Love and Other U-Turns Page 12

  When I transcribe the interview tape back in Melbourne, I sound like I’m drunk. Although outwardly awake, the picture of a bed is now swimming and spinning in front of my eyes with more and more intensity. Jim and I have only hoarse croaks now, instead of voices.

  ‘We’ll go to my parents’,’ he whispers, and I secretly hope they aren’t home so we can just disappear into a deep sleep without having to speak.

  When we get there, his mum invites me to a market, knowing I’m only in Sydney for one more day. I should be on my best behaviour considering this is my new love’s mother, but the proximity of a bed has slowed me down like an Energizer battery on its last legs.

  ‘I. Don’t. Think. I. Can.’ I say, gazing longingly at her clean hair, freshly made-up face and energy of a person who has slept a whole night through in a cosy bed.

  A few hours later, when I wake, I wander outside to find all my clothes hanging out on the line, including my underwear, carefully laundered and pegged. I have to borrow Jim’s shorts and t-shirt to leave the bedroom. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve just woken up, disorientated and relieved to find I’m in a safe, warm house and we don’t have to rush off anywhere, or because we’ve just travelled three thousand kilometres together and there’s a shower at the end of the tunnel, or because an hour later my dry clothes are folded neatly on the end of a spare bed with a frangipani garnish, but I burst into tears.

  ‘Oh! Poor Lou!’ says his mum, when Jim shows both his parents on the map all the places we’ve been in so many days. She then dishes us up the most delicious plate of osso bucco I’ve ever eaten in my life.

  It’s all a prelude to the theme of our relationship: pushing the limits of everything, shocking people at the same time that we bring out their best and worst sides, unfulfilled dreams, longings past, surprising love. And me, ignoring the clues in my body that I’m going too far for fear that I’ll miss out on the adventure. Or – worse – pass up the most wondrous feeling of love I’ve ever been given. We suck out the days and spit the pips back into each other’s mouths – the marrow, the bone, all of it – swallowed whole.

  I’ve never met someone else so eager to make the most of their one, miraculous crack at life, don’t wait, don’t hurry, but do it. Be it. Now. Take the risks, beg for everything, all at once, but never stop being grateful. Don’t give up, just be. Love. Now.

  It’s quite incredible how quickly you can recover from things, when at the height of your exhaustion you feel like your body is about to shut down for good. A bit of domestic softness soothes the ragged edges of our road-weary bodies and soon we are as freshly laundered as our clothes after our sleeping binge. I’ve slept, I’ve eaten, and I’ve showered. Someone has even washed the coffee stain from my pants, which now smell pleasantly like eucalyptus laundry liquid. Bellies full of home-cooked dinner complete the picture. We’re back.

  Jim has one more gig tonight, and because I drive back to Melbourne tomorrow, I want to go with him. We hop back into the car for the one-hour drive to Windsor, a place I’ve never heard of, but is apparently quite rough, for him to compere a two-hour Big Night Out show after an hour of jelly wrestling.

  ‘You can stay here, Lou,’ says his mum, after I get dressed and ready.

  ‘Thank you.’ But I have to go, I think. Once you’ve seen how far you can push your body, comfort just seems … lazy.

  ‘It can get a bit rough in there, Lou,’ Jim tells me. ‘You might want to just read in the car, if it gets a bit much.’

  We’ve pulled up at the gravel parking lot out the back of the barn-like Jolly Frog. I’m planning on slipping out and going for a walk around the town. I’d hoped there might be a library, my favourite refuge in cities when I’m waiting for something or just passing time. But being past seven on a Thursday night, I’ll be lucky to find anything that’s not selling alcohol, video rentals or takeaway food. This isn’t, technically, a city. It’s more a cross between an outer suburb and a country town.

  Out of curiosity, I stroll into the pub a little while after Jim. Since it’s payday, there’s a bustle of guys rocking in after loudly parking their hotted-up utes. Still, if the last two weeks have taught me anything, it’s that you should leave your preconceptions at the door. Two men nursing beers gaze up at me as I walk in and, instead of being aggressive, actually look quite shy. Embarrassed, even. They take big gulps of their beer as I pass to sit down on a stool in the corner, ordering a diet coke. Nobody wants to harm me, in fact, they’re all quite happy – they have someone to laugh at, jelly wrestlers to look at, beer to drink and it’s payday. Two young-looking guys pull up stools next to me and introduce themselves, laughing at Jim’s current gag about dating and then one of them launching into a monologue about the difficulty of ‘finding any decent girls …’

  ‘I try the internet you know, but they all lie. How do you know how old they really are?’

  His friend looks at me, as if to find an answer, too. ‘You look like a nice girl …’

  I want to be an objective listener, and I’ve always envied the way a man can go into a pub and have a quiet beer and conversation with another man without any sexual dynamics coming into it. But I can’t help but think – if a man watches nothing but jelly wrestlers and scouts internet chat sites, what sort of woman is he going to find? I tell him I’m with Jim, so that at least he won’t take it personally that I’m not responding to him sexually, but I find myself annoyed that I have to do this. There’s no way I could nomad around alone, like Jim has been. In a way, my gender keeps me from real Australian freedom, because so much of the outback, waiting to be explored, is a frontier of masculine, macho energy.

  The guy, inching closer to me, with his arms up across his chest, is talking from a place of ego now, comparing himself to Jim, in some tribal communication style reminiscent of the Dark Ages. ‘I did a bit of stand-up comedy once … hey, you got any girlfriends?’

  I slip away to go for a walk to find a café, somewhere to read the paper in peace, get away from the neediness and hunger in this church of the twenty-first century for lonely men. I stroll up and down the main road, and shift my gaze to the window of Gloria Jeans coffee, where all the ‘decent females’ missing from the Jolly Frog are flocking and drooling over mud cake and cinnamon-spiced hot chocolates. Sigh. If only Mr Chat Site could tear himself away from the jelly wrestlers and the pub, he might find someone nice to change his mind.

  Back at the Jolly Frog, Jim has finished but a cluster of drunken die-hard fans want to keep him talking after the gig. We squeeze a guy and his stubby of VB into the back of the Mazda to give him a lift home, which he says is just up the road. After we drop him at the end of a twenty-kilometre dirt road past paddocks, he tells Jim that he usually walks it ‘to sober up’. What does it matter to us? We treat kilometres like kisses – the more we log the richer we feel. Our love of the road is surreal, delirious. I start to fantasise about how many roads my body will have crossed before I die – I hope it’s a lot. In and out of sleep, while Jim drives through the black night, I worry about all those people who live, and die, without travelling long distances. I see the road – and the car, and Jim driving it – as a glorious teacher, come to open my mind and open my eyes and show me things about myself and the world no book could ever teach, no photo could ever evoke. This feeling about the road is, perhaps, why despite only just rocking back into Sydney that morning, we go and collect my car, Jim following me nine hundred kilometres back to Melbourne down the Hume in the dead of night before collapsing into my own bed.

  9

  Outworn objects

  ‘Babe? These clothes are still wet?!’

  ‘I know. I was missing you.’

  ARRIVING BACK AT MY FITZROY apartment, with Jim in tow – is like walking in on someone else’s movie set. There’s evidence that I live here: seventeen messages on my answering machine, mail in the letterbox addressed to me. Books on my table, photos of my family. But the only palpable proof of the change two weeks can have
on anything is the fruit I forgot to clean from my juicer. Dried pulp from apples I minced a fortnight ago has gone brown and is emitting a smell like earth mulch on an otherwise unmoving bench.

  I’ve always loved taking the rubbish out. Like new beginnings or clean slates, it’s just a strange thing that gives me joy. I clean out the manky pulp from the top of my juice machine and carry a plastic bag filled with other remnants of a time before a time and feel I am cleaning out someone else’s kitchen. Who am I? I feel like all we’ve discovered and all the epiphanies I’ve had in the last fortnight have made everything I ever owned redundant. Too comfortable. Too much. Too easy.

  Half-sleepwalking, we lug Jim’s sparse belongings up the stairs, take a shower, then collapse into bed. And that’s that. He’s moved in. Just a few weeks after we met.

  Reconnecting with friends and family means I have to put a name on this – situation.

  ‘Uh, I’ve got Jim here. Boyfriend? … Yeah. I mean, I guess …’

  He’s beside me, always. We sleep, eat, walk, write, everything within an inch of each other. He comes home from doing our laundry with a pile of wet clothes.

  ‘Babe? These clothes are still wet?!’

  ‘I know …’ he chuckles nervously, embarrassed. ‘I was missing you.’

  To the outside world, it looks like I’ve moved in with a boyfriend. And I guess I have. It’s just not what we’re about. I feel uncomfortable even calling him that. The name implies something you ‘get’, someone who has to ‘do’ certain things. A material object. He’s more my soul mate – come to teach me lessons, crack open my perception of love and stretch my boundaries. I’m not expecting this to be easy, and I don’t want it to be, as it hasn’t so far.

  ‘I’m having a dinner party – you and Jim are invited.’ I feel uneasy, asking him along to parties and dinner invites. ‘You don’t have to come … but you’ll like Karina and Tom,’ I tell him. I’m scared it will send him packing. But deep down, perhaps it’s because that sort of stuff sends me insane with boredom.

  I reach a compromise, inviting friends to his Melbourne gigs, Sally and some other friends, shocked and curious that I am so seriously involved with someone so soon, but understanding completely the moment they meet him.

  ‘He’s just as weird as you, Lou,’ says Sally one night, in a nice way, after we’ve driven to watch the tennis at her place and I’ve found them in a deep discussion about the ethics of in-vitro fertilisation, in the kitchen.

  ‘It’s funny that he swears so much on stage,’ says Paige, another friend. ‘You’re the most anti-swearing girl I know!’

  Just as I did in Sydney, he gets a fast-forward tour of my entire social and family network. He listens to everyone, nods at the right times and, to my astonishment, has absolutely no critics amongst everyone I know. Except Sally.

  ‘He’s going to take you away from us. I know it.’

  He already has.

  Still, I feel like I’m caging a wild animal. Seeing how lightly he travels has made me look at all my trappings as excessive, indulgent. He’s done numerous laps of our country in its entirety and what have I been doing? I have a stack of books and clothes. Although he goes on the prowl in the Melbourne comedy rooms on the hunt for gigs most nights, his reputation precedes him. He gets one here and there, but every Thursday he drives back to Windsor in New South Wales for his Jolly Frog show, and I miss him the entire time. His phone beeps constantly, with messages from publicans littered across the outback map.

  ‘JIMBO! MAAAAATE! WHEN ARE YA COMIN’ BACK?’

  ‘Uh …’ he laughs, looks at me, beside him in the bed. ‘I’ve met someone! I’m with her – Lou – in Melbourne!’

  ‘Fuckin’ WHAT?’

  It’s my fault they’re missing out on laughter. The missus has trapped ’im.

  Meanwhile, I’m getting a lot of work. Just before I met Jim, I’d sent out a stack of thick Manila envelopes to every magazine and supplement I wanted to write for. I typed up story pitches, column ideas, colour-copied my updated folio, and wrote each editor a personal cover letter. It cost a fortune, but now my investment seems to be paying delayed dividends.

  In the next month I write three e-newsletters for a health magazine, three magazine feature articles and four columns. And the best bit is, in between it all I’m free to head up the Hume whenever Jim gets a gig. In six weeks we do the Sydney round trip seven times and Canberra twice. But through it all, I have this dilemma. The only time he gets a really free look in his eye is when he’s talking to his random mates from the outback. And when he talks about gigs he’s done in Western Australia, his eyes shine. I think: Why have I been melded with a free spirit if I’m not supposed to travel, too?

  One night, he gets a small emcee spot at a comedy room in the city. We’ve been walking in there every Tuesday. It’s such an old-fashioned game. If you want a gig you need two already established comedians to vouch for you. After wearing down the two comedians who seemed to hold fort at this room and promising to ‘keep it tame’, he lands the spot.

  I watch him from the bar, looking slightly cagey, casting edgy glances at the manager, who is standing in the shadows making hand movements, signalling to tone it down.

  The headliner, a neurotic veteran with that bitter edge of someone still living on borrowed money and a broken thread of hope twenty years later, aggressively sculls three glasses of neat scotch beside me, not knowing I’m with Jim. I’ve seen his act before. His style is like a nutty professor on heroin, and I know for a fact the latter part is true in his real life too. Before going on stage, he pesters the manager for an ‘advance’, and shuffles out the back for a few minutes, before coming back to the bar rubbing his nose and teeth and downing his fourth pre-set scotch.

  Despite the constraints, Jim had managed to suss out the vibe of the crowd, a bunch of English backpackers who wouldn’t have got any cross-cultural references except those made to Neighbours or Vegemite vs Promite spread. They had no idea who the headliner was, and they didn’t care. They just wanted to laugh.

  He decides to pull out a gag about the comedy industry. ‘I said to my agent, I’m not like your average comedian I don’t smoke or drink, I don’t do drugs, I don’t have a gambling addiction. But if you get me some gigs so I can afford to have these problems, I’ll sign now …’

  The crowd laughs. Headliner, beside me, swears loudly. ‘Oh for fuck’s sake why do I have to get HIM before ME!’

  The manager is tapping his watch indicating time’s up, so Jim skates along to introducing the headliner. Timing is everything in the comedy rooms. Go over by five minutes and you’ll have no friends.

  ‘Ladies and gents get ready to be taken to Planet Ramble – this next comedian is a madman with method!’

  Headliner swears again and shakes his head at the manager, like, I loathe this guy, give him another spot and I’m not coming back, only to nod in friendly acknowledgement to Jim as he walks off stage. My stomach lurches. I’ve never seen Jim treat anybody like that.

  We stay for the headline act and as we walk home, I weigh up whether or not to tell Jim what went down. He already knows.

  ‘Lou, this is why I stopped doing comedy in Melbourne years ago. You just can’t do what you want. If you go too hard as an emcee you piss off the headliner. It’s all about egos. That’s why I like going off on my own.’

  When we get home we lie in bed, talking intermittently until daybreak.

  ‘This is the longest I’ve stayed in one spot in a long time,’ he says after we’ve been lying silently, looking out the window to the stars, for an hour. ‘I’m scared I’ll lose my edge.’

  He’s referring to the pages of road stories gathered over years of touring. Stories and anecdotes he uses to punctuate his sets on stage. Part of who he is. The free-spirited Aussie swagman. You don’t put a swagman in a North Fitzroy flat and make him go to dinner parties.

  I wake with a headache, like I’m putting off a decision. My phone rings. It’s an editor fr
om yet another magazine, signifying a breakthrough. She wants one of my feature proposals.

  ‘Yes, Louisa, I want you to interview a man called Shanaka. He doesn’t own anything and he runs a very successful business. It’s called Lentil as Anything.’

  I walk to Lentil as Anything one rainy autumn day. I left Jim snoozing in our bed, loading up on sleep for his weekly 1800-kilometre round trip to his Windsor gig tomorrow. I’d decided on style over comfort, layering two cotton blue tops over each other with some thin pants and my high-heeled boots. Funny how you slip into old patterns. I still feel the need to impress that I’m a journalist who has it together. To straighten my hair. To look good, lest I be found out.

  I arrive at the café to meet Shanaka, who is in his mid-forties but looks like he’s in his late twenties. Intelligent, sensitive and kind, he intermittently jumps up during our interview to help serve coffees when the restaurant gets busy. The café–restaurant is a migrant-assistance program, serving healthy vegan food with live African music most nights. There are no set prices – you ‘pay as you feel’.

  ‘You don’t wear enough clothes, Louisa,’ is the first thing he says, shaking my hand as I sniffle and shiver after my rainy hike.

  I look at him and realise that he would always know if it’s about to rain. He pays attention to his surroundings.

  ‘So … I wanted to know about you living in a tent … ?’

  He knows why I’m here. This is part of the luxury of journalism. You can ask about anything. You may not always be answered, but generally, if someone has agreed to be interviewed, they are willing to give you some answers.

  ‘Yes, it’s not for everybody. I used to have a house, and worked in the conventional legal system. I just felt very … separate from society. In the house, in the car, in this job. And I had some ideas for a program which would help migrants.’