Geography (12 page)

The few friends I had told over the years had said the same thing. To me it was a fog. I couldn't see how it was connected to the person I was now, and I certainly couldn't see how it was connected to Michael.

‘Look, Laura's dad never actually fucked me. He just felt me up a few times. Lots of older people tried it on me. In some ways it was kind of sexy, it made me feel powerful.'

‘I don't understand why you play this down, Catherine—you play every-bloody-thing else up. There's nothing powerful about how you behave with men now. When it comes to Michael, you're like a junkie,' she took a breath. ‘This is not romance,' she said carefully. ‘It is madness.'

She put a glass of red wine in front of me. She, five months pregnant, was on the mineral water. ‘If I wasn't pregnant this friendship would be driving me to drink,' she said. ‘Let's watch TV—“Seinfeld”'s about to start. Otherwise I'll kill you and agitate the baby.'

I leaned across the couch and took Marion's hand. ‘Why do you put up with me?' I asked her.

‘Like you said,' she smiled at me. ‘Love isn't sensible.'

Through the perfect autumn and into early winter Marion, Raff and I planned the coming of the child. I offered to move out but they both said they wanted me to stay. Or, to put it as Marion did, ‘subvert the heterosexual family norm.' They asked me to come to the birth and I took the responsibility seriously, reading my Sheila Kitzinger conscientiously. I even attended the hospital pre-natal clinic with Marion. We talked about pain control, and names, and whether it was bad to dress boys in blue and girls in pink. Raff built shelves and fossicked through secondhand shops looking for a cot and other things the baby might need. Marion and I cleared out the small study and painted it, blue and yellow like the sky and the sun. I made curtains out of an Indian print with wood-blocked elephants and then painted some elephants, and the occasional goat, down low, near the floor. I did this because they reminded me of Rajasthan and
Arabian Nights
and such thoughts had always made me happy.

‘But will they make Embryo happy?' asked Raff, unconvinced. Embryo was now large enough to make Marion's stomach round and smooth with a popped-out belly button.

‘Well, they won't make it unhappy,' Marion reasoned. ‘And perhaps they will make it wise.'

All this should have made me less interested in Michael, but it seemed to have the opposite effect. I felt a stirring of want for the things that Marion and Raff were going to have and it did not occur to me to look closer to home to find those things.

‘We've just got email set up at work,' I told Marion one evening. ‘It's great.'

‘We've had it for a few months already,' she said. ‘I get much more work done but it's addictive. I think I'll miss it when I take time off after Embryo is born.'

I soon found out what she meant. Email changed how I felt about the world. It brought me closer to my family—my father in Paris; my dad in Bangkok; my brother in New York; my mother in Adelaide. Sometimes I felt as if I personally was being globalised: stretched thin, across the world. Sometimes I felt as if I could never find all of me in the one place at the one time. So more and more the place I found myself was at my computer, imagining Michael sitting in front of his screen on the other side of the world.

When Michael and I had used faxes, the contact was irregular, once every couple of weeks or so. But soon, with email, we were up to every couple of days. Out there in cyberspace there were no gestures to read. We didn't have to see the certain turn of the body, the angling that suggests ambivalence. We emailed each other with no idea what the other was doing at the time: drinking, working, grabbing a quiet moment away from a lover, it was irrelevant. Most importantly all these words between us, the frequency and intimacy of them, made me forget how fraught things had been when he was in Sydney and Melbourne just a few months ago.

He would lose interest periodically of course. Faxes, emails, letters were unanswered, phone calls unreturned, the waiting was so intense, so exquisite that it consumed me. I pined across, masturbated to, the distance between us. Thought of that wonderful sprawling city in the soft winter light and the sea that edged it. Thought of planes cutting through the sky to be at that airport, with him, fucking in half an hour as if one year, or two, had never passed.

‘What I imagine is this,' I'd write. ‘I am lying on a towel on Venice beach, hot from baking in the sun. The sun on my skin fills me with heat. I am wet, I am swelling, thinking about you…'

Time wasn't as solid in this space. I would sit down for a moment and find hours had passed. I found I could write things, say things, which I lacked the courage to say or do in the flesh. Things I was embarrassed to read once I had written them.

I told Michael what I would like to do to him. I told him what I would like him to do to me. I would describe how it felt to have him slide into me after weeks—no years—apart, shocked by how easy it was, how ready I was for him. I told him I loved his cock, how big it was. I was graphic. I described the sensation as he sat on my couch, grasping my arse, moving me down onto him. The way my cunt resisted him at first and the pressure we used to push at each other until that moment when my body stopped fighting him. The release inherent in that precise moment of giving in. I would describe him licking and biting me, holding my arse and spreading it wide as I moved upon him, so he could go deeper. I told him that I wanted him in me as deep as he could go without hurting me. No, deeper, I didn't care if it hurt. I wanted it to hurt.

It was enough to make us both come as we were reading, as we were writing. If I were at work I would run to the toilet to masturbate. I couldn't, not once I got there and the reality of the office-grey toilet walls, the fake smell of pine from the room deodoriser and the neat line of toilet rolls impressed themselves upon me, but the need was urgent.

Words amazed me. The fact that they wrought such an effect. Could make people cry, and laugh, make their body swell and harden, or soften and open. I would describe how it felt to suck his cock. As I typed I could taste him in my mouth, my lips would part. I began to miss meetings at work because I was typing so hard, so furiously. I would jump when anyone came into my office.

Sometimes Michael complained that my emails were too intense. ‘Perhaps if you gave me more detail, built things more slowly,' he said, ‘I wouldn't come so quickly.' Occasionally he asked me to stop. ‘I am sitting here, my cock hot and hard in my hand, and you are several thousand miles away. This is driving me crazy.'

I would masturbate and describe that to Michael. The feel of my fingers, or of the vibrator, too large really, having to be worked into my body. I would describe to him the fantasies I would have while I did that to myself. ‘I imagine,' I wrote, ‘that you are fucking me up the arse. It is hard for you to get your cock in, we are worried it is too big, but we manage if you use a lot of lubricant, if I lie very still, not moving, and you push slowly. You have me pinned.'

‘I am not sure if that is what I want to do to you,' he answered. ‘If we do it like that I will not be able to see your grey eyes and that is what I first noticed about you. There is a game I would like to play. You lie on your side and read a book to me, out loud. I will stroke you for a while, then put one finger, or two, in your cunt to see where it is your attention lies, with me and my cock that is hard against you, or with the book. Let's say it's Tolstoy:
Anna Karenina
. That's a long book. You must keep reading all the while, while I stroke you, while I fuck you with my fingers. You must keep reading as I penetrate you. You get the idea, I'm sure. I want to see how long you can keep reading for, I want to wait for that moment when all you want to do is fuck, nothing else. I want that moment to take a long time to arrive, to take no time at all. Clearly, it seems, I don't know what I want. But you know what I want. You always do. You are always right.'

‘I want a look,' said Raff. ‘I've always thought you were a girl with literary talents.'

‘Forget it,' I said. ‘I can't re-read this stuff without blushing. I'm sure the computer guy from work has read some of it and you should see the way he looks at me. I can guarantee it will send you crazy with desire. You'll stare at my breasts more than you do already. Marion will get cranky.' But then Marion, despite her reservations about Michael, started nagging as well. I showed them an extract of one of my more pornographic attempts. We sat together, shoulder to shoulder in front of their computer screen, reading. Marion kept laughing out loud, but Raff went silent.

‘I didn't think it was possible,' Raff announced, ‘but you have finally made me blush. You're wasted in the travel industry, you could make millions writing smut like this.' He turned back to Marion. ‘Have we got time for a quickie before dinner? We both know how randy those hormones are making you.'

Marion laughed. ‘It's a miracle, my darling,' she answered. ‘You've been out-perverted in your own home.'

There was sex, there was the weather. Michael would write of the sky with clouds or without. Of clouds, full of rain or empty of it. There had been a hot north wind in Melbourne, in Los Angeles a hot wind had come in from the desert. Storms and dying cyclones would come down from Far North Queensland to Sydney, giving the city the feel of the tropics. In Los Angeles the storms came from the west across the American plains, exhausted of rain by the time they got there, more wind than anything else. There was so much drama in the air and sea: wild winds, killer surf, storms and heat. We would always have the weather between us, the weather to talk about. Cold currents would move south from Alaska, freezing the seas at Big Sur while the seas around Bondi were heating up, as if it were on the equator, and Melbourne sweltered in forty degree heat for days and weeks on end. The warmth would bring in sharks and bluebottles along the beaches of New South Wales. Whales would swim north earlier than usual; in California they would move south late. Summer hailstorms would pelt me, while fog hung heavy over the ocean at Venice making it impossible to surf in the morning.

He might write: ‘It has been hot for weeks on end. There is no relief in sight.' Or this: ‘It has been raining and in this weather this city loses all its charms.' These things felt important. Expressed, perhaps, his state of mind (‘it is cloudy'), or his feelings for me (‘it is hot'). That he was missing me (‘I envy you those tropical summer storms, the build-up then the relief. The thunder and lightning. It gets so wild there. Here, here it is always the same').

I told Michael how it had been raining constantly in Melbourne, and then again in Sydney whenever I went there for work. ‘I thought Sydney was drier,' I complained, ‘so how come it rains whenever I am there?'

‘People always think it rains more in Melbourne but it's not true,' he said. ‘Sydney's annual rainfall is 47 inches a year—twice Melbourne's.'

‘My mother has a theory,' I say, ‘that the weather follows me. I think perhaps it does.'

One cold winter night, Raff knocked on my door and woke me up. Told me it was time. I got up to find Marion pacing. ‘It hurts,' she said, outraged.

She staggered out to the car and lay in the back seat, curling over a large cushion I'd put there for her days earlier. Raff got into the front seat and together we drove the five or so blocks to the Royal Women's Hospital. We put Marion in a wheelchair and went up to the twelfth floor.

She was in so much pain all she wanted was a hot shower. She couldn't bear having either of us near her. ‘Just piss off and leave me alone,' she hissed, so Raff and I sat in the hallway, on the floor outside the bathroom, helpless, listening to Marion's groans. Sometime, around three a.m. they took Marion into the delivery room and gave her a shot of pethidine. For a while things became very quiet and still. I sat by the window, staring out over the streets of Carlton, the suburb where I'd gone to university and hung out, the place where I worked. This night as Max was being born, the moon was bright enough to bathe the street in light. Mist hung in the air and everything shone white.

After Marion had slept for an hour or so she began to enter the contractions again. I sat by her, putting a washer on her burning forehead, bringing water to her in a glass with a straw, spraying her with Evian water. She was very self-contained. A lover of cats, she was like a cat herself, drawn deep into herself. I'd look into her eyes when the contraction was building, panting in short breaths, reminding her by example how to breathe over the pain. To breathe with someone, to look at them with such a steady gaze was a revelation. It revealed to me the quiet depth, the steadiness of friendship.

Raff, who was sitting at the end of the bed with a book of sports trivia, threw out a continuous string of quiz questions. ‘In what year did Bradman make 974 test runs at an average of 139.14?'