scene in which the narrator falls out of love

Her agreement was brusque – “you really can” or the like – but she sounded different, more invested somehow.

 “I used to write poetry”, I said back with surprise, almost in a whisper.

At this she put her book in a small brown leather backpack and got up, perceptibly nodding and smiling but making no eye contact except with some notion or other in her head, by way of the ground I guess, and started to zigzag towards the parking lot where the boy was still running in front of his white-haired admirers. There seemed to be a greenish aspect, toxic rather than natural, to the colours of everything.

I thought it was wrong follow her. But when she turned to ask me “why used to?” I thought the opposite, or felt that she did, and so I started closing in. She showed me her back again and kept zigzagging. I raised my voice and told her I’d changed a lot since the poetry. I picked up a flat, bald car tyre that was lying on the asphalt; both the brand name and tread indicator had worn away completely. It rolled in a floppy circle before falling with a thud, which she either ignored or didn’t notice. Then from the corner of my eye I saw the boy shoot off. I sounded out the lilt of youth in his breaths and smelled young men’s deodorant, Lynx Graphite or Accelerate, or even Polo Sport – his shoes were top of the line Nike Air Zoom Vapours, made in China from synthetic leather – as he ran up and back, up and back. Paying him a closer look I noticed there was no hair, none whatsoever, on the boy’s legs, and concluded from that that he must’ve shaved or used calcium thioglycolate cream the night before.

I started thinking about the time I was his age. My parents featured in almost all the memories, but not as people who were alive then but weren’t alive anymore. They featured instead, at least in the feelings they aroused, as people who were never alive, alive to me, like beautiful animals I’d seen only as road kill, re-killed over and over for sixteen years before decomposing completely. Like a kitten pawing at a catnip toy I waved this turn of thoughts off with a somewhat mad hand gesture, not because it was painful but because I knew, the way a man with Asperger’s might have known it, that that type of thinking was the pits. Then one of the ladies gave up her post at the fence to bowl; she walked slower than anyone I’d ever seen.

“What, you mean in terms of being poetic? You’re not as poetic as you used to be, is that it?”

She was wearing a long cargo jacket with the German flag sewn halfway up each arm, very tight black jeans – the kind made with 10% spandex – and black faux-suede riding boots, cheap and breakable looking, maybe from Sportsgirl. Her black hair had a caramel tint in parts, mainly the ends, which reached the small of her back. She had narrow shoulders and big thighs and she wasn’t sexually attractive. At least in a physical sense she wasn’t. I put my hands in my pockets.

“I didn’t say that. I just don’t write poetry anymore”.

We traced the bowls club fence, delighting the ladies – to whom we must’ve have looked like a couple – by saying good morning, and then came to a weed-filled alley between the bowling greens and the back fences of the houses beside them. Finishing a few centimetres before the ground, undergrown by Stypandra glauca just past bloom, the fences were warped and covered in spray paint piss stains and also a brown outdoor paint that had faded to purplish, like dying flowers. The alley wasn’t very long and was full of trash and quiet. It smelt like a near-empty creek. At the end I could see a small playground and a sliver of the baseball diamond too, mostly grass but also some of the ochre sand of home base. She was still a few metres – maybe five metres – in front of me.

“Well why don’t you? If you did once, why don’t you now?”

“I do other things”

“Like what?”

“Landscaping, for one”

“So you’re a landscape gardener; architect; painter?”

“Gardener. Yeah, I am. I mean I think I am”

“Strange thing to be unsure about – are you one or aren’t you?”

“It’s not a question of being sure,” I said, Steve flashing through my mind, “it’s just that, yeah, I do landscaping and all, but I don’t necessarily see myself as a landscaper”.

“Sure, sure”.

“I’m not tunnel-visioned,” I said, a bit angry, a bit confused, “and to suggest that I’m less poetic than I once was, that age has soured me or I’m drug-fucked or something, is a hell of lot more offensive than talking shit about the suburb I live in, which isn’t even Bundoora anyway”. Then I paused. Then I said: “Why would you suggest that I was tunnel-visioned? I’m twenty-five, for fuck’s sakes. The time for not knowing who I am ended years and fucking years ago”. I said sorry after that. My chest was throbbing and I smelled and tasted metal, tasted the smell of metal, which alerted me to the fact that she wasn’t wearing perfume. I couldn’t remember being near a girl who didn’t wear perfume, or speaking that way to anyone.

She made to turn back but stopped. I thought I could see her looking down and nodding again, and her hands were clasped in front of her pussy, which came to me a second as a pure, imageless idea that sent blood spurting to my dick.

It was almost as if my behaviour, I thought after putting her pussy respectfully out of mind, the behaviour of which I myself couldn’t make a modicum of sense, was ticking all the boxes in a kind of mental checklist she’d been consulting.

She dropped back to my side and as we continued to walk said, “don’t be sorry, I’d call those very good answers to very bad questions.”

I let out a curt laugh.

“The problem is I’m not a good asker but I love asking, which I think is pretty normal, and you’re just the sort of person someone like me wants to ask about because they know they’ll get answers like the ones you just gave, because secretly people like you want to give them. See what I mean? You’re itching to give them. People like you and people like me are going to be having these sorts of repartees until we’re old and, like, blue in the face. Blue from being dead”

“I don’t know if I agree with that at all,” I said after a time.

Her only response was to nod and look down.

As we reached the playground she burst out laughing and broke into canter and turfed her backpack onto the tanbark next to a tall but rusted slide, the sort that undulated, which she then clambered up on all fours. For a stride or two her jacket folded over itself and exposed her arse. I looked at nothing else until the jacket fell to the back of her knees again. Out of breath, she turned and looked right at me, knowingly, not for my perving on her but as if we’d just robbed a house together.

“There’s a ladder, you know,” I said.

“Well I don’t care because this is a weird fucking encounter, man,” she replied, still laughing. “My name’s Kirsty Gregory by the way”

“I’m Phil Shanahan”

“Shanahan – I know a Shanahan back in Canada”

I didn’t answer when she asked me to come up, but walked around to the ladder. While climbing I could hear her talking, itemising; I imagined she was counting on her fingers too.

 “I’m on the way to my dad’s reading poetry in the Aussie ‘burbs, at the crack of dawn; I’m leading some strange guy down a weird alleyway, a guy who happens not only to be awake at this hour but who’s also a poet, or a former poet, or a landscaper, or all or none of the above; I’m asking insanely inappropriate questions; he’s yelling, and I believe him, and he hasn’t asked me anything back, and I’ve never led a guy anywhere in my life”.

Three Myna birds, perched on the warped bar from which the swing chains hung in jaggedly welded grooves, had broken into song when it struck me that maybe things would have gotten physical if not for that pathetic soliloquy I’d just listened in on, just been made to listen in on. I thought that at the least I would’ve kissed her, or she would’ve kissed me. The sense of dread I felt almost buckled me over but there was also a sense of accomplishment in my newfound aversion, like we’d already fucked and I was lying beside her, and buoyed by this second sense I managed to climb high enough so that I could rest my hands on the wooden platform and rest my head on my hands, and look up her. I could smell the wood. She beckoned me forward but I stayed where I was.