Geography (9 page)

When I got back from the States my contact with Michael was erratic. A few days after my return to Melbourne I was still flushed with him. I sent him a long fax full of excitement about our time together. I said, ‘I am pleased we have met. I think we are going to know each other a long time.'

His reply was brief. ‘Know each other a long time? I'm not sure about that. I can assure you, I'm not worth it.' When I read that, standing by the fax machine at work, I flinched. I felt as if I had been slapped in the face. I got it wrong, I thought, blushing with the shame of presumption. I am an idiot.

I did not fax or write or phone—all the things I had been planning to do as I had flown the twelve hours from LA to Melbourne. But complete withdrawal was not what Michael wanted either, it seemed, and after a few weeks he began to send me postcards and brief faxes. They were so affectionate I began to believe that his rudeness had been a misunderstanding and I started to send him postcards in return. I would search out increasingly ridiculous images of talking koalas, kangaroos and girls in seventies bikinis. I wooed him with kitsch.

‘It's not like we're in a relationship,' I said to Marion. ‘It's not like I'm ever going to see him again, despite the occasional postcard. Sometimes I wonder if it wasn't Los Angeles that swept me off my feet. The romance of Hollywood.'

‘Well if you've fallen for the myth, he must've too,' said Marion. ‘He's the one living there. Anyway you will see him again. He comes back to Australia every year.'

That night I got out a video of
Legends of the Fall
and forced Marion and Raff to watch it. ‘You know this is crap, right?' Raff said ten minutes into the film, having seen enough fur coats, bears and men with long hair to get nervous.

‘I think it's good,' I protested. ‘This is the third time I've seen it.'

‘Sometimes,' Raff said, ‘I have serious concerns about your judgment.'

The second time I was with Michael it was very hot. It was the summer of 1994 and fires were raging everywhere. He was home for the Christmas holidays so I decided to go up to Sydney. The first night I was there I planned to go to a homecoming party Michael was throwing even though I had not, despite receiving a postcard only a few days earlier, been invited. In fact Michael hadn't even told me he was returning to Sydney for the holidays.

‘It's a dubious situation, Cath,' Marion said. ‘I know I told you he would be coming back. But he hasn't told you. That's not good.'

Raff was blunter. ‘He's fucking you around.'

‘I like a challenge,' I said. ‘I think of him as a kind of Bermuda Triangle for women.' I was laughing, but Marion and Raff were not.

‘Sounds like that game we used to play in primary school,' Raff was sarcastic. ‘Would you rather hang yourself, shoot yourself, or drown?'

‘Drown,' I smirked, ignoring the warning in his heavy-handed irony. ‘It works in with the Bermuda metaphor.'

I got to the party late, hoping to suggest I felt casual about it. I knew a lot of people there and spoke to them as I worked my way through the crowd to Michael. When I looked at him it hurt, I felt him in my whole body. This is what is hard to explain to people—how physical my response to him was. All I could think of was his skin and how I could get it close to mine.

Whenever I glanced up from a conversation he was watching me, his eyes upon me. But whenever I went to approach him he seemed to slip away into another room. His technique was hypnotically simple: interested, inattentive, present, absent.

As I was about to give up and leave the party Michael came out to me. ‘I've been looking for you,' he said. ‘If I'd known you'd be in Sydney I'd have asked you to come along myself. Do you have to go so soon? I can't leave, I have to clean up.'

‘I'll be here a few days,' I said. ‘Call me.'

He called first thing the next morning and came over to the flat I was staying in. He stood in the doorway of the living room, arms stretched up, hanging off the jamb. He was still lean and lined and, to me, sexy. It had only been eight months.

‘Are you seeing anyone?' he asked.

‘No,' I said. ‘I assume you are. Is that why didn't you tell me you were coming out?'

‘Not at all. I thought a girl like you would have a lot of options and I'd be down low on the list,' he was cocky now. ‘I've sent you a few postcards, haven't I? I'm hoping that will count for something.'

‘It takes more than that,' I lied. ‘And I want you to know I don't send bum titty bum bum postcards to just anyone. Have you got time to go out for breakfast?' I was anxious to get him out of the flat. All I wanted to do was touch him but it seemed to me that was a bad idea. I wanted to see if there was something real between us, something that sex couldn't cover up.

‘Of course,' Michael looked disappointed but was gracious. ‘Coffee would be good.'

Being with him in a public place just made things worse. I could barely concentrate on the menu, or the view of Bondi Beach. Michael seemed in the same state. He was shaking. Our hands brushed against each other as we reached out for our coffees and it was like an electric current ran between us. Finally, after what seemed like hours, but was probably only ten minutes, Michael reached across the table and tentatively stroked the inside of my wrist with his forefinger.

‘Catherine,' he said, ‘I…Could…I still feel the same about you. I didn't know that I would, but sitting here, it's driving me crazy.' His voice was quavering.

‘So it's not just me?' I asked, and he grinned.

‘It's not. It's me too. It's us.'

We walked home holding hands and kissed as soon as we got back in the door. We kissed, nothing else, for a very long time. I drank him, I was drunk with him. I was full of feeling and empty of it at the same time. I looked at the clock to find an hour had passed and we were still standing in the hallway with our arms wrapped around each other.

‘That's to make up for missing all that foreplay in our mad desert fucks,' Michael stroked my cheek. ‘But now, now I want to get dirty.'

We undressed each other slowly; I felt that I was floating. By the time he was inside me I was outside myself. This is what I need to say, again, to try and explain all that happened: no one else had ever made me feel like this. No one. When I was with him, all thought stopped. I cannot remember what we did, or what we said, only that hours passed and I was in a state that I think must have been ecstasy.

You are my church, I thought to myself, but didn't say. I knew how strange it would have sounded; the thought itself felt strange but how else to explain the feeling between us? I chased this moment, precisely this feeling, for the next six years. Michael looked into my eyes. He said, ‘You have no idea how often I have thought of you. I toss and turn, you lose me sleep.'

Despite the heat, we made love all that day and into the night. After the hours of gentle we became rough. He hurt me like I wanted to be hurt. I was swollen and sore but this just made everything more beautiful.

‘We should get up and get something to eat,' Michael said, after dark had fallen. So we did. We ventured into the night to buy some Thai takeaway and some cold beers. We ate in bed and I can't remember falling asleep, but I did, heavily, and I didn't wake until morning.

Michael was stretching. When he saw I was awake he said, ‘I think that might be the best night's sleep I've had in a decade.' Before I could answer I realised I was bleeding, though I wasn't due.

‘Shit,' I said. ‘I've destroyed Rebecca's sheets.'

Michael laughed. ‘Won't you be their favourite house guest,' he said, before kissing me on the forehead and getting out of bed. ‘I've got family stuff to do,' he said. ‘But I'll see you tonight.' He paused. ‘I mean, if you're around. If you want to.'

‘Both,' I said. ‘I want and I'm around.'

My friend Tony rang me when he heard I was in town. ‘A few of us are going to the movies,' he said. ‘Join us?'

‘Maybe,' I said. ‘I'll meet you there.' But I never turned up. I was waiting for Michael to call, which he eventually did, around nine that night, asking me if I felt like dinner. I said yes despite the fact I'd already eaten.

Tony called again the next morning. ‘Where were you last night? Waiting by the phone?'

‘I was tired.'

‘So you were. Waiting, I mean.'

‘No,' I lied.

I lied a lot over the next few days. I only had time for Michael, for the idea of him. I stood up friends, cancelled arrangements at the last minute. I hung around a flat that was not my own. I waited for him to have a moment to drop by. For the rest of the time I was in Sydney, I didn't go anywhere, do anything with anyone other than Michael.

In his absence I spent my time in Bondi, falling in love with that place. One day I went to the beach and there was a flotilla of bluebottles, thousands and thousands of them, floating in to shore. They were bright and shiny blue, so pretty it was hard to imagine they were dangerous. I'd had one brand me down my thigh the first day I swam there, a line of scarred skin that bubbled and itched for the next six months. Later, one wrapped itself around my wrist when I was paddling my surfboard and I had to pick the tail off delicately, fighting my instinct to panic and brush the sting and its poison across me.

Each night Michael would arrive later and later for our date. One hour, two hours, three, and I'd sit on the balcony, waiting, looking out over the water. When he did arrive he would often talk to me about Sydney, how beautiful it was, how much he missed it. Other times we wouldn't talk much at all, he would come over and walk straight into my bedroom. It was always hot, it was always humid and I would lean over the windowsill into the evening air while he held me by the hips and fucked me.

As the fires got closer to Sydney the air became thicker. We would wake up in the middle of the night, coughing in a smoky room. There were two hundred fires burning around New South Wales; it was as if everything was swimming in a sea of smoke. Each night on the news there were fire stories and, one night, a shot of a reporter in the centre of town gesturing to the fiery suburbs behind him with a broad sweep of the arm. Houses were burning; the city was ringed by fires. A man in a torn, blackened singlet was filmed in front of the wreckage of his house. He shrugged.

‘Everything is ash,' he said.

There were stories of heroes, of fifteen thousand fire fighters from New South Wales and volunteers pouring in from around Australia. Of people abandoning their cars on the highway. Of a family pet exploding into a ball of flame as it tried to escape. Of fire cutting people off so they couldn't drive out backwards or forwards. People in outer suburbs started to clear their gardens of dead wood, clear the land around their houses and hose everything down. They stood on their roofs with their hoses; waving them at the flames as if they could shoot the fire, kill it dead. Five houses in a Sydney street burnt down and the tabloids went crazy, running photos of the charred remains of a little girl's Christmas presents on the front page.

‘It's Christmas,' the people who had lost everything said on the news. ‘Things like this shouldn't happen at Christmas.'

But things like this always happen at Christmas. I thought of my friends whose father had walked out on them on Christmas Eve. Remembered getting up to fetch the newspaper on Boxing Day when I was a little girl and seeing the photo of a city, Darwin, obliterated by a cyclone. The stories of people's legs guillotined by flying iron; of a nursing mother being blown out of her house into the yard and crawling, on her hands and knees over broken glass, to find her newborn wedged under the front tyre of a car; of a couple and their cat jammed in a cupboard for five hours as shards of glass formed a mini-tornado inside their house, turning it into a giant blender. Christmas, I thought, is exactly the time of year shit like this happens.

The heat over those days was oppressive. Whenever we had sex we would drip with sweat, the smell of each other was strong. Michael would lift me up; we would fuck on the couch, on the kitchen bench, on the floor. He would talk while we were doing it but once our bodies were apart he said little, and what he did say was meant to hose me down, to deny the intensity between us.

‘This is not a good idea,' he might say. ‘I'll be leaving in a week or so.' Or, ‘I have to go soon. You know what it's like when you are only in a place for a short time. So many people to catch up with.'

He talked a lot about moving back. Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn't. ‘If only I could get a job here as good as the one I have at UCLA, I'd move back in a flash,' he might say. ‘And you are here.' Or, ‘I could never move back. Too much history. In LA I'm free of all that.'

One morning he rang me and said, ‘I won't be able to see you today. It's the fires. They're getting close to my uncle's house.' That night the fires turned the full moon red. It seemed to me that the moon was always full when Michael was around—that it would be hot, that I would bleed and the moon would be fat. This night it seemed the moon itself was bleeding. Other things also kept happening when Michael was around, but I found it harder to remember them: he was always late, I was always waiting; as soon as he arrived he would talk of being gone.