Isabelle the Navigator

by Luke Davies

  In the early days, weeks, months, we were mostly interested in making love. I came to love his body more than any other I had known. And he, I guess, mine. What is love, in the beginning, if not this mapping out, this settling into the other’s undulations?

  With Matt things were different. When I made love with him it was the only time I did not feel disembodied. It was the only time it did not seem as if the actual act of sex was a high-speed struggle with flames, with something that could never be grasped. With Matt everything slowed down. I tasted his sweetness. I felt his body and we fitted together.

  I came to realise, by way of contrast, that in the past when I had fucked other boys I had really been aware only of myself. When I made love with Matt I became suffused with an awareness of him. I became fascinated with every curve of muscle on his shoulder-blade, engrossed by the sweat on the arch of his neck when he came, hypnotised by the pounding of his heart against my hand.

  Certain events stood out as we wove into each other’s lives those threads of love. How he taught me to leap downwards, the opposite of the high jump. First you grow up and then you grow calmer.

  Matt knew about a cliff twelve metres high on the harbour around from Watson’s Bay. Now and then on summer weekends he jumped off this cliff with his friends. He somehow convinced me to jump, to swallow all that acrid adrenalin and leap from the edge. It was a rush of fear and relief but after the first jump I loved it. After a time I discovered that the fear began to go, and jumping off the cliff became for me like some weird act of meditation.

  When I leapt out from the rock I experienced for that second of free fall a silence that enveloped me like a blanket. When I leapt I hung suspended in the air and the water came towards me and I heard nothing. As if controlled by a switch, all the ordinary sounds of the day dropped away instantly and there was nothing but the sun and the sky and the green water coming closer.

  One weekday morning, though, we went there alone, and everything was different. I had always jumped in the afternoon, in the blazing sun, when the rocks were scattered with tribes of loud kids and all the air was light with noise.

  Now I came with Matt on a dark morning, the air laden with heaviness and about to burst. The sky drizzled but the humidity was intense. Our shirts clung to our backs. A sweet and sticky aroma rose from the asphalt of the carpark where it had absorbed the thin soup of rain like a sponge.

  We walked barefoot; only the sand on the path to the cliffs was cool. We were quiet that morning. This worked as a sign for me: a portent of love not because of silence itself but because that silence went in through my stomach before it registered anywhere else. I sensed a love so large I could travel vast distances and never once step outside it.

  Even my heart that morning was not yet aware, could not have been aware, of an emotion that can be sensed only by some animal instinct, of a psychic rumbling not even the most delicate seismograph could trace.

  The cliffs were deserted. We stood there alone, at 9 a.m. on a weekday in the rain, looking across the harbour at the city in the distance, and looking down to the green swell of water twelve metres below. He said then, with his hands plunged nonchalantly into his back pockets, that he loved me.

  I sensed the warm grey morning crowding down, and in that unnatural summer gloom bridges of electricity flickered and sparked and fused between us. I had thought about it since Kalbarri but now, for the first time, I said the same words back to him. We kissed there on the cliff.

  I had not known what kind of kiss it would be, short or long. At the last moment before contact our lips parted. We kissed for maybe three seconds, maybe five. It felt wet and hot, above all hot. We pulled away and I heard a faint murmur leave his lips; even so close, the sound was almost lost in the distance from his mouth to my ears. But it was there, distinct and clear, as if the whole world for that instant was that soft moan, that murmur of desire and melting—the murmur of all possibilities. I felt it in the spine, where it continued to echo and buzz.

  He had to go to work: he had a meeting on behalf of Spud Gun, with a record company. We hadn’t yet moved in together. That evening he turned up and we didn’t even say a word. We kissed at the door of my bedroom and fell inwards onto the bed. He touched my breasts, which were tight and menstrual. I was filled with fluid. I rubbed my belly and groaned. My mind began to drift, deluged by the onslaught of wanting. We were becoming effortlessly unclothed. My nipples were erect, stretched tight in their expansion. My breathing was fast and shallow.

  He said, ‘I want to fuck you in the shower.’

  I thought of all that effort. ‘Fuck here.’

  ‘No. You’ll get blood on your sheets.’

  ‘Blood? Blood is not a problem. Put it everywhere. We’ll put a towel down.’

  ‘Blood is fine. It’s not that. But please, let’s fuck in the shower. I want to do it on the hard floor. I don’t know why. And the blood will wash away.’

  I saw the look of dreaming and surrender in his eyes.

  I felt beneath me the soft curves of the mattress and pillows and sheets. I thought of the sharp lines and right-angles of the tiles in the bathroom. I felt my legs go weak and light. A voice inside me said, ‘The bathroom. The bathroom.’ Clearly the bed would have been more comfortable, but sometimes comfort is not the point.

  We left the light off in the bathroom. The steam from the shower could be seen framed in the patch of light that the window made. Only the moonlight shone through. A kind of sensory imbalance began to occur. The sticky heat engulfed us. The roar of the water seemed to echo exponentially on the tiles. It was an enormous old hot water boiler and the shower never ran out.

  There was no other sound. But the sound of the water was everywhere. It was the same kind of silence and non-silence as on Big Rat Island.

  In awkward positions, standing first and sliding downwards, we began to touch each other. He lowered me to the floor. The shower enclosure was as long as a bath and narrow. Our heads and shoulders were under the stream of water.

  I heard nothing but that roar, felt nothing but heat. My thoughts began to warp in that sensory delirium. The thought flickered through my mind that I wished I had a machine to measure my skin temperature. What extraordinary level would it register? Everything went silver and wet and snapped into frantic overdrive, although everything happened in slow motion.

  I knew nothing but water and skin: two-dimensional things. Then Matt entered me, and I began to drown in a three-dimensional world.

  This is what happened. In that steamy darkness my eyelids fluttered. The colour all around was silver, the temperature close to scalding. The noise was deafening. My body felt weak and far away. We slid without friction in the wetness, in the water and the blood.

  I manoeuvred around and lowered myself on top of him, his head tilted against the tiled wall, beneath the taps. I felt the hard spray of water hit the back of my head and stream through my hair and onto his face. We tried to kiss between gulps of water and gasps for air.

  In the cramped space I raised my upper body away from him, arching my head back under the shower. With my arm around his neck I pulled him towards me. I held onto the soap dish for balance and pulled his face into my breasts. We moaned softly in rhythm, in surprise at such overwhelming pleasure.

  We swayed for a while.

  My eyes had adjusted a little. I saw his face faintly lit by the light from the window. All the world was liquid now, or else steam, liquid whose molecules have been agitated by heat.

  My hair fell across his eyes. The water splashed in tiny silver splinters off his face. My eyes rolled upwards and I stared at absolutely nowhere, nothing, the dark far corners of the ceiling of the bathroom receding in the mists. I felt the first tug of momentum towards orgasm as one hears, in old movies, the distant whistle of the steam train. I began to rub myself to keep it on the rails. Round and round at the same time I thrust up and down on Matt.

  As my pulse began to race I moaned almost soundlessly. Matt’s lips
parted a fraction more. A bridge of saliva stretched from his top to his bottom lip. It, too, was silver as it lengthened for an instant like elastic. A drop of water collided with the bridge and it exploded—I’m sure I heard the sound through the roar of the shower—with the minute hiss of liquid thrown on a hotplate.

  I leant down for a moment to kiss his neck with an open mouth. His eyes were closed, his head flung sideways. I sat back up and watched him from a distance as I ground back and forth on the bone of his pelvis and felt him inside me. The more I arched the small of my back, the more I felt his belly against the fast-moving knuckles of my hand. I felt him start to come.

  Then very suddenly, very powerfully, there came for me the moment of the freeze-frame—or was it strobing?—infinitely compressed, infinitely brief, infinitely extended, infinite. Physicists talk about the space-time foam, in which time does not move forward as elsewhere in the universe. Quantum theory says the space-time foam exists inside the ‘naked singularity’ of a black hole. The theory stresses the unknowability of the space-time foam state. And here it was, and is, beneath our noses.

  During that moment there was no more sound, and there was nothing but infinite space, for a very long time, all around me. Even Matt was not there. All my muscles contracted. I pushed down on his cock, and shuddered, and rocked myself into an imploded place. Cradle and all. Then sound returned, and the noise of the echo of the water was like whole factories winding down, the whirring and spinning of gigantic wheels and cogs losing all momentum and drifting into a profound silence. And suddenly I was aware of my heart, as frantic as any voodoo drum.

  We could hardly speak as we towelled ourselves. Well, it’s hardly as if there was anything to say. We went to bed still slightly damp. He leant over and kissed me on each of my eyelids. We fell asleep deeply within minutes.

  The real heart of love moved forward from there, the daily ups and downs, the big in the little event. Later, looking back, the day of the cliff and the night of the shower came to represent some mysterious point at which the way I looked at Matt began to change. Or perhaps I myself was beginning to change: ready for the thing to enter, and to enter into the thing; not the practice runs of the late teens and early twenties, but the heart in flood and the hard work too as life rolls on. Give it all to me, I thought I heard myself say.

  The imaginatively named Matt Smith Management did indeed flower, and Spud Gun became, for a couple of years, one of the biggest bands in the country. He didn’t get to buy or build his house on the cliff, but we lived near the beach at Bondi and were comfortable and happy. I set up a makeshift darkroom in the laundry and found a job in a photo lab. I was hoping to improve the developing techniques I had learnt in college. At this stage of my life I still clung, like many of my friends, to the romantic dream of being a photographer. Everything comes to nothing in the end, I suppose. Or at least, nothing happens exactly the way we imagine it.

  Yet for several years we would work together through the good and the bad, the doubts and the bright certain moments, through all the long domestic haul and the tiny actions of the days. I came to realise that love was a series of such actions, and that action has a certain grace and power in it. All that I have told you is how the intertwining began. But life can be larger than love. I learnt too late, after four years of developing parallel loyalties and trust, permanence and commitment, leading up to talk of babies, that absolutely anything can happen and if it can it probably will. I learnt too late that what is most important to us is always most precious at the moment it occurs, and it is precious in its absolute immediacy and not as some vague confirmation of future directions; since the only certain fact, aside from death, is the flimsiness of everything. Such flimsiness hit me like a knockout blow in the photo lab, the day everything came to an end.

  Accident

  MATT’S DEATH SEEMED LIKE THE END OF MY LIFE, but in the strangest way it moved everything forward, to places like Paris and the place inside where you start to feel okay.

  Tragedy arrived as a brutal interruption to the normal flow of time. It makes sense that there is a reservoir of time, possibly infinite but at least enormous, into which life dips; and then there is the time that flows, neither fast nor slow, in a landscape of pain. And there is never any way to prepare for the moment when you shift from the one to the other.

  At the instant when I knew that he was dead, I was struck with horror by the fact that our last days together had been particularly uneventful. I’d been in the middle of the pleasantness of living my life and of being in a lasting relationship. After four years, and many ups and downs, we had seemed to be coming to a point of new commitment. Intimacy was a powerful thing.

  It was an Indian summer. After the school year started again, the beach emptied out but the days remained warm. The light seemed to hang suspended hours beyond dusk. Matt’s office was above a pub in Newtown and he was tour-managing overseas acts as well as managing Spud Gun and two other bands. We lived in North Bondi, away from the main traffic flow, in a desolate grid of streets that I had come to love. On sweltering afternoons when I wasn’t working, Matt would ring sometimes and say he was leaving work early. He would make his way on his motorbike through the fumes of King Street and along Cleveland, and I would wait fifteen minutes then slowly amble to the north end of Bondi Beach, our meeting place. I would bring Matt’s Speedos and an extra towel. We would while away a couple of hours, lying on our towels on the sand and chatting, going into the water whenever we got too hot.

  The weather stayed balmy into early autumn. In Sydney, April is the loveliest month. One weekday afternoon we met. The sky was stretched tight like a lacquered drumskin. Instead of finding ourselves a space on the sand, we made our way past the children’s pool and the rock pool and around the rocks of the north end to the fishermen’s boat ramp near the point at Ben Buckler. We waited for a gap between waves and dived off the rocks into the deep water.

  Later we ate laksa at the noodle bar on Campbell Parade. As the night came on I chatted on the phone to Louise while Matt worked on his motorbike under the porch light.

  In the morning he was out of bed early; he had a big day on and wanted to beat the worst of the peak-hour traffic up Old South Head Road. He jumped in and out of the shower, made coffee and came into the bedroom.

  ‘Okay, I’m off,’ he said, setting my coffee down on the side table and kissing me on the forehead. ‘What time do you finish today?’

  ‘I work from ten till six.’

  ‘Maybe we’ll have a late swim, then?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I’ll ring you.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Bye!’

  ‘See you.’

  A while later I got up and went to work in the photo lab. We mainly developed for magazines and publishers and professional photographers so it was always busy and I never had time to think. Matt hadn’t rung by five o’clock and when I rang his office, the answering machine was on. ‘Where are you?’ I said. ‘I’m leaving work soon.’

  Fifteen minutes later I was in the darkroom developing the last print for the day. My mind was in neutral in the red womb of light, though I was vaguely aware of the anticipation, the pleasure that swimming in the ocean would bring. I always imagined the wash of photographic chemicals that clung to my skin during the course of work trailing behind me like a porpoise’s wake as I dived beneath the waves for that first time.

  There was a knock at the door. Sharon, the front-desk girl, called out. ‘Uh, Isabelle, there’s someone here to see you. I think it’s urgent.’

  ‘I’ll be one minute.’ I clipped a peg onto the last photo and rinsed the trays.

  When I walked out into the foyer I was surprised—and happy—to see Matt’s mother and father there. I smiled, then stopped. They were clutching each other, perched on the edge of the couch. Mrs Smith’s face was white, her make-up streaked with tears.

  ‘Hi Anne, hi Harvey…What? What is it?’ And yet it was so clear it could only be
one thing. Mrs Smith stood up and swept towards me and a half-strangled noise gurgled from her throat.

  ‘Oh, Isabelle,’ she moaned.

  ‘Oh no,’ I said softly.

  ‘It’s Matt.’ She clasped my wrists. ‘There’s been an accident.’

  ‘Is he okay?’ It was a pure moment of change.

  ‘He’s dead,’ she cried, and broke down completely. Mr Smith held her tight in his arms.

  I turned away and gripped the counter. It is horrific how much these things are like movies. Did movies get it right or do they teach us how to act? Sharon was standing with her hands to her cheeks, her mouth open, her face white. Mr Smith, rigid with shock, was trying to soothe his wife. Inside of me one part was saying, ‘There must be some mistake.’ The other part, further away, but more insistent, was saying, ‘That’s it. Matt’s gone. He is dead and everything’s different.’

  ‘An accident on King Street. Truck didn’t see him,’ Mr Smith said in a quavering voice, stroking his wife’s hair, pulling me into a three-way hug. ‘He was never conscious. Lived for an hour. We’ve identified the body. But if you need to see him too, we’ll take you back there now.’ The words were surreal. For as long as I’d known him he was Matt and now he was ‘the body’. What did that mean? Was there a soul? It was inconceivable that we wouldn’t meet again, the next day, perhaps, at the beach, when all of this was over.

  ‘Yes. Oh yes,’ I said. ‘We have to go there now.’

  We drove to the hospital, Mr Smith driving, Mrs Smith and I clutching each other in the back seat. I gazed numbly out of the window and watched the faces of the people passing in the street. Most had been touched by death. Everyone was marked by it.

  When we arrived we found that the body had already been taken to the morgue. I was gliding through the passive heat of shock and so nothing came as an inconvenience.

  The morgue was, like the hospital, a world of antiseptic smells, hard lines and linoleum floors, and yet it lacked the hospital’s manic urgency, was devoid of bustle: a place where hope and fear were making the transition into defeat and acceptance.