by Michele Lee
‘Geez girl,’ Four Track observed. ‘Your housemates are a bit straight.’
This was true. But I was a bit straight myself. I’d been this way for the last twenty-one years. I’d done theatre during high school and uni but I hadn’t regarded theatre as a career, I’d genuinely wanted to use my Advertising degree and work in an ad agency this year, my first year out. You could have accused me of being a neo-liberal, I wouldn’t have known what that meant but I knew that I didn’t read the paper, I didn’t question my politicians or anyone in power, I enjoyed the benefits of supermarkets and chain stores, my car let off carbon dioxide and I was more worried about petrol prices than pollution. I never rode a bike, I definitely didn’t own one, I hadn’t since I was a kid. I watched commercial television uncritically, and I liked it. I didn’t read books. In fact, I didn’t know why Four Track had agreed to be my boyfriend. He gave me Crime and Punishment, which he’d had on his bedside table in his room in the dilapidated share-house he lived in over in Reid. His landlord was an ageing hippie, who’d illegally built three shanties in the backyard that he rented out to arts students. In the front yard, the landlord, without government approval, had constructed a giant concrete and chicken-wire sculpture forest.
I couldn’t picture myself or my two housemates in a chicken-wire sculpture house. The female housemate was a PR student and the male housemate was studying architecture. He wasn’t cashed up but he still found it affordable and preferable to buy a brand new Fantastic Furniture package for the apartment rather than go op-shopping. After he assembled his furniture, he spread the items across the apartment like jigsaw pieces from a giant puzzle of beige blah. I had a few things that I dispersed around the apartment, intruding on his puzzle pieces – a vintage orange lamp, a fake-reed basket with fake flowers tucked inside it, a glazed bowl from Copperart, a cheap framed print of two cherubs, a patterned throw-rug, and two amateur Jackson Pollack-style paintings that I’d bought from a garage sale. In my penchant for second-hand things, perhaps Four Track sensed some redeeming potential.
I’d recently bought one of my first cookbooks and I used it to prepare a feast for my twenty-second birthday party. As a teenager the extent of my cooking had been to make cakes from the cookbook I’d borrowed from the neighbour or to make mince curries using packet flavouring. During uni I continued to enjoy carbs and convenience: from the student refectory, on a weekly basis I ate $1 finger buns or $2 tubs of steamed rice with stir-fry sauce, or I ate toasted cheese sandwiches at Subaru’s house. Living out of home, however, prodded my curiosity for cooking. For my birthday I cooked for half the day – including making adventurous things with lentils and blue cheese – and arranged my offerings on the surface of a teak sideboard I’d bought from a second-hand store in Belconnen and then had had Four Track lug up the stairs to place in the dining room. My sideboard sat beside the fake-pine dining suite, but up against the wall, the two pieces eyeing each other off, teak versus pine.
Four Track had complained about the three flights of stairs in Kaleen. He’d been sweating and had had to put down the sideboard and stop on one of the landings.
‘At least it will be easy going down,’ he’d said, resigned to helping me with the next move.
I couldn’t touch him. He was soaked.
Four Track’s mum lived a five-minute drive from my place. She had moved to Canberra from the country because Four Track’s sister needed to be in Canberra for constant medical treatment. On top of being a carer, his mum had started studying too at the Australian National University. This was her first time at uni because she’d had children so young and hadn’t studied beyond high school.
Four Track and I slept over sometimes to keep her company. Other nights we stayed just for dinner.
I’d roasted a chicken for dinner, although it was a misnomer to call it roasted. I’d stuffed it with lemons and then baked it in a Pyrex dish and it had stewed on its underside in its own tangy juices. Although the meat was moist and white, I was bummed by the results. I had imagined gleaming chestnutcoloured skin. But what was to be expected of a girl who’d only recently begun cooking for herself.
It tasted good though. I’d made gravy too.
‘Thanks girl,’ Four Track said. ‘It’s great.’
‘It’s delicious,’ his mum said.
‘Good,’ his dad said.
The Four Track clan agreed that the chicken was great, delicious and good.
Four Track’s dad wasn’t usually in Canberra. He spent most of his time in Carcoar working on the family farm. He worked hard, day in and day out, managing flocks of sheep. Most days he was outside topless, not soaking his shirts with sweat, just letting his chest glint with it. His chest was brown, so brown that he’d once been mistaken for an Aboriginal and a concerned neighbour had reported to Four Track’s mum that a suspicious person was on the property.
Four Track predicted that he going to end up running the farm, and it would be a short time coming. He said, ‘He’s probably only got a few more years in him.’ He was thinking about his dad.
Four Track and I were outside his mum’s rented townhouse in the cul de sac. He barracked for the Swans and he liked to show his enthusiasm by making me kick the footy with him. He surmised that my size nine hoofers, unusual for an Oriental, made me an apt kicking buddy. He’d also taught me a simple drumming routine so when we went inside after dark I could jam with him while he was on electric guitar.
‘I don’t think my brother will be heading back to Carcoar any time soon,’ Four Track said. ‘So it will probably be up to me.’ ‘Do you really think your dad is going to die?’ ‘Yeah. He’s old and he’s worked a hard life.’ Four Track’s dad didn’t like going to the doctor. He’d fractured his hand punching a sheep, possibly broken it, and he’d simply wrapped it up and continued using it, cracked bones and all.
I visited Carcoar three or four times. Four Track warned me about his family house and that I should expect a ramshackle construction, expanded haphazardly over several generations by family members who lacked architectural skill. The original building, at the centre, was a low-ceilinged cottage with a living room, a kitchen and bedrooms. The bathroom had been tacked onto the side of the house and a sunken family room added out the back, sunken perhaps by accident rather than good design. There was table tennis in this room.
We played several games.
‘Come on, girl,’ he said. ‘You’re Asian. You’re naturally gifted at this sport.’
Actually, I was good. We were both surprised. Four Track won but he was wet with the physical exertion of fending off my return hits.
His bedroom was next to the kitchen and could only be accessed via a wide passageway that had also served as his sister’s room. His room, preserved like a museum exhibit from his teen years, had two single beds – one had been his, the other his brother’s. The boys had shared a wardrobe too, which had a full-length mirror on the door. I couldn’t imagine either one of them having preened in front of the mirror, getting ready for the hour-long bus trip to high school. Four Track and I sat in front of the mirror and with hungry wonder we watched ourselves fuck, our bodies the real curios in this museum. Four Track described the initial honeymoon period in a relationship as being ‘cunt-struck’, in awe of one another’s magical genitalia. All our meetings would end up in bed, awed and awed.
When we were taking breaks from sex, we explored Carcoar and the surrounding areas. Down on the Belubula River, he paddled us out to the middle in an old canoe. The water wasn’t very deep but I didn’t know how to swim so I sat inside the canoe in my blue bikini. My shoulders browned.
The hectares of his family’s sheep-grazing land rested behind the hill and wool-heavy sheep wandered over and around it in the heat, little spots in the distance, their impractical jackets of wool now at an ideal length for being shorn off. Near the bank of the river was a small, disintegrating house that Four Track said he had a mind to fix up when he eventually ended up at Carcoar, shearing jackets for a
living. He might even get as brown as me, as brown as an Aboriginal. He didn’t speak in terms of sharing the farm life with anyone, but in my mind I wistfully inserted myself in his future. I wondered how often Asian people drove through Carcoar, if they stopped to fill up their cars with petrol at the general store that Four Track’s family owned and ran. Certainly there were no Asian people in the pub. I never went in. I only ever saw the veranda populated by the same ancient locals, clutching their beers and staring out onto the road. They were permanent fixtures, another museum exhibit.
Yes, I imagined myself living in Carcoar.
Four Track diagnosed me.
‘It’s inevitable, girl,’ he said, ‘that you end up marrying your second boyfriend. You had a go with the first one and that didn’t work. So the second time you’re much wiser with who you pick.’
I’d had my first boyfriend: Subaru. And Four Track had had his first girlfriend in high school. She had curly hair and cheeks like ripe apples. He didn’t keep mementoes of her and he hardly mentioned her, except for orating the epic story of their car crash on the farm with Four Track having to carry her heroically from a ravine all the way back into town. He liked telling stories. When he was performing music on stage, his favourite part was the banter in between songs. He shed his monosyllabic hulk-ness, he became the gregarious giant.
He was right. My housemates in Kaleen were too straight for me and I wasn’t as straight as I thought I was. I didn’t know what I was, actually. It was making me sad, feeling like this. I dripped, like the blobs of paint on my pretend Pollack paintings, and I felt like I had no canvas on which to be caught. I hadn’t done as well as I wanted to in my advertising units at uni and that hadn’t made me feel very good, to be in the middle or near the bottom of the class. It hadn’t mattered how hard I’d worked, or how stressed I’d been, I didn’t get the internships and I didn’t pursue the advertising agencies, they certainly didn’t chase me. I left the peak body in Deakin and got a new job in the public service but I sat down worried with my manager soon after I started and I said that I felt like a cog in it all. She told me not to give up. She’d floundered and flailed too after she graduated but it all works out.
It seemed to be working out for Four Track. He wasn’t going to have to run the farm too soon after all; his robust dad was far from dying, and Four Track had quit his graphic design career and the NMIT had accepted him into a classical music course in Melbourne. We didn’t talk in detail about the logistics of a long-term relationship but he was still reliably here to help me move from Kaleen into the seventies duplex in Downer, in the bohemian part of town, the East Brunswick of Canberra. I’d met with my future housemates on the lawns of Gorman House for my successful share-house interview. They were all friends, they dressed like extras from Degrassi Junior High, and they seemed to think that I’d fit in. One housemate was a young lesbian doing accelerated courses at university. As a child, she’d listened only to ABC radio and watched ABC TV. As a teenager, she’d had a cherished girlfriend that her parents let stay over. The second housemate was a quieter woman my age, sexuality uncertain, and she’d met the younger girl in an anorexia recovery group. Sometimes she cried and I heard her being comforted by the younger housemate. And the third housemate was their mutual friend, a gay support worker who looked after clients with a disability. He was unsentimental about them and didn’t even seem to like them. He was more interested in going to the sole gay club in Canberra, The Cube, and staying on until closing hours to pick up the dregs. Once I greeted him on the stairwell and a plump boy was trailing behind him. He was about eighteen.
‘This is …’ my housemate said, hung-over and attempting an introduction. The boy was embarrassed and told me, and my housemate, his name.
A fifth person moved in. He was a single father and a friend of the gay housemate. To make room for him, the young lesbian housemate gave up her room and moved her bed onto the upstairs balcony. It was generous enough in space but it didn’t have walls, just a flyscreen. She was happy to be outdoors for the summer. Her bookcase even fitted on the balcony.
In the kitchen, downstairs on the floor I inhabited, I asked my new housemate to please leave the stovetop lit after he removed his pot of pasta. Just as Four Track had his quirks about certain kinds of irritating noises, I had my own quirks too: I liked to minimise how many matches I used in lighting a stove. It had something to do with minimising mess in the kitchen in general. Growing up with nine people had meant that there was always a dirty fork or dirty knife or once-used cup lying around. And not only had I been the jokester in my family, but the second mummy, the second matriarch. In my family home, in share-houses, I noticed and reacted to unnecessary mess and waste, I responded to it almost personally. It annoyed this housemate for some reason, my quirk and my request. He snapped at me. I was surprised, noone snapped at each other in this tranquil house, but I wasn’t really sure what was going on in his life. I knew he’d moved in because of some not so good personal circumstances to do with being a single father. He didn’t know what was going on in my life either. He didn’t leave the stovetop on and I ended up using an extra match.
By that stage, I had visited Melbourne to see my longdistance boyfriend. He was happier in Melbourne but not so happy to stay with me.
‘Girl,’ Four Track said on the phone, ‘I don’t think it’s going to work.’
I cried so hard, in that way where you gulped for air but that wasn’t enough to comfort your lungs and yet some invisible wretch then reached down your throat and stole what meagre air there was, rattling your vital organs as they burgled you. I don’t mean to be melodramatic. That’s how I knew how to feel at the time. He was sad but he didn’t cry, he hadn’t cried throughout his sister’s illness.
The younger housemate asked me if I was okay. Not about the confrontation I’d had over the matches. She could see that I’d been losing weight and I guess she was sensitive to that, having lost so much of it herself once before. I was dripping, I felt like a cog. I would drive out for forty minutes from Downer to Greenway to my public service job in that big multi-level building, where I swiped in and out, and then I’d drive back home to Downer, and I kept thinking what the fuck am I doing in this routine, this cubicle, in this multilevel building staring out over the fringes of Tuggeranong. I’d never had a problem with being from the dowdy suburbs, not during high school or college or uni, but now I did. I’d never felt embarrassed, like a gay boy on the stairs, about being here, being a straight girl in dead-end Canberra.
I’d read Crime and Punishment and Four Track had bought me Catcher in the Rye for my twenty-second birthday and later I’d bought Catch 22 for myself, his favourite book. Four Track was like Hungry Joe, who couldn’t stand the noises outside of his tent. And I felt like Yossarian, who couldn’t stand anything but was stuck here anyway.
I bought a guitar from the music shop in Dickson and I strummed basic chords with my stiff fingers on the neck of a cheap Yamaha; in his Northcote share-house he perfected diminished barre chords on his Maton. I became proficient enough to transition from A Minor to F. He formed a band and they rehearsed in Moonee Ponds. I made up sad lullabies, crude in their construction, and they rang out into the first floor of my Downer share-house. His futon slats from the chicken-wire house were still in my shed, and he said he was planning to retrieve them. He visited when he made his way from Melbourne through Canberra back to Carcoar. We had sex but we stayed broken up.
‘Why do you want to talk about it?’ Four Track groans.
I’ve mentioned his sister. ‘Because enough time has passed?’ I say.
We sit at the Hotel Chancellor in the city, in the lobby. It’s Wednesday and only two nights after our two-for-one Wesley Anne meal. Four Track is unfortunately having to see me and my mullet again. Two times in the one fucking week. We’re waiting for his mum to finish showering in her room upstairs. She’s been at work that day in the city, training Victorian health workers in federal health department software
. She graduated from her degree a few years ago and through a graduate program she now works in the public service in Canberra, a mature-age cog. We’ll have a short meal together and then son and mother will see Jersey Boys, I’ll head home to Albert Street.
The roving waiter leans towards us with appetisers.
‘Look, girl,’ Four Track says. He has a duck roll and a beer. ‘I appreciate it but I’d rather not.’
Four Track helped me move into my first home in Melbourne, in West Brunswick. Once a month or so he and I would catch up and eat a meal. He’d drive us to Singh’s on Nicholson Street and get chicken korma – his favourite. He’d drive us back to my place, we’d smear curry onto soft pads of naan. Then upstairs. Sex, in that familiar bed which I’d dismantled in Downer and reassembled here. Or we’d head to his house, now that share-house in Thornbury. And as we drove down Victoria Street in West Brunswick, away from my bed, in that same Camry we’d driven in around Canberra, I said ‘We should go out again.’
According to him I married my second boyfriend. He’d been my second one. It was incongruous to be broken up, a violation of his own laws. Enough time had passed and perhaps, might I venture, our wintry Canberran dispositions had cleared up in Melbourne, defogged.
He said, without any hesitation, ‘No. Girl, we already tried it.’
‘Girl’ was his endearment, the only one and it was still in use, now to reason with me. He was firm and sounded very sure.
‘Oh,’ I murmured.
He softened. ‘Listen. We don’t work, not together.’