Australian Love Stories

by Cate Kennedy

  She said my name. ‘Kiss me,’ she said.

  I had no idea what to do with this moment. My future self stood in the corner, her arms crossed, her face black with disappointment. Trouble was, I couldn’t tell which outcome she was upset about. I loved Carmelita, I realised. She was a hot flower; she was a velvety bar of dark chocolate. I saw these things, but none of them seemed to be attached to my wanting to kiss her. Wide awake the rest of the night, I did my very best deep sleep snuffly breathing.

  We never talked about it. For weeks I kept looking at her mouth while she was talking. Could I have kissed her? Should I have kissed her? I thought about touching her breasts. Nothing greater than mild curiosity stirred in me.

  I met Jeff, whom I kissed with no equivocation. The more he grew on me, the more distant Carmelita became. She was irritable. We stopped our couch and wine evenings and I didn’t have the good sense to miss them.

  One morning she dropped the blackberry jam. I had my back turned and heard the shattering of glass. I turned to see her, adrift in shards and splattered fruit. Her feet were speckled, as if the nail polish on her toes had detonated. For a frozen moment I waited for the Carmelita who would have laughed, or sighed tolerantly, at this little accident.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ is what she said. ‘What’re you staring at?’

  ‘Don’t move,’ I said. I imagined her bare feet bleeding across the havoc of the kitchen floor.

  ‘Don’t move?? Is that the best you can do?’

  ‘Keep your hair on,’ I said. I wished I hadn’t. ‘I’ll get the dustpan.’

  ‘If you kept things clean it wouldn’t have slid out of my hand.’ ‘What?’

  ‘You’re so bloody messy. It’s all Jeff, Jeff, Jeff and never wiping things down.’

  She was crying. I’d never seen such a thing. I cleaned the floor around her while she stood still. We didn’t speak again until I was done.

  ‘I’m going to have a shower,’ she said, and stalked off.

  Sometimes the wrong man grows on you. The reason he does is that you have avoided some inconvenient truth about yourself and chosen someone who answers all the wrong parts of you instead.

  Jeff was a flirt and I was plain. Carmelita was exotic. She was angry with me and I thought it was my fault.

  On the day I moved out, she went to work without saying a word. Jeff helped me pack my life into boxes and unpack it again in his flat.

  ‘She seemed strange,’ he said. I didn’t want to talk about it, so I kissed him. I still didn’t want to talk about it when I went out early the next morning to go for a walk and found an envelope propped against the door of the flat.

  I’m sorry I’ve been awful to you lately. I don’t know what’s come over me. I do love you, and wish you all the best. When Jeff lets you down, here are two places you can go.

  She’d drawn a little map of our suburb, with an X marking her place and another marking the local beauty salon. She’d attached a voucher for a foot massage and pedicure.

  The phone rang just as I picked up my keys. ‘I’ll get it!’ I said. It was unlikely to be for Jeff—three months with him had taught me why. That, and the bruise on my face.

  ‘Can you come over?’ someone said.

  ‘What? Who is this?’ I was having trouble holding the phone and putting my scarf on.

  ‘It’s me. Carmelita. Can I see you?’

  ‘Oh, shit, I’m sorry. I’m late for the theatre.’

  ‘That’s okay. Another time, maybe.’

  ‘Sure. I’ll call you.’

  I only just made it before they closed the doors. In the dark, I surveyed myself. What had I done? She’d not contacted me for three months, and I’d pranced off as if it meant nothing. The play was dull. I felt ill.

  Two weeks later her mother called.

  ‘She’s asking for you,’ she said. What an odd thing to say, I thought.

  ‘I don’t do hospitals.’

  That’s what I said to her mother, and that’s what I said to myself. That was my excuse for a bunch of flowers that was ten times more generous than my visit.

  I perched on the plastic chair by her bed. I hadn’t recognised her at first, and only went in when I saw her surname on the door.

  ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost!’ she said. I thought that was exactly what I’d seen—what I was looking at still.

  ‘No, no! I just got lost on the way in, and I hate hospitals,’ I said.

  She patted the bed and said, ‘C’mon! Sit here! Let’s do the couch thing!’ She began to pull the sheet back, but the sight of the drainage tube disappearing under the sort of nightie the old Carmelita would never have been caught in was too much.

  ‘It’s OK. I have to leave in a minute. I’ll just stay here.’

  ‘Well, tell me about the world before you go,’ she said.

  What could I tell someone who’d been opened up, then closed again because it had all gone too far?

  ‘Um. There’s a war in Sudan,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t even rightly know where that is,’ she said.

  ‘Neither do I, exactly, but it’s all over the news.’ I pictured her and me, end to end on the couch, her in her old body, the ABC news on in the background.

  ‘What else?’ she said.

  ‘Kelvin got fired,’ I told her. I used to tell her about his misdemeanours in and out of the office. ‘And I bought a red dress last week.’

  ‘Well done you!’ I’d never owned a red dress.

  ‘Have you had your pedicure yet?’ She couldn’t see my feet, on account of the cold weather and the boots I was wearing.

  I thought of her little hand-drawn map. Where had I put it? The voucher was still on the fridge, under a Scotch magnet. Jeff often got freebies, he bought so much of it.

  ‘Not yet. I was saving it for a rainy day.’

  We both looked out at the grey sky, the water running soundlessly down the outside of the glass, cut off by double glazing and the hum of air conditioning. We laughed, although nothing seemed funny.

  ‘So, what’s really going on with you?’ She looked at my face closely, and I recognised her at last.

  ‘Oh, nothing much. Routine domestic life and all that,’ I said.

  ‘I suppose you’ll be telling me you walked into a door by accident next.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry! I’ve got to fly,’ I said. I kissed her cheek. It was too soft, too pale. ‘I love you,’ I said, and fled.

  I didn’t bother with the umbrella out in the street. The rain felt good on my cheek, my hair. Like a cross between a benediction and a punishment.

  I went to a bar and sat in the darkest corner. I had three Scotches, all with ice. They were vile. How could he drink this stuff?

  When I got home he must have detected something in me because there were no jealous questions, no arguments.

  The funeral was huge. I wished I could have worn one of those obscuring black fascinators they wear to funerals in the movies. I hadn’t seen Carmelita again for the two months more she had managed to extract from life. One excuse after another had welled up every time I went to pick up the phone. Hating myself was no cure.

  I recognised people from her work, some of them the men she’d dated. They looked grown up now. One of them gave a speech.

  ‘You always knew where you were with Carmelita,’ he added to a little story about what a great girlfriend she’d been.

  ‘She never let me stay the night. Her relationship with her flatmate meant more to her than her relationship with me did. That might sound odd, but it was all part of the integrity of her and I loved her for it.’

  He was laying it on with a large trowel, I thought. Carmelita’s mother wouldn’t look at me. In fact, no-one did.

  When I got home I told Jeff I was leaving. ‘Don’t ever touch me again,’ I said, and he didn’t.

  I sat at the kitchen table and began drawing circles around To Let ads. The pen ran out. In the bottom drawer where I kept spare pens, little notepads and small otherw
ise homeless things I found a folded piece of paper. It was Carmelita’s map. Her flat, where she wasn’t, any more. The beauty salon, which I would never visit.

  At the beginning of last autumn, after I had only just moved into my new apartment, I felt the lump under my arm in the shower. I stood there with the water pouring over my face, my hand holding the breast Carmelita had touched that long ago night.

  Feed With a Flat Hand

  CANDACE PETRIK

  Ben’s dad comes round, some nights. Comes to watch the kid while the spaghetti gurgles on the stove, salad already wilting in the summer heat. Go on, don’t worry about me. You girls have a good one. He has a smile for the both of them like it’s okay, it’s cool. We tried, he says, for Ben. But you gotta think about it, if that’s the only reason, don’t you? Eyebrows raised. You better not break Ashley’s heart. For reals, though, I’ve got nothing against punching your lights out. I don’t care that you’re a chick.

  Hurry up Claudia—and then Ashley has her pushed against the outside wall with a kiss, leading them away to the tram stop with the pull of her fingers against Claudia’s wrist. Questions get the brush off. Met him in high school, before anything with girls. Seriously no, Claud, that wasn’t why it didn’t work. It just became a different love after a while. Like a brother. And to be honest, he was too young for this shit. So was Ashley.

  Ashley kisses so she can stare at you and it would be comforting if it weren’t so much easier to lower your eyes. Her world has babysitters. Bed times. Things that are too loud. Plastic stoppers on every cupboard, on the toilet so you have to press and touch and yank. You can’t just piss. Things could be dragged down if not bolted to the wall. A kid got crushed in the States, was it last year? This year? Or was that Russia?

  Reading bedtime stories, the kid’s words are all vowels and grunts and sticky fingers reaching out. He likes you, Claudia.

  It’s been months and friends laugh and say you’re an instafamily. Say you gonna move in? And get hers and hers matching towels? Say you go everywhere together, you may as well start from the same mattress. Look at you two, do you have the same haircut now? You even dress the same, don’t you? Laughter.

  The festival season starts and the dad is over even more, waving them off. All the nights are spoken for. Claud doesn’t remember saying yes, didn’t say no but there’s poetry readings and music and screenings in the park and Ashley is good at it. At being around strangers—she waves and laughs and seems to know them all. Mutual exes are women they share a drink with, like it’s been too long. Sitting together on the grass as they wait for the darkness to hit and the thrum of chatter to quieten during the opening credits. It’s that same slow film Claud watched back when she realised boobs were something worth touching, worth finding ways to touch. Ashley reaches for her hand.

  Claud thinks it was a couple of years back, maybe, since she bothered to head down on the number 96 to St Kilda in the middle of summer. Sweaty, and all the roads blocked, people muttering as the trams diverted. The same rainbow bits and pieces every year, the smell of beer and the yelps of people in roadside bars. It’s not the biggest but the showing is good. Banners and bikes and wolf whistles, raised fists. A sunburn the shape of her sunnies when the day is done. Only she won’t feel it, not till the next day when she crawls out of the covers, head weighing her down.

  The kid gets sick of waving and clapping. Ashley’s mates are in the park just up that way, like everyone else. The lines to the port-a-loos stretch from one side right down to the food stands and the kid is making little grumbles that aren’t really cries and aren’t really words. Rubbing his face and saying no, he doesn’t want to go pee. He doesn’t.

  Ben missed his nap, didn’t ya?

  That just makes him let out a long whinge. Ashley takes him to a tree, down away from the crowds.

  Ashley’s mates have their own little kids playing and running with rainbow ribbons on sticks. Back and forth they run, waving them. Making them twirl. Twelve bucks, but Ashley buys one for the kid anyway. He plays with it, but after a while he starts crying and chucks it to the ground. Don’t wannit, face screwed up. Somebody’s gonna have to go to bed the second we get home, isn’t he Bennie? No story time. Don’t give me that face.

  Living near each other is enough. One suburb away, the kind that goes sideways and misses all the tram lines. Ashley doesn’t drive, though. She has a bike with a little kid seat bolted on the back for Ben, and so Claud’s car is something that complicates things. Or simplifies them. Pick this up, or pick that up. Or: don’t drive; it’s not even that far. We’ll ride. We’ll tram it. And Claud never finds the right balance. One house is too small, and the other is falling apart. Cracks in the walls, the kind that don’t seem to be doing the structure any favours. Best not touch in case the dust crumbles out. Everything made in that era was asbestos. No place for a kid. Roof leaks and the mould on the bathroom walls comes back no matter how much Ash scrubs. And she does, with Claud trying to convince her that no, there’s no point. Who was that Greek dude? Sisyphus. And it’s the wrong thing to say because that’s a great attitude isn’t it? It’s not like you’re doing anything, just standing there.

  Claud’s place has just the one bedroom. Plugs everywhere, wires running along the carpet. A fish tank. You never know what a kid will get up to. You’ll never be able to leave him alone in the room the way you have things set up, Claudia. And the gap between houses becomes longer, wider than that suburb. Like the mould, it seems worse the longer you look at it.

  Carnival, then. The mass picnic is close to spilling over the edge of the Alexandra Gardens. Families are yanked forward by little hands and sweat builds on your hairline. Flushed faces and laughs, beer bottles hissing and then clicking, the bottle caps dropped to the grass. The sun is insistent and there’s no shade. The kid has a sunhat, sunnies the colour of rainbows and sunscreen smeared everywhere. Ashley frowns because it’s been one of those weeks. The hum and cackling of all these people at once sounds like ten kinds of birds. The side of her neck, her temple, the palm of her hand—Claud is getting to know the importance of these places. Ash lets her. It is less a kiss than the feeling of Claud’s lips against her skin, like Ash is the kind of human you can breathe in and out. Like she is a place of rest. It’s a small moment. There’s a squeal from somewhere across the park and Ashley’s eyes dart to attention, body stiffening as she reaches and remembers. Her hand clasps around the kid’s arm. He doesn’t look up from his toys. The noise, the chatter and laughing and wailing, rushes back at them sharp as a clap.

  It’ll just be simpler. Ash has to move anyway, and you can’t stay where you are forever Claudia. So they look, or Ashley looks. Real estate finds popping up in Claud’s email with little pings all throughout the day. Have you seen this one? I like the backyard in this but the kitchen, you know? And I know you don’t like Brunswick but I want to get the school stuff sorted, and his playgroup meets here. You can help us, just a little.

  It happens at a petting zoo. The rabbits are in danger of being trampled and the sun has turned the water troughs into something hot and murky. Ashley hands everything off to her, running to take a call. The bags are heavy—little plastic tubs with cutup fruit, sultanas and nuts and sandwich squares, wet wipes, pull-ups. A change of clothes, sized down. Hefting it onto one shoulder, Claud teaches the kid to hold out pellets to goats, to lambs. His little hands curl. No, make it flat. Not like that. Ben shakes his head and makes a noise as the animal teeth connect with his skin. The pellets drop. He slumps down in the middle of it all, on straw drenched in goat pee. The bags cut into her skin and she can’t get him to stand. She wants to pull him by his little arm, drag him. Wants to shut the little gate and let the animals have him. She spots Ashley, who walks with what seems like a practiced slowness. They are not seeing the same thing, not with the way Ashley smiles. Looks like today’s been too much for you, hey little guy? But Claud barely listens. She breathes instead, and the effort not to say something hurts her thro
at. She places the bags down on the straw and ignores the way Ash looks at her, like she is only just noticing something. Claud walks, slow then fast. Out of the petting zoo, then to the car park. Passing people who seem to find happiness easy, the way they nod and chat and share bags of food. When she starts the car she can barely feel her own fingers.

  Ben’s dad comes round. Claud hadn’t called. He looks at her like she proved something he wanted to be wrong about. He invites himself in, makes her get him a beer from the fridge. They sit on the couch, the TV flashing ads and the hiss of white noise when he reaches over and mutes it.

  You’re gonna go over there, and you’re gonna say you’re sorry.

  She doesn’t know what to be sorry for. She wipes her nose with the back of her hand and swallows another mouthful of beer.

  Grow a couple, Claudia. Jesus Christ.

  Fuck you.

  You’re not gonna just sit here like a pathetic shit until she’s given up on you.

  You’ve got me. That’s the plan.

  Stop it.

  She drinks her beer. He finishes his, but she doesn’t offer him another. She waits for him to get the hint and he stands up. She turns the sound of the TV back on before he’s out the door. Another half hour. An hour.

  Dialling, it rings and rings until there’s a click. Breathing. No hello and the receiver is muffled, crackling with sound. Is that you Bennie? It is, she can tell by the mumbled hum. By the shyness that only comes out when a kid is stuck on the end of a line, or made to be polite to a stranger. Ben. She doesn’t ask him to get his mother, only listens to him breathe in and out. To the sounds of the TV in the background. A voice calling for him. There’s a clatter and she knows the phone has been left behind. It isn’t a hang-up. She listens for a little while longer to what she can only assume is the bedtime routine. Ash gathering him up—no you’ve had dinner already. It’s time to brush your teeth. Then the book, settling under the covers. A hand resting on his head as he finally sleeps. Backing out of the room, the door giving a gentle click. And then it’s that moment of quiet, right before the day ends, where Ashley has a chance to breathe. To take everything in.