Montreal

On Wednesday night we eat out. One of her friends, a student at Concordia university, has organised an environmental rights gathering at a place called Burritotown or Burritoville somewhere in the gay district. The guest speaker lectures at the university. He is Anglophone, and I am glad about it. Nights earlier she hosted a dinner at the apartment where only French was spoken. Sitting at the table, pining for new places to direct my tired stare, I tried to bear in mind the fact that this was Quebec, that these were Quebecois who had come home after a day of bilingualism and only wanted to drink some wine and speak in their mother tongue. On another level though I was disheartened to hear my ten weeks of French class completely undone. And on another still I found it hard to swallow that her friends, who had presumably heard at least something about me, could not condescend to use their fluent English in order to ask a single question of me.

While they got drunk and listened to Celine Dion – just as popular as one might expect – I got drunker and sank further into my seat. Smiled cheerfully whenever she looked my way. It was all I could do to remain at the table, but as a spectre, a present absentee. And then she was up and dancing crazy.

After everyone had left I washed up, genuinely happy to see her in such high spirits but unable to shake my own self-indulgent broodings. In bed the alcohol stirred my mind to odd places. I felt tense in the chest and loath to touch her. If one evening with her friends had left me feeling so inadequate, so jealous, where then did that leave us? Normal relationships didn’t tolerate failings so basic; why should ours be any different? With a fast heavy heart I fell asleep, head to the wall and a strip of cold sheets between us.

How early she awoke I didn’t know but early enough to put me on edge. The same odious thoughts swirled back into awareness, but another concern now dominated the rest; was she thinking the same thing? So I lurched to foot of the bed and found my laptop and manuscript and French dictionary and pen. Music playing in the living room. I was almost sick from the anxiety. I was close to being sick and to telling her I had to get away, just as I would with some other girl back home. But with effort I wrestled that urge down and supplanted it with the urge to dress and go to her.

The speaker cannot stop touching his long curly hair, barely long enough to drink the four beers allotted him for his speech. He has no cue cards, a British accent and a messily brilliant brain. I worry that his manic English, laden with political terminology, will be too much for her to understand- matter of fact I know it will. But he keeps her attention for the whole hour. Better than he does mine anyway, since I am always looking at her. During question time he answers with facts and figures but no answers. Can’t this distinguished lecturer and journalist who has spoken to Donna Karan about bamboo clothing and met Brundtland herself, who has supposedly refused to sign Nato’s contract for media personnel working in Libya and offered Steven Harper advice on the melting glaciers up north, can’t he face this reverent pack of politics students and offer anything more than, “I am part of the generation that made this planet go tits-up, now it’s your job to get it right”? The answer is yes and no. True he offers more than that; he is a legitimately excellent scholar. But when I ask him how we can encourage people to vote more altruistically – since so many countries are seeing a return to conservative governments on the back of anti-immigration platforms – he reels off a hundred things I didn’t know about the Australian situation but not a single word about my original question, just a glib smile. I guess it strikes me as defeatist. He is interesting without drumming up an ounce of optimism, he gives us the your job spiel and even says tits up like a good left winger but baulks when it is his opinion we need. Okay though. And she liked him. We leave with full bellies in the dark. We walk the dark streets like a fearless old couple undaunted by anything except the ferocity of the other’s opinion, which excites as well, and our bellies are full like the moon. “Are you afraid of werewolves?” Suddenly she is a terrified little girl. Entering the park, I breathe loudly and loom behind her. She almost starts to cry. It is adorable and there flashes in my mind a vision of wild horses at gallop. Then the lake, the lake turning to ice, her skating on the ice as a child and her dad tripping over her – I realise our hands are clasped and she was telling me stories about her childhood while only my subconscious listened. Now all of me is back and her cheek has begun to bleed onto the ice.