Love and Other U-Turns

by Louisa Deasey

  When I’ve finished, I light a candle for the bathroom, sinking into the hot water as the city whirrs around me. My ears file the familiar sounds through the bathroom window of a street I’ve known for years, and I give thanks for the peace at the end of a day when I farewelled the only possession which was really, really hard to let go. And with it, I’ve said goodbye to a bucket of fears and doubts, shedding a city skin I’d grown too comfortable and familiar with, ending a chapter of my life which I can never, ever return to.

  Having nothing exposes your soul’s real currency in this life. I vow not to let anything material define my true worth as a human, again. From now on, my daily thoughts, choices, decisions and words are going to provide the compass from which I steer my direction.

  Like a perfectly timed scene in a play, Jim’s trial comes to a close the night before I hand back the keys to my flat.

  ‘Red-bulling my way to you, babyyyyyy!’ he texts, as I’m carrying the vacuum cleaner down to the kind neighbour who brought me the chicken soup. She looks like it’s Christmas.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she says, inviting me in to her cluttered flat to meet her pet parrots.

  ‘Well, I’ve always wanted to cross the Nullarbor. After that, not sure …’

  She looks like she’s about to have a fit, convulsing and hearing voices I can’t even imagine. As I back out of her flat and say goodbye, she emerges from her inner world for a second, and yells after me, ‘The red dirt in Western Australia is what I loved best.’

  Even she’s been there. Everyone has a story.

  Jim arrives at 2 am to find me scrubbing the blinds with a bucket of soapy water. My two bags are packed by the door, with a pillow perched on top.

  ‘So, I guess you’re serious about hitting the road, then?’

  PART 2

  THE ROAD

  10

  Outsiders

  ‘Why can’t we just fall across a warm empty space to sleep in while someone’s at work?’

  ‘Oh, we’re not that evolved yet, Lou.’

  AFTER MEETING ME IN MY empty flat, Jim and I do one last lap to Sydney. He lands an audition for an ice-cream commercial before three clown gigs in a row so I meet Mystic Medusa for fish and chips on Clovelly Beach, talking about astrology and the coming eclipse season, while kids flip and fly around us in the water. Rounding the cliffs near Coogee, Jim jumps up in front of us in his clown gear, covered in shaving foam and toilet paper from the kids’ party.

  ‘Jimbo! You look ridiculous!’ says Mystic, so he throws himself into the waves to wash it off, forgetting a huge chunk of foam which remains in his ear, as he dries nonchalantly in the driver’s seat, cruising back to Lane Cove to collect our things before we do our last trip south on the Hume.

  We’ve been doing laps of Melbourne’s rain-slicked streets for hours now. Neither of us has slept since Sydney, and wasn’t that the day before yesterday … ? Not leaving Lane Cove until late that evening, we’d decided on a detour to Yass to drop in on one of Jim’s comedy friends doing a gig. So now I’m not sure what day it is, and when we last slept.

  Rolling back into Melbourne’s wind-whipped roads is like meeting someone I’ve always known under an entirely new set of circumstances. I no longer have an apartment in which to escape the long drives, soak in the bath, collapse into my bed. There are new rules to the relationship. I feel like an outsider.

  We drive down Glenlyon Road, in Brunswick, and I suspect that half the street is at work. I think of the sheer waste of all those spaces – doors you can close, taps with running water, roofs against the rain. That’s all we need. I don’t even care if there’s a proper bed or not. ‘Look at that house, I bet it’s empty. We’d be out by the time they got home … you could just leave some balloon animals for the kids … why can’t we just fall across a warm empty space to sleep in, while someone’s at work?’

  ‘Oh, we’re not that evolved yet, Lou.’

  Jim nods contentedly, gazing softly at the road ahead like everything will happen at just the right time, then he passes me the packet of Allen’s snakes with a cute smile. ‘Here, Lou, I saved you all the red ones.’ He puts his hand on my leg, and gives me that look.

  I remember where my new home is.

  Here, now.

  We could call my sister, or even some of my friends, who have spare beds and rooms in various suburbs of Melbourne, but finding a place to rent together marks the beginning of the journey. My promise is to follow Jim where the gigs are and try everything I can to see life from places I never would have tried. This week, he has two comedy gigs in Melbourne. After that, we’re heading west.

  Cruising through rainy Fitzroy, just blocks from the apartment I packed up and left, just a few weeks ago, we spy a piece of paper, flapping in the window of a pub on the corner of Alexander Parade:

  ‘Short and long term accommodation available. Enquire within.’

  ‘Bingo!’ says Jim, like he was expecting it. We pull over, and I step on a twenty-dollar note in the gutter, just as I get out of the car.

  ‘It’s a sign!’

  We spent last night at a comedy show in Yass, and because we arrived so late, there were no rooms in any hotels. On a high from cheek-sore laughter and black coffee sweetened with sugar to drown out the taste, courtesy of the Yass Red Rooster, at midnight I said, ‘Yeah, let’s just keep driving, hey?’ and like madcats we used up the high for about a hundred kilometres of Hume.

  An hour or so later, we tried for some shut eye in Jim’s swag in a freezing park in Jugiong, just outside of Canberra, but instead of sleeping we just shivered and clung to each other on what felt like a grassy cliff, eyes wide open, chuckling to allay our fears.

  An hour later I looked up to see his blue eyes blinking back at me in the night. ‘Wanna go?’

  He breathed steam puffs into my mouth. ‘Sure do babe, it feels like we’re intruding on something, here.’

  And we hit the road like thieves. By the time it was light and the shadows had long gone, we found a nice patch of gravel near a paddock outside Albury.

  Half an hour passed, until the sound of cars pulling over metres away from the swag triggered our silent agreement – time to leave – dissolving the embrace in one swift movement, Jim rolling up the swag in one fell swoop, seconds until the space where we’d just slept is a cloud of dust kicked up by the Mazda.

  It’s a strange feeling, this anonymous use of space where and when we can find it. Criminals stealing sleep in wide open spaces. Lovers on the run.

  I love how portable the intimacy is, the fact that as soon as we are lying down, arms around each other, wherever we are becomes our bed, infused with this feeling we can only re-create when we are together. Our vibe. And through spreading ‘us’ around in this way, all the spaces we cover become part of our story, too.

  Love left in piles, wherever we’ve lain.

  Exhausted by 9 am, eight hundred kilometres later, our third attempt at sleep, we’ve grown careless, throwing down the swag under a weeping willow off a dirt road outside Seymour. My eyes are shut and I’m almost there, almost gone, when I can feel Jim’s energy shift and quicken. A nanosecond later he is pulling on his trousers, face lit up like he’s on stage reacting to a heckler.

  ‘Hi! Uh we’ve just driven from Queensland …’

  I see an elderly lady’s knobbly legs just centimetres from my head. The woman, casting her eye from our half-naked bodies lying in a field to our overloaded, zanily parked car, backs away, speechless.

  ‘Why did you say Queensland?’ I ask Jim, laughing hysterically, pulling my clothes on as he careens onto the freeway in a skidding U-turn.

  ‘I thought it’s a bit further so it makes sense that we’re tired?!’

  We speed off like hoons, and I keep laughing, the only antidote to the terror that’s been gripping me ever since we left Sydney, the line between wildness and pure insanity completely blurred now.

  At The Royal Derby, we pay the deposit without even bothering to loo
k at the room, lugging our refugee hessian sack of clothes up the rusty cast iron fire escape. It’s 4 pm now, and Jim is due on stage by eight.

  As soon as we have the keys we close the door and hop in, top-and-tail style, to the single bed. I barely register the smell of must, old bodies, hurried lives. Jim distracts me from wondering who last slept on this bed by saying, ‘On your marks, ready, set go!’ like we’re in the middle of a sporting match. To counter the sport speak he rubs my shoulder affectionately with his dirty foot and puts his hand on my ankle near his head.

  A few minutes later, we’re out.

  11

  Unfamiliar terrain

  ‘I like to make things nice. Like that jasmine in the bathroom – I put that there …’

  THE ROYAL DERBY IS AN old, red-brick pub perched on the corner of Brunswick Street and Alexander Parade, just a ten-minute walk from the apartment where I’ve luxuriated for the past three years, but oh so many miles away in difference. It heaves and pulses electrically, swimming with stories on their way in and out.

  Slapped on the corner of a busy freeway and a major tram route, we can feel the city throbbing in the walls and between the ancient, filthy floorboards. Our room is maybe 4 by 4 metres, technically a ‘single’, and, for the grand sum of sixty dollars each for the week, we get a single bed that sinks in the middle below a cracked window with just one curtain that falls off every time we accidentally touch it. I sleep beside a hessian bag full of our dirty laundry and a jar of Worcestershire sauce.

  It’s only been a few months since we met, but by now we share a key, a towel, a swag, a car, and most of the ideas that pass through our brains. We’re laughing at the filthy room, at how places like this always feel safe when you’re with someone you love, and how fun it is to rent a room in an old pub in the city you’ve lived in forever.

  ‘Lou, do you think I should pull out my Japanese flag gag in Richmond?’

  ‘No way! You’re not in Grafton tonight. Melbourne girls are … different.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re dead right. I’m not used to having a female perspective on my comedy. What makes Melbourne girls laugh?’

  ‘Just go in a bit gentler. Do more of your quirky clown stuff. You don’t need to swear.’

  There seems to be toast crusts in one of the bathroom toilets at the end of the hall so I wind up using the pink one which says, in handwritten black pen, delightfully misspelled, ‘LADYS ONLY’.

  Someone has filled a beer glass with wilted jasmine next to the tap, in an odd display of home decoration. I turn on the water and nearly have a heart attack. The shower is stone cold. I lurch out into the hallway, gasping for dear life, goosebumps under my pink towel.

  ‘You okay hon?’ a voice calls out. I’m steaming ice and shivers, a sorry sight.

  Georgie, a ‘long termer’, who sings and plays guitar in the room directly across from us, shows me how to warm the water up by walking down the two flights of stairs outside and switching the dial on the old hot water system.

  I’m grateful for Georgie, and not just because she saves me from hypothermia. Her energy is light, and you can hear her singing and practising her set-list for a weekly gig she does at the restaurant downstairs in the hallway at dusk. She has a husky voice and a sinewy body, somewhere between man and woman, adult and child. You don’t know where she’s come from or what kind of background she’s had, but something tells me she’s seen a lot of life. Yet she’s managed to do that rare thing – establish boundaries, and keep her lightness, despite it all.

  I step outside the room on the third morning to go for a jog, and she spies me lacing up my runners. ‘Ah, exercise. Good for the body, good for the soul,’ and invites me into her room as I pass. Inside, with a window out to the howling traffic, her room smells of incense and on the wall above her mattress are little tacked up passport photos of her and someone else pulling faces at the camera.

  ‘Just because you’re staying in a pub, doesn’t mean you have to feel povo,’ she says, offering me one of many morsels of wisdom from someone who has spent far longer on the road – and perhaps not by choice – than me.

  ‘I like to make things nice. Like that jasmine in the bathroom, I put that there. And this scarf.’ She points to a dusty black-and-white football scarf she’s hung on her wall like a trophy. ‘I found it on the footpath.’

  Her room is clean, sparse, but filled with other people’s castoffs. ‘I pulled up the carpet, and I found that rug,’ she points to a little stained rug she’s placed carefully next to her bed. Proud.

  From our bedroom across the hall I hear the well-dressed and giggling gay man I’ve seen, knock on her door in the night, asking if she wants to ‘go for a coffee’. By that he means: to walk to the kitchen. They pad past our room, unexpectedly cheerful despite the dank space, perching their steaming hot beer glasses filled with coffee beside cigarettes ready for lighting, an unlikely duo sharing this moment in time.

  When they finish their cigarettes they walk up to his room, number 8, where he has a TV. I hear a few bars of the intro music for Seinfeld. Georgie’s hoarse voice crackles down the hall, in between their laughter.

  It only takes two safe people to soften what would otherwise be a scary place to stay. Not everyone is as chatty and friendly as Georgie, and we quickly learn who to avoid.

  Strangers, like animals, pick up the scent that we are a self-contained cocoon, and they leave us alone. Jim, too, is free from being taken into the fold of wayward men, because of my presence. Both of us, outsiders, together.

  In a place with so many transients, monitoring boundaries, moods and different people’s ‘vibes’ is a full-time job. A secret code seems to permeate all our interactions with everyone – a code of respect for the sense of personal space so necessary when you are sharing such a strange living situation.

  This is the problem with short-term accommodation – people rocking up with nothing to lose and jagged with their current space and story. Defensive from travelling, or just broke, lonely or looking to ‘party’ every second of the day.

  A young English couple across the hall wave hello to us, gauging whether or not we’d be up for a drink. Normally friendly, chatty, making eye contact with everyone, it’s here that I start to keep a little bubble around myself. I’m in this for the long haul, I need to be careful. Shield myself against that hedonistic travellers’ mindset of meeting strangers, bonding over twenty beers, losing the day, ready to go somewhere else.

  As much as I’m here to travel and experience things and meet interesting people, writing comes first. If I can’t stay afloat, what good am I to anyone? Since we met, Jim and I have inspired this single-minded focus in each other’s creative pursuits. Night after night we debrief over ideas and creativity, and what it means to be a sole operator.

  ‘Our jobs are synchronistic, Lou. It’s as if we both need the down time more than the actual time on stage, or you landing your writing gigs. It’s what we do with the down time that determines whether we’ll get on stage or not.’

  My work life has been stripped back to its absolute essentials now. No glamorous home-office to rely upon, my moveable workspace is a powered-up laptop, ideas injected from the people and places I encounter and the non-linear hunt for information to fill the gaps in commissioned stories. An added bonus? A door that shuts, and a room – any room – will do.

  On Friday night, Jim flies to Darwin for a whirlwind gig. Like me, he finds it hard to say no to a gig, even if, after expenses, he doesn’t technically come out that far ahead. For him, like me, it’s as much about the people he meets and the experiences he has as the pay packet at the end.

  I spend the first few hours writing my columns for the Sunday newspaper. Nag Champa burns away the drift and din of stale beer, wafting in from the balcony, and Bach’s concertos from my laptop block out the intermittent drumbeat, thudding through the floorboards from the bar below.

  After focusing for so long I forgot where I was, I look up from my computer, returni
ng to the room. I send an invoice and shut down my computer, trotting outside to Brunswick Street, and realise I just did my ‘job’ in a cracked room on a stinky mattress. And it didn’t make a scrap of difference.

  I head up the road to Sally’s house for dinner, wine and goodbyes. We talk about travels and adventures, her new job, which states of Australia I’m about to tick off the list, play music and laugh about where I’m staying.

  ‘Do you want to stay here? I have a bathroom you don’t have to share with creepy drunk strangers and a spare mattress for you to sleep on …’

  As tempting as it is, the pub experience is a personal challenge to me, especially this one night without Jim. ‘No, it’s okay!’

  At Nicholson Street on my way home, I have to stop myself from automatically walking to my old flat. I gaze forlornly ahead and face the reality that that door, that room, is no longer mine. I’m anywhere I’m booked for the night, now. That single fact has more effect of pulling me into the here and now than anything else.

  Back in room 15, I toss and turn to the sounds of screams and throbbing bodies, wishing I’d taken up Sally’s offer. The band played until 4 am.

  By morning it’s quiet as I pad to the kitchen and pour myself a water in the only receptacle available: a beer glass. I have a huge feature to write, and I’m nervous and scared. It’s on the latest leukaemia research for a medical journal, and I’ve never heard of half the terms referred to in the interviews I transcribed, partly in the car, on the way back from Sydney.

  I head to Princes Park for some fresh air before I tackle it, and the effect of being in such a wide, lush, open space after the dusty pub is physically palpable. I run and sweat, filling my lungs with power and my muscles with energy. When I reach the end I feel like I’ve started the whole day over, like I’m brand new and alive.

  Exercise always has this effect; a dusting down and wringing out, like a shower for the spirit. A toughening and a smoothing at once, the most natural way in the world to polish your ragged edges.