55

Hi, she says. So I take it you’ve managed to avoid naked flames since I last saw you?

Yeah, thanks. But my real concern is for the ozone layer.

That’s good. I like someone who’s aware of their global responsibilities. You could be on my TV show.

Thanks.

Are you doing anything tonight?

Tonight?

Tonight’s a problem? I’m sorry, is this a mistake? You need some space or something?

No. I hate space. I live in the inner city. Space scares me. Tonight is great. I’m very enthusiastic about tonight, and it just happens to be one of the seven available nights in my diary over the course of the next week.

What about work things? Those work things that might have been a problem later in the week?

I’m on top of them now. So what’s tonight? Have you got any ideas? Or a plan even?

Ideas. No plan. Kathy’s now gone up north doing some secret story on foxtail palm smuggling, so it’s just me at home. So I thought maybe you could come over. We could have something to eat.

Good. That’s a good plan.

It’s not a plan. It’s just an idea. A plan would be like, be here by seven and bring a bottle of that wine you brought on Friday and we’ll get takeaway from Qan Heng’s, pork balls followed by chicken with ginger and shallots and rice for two. Now that’d be a plan. But why don’t you just come over after work?

Yeah. Good. I’ve got to get my stitches out, so I’ll head home and do that and then I’ll come over.

So for three hours I work hard. I focus and I deliver. Sure, my mind wanders, but only among pleasantries. I am forgiven all three farts, and I shall be with Rachel Vilikovski before the sun sets.

I tidy up several minor tasks that have needed tidying for some time. I go through three tapes dictating responses to things and when I give them to Deb I ask her if we shouldn’t be taking more of an interest in Barry G, sending a card or something.

We did that last week babe, she says to me gently. So that one’s covered. But I think it’s nice how you put in a couple of hours of actual work and you think you’re really on top of everything again. Couldn’t be your Rachel friend, could it?

Now, Deb, you know me. I just love my work. And I don’t need some Rachel friend in order to be able to function.

Sure babe. Whatever you say.

So, three hours of quality in the workplace and then I’m running to catch the bus. Even as I run I know it won’t mean anything to the bus that I get there eight minutes before it leaves instead of three, but running is just what I do.

And when I get off I run from the bus stop, down Waterworks Road, down Zigzag Street. I give Greg an early dinner (otherwise I’ll forget to feed him at all) and I dive into a room full of boxes and search till I find another bottle of chardonnay. I put it in the freezer and then I panic, thinking I might get caught up having my stitches out and the bottle might explode (I have no idea how long that takes), so I go and find another one and put it in the fridge. And I drive down the hill to the medical centre.

Just stitches, I say to the receptionist. Just two stitches to come out.

Do you have to see doctor?

He said no. He said to just drop in and someone would whip them out. He seemed to think it was no big deal.

She tells me to take a seat, and in about two minutes a nurse opens the door of the treatment room and calls me in. She looks at the wound, says, That looks fine. I think we can just take those out.

So in another five minutes I’m back at home, and the wine bottle in the freezer is barely cool.

It’s still peak hour when I’m driving to West End, and I find this incredibly frustrating and I drive quite badly. It takes me nearly twenty minutes to get there, five whole songs and some talking on Triple J.

She’s wearing jeans and a vaguely see-through white top when she comes to the door.

I think the wine should go in the freezer, I tell her. It’s not cold at all.

She puts on her shoes and we walk down the road for coffee. And she doesn’t say much on the way there and she’s thinking hard as she cradles her cup and looks out at the traffic.

I’m sorry about last night.

You’re sorry about last night. What have you got to be sorry about? You and your impressive sphincter tone.

I’m sorry about turning up late. Leaving like that.

Like what?

You know. Kathy at midnight.

Yeah, well she’d had some problem. You told me that.

Yeah. She did want me to be home. She doesn’t sleep well when it’s just her in the house.

Yeah. You said that.

Yeah. But earlier on. Not turning up.

It’s no big deal. Is it?

I got a call. I haven’t told you any of this, and I should have told you. I got a call from a guy I was going out with, well, when I say going out with, it was maybe more than that. About ten months ago we were going to move in together. I actually left the place I was living in and I moved my stuff to his place, and he just didn’t cope. He said the commitment freaked him out. It was like he saw me putting my toothbrush next to his in the bathroom, and that was it. So we had a really bad weekend and, since it was his house, I had to leave. So that’s how long I’ve been living in Drake Street. We tried to sort things out, and I’m still not totally sure what his problem was, but it never worked from there. Last night he called me to tell me he was getting married. To someone I’d never heard of before. And, don’t get me wrong, I don’t want anything like that with him, not any more, I’m pretty sure of that, but I wasn’t totally ready for the news either. That was about seven. Seven o’clock that he called. So Kathy was concerned about my welfare. She wanted to make sure I got home. She said, this is not the night to do something with a man that you might regret later. So we agreed midnight.

Okay. I understand. That must have been tough.

It shouldn’t be tough. You don’t know how angry I was that it was even slightly tough. I was really annoyed that he could still get to me.

Yeah, but it’s like that.

So that’s okay? All of that?

Sure it’s okay. And it’s nice of Kathy to think of me as a man that you might regret later.

That’s not what she meant. You know that’s not what she meant.

Yeah, I know. This is all fine. I can’t expect you not to have some kind of past.

We walk to Qan Heng’s and by the time we get back to Drake Street, both the dinner and the wine are cold. I open the wine while Rachel microwaves the pork balls.

We sit on the small back deck looking over the untidy grass of her garden and someone else’s neat vegetables just beyond the fence. And we eat and drink and talk.

And I find that for some reason I’m telling her about Anna, about the trashing, and this is different to any other time I’ve told it. It’s not as much like revisiting it, it’s not like being trashed again just by telling it. So I tell her what it really felt like. The months of paralysing uncertainty, of wondering what I’d done. And I tell her there have been times when I’ve thought I might be going crazy, and it just shouldn’t be like that. There should be some rational, linear process, where you progressively get over it. But it’s not like that either. Some days you’re okay, other days it’s all back again. And you have no idea whether anything you’re feeling is quite the same as it used to be. You’re spinning out of control, and you wonder if you can possibly make a right decision any more.

You’re such a theorist, aren’t you? she says. You have such a chaotic, busy brain.

I do. I know. I’d like to think less. I’d like to be the kind of person who thinks less and just does things. Does crazy things on impulse and doesn’t get hurt by them.

She laughs. Why? Why do you want that and why do you think it’s possible? And aren’t you already the sort of person who picks up girls by throwing footwear in crowded places? Relax Richard Derrington. Relax if you can let yourself, but don’t change all this. As if I haven’t done more than enough thinking in the last ten months myself. I thought I knew what was happening with my life, and suddenly I didn’t. I was depressed for quite a while. Hardly an entertaining housemate for Mel and Kathy. And they were worried for me when I told them I wanted to bring a boy round for dinner. We had big talks.

I know big talks. I bore my friends stupid with big talks.

Hey, I’m not saying I bored mine. I’m just saying we had big talks.

So what did they say? What’s the last thing Kathy said to you before she left town?

Be careful. She told me to be careful.

Yeah, I get that too.

They mean so well, don’t they?

Yeah. And sometimes they don’t have a clue.

At least mine have met you.

Yeah, but mine are really impressed with you. I’m sure they feel like they know you.

I can’t imagine what you’ve been saying to them. I have no idea what you actually think I’m like. I bet it’s nothing like me.

As if you’re in any position to judge.

It’s cooler now, and quite dark, so we go inside.

Just dump the plates by the sink, Rachel says. I’ll get to them some time. And she piles up the plastic takeaway boxes and says, Hey you could use these for your kind of art. You want to talk about the late twentieth century? You get a few thousand of these, used takeaway containers.

Yeah, yeah I can see it. All kinds of arrangements, neatly geometric and haphazard, a whole room of them, built up like a decaying city. All kinds of residual stains and smells. And you could just call it Eat Out.

She laughs.

You were bullshitting me, weren’t you?

Maybe.

Great. Completely suckered. Tricked into thinking I was a genius, just for a second. I thought I was going to get a government grant to eat a shitload of takeaway. I thought my life was about to have meaning.

Such a theorist. Looking for meaning. Some days you’ve just got to live, boy.

And she makes the move.

She puts her arms around me and kisses me, right there in the brightly lit kitchen next to the sink. And it seems infinitely more sophisticated than Tim Tams and a dark verandah and flatulence. But maybe that’s just her. And maybe I’m thinking too much right now, maybe this isn’t a time for thinking at all.

She leads me into the lounge room and we sit on the sofa and she says, No dog ever sat on this, just so you know, and she kisses me again, before I have any chance to reply.

And she looks at me, biting the end of her lip and smiling at the same time.

I’m not sure I was planning this tonight, she says.

It’s not a plan thing.

No. I’m just feeling vulnerable, that’s all. Last night’s call and things.

It’s okay.

It’s okay?

Sure it’s okay. You think I don’t feel vulnerable?

Okay. I just … maybe you can understand this. I hope you can understand this. I really like you. I want you to be here. And I want you to stay. But … And she takes off her glasses, wipes her eyes and starts to cry.

She leans against me and cries into my chest, and I can feel it moving right through her, every difficult breath. And I find myself stroking her hair and telling her it’ll be all right, as though that’s any use.

She stops, clears her throat, sits up and laughs at herself and leaves the room to find a tissue and blow her nose.

Okay, glad I’ve got that out of the way, she says. I have no idea what happened then. I think I just let myself go and it suddenly felt a bit risky. You have this theory, well, I have this theory, and I expect that you, as a big fan of theories, have something quite like it, that if you take things slowly, you’re not going to put as much on the line. You just edge along, one step at a time, and you can back out at any second and you’ve lost nothing.

I have that theory, but at least I realise it’s ridiculous. At least I know it’s only a theory you believe in at really crazy times. The theory of elegant slowness, where you have a plan, and it’s one step at a time and no-one gets hurt.

Yeah, that’s the one. So can we just take it easy, as much as we can? No plan, no one step at a time, no agreement to back off a bit, cause that only scares everybody and before you know it it’s all messed up. I want you to stay tonight.

I think I can do that.

Good. I feel like a real mess now. Like that really took a lot out of me. I must have been tense. You know what I’d like? This is going to sound really dicky, but you know what I’d like you to do now?

What?

I’d like you to brush my hair. That’d be really nice. Does that sound weird? I’m not putting you off with that?

Not if you just mean, you know, regular, straightforward hairbrushing. I think I can do that. It’s not a euphemism for some sexual practice I don’t know about?

Not the way I want it. The way I want it it’s incredibly innocent, but maybe really nice.

So she takes my hand and we go into her room and she picks up the hairbrush from the dressing table. She hands it to me, still with a slightly embarrassed smile, and she sits on the edge of her bed. I sit next to her and she says, Okay, now you brush, and she shows me just how she wants it. And she closes her eyes, and soon she’s breathing as though she’s asleep. I ask her how it is and she says, Really nice. And then she says, Can we move round a bit so you can do more of my head?

And she turns and sits cross-legged on the bed, and lifts her pillow up and holds it. There’s a small box left lying where the pillow was and I ask her what it is.

Guatemalan worry dolls, she says, and picks it up to show me. She opens the frail wooden lid and inside are six tiny stick figures.

Hey, one of them looks just like Elvis.

Maybe a lot of people worry about Elvis. Do you know how these work?

No.

Well, you keep them under your pillow and every night before you go to sleep you can give each of them one of your worries, and then they do the worrying for you.

Wow, that’s great.

And that’s all I can say. Wow, that’s great. When this makes me feel very strange and want her even more. I think I might be in far more danger than she is.

You sound like you meant that.

I did mean it. I think it’s great. I love the idea that you have Guatemalan worry dolls under your pillow. I don’t think you have any idea how desirable you are. You’re an incredible combination of things, and I think you just don’t have any idea how attractive it all is.

As opposed to you, Mr Insight. Correct me if I’m wrong, but if you had Guatemalan worry dolls you’d think they were crap, and if I’d made Purvis the Sock Friend, you’d think he was great. Doesn’t this make you wonder? That it might be a lot of these little things, a lot of these things that you probably think are crap, that some people might actually find attractive about you. You and your scraggy cat and your shambles of a house and your loose association with reality. It’s never occurred to you that people might like that, has it?

No. Why would people like it? It’s the stuff I want to change.

Don’t. Just brush my hair, okay?

So I brush. And in all my intimacy fantasies I never imagined this. Me brushing her hair and feeling like this. I feel her hair slip through the brush and through my fingers, stroke after stroke. I shape it over her ears and brush right out to its tips and watch it fall softly down to her shoulders. And I put the brush down and rub her neck when she wants me to, and she undoes buttons and I rub her shoulders. Then she’s face down on the bed and I’m kissing her bare back, rubbing my hands over her back.

So it goes, until we’re both wearing nothing and holding each other, lying under a sheet in the dark with the moon coming in the window, over my shoulder, glinting in her eyes.

I can’t see your face, she says. I want to see your face. So I roll onto my back and she lifts her head up and looks at me and says, You will stay, won’t you?

Yes.

She leans over me and kisses me on the mouth, says, Good, and lies down again, and sleeps. I lie awake a while listening to the traffic, quite far away. I make myself think about other things, about Anna, as though I’m testing myself out. And I think right now I am where I want to be.

When it’s light I wake on my side near the edge of the bed, as Rachel has already taken over the middle, and the sheet. Maybe it’s good to get these things sorted out early.

I get up and shut the curtains so it’s dark again, and we sleep till nearly nine.

I don’t want to go to work today, she says, stretching. I want to do other things today.

So I call work and I tell them I had my stitches out last night, but there’s a problem with the wound, so I may have to stay in bed for the next three days. Rachel takes the baton and calls her work and tells them it’s to do with the head injury she suffered last week, and that it’s quite possible she’ll have to stay in bed for the next three days.

We make these calls in her lounge room, wrapped in the same sheet, and then we shuffle back to bed. I kiss her mouth and her breasts and things move quickly and her legs are round me and this is different to last night. And she’s showing me where she wants to be touched and biting her lip again and breathing hard.

And she says, Have you … have you got a condom?

Then I have a bad feeling. I know we need a condom. I would almost give my life for a condom right now, a plain, lubricated Checkmate. But all I’ve got, and I know it’s all I’ve got, is the rooster. This is an impossible bind. I can’t get dressed now and drive down to the chemist and back and hope the mood won’t be dead when I get here. The mood is now. The condom is the rooster.

Yeah, I say, and I reach for my wallet on the bedside table. I open the condom beneath the sheet, but there’s that rooster head, lubricated in my hand. This is no regular colourless, flavourless plain Checkmate. Tell me if you have a problem with this, I say to her, and I guide her hand to it.

No.

So, I don the rooster. And I don’t know what it does for her, but I’m already gone, completely lost in this as though there’s nothing else. She closes her eyes and bites her lip again, grips hold of my back and we move against each other. I can feel her thigh under my hand, the muscles of her thigh contracting and relaxing, contracting and relaxing. We both start to sweat and there is sweat between us, sweat from our warm skins wrapped in this sheet, sweat prickling in my hair. And our breathing gets rough and her mouth’s wide open now and I’ve got to hold back, I’ve got to hold back.

I do some counting, down from a thousand in threes and then thirteens, and this is just incredible. I square thirty-seven, and I can hear my own voice, just making senseless noise. I try to recall the names of all Australian batsmen who scored centuries on debut, in chronological order, and I’ve just reached Dirk Wellham when she says, Yes, yes.

Afterwards we lie wrapped in the sheet in our sweat for some time and our breathing slowly settles down. She smiles at me, laughs softly, flops her head flat back onto her pillow.

This is such a man thing, she says, but I think I want to have another sleep.

So sleep. You can owe me one.

And I unravel myself and go and attend to the rooster, now as limp as a chicken on a hook.

She is asleep when I get back, though I can’t have been gone two minutes, so I move in beside her and she puts her arm over me and I sleep too.

I wake at about eleven and she’s awake already and still there, which is a nice change. I want to tell her that usually when I have sex with someone they’ve got their head down a toilet screaming by now. But I don’t.

It would be okay if you bought more of those, she says. I’ve never used anything like that before.

No, neither have I. I’ve only ever bought them for people as a joke.

I want to do it again.

You mean now?

Yeah. Now. There’s a problem with now?

I only had one.

That’s very disappointing. I really want to do it again now. Hey, maybe the girls have some stashed away. Let’s check their rooms.

Is that okay?

Sure. They’d do the same. We share things. Girls do that. They’ll probably just be regular ones though, but that’s okay. Just stay here. She takes the sheet and goes. Nothing in Mel’s, she calls out, and she goes into Kathy’s. Hey.

What?

Wait and see.

And while she’s out there she puts on a CD, The Triffids, Calenture. She comes back in with a yellow rooster condom from Kathy’s bedside drawer and says, I’ve just put ‘Bury Me Deep in Love’ on repeat if that’s okay. This time it takes at least as long, but I just go with it, no Australian batsmen, minimal maths. And we lie there quite a while after, on our sides, looking at each other, and we don’t say much. I can’t say much. If I say anything I think I’ll say everything.

Eventually, when we’ve heard ‘Bury Me Deep in Love’ about a million times, I get up and I take the CD player off repeat and I fetch us glasses of water. On the way back I notice a guitar in Kathy’s room. On impulse I go in and play a few chords, since it’s been ages since I picked up a guitar.

Bring it in here, Rachel shouts. Play something.

The curtains are half open now and the room is almost glaringly bright. I give her the water and she tells me again to play something. So I sit in the old arm chair in the corner where the sun comes in and she drinks her water and I strum around a bit before working my way into a few things I think I’m borrowing from Bob Dylan, even though I’m making up the words.

She laughs and calls me a genius and insists on taking my photo and, since I’m stupidly happy, I let her. She says it’ll look good with her mug shots from the medical centre.

You know what I should do? I say. You know what I should do at the next office Christmas party? I should take the mike and do Dan Hill’s ‘Sometimes When we Touch’. What do you think of that song?

I deliberately pick it because it’s enduringly crappy and she, after a short pause, says, I think it’s one of the classic ballads, and after a slightly longer pause she tells me to get fucked.

I laugh and she says, You’re a really funny guy. A really funny guy.

We get dressed and we go out for burgers, and she says, Let’s go to your place. I want to help you paint.

There are two messages on the answering machine when we get there. My mother saying, Just calling to find out how the renovating’s going, and Hillary saying, I guess you’re not supposed to get up to answer the phone even. Well, I hope you’re okay. I was just calling to tell you, and for a moment I’m tense, suddenly thinking of things she might tell me, that since the initial injury happened at work, technically, this should all be covered by worker’s comp, so you’ll have to make sure you get the paperwork sorted out when you come back.

We walk through the rooms talking about various things that might be done to improve them and she sees the loofa’d wardrobe.

Did you do this?

Yeah, maybe.

Pretty controversial. Pretty courageous. And she’s nodding respectfully.

You like it?

She just smiles, the restrained smile of a small victory.

Are you bullshitting me?

And she looks at the wardrobe, looks back at me, says with a calm kind of cruelty, It’s a possibility.

So I feed Greg, and she looks at my mother’s paint scheme and she says, Is this heritage? Is this really heritage, this place? What colour was this house when it was built?

I go into my room and I get the silver cigarette case and I show her the letter from 1923. She reads it, a couple of times.

Then that’s what it should be, I think. If you want to know what I think.

My mother wants heritage.

Then we’ll talk to your mother, if you want. This house has heritage, small h heritage, its own thing. Maybe that’s what you have to look after. It wasn’t built in the 1880s. It was built in the 1920s, and it was built for a good reason. This is your grandparents’ house. It’s quite a letter, isn’t it? It must be an interesting story, the two of them and what they went through.

Yeah. I don’t know the story. I just found the letter a couple of weeks ago. I never knew any of it before then. My grandfather died when I was young and he never told me any of that. Neither did my grandmother and she only died a few months ago. I wish I’d found the letter before, or something else that might have made me ask something. It’s like a space I want to fill in. Maybe I should talk to my mother.

My grandfather, the Vilikovski grandfather, I don’t know much about him. He was a White Russian, an army colonel, Anatole Vilikovski. He came from an aristocratic background. He was posted to the Ukraine very late in the war and he disappeared. The story is that this was deliberate, part of a Stalinist purge. I don’t know the details. My grandmother had to get away, and she was pregnant with my father. So my father was born in Harbin, in China. They never heard anything about my grandfather again. We don’t even have a photo. My grandmother said there was a portrait painted of him in uniform, when he was quite young, but it’s hard to imagine that it survived. So, as far as I know she was the last person to die who knew his face. You’re lucky with this letter.

Yeah.

So maybe I won’t get all the answers, and maybe I won’t need them. And maybe there are some questions I should just stop asking now. Some spaces that can be left as spaces if I can’t fill them. Some things I don’t need to know any more. Other things that I might know instead, that I might discover slowly.

We came here to paint, and we don’t. I’m still stalled two and a half verandah railings into the renovation, but the story’s very different now.

I go into the kitchen to make coffee.

Rachel says, Hey, albums, vinyl. Can I put on some music?

She sorts through the pile and plays The Queen is Dead. Leaves her fingerprints on some other part of my past. Turns it from a story and back into an album again. And one day maybe I won’t recall who gave it to me, or if I do, I won’t give it a second thought.

And I want to go into the lounge room now with her coffee and tell her. Tell her now. You remind me of no-one.