Montreal

Let’s go walking, she says – oui on y va, on y va. Her strides are short because her legs are short. Bursts of lively conversation rise like bubbles into great expanses where nothing is said and all I can hear is the clip-clop of her boot heels on the pavement. We walk on. Much as I would like to say they, the silences, contain no awkwardness, are as natural to me as walking silently along with no-one, my gut feeling does not always support that claim. We round a bend and turn right onto Saint-Laurent. No physical intimacy can ever fully compensate for a language barrier- if it could the very purpose of verbal language would be undermined. And ours, though slight for me, is a gulf for her; how many times she must switch back to English and struggle to conceal the sigh! Those great expanses are therefore not born of some serene mutual silence but a basic void in understanding. The funky grocery store. Before stepping inside you are already drunk on the smell, seeping out onto the thoroughfare with an admixture of the horrid and the wonderful. She asks me about a trolley – I smile but give no answer.

There are a lot of beggars in Montreal. I have similar memories of Vancouver though it is a more temperate climate there and the homeless journey to its alleyways and underpasses to escape the frigid winters to be found in other parts of Canada. Here people show them little charity, even the man in rags who plays his recorder with such elegance. In her neighbourhood the street crowds are small, even on weekends, almost dismayingly small when compared to a similar area of inner Melbourne. There are also more trees. Hospitals look like castles, sports stores like boulangeries. In concert it all creates an atmosphere that is refined but also more organically human than can be found in most of the large cities I have visited, certainly all in North America.

Downtown, Old Montreal is greyer, more leaden. The buildings are bigger – though by no stretch as big as Melbourne’s – and people seem to shrink in their shadows. A block from the water’s edge, the legal and financial precinct feels at odds with the small-town atmosphere cultivated in her neighbourhood, but then I guess this bespeaks of good urban planning; the same comment could be made about dense industrial zones or power plants. There are more tourists and subsequently more kitschy souvenir shops. The clothes stores have less in them for a higher price. And with its stately mayoral chambers the town hall looms out over the street with a sort of Bram Stoker tremendousness.

On our way back from the river – an ugly section expanded for shipping, beside which runs a massive freight train line – we pass the Hotel St. James. It is Montreal’s most expensive and probably the one clad in the most ivy. “When I’m a famous writer,” she says, only half-joking, “I’ll have a tiny room there near the top with a maid and my own concierge, just like Francois Sagan”. She doesn’t understand when I tell her she is maddeningly capable and it is likely, though I can’t say for sure, that I have used these unusual words just to confuse her. The museum is only free after six, meaning we still have twenty minutes to kill. So with bags of groceries bought in the unimpressive Chinatown we sit on the white pebble steps facing the street, take in the enormity of space required for this museum and concert hall and ballet theatre while eating green tea flavoured balls of gelatinous goo, and she smiles wider with one of them between her teeth than I’ve ever seen her smile; postulating about our names and personalities had we been born the other gender – she’d have been gay, which I label a cop-out – I realise that not only would I rather go home and spend time with her than enter this Napoleon exhibition, but also that’s it’s been remiss of me not to have asked more questions about who she is, who she was, who she does or does not want to turn out like, instead of just looking at her face and wordlessly making to kiss it and breathe deeply on it. By now it is after six-thirty. Without my prompting she asks if I really want to go inside.

We walk home. Another hour and a half, mochi balls, snow peas and a few jars of Asian seasoning to show for our toils. I kiss her in the stairwell but she has turned inward and obliges evasively before hurrying up to the bedroom. Since arriving I have felt a strong desire to cook for her and do so again. Watching her as she eats, while creepy, gives me great pleasure. And for dessert we quarter an apple but leave the kiwi fruits as they are still hard as marbles. 

Montreal

Windsor, Ontario, the birthplace of my mother, lies some six hundred miles southwest of here. It is a small hard-time city with few attractions other than being the Canadian little brother of Detroit, which is just across the river. Originally I had planned to go there alone while she visited an uncle in Gatineau, the last bastion of French Canada before the bridge to Ottawa. But after ten days down here I find myself increasingly reluctant to part with her company. So I pitch my new idea. She talks me down. We compromise – I’ll join her in Gatineau and go onto Windsor after two days, she will go back East.

Meantime Montreal is gripped by an unseasonal string of warm days- twenty degrees but hotter than that in spirit; I walk the streets as if it were summer. Its famous irreverence is on parade everywhere you look. Jugglers, flutists, comedians, transsexuals; the city flexes happily in the afternoon warmth. By night enormous spotlights crisscross the sky with erratic movements, more than twenty at my count, part of an art installation near the contemporary museum with which people can interact and create by jerking long levers this way and that. But I have worked hard to be here and contentedly pass those levers by, uncaring and content with her beside me. Like yupis we work on our laptops in silence or like poets our notebooks on her balcony or a Guatemalan hammock spread flat in the park.

When home, rarely do we engage with her flatmates. One is Anglophone, a 3D animator who sleeps by day and works by night. He is a nice enough guy but is more likely to emerge from his room in the daylight hours for food or something completely left field – the other day it was every last fork in the kitchen to play the role of fish in a project – than communicate with others. And while his dedicated introversion impresses me it is another thing entirely to be too insular to observe basic household courtesies; she regrets choosing him when the last girl left. The other two, both women from France, are lovely people but neither here nor there for me. One is much older and pregnant, the other from a tiny village near the German border who does not speak English and is shy as can be. 

Montreal

More maple leaves will fall as the first frost closes in; at present many of the trees lining Montreal’s one-way rues and avenues are half green, half red. The sun is out but high and cold. Looking upwards I see ducks flocking to the enormous park near her apartment – there the lake’s foamy spillway is clogged with leaves and goldfish swim in the shallows. By the time the shedding is complete, when they cake the footpaths like a daub of paint, the leaves themselves will be caked in snow.

Charming blocks of apartments all have staircases on the outside so every front door can be reached independently, undisturbed. It gets me thinking about why Australian apartment blocks rarely afford their residents this luxury. Too big I guess; these are three or four levels at most, the kind you might swan past in a more elegant area of Paris. Old women sit in rocking chairs on numerous balconies, obese, silent, staring. And from afar their chairs rock with a barely detectable rhythm, so slightly that you must stare back in order to see them move.

We enter the park at a pedestrian crossing. Fortunate that we do, since I am yet to grasp the idea of reversed driving directions and goad beeping motorists by looking right first, always right. There is a soccer pitch, a baseball diamond, a petanque square full of white-haired men. Bands of musicians play, eyes fixed on their counterparts for signs of a change in the jam. An adult learning centre made of old grey stone; cryptically the coat of arms above its entrance depicts a woman hitting a tennis backhand. I ask after its meaning but she can’t tell me. “Once there was a dead body in the lake though,” she says, as if pressed into supplying me with a substitute piece of trivia. Smatterings of people in meditation pose on rocks by the water and shaded grassy hillsides. I gush at all the squirrels and she shakes her head but listens as I explain their significance; the park in Windsor when I was ten years old, illumined by fireflies, my father shrinking to a ball on the tanbark, crying for reasons I could not understand then, grandpa. Grandpa who I’ll visit in ten days, by total coincidence the day of his eighty-eighth birthday.

Commotion up ahead; a man is screaming. People look around with concern but discover only the barks of a huge black fitness trainer, practically towing his pupil along in a slipstream of berating motivational jibes. Most of the women I see are beautiful. 

From the Balcony

Only the exhaustive is truly interesting- who wrote that? And the other border of this divide I straddle – thirty seconds? But I want it now! Attaching my daypack to its big brother in a hot sweat, the sweat of passport control, the sweat of customs, and the pointless race to the baggage carousel, I know that she is just beyond the ‘Sortie’ sign. And I have exhausted myself in anticipation but would almost prefer it if she were already here and there was no ‘big meeting’ at all. Withdrawing from sight, meting out comparisons between incomparables – why am I the last to leave the terminal? Are you going to tell me; tell me about those first moments! Hers is the first face I notice. All the other faces are imprecise as background characters in a movie. The doors open and she sights me and stands. The weight of the backpack topples me into her; we embrace, stare at one another with unidentifiable emotions, walk.

At the back of the shuttle bus I do not touch her, I can hardly look at her- when I do I always seem to lapse into a rude stare that confuses some young Quebecois backpackers on their way home. What is this beautiful French Canadian whose fringe is straight and nearly covers her eyes doing conversing entirely in English with him, wild haired and bespectacled, too awkward to sit flush on his seat? Perfunctory questions about the flight and the weather and a small road accident flash dimly through our stalemate, charged with joy but overlaid by a feeling I can’t pin down. After every answer we share a glance, smile innocently and shake our heads, as if in disbelief, then look away again. It is a common condition among people to have their mind’s eye fixed on something but their gaze trained on something else; never have I felt that more acutely than in these dark caricatures of neighbourhoods seen but unseen, this city I have never visited and should be clamouring to study but am closed off from by a solid wall of other thoughts.

We come at last to a stairwell. Too narrow for two, I go in first but must let her push uncomfortably past my massive backpack in order to unlock the door. My legs are weightless at this point and I suffer from short interludes of terror. And the floorboards creak more than any I’ve heard and they seem to heave beneath us, and that nostalgic perfume trickles back to me in the air her body cuts through. The bedroom I know so intimately from Skype is now here, a cartoon illustration come to life. I cast my stuff down exhaustedly and shower. The shower is difficult to work and I burn and I freeze. When I creak back to her the door is ajar, held so by a stone pig smirking at me. It smells of incense. Will I put things away before bed, she asks – empty hangers dangle in waiting on my side of the close. My side? Unbelief never took so trivial a form. Police sirens sound strangely over my no and fully clothed I lower myself onto her frameless mattress, taking care not to step on her legs. Still I struggle to look at her.

The walls are poorly painted in off-pink, white base layer showing underneath. They are adorned with posters and photographs and incomprehensible French scrawled in black marker. A picture of her, then 16, with her girlfriend of the time takes my attention; her hair is short and her eye makeup dark green. I ask her about it and before long we are looking through her few remaining baby photographs, in front of televisions with Play School-style women holding colourful placards aloft – CINQ, SIX, SEPT – by lakes with her father and on couches between cousins both kissing her forehead, face practically unchanged, eyes no more or less spectacular; in her teenage brother’s arms, with her mother whose hair colour changes in every shot, a tiny carefree mind destined to live out hardships both undeserved and self-engineered, anchors on her dress and glittery cheeks, and by the time the first picture comes around again her chin is on my shoulder, her arms threaded under mine to reach the top of my back. And I am holding a body which is bigger than I remember it as if I were holding a family member I had taken for dead. Below the last line of Romain Gary’s suicide note suspended in huge letters from the ceiling like the Happy Birthday at a child’s party I recognise and drink her. My heartbeat returns to normal; the ineffable feeling was love. Sunlit Australian beaches encroach briefly on my dreams. Then hours and hours of nothing. When I wake, half the day is gone.

Before Her

Like the reptilian eyes of a cat in sunshine a morning sky more white than blue finds itself divided by an enormous vertical slit of purple cloud, still as a stone but roaring. Yawning; the sky is old and tired. But when I first approached the airport it was the dilated pupil of a cat prowling for possums in the night. And my parents, though they had listened eagerly over breakfast as I answered their questions about money and insurance and severed heads in Acapulco, could not look me in the face, as if only it were leaving and my body remaining behind.

Oil spills on the tarmac, planes taxiing backwards, fingernail-deep foundation on the cheeks of flight attendants whose pants zipped up on the side instead of the front. Grudgingly I cried but felt my tears were an elegy to nothing. So removed was my mind from this Melbourne, the Melbourne of the airport with its barren paddocks and industrial estates, and industrial lakes of refuse, so typical of those skirting airports the world over – so much further removed from the city. Then in the air all the dams on the eastern plains were spangled silver and that great slit of cloud revealed itself to me, and inspirited by that strange contagion I yawned back at it and took out my notebook.

Perhaps out of frustration at my score of failed attempts, the big man sitting next to me fastens the pendant clasp around my neck. His hands are the biggest I’ve seen and worked coarse; I find a paternal strength in their touch and consequently feel smaller than I am, and my voice lighter, my independence more arguable. Now that we have ascended beyond the highest vapours the sky is young again: the sun monsters me at my window. Next to the emergence exit I am afforded more legroom but also a confining sense of vertigo – the ease with which I could grab and yank that handle! My first awarded story centred on a scenario like this. I shudder to think how it ended and why I chose to end it so.

Wednesday will be longer than Wednesday, for I am scheduled to cross time zones and lay over at three airports in the USA before arriving in Montreal. Disconcertingly, the girl who checked in backpack seemed somewhat vexed as to how it should reach Canada. She instructed me to ignore Sydney and Atlanta but to be sure to recheck the backpack in Los Angeles and with 5AM nonchalance I nodded but was more taken with the idea of holding her in my arms a while, like two disaffected loners trying intimacy out – like me and Audrey – Audrey the person she bore a slight resemblance to and who would probably be reading Stendahl when, at midnight, well into Thursday Melbourne time, I finally reached Pierre Trudeau.

In the back of my seat and everyone else’s there is a credit card slot and I don’t like that so much. It calls forth memories of coin-operated appliances in cheap motels. Bathrooms in pompous Europe. Rolling along a sequence of parallel thoughts, not pissing in Melbourne because the urinal was crowded strikes me now as a sad, quintessentially western state of being; even though I can argue to pencil shavings the ills of that condition or direct one to arguments made by men far superior to me, that condition is me and I it, inexorably. Usually I can exhort the piss out by thinking to myself, you are enviable, you are talented, you have been places many people haven’t, made money off your pen and your looks and there is no fucking reason why the company of other men – not even the company, just the presence – should make you nervous. But my giddy stomach, and my humiliation at having to engage in such conceited inner dialogues just to take a piss get the better of me.

Transferring from Sydney’s domestic to international terminals I sit on a bus beside twin girls more lovely than any others because they are here with me now. Barely ten years old, they repay my adoring smiles with blush and laughter. I stare straight ahead for propriety – their mother might (will) misinterpret my affection as lust – and consider them good luck omens. My heart flushes; I check myself before tears start falling – how tenuously these emotions, all of them, are perched! Later, while attempting to find departure gate 3 – the one I should have been looking for was 53 – the girls flash back into my mind. Only this time it is sadness they bring. How facile and shallow it was to feel uplifted about human beings in general because those two children were so physically beautiful; would I have reacted the same had they possessed faces less angelic? But wait: would the hairs on my arms stand more readily erect above gooseflesh if I were looking at Mount Hotham, or Everest? Absurd analogies poison my spirit.

And whatever it augurs, they also sit front of me on this shabby jumbo bound for Los Angeles.

Sydney airport was bitterly cold and its floor so crowded with duty free products that I could not take a step without grazing some designer handbag or comically oversized block of chocolate. Light and lovely like the movements of a beautiful girl, light and lovely like the movements of a beautiful girl. The solid mantle of white below us has given over to snowy spots in the sky and specks of foam scudding across the sea, down there on earth’s eternal blue. Fingerprints smudge my little portal window, which is directly aligned with the tip of the right wing. Not even the glassy lakes of Banff or Colorado can offer two skies like altitude can. Apparat is a tremendous artisan of electronic music but cannot write lyrics – why does a German try to write lyrics in English? Market appeal? Write fantastic lyrics in your own tongue and sing no more songs about sunlight washing things away. I’m disappointed by Apparat but consider that perhaps his lyrics have been translated from the German the way, for example because his book of essays happen to be on my lap, Hesse’s writings were. In that case, I’m even more disappointed by him. The flight attendant gives an inconsolable man watching Beauty and the Beast a tray with fruit salad – mostly cantaloupe – tasteless pasta, crackers, lettuce, tomato, horseradish. Water.

It’s alright. Physically I overtop the world and metaphorically I look back at six months of indecision, anxiety, unsuitable affairs with girls I care nothing for, joy at sad times and sadness all besides, the rapid disintegration of my little brother, passing up university for the second year running, palming the trust of best friends into dirty gutters, mimetic shapes forming in my head as physical embodiments of the alphabet while on magic mushrooms in rooms where everybody else is sober, and Audrey – always, inescapably, Audrey est ici.

Forty minutes from the City of Angels, the sky still pitch black, cabin lights somnolently dimmed. Even the jet engines seem to have quieted. Since these sleeping tablets wore off I have begun to obsess over the whereabouts of my backpack – was it sent to Atlanta first, then LA, then Montreal? Because if it was I have a problem. I’m pretty fucking certain she did. Then breakfast rolls in – an upside to vegetarianism on a plane, the only upside, is that yours always comes first. But worries encroach again before I can fork the first mouthful of spinach; my times seem out, too miserly, wrong. It’ll be seven in the morning when I enter the terminal and according to my itinerary I arrive in Montreal at midnight tonight. There is either a monstrous unspecified layover or this itinerary is a bunch of shit. I feel a great deal more privy to small annoyances than I did on my way to Europe, almost twelve months ago to the day, and the fact that I condescend to thinking of such trifles when the only person I have every wanted to devote myself to will be awake soon and organising her bus to Pierre Trudeau serves only to annoy me further. White waterlily skin, hair like the dilated heavens closed off to me now by a plastic shutter. Nine months now I have imagined our re-acquaintance. Every possible scenario, every angle of the mind’s great camera I have countenanced and exhausted, never, for all my efforts, managing to get past the first hug. Good, good – she is inside me again.

No monstrous layover, no bullshit itinerary – just people altering the time in accordance with their share of our great star. In LA I sight my backpack with manifest relief. I pass through customs without shoes or a belt or a kind word from the huge officers.

“We do not discriminate against belts,” one of them, a young black man, bellows to the tired masses, “black belts white belts skinny belts chubby belts, get ‘em all off”. 

The backpack is rechecked without incident and I will not see it again until Montreal.

Many familiar faces surround me as, Atlanta-bound, we take off in a shroud of oppressive rain and un-Californian cold. Next to me is a heavy man of thirty who buys up large when the lunch trolley comes; peanuts are complimentary but everything else costs. I ask him, where are you going? Home? “Yeah,” he says, “where are you going?” So I tell him and he merely acknowledges my reply without harping on the romanticism of the situation, as people have been prone to. I love him. Since he will be the last to pass judgment it has left me on the ground, for if this fantastical holiday love is doomed to fail it will be brought down by that impossible idea of love conjured in the mind during its darling’s long absence, reinforced by the gushes of friends and family, the often wistful gushes of people who may once have found themselves in a similar predicament but erred, to their eternal regret, on the side of caution.

I buy an avocado sandwich in Atlanta and buy some Wi-fi too. And I eat the sandwich while writing Audrey an email. The sandwich came with potato chips and half a massive gherkin which I eat in little increments with mouthfuls of bread and avocado and rubbery cheese. Then I post some lyrics from Beauty and the Beast, about Gaston, on Facebook and Audrey is online so we speak for what is categorically the final time before me meet. I’m deliriously tired but quite excited, or the thought of excitement exists but has no able body through which to channel itself. I am not nervous. We chat for a few minutes. Her written persona, that irrepressible cascade of slightly Awry English written with the sagacity of a native poet, that voice of a thousand emails to whom I have confided the celebration and mourning of my life as I never could through speech – she leaves me. She is gone to me. And even though I exchange her for the reality beneath, there echoes in my heart another mourning that I can confide to no-one – words often fail me, but with much more aplomb when they come from my mouth and not directly from my mind. To whose silent sessions will my own be carried? That heavy man sang in a capella at the Brisbane convention centre three days ago.

I love the mango sky. I love the ridiculous pink ties worn by Delta pilots. Red exit signs and Georgian women wearing stilettos on long-haul flights. I love the blacks and hispanics who cook people’s fast food and clean their floors, ragged mops roiling the brown water in their rusty pails detergent. The Devil’s Walk is better than I gave it credit for. Ohio State, Arizone, UCLA Business – I love them. More than anything I love layovers because they represent the closest possible phenomenon to the suspension of time. What state was Walt Whitman from? Who knows but I think of him, his words like mental furniture for so many Americans. Audacity! Federation! Singing! Contradict! The leaves of grass I love but still can’t picture – are they leaves or is it grass?

Smelling almost offensively now, I watch a baseball game with great confusion and wonder if the rules are the same as rounders. Twenty minutes until Montreal. The girl whose nose is pressed into a book as she walks through a standoffish crowd of sleepwalkers is going to kiss me and take me to her apartment. For the first time since that sad Berlin morning I imagine I will sleep in peace. 

Spring

How the apricot saplings have grown, impervious

to those brutalising cockatoos and crows -
penned in like an infant behind two-foot bars
green wire mesh armour warding
off field mice and a Labrador smarting
from its first March Fly bite – how the hard
little nectarines ripen and spill stones
how the butternuts grow in unbecoming briars,
their seeds flung down by cockatoos and crows,
how the loquat saplings age unwatered and alone.