Love and Other U-Turns Read online

  Exhausted and sniffly with the hint of a cold, he takes a handful of vitamins from his glove box first-aid kit and disappears into a thick sleep. I lie there next to his peaceful form in the room unsleeping, and when morning breaks through the window and I can see the outline of the horse coming clearer into view, I slip out to explore the town.

  When I pass the primary school with a banner about a visitor from Brisbane, I remember how privileged I am to be here, on a whim, from further away than many people have come in their lives. The lady who checked us in last night had said, while pencilling in our original destination to the hotel guest book, ‘Been to Sydney once, never been to Melbourne.’ She’s almost twice my age.

  I walk up a hill in the mellow sunlight, waving off offers of a lift from friendly truck drivers, passing noble-looking horses grazing a paddock, cows littered across the lush green of dairy farms in autumn. I stop to look around, when I get to the top, and almost slip on a large, rusty horseshoe, right side up on the road. I pick it up and jog it back to the car, placing it in the glove box for driving luck.

  When you’re in love, everything’s a sign.

  Like a hunger that’s just been stirred, the more towns in Australia I visit, the more I want to see. It’s not that I want to do anything in particular, I just want to observe, look and feel and know, have my feet tread their paths, witness these worlds within worlds, in our grand, luscious country. To have Jim by my side while I do it is the icing on the wedding cake. This is why I’m here, I think. Experience.

  I feel the first inklings of understanding the flipside of the anxieties of freelancing, like a puzzle piece that has just fallen into place. This is why I don’t work in an office, for a boss, in a conventional way. Freedom.

  Jim sleeps till late during the day, going for a jog around the golf club, showering, then climbing back into bed, where we talk past dusk. Something has flicked a switch in me. I’m bored here. I want to go. We both look up at each other at the same time, thinking it.

  ‘But we paid for two nights … ?’ I offer, voicing one half of my brain.

  And then – we bolt, like horses, leaving the keys in the door.

  We drive for four hours through the black night up to Brisbane, crossing another border, stopping to eat pizza at a twenty-four-hour diner on the main drag, continuing to the Gold Coast and arriving at around three in the morning. After the fast-forward healing of a room and a shower for the night, we’re back telling stories again, losing our voices, pulling over by the side of the road for one-hour naps in the car. I catch a vision of myself in the rearview mirror, oily pizza stuck to my face and the same singlet I’ve worn for three days now.

  Yep, I’ve officially gone insane. Why did I just leave a perfectly good bed in Woodenbong? We’re as addicted to the road as we are to each other.

  My phone rings in the morning, waking me from a stiff sleep in the passenger seat of the car. It’s Mum. She knows I’m not at home. She’s been leaving messages on my home answering machine for days.

  ‘Lou, where are you?’

  ‘Um. Queensland? I think.’

  ‘Who with? What are you doing?’

  ‘A guy I met at Mystic Medusa’s astrology night …’ Out loud, the notion even sounds ludicrous to me.

  Mum goes understandably silent. The poor thing is probably worried I’ve been brainwashed by a madman.

  ‘When are you coming home?’

  ‘Um, Thursday?’ I pulled that out of my head.

  I thought it best to make it sound like I know what I’m doing.

  As we walk along the beach on the Gold Coast, eating fruit and talking about our families, Jim’s phone beeps with a message from a fan. He bursts into laughter and replays the message, a yelling diatribe of profanities and profundities.

  ‘Mate, just watched your DVD for the twentieth time. Hope you don’t mind but I burned it from a copper friend who leant it to me. Just wanna say, man, you FUCKING INSPIRE ME! INSPIRATIONAL! Any time you need a place to stay, I’m here man, living with my goddess in the Hinterland. You stay as long as you want. FUCKING INSPIRATIONAL!’

  ‘Want to go visit him?’

  I think for a minute. I know, from listening to his message, this isn’t the kind of guy I’d meet living in my Melbourne apartment, sipping lattes with the girls. Which is one of the many reasons I’m here.

  ‘Sure!’

  It’s only a few hundred kilometres back-tracking into the Hinterland, and we don’t have to be anywhere, so we hop back into the car. I brush off the vague anxious feeling that I’ve promised to email someone, and gaze down at my mobile phone, to see that it’s out of range.

  I love talking to Jim. It’s as if I finally found someone who sees the absolute weirdness of life, the upside-downness of rules, and the magic and wonder of the most seemingly horrific things. Nothing scares him, nothing revolts him. In his pure, open state I find absolute freedom, and it’s like nothing I’ve ever felt before.

  When he listens to my life stories, he doesn’t cringe and sigh and get protective over the scary bits and angry over anybody doing me wrong or the lessons it took me so long to learn. He’s just curious. The way it should be. Nothing is bad or good. It just – is. His view is almost Buddhist, except that he isn’t religious. He wants my opinions and feedback on his life, and asks me questions about mine without ever interjecting with a judgement. I realise, somewhere on the road between Sydney and Brisbane, why it’s so easy to open up to him.

  He has no ego.

  We weave in our life stories, like a confessional, with our views of spirituality – that the only true religion is love, and that should be the measuring point from which all the decrees spring forth. If I’d brought this kind of thing up with any of my exes we wouldn’t have got further than an ego-based intellectual argument. But Jim just nods, and encapsulates my exact view in his own words. We match.

  I never knew I felt this way, because I never really talked about it before. Most of my friends and past boyfriends seem to have just ‘inherited’ their religion, like a surname you don’t consciously choose. Marco was like that about his Catholicism, carrying a token crucifix his mother had given him to ‘protect’ him, no matter what he did. To question it would have been to insult his upbringing. The emails I shared with Mystic Medusa were probably as spiritual as it got, offering sage interpretations of symbols and signs, and a vision of the universe which encapsulated a much wider viewpoint than a traditional creed or format.

  I’ve always felt life is magical. Sure, there are some horrendous moments, but occasionally I’ll be lying in bed or sitting at my computer or walking down the street and just get this absolutely insane wave of wonder which overcomes me. Until Jim I never saw a match for that glimmer in my eye of someone else who feels it too. That no matter where you are or what you’re going through, we’re bloody lucky to be here, and there’s a magical, mysterious reason for all of it.

  In Jim, I’ve found someone who shares my uncommonly gleaned perception of the meaning of life, religion, true purpose. To him, all roads lead to the same place: love and acceptance. In that place, nothing I – or anyone else – has ever done, is wrong. In the accepting space of the interior of his Mazda, all my preconceptions of previous relationships, love and life come undone.

  If religion can be defined as a series of values with one binding cord, or a leader who epitomises them – then Jim was my guru, and love the religion. And the world, with its freedoms and experiences waiting in every unlived day, was the church where I could express my devotion. From a balloon animal for a stranger to an understanding joke for someone having a rough day, Jim was my new measurement of whether or not I was living up to my potential for kindness.

  And my new spiritual purpose was to feel this stunned, amazed, awe-inspired and loving every day.

  A few hours later, up a hill from a tiny, herbal-looking town outside Mullumbimby, we pull up at a fibro house at the end of a dead-end gravel road. I brace myself, as usual, having no
idea what is going to happen next.

  After knocking on the flywire door a few times, a skinny, hardened, fifty-something man in stubby shorts and thongs comes to let us in, almost falling over when he sees us at the door.

  ‘Jimbo! Fuck! It’s really you! FUCKIN’ ’ELL! And ya’ve got ya MISSUS too!’

  It’s funny travelling with a public figure, but one only known to obscure men in back towns. Johnny, the guy, immediately runs to get his camera and starts filming both of us standing on his porch.

  ‘Wait, I’ve gotta get the car in it, mate. The famous car! Jimbo’s Mazda is parked outside my place!’ he yells into his video.

  As chequered as his past, the guy is a tattooed gentleman. After showing us around his hydroponics shed like a little kid at show and tell, gifting Jim with a hefty hunk of hash (‘Mate, I want to give you something! For visitin’!’), he invites us to share some beers with him and chat, pulling out the video camera for impromptu footage of us sitting in his shed.

  ‘Like a laugh, eh?’ he smiles, wiping his hands self-consciously before shaking mine and looking at me like I’m an extension of Jimbo’s stardom. ‘You two make a lovely-looking couple,’ he says, panning the camera across us both, wearing five-day-old outfits, sitting at his kitchen table.

  I soon hear his complete life story. The problems of sprinkler couple pale in comparison to this man’s history. An ex-heroin addict who had somehow lived through ten years in jail for armed robbery, drug dealing and murder, he has undergone a complete turn-around since getting out, and off the drugs. A bit of homegrown hydroponics is nothing compared to what his system has seen.

  ‘I’m bloody blessed, Jimbo,’ he says. ‘Lucky to be alive.’

  He raves about the book Conversations with God and flings his only copy on Jim, urging him to borrow it. ‘Fucking changed my life, mate. Only thing that matters is the moment.’

  He has the edge of someone who has seen hard days, but it’s his gratitude for the kind of freedom most people take for granted, to live on their own cheap property growing their own food (and hydroponics), reading books about spirituality and putting together a comedy routine, that really touches me.

  ‘I’m just starting to get into comedy, using my stuff from the inside.’ He puts on an amateur shot video, of his first show in Brisbane, and asks Jim for some ‘professional feedback’. ‘And mate, if I credit you, do you mind if I use one of your gags in my next spot? You’re my inspiration!’

  Assumptions are funny things. You’d think someone who has associated with some of Long Bay’s finest would be intimidating to be around. But I feel relaxed here. This man has faced his demons, and come out the other side.

  He refers to his girlfriend, who is at work, as ‘my Goddess’, and when she arrives home he runs to greet her, all but falling at her feet. ‘Honey come in here, look who I’ve been chatting with!’

  By eight o’clock I’m starting to get a bit hungry, but nobody has mentioned any food. I’m also getting more and more anxious that I’ve forgotten something major to do with work. Being stuck, not knowing what day it is, in the middle of Mullumbimby’s hills with a lovely ex-con and his psychologist girlfriend, whom he’s just showered with a bong to welcome home from work, I’m not too sure what the polite thing would be to do or say. So I just sit, quietly, and wait.

  Jim, sensing something’s up, and suddenly appearing to remember something, too, starts to say goodbye. Johnny looks like we’ve just stolen Christmas.

  ‘Mate, I’d love you to stay if you can. Come back any time. Stay for the week! You need a place to sleep? Always welcome here!’

  After an extended, excruciating goodbye, we make it back into the car. As we round the corner they are still waving, Johnny shaking his head like he’s just been visited by Elvis.

  The love-smack is wearing off, just a tiny bit, and I’m not feeling very good. All this broken sleep, different houses, random strangers and undefined mealtimes has thrown my body off. My period, the way in which I measure the tune of my body’s rhythms, has fallen way out of whack. Usually, it’s like clockwork, falling on a rhythmical 28-day cycle. Some months, I even time it to the hour.

  My friend Sally had always found this funny. ‘It’s like your body is more female than mine,’ she’d said once, after lamenting her year-long amenorrhea when she started stressful full-time work. My problem had always been the opposite – a bleeding reminder of my gender any time I try to push the limits through overwork, weight loss or lack of sleep. I’m one of those girls who bleeds twice a month when I’m stressed. Once, when I did a month of sixty-hour weeks at the Italian restaurant, I got three periods. Ignore your interior rhythms at your own peril, my body seems to cry.

  Just like then, now, my body is struggling to adjust to the massive changes taking over my whole being. I start to bleed, and then it stops for a day, only to start again a few hours later. Is it normal to visit this many pubs, houses and strangers? How does Jim do it, and stay so sane and stable? Maybe the female body just wasn’t cut out for this?

  I calculate when our last full sleep was. I think it was Wednesday – two days ago, back in Woodenbong. I don’t know how many more stories I can listen to before I sleep. Like a marathon runner, I’ve hit the wall. Although I’m beyond exhausted, I won’t allow myself to complain. What if he won’t think me road-ready, and sends me back to my ‘comfortable’ life in Melbourne? This could be my only chance to prove I’m up to the adventure. It makes me think this is the real reason most girls don’t hit the road.

  But this touches on something deeper. The Australian outback isn’t the kind of place girls like me usually go. Maybe there’s a reason Jim can live like a swagman and I can’t. As superficial as it is, most people judge by appearances, and the brutish-looking men in Jim’s DVD clips don’t talk or look that pretty. After meeting Johnny, and hearing Jim talk of all the other beautiful souls he’s met on his travels, I’m beginning to think I might have more to learn from them than I once thought. And maybe by not judging them, and taking the risk of going out there and seeing what’s further than my Melbourne tribe, I’ll encourage them to look beyond assumptions too.

  Visiting so many strangers in their own homes in such a short space of time has me getting particularly sensitive about the details. As soon as we park the car I start weighing up signs and searching for clues about the inhabitants. Here, somewhere just outside Nimbin, I see a rambling cottage garden with lamplight spilling through the balcony window. Jim catches me checking my face in his rearview mirror and tells me not to worry. What can I do? They’ve already opened the front door. This singlet, coffee-stained pants and Birkenstock sandals will have to do.

  Inner beauty, I chant. I’m wrecked. How do I drum it up under these conditions? I pretend I’m a performer. One more show for the night. Let’s see what these souls need …

  We walk in to an idyllic dinner scene of a bohemian couple cooking Moroccan chicken. It’s a house which reeks of comfort and thoughtfulness, a life spent devoted to art. The girlfriend, a professional singer, is in the middle of telling her boyfriend about an opera that had made her cry.

  Jim’s old friend, the guy, is a carpenter, who has never been addicted to heroin or gone to jail, but he seems much less content than Johnny, who I just met. He looks sad and exhausted when Jim introduces me, explaining that his sister has cancer and they don’t know how long she has … His partner is a gentle creature, my age, who teaches music. For the first time since we left Sydney, I don’t feel it would be wrong to tell her what I do for a living.

  She is yin to all the yang I have been witnessing in the pubs, in Jim’s jokes, in this crazy road life. She dishes up bowls of steaming chicken, pouring us both a glass of wine as we sit on the couch. As we have no wine, or gift, Jim pulls out a wad of the hash Johnny gave him, asking the carpenter if he’d like a spliff before bed. He rolls a joint as soon as he’s finished the chicken, smoking it on his own for the next hour, so distracted by his sister’s news that he forge
ts to offer it to anyone else in the room.

  Alas, I have hit the wall for chitchat and gentle speak.

  My mind goes blank and mute. I’m exhausted. I open my mouth and then close it again. Show’s over. Jim is still listening intently to his friend, offering a nod and a monosyllable or a sage piece of philosophical wisdom, at the appropriate moments. I am amazed by his fortitude.

  Dizzy with houses, souls and juxtapositions, I drift in and out of consciousness while remaining upright in the guest chair.

  Generous and poetic ex-cons flanked by sad, stoned carpenters with beautiful, musical girlfriends and bowls of steaming chicken.

  The girlfriend grows tired, and leads me to the spare room, showing us the single mattress in the study that is our bed. I ache to close the door, but I must wait for Jim.

  When he pads in, we talk of sleep like a sporting race. ‘Okay, no talk tonight. As soon as I turn off the light we just – go – okay?’

  When we eventually open our eyes and look at the clock, it’s midday. We slept for thirteen hours.

  In the morning we leave the last chunk of weed for them to smoke at their leisure. It’s our attempt at an apology for overstaying our welcome. I hop back in the Mazda, applying a few drops of perfume and deodorant from the car in my Clayton’s wash. The house had been empty when we left, moments after waking. We didn’t want to push it by taking showers.

  My work brain replenished from sleep, I remember what had been hanging over my head the night before. The day I got to Sydney, I’d arranged to interview a Sydney couple for my monthly column. Without a recording device on my mobile, and none of my notes, I panic. We drive straight to Byron Bay, where Jim drops me off at an internet café. I check my inbox to find three emails from the PR woman demanding to know when I can email her some preparatory questions. Uh oh. I don’t like the sound of this. A control freak, these are often the toughest nuts to crack, interview-wise. How can I turn this around? The answer presents itself, as I look out and realise we aren’t that far from Sydney.