Love and Other U-Turns Read online

  After breathing a sigh of relief that the Pisces in the group get to sit up the back, I notice the guy who’d talked to the homeless man in the chair I want to sit in. ‘What are you?’ I ask.

  ‘Um, Poisces,’ he drawls in a lazy Aussie twang so strong it’s like he’s just crawled in from the bush. I take the seat beside him, amused by the fact that this rogue country drifter is sitting on his own at an astrology night.

  The night is like an Oprah-style astro confessional, and Mystic goes through all the stars in a sort of Q and A, revealing quirky characteristics from an online poll of forty thousand readers. Aside from having trouble hearing her, I’m glad I’m up the back, where I can survey the sorts of people who would come to such a wacky night.

  ‘Virgos email me a lot about their stick collections,’ she says, and three different Virgos start up about their penchant for sticks. One has obsessively sharpened pencils. The other – branches from a tree. All, sticks. Odd.

  Pisces guy lazily turns to acknowledge me when I’ve settled in, and his blue-eyed face is so boltingly familiar that I accidentally stare too long, then hope he doesn’t think I’m sitting here to pick him up.

  Piscean men are strange, anyway. I don’t care what he thinks of me. I’m going to say whatever I want just so he knows for SURE I’m not trying to pick him up. Hey, he’s at an astrology night, too! He must be weird.

  One thing plays on my mind, while I listen to Mystic quiz the Scorpios on their propensity to both stalk ex-lovers and be stalked themselves, and work in professions which involve death or sex. How do I know him?

  ‘My name’s Jim. I’m a friend of Mystic’s.’ Hobo-spunk interrupts my thoughts, like he heard me asking. He shakes my hand, which is odd, as his knee has been resting on mine since I sat down. I don’t think he’s noticed.

  Jim. James. Actor?

  ‘What star sign is most likely to leave parties without saying goodbye?’ Mystic asks, and I suddenly remember to be as unappealing and weird as possible, so Mr Good-looking Pisces doesn’t think I’m trying to attract him. Even though maybe I am. But I can’t. So I won’t.

  ‘God, I always do that!’ I say, remembering how much it peeves all my friends. He cocks his ear to hear me better, nodding.

  ‘Yeah, me too,’ he says quietly, then yells, so Mystic can hear, ‘It just cuts out all that unnecessary chitchat! “Stayyyy, have another drink,”’ he mimics, ‘Bo-ring!’

  Then she asks, ‘What star sign was voted worst in a crisis situation?’

  Someone yells, ‘Pisces!’

  Jim looks at me and chuckles, shaking his head, like they just don’t understand us.

  ‘That’s because it’s never a crisis,’ he says under his breath, so only I can hear.

  I look at him, ‘I know,’ I say, ‘drama queens are so annoying!’, and he begins to tell me about a friend who announced he’s getting a divorce.

  ‘I mean, they weren’t happy so I figure he should celebrate the divorce. I’m not going to say poor thing. I mean, that’s not really a crisis, is it? Most people see the tiniest things as a crisis.’

  Suddenly I remember why I know his face.

  Months ago, on Mystic’s blog, she’d written about a resolutely single ‘Piscean Comedian’ who drifted around Australia living out of his car doing rude comedy in out-of-the-way bars. She’d used him as an example of how unpredictable and contrary Pisceans can be. A well-educated Sydneysider, from some kind of aristocratic heritage with a degree in commerce, ‘he now pretends he’s the son of an itinerant shearer if anyone asks him about his background,’ she’d written. ‘He also travels across Australia with all he owns in his car, refusing to settle down for anyone or anything, abstaining from all conventional notions of a relationship or material success.’

  I’d clicked on his link on her blog, which had led me to his website, the front page bearing a photo of him being kissed by an Aboriginal man in the Northern Territory, a huge grin on his round face, red dust smeared across his tanned arms. He even had a notes page, and I saw how many random girls and rough, outback guys had posted fawning messages. She was right. This multiple conjunct Pisces was one weird fish.

  I will not be attracted to you, I think determinedly, coming back to the auditorium from my reverie. Classic commitment-phobe. But hang on – I’m not in any hurry for commitment, either! Plus, he’s a Pisces. Even though I’m one, too. Plus, he leaves parties without saying goodbye! But I do, too.

  But damn he smells nice.

  Like earth, sweat and happiness.

  Like wide open spaces.

  Like freedom.

  After we’ve gone through all the star signs, Mystic invites us to join her for a drink at the Dog’s Bar, a wine bar just a few steps down the road. I rush away from Pisces spunk to put money in the car meter, and as I walk back to meet everyone, my stomach does the same flip-flop it would do if I was about to give a speech. When I get to the entrance of the bar, I take a deep breath, and look down at my feet. I’m standing on a stone carving of a lightning-bolt. The night is warm, so everyone is sitting outside, and as I slip to the side of Mystic, introducing myself quickly, I notice Pisces guy in the corner, sipping quietly from a bottle of water. The astrological talk is growing wilder and louder, people trading planetary transit stories as some would trade gardening tips.

  ‘When I had Pluto transiting my sun I lost my job, my house burned down and the laundromat accidentally burned all my clothes. That’s when I started to write about astrology. The first sentence I wrote in my new notebook was, “Keep an eye on F’ing Pluto!”’

  I remember what she’d said about the astrological climate tonight. Venus and Pluto were at opposite ends of the sky.

  Mystic turns and looks at me, and says, eerily, ‘Relationships started under the stars tonight are very Venus Pluto. It’s almost like a kidnapping from one life to another.’

  Jim moves a chair so I can sit closer to him, looking at me with a soft half-smile like he’s just woken up from sleep. There’s something about how comfortable he is, with no need for alcohol, that makes me feel immediately at ease. Like he doesn’t want or even need anything from me, or from anyone, but he’ll be happy to experience the encounter, whatever it holds. I have a tendency to feel easily trapped and smothered, so his way of half-ignoring me puts me immediately at ease. Plus, he’s the first Piscean I’ve met who doesn’t drink.

  I’m impressed by a man who needs no artificial aids to be able to relax with the intense astro crowd, even if they are well dressed and he’s in his old sneakers and a scruffy old shirt. He’s comfortable. And because he’s comfortable, I feel comfortable. There’s something – naked, about him. Or just, unnaturally open. Like you couldn’t jolt him, like he’s not scared by much. Because it’s never a crisis, I think, hearing his words over and over in my head. I sit there in peace, close to his scruffy jeans, wondering how much he’s seen, how many laps of Australia he’s done. How many crazy people he’s made laugh.

  Just then, a couple pull up on Acland Street, leaping out of their car in triumphant jubilation, hugging, screaming and kissing each other.

  ‘Always good to get a car park,’ says Jim quietly, looking at me with a smile, like he makes up jokes as much for his own amusement as anyone else’s.

  ‘I loved your poem about the city and the country,’ says Mystic, interrupting our moment, thanking me for coming, remembering something I’d forgotten I even sent her.

  ‘What were you saying about the city and the country?’ asks Jim. Placed on the spot, I can’t explain things very succinctly.

  ‘Err, it was just about the different people you can be … in two different places … kind of.’

  Jim nods in understanding, leaning towards me like there’s no-one else in the packed bar. ‘I get that as well. That’s why I love travelling around Australia so much. It’s like you get to explore all the different aspects of yourself, depending on where you are.’

  It’s an uncanny feeling, like we’ve been to
gether before, and our meeting again tonight is the relief of return. We are like silent, war-weary comrades from lost lifetimes together. Even when we drift apart as the night unfolds from place to place, I feel him with me.

  His phone beeps, and I remember I left my mobile in my car. ‘Oh, I left my mobile on the dashboard of my car,’ I stand up, ready to dash off.

  ‘Yep, Lou. Just a sec, I’m coming …’ he says. Our togetherness is a given.

  Part of the reason I had stopped going out so much, over the past year, was because the superficial pick-up-dance with ego, arrogance and personal baggage took centre stage every Friday or Saturday at any number of glossy bars in the city. And frankly, I was in no hurry to settle down. Clucky? Nope. Traditional? Nope. My idea of romance is someone curious about my dreams and excited about how they’re going to pursue theirs. Not telling me how much money they earn or what sort of outer look encapsulates their ‘ideal woman’. But at bars and restaurants all over the city, it seemed the pendulum swung to the extreme, and I’d begun to feel like the odd one out for noticing. People in my age group seemed more obsessed with the way they and their partner dressed, smelled and wore their hair than whether they were actually happy and healthy. Screaming fights after too many drinks were considered normal, gaping wounds of loneliness mopped up with shopping, and relationships deemed ‘successful’ just because neither had cheated on the other, were all part of the package called ‘dating in western civilisation, millennium style’. I wanted more.

  I wanted honesty, health, someone who saw me and acknowledged me for who I was, beneath the clothes and the make-up. Someone I could trust to love me more for being true to myself than wearing the right shoes. And I was willing to do the same for them. I interviewed a relationship counsellor once, who told me the main reason couples came to see her was because they claimed the other one ‘never listened’. But how can we listen to each other when we don’t even hear our own inner voice?

  The number of conversations I’d had with men who loathed their jobs but valued the money above their own health or sanity had begun to blur. And because I don’t follow football, I didn’t have much else to discuss either. If I didn’t take the drugs that were offered to jazz up the night or get roaring drunk, then forget about any kind of encounter with the opposite sex. Marco had come from a decidedly chivalrous Italian background, and deep down I doubted I’d ever meet an Australian man who knew the meaning of chivalry, or romance. I’d almost given up hoping I’d ever meet someone who shared my weird views of the world.

  My choices had placed me in a sort of no-man’s land. The fact that I wasn’t interested in sitting around talking about how hard it was to make a living from my ‘art’ for hours on end disconnected me from the real bohemians. But living from story to story and unable to save for a mortgage or pre-book a holiday excluded me from the rest.

  It wasn’t like I hadn’t tried to be normal. The job I’d been so lucky to get, at the newspaper, could have led to a journalism cadetship, if I’d really wanted it. But the moral agonies of news journalism turned my stomach in knots. I’d see hungry cadets be promoted over a ‘scoop’ on the latest fraud, murder or child-rape case. Each day as I dutifully typed up the headline summary from A Current Affair, Today Tonight and the Rumour File on 3AW, I’d overhear the chief police reporter behind me, on the phone, picking the details like a hungry crow. ‘And – just off the record – where was the body found? Did he decapitate her?’

  The crunch came when the Bali bombings happened and I found myself fielding phone calls to the news desk from anxious families waiting for us to update the dead list. The chief of staff would clap his hands every time a new round of photos came in, fresh with blood from the AAP wires.

  ‘We’ve got a ripper cover for tomorrow,’ I heard him on the phone to the editor-in-chief. It was a close-up of wounded revellers running for their lives. The fear of death in their eyes, blood stains on their dresses. One of them appeared on the dead list the next day.

  Jim breaks my memory, his blue eyes looking into the distance but his head leaning close with his ear near my lips. He is listening, intently.

  ‘Do you still write poetry, Lou?’

  I think of that poem I wrote, so long ago, about the city and the country. Before I discovered the right brain of freelance journalism – a necessary compromise between wanting to make money from my ‘art’ and giving it up completely.

  ‘Um – well – not for a while. This is how I know Mystic – she’s been helping me with my writing over the past six months. We kind of do similar work … I needed some support, you know, being freelance is a pretty weird job …’

  ‘That’s cool. I think we do the same thing, Lou. It’s a constant balance between following your inspiration and keeping yourself fed.’

  We talk about the wacky situations we’ve found ourselves in, and I tell him how chasing invoices is as much a part of the job as actually writing.

  ‘Yeah, I get that too,’ says Jim. ‘After I’ve performed, sometimes the publican says he didn’t make enough money over the bar to pay me. It’s like, “I wouldn’t mind covering my sundry costs – like some food!”’

  I laugh at how he says ‘sundry’, and notice that I’m unravelling in his presence. It’s not just because I’m not filtering my words for attractiveness, but because, finally, I’ve been able to go beyond explaining what I do and just relax with someone who understands.

  As we walk back to the bar, I find myself telling him about the newspaper, about how I had nightmares for months after I left, how nobody understood why I was passing up the ‘career opportunity of a lifetime’, how I felt ashamed even when I went back to waitressing, like I couldn’t understand it. I’d lost any chance of a ‘career’, I felt, but I just saw that job as finding the most fear-provoking, negative and awful stories going on in the city, interviewing the people who’ve suffered, expanding people’s darkest terrors and using my writing skills to sell newspapers which just expanded the fear. I remember people shaking their heads at me when I quit, like I was a lost cause, and my decisions made no sense.

  He stops and takes my hand, looking a bit nervous, but rubbing my palm with his thumb. ‘That’s the most beautiful story I’ve ever heard.’

  Two different bars, many drinks and umpteen conversations with strangers later, I decide to call it a night. It’s 3 am, so I migrate out the front door to the footpath, wondering where the taxi rank is. Jim appears at my side.

  ‘Do you need a lift somewhere, Lou?’

  He says it in a way that tells me he doesn’t expect anything from me. That I don’t owe him anything, just because we’ve spoken. He’s just wondering if I need a lift.

  ‘Um, well, I live on the other side of the city. It’s a bit of a drive. I’ll get a taxi, it’s okay!’

  ‘No worries Lou, but I’m staying in North Fitzroy if you do need a lift …’ He gives me his friend’s address, which is about fifty metres from my flat.

  ‘Okay …’ We smile, like kids about to go on an adventure.

  ‘Hop in!’ he says excitedly, clearing the passenger seat for me and opening the door.

  In his silver Mazda, red dust covers the dashboard and every square inch of the back seat is filled with his belongings. He clears a space for me in the passenger seat, turns the heater on and, whilst cruising along Punt Road, fishes around in the back for something he wants to show me.

  ‘I wrote a book!’ he says, proudly passing me a bound copy of Jimbo’s Great Aussie Adventure, flicking through to find a particular page as his other hand stays on the steering wheel. I feel like I’m at a slumber party, in his house, and his car is our cosy room.

  ‘Are you warm enough?’ he asks, putting on a Hall and Oates CD. The speedometer says over 300 000 kilometres.

  ‘How much do you drive?’

  ‘Oh, I average about seventy thousand k’s a year. Some people sit at an office desk all day. At least I get a nice view!’

  When he pulls up at my flat,
he leans in for a kiss, which is kind of jarring, considering how much fun we’ve been having and how relaxed I feel with him. Usually there’s that weird anticipation … Halfway through the movement, my right brain barks ‘STOP’.

  Get out of the car, Lou. He’s a Pisces, for God’s sake. And you saw the t-shirts piled high on his back seat. They are emblazoned with the words: I FUCKED A GOAT.

  I slam the passenger door, making it up the steps to my flat in a tipsy blur, distracted with my brain argument. I know, I know. But I really like him.

  4

  Interstate stalking

  ‘It’s not stalking if we both do it.’

  I WAKE EARLY, FEELING AS though I’ve missed a vital clue in a mystery. My head is fuzzy, like I’m coming down with the flu or something, obsessively spinning the events of the previous night through my head in a constant rotation. What have I lost?

  The rain pours down outside, while I make coffee and try to remember what I am supposed to be doing today. Everything in my flat is as it was when I left to go out last night – but I can’t seem to find myself here again. I feel like I’m meant to be somewhere – else. Or missing part of myself, which lies beyond the four walls of this flat.

  Unfinished articles lie in printed-out piles on my desk. A review copy of the latest dating book by a relationship expert, advocating the use of ‘sales tactics’ to score the man of your dreams, lies unopened, next to the publication I’m to review it for. I wonder what the dating expert would have to say about what I’m about to do? Ha!

  I search Mystic’s blog archives, finding Jim’s website, which, naively, lists his phone number, for all the world to call him. So I do. It goes straight to voicemail, so I send him a text message, inviting him to pop over before he drives back to Sydney. The only reason I know he’s going back so soon is because he’s giving Mystic a lift.

  I’ve got to hurry. Something urgent has come over me. I was so quick to jump out of his car last night. But now, I’m reconsidering my haste. When was the last time you met someone uncompromisingly following their passion, Lou? Never.