9

Friday the US dollar drops. The joint venture partner bails out.

I manage to restrain myself from jumping up and down punching the air until I close my door.

I whip the computer’s butt at Sammy the Snake. I should ask for an upgrade on my games package. I’m ready for something more sophisticated.

On the bus going home people around me are talking about weekends, and I realise we’re about to have one and I haven’t thought this through. Friday night and nothing to do. And then Saturday.

There’s a message on the answering machine. Jeff saying, We’re going to the coast. See you Sunday for tennis.

How did I ever end up with the answering machine in the Division of Common Property? I hate the answering machine. It gives me only false hope and discontent.

Forty-six hours to kill before tennis. I think through my list of people I’d like to do something with tonight. People I would choose to favour with my company. People who are likely to take me on at short notice. I call Freddie and Gerry.

Oh hi, Gerry says. Had a big week?

About the usual. How about you?

Oh, it’s been a wild week at the House of Romance, as always. Well, lots of fiction anyway.

Sounds like my life.

Oh, you poor glum boy. And what are you doing tonight? Shouldn’t you be out doing the girl thing?

Probably, but maybe I’m not ready for the girl thing again yet. Or any thing.

Yeah, who needs ’em? Well we can’t leave you at home lonely. We’re just having a barbecue on the deck but you’re welcome to join us. If that’s not too boring.

It’s great. It sounds great. In fact, I can come right over and tell you all about what boring is, and you’ll see that that isn’t it.

The sun is setting as I walk down the hill, a bottle of red wine in one hand, and a blue haze is settling over the brewery and Toowong and the west. Lights are coming on, and there’s traffic blocking Milton Road in the distance and moving slowly along Waterworks Road behind me. But not many cars in these small streets, crazy streets like Zigzag Street, made up of curious angles and unexplained decisions, streets that lose themselves in the contours. That end, and maybe somewhere else, begin again. Finding their way among old cottages in every state imaginable, some confidently renovated, some dealt with cruelly in the fifties and sixties, a few leaning as though they could fall with only a lapse in concentration.

Gerry and Freddie, not unpredictably, live in an 1880s colonial with all the work done, right down to the authentic clawfoot bath.

Freddie says, Hi, come right through, we’re out on the deck. I give him the bottle of wine and he says, Oh, nice, after pretending to read the label. Freddie knows fuck all about wine. We all know that.

Richard brought us wine, he says as he leads me onto the deck.

Gerry turns to me wearing an apron with an eclectic design involving a very matronly bosom and lederhosen.

Oh ’88 Rouge Homme. You are being nice to us. You must have been very lonely.

Freddie fetches a beer for himself and two glasses for us.

Don’t take it personalty Richard, Gerry says, but Freddie won’t partake of your gift. He actually knows fuck all about wine, so he’s doing the decent thing and not wasting it by drinking it just out of politeness. All the more for us I say.

Freddie takes this impassively. This is the kind of relationship I’ve never had. The kind where you can say something like that and it’s just fine. Anna knows fuck all about cricket, now that would have been okay to say, but wine and cricket are valued very differently. So even though I’m quite convinced Anna does know fuck all about wine, it could never have been said without significant response.

I hope you don’t mind, Gerry says. I’ve taken the liberty of marinating the steaks without consulting you first.

The sky darkens and Gerry proceeds to fill the air with the kind of barbecue smells that in my experience have only come from someone else’s barbecue. Tonight I’m on the right side of the fence. I’m not the loser at home next door, opening a little cardboard box and taking out my burger, shuffling the fries out of the paper bag. I’m on the barbecue side, and the food is almost as good as it smells, so I eat like a pig and Gerry takes it as a compliment.

We drink the Rouge Homme, and he finds another bottle of red so we drink that too.

You’ll be sorry, Freddie says, waggling his finger at Gerry. You’re forgetting your histamine problem.

Fuck the histamine problem, Gerry says with a defiant wave of his right arm. Tonight I’m going to live.