‘There are these antelope in South America,’ he tells me. ‘And when all the antelope are being attacked these ones stay as decoys and get eaten so that everyone else can get away. We’re the antelope. That’s all. People like us.’
‘I’m not the motherfucking antelope,’ I shriek.
I talk for an interminable time about why we are not the antelope, about how human nature is not predisposed towards greed and cruelty, about why we have to get rid of the class system to have any equality.
I believe in changing the world – that we are going to change the world – and I am helplessly, ruinously, fearlessly, bewilderingly optimistic about other people.
We have sex in the gardens and a man walking his dog stops to look. Afterwards, Josh is silent. I wonder if I’m shockingly ugly and just haven’t realised. ‘What just happened?’ I ask him but he sits like a patient in shock and doesn’t answer. I adopt my mother’s habit of speaking to myself but for an audience of one: him. ‘Jesus fucking Christ, this is ridiculous. I can’t believe I’m…’ but I don’t really have the enthusiasm for it. I think if he tells me what’s wrong then I’ll be able to fix it. I get up to walk away but he grabs my hand.
He takes pieces of paper out of my notebook, crumples them up and throws them into the grass. I go around picking them back up and putting them in the bin. It’s almost hilarious. There is something comforting to being this abject. I go home and I delete his number from my telephone.
‘He looked,’ I tell my friend Meaghan, ‘as if he’d witnessed a car crash.’ Meaghan puts her hands under my chin and looks straight at me. ‘What are you doing?’ She leans back and rolls a cigarette. ‘Where do you find these people?’
‘At K-Mart,’ I tell her. ‘In the garden section.’ Then, in case she hasn’t grasped my mood, ‘for five ninety-nine.’ She shakes her head, puts her arms around me. ‘Oh whatever,’ I groan. ‘It’s fine. Next time someone warns me they’re going to hurt me, I’ll listen,’ I tell her. But I don’t. I will be okay, I think viciously, I’m always okay.
That night I play Leonard Cohen on repeat and try to feel like someone getting into a mess. “It’s hard to hold the hand of anyone who is reaching for the sky just to surrender.”
* * *
I see Josh again at a party. We climb up onto the roof of the house, look at the city skyline, and smoke a joint. The house is some throwback to the 1990s with mirror-balls, ironic porn-star posters, horrendous seventies’ panelling up the walls, and one room painted black with foil sheets pinned over every window. He tells me somebody did shoot a pornographic film in their backyard, next to the outdoor bath and the fairy lights. He tells me some of his friends earn money by allowing videos displaying images of their faces as they orgasm to appear on websites for other people to look at. We talk about how we’d like to die if we had to kill ourselves and I find that my heart has turned. He bores me; the whole moment’s plagiarised from a conversation in a scene from a Sylvia Plath novel he hasn’t read. His suffering settles across both of us, stops the words in our throats, turns us into ghosts. I quote Annie Lennox, ‘Dying is easy, it’s living that scares me to death.’ Then I say I’m going. He tells me he needs me. I’m supposed to be his friend. He thought I believed in him. That I’m a fucking bitch. Meaghan’s making crepes when I get home – she’s obsessed by them; she makes them almost hourly; she can’t stop eating them.
‘So?’
‘I’m a fucking bitch, apparently.’
She makes my bed for me, turns down the covers beautifully and puts a Fantale on the pillow as if our home is an expensive hotel. The mice scrabble and skitter in the hall.
‘At least he said what he means.’ I murmur as I climb into bed. ‘People don’t say what they mean.’
‘Maybe they don’t know.’
When I was a child, I used to only like to cry in the rain as if the water disguised it or if it wasn’t that I was weeping but just a lot of crying going on out there under the sky. My dad used to kneel down in the soaking wet street and wipe my eyes. His fingers were so delicate. I put my own fingertips to my skin and think of his hands.
* * *
Josh writes me a letter of apology. His handwriting is so careful it moves me. He has carefully blacked out all of the emotional declarations and I spend ages trying to understand the censored sentences, trying to decode them back-to-front from the other side of the paper. I would like to read love and regret into the gaps in the letter and so I look and look for signs. But Meaghan’s older sister is staying with us, all crying jags in the night and wine for breakfast, and she’s talking loudly about the married man she loved who pretended he had returned to his elderly parents in Hungary instead of admitting he didn’t want to see her anymore. ‘He played this game, when we were in the bath, lying in the water together, of ‘oh, let’s close the door, we’ll wake the children… we didn’t have any, obviously… and I got this feeling just of well-being or… almost dizzy with joy because it meant he was joking about us having children one day, hinting we would have children together, and I thought this meant he loved me.’ So I can’t find any love in the scribbled over passages.
I only see Josh one more time, although I fall in love with many variations on the theme and they too do all the things they warned me they might with remarkable consistency. I go to his graduation. I make him wear a badge about university fees for the vice chancellor to see when he queues to shake his hand. I am at the ceremony because Josh’s mother is sick and his sister has just come out of rehab for heroin addiction and he is alone again. I’m stoned and the ceremony is interminable. His sister hugs me then, as we sit waiting for Josh to collect his degree, she leans across and starts pinching my thigh. I look across but she is staring straight ahead. I let her pinch me, I don’t know why, I just sit there and don’t say anything. It seems rude somehow to lean over and say, ‘Excuse me could you please stop pinching my leg,’ so I don’t.
When Josh goes on-stage his hands shake and he checks to see if we are watching him. He’s just a boy, I think. That’s all.
The women behind us are drunk.
‘He’s cute, right?’
‘Josh? Jesus, I slept with him and I can tell you he was a fiend. He was a sex fiend.’
I turn around and look at them. They’re south side girls, gold jewellery, fake tan, lovely nails.
‘Annie said he was a creep.’
‘Not a… creep… slept with half of Melbourne maybe.’
* * *
My mother had been firm with me after my father died. ‘You’re going to meet some very damaged men, charmingly damaged or charming and damaged and you can feel sorry for them, that’s fine, but feel sorry for them at a distance, don’t love them.’ I was ten. I did not know what she was talking about. And if I had, I probably wouldn’t have listened. Warnings were like invitations for me, like drugs: I followed a warning to the end of its possibility; I seemed to choose stories for which I already knew the endings.
Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 1, Issue 1 Page 3