Her hair was a mess, and she had a phone to her ear. ‘You’re early,’ she mouthed, waving me in. She then disappeared into another room to finish her conversation, which was, she would later tell me, with a guy she was ‘kind of seeing’ at the time who had rung to tell her he no longer wanted to see her.
We went to a Spanish restaurant in the city called Capitan Torres. This was an oversight on my part: I used to go there with Inez. The minute we walked in, the owner, a lovely chain-smoking man called Hernan, ran up to Margot brandishing a menu: ‘Ah, Inez! So good to see you again!’ A volley of corrections ensued – ‘No, Hernan, it’s Margot’ – after which Margot walked ahead of me through the restaurant, holding the menu behind her, over her bum, the breadth of which had always bothered her and, I was touched to discover, obviously still did.
She looked the same – same dark hair, dark eyes, dark skin – only something about her was a little less triumphant. She worked as a lawyer, for the Aboriginal Legal Service in Redfern. It didn’t pay as well as a big city job, in fact it barely paid at all, but she believed in the social justice system and she got lots of hands-on experience. Her dad hated that she worked there. He considered family and criminal lawyers to be ‘bums’ and ‘crumbs’.
She told me that her last relationship was with a guy called Justin, whom she adored. Justin was tall, and worked on film sets. He had lots of great stories, usually of film stars behaving badly. Margot went out with him for several years before discovering he had been sleeping with everybody on set. It almost killed her, she said. She was so depressed, she stayed in bed for three months. She had also lost her voice, literally. ‘It just faded away, till I couldn’t get a word out,’ she said.
I found this hard to imagine. She had always been so smart, so outspoken. I had always loved that about her.
*
We woke up together the next morning, at her place. I dozed while she showered. Why am I here? I wondered. Apart from sex, why had I come back? I felt I should have had an answer for this. I needed an explanation, in the absence of which I was liable to assume the worst. That’s how I worked. But I didn’t have an answer.
At breakfast, I saw a red pocketknife – imitation Swiss Army – lying on the counter by the fruit bowl. I picked it up. On the side, something written in capital letters had been crudely, angrily scratched out. Underneath the gouges, I could just make out the word: TEAMSTERS.
‘What does TEAMSTERS mean?’ I asked.
Margot was eating her customary breakfast: a fried egg yolk on Vegemite toast, the albumen pared off with surgical precision.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Teamsters is what Justin and I used to call one another.’
*
And so our relationship began again. It had been rebirthed, like a stolen car. It had some new parts here and there – maturity, life experience – that made it run more smoothly than before. But it was essentially the same, which was nice. I knew its idiosyncrasies and defects, its dents and dings. I was comfortable with the dings; I had plenty myself.
It was Margot who was not so comfortable, and with good reason. The first week we were together, I asked her to marry me. Why waste time was my thinking. Margot fobbed me off. She said maybe it was a bit early for all that. I found out later that she’d told Cam and Gina she was worried that I was completely ‘manic’.
*
At a party about a year later, I saw Inez. We hadn’t crossed paths for a couple of years, and yet she glared at me as if we were still going out. ‘You’re back with Margot, I see.’
‘Yes.’ I shrugged apologetically, though I wasn’t sure why I should be apologising.
‘You were just marking time with me, weren’t you? Just waiting till you could get back with her.’ A look of disgust. ‘It’s so fucking obvious now.’
I was shocked by this, and also affronted. It made me seem to be somehow still in Margot’s sway. For some time after I thought about what Inez had said. I would shake my head at it, dismissing it as absurd, before realising, of course, that she was probably correct.
*
After a year or so, Margot and I moved into a rental unit in Bondi. Bondi was where everyone in Australia under the age of thirty was living. It was full of musicians, DJs, film students and baristas who called you ‘dude’, plus a whole lot of very cool people of indeterminate means who did nothing but drink flat whites on the pavement in front of Sean’s Panaroma. To a greater or lesser extent, everyone here defined themselves by their shoes and/or their hairstyles. I had short hair and sneakers – I was freelancing, after all.
Our apartment was opposite a bus depot. This was handy for Margot, who was still working in Redfern, but the apartment experienced what felt like an earth tremor every three-and-a-half minutes when a bus pulled in. It was also infested with cockroaches: one night I woke up with one nestling in the palm of my hand. We blamed the cockroaches on the fact that we had a greengrocer and a Thai restaurant immediately beneath us, on the ground floor. But it was also largely due to the fact that we were having too much fun to stop and do the cleaning.
On the weekends we went to the movies, or to the RSL Club just across the road, or to the Thai restaurant below us, for Massaman curry and Money Bags. We read a lot. We weren’t exactly adventurous: a friend told us that we ‘should get out more’. But we didn’t want to. We were happy as we were.
We also went to the beach, which even then had the air of a catwalk, or soft porn set. It was the late 1990s, and breast augmentation was just taking off: having a brand spanking new set of plastic cans was like having the latest iPhone; women would show them off to each other, in public, right there on the beach, actually inviting their girlfriends to feel them. The boobs themselves looked dangerously overinflated with what we imagined to be a highly unstable gas. On particularly hot days, we joked about them exploding, or bursting into flames. Margot didn’t need fake boobs. She had more style than that. Sometimes I would sit beside her on the sand, admiring her Sophia Loren hips and one hundred percent authentic, non-flammable mammaries, and think how lucky I was.
One Saturday night in late summer a mate and his girlfriend showed up at our flat with a bag of ecstasy pills. An Israeli friend of his had brought them into the country, on a two-day flight, stowed in his rectum. The pills came in twists of Cling-Wrap with sealing wax on them. It wasn’t easy eating something that had spent 48 hours in a stranger’s anus, but we went ahead anyway, which is how we found ourselves at 4am, frisbeeing frozen pizzas out our front window, trying to hit the lamppost across the street. Just before dawn, Margot and I went down to the beach. The water was velvety and warm as blood. We took off our clothes, then swam out, side by side, into the deeper water.
*
I still thought about Dad every day. There was a small cliff-top golf course at North Bondi, and sometimes I went for walks up there at night. If it was windy, I told myself I could hear him. If it was a full moon, I told myself I could see him. I would walk to the edge of the cliff and peer over – to spot him at the bottom, perhaps, lying there in a crumpled heap, or maybe just sitting on a rock, with his back to me, watching the waves.
My depressions came fairly regularly, every four or five months. They began with a seeping mental and cognitive pallor, a leaching away of energy that migrated into an existential dread which led me, quickly, like a child, into a lonely darkness, a nullity that asserted itself with the illogical intensity of nightmares. This feeling often lasted for three weeks, maybe a month. It was awful, but that was okay, because I deserved it. That’s how you think when you’re depressed.
I hadn’t worked hard enough; I hadn’t achieved enough. I was pretty much a nothing. I also felt a constant nagging, low-level guilt, a vague, residual culpability that hung over me like a little raincloud, the kind you see in cartoons. The reason for this guilt, its origin, was not immediately apparent, just as the guilt itself was not immediately accessible. I knew it was the
re, I could feel it, but I couldn’t get my hands on it, which made it impossible to deal with. Maybe I’d done something terrible in a past life, a crime I couldn’t remember but that I now had to pay for. Maybe I was a billionaire hedge fund manager who ran over a Panda in my Porsche convertible. Or maybe I shot a kitten. Whatever I’d done, I felt very, very bad about it.
Because I was a nothing, I shouldn’t really eat properly. But I enjoyed eating, so what I did was this: I had a light breakfast then I consumed nothing but water all day; I kept a three-litre jug of it beside my desk. As I drank the water and I felt myself being cleansed of whatever it was inside me that had to be cleansed. I was getting it all out, flushing it away. Mum said I was losing weight, but then she’d always been a worrier. As time went by, this feeling of guilt intensified. Because it had no name, I tried to give it one, or to find it a home at least. I looked for issues to attach it to. Luckily, there was no shortage of things to feel guilty about – big things, like global warming and world poverty (both of which I was doing nothing to alleviate), and small things, like how many cigarettes I’d smoked last Saturday night (I’d have no-one to blame but myself when I got lung cancer), or how I should never have slapped that little kid who was annoying me in the playground in primary school. I also felt bad about not visiting Nan Ell often enough; Nan Ell, who was about one hundred and fifty years old and about to die; Nan Ell, who had lost her only son and who would, presumably, leave something to me in her will. Professionally, I had no end of regrets, and much to feel guilty about. Unlike my father, for instance, I did not have a medical degree. I didn’t even have a proper job.
Every morning I examined myself in the mirror while I brushed my teeth. I didn’t look like I ought to. I didn’t look like a man. I certainly didn’t look like Dad. I wasn’t tall. My tummy wobbled with lips of baby fat that had clung on tenaciously from childhood and never really gone away. My dick was small and shrivelled. Just look at it. What a joke. It looked like the freshly discarded shell of a juvenile cicada that had somehow crawled up between my legs. Then there was my arse, which was all white and stupid and pimply, and my acne, my FUCKING acne, which I was still getting, despite being in my late twenties. Other guys could disguise their bad skin by growing beards, but that didn’t work for me. If I didn’t shave for a few days, I didn’t look rugged and unshaven, I looked like the sad little man who busked outside Bondi Junction train station, sitting there all day on a wooden crate playing his funny little violin-cum-guitar and who had what appeared to be several revoltingly long pubic hairs sprouting from his chin.
I had only one life, one chance, and I was wasting it. Maybe I should join the army, I thought, or become an aid worker. That way I could really make a difference. (‘Yeah, right, you can kiss me goodbye then,’ Margot said when I mentioned the army.) Or, even better, I’d become a doctor. It was not too late. I could re-enrol as a mature-age student. It would take years, of course, but I was still young. I’d graduate by my mid-thirties . . . Then I realised what an absurd idea this was; I couldn’t even pass high school chemistry. I could barely remember my five times tables. I was so unintelligent that I didn’t even understand how unintelligent I was.
One of the problems was that I didn’t have much work on. The worst advertising downturn in living memory had crippled newspapers and magazines, and no-one was commissioning stories. About the only reliable gig I had was for the real estate section of The Sydney Morning Herald. Writing real estate stories was not real journalism. A friend of mine was working for the ABC in East Timor, covering the war there. Another was a foreign correspondent in New Delhi. That’s what I should have been – a foreign correspondent. Or a features writer, probing the latest corruption scandal. Instead, I was writing about what colour splashback Meriton was installing in their latest ‘boutique offering’, which was what you called any development of less than two hundred apartments in the eastern suburbs or anything that involved a converted wool storage depot on the waterfront. I didn’t mind doing these stories. It was money. But I did mind dealing with property developers. We were doing them a favour by writing about them. It was a free ad. And yet they made me feel like a nugget of poorly digested dog turd wedged in the tread of their slip-ons.
One of the stories I was doing dealt with strata title by-laws as they pertained to domestic pets and companion animals. I had to speak to someone from the Property Council of Australia, a specialist in real estate law and, unfortunately, a developer. I also had to get comment from some ‘real live pet owners’ about how they would feel if the proposed changes forced them to choose between moving out of their unit or euthanising their cat. But I couldn’t have cared less how they’d feel. Of far greater concern to me was how I felt, which I knew was horrendously self-absorbed, but I couldn’t help it, because how I felt right at that moment made me want to throw myself off the balcony.
By this time we had moved to another part of Bondi, into a two-bedroom flat four flights up. Thus the balcony. The view was amazing. I would look at this view, then I would look down at the concrete fifteen metres below and wonder: would I feel it? Just the impact? Or would I lie there for God knew how long in unspeakable screaming agony, my ankle up around my neck, my brain spilling like a thickshake out of my left eye, before anybody found me?
The new flat was Margot’s idea. Margot is, above all, a practical person. She’s like Mum that way. After years of renting, Margot suggested we buy something together, because this would make more sense financially. I resisted, of course, mainly because buying property had connotations of ageing and responsibility, neither of which appealed to me. But she said that if we didn’t get in soon and start paying off a mortgage then it would only get harder. And she was right. She’s always right. It’s one of the things that I hate most about her.
Sometimes, when I was really down and could barely move, when all I could hear were the voices telling me how much I sucked and what a waste of space I was, or when I had been staring at the same stain on the carpet for three hours straight, Margot would take me down to the beach and march me up and down the soft sand to get the blood pumping. She would say: ‘Look up at the sky. Look at how beautiful it is!’ And again, she was right. It was beautiful. It was so beautiful I wanted to burst into tears.
I knew then that if it wasn’t for Margot, I’d be fucked.
*
After a while, work picked up. I began writing for the Sunday magazines, The Australian Financial Review, an inflight magazine called Panorama, and for Australian Geographic, who at one stage sent me to Far North Queensland to write about a remote settlement full of escaped cons and professional dope growers, one of whom threatened to stab me with his pigging knife. Then a friend of a friend who was a journalist called me. She was leaving Australia for a while, and suggested I take over her gig as a local contributor for the Financial Times, in London. Of course! I said. The Financial Times would look great on my CV – anything foreign looked good. I was to be the paper’s Australian higher education correspondent, a terrifying prospect as I knew nothing about Australian higher education. Fortunately, my editor in London knew even less.
Friends always asked me, ‘How do you freelance? You must be so disciplined!’ They said that if they worked at home they would get up and watch TV all day. I told them that watching TV all day was not an option since I quite liked eating and I had a mortgage. So no matter how shitty I felt, I got up, went to my desk and worked.
Then one day I felt particularly bad. Not just sad, anxious and full of dread, but slow, as in cognitively slow. My brain was not working. Some essential component had seized up. My thoughts had become fuzzy-edged and soggy, like wet bread, and no longer linked together but drifted apart, abandoning the context that initially gave them meaning. This was entirely new, and very frightening, but I told myself it would pass. I also had a deadline to meet, and if there was one thing I’d learned about depression it was that it’s better to do something than nothing.
And so I took a deep breath and picked up the phone.
I had an interview to do with a property analyst who worked with the investment bank BIS Shrapnel. This analyst was very knowledgeable and important (and no doubt exceedingly well paid) and he would, I’d been told, be able to talk me through the possible effect of changes to negative-gearing laws on apartment vacancy rates and future investment.
On the phone, the analyst sounded immediately and irredeemably obnoxious. He called me ‘buddy’, and repeated my first name two or three times, as if he was gifting it to me afresh. Despite this, our conversation went okay for the first two minutes, after which I found my thoughts drifting apart again. I understood what he was saying, and I could follow the information as it went in, but once it was in my head it just sat there, inert and without context, like islands in an icepack, blank and lifeless.
‘What about the . . .’ I said, suddenly lost for words. ‘Um, the—the influence rates.’
‘You mean the interest rates?’
‘Yeah, sorry, the int—’
‘What do you mean, “What about them?”?’
Good question. I had no idea what I meant, because I had no idea what I was thinking.
‘The racancy vates and the—I mean, the vacancies.’
‘I’m not sure I follow you, pal.’
My brain was jammed. I had no words. The words I had were blunt, obstructed, and would not move from my brain to my mouth. I moved my head, shook it, pushed it forward, as if roll-starting a car. But nothing came out. I became aware of a distant croaking before realising it was coming from my throat.
‘Tim, are you there, buddy?’ It sounded like he was sniggering, or trying not to snigger.
‘You know, the currencies and government.’
‘Why do you want to know about currencies?’
I said nothing. I felt nakedly disordered. I was absent – absent but in plain sight.
‘Tim, mate, with respect, that’s the stupidest question I’ve been asked all week. And I get asked lots of stupid questions. Honestly, buddy, come on.’
Farewell to the Father Page 18