I had walked down
most of Coolidge, past three crumbling roundabouts and the house with the
Scottish Castle letterbox, which had a bunch of junk mail sticking out its
drawbridge, past a couple of fresh sets of burnouts, when the foreplay started.
She was sitting on a bench facing the road, giant Red Bull can and fragments of
cola Chupa Chup wrapper that looked dog-chewed at her feet, in clear view of the
tram stop I was walking towards. Behind her, Kurrajong Park: a footy oval and
baseball diamond and lawn bowls green. Morning still muffled the atmosphere
like a pillow held gently over a swollen face.
A boy wearing an
Australian Open T-shirt was doing suicide sprints using the lines in the bowls
club parking lot and some of the old female bowlers had gathered at the rear
fence and to watch him. Their faces were pressed up zoo-exhibit-style against
the green wind-breaking mesh. They would’ve been prepubescent at the time the poet
she was reading, as if his book were the thick manual to a machine that was going to
save her life, wrote his most memorable lines. But it wasn’t the poet that stopped
me. In fact, I walked straight past without recognising his jacket or form and
without regarding the girl holding him as anything more than an incident I
hadn’t been waiting for. The truth is that I happened to stop dead on the
footpath a few metres in front of her for unclear reasons, but most probably to
catch myself up to what my body seemed to be doing of its own accord, to figure
out what the fuck I was going to do until I met Lucinda. All I could bring
myself to look at was the high fence at the back of the baseball diamond and
even that abstractedly, like it wasn’t there. I must’ve stopped a long while,
though, because at some point I was turning to respond to a question, delivered
in a girlish New Zealand accent tinged partly with curiosity, partly fear: what
are you doing?
“Looking at the
baseball diamond,” I told her. “You don’t see many in Melbourne”.
She put her book
face-up on the bench. I glanced at the name: I knew it well. I thought then
that maybe she’d been up all night. She stretched her arms out but not as far
as they could’ve gone. “You call this Melbourne?”
I paused. “I
guess I do. Greater Melbourne. I hadn’t thought about it. What do you call it?”
“Slumdoora,” she said, and laughed. “I’ve
actually never called it that before. But God, you probably live here, I
mean…do you live here?”
“Close to here,
yeah”. There wasn’t a trace of condescension in her voice, which I found odd.
“That was
offensive, sorry. No, I don’t know. The suburbs, the ‘burbs. It doesn’t
matter”.
“I wasn’t
offended. There’s more out here to hate than there is to love, if there’s
anything to love at all. What are you doing?”
By the time she’d
finished explaining to me that she was on her way to see her dad, who lived in
a street just off Coolidge, but after getting off the tram from Northcote,
where she lived – I smiled and told her that Northcote was where I was about to
go, which made her say something else and briefly lose her train of thought –
she’d been so wrapped up in the poet that she’d sat down on the bench to read
the rest of The North Ship before walking through “that door” and into “that
house”, I think I was in love with her.
“I’ve needed
him,” she said, “I’ve been sick with need for words like his and I didn’t even
know it until this morning”. A curtain seemed to go up in her then, and she
took the book and flicked through it. When it came to rest she read:
Only hurrying and troubled faces,
The walking of girls’ vulnerable feet,
The heart in its own endless silence kneeling.
Then she
apologised profusely for reading it so bad. I told her I would have done worse,
then added that she’d done well. Then she read:
Then the moon would go raving,
The moon, the anchorless
Moon go swerving
Down at the earth for a catastrophic kiss.
Without knowing
why, the first thing I said to her in response to the second reading was: you
can only imagine what kind of a man he must’ve been. Even more strangely, I
think that she fell in love with me because I said it.
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