by Leanne Owens
His voice faded as he remembered the look in her eyes that day when she woke to find them standing over her. They thought they were helping, but the terror and betrayal in her eyes told a different story. ‘We failed her.’
‘I’m sure she doesn’t see it that way,’ said Marcus, ‘and you can’t be expected to have accepted her obsession with a dead man.’
Andrew’s dark almond-shaped eyes rested on a large oil painting on his feature wall. Autumn colours swirled and danced in aesthetically pleasing patterns. Laid across the colours in black and gold leaf were some of the words Ally wrote to him in her last letter. She wrote a letter to each member of the Lamore Crew, delivered after she disappeared. Its beauty pierced his heart as she described her love for the man who existed in her mind. The words described the sort of love he hoped to find, and had found with Marcus.
He had commissioned a leading artist to create a work around these words so that he would always have that part of Ally in his life. He read the words, as he did almost every day of his life.
He had always known how much I loved him, more than life itself – I would have died in his place if there had been a god to answer my prayers, but I remain in life while he moved elsewhere. I had thought that I could not live without him, that if he left this life, I would leave, too, but now I understand I must live on, in that life and in this. Sometimes, living is the hardest thing to do, but it is always the right choice.
He blinked a couple of times to ease the burning in his eyes as he read the words. They never failed to release tears and a flood of emotions about love - about her love and how he let her down.
The ringing of the phone shattered his thoughts, and he deftly caught the handpiece that Marcus threw to him.
‘Andrew here, Peter,’ he said, having checked the caller ID before speaking.
‘Hey, mate – how’s it going?’
‘All good, how about you?’
‘I found Ally.’
Andrew sat up quickly, spilling his tea on the lounge and Marcus sprang into action to fetch a cloth to wipe the spill. ‘Is she OK?’
‘Not really. No. She needs us. She needs all of us. I thought I could make her better before you saw her because she was in a bad way, but I can’t. I thought I could save her myself, but I’m failing her… again.’
‘Are you at Kamekura?’
‘Yeah. I admitted her.’
‘I’ll be there tomorrow,’ he promised without hesitation.
‘Thanks, Andrew. I don’t know what we can do, but it needs to be more than what I’m doing now. She wants to be with him. She doesn’t want to live.’
‘Hold on, Pete. We’ll sort it out. I’ll leave today.’
They ended the call. Andrew glanced at that last line on the painting again, about living always being the right choice. He felt tears once more well up in his eyes, as the childhood inadequacies that Ally had fought so valiantly reared its head out of the ashes where she had consigned them. He looked at Marcus who simply nodded, giving his agreement to whatever Andrew wanted to do. Although Marcus had been looking forward to an adventure holiday together, he understood what this meant to Andrew, and gave him full support to follow his heart.
Hearing the anguish in Peter’s voice made Andrew feel physically ill. He had such empathy for the suffering of others that he felt the ripples of their pain within himself, and felt compelled to help. It was the characteristic that Ally first noticed in him. The trait his father had seen as weakness, she saw as his strength. When the emotions of others moved him to tears, his father had turned away in disgust, but Ally held him and told him that the ability to share the emotions of others would help him change the world. She told him that he would never stand and watch the misery of others without doing something about it.
The hurt in Peter’s voice reminded him of how much his friend had loved Ally. Their school years had seen them mix friendship with love and lust and, in hindsight, it was a miracle that they had remained friends as they fumbled their way through their sexual awakenings. Ally was in love with a fantasy, Peter loved Ally, Sandy pined for Peter, Lynette and Andrew failed an attempt at the girlfriend/boyfriend scene, while Andrew fought his sexual feelings that emerged for Peter.
A smile quirked the corner of his mouth at the memories – if they’d just thrown in a lustful parent and maybe a god disguised as a swan, they’d have had the makings of a classic Greek tragedy. All through it, Ally appeared to understand what was going on around her with maturity far beyond her years. As the decades passed and Andrew met leaders from all parts of the world - religious, political, financial, business, entertainment, and charity leaders – he only increased his admiration for the role Ally played in their formative teenage years as the leader of their group.
The day he graduated his Law/Economics degree with honours, he looked out into the crowd and saw her sitting in the audience next to his parents, her face glowing with pride. He sought her out as soon as the ceremony was over. He wrapped his black gown around her, and hugged her tightly, telling her she was perfect. The perfect woman. The perfect friend. His hero.
She put her hands on his shoulders and looked into his eyes so deeply that he could feel her soul touch his, and he was aware of a vast sadness within her that ate at her like an ocean washing away the shores. Those violet eyes of hers, often brimming with laughter and reminding him of the colours of flowers, looked like bruises from cruelly beaten flesh, and he felt her pain. In that moment, he felt her pain and it hurt.
‘Every hero has a fatal flaw, Andrew, secrets they can’t share without risking their own destruction – that’s about the only thing I have in common with a hero. And I am as far from perfect as anyone can be, and still breathe.’
‘Tell me, Ally,’ he urged, his dark eyes full of the empathy that acted like a bridge to the minds of others, encouraging them to talk to him when they could trust no other.
‘Maybe one day, not now,’ she smiled at him, a small, sad smile that turned in his heart as though he shared the knife that created her wounds. ‘Isn’t that the way of life? There’s always so much to tell and yet so much not to tell. My secrets will destroy me one day, and there’s nothing anyone can do to help.’
‘We can help,’ he told her, believing that the Lamore Crew could overcome any problems she faced. ’We are here for you.’
‘I know that, sweetie,’ she said, turning the bruised colour of her eyes back to flower petals that reflected sunshine and hid the shadows, ‘and I’m just being melodramatic. Don’t mind me. This is your day – don’t let me spoil it with my silly worries.’
His parents interrupted them, proud of their son. It was one of the first times he could remember his father clearly showing a sense of pride in him. Until that moment, he had felt more like an embarrassment than an asset to the family. Ally stood aside to let his family have him.
‘Do you want me to come with you?’ Marcus interrupted his memories. ‘I’m happy to go, happy to stay, whichever you prefer.’
‘No, come with me,’ Andrew’s eyes focussed on his face, pushing aside the thoughts of days gone by. ‘I want you to meet them all together, with Ally, in Australia.’
‘I have to admit, I long to meet Ally. I want to thank her for waving her magic wand and turning your life around.’
‘She did do that,’ said Andrew, gulping down the last of his tea with haste. ‘Who knows? Maybe I’d have been happy working in Dad’s take-away shop without dreams and ambitions, just getting through each day and waiting for the next. Dad would have liked that. And marriage to some quiet girl from the Chinese community who understood how life worked: marriage, kids, work, the occasional weekend at Barwon Heads.’
‘And a boyfriend on the side, perhaps,’ added Marcus, raising his expressive brows.
Andrew gave a brief chuckle, ‘Yeah, one of the, I’m not gay, I just have sex with men occasionally fellows who are torn up about who they really are.’
‘No regrets?’
Placing his cup and saucer on the table and reaching over to clasp Marcus’ hand in his, Andrew sighed, ‘Never. No regrets ever. This is who I am, and you are my other half. I want Ally to see that. She will understand.’
With eyes shining with emotion at Andrew’s declaration, Marcus cleared his voice with a cough, ‘I’ll get on the phone and organise flights, then. You go pack.’
Later that night as they rested in the comfort of Business Class high above the Earth’s surface, Andrew thought back to his school days. He hated school. He hated walking to and from school. He hated all the people who judged him based on his Asian features. The endless taunting from the bullies made him angry. He wanted to hit the nasty little white kids who didn’t understand that he was more Australian than most of them. His family had come to Australia in the 1860s to look for gold, whereas many of them could only claim a generation or two in Australia. He wasn’t a Nip. Nips were Japanese. His heritage was Chinese. And he wasn’t a Chink or a Ching-Chong or Goon or a Slanty-eye. He was an Australian.
There were two other Asian-background students in his year level, but he had nothing in common with them, despite people assuming they would be good friends because they shared black hair and almond-shaped eyes. It was almost like a bad joke: three boys from Vietnam, China, and Japan turned up at school one day and everyone thought they would be friends. His racist father forbade him from having a non-Chinese background girlfriend, so heaven knows what he would have done if he’d brought home a Japanese or Vietnamese friend. He stuck to himself, doing the school work and coming midfield in everything, from English to running. Mediocrity was a comfortable place to be - among the masses, like a zebra on the plains, hiding by fitting in with the main herd, and not running on ahead of the others.
He helped in the take-away with his brothers and sisters after school and on weekends, as that was how families succeeded. Sticking together and helping each other to achieve success was the only way, according to his father. The extended family of grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, second cousins, and other relatives, gathered together at least twice a year to show each other how well they were doing, how smart, obedient, and well behaved their children were, and how their respective businesses were thriving with the help of such good family members. This was his life. His father drilled him in the way things were and would be, and how his life should play out.
Perhaps life would have played out with predictable mediocrity if Ally had not noticed him. He had seen her, of course, who could miss the girl who walked like a warrior in the schoolgrounds? Always flanked by her two friends, Peter and Sandra. He hadn’t expected her to notice him, though, apart from seeing that he looked different from almost everyone else, and then dismissing him. Avoiding notice was something at which he had become an expert by the end of his first year of high school, but Ally saw the weakness which his father despised, and she pounced on it.
It was a wet Saturday lunchtime, and the take-away had a dozen people waiting on hamburgers and toasted sandwiches. Twelve-year-old Andrew was working the hamburger grill, lost in the routine of placing food on the grill, turning it, arranging it on the toasted buns, wrapping it, writing the initials of what it contained, and placing it on the counter for his mother to hand over. He didn’t like the work, but at least, while he was doing it, he didn’t have time to think of much else, just read the next order and start placing more food on the grill. The customers almost didn’t exist for him, he didn’t look at them, didn’t make eye contact with them, he just read the pink order slips and watched the food as he placed, flipped, arranged, wrapped, initialled, and put it on the counter.
The shattering of glass and a cry broke his concentration and he looked up to see a young boy staring at his broken bottle of cola on the painted cement floor of the shop, his eyes brimming with tears. The boy’s father gave him a slap across the side of the head, swore at him, and called him stupid. Unable to stop himself, Andrew, moved by the plight of the child, went to the fridge to take out another bottle of soft drink for him. Ignoring his father’s sharp command to stop, Andrew slipped under the counter at the end where it folded up to let people in and out, and kneeled on the floor next to the boy.
Handing him the cola, he looked into the tearful blue eyes and smiled. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve broken lots of them,’ he said, his voice soft. ‘I’ll clean it up. You have this one.’
The boy’s father jerked his son away from Andrew as though he might catch Asian from him, but not before the boy’s face had the chance to light up from Andrew’s kindness.
‘How many times have I told you not to give things away?’ Mr Lee snapped the question at his son, anger in his voice. ‘It’s not up to you to fix everyone else’s mistakes. You think you solve everyone’s problems? Solve your own. You pay for that drink. OK?’
Andrew respectfully apologised to his father as he swept the broken glass into a dustpan and mopped up the spilled cola. His father continued to berate him about a soft heart being a weak heart, and that people would take advantage of his weakness. He expected it. He knew he let his father down daily. As he ducked back down under the counter to return to his cooking, he glanced up and saw Ally looking at him.
Those violet eyes saw into him, seeing the kind heart which his father scorned, and recognising qualities in him that no one else had appreciated. It was just a small act – giving a distressed child a five-cent bottle of cola – but that moment seemed to define him in Ally’s eyes, and she knew him. She knew him. From that moment, she enveloped Andrew with her friendship and her love, and lifted him up into dreams that would come true.
She believed in him, in all of them. Even when he confessed to her that he liked men, she didn’t falter. In a time when many described gays as dirty poofter bastards and people thought some sort of treatment might fix them, Ally had made him feel normal.
‘I’m thinking that sexuality isn’t just a red light, green light sort of thing,’ she’d told him as they lay side-by-side on their backs on the grass of the Highton football field in their last year of school. ‘I think it’s a sliding scale and we can be anywhere on it.’
‘How do you mean?’ he asked, moving slightly so that she could put her head on his arm.
‘Most people are probably down towards the end of the scale where the opposite sex is preferred, but some people are up the other end where they prefer the same sex, and others are placed anywhere along it so that they mainly prefer one, but won’t say no to the other if the circumstances are right.’
He chuckled, ‘So, if I’m up the same-sex end, where are you, Chickadee?’
‘I’m not even on that scale,’ she snorted in amusement. ‘I’m in love with someone from the Renaissance, and there’s no spot on the scale for dead people.’
‘What? No place on the scale for those who prefer necrophilia?’
‘It’s not necrophilia,’ she dug her elbow into his ribs, making him grunt. ‘I don’t love his dead body, it’s him when he’s alive, only a long time ago.’
‘You know that, sooner or later, you’ll have to let go of the past and fall in love with someone in this life.’
‘That’s like me telling you that you have to let go of this nonsense about liking boys because you’ll have to fall in love with a girl sooner or later.’
‘Not going to happen,’ he assured her.
‘That’s how it is for me, too.’
‘But he’s no longer here, Chickadee – they’re just stories in history books.’
‘If I knew how to explain it properly, I would, but all I can say is that, to me, he lives and I see him, and I know it’s five hundred years ago, but it’s now as well. I’m here, and I’m there, and I’m me, but I’m not…’
‘See? This is why I don’t take drugs,’ he sniffed. ‘You blow my mind enough with words. I’d hate to see what would happen if I took drugs and tried to listen to you.’
‘I’ll prove it one day, you know. I don’t know how, but I will.’
>
‘In the meantime, don’t tell too many people you’re in love with a man who is dead.’
‘And don’t you go telling them you like boys,’ she twisted her head to look at him and planted a light kiss on his smooth cheek. ‘It’s not a bad thing, it’s just who you are, but there are too many people who will think it’s bad. They’ll forget that you’re made of a thousand wonderful parts and your sex life is only one of those parts.They’ll see it as the one defining thing about you and forget the other nine hundred and ninety-nine other things. I hope it will change, but 1976 isn’t the time to be telling people you are homosexual.’
She drawled out the final word in a prissy voice so that it sounded like homo-SEX-you-al and they both laughed. They lay staring up at the clouds, laughing about life. She made him feel normal when so many others would have made him feel diseased. Then, some years after she had made him feel comfortable about his sexuality, he had joined forces with the others to help her in the way they thought she needed, and she vanished from their lives. What had they done? What had he done?
He looked up as someone passed in the aisle to stretch their legs on the long flight to Australia. His hand sought the letter in his pocket. She had left one for each of them, each slightly different from the others, and sprinkled with imagery that seemed like clues to her reality. I had thought that I could not live without him, that if he left this life, I would leave, too, but now I understand I must live on, in that life and in this. Her words remained beautiful, even though he looked at them every day on his wall. It was a way of keeping her in his life and honouring the friendship to which he owed so much. He prayed she would forgive him for not accepting her reality as she had accepted all that he had been.