by Ann Michaels
White. Could I please speak to Therese?’
‘Oh! Hello Richard, dear, I thought you knew that Therese had moved to Sydney weeks ago. She accepted an offer at the University of New South Wales, to study psychology!’
Richard had no words. No words at all.
‘Are you still there, dear?’
‘Yes….thankyou Mrs O’Brien…..goodbye’.
Richard had been so absorbed with himself, that, he had not even thought about the plans Therese might have had for her own future. I thought I was so clever, when I have really been a conceited fool, he thought, as he walked over to the telephone again, to call his friend, Jesse.
Later that evening, Richard and Jesse sat hunched over a beer, in a grotty, old pub on the highway, which reeked of stale beer and urine. Jesse had a gig here later, playing saxophone with a band called Feint Ruled. It wasn’t much of a job, but he would get a share of some of the door charge. At least.
‘I’ve decided to move down to Sydney for a while and give it a go’, Jesse said flatly.
Richard’s chin jutted out suddenly, ‘What’s with this moving to Sydney business? Supposedly, Therese has shifted down there too…. to go to uni. I didn’t even know!’
‘Like hell you didn’t know! Therese was always talking about it.’
Richard remained quiet. I must have really been wrapped up in myself, thought Richard, as he looked about the Smokey room, where pub patrons sat, nodding like old horses.
‘So, where’s she living’, asked Richard carefully?
‘Kerry’s brother, Aiden, told me that, Therese was renting near Randwick somewhere. He also mentioned that Kerry invited Therese to a party in Newtown. But Therese didn’t stay long’.
‘So Kerry’s living in Sydney too!’
‘No. Settle down mate. She was just staying there for a while. She is working somewhere out in whoop whoop now. You know what a socialist she is.’
Richard brooded for a moment, and hugged his beer. The old gang was breaking up and everyone was leaving. He, however, was still living at home with his parent’s. And, he hadn’t even considered going anywhere else.
Richard stayed to watch Jesse’s band for a while, but they were a pretty rough outfit, and the smoke and the loneliness were getting to him. He got up, and walked out into the dark night.
When Richard started university at the end of February, he was having trouble getting into the work, and the uni experience. He felt despondent. It wasn’t just that he didn’t really know anyone, and that he felt lonely much of the time. And it wasn’t just that work was difficult, in a whole other calibre compared to school. It was also that, he was hearing reports about Therese; that she had a lawyer boyfriend, who was much older than she was: a lawyer boyfriend, who was successful and making plenty of money.
Richard felt parochial and obscure. Had Therese used him that night? Had she merely felt sorry for him? These days, he was no longer strutting around like a rooster; now he was plagued with self-doubts and worries.
A few months later, however, Richard was becoming part of uni life, by simple osmosis. He began to throw himself into his studies. By the end of the year, he was doing very well. His confidence took another step up when he met a quirky, science student, named Linda McDonnell, who seemed to fancy him too.
Richard was not good looking, but he wasn’t bad looking either; he was tall, with ordinary, brown hair and run-of-the-mill brown, bespectacled eyes. His main charm came from his intelligence and wit. His sharp brain could find the irony and humour in most situations, and Linda seemed to appreciate these things about Richard.
Richard, however, struggled for about a year of their relationship, comparing Linda to Therese; sometimes, quietly thinking to himself that, Linda was second best. Slowly and painfully this passed. But it seemed that, Therese had dibs on his heart, which is the agony and deceit of first love.
In 1989, Richard and Linda gained their Master’s Degrees. Richard was offered a lecturing post at the university, where he now felt right at home. Linda, however, who was often shy and awkward with people she didn’t know, had problems getting her first job. Eventually, she landed employment as a low paying research assistant. It was role in which she felt safe, and so, she stayed put.
At the end of autumn, 1990, Richard and Linda got married in front of their friends’ and family. Jesse was best man. But none of Richard’s other old school friends could be there. Sonja was living in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia; Kerry was somewhere in the outback; Marco was in New York, and Therese, was delivering an important paper titled: ‘The Superego and the Lateral Frontal Brain’, at a conference in London.
The highlight of the wedding was Jesse’s wedding speech. It was such a hit; in its droll cleverness that, many people were still talking about it twenty years later.
Richard’s star began to rise. His knowledgeable and waggish lectures, peppered with many interesting anecdotes, entertained the students, thoroughly. He was admired and popular. Linda, however, became increasingly introverted and retiring. She enjoyed staying at home, and digging in her organic vegetable garden, most of all.
Linda became pregnant in 1993. And early in the following year, she gave birth to their son, Quentin, (named after her grandfather) after suffering through a 24 hour labour, and emergency caesarean section, as the baby went into foetal distress. Afterwards, Linda was hypervigilant about Quentin’s health. She fell, paradoxically, into a kind of postnatal depression, and febrile anxiety.
Richard also experienced agonies: careering between concern and entrapment.
Later that year, Richard ran into Sonja and her husband, Goran, whilst pushing a trolley around Jewels Supermarket, doing the weekly food shopping, after work one Thursday evening. Sonja was so happy to see her old friend, that she threw her arms around him extravagantly, as her husband glowered nearby.
Sonja told Richard about the horrors they had experienced and witnessed in Sarajevo, and their escape through a tunnel. These stories of atrocity and derring-do, made Richard feel faintly ashamed and impotent; he just stood there, under the glaring florescent lights, with the smell of disinfectant invading his nostrils, feeling small; not like a knowledgeable academic at all.
‘How have you been? Do you have someone special’, asked Sonja coyly.
Richard skimmed over his story, sanding corners and sculpting truths. And when he felt that he had said just enough, he asked about Therese.
‘Therese has her own psychology practice, somewhere near the city… Redfern, I think’.
Despite the years that had passed, despite his marriage and son, Richard felt a small pang of having lost part of himself.
In the middle of 1994, Richard’s wife, Linda, was made redundant from her job. After this, she simply stayed home: gardening, making compost, and researching a sustainable lifestyle. Richard began an affair with an older lecturer at the university, whose husband was impotent, and mostly silent.
And so life went on.
Kerry
After vomiting into a bowl for the third morning in a row, it dawned on Kerry that, she might be pregnant. She felt a shiver of fear slice its way through her body, at the mere thought. How would she support herself and a child? How would this shape her future? Her child’s future?
Luckily, Kerry’s mother left very early in the morning for her cleaning job at the local club, and so, she had no clue about Kerry’s secret. Kerry may have been a lapsed Catholic, but she was not ready to face her mother yet: unmarried, and pregnant.
She needed to think.
Kerry was still thinking one week later, when she received a letter offering her a job at a remote, Aboriginal community, in the Northern Territory. She decided that she would accept the job, and see what happened with her pregnancy. But first, she would go and visit her friend, Demeter, who was now living in Newtown, Sydney. The last time she had seen Demeter, was when she had come to the door, on the night of the Farewell, when Kerry’s school friends’ had been gathered about in t
he lounge room. Looking on.
On the night of Demeter’s party, at her decaying, rented, terrace house in Newtown, Kerry had been amazed, when, Therese stepped out of a taxi, wearing a shiny, designer outfit, and sizable, poodle perm. Kerry had invited Therese to the party, motivated by that odd pull that Therese had over her, never imagining that she would come. But Therese didn’t stay long. It was probably soon after Therese noticed couples holding hands, and another kissing, that she took her leave.
Kerry realised that a room full of lesbians was not Therese’s scene.
The irony for Kerry was that, despite her struggles to conform and to hide that she was a lesbian, she happened to be pregnant. This inconvenient reality had come about, because, one night, some weeks ago, she had end up having too much to drink, whilst watching Jesse play in a pub band. It was afterwards, when she had stumbled to Jesse’s house, to listen to some cassette tape, that, it had happened. Strangely, it was just a symptom of their loneliness, their desire for belonging and friendship, which had led to Kerry and Jesse falling into bed together. The act itself, for Kerry, had no more significance than that. And yet, here she was: pregnant with Jesse’s child.
She didn’t tell him.
Working as a project officer for youth, around the remote Aboriginal communities of the Northern Territory, was a job that Kerry grew to love. She loved the Aboriginal people she worked with and she