I drag on my cigarette. “What’s to be shocked at? It was wonderful.”
Ben smiles at me, runs a fingertip over my eyebrow. “Not everyone likes it,” he says.
“What? Being fucked?” I ask. “I’m not always an aficionado myself.”
He frowns at me. “You did realise didn’t you?”
I raise my cigarette to my mouth, then pause. “Realise what?”
Ben snorts.
“What?” I ask.
He laughs again.
“What?” I insist.
“Nothing,” he says. “Can you stay the night or?” I look at my watch, I had forgotten, it is three a.m.
“Shit. I have to get up in …” I count, “One, two, God! In three and a half hours!”
Ben watches me dress. “I’ll call you when I get back,” he says.
I nod noncommittally. I’m thoroughly convinced that he won’t, and more importantly I am protecting myself from any emotional engagement. I don’t want to ruin my holidays thinking about an illusory relationship back in France. Been there, done that …
I pull on my pullover, open the front door.
“Happy Easter,” he says. He sniggers as he closes the door.
I frown as I walk away. “Strange man,” I think.
I slide between my sheets – they feel luxurious and crisp. My skin feels tingly and smooth. Sex often makes me feel that way, like a cat stretching in sunshine.
At six-thirty, I drag myself from my bed, sling the toothbrush and the razor into my pre-packed bag and stumble from the door into the cold morning air.
Easter Surprise
By eight-forty-five, I am halfway to Rome, the first stop.
At eleven-thirty, I am somewhere over Israel wondering if the guy with the beard is going to explode the aeroplane over Tel Aviv. Qantas are serving Chicken Satay and simultaneously showing Chicken Run. A sort of Easter thang I guess, but I’m glad to be a vegetarian.
I squeeze past the guy with the beard, push down past the trolley, still serving drinks, beat the queue to the toilets.
Travel always does this to me. Air travel, time differences, microscopic toilets, all hope of regularity is lost. My guts feel strange and in the tiny room, wedged between the fold down baby tray and the dolls-house sink, the relief is wonderful and immediate.
I wipe, I stand, I reach for the flush lever. I freeze.
Lying in the pan is an egg. A perfectly ordinary, intact, peeled, hard-boiled egg.
“What the hell?” I think. It takes a while to realise where it has come from.
I pause, exhale and shake my head. I picture him laughing, saying, “Happy Easter.”
“Bastard!” I say.
Members Only
An internationally renowned gay-fest, in the gayest and most beautiful city in the world, that’s what the Qantas magazine says.
I arrive in Sydney with little time to spare, shell shocked by the journey. I call in to Oxford Street where I guess I can buy tickets for the party. The street is abuzz with beautiful bronzed boys, muscle-bound men, and plain old-fashioned, screaming queens.
“This,” I think, “is a bit more like it! Statistically much more chance of meeting Mr right.” But how dreadful, to meet Mr Right on the other side of the world …
I stumble across the ticketing queue immediately and insert myself at the end of it. I am feeling woozy from jet lag and lack of sleep, but I am terrified that if I leave it until tomorrow, the day of the Mardi Gras, the tickets will be sold out. The queuing is good tempered, quiet conversation buzzing with expectation, foreign accents abound.
The sun is shining and I think, “Maybe I could live here, if I did meet someone …”
Finally after thirty-four hours travel and two hours queuing, I get to the counter. I have a brief panic attack – Will they take my Visa card or should I have taken out some cash? But I needn’t worry about my credit card.
“Membership card?” The guy smiles at me hand outstretched. His accent is thick, pure Ozzy.
I frown at him. “Membership card?”
The smile disappears; the man rolls his eyes and repeats, seemingly for the fiftieth time today, “You can’t buy tickets to the party unless you’re a member of Mardi Gras.”
I don’t get it. The idea that the internationally renowned, international gay-fest is a member’s only affair is more than my mind can grasp. “Member?” I repeat. “But that’s insane, I live in France.”
I start to feel annoyed. That tired, feverish kind of annoyed that happens when you travel for two days to a party but can’t get in.
“You should have joined before you came.” He shrugs bitchily.
“But I just queued for two hours!” I protest lamely. “Can I join now?”
“No, it takes a week. You should have done it over Internet mate,” the guy replies.
His voice goes up at the end of every sentence. Every line sounds like a question.
Do I detect that he is enjoying this or is it just jet-lag paranoia?
“Maybe you should tell people in the queue about that.” I am getting annoyed and I am feeling a little trembly. I know that I will have to leave before I explode.
“So there’s like, no way?” It is my last, unconvincing, feeble attempt.
“Unless you ask a mate who’s a member, they can buy three tickets each.”
I shake my head. “I live in France. I don’t have any mates here.”
The guy shrugs; I shamble outside.
I announce to the crowd, shouting, burning calories, emptying angst, that if they aren’t members there is, “No bloody point queuing.” A large group forms around me. Briefly I imagine us storming the ticket office but the group simply disperses groaning into Oxford Street.
I decide to convince someone, anyone, left in the queue, to buy an extra ticket for me. I shout to them all – no answer. I shout at them all.
I am proud of my bravery, but they all just stare at their feet.
I make my way back to the hotel on a lethally driven, diesel-pumping bus. It speeds along, way over the speed limit, with little or no regard for red lights or standing passengers. It reminds me of Italian public transport. Actually the driver looks Italian.
At the hotel I read the glossy Sydney guidebook, thoughtfully provided. It opens with the following phrase:
Sydney, the penal colony with an early case of perpetual anxiety about its chances of survival has turned out not to be an introspective, insiders city like its southern sister Melbourne, known to Sydneysiders as “Bleak City”. As novelist Thomas Kenally said - Melbourne sometimes seems to be a secret to which you can obtain the code only if you are born into it or undergo a long initiation.
“Or have a membership card?” I think angrily.
I read on: the word Melburnian, Kenally suggests, has a serious patrician resonance to it, whereas Sydneysider is a shack-dwelling beach combing sort of a word.
“How strange,” I think, “for a city to define itself primarily by what it is not.”
And how strange, for Sydney to be primarily not Melbourne. Melbourne, which always struck me as such a funky, charming city, in a skinny-cap crystal-healing kind of a way.
I drift into a deep, jet-lagged, angst-filled slumber.
And You Thought You Were Gay?
The next morning, I awaken late and woozy. I pick up a second leaflet – this time a gay guide to Sydney – from the hotel desk and head off for coffee in a nearby café. This guide informs me that Sydney is, “the most beautiful city in the world.” “What about Venice, and Paris, and Prague?” I wonder. They’re all supposed to be OK-ish.
The guide also explains about Sydney’s efficient network of buses, boats and trams. No rat-infested sewer trains in this city sweetie, it proudly proclaims.
I’m starting to feel a little anti-Sydney, but I decide to fight it. I know from experience that it won’t help my holiday experience at all.
Unfortunately that evening the efficient buses aren’t running to Taylor Square because
of the Mardi-Gras parade, so I take a taxi and get stuck in traffic diverted around the carnival trajectory.
I watch the counter climb and wonder how much that makes in French Francs, or even more complicated how much in the soon-to-be-introduced Euros.
As I get out to walk it, I wish there was a rat-infested sewer train.
Taylor square is throbbing; people are excitedly reserving their viewing positions. A huge advertising hoarding dominates the square – it shows a woman with her tits popping out of the top of a Wonderbra. The caption reads: And you thought you were gay.
It strikes me as sexist, patronising and homophobic. I wonder what reaction would be to a poster showing a man’s dick with the caption: And you thought you were straight.
Strange men are trying to sell me milk crates for anything from five to fifteen dollars. I reckon that they’re impractical gifts and that I’ll take back koala fridge magnets instead.
I go for a drink and chat to a couple of lesbians from Leeds in England. We drink too much. As the girls get louder they rope some cute Kiwis into our group.
Everyone is talking about Sydney. The girls agree with the Kiwis that Sydneysiders, “have their heads up their arses.”
A sudden movement announces the beginning and we all rush outside. It has started and I finally understand the milk crate thing, but a little late.
We are faced with an impenetrable wall of backs, four people deep and three milk crates high.
We run up and down frantically, (a lot of people are doing this I notice), trying to peer through nooks and crannies, but I can see nothing.
After twenty minutes, I move over to a topless guy with Wonderbra pectorals. “Can I can stand on your crate for a few seconds,” I ask, desperate to know what’s happening on the other side.
“Nope,” he says.
I turn to the guy next to him, who is looking down at me, smiling. He shakes his head. “Sorry.”
“The locals are friendly,” I say.
His smile fades. “What is your problem?” he asks.
I start to feel angry again. “My problem is flying for two fucking days to look at a row of backs,” I shout.
He shrugs. “Yeah, well sweetie, some of us had to walk minutes to get here,” he simpers. He turns back to watch whatever he’s watching. I consider pushing him over and imagine the whole row falling like dominoes, but just in time, an American girl next to him jumps down. “Here! Use mine!” she offers, grinning.
Kylie Minogue is blaring from one of the floats. Nah nah na, nah nah nah nah nah …
I smile at her and climb up. Thirty or forty men in red sequinned shorts are dancing in formation, showing their waxed bodies. They are followed by forty drag queens running around in a headless-chicken figure-of-eight movement. Aware of hogging my host’s milk crates, I jump down.
“So?” she asks.
It all seems a little empty to me – a little content-less, but I can’t put it into words, so I shrug.
“I know,” she says wrinkling her nose. “Once you’ve seen one butt in sequined shorts, you’ve seen them all.”
I thank her and wander off to a bar and drink another beer. I can feel it all sloshing around in my stomach. I speak to a Scottish girl who says she’s been living here a year. I’m feeling a little drunk again.
I say, “I was thinking of coming and living here. The gay scene is supposed to be so cool.”
She laughs. “Aw for God’s sake,” she says, her accent thicker than ever. The words whistle out of her mouth. “Don’t come here for that! They’re so up themselves!”
I giggle.
“They’re worse than the English,” she adds.
When she leaves, her stool is taken by a guy: balding head, clipped hair, stubble, square chin, bold eyebrows. A sort of young Bruce Willis; he asks me where I’m from.
“How does it feel to be in the most beautiful city in the world?” he asks.
“People keep saying that,” I say, “but who decides these things? Who decides that Sydney is better than Barcelona, or Rome?”
He gets up. “Winging pom,” he says, as he moves away across the bar.
I get maudlin and push through the crowd to another bar.
A guy comes up and speaks to me. “Hi! You’re cute,” he says.
I grin. I start to breathe again.
He says, “Having fun?”
I try to look lit-up and enthusiastic. Then I let my features drop; I shrug. He looks so disappointed that I force the words out. I say, “Yeah, sure, it’s great!”
He says, “There’s a sauna next door. My boyfriend is waiting.”
I smile uncomprehendingly. “You better get going then,” I say.
He smiles and leans in until his face is almost touching mine. “I thought you might come too?” he says.
I smile. “Nah, you’re alright thanks,” I say.
He laughs. “No?” His voice is incredulous.
I grin at him; I shrug. “Sorry, yeah, I mean, yeah, the answer is no.”
He blows through his lips and shakes his head. “Crazy planet!” he says.
I bite my lip and frown. “Crazy planet?”
He shrugs, already turning away. “Yeah man,” he says. “Like you refusing me!”
I feel homesick and utterly miserable, so I decide to go back to the hotel.
I stand in the midst of the international gay-fest waiting for a taxi. The crowd is diminishing and I imagine that they are all going to the party. I wonder how they got tickets.
The sign shouts at me. And you thought you were gay.
And I wonder. Sometimes I really do.
“Time to move on,” I decide.
At the hotel I open my wonderful book: Night Letters by Robert Dessaix – a Melbourne man, please note.
I nod to myself as I start to read. “Tomorrow Melbourne!” I say quietly.
The Universe Lets Us Down
The night before it happens, we sit up till the early hours. We’re talking out the big stuff in the garden and then, as the temperature drops, in the little purple lounge, sitting on the floor around bottles of beer. God, destiny and free will – it’s years since I have discussed this stuff. It takes me back to my college years.
Owen’s Australian wife gets bored with us and turns in at the beginning of the evening. She lives with the certainty that Buddhism is the only true religion. From that perspective she can’t see what’s to argue about, which seems fair enough. Faith, you’ve either got it or you haven’t.
Owen moves with increasing difficulty to the fridge for more beers and in the alcoholic fog, lanes are explored and then abandoned simply because we forget which way we’re going.
But in the morning when I awaken, I remember my problem.
I have been arguing that The Universe, The Force, or God for those who prefer, does not control what happens to me – I believe in free will.
And if God or the Infinite, or the System, is up there simply answering my own prayers, satisfying my own desires, creating the universe that I believe in, then why am I still single? Why am I so lonely? Why is my life so far from how I had hoped?
I have never really prayed, but this morning, as I wake up, I do. Not to any particular God – certainly not a mean judgemental man with a beard – but sticking to my theory of a benign force, I send out a call into the universe; I ask it for help.
I say, “I am sad and lonely. I need someone to share my life with. I need someone I can consider attractive, someone who makes me laugh, someone to build a history with. I’m sick of going on holiday on my own.”
I send it into the universe and forget about it.
We rumble out of Melbourne to St Kilda on the tram, wander along the seafront, and then take seats in a café. The gentle summer sun bounces off the walkways. People loll around on every available inch of grass or beach while roller-blades energetically thrust past.
I watch a man jog along the promenade past us, and pause speaking momentarily, almost unnoticeably. For an i
nstant his body has filled my mind.
He’s tall, with dark short hair, rounded friendly features. He has a square jaw, jogger’s thighs.
He trots by, and Owen and I continue talking, planning our journey south along the Great Ocean road. We order coffee.
The jogger speed-walks past in the other direction, and as he does so, as I turn my head to follow him, to fully appreciate this vision, he glances back. His brown eyes look puzzled, a half frown creases his forehead – I pause again but for longer.
Owen smiles at me knowingly. “What have you seen?” he asks.
“Oh nothing,” I grin.
The coffees arrive. I drink and wipe the froth from my mouth.
The man walks past again, but this time looking at me with a nonchalant half smile on his lips. He heads off to the left towards the car park and my heart sinks. Giving up any attempt at conversation, I strain to watch him go.
And then, it happens and it is magical. He pauses, puts on his t-shirt and freezes, maybe thirty seconds in all, visibly deciding what to do. Then he turns back and starts walking towards us.
As he sits at the table next to ours, my heart starts to race; it feels terrible, the same way it felt when I met Robert, like a heart attack. I change seats to be able to see him better.
Owen asks if I’m OK – he’s trying to talk to me, trying to tell me about a gallery in Canberra, but my mind is racing. Something tells me, something within me knows. This man is The One. He has been produced by The Force in response to my plea for help.
I try to think of a way to introduce myself, but my mind is a blank, everything seems cheap, stupid, obvious. It remains blank as he orders – his voice, smooth, rich, Canadian, I decide – and as he eats: oysters and salad, devoured with pleasure.
My heart’s still racing. Between oysters he’s glancing directly at me, his eyebrows raised into an amused question, a question not from him but from life: “So this is what you wanted, will you now act?”
I need to pull myself together.
I go to the bathroom to splash my face with cold water, but as I come out he’s there, filling the doorway, smiling crookedly, waiting.
50 Reasons to Say Goodbye Page 11