Love and Other U-Turns Read online

  ‘They all know me as being single. So I’m as shocked as them!’

  This time, we head to a pub in Potts Point to meet his friend. I feel privileged to be taking a walk through his history album, which he has so openly laid bare. Live sport blares from a huge TV as we walk in, and I immediately want a drink, if nothing else, to block out the noise. I’m not much of a sport watcher. Jim gets rugby blindness straight away, and I stand sort of lost for a while, until a tall, slick-looking guy walks confidently over and pats him on the shoulder.

  ‘MAAATE!’ He introduces himself to me with a handshake, like he’s at a networking function, his eyes darting over my shoulder.

  We make chitchat. Some sort of architect-cum-property-developer, he tells me he has three houses – two in Sydney, one in Melbourne. He talks angrily about money the entire time – stocks, property, how much his divorce cost – drinking schooners of beer and impatiently prodding Jim when he doesn’t get up to shout another round, because he hasn’t even finished the last two. It’s just as Jim’s trying to distract him from the money talk by telling him a funny story about a gig he did in Norseman, Western Australia, when the guy’s eyes glaze over until he spies a woman in a red dress walking past. He follows her bottom to the bar, winking back at Jim.

  ‘So when are you getting a spot on Rove, mate?’ he says to Jim. Clearly, he’s not listened to anything Jim has said about his love of doing uncensored comedy.

  I find this man quite curious. He’s intelligent, good-looking, educated and politically aware. Occasionally he pipes in with something about the state of the world which makes me think he reads the papers and has a conscience. But it’s the patronising way he looks at Jim – and me, for being with Jim – because he’s not striving to earn loads of money and get the shackles this man is so painfully griping about that astounds me. Lack of self-awareness is a funny thing. Jim is sitting there patiently, doing his best to cheer the guy up, find some common ground, bring his attention to the paradoxical irony of how the pursuit of money seems to be a common thread in the guy’s stresses and strains. After telling us his ex-wife was only after his money, he announces proudly how much his assets are worth. He seems completely unaware of how little this matters to either of us.

  I head to the toilet, leaving them to the huge sports match. When I get back, slick guy is madly texting someone underneath the table, thinking Jim and I can’t see. He makes an excuse and rushes off, after kissing me in a really strange way too close to my lips for comfort.

  We walk home in silence, across the Sydney Harbour Bridge in the beautiful, balmy night. We’re both quiet. I don’t want to insult Jim, who is opening up and showing me everyone he’s ever known, so early in the relationship. But he shakes his head, a mixture of bemused and appalled, by what was really quite a typical catch-up with an old friend.

  ‘When you went to the toilet he asked me who else I’ve been sleeping with.’

  ‘No wonder you split Sydney.’

  5

  Love dust

  ‘I can take you anywhere …’

  I HADN’T THOUGHT FURTHER THAN getting to Sydney to check whether or not I’d dreamt Jim up. So when he invited me to join him on his ten-day road trip up the coast of New South Wales, to Queensland, my heart spoke before my head had a chance to calculate whether or not I even had any deadlines or meetings or appointments back in Melbourne. Or that perhaps you should pack properly before you go on a long road trip, and ask a few questions about where you might be staying.

  ‘I’d love to!’

  It always amazes me how quickly you can forget the past when you’re travelling. We spend months and sometimes years before a trip, stewing in our analytical thoughts, deliberating and planning, but when you actually hit the road, you realise nothing much matters but what you do right now, in this moment in time.

  In the past, I’ve only ever done long road trips where meals and rest stops were planned, kilometres logged, all accommodation fully booked in advance. The most memorable trips, though, always involve some sort of mistake, wrong turn or accidental loss of vitally important information.

  On the way to a camp years ago, with two friends, we got so lost with no mobile phones or maps we ended up pulling into a random town at midnight that was so small it didn’t even have a shop. So we saw a light on and knocked on a stranger’s door. A young woman in a nightie answered and let us in, quite grateful for the company and not particularly curious about who we were. When we asked to borrow her phone to call the camp she put on the kettle and gave us plates of biscuits. After she spent an hour exchanging relationship woes and the trials of small-town living with her visitors, we were almost sorry to be collected by one of the other leaders who’d arrived to ferry us to camp. Engaged, living with her fiancé, who had gone out and not come home when he said he would, she seemed grateful to unload on strangers who had no investment in her life, and no judgement, right or wrong, for how she felt about it all.

  It was one of those moments that cemented my decision to choose friends based on whether or not I’d like to get lost with them or not.

  ‘I like getting lost with you, Lou,’ she’d said, and I thought it was one of the most flattering things anyone could have said. ‘I can take you anywhere and people just – talk to you.’

  When Jim told me the first night I met him that he actually preferred wrong turns to following an itinerary, I knew we would be okay wherever we went. Full of adventures, the kind of person who’d be met with cups of tea in the middle of the night by a stranger in a nightie, he wouldn’t chafe at the waste of time, or the change in plan.

  Although he manages to keep enough money in the bank for food, petrol and water, his main aim isn’t linear accomplishment, but accidental experience. The here, now moment. Exchanges with strangers.

  Unexpected magic.

  Two days after my arrival in Sydney, I leave my shiny new car outside his parents’ house and get into his beaten-up Mazda, covered in stickers from towns I’ve never heard of. So smacked out with love dust, I forget, momentarily, that he will be selling stubby holders after each gig with the slogan, ‘I Fucked a Goat’. His method is simple. He rolls into town on his way past, pulls out a few posters, introduces himself to the publican, and explains his comedy show.

  ‘If I get a gig under these conditions, just by my own rules, I feel like I’ve really earned it.’

  When I do remember the t-shirts and the stubby holders, somewhere up the Pacific Highway as we lose more and more Sydney traffic to a shining, glorious sky of blue, I ask what it means. At first glance a crass, brash statement, it turns out he’s put a lot of thought and philosophy into it.

  ‘It means I don’t care what you think about me. I mean, by saying to the world “I Fucked a Goat” – what can they say back to you? What could be worse than that?!’

  I ask him how many t-shirts he’s sold, at twenty dollars a pop.

  ‘Um, think I’m up to about two thousand …’

  I burst into laughter, wishing I’d left my overpriced boots at home. They don’t fit with this new life I’ve stepped into. I wasn’t setting out with a map or itinerary, I had never heard of the towns where Jim had booked gigs. In fact, I didn’t even ask him where we were going. My shoulders unravelled as I met each day not with goals, aims and plans but a blank slate and an open heart. I became dizzy with adventure, roads, beauty, strangers, truck-stop rainbows and new sights, and consequently shifted my perspective from deadlines and accomplishments to the importance of instinct and a lack of judgement.

  We slept in dingy single beds that sank in the middle and on acquaintances’ couches. If the sun was shining and there was thick enough bushland, we slept by the side of the road.

  Sometimes we didn’t sleep, we just kept driving. I drank coffee akin to lighter fluid from petrol stops and we checked our emails from two-dollar coin-in-the slot kiosks with dirty keys, Jim updating the gig guide on his website from shops where the confectionary hadn’t been rotated for y
ears.

  If it was cold, we pulled over and just closed our eyes in the car and kept the heater running. We were high on life and adventure and love so the fact that he had to perform most nights and I was in an unknown situation every hour, every day, wasn’t frightening, but it all took on a mystical, transcendent tone. They say the early days of love have the same effect on the brain as a high from cocaine. We were junkies, all right. We talked, sang and laughed so much we both lost our voices.

  Australia’s roads had never looked so beautiful and strangers had never been so welcoming. In just over two weeks, logging about four hundred kilometres a day, I saw more towns and states of Australia than I’d taken twenty-nine years to see. With a growing perception of the idea of beauty which lay at the opposite spectrum to what I’d been taught my entire life, my suitcase of colour-coordinated clothes and bulging make-up bag lay unused in the boot of his car.

  I learned, over the next two weeks, that being kind, trusting and open is a much more transferable skill than knowing how to adorn yourself outwardly. And that if you’re sleeping in a ghost-ridden room or by the side of the road, love and trust are much more useful than designer trimmings.

  In the scheme of one-on-one time, we probably spent more time together in those two weeks than I would have spent in six months getting to know anyone in my life to date.

  Where I’d thought I’d been in love before, never had I experienced the drugged-up feeling like this. Though I was often sleepless, hungry and constantly out of my comfort zone – nothing could hurt me.

  I was fascinated, entranced, obsessed, consumed with Jim, the addictive part of my brain stimulated to the point where I couldn’t remember what I ever liked or wanted before meeting him. After spending days and days in the car, listening to him talk, breathing his energy and feeling his company beside me, I think I even forgot that he was a separate being.

  Like smack addicts who see angels in bedsores, we wanted to share our high with everyone we touched.

  In a café on our way through a small town on the coast of New South Wales, we stopped for a sandwich, his arms around my waist, and he’d just made a balloon animal for a random kid walking past. When the lady behind the counter asked us why we were so happy, Jim blurted out, ‘We’re in crazy love!’ Our eyes shone back at her like she was part of our insane fantasy.

  ‘Oh gee, kids, wow … be careful with that …’ she said, looking at us like we were a breed of bird she’d thought extinct.

  Our drug was the type of intense love some would classify as insanity, and we did all we could to prolong its effect. All the details of life that once mattered didn’t bother me anymore. If I went for three days without showering or four without checking my email, I didn’t care – but where was Jim? That’s all that mattered. I felt like Jim’s presence was the fairytale kiss that woke me from a deep slumber – and I’d been spending my whole life, until now, in that slumber. At night, lying beside him, wherever we were, I didn’t want to shut my eyes.

  If we parted for more than a few minutes, to go to an ATM or make a phone call or even just – the toilet – we’d message each other, only half-joking: ‘Miss you!! xx’.

  The way he looked at me, I knew I wasn’t the only crazy one. Perhaps we weren’t seeing each other, we were seeing some higher, fantastical vision of who we wanted the other person to be. Who cared? It felt good. Dangerously, sickeningly, good.

  When he drove, I kept my hand permanently on his leg, and when we got out of the car and walked, we’d keep touching, in an attempt to stay endlessly connected in a line of energy that couldn’t be broken.

  ‘That was the lost week,’ Jim said one day, referring to the week when he’d come back to Sydney before I drove up in a lovesick frenzy, to follow him. That time apart had been more than enough to make us overcompensate by not wanting to spend even a minute apart now. We talked and touched all day and all night, frustrated when our bodies beckoned for sleep, like it was an unnecessary separation.

  We both lost weight in the course of those ten days, and Jim used a balloon as a belt to tighten his jeans. Eating, sleeping and showering were such crude interruptions, almost like a waste of time. We had more important things at the forefront of our brains. Like catching up on lifetimes apart.

  Where just weeks ago I’d been so work-obsessed that I’d log ten hours a day on the computer, feeling lazy if I wasn’t simultaneously pitching, researching and filing stories, I was now so lost in something which had nothing to do with accomplishment and all to do with instantaneous reaction that it was like my previous self had been kidnapped. She’d gone. Left the building that was my body. And now this vague, open-hearted girl was replacing her. Me.

  Leaving Melbourne, I’d packed quickly, but like the old me. I’d flung my hair straightener, a huge bag of toiletries, make-up and going out dresses, including heels, into the boot of my car. What a mistake.

  For two weeks I changed clothes twice, washed my hair once with some leftover Palmolive in someone’s home shower, and the rest of the time gave myself Clayton’s washes in everything from pub toilets during Jim’s gigs, to road shack outhouses and taps by the side of the road. Sometimes, I brushed my teeth out the window as he drove, rinsing my mouth with our bottles of water. I didn’t want to appear high maintenance with this free-wheeling swagman. Besides, the way he looked at me, even the unwashed version, I figured it didn’t matter.

  Although at first glance Jim’s life could be viewed as a couch-surfing slacker, I soon learned he more than paid his way in accommodation by listening, entertaining and performing impromptu clown shows for any children who were loitering about.

  And I learned to go with the flow, too, falling into these myriad lives in houses, dotted across the map. I’d wake in the middle of the night on a sofa bed, or a mattress on someone’s spare-room floor, seeing Jim beside me and mentally constructing the time and place by a process of deduction. Where had we parked the car? Which friend was this from which house and which school or gig? Was a shower out of the question and what time did we need to get up to fit in with their schedule? And did any of it really matter as long as I was happy, here, in love?

  More and more unnecessary history fell from my soul with every mile we logged, and so by the time I returned to Melbourne, I was virtually unrecognisable from the girl who had left two weeks earlier. But it didn’t feel like I’d accumulated anything. Rather, the real me had just – emerged.

  And all it had asked of me was that I leave home and drive up the road.

  Take a risk.

  Let Go.

  In Coffs Harbour, Jim stops for a match of tennis with another old friend. My bare feet poke from the floor, and my knees, stiff with sitting, beg for a run.

  The sun drips upon us like nectar from the gods, and I notice happily that there’s a tennis club shower I can use after my run. I pull out my towel and a summer dress and place them on the passenger seat for later.

  I begin to jog away from the court, smiling like a drunk with lack of sleep, the honeymoon phase of love, and a blissful appreciation of all the miles I’ve already travelled. Tearing myself away from Jim to go for a run had been an interception by my logical brain to get my body back. But it’s hard to stay focused.

  I don’t take my phone, and I have no idea what time it is. I just run, that’s all I can remember to do. I go up a hill, then down a side street. I’m not looking where I’m going, just enjoying the feeling of being in motion again, moving my legs. Free, freedom, the word, the feeling, exhilarates my veins, I don’t even consider the fact that I might get lost. Life is all too easy and blissful today, what could possibly go wrong?

  After a few left turns, and then a few rights – or was it three lefts and one right? – I am utterly lost, and the sun is beating down on me brighter and hotter than before. I realise, with both fright and humour, as I find myself on the edge of a freeway, I don’t even know Jim’s phone number.

  I swing wildly between Zen cool, thinking Jim and
I have such a connection he will surely channel my locale, and at worst in a parched and dizzy panic. I am dripping with sweat, carrying nothing except the sweaty singlet and shorts I wear, have no idea how long I’ve been jogging for, and, to perfectly top off the situation, it’s the first day of my period so I’m not too sure how long I have before a certain something will start to – err – leak.

  After a long diversion when someone directs me to the wrong tennis court, I find myself at a graveyard. I feel like a walking joke, but I have to ask this elderly couple, visiting a grave, where to go. I’m desperate. Parched.

  ‘Excuse me?’ I pant. ‘I’m a bit lost. Sorry to interrupt. Do you know where the tennis court is?’

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Melbourne.’

  They chuckle, murmuring that the tennis court is somewhere nearby but they can’t recall where.

  ‘Who are you trying to find?’

  ‘My … boyfriend …’ I let it hang in the air for the nothing word that it is. How can I use the same name for this man that I’ve used for every other relationship I’ve been in?

  ‘Well can’t you ring him?’

  You don’t understand, I wanted to tell them. I just used that word because I can’t say soul mate to a couple of strangers in a cemetery or I’ll sound cuckoo. And by the way, I don’t know his surname.

  ‘It’s cool, I think I know where I’m going!’ I don’t want to worry them, so I jog away, only to move towards the familiar sound of tennis balls being lobbed. Like a panting dog, I sniff out their origin, two streets behind the graveyard.

  Grateful but dripping with sweat, I flop next to Jim on the chairs next to the tennis court. He gives me a hug, even though my sweat is now mixing with his, all over his t-shirt.

  ‘You’ve been gone for an hour and a half!’ he says eventually, as I guzzle the entire litre of water he’d left courtside for some post-tennis hydration.