Speaking the same

It is summer in Canberra and I have not seen you in six years. The last time we were together, it was winter, and I woke up and caught a train to the airport, leaving you in my parents’ friends’ house, with spaghetti splattered on the lounge-room ceiling. I had wanted to drink quietly and talk, but you had invited some Africans around we had met in a taxi. More had showed up and I became upset. Eventually they left, after I had tried to feed them. In my drunkenness I had forgotten the water in D.C. is full of iron from the decaying pipes and chloramine. I am not sure whether they threw the mince on the ceiling in fete or scorn, but I saw it on the way out in the morning, and still have not explained it the owners.

Six years later you arrive. I am with a different woman now. The one I was with before, when you were around, left me for a man who is interested in indie-rock and says things like “Education is the panacea of the masses”. She is happier now though, and has larger speakers and a television, which must be good for her. That woman taught me the full force of jealousy. With you I had been jealous, in that it was disappointing when you went with another. This had been my understanding of jealousy and at that time I had never understood how Dido could have throttled Aeneas to death over a matter so slight. Then, it was easy to be collected, to keep things in perspective, in matters as slight as these. She corrected this experience.

One night we were screaming at each other in the alley ways of Melbourne. She knew this would get to me. My parents are atheists but have Protestant roots—roots that decree that a father does not tell his children they are loved—so there is nothing worse than the ordeal of a public display. She screamed at me in the dull autumn evening light as men and women in charcoal gray suits walked around us, looking away. I grabbed her pony tail and pushed her against a door and kissed her. She bit my lip and it bled, but she kissed me back and grabbed me closer. “Isn’t it better to get it out?”, she had asked. This is how stones are worn away by water.

You tell me about a plethora of names, “Did you know her?”, and writing movies in New York, and it is too intricate for me to follow. While you speak I remember how little I could ever follow of your conversation. We are sitting outside, my lover is asleep, and the dry heat cloaks us in the dark. I don’t smoke but I take another cigarette. You are amazed by the stars, which really are not much here. You need to go west, away from the city lights. I finish off another glass of wine, without discernment, even though it is good and I have saved it for years.

We talk about your travel plans and your project. You really don’t have any, which makes the conversation difficult, and increases the temptation to leave my job, my dogs, my wife to be. I tell you how it is summer and so you cannot cross the top end; you could be stuck between rivers for weeks until the water runs back to the sea. I tell you to cross the Nullarbor, though it is better going the other way, where at dawn after a night driving you can see the sun rise over the sea and across the desert.

We are surrounded by concrete and fibro cottages, built in the 1950s and early 1960s, which, when they were first built, had identical locks fitted to their backdoors. Each morning the workers drive towards the lake, and then sit and write their briefings for the minister. The last bottle is empty. You admit you are drunk and tell me that we still speak the same as before and we go back inside.

I leave you on the weathered chesterfield and wake up my lover. Then you are in our room and I find myself wondering whether you are surprised at how she kisses. We take your jeans off and I sit back and, seeing you in her arms, I think how beautiful it is in the darkness. I kiss you and smile. You gave up men some time ago and I am contented sharing her with you. Then the madness comes out in you. It is new to me, and it makes her scared. I walk you to your room and stand there for a moment, naked, without lust, alone.

I walk back to my room and close the door. I hold my girl. It is dawn and we will ride to work in a few hours, taking our bikes down a path that criss-crosses an open air drain, engineered to flow into Lake Burley Griffin.