Reunion (41 page)

Jack finds the whole idea abhorrent and he is sure Ava would too, but where once he would have tried to persuade Helen to change her mind, he won't bother now. Friendship is no longer the complete and coherent package it once was; both more clear-sighted and more browned about the edges it requires far greater understanding than its youthful progenitor.

Come and visit me, Jack
, Connie had written in a recent email.

Poor Connie, every moment's genius until the inevitable future seized him by the neck and began to squeeze.

I miss you, I miss us as a group
. And:
When did our friendship become old times?

Connie wrote of a gap where Ava used to be.
I'm aware of it even more than I was aware of her presence.
This was not lost opportunity, he insisted, but lost possibilities. Jack detected a
flatness in these communications, a resignation, but Connie was adamant: he had made the right choice in returning to his family.

How different they all had been at the reunion. Jack can still feel the texture of that evening: the terror of seeing Ava mingled with his desire, her easy duet with Harry, the carefree conversation of his oldest friends, and a sense of being locked in a scene in which he had no role. Looking back on that night and all the nights preceding it, it was as if, for him, love and friendship were a one-way ticket not to the next stop, nor even the next suburb, but right to the end of the line.

He had always assumed he loved Ava best. Loved her better than did Connie or Helen, loved her better than Harry. But he had just loved her more exclusively.

He crosses the road and enters the grounds of the university, the place of their beginning. What now? he wonders. What now with Ava? After decades of wanting nothing other than to devote himself to her, the answer to Harry's proposal is no longer so clear. He has read about the strange neurological tricks of a damaged brain that cause people to know that one side of their body is paralysed but have no real sense of the existence of that side. It is how he feels about Ava. He knows she is dead but he cannot quite believe it. When the bewilderment overwhelms, he reaches for her fictions, but then he has always felt more at home in her work than he ever felt with her — until those last months when finally he shaped his love to something she truly wanted. He came to their friendship too late. But there are the books. The only life remaining.

He has no photographs of those last days. None of them do. Yet he pictures her easily: Ava perched on the verandah
of her house, Ava stretched on the couch in all her lovely lushness, Ava in her courtyard, Ava strolling through the cemetery, Ava listening while he played his guitar. And Ava asking whether he could help a loved one end their life. Did he let her down? Jack has posed the question so many times and still he is not convinced that if she wanted to die (and, unlike Minnie, he will never be sure she did), she understood why he could not help her. Although he knows she valued his visits those last months, that they gave her life when the rest of life was wearing thin.

It is quiet here in the grounds of the university. The library is lit up and through the glass he sees the night students at work. There are people walking the paths, shadowy figures and solitary like him. The wind has freshened, life itself rushes into his face. He picks up his speed, he begins to run. He feels his heart racing, the knots fall away. He passes familiar buildings, he moves swiftly through this landscape of his past.

And now he leaves the campus, a lone man in his middle years streaming through the streets, back to the city centre, across the river and into St Kilda Road. He passes the Botanic Gardens where he spent so much time with Ava; he is skimming the asphalt, like skating or flying. He runs and runs, pulling away from the past. Finally he slows down, finally he stops. He waits at a tram stop outside a block of flats he has never before noticed, a tatty oddity amongst the glassy towers. His head is so clear he sees everything tonight.

The tram picks him up and carries him through the darkness to the terminus. He disembarks and walks the short distance home. The flat is still warm after a day of sunshine. He switches on lamps and shuts the blinds, then he collects Ava's novels and settles on the couch. He has no regrets. He rests
one hand outstretched on her books, and the other curls in that vulnerable human hollow above the heart. Early friendships are cemented with the hardest glue, Ava used to say. But time has the hardest grip of all. Jack closes his eyes and sees himself as he once saw Ava, one hand grasped to the rail of a speeding train as it hurtles into the future.

My partner, Dorothy Porter, died on 10 December 2008 after a brief illness. She was healthy all through the writing of
Reunion
, she was healthy when the novel went into production in late 2007. We looked forward to celebrating together the publication of
Reunion
in 2009.

Both Dorothy and I believe in the power of fiction to take one into the hearts and minds of characters who owe their existence to the author's imagination.
Reunion
is a work of fiction. None of the happenings in the novel are drawn from my own personal loss of late 2008.