Love and Other U-Turns Read online

  I type up some questions excruciatingly slowly, racking my brain for the habits I took so long to learn. How did you meet? What attracted you to each other? What challenges have you overcome together and how? What have you learned from each other?

  I save them in a Word document and email them across to the lady, feeling fraudulent and cheeky, emailing work after no shower, from an internet café in Byron Bay. Thankfully, she can’t see me. The PR lady emails me straight back with a time and an address in Sydney for the following week. I wonder idly where else I’ll have been, by then? And hope against hope that I’ll have at least had a shower.

  To say I’ve forgotten who I am would be an understatement. Reading my own emails, sent just a few weeks earlier, is like reading someone else’s diary. I find an email from an editor, who is checking a small fact on a story I had written months ago. It takes me ten whole minutes to construct a two-sentence reply. I’ve forgotten how to write.

  People talk of love being like a spell, but never have I felt it like this. Each day I’m doing things I never dreamed I would, meeting people in situations so far out of my comfort zone that it’s as if it’s not even me anymore. But all the while, I’m with this man who drives me wild. But it’s not lust. It’s not even deep friendship. It’s pure, blinding, all-encompassing, sickening, I-will-do-anything-for-you – including drive around Australia in the same outfit for two weeks – love. Why? I keep asking myself. I feel like he’s the best part of myself, or a constant reminder of who I am, when I don’t worry about what other people think, or what other people say. He’s me, without the ego.

  After I’ve been on the computer for half an hour, he comes in to check on me. It’s the longest we’ve been physically apart since the tennis match.

  One of the first freelance columns I was given was interviewing couples each Sunday for a newspaper liftout. It was called, ‘For Better, For Worse’. I filed one interview a month, for two years, and time and again, probing my way through an hour of what felt like psychotherapy, I’d discover that when they met, he couldn’t hug her for the first six months, as she was recovering from a car accident. Or that just after an intense two-week courting, the man had to go and live in Poland for two years, before they ever saw each other again. It could be anything – one ate meat, the other was a strict vegan. They meditated for three hours each day together because one was recovering from cancer. They both wanted a huge family, but she was infertile so they adopted.

  Every few weeks I would travel to a different house and meet with these people in their own personal space, taping every word and asking questions which, later on, when I was replaying the tape to transcribe it in my little flat, sometimes made me cringe with the intimacy. But what surprised me most of all was that the couples were never what you would expect. The attraction that really lasted didn’t seem to follow any of the expected rules – i.e. look like this or go to the right parties – and someone will love you. When I did probe to find a ‘reason’ for why they withstood the challenges, why they thought it was ‘worth it’, they could only ever come up with ‘We just had to’. As if, when you know you are meant to take a particular journey with someone, it’s harder not to go. Even if, by going, it throws life – as you know it – apart.

  But one of the strangest things about life is that everything always seems to be a preparation for the next step. With Jim, I felt that what used to be important to me now came second to that feeling that I had to hurry up and become who I was meant to be, and he was the key. And like the numerous love stories I’d been writing for two years, I had no choice. I just had to go along for the ride.

  As we drive on, the scent of space and gums is merging with Jim, so that I will forever associate him with the Australian landscape. We nap in his swag by the side of the road in the sunlight, to the sounds of native birds, our bodies crunching on leaves, bull-ants bypassing our peaceful heads resting on the ground. Cocooned by ancient gums in a self-sufficient, natural world of insects and animals, the silence breathes new life into our tired veins. The sun warms our skin and sends us into a drugged sleep. I feel like an explorer, seeing my own country for the first time. Drifting in and out of consciousness, I think of the people I know back in Melbourne, trapped in offices, listening to man-made sounds. I feel so blessed.

  Each time we wake, we check to see if the love bubble has popped when we look at each other. ‘Yep, still there,’ Jim says, as I burrow into his whiskers in the middle of a field, thinking his eyes see the world like the best part of me does. He smells like Home.

  Work concerns begin to drift in and out of my thoughts, as I lie on his swag on a patch of ground somewhere up the coast. On the surface, we lead completely different lives, with a completely different objective. His entire act is centred on being the consummate single ocker Australian bloke, and my articles are all targeted to preoccupied urban women in the capital cities. Do we really have to choose between love and work?

  In Casino, a beef grazing town two hundred kilometres south of Brisbane, Jim veers towards a pub to ask for a gig. I think I’d better leave him to it, so I go for a walk, looking in dusty shop windows and exploring yet another town not listed in your average Australian travel magazine. I call Sally, back in Melbourne, and tell her where I am. I call my sister, I message my other girlfriends. It’s hard to remember that I have another aspect of my life.

  ‘You’re going to run away with him, aren’t you Lou?’ says Sally, catching me by surprise.

  ‘Um, no, I’ll be back in Melbourne next week!’ I say, nervously. I feel her stiffen, on the other end of the line. Why does going in one direction have to mean leaving the other?

  A little boy with a miniature mullet appears as I’m turning the corner to return to Jim crossing the road. He’s on a bike, doing wheelies, aged around six or seven. He follows Jim like he’s the pied piper, on the phone to a friend, making funny faces to the boy as he talks, snapping his phone shut. Jim can’t see me yet. He has his back to me to face the little kid.

  ‘What are you doing?’ the kid says, like a teenager hanging out with the cool gang on the street.

  ‘My name’s Jimbo. What’s yours?’

  ‘Josh.’ He’s pulling his bike up to show off, still acting tough.

  ‘How old are you Josh?’

  ‘Six!’

  ‘How old are you gunna be when you grow up, Josh?’

  Josh’s face is perplexed, then he lets out a tough little laugh, crossing his little muscly arms across his chest as he inches further towards Jim.

  ‘Here, I’ll show you a trick, Josh.’ Jim asks him for his bike, and places it on one wheel, on his chin. A woman strolls by, shopping bags in hand, not even casting a sideways look.

  Josh is entranced.

  ‘Where do you live?’ says Josh.

  ‘In my car!’ Jim replies.

  ‘My house is up the street, wanna see?’

  Jim turns around to see me, laughing. ‘Do you wanna go to Josh’s house, Lou?!’ he’s joking.

  It’s a silent town, and Josh has never even been as far as Brisbane. This must be as exciting as it gets.

  ‘Nah, Josh, we’re looking for the golf club. We want to go for a run.’

  ‘I’ll show ya! Follow me!’

  We hop back in the Mazda, following Josh on his yellow BMX, going at about one kilometre an hour. Every few moments he turns to check we are still there. Like a police escort, he takes his role seriously, except that we have to go slower than his tiny BMX, to let him take the lead. I pray no cars pass us and ask us why we are following a little boy on a bike. Eventually, the slow drive comes to an end at the golf club.

  He hops off his bike. ‘Did you see my house? I took youse the long way so you could see my house.’

  Jim makes him a bike out of purple balloons, and says we have to go.

  ‘Have ya got a plastic bag I can put it in?’ says Josh, like he gets purple balloon bikes all the time. I find one in the car and he carefully puts it over his front
handlebars.

  ‘See ya!’

  8

  Sugarcane moon

  ‘Jim, did Sammy mention graves under the floor?’

  ‘They’re just resting.’

  I TELL JIM ABOUT MY interview.

  ‘No worries, Lou, just got a gig in Gympie then we can drive to your interview!’

  Gympie, a town almost two hundred kilometres north of Brisbane, is at least two thousand kilometres from my interview destination. It doesn’t seem to bother Jim, so I won’t let it bother me. Besides, we’re in Queensland, in May! My mum will be pulling on a second pair of socks right about now, and I’m passing giant pineapples and sugarcane fields, swaying in the angelic Queensland light.

  Adjusting to my wacky news on the phone the day before, Mum had helpfully suggested I buy some tropical fruit since I was up north. We stop by a roadside barn in her honour and stock up on peaches, mangoes and bananas. Jim buys two of everything, and insists on peeling my banana for me.

  Romance.

  There are certain parts of Australia where it’s dangerous to have a particular view on racial issues, and I have a feeling this is one of them. Gympie was Queensland’s first gold-rush town credited with ‘saving’ the state from bankruptcy. Although the word Gympie is from a stinging tree Aboriginal people found in the area, the locals have eradicated all other ties to its original inhabitants. Later, when Jim and I pop into an RSL to share the roast of the day with fifty other white-haired locals, a friendly clerk on the front desk mentions something about ‘Abos’ while talking with us. If I show my horror at the choice of words, I will cut down most exchanges before they’ve even started. I’m learning to just listen and learn.

  We pull up outside the pub I assume Jim is due to gig in, and I stare in gratitude at the gold-tinged Queensland sky, so white and far from the Gothic grey of Melbourne, fast becoming like a dream of a place I once visited. After speaking with the publicans, Jim takes his speakers upstairs and I follow him through the smoky pub, weaving between overweight pensioners in print-dresses with one hand on the pokie slot button and the other on a stale beer.

  I wonder what tonight’s digs will be like? Not having to navigate the interpersonal complications of visiting strangers in their homes simplifies things. Even if it is – err – another Hotel California.

  I follow Jim up steep creaky back steps covered thickly with pigeon poo, almost arriving on the roof of the steep Queenslander. The publican had muttered something about not seeing it for a while – ‘Staff just use it for parties love, that okay?’ – so I brace myself, expecting the worst, clinging to Jim for safety as the strange smell of stale cigarette smoke leaks out of the dark door.

  ‘Hello … ?’

  He motions to me to stay back while he assesses the scene, finding a light, waving me into the room. It’s pitch black but for a dusty shaft of light from a crack in the open door, where it looks like it’s been kicked. A bathroom which appears to have not been used in half a century lies to the side of a huge living room covered in filthy carpet, a couple of worn chairs and some old copies of Ralph, beside that eternal Australian pub room decorating trademark: empty cans of Woodstock bourbon and cola.

  It smells like a farmyard but that’s probably just the hundreds of pigeons congregating outside on the balcony that have been performing their ablutions here for a couple of centuries. The windows are boarded up so when the door slams behind us we can’t find the light switch, and I pathetically yelp and cling to Jim while he feels his way around in the dark. When the light comes on we hunt for a bed, or even a mattress of some sort. Nope. Looks like we’ll be sleeping on the (filthy) floor. An overflowing ashtray sits on a sink and a wardrobe filled with odds and ends is in the bathroom. Yes. The bathroom.

  Jim never goes anywhere without his swag, and luckily, I think that a night spent on the floor is good for your back. It’s also a balmy night, so we don’t need to worry about blankets. Nevertheless, I cross my fingers that cockroaches and rats haven’t made any homes nearby and try not to breathe in the dirt too deeply through my nasal passages. Hey, at least we have the place to ourselves, right?

  With the feeling that it’s only been used as a party zone by young folks, my ghost-radar isn’t picking up on any spirits. Still, I’m not staying here on my own. We pull off a couple of cushions from the couch and lie on the floor. We need some sleep. I shut my eyes and visualise my bed back in Melbourne. I’ve left my cosy apartment to sleep on the floor of a filthy pub room in Gympie.

  ‘It’s all part of the adventure!’ Jim says, reading my thoughts.

  I love the anonymity of entering a new town, like an invisible observer, so safe and free to absorb the vibe but not be a part of it. Gympie feels, like Grafton did, that it’s a shadow of a once-gloried place, and to learn that it was the home of a gold rush explains the feeling.

  I withdraw some money from an ATM on the main street, randomly requesting a statement of my last transactions:

  3 May 2.04 pm Withdrawal Liberty Petrol Newcastle $27.85

  4 May 9.19 pm Withdrawal BP Service Woodenbong $7.60

  5 May 1.15 am Eftpos Transaction New York Pizzas, Brisbane $9.90

  It occurs to me that I look like a criminal on the run.

  After Jim has done the necessary preliminary work at the pub, we head across the road to the RSL for a buffet roast. After signing in and talking to the racist but friendly man at the counter, we dine next to a sea of semi-rinses and well-cultivated beer bellies, white socks pulled up to the knees, eating peas soaked in gravy with mashed potato. Jim eats quickly, in gulps, and starts his process of preparing for the gig ahead. I’m still not used to how spaced out he gets, asking me the same question three times and looking distracted, then forgetting where his things are.

  ‘You’re holding your keys, babe.’

  ‘Right.’

  I race back inside the RSL after he leaves his wallet on the table.

  Back at the pub, I sit out on the verandah while Jim sets his speakers up and starts talking to – nobody. There is not a single customer in the room, except me, and the bartender who had gone out the back to finish a cigarette. But Jim has promised to do a two-hour show, so on he goes. He is literally performing to an empty chair.

  ‘How you going? Tired of being pushed around and sat on?’ he says to the chair.

  I sit at the bar drinking diet coke, enjoying the breeze coming in from the balcony and wondering how Jim can be so cheery and relaxed when there are only two people listening. A few more people start to slowly filter in. For the next hour or so, he does the full show to a room of about six, and just when his voice starts to croak and I think he’s losing his spark, about fifty people walk in off the street.

  It’s like watching the sun come up. Jim springs to life, jumping into the crowd and bantering with the newcomers, figuring out who is who. Within a few minutes the taken-aback crowd is roaring with laughter, furrowing their brows in confusion and wondering who is this strange man standing in the middle of the room being so crude but doing it so playfully.

  I finally understand why he is always chasing gigs in every backwater town and pub across the country. These people, who would otherwise have spent the night drinking away their wages, are guffawing and crying, acting silly and generally behaving like kids let out of school. As rough as they appear on the surface, there is a real purity and innocence to their wanting to be included in the jokes. When he says something ludicrously coarse, they roar some more before shaking their heads, when their minds have caught up.

  By the end of the night they are behaving like a room full of his friends. Ocker men with shaved heads pass him beers and ask if he needs somewhere to sleep for the night. I sit back, trying to remain anonymous, afraid that I’ll give away the act, place something between him and them.

  One man, who I half assume is a sexist redneck, is drinking Bundy, heckling Jim, and laughing particularly loudly at the vulgar jokes. He walks to my chair at the bar and starts chatting to me as
he waits for his drinks, happy to be out on a Saturday night, eager to make the most of it.

  I learn he works in the sugar fields.

  ‘It’d be good for you, love. I don’t know if you work in an office or what but the women, they need a bit of sun – you know, to regulate their cycles. You sleep better, too.’

  He then starts telling me how the sun and being outdoors is good for mood regulation during the time of the full moon, ‘especially for sheilas. Dunno why, but it’s better for them.’

  I’m in a pub in Queensland filled with drunken men, and one of them has chosen to talk to me about the effect of the sun and the moon on our circadian rhythms.

  ‘What do you do with yourself, anyways?’ he asks me, sweetly.

  ‘I … ah … write?’ I offer.

  ‘You do what you love, that’s the important thing,’ he says, wisely.

  Another man sidles up to me, using pub-room telepathy to gauge the relationship context. He stifles a beer-scented burp on my shoulder, then says quietly, ‘You and the funny man need a place to stay, I got a big house up the road. Plenty of room. Number 24. Just knock. Any time.’

  Like Macksville, I’m not anonymous here. The dynamic is quickly assessed in a pub – who is single, who is with whom, who has blown in from out of town, who to trust. It’s so simple, this life – I now begin to see how Jim has truly couch-surfed around the country. Australians are just so damn laid-back and generous.

  We fall asleep later, giggling on the floor in the farmyard room. I burrow closer to Jim to block out the smell of dust and dirt, dreaming again of pineapples and sun reflecting off bitumen.

  In the morning we hit the road at pace, flapping the newspaper in the passenger seat, delirious with distances. On we drive in the Queensland sun to the daggy tunes of Hall and Oates, Eagles, Fleetwood Mac and eighties pop classics. No melancholy love ballads here. Just life. Sun. Freedom.

  It’s beginning to feel normal to me, not knowing where I’m sleeping each night. I’ve fallen into Jim’s rhythm, and he mine. Our days don’t follow any pattern. We don’t even eat according to mealtimes. The car is our home, our refuge, where we debrief from the space we’ve just left, sharing encounters the other may not have noticed, and prepare for the town we’re about to enter. I don’t want the adventure to ever end.