Image: Simon Dooley, Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)
I always said this was the story I would write. There’d be a boy and a girl and that city, tan like a band-aid over that old wound of a river. Instead I drive out of Sydney (Big! Green! Busy!) alone, having returned to Australia, to Perth, to leave it.
I’m driving to Broken Hill and listening to Rihanna. The Dubbo Subway is as grimy as a windscreen driven through a particularly fecund field. Over my sandwich, I instruct my latest frenemy on the ways I find it useful to stay alive: read something until you stop seeing words, then stare out a window until you can imagine yourself as a building.
I don’t have a restless heart – it’s almost too regular, a down and an up beat.
*
I remember the first time we met. I wore a red dress. I weighed twenty kilos less. I didn’t know I didn’t like parties. I said something about Socrates. I was 18 and dropped out of acting school. You were 23 and you asked what other philosophy I read. My boyfriend, your friend, laughed at both of us. Something thumped.
I could never write it because I never knew how it ended. Or that it would end. Neither of us ever read the books we’d claimed to.
*
It has been unusually wet for this part of NSW. Moving west out of Cobar, the ground is red clay bordered by the bright purple of Patterson’s Curse coming up roadside, although I don’t know that’s what it’s called until I stop in Wilcannia by a brimming Darling River and call my mother-in-law who has towed her new caravan through here, back to Perth, not so long ago. My husband, your friend, is in Europe. She and I discuss in detail his itinerary, exchanging the facts of train schedules like the answers to a Sunday crossword given over coffee on a Monday.
*
In those first years, before the city boomed, you lived in the townhouse your parents had bought you in South Perth and sporadically attended a commerce degree, always finding ways to disappoint yourself in how little you cared.
Perth works by keeping everything salty and drunk. Men get killed by cricket bats on beaches at Christmas or tossed out pub windows in the suburbs. We would drive together, from one end of the freeway to the other as it expanded over the years, the bush edges filling in with roads as lines grew from the corner of my eyes and your brows wilded slightly. From up Kalamunda, we could look over the scarp at all the lights of homes laid bare and the blackness where the city blinked out.
Your new love is from one of those dendritic outer suburbs, where the lights skip from one section of the bushland to another well-manicured network of beige houses, cars passing between like ions.
*
In Wilcannia, it rains and the clay footpaths turn to sticking ruts. I am only wearing thongs, like I might be headed to the beach. It takes effort to prise them out each step and not to fall. In my motel, I read about ways other people have chosen what to love about a place.
You always said Australia was ugly, and you never moved from Perth. I have always loved it and been the one to leave.
*
In the beginning, there was a boy and a girl, a moon and a star. ‘How little light you make’, she said.
You always said Australia was ugly, and you never moved from Perth. I have always loved it and been the one to leave.
I am 21 and very sad. I have never met your parents, but I spend night after night in their Applecross home. I sleep, or rather don’t sleep, on Valium, in their bed and wait for when it’s light to go down to your childhood bedroom and wake you by crawling over the covers. One night we watch Last Exit Brooklyn, Dogville and Deerhunterin bathrobes, a bottle of wine each for each film. I ask if you ever wanted me like I imagine Christopher Walken wants to die. You say you never have. We will never stop having this conversation.
*
I have not been in love with you for 15 years when you stop talking to me. Later, in an email, you will say the timing of your silence has an obvious precipitating factor – a tragedy and a new love – but that to you it’s been years of having less and less to give. How weak, I think – you must be to be exhausted so easily, while my heart continues its thump-thump like a metronome. You had a crazy uncle who spent all his money trying to find a perpetual motion machine. Ha, I think, rip it out, here it is.
*
The summer I was 23, the age you were when we first met, I put my lips to your chest chastely and moved downwards in even increments, like I was unbuttoning you. Later I sat atop you and you dared me to kiss you like I meant it. In the background of both scenes: boats at moorings; so still not even the sails clinked against the masts.
Later you will say you remember none of this, but perhaps it is true we were too close for a time.
I never kiss you. My mouth stops well above the love point of your navel.
*
On the way out of Wilcannia, I stop at a random picnic table on the side of the road to write. It’s amazing how sound stretches out in expanses of space. In every direction there is bare land dotted with bushes like stubble across a face. I hear the whine of trucks hurtling somewhere unseen. I like a flat land with everything out for the eye. You said it was ugly, this literal plain-ness. You claimed an affinity with mountains, the sanitary smell of pines. Those places are easy.
The last time I was in Perth, I drove my rattling teenage car down West Coast Highway from north to south, Scabs to Freo. The late summer night hung across the shoreline, tankers on the horizon lit white like shirts on the line. We would always find our way here, to the alluvial space between Port, City and Island. I have never been able to describe what Rous Head does to me at night. One evening there is a rig moored by the north of the Port. It’s a rocket; I cannot say where it goes. The cranes, like detached grasshopper legs on a last twitch. All the times I considered ways of ending, we would sit on the sand cold as the scales of a hibernating snake. You would hold me as I didn’t cry, one arm awkwardly wound around my midsection, both of us trying to get warmer. Seeing the rusted wheat tanks now, I do cry, my face cracking.
*
There’s this one Rihanna song I play over and again. In it she asks, ‘just love me, all you have to do is love me’. Opening and closing the gate on the way to Daydream Mine, this song emerges from my car into the orange landscape. My body, stepping down from the vehicle, swinging open the door, stops before returning to the driver’s seat. I am alone. By a floodplain. You would hate this song. I would play it to you but we no longer speak. I turn back and take a photo of my car, red and dirty with dried bugs.
*
When I receive your final email, I have come out of a movie. Almodovar’s Julieta. In it a mother and daughter are separated by a decade of unspoken anger, only reunited once the daughter experiences loss, the drowning of her child. I have been living with visions of death. It is my second day back on sertraline after 10 years. It makes me believe I am moving like a parade balloon float. I am plastic, and air on the inside.
The late summer night hung across the shoreline, tankers on the horizon lit white like shirts on the line. We would always find our way here, to the alluvial space between Port, City and Island.
When I return from Perth after the Dogville summer, I wait for you to come find me. I arrive at the airport drunk and singing. My boyfriend, your friend, has to help me into the car. At work I watch the door and imagine how you might enter. Joy seems like a peculiar desperation, so I lean into sadness. I stop sleeping. You go to work and to home. You are routine. You laugh at me on the phone when I ring to say we can’t talk anymore. I ring to make sure you know I don’t love you. I start to cry like I might be dissolved and absolved. My boyfriend, your friend, walks me to the GP, the psychologist, the psychiatrist who asks me what I would do if there was something I wanted that I couldn’t get. I would die, I say. Eventually the medicine kicks in. I am fluff and cotton, you pass through me like air as my body is compressed back into form.
*
I don’t know why I came here, to Broken Hill. I am trying to find the right question to ask, to learn what was between us. I know it is my last chance to make myself well. You, thoughts of you at least, have come to be indistinguishable from madness. I wonder if I have consumed you. Maybe it’s true there was nothing left you could give. Maybe I had churned it out of you. I need to know how not to do this to people. Atop Miner’s Rest I FaceTime with my husband, your friend, in Amsterdam. He seems so small.
At Daydream Mine, there are flies and straggling opium poppies. The guide walks us to three small brick walls cut into a hump that doesn’t even count as a hill or hillock. Too small for a man to lie down in. They needed to be propped up to sleep as more and more silicon fibres collected and blocked their lungs.
*
Once, as we drove, you turned to me and said, ‘I don’t know if you’re a nice person pretending to be a bitch, or a bitch trying to believe you are a nice person.’ A few years later you bemoaned that people always called you nice. How bland, you say, how vanilla. People do like you. I am not the only one. You have a collection of the slightly unhinged in your orbit, flitting about you like summer flies. One of these, your ex-girlfriend from high school, you marry because she needs you to. You have trouble saying no. Instead you juggle us like blunt swords, acting like we could cut you, when really, it appears, you can drop us without injury.
*
You come to visit me and my husband, your friend, in America. I fly alone to California to meet you. You are in your thirties and I am in the last days of my twenties. We have over a decade thumping between us. In the week we are alone, I cling to the fact my husband would soon arrive to meet us. On some nights I lie on the outside of your sheets, you under them, and you trace patterns on the skin of my back. We listen to only sad songs, dine in fine restaurants, drive up the coast and into the mountains. When we reach Vegas you say ‘you are my best friend,’ and I cry on the escalator of the Bellagio wearing a thrift store wedding dress. We dance in the undercarriage of the Excalibur and accept drinks from well-wishers on our marriage. I can’t stand to look at any photos from this trip, can’t look at my face. That smile. After, you will say, ‘America – that was a high time,’ and I will want to say liar, liar.
*
It’s not really about a boy and a girl and a city. It’s a boy, a girl, a girl, a boy, a boy, and many cities. Only to me, is it just the two of us, haunting the blackness of Perth’s outer spaces.
The one time our mouths ever touched – I wouldn’t call it a kiss – was at the five-dollar Blackjack table at Burswood, when it was still called Burswood. You were to be married and were sad all your choices had been taken from you. I leaned in and whispered, ‘you are so good, so good’. We went up the club and danced to OutKast without touching, in the mid-noughties, high-vis, high-income, high-testosterone twilight.
It’s not really about a boy and a girl and a city. It’s a boy, a girl, a girl, a boy, a boy, and many cities. Only to me, is it just the two of us, haunting the blackness of Perth’s outer spaces.
There’s this dance I do between selves. I am never in love with you because I am in love with my husband, your friend. Once at an artist’s colony, I found myself the only one practicing monogamy while the rest paired and re-paired. The truth is, I don’t want you to take me into the woods. There will be no coming back with leaves in our hair and mosquito bites on our softer parts. But I want to be under your skin, indelible. A tattoo or scar, like the stretch marks that form a second spine running up your back from a late teen growth spurt, something you could never outgrow.
The last night we spent by the Swan, both of us in our 30s, we drank three quarters of a bottle of Bombay. I pressed hard into the sand, into why you don’t want me. ‘You’ve lost weight’ you say. ‘Look at those thighs. I like something with more heft’. Later you explain how you can’t stand how my vowels stretch out into strine. In my writing you would always edit the landscape out.
*
This isn’t the way I would’ve written it. The boy and the girl. We are old and ugly to one another. There are so many rivers spreading out into flood plains, keeping us separate.
There is a moment out in the Silver City, after crossing time zones, half an hour closer to WA, that I think about driving straight through to Perth, arriving at your office in the CBD where you sit in your inoffensive business attire. I would be wild with the kilometres of desert stretching my hair and nails out. I would wait for you to recognise me as the one you abandoned to the wilderness.
*
In an earlier draft of us, the boy and girl leave the city heading north at midnight and go as far as their eyes can keep open. In a tent at Exmouth, the rain collapses the roof over us, sticky and humid. I feel like I am emerging from under your skin, from the part of you that is me that you keep hidden. Our bones meet.
