she could see sitting behind her bedroom door where he had left them in his own efficient way, taking them off before he’d even touched her, before he’d even made it to the bed.
Clare stood up, put on the faded pink pyjama pants her mother had given her so long ago, tied her hair back in a ponytail. Downstairs she could hear her housemates yelling at a sporting match on the television. In her grandmother’s old mirror hanging on the wall, she looked at the bags under her eyes and wondered if she was too old for share houses. Thirty. She was thirty now. She wondered when she would start to feel like an adult.
What she would like to do, really, was spend the rest of the evening reading in bed. She wanted to fall asleep with a book by her side and get up again tomorrow morning and read it some more and now that she’d had sex with Richard she could do these things and stop feeling like she hadn’t put some kind of effort into the outside world. This evening though, he was in a slow mood. He didn’t look like he’d be going anywhere anytime soon. He moved the sock he had abandoned on the ground around with his right foot. Clare sat down next to him on the bed. She folded her hands in her lap. Yawned.
‘What are you doing tonight?’
She knew what he was doing tonight. She just couldn’t think of anything else to say. He was going to see a documentary about pineapple farmers in a place that was hot and far away.
‘Going to see a film. You can come, if you want.’ Finally he picked up his socks, looked at them, put them on, began to make a move.
She didn’t want to go. He didn’t really want her to go. They both knew these things. Back when they were at uni, they’d hung out together more, but that was when they were young enough not to care that they didn’t have much to say to each other. When they were younger, it had been enough just to be together and to drink cheap beer and to ask someone you didn’t have much in common with endless questions about their life. Now that they were older, time was more important, even if they just spent it by themselves. They didn’t have the time to hang out with people just for the sake of it, so they didn’t do outside spaces together. He crossed the room and put on his jeans and his old Led Zeppelin shirt. She watched him put his red Vans on. He hardly looked down, just slipped his feet into them, used her dresser to steady himself with his right hand before tightening a shoelace with his left.
Clare made her bed, as if she wasn’t going to get right back into it when he left. When he was finished getting dressed and she was sitting on the bed he came and sat beside her like he always did. He put his arm around her shoulder, rubbed it and said, ‘Was that alright?’ She hated the way he asked this every time. Her friend Hannah reckoned he did this because, like most men, he needed his ego stroked, but Clare knew that this wasn’t entirely true, not in Richard’s case anyway. Even having sex he wanted to make sure he went about it with the right politics.
‘Yep, fine.’ It was the question, not the sex, that made her blush. He was always so conscious of being good, of making the right decisions and doing the right things by people. She couldn’t arouse in herself that same kind of consciousness. It wasn’t that she didn’t care, but that she just couldn’t remember to think about everyone and everything all the time in the same way that he did. She yawned, smiled at him, hoped he got the hint.
‘I’ll walk you downstairs.’
‘Sure.’
In the hallway there was the musty smell that these old terraces have. Her housemate, Anita, had left one of her orange platform pumps on the ground outside her bedroom door. The new housemate, Greg, a postgrad student from the UK, had put a poster of Derrida up on the wall. It was the kind of place that made her feel interesting. That’s why she lived here. She suspected that’s why most people lived in Surry Hills – because it made them feel interesting.
Richard went before her, took two or three steps at a time, like he always did, almost jumping. In the living room at the bottom of the stairs the television was up too loud. It was a football game that Greg was watching, his face was in his hands, some team he had sworn his allegiances to was losing. He looked up for a moment, stared at Richard and said, ‘They’re smashing us.’
Richard nodded his head sympathetically, made a kind of half-arsed gesture of looking at the TV as if he cared about what was on it and shrugged his shoulders. Greg looked over his shoulder momentarily, past Richard and towards Clare, gave her a half smile that made her wonder if he was judging her or just curious.
She turned away from him and walked with Richard to her front door. Richard kissed her on the cheek, let himself out and she stood against the doorframe for a while just watching the street. The nights were beginning to warm up again but the people hadn’t started coming out of their houses yet. It was quiet this time of evening, right after everyone had made their way home from work and too early for anyone to be on their way out again. It was twenty to six and she had the feeling that in all these terraces, people were getting ready for something big to happen. She was going to make herself toast with plenty of butter and get back into bed with a bottle of wine and a glass and E.M. Forster or John Cheever or maybe Virginia Woolf.
When she turned around she saw that Richard had left his cap in the hallway. Perhaps she wouldn’t call him again. It was just that it was Monday night and she needed something to help her get over the horror of the weekend at her parents’ place. At least Richard helped to remind her that she wasn’t under her father’s roof any more.