Geography (15 page)

There was also the Sydney I discovered with Tony. ‘The only way to really know this city,' he said to me soon after I arrived, ‘is to kayak. I've got a five-week plan for you. We'll paddle around Middle Harbour and Pittwater. A different kayak trip every Sunday.'

I agreed to the plan. The mildness of Sydney's weather meant you didn't have to put on a wetsuit, like you did when you kayaked in Victoria. We would put on our rashies—Tony's was black and mine was blue—and smother our faces in fifteen plus, put on baseball caps and sunglasses and off we'd go. By Melbourne standards we looked like dorks. In Sydney, dagginess resulting from sporting paraphernalia was more acceptable.

That first weekend we paddled around the edges of Middle Harbour and Tony, an enthusiast when it came to architecture, pointed out all the best houses on the waterfront. Another weekend we went to Pittwater and, despite the wildness of the coves and beaches, we found ourselves at sea with hundreds of other boats, including one that sold us lattes and good muffins.

Sydney has this great ability to appear, in all its glorious cliché, more beautiful than you can imagine, and that physical beauty becomes addictive. One day we pushed out from Watsons Bay and headed for the national park that fell, blooming and green, onto the beach at Obelisk Bay. The sea was calm and the water sparkling.

‘Be careful,' Tony warned me. ‘All the rain this week has forced raw sewage into the harbour. It might still look gorgeous but just make sure you don't fall in.'

The harbour had a particular kind of beauty, Bondi had another. It was a place where informality had been ritualised. People never arranged to meet. When the weather was warm, which it was until close to winter, they simply hung around their chosen bits of the beach and waited for others to show up. I met lots of people like that. Vague acquaintances who, over the weeks of morning swims, coffees and walks, became friends. It was a bit like Venice beach, or Venice beach was a bit like it. Lots of flesh and sun and sand and parading. The weather shapes your day in both places, you have to give yourself over to it, though the weather got wilder in Bondi. And while Sydney was a large and difficult city, Bondi, if you learnt to move around the constant stream of visitors, was like a village. I didn't interact with the tourists and talked about them with the same disdain that all the locals did, but their presence made Bondi the perfect suburb for someone like me who always liked to imagine they were living in other places.

Every morning when I went down to the beach to walk and to swim, buses full of Japanese and American tourists would be lined up. I'd watch them removing their shoes, feeling the sand between their toes, taking photos of each other. When I went overseas myself everyone I met knew Bondi, had seen the photos of this crescent moon of beach—the beach, and its famous surf. But I loved it best when the water was as flat as a mirror and I could swim, seeing clear to the ocean bed that was laid out below and before me.

Dolphins surfed the waves in the morning, playing with the surfers, while people watched from the beach and smiled and nodded at each other. One morning Tony and I were sitting out the front of a café that overlooked the water.

‘Does my nose look big?' he asked. It had become a running gag—his nose was huge and he thought it was ugly. He would say to me, ‘It makes me look so Italian,' and I'd say to him, ‘You are Italian. I think it's sexy.' Then he would say, ‘Do you really?' and smile; like it was the first time I had said it.

It was a warm winter's day and half a dozen Bondi-ites sat in their dark glasses and Mambo tracksuits reading the papers. I turned to look out at the ocean and there, fifty feet away, a whale was rolling lazily, holding its flipper aloft. I had never seen a whale before though I'd spent various holidays over the years on rocky outcrops with binoculars in my hands, jumping at every shadowy shape in the distance, every smudge on the horizon.

‘You see,' Tony leant towards me. ‘There is everything you could possibly want, right here, in this suburb. That is why people never leave.'

On warm nights, Tony and I would take a drink down to the beach, just before we went to bed. In early summer the water was at its coldest because winter caught up with it three months after the season itself ended. As far as I was concerned, that just made it more exhilarating. One night the surf was high and I decided to swim out to catch a wave. Tony stood on the beach, yelling at me.

‘Do you have any idea how many pissed tourists die each year doing what you're doing?'

‘I'm prepared to risk it.'

‘Well I'm going back to sit in my car and put the headlights on. Promise me you won't move out of the spotlight.' He walked up to his car and put his lights on high beam while I attempted to bodysurf. ‘Stay in the lights,' he kept calling, which was impossible, as the beam dropped into the water about two feet from the shore.

‘I'll die of sand rash, not drowning, if you keep carrying on like this,' I yelled.

‘I can't take it any more,' Tony yelled back before he jogged back down to the beach, then dived into the water and swam out to me. When he got to me he manoeuvred me, half-joking, half-seriously, into a lifesaver's grip, then started to sidestroke me back to shore.

I couldn't stop laughing. ‘You remind me of a sheep dog,' I said. ‘Always trying to round me up.'

‘And you remind me of a sheep,' he said. ‘A wet one.'

I didn't think about what was happening with Tony, about the time we spent together, the comfort I felt around him. It just made sense to me that, as the nights got hotter, we did what housemates sometimes do, what ex-lovers often do. We would lie in bed and talk until the small hours of the morning. And as we talked we would touch each other, and sometimes the touching would turn to sex. There was a sweetness to our times together, but I would always go back to my bedroom for a few hours of sleep. We never woke up together.

One night it was different. We'd been to a friend's birthday party on a Bondi rooftop. It was a hot, sticky night and we'd danced with, and talked to, each other all evening. I was touched by the shy way he danced, by the fact he was dancing to be close to me, not to show off to other people. We kissed in public at the end of a sexy dance to, embarrassingly, ‘Sexual Healing'. Now questions would be asked.

We left the party early to make love. That was hot and sexy and slow as well, like the whole evening. ‘Do we need to talk about this?' I asked afterwards, after the sex was over. ‘This seems to be becoming a weekly not a monthly event.'

‘I don't need to talk,' he said, ‘I'm happy. Do you? Need to talk, I mean.'

‘I'm not good at casual,' I said. ‘But I'm not available either, so I don't know what to do.' As the words came out of my mouth, I realised what I'd said.

‘Not available?' Tony still had his arms around me, but I could feel his tension. ‘I didn't know you were seeing someone.'

‘I'm not,' I said. ‘Well I am. But he's overseas.'

‘That Michael guy? You haven't seen him for over a year and he's not even calling himself your boyfriend.'

‘It doesn't make sense. I know that.' Now I was tense. I got up, ready to go to my own room.

Tony grabbed me, pulled me back and put his arm around me. ‘It's fine,' he said. ‘I was just surprised. But I'm still fretting over the evil Julia, so I'm not really available either.'

‘So,' I hesitated. ‘Fuck buddies?'

‘I hate that phrase,' Tony said. ‘It's disgusting. This is how I see us. Like two planes circling beside each other waiting to land. We are doing the same thing at the moment but perhaps we are going to land in different places.' He kissed me on the forehead. ‘We're airport buddies.'

‘Sometimes I think,' I said to Tony over dinner one night a few weeks later, ‘that I'm not a nice person.' I was smarting from a comment a new acquaintance had made when we had met for lunch. Intimidating, she had called me. Reserved.

‘Of course you are a nice person,' he said, waving his hands around even more than usual. ‘But you have edges, people injure themselves on you. You know those coffee tables at the Adelphi in Melbourne? All metal and sharp corners, and everyone who stays there damages their shins? You're like that. You sit in the centre of things in everyone's way looking shiny and gorgeous. Then you are surprised when people fall over you. You think you're the wallpaper, but you're not, you're the coffee table.'

‘Ah-ha,' I said. ‘Pop psychology meets interior design. Very Sydney.'

‘But,' he went on, ignoring me, ‘if what you are asking is whether it makes sense that you are oblivious to me because there is a chance that you might get laid by a man who lives in another country some time in the next year, I'd say no.'

‘I thought we were circling planes?' I said nervously, not sure whether Tony was seriously trying to discuss our relationship or was just continuing in his generally flirtatious style. ‘I didn't think you wanted more.'

‘What would you say if I did?'

‘I don't know,' I said. ‘Good? I think.' And as I said it I meant it. Michael was becoming a blur; it was Tony who was coming into focus.

‘Well, if we are still enjoying each other's company come Christmas time, why don't we go away for a week or two? To Byron Bay.'

‘It's a deal,' I said.

Michael's sixth sense was up and running and the next day an email arrived: ‘What are you doing over Christmas? Going to go to New York to see Finn? Why don't you come through Los Angeles first? We could have some fun. Drive to Mexico or something.'

‘I have nothing planned,' I typed, not even waiting a full minute before I answered. ‘I'd like to come over.'

It took me a week to tell Tony that I had booked the flight, and even then I was evasive about it. Even worse, I brought it up when he had his back to me doing the dishes, so I didn't have to look him in the eye.

‘You know how we talked about Byron over Christmas? I have to go to New York for work, so I wanted to take advantage and stay on to spend Christmas with Finn.'

‘Are you stopping in LA?' There was a pause. ‘For work? To take advantage?'

‘Yes. I mean not work. I mean…'

There was another awkward silence, then I said, ‘I'm sorry; it's just that I don't really know what it is between us. We're not really an item and…'

‘You and Michael are,' he paused, then went on scathingly, ‘an
item
?'

I said nothing.

‘You're a fucking idiot,' he said, throwing his candy pink dishwashing gloves onto the kitchen bench and walking out of the room.

Eight

‘These last few days have been a bit of a low point,' Ruby says. ‘In more ways than one. Today, I am in charge of the itinerary.'

Despite my misgivings about continuing to travel with her we have caught a bus to Thekkady, just out of Periyar National Park. We are both being nice to each other and I'm beginning to enjoy Ruby's company again. We spent yesterday in pursuit of some of the world's last living tigers. We saw nothing, of course. Our ‘Wildlife Lake Cruise' was one of half a dozen boats that set off late each afternoon. The noise of all the engines scared most animals off, though we did see some water birds, a few deer, a hyena-looking thing and some water buffalo, which, for an exhilarating moment, I thought were elephants. Our guides told us endless tales of animals being poached and killed, ‘for the Chinese aphrodisiac'.

We walked at dusk, in the hope of seeing some rare goats. There was a traffic jam in the car park and, as if in mockery of the signs that line the road requesting silence, the drivers leaned flamboyantly on their horns to hurry the traffic along. So, no goats.

‘Today,' Ruby elaborates, ‘we are going to the spice farm.' I am dubious, thinking it will be yet another tourist trap, but I have no better suggestions. As soon as we arrive at the farm I'm won over.