I found a picture of you, the girl I once loved, changed time just to be with. The girl I slowed down to meet, sped up to miss. There’s a ring on your finger, but this is not what I notice. What I notice first is your confidence. Not caring that a camera has just collected you up into eternity, added you to that growing landfill of available information. Your details are teeth, thin wrists and a red string bracelet. You laugh, truly unaware of the consequence this laugh will have.
I got a job as a bus driver for a regional women’s basketball team, driving them around through small country towns, dropping them at school halls, buildings sided with corrugated iron, even sometimes bitumen outdoor courts. I’d stand around outside, smoking, while they played their games, chatting to the other coach drivers, all men, all just as alone as me. It wasn’t a sexual thing, they all assured me. It wasn’t for the power, they said. One showed me an old mattress in his cargo hold. Another had a set of bath oils in his glove compartment. All had Kenny Loggins tapes stuck in the deck. The love of the game, they told me. Competition.
Just to have you there. That was all I ever wanted. That gentle pluck of breath as your lips unstuck, the sounds of you moving without knowing.
When I got to old to care, I’d chase the ice-cream trucks that came down my street because they drove so slowly, and sometimes they’d throw a wonky soft serve at me, which, flying through the air, missing me by metres, was about the funniest thing I’d seen in my whole life.
After it happened, I went out onto a ship and stayed there. Packed what I owned and walked up the gangplank. Hauled it up behind me leaving only air. A steam-powered life, all that power at the mercy of a current. Stayed in the bilges, making anchors. Making them heavier and heavier, making more and more, until there was no room left, until I felt the soft thump of the sea floor.
He came to me with an idea. Arrived at the coffee shop with a blueprint rolled under his arm, a torch in his mouth. I told him to take off his eye-mask, but he wouldn’t. Said his skin was so dry he had to leave it on. He unburdened himself of his grappling hook, clanged it on the table, upset my latte. He was so excited I could see little patches of sweat forming on his skivvy. This is it, he told me, holding up a Hessian sack with a dollar sign painted on it. I took a sip of my coffee, and waited.
I thought the Admiral’s hat looked good, but you’d already left the shop. We’d been tailing each other in and out of boutiques all morning, summing up our dwindling feelings with shakes of the head, exhalations of air. I gave the hat back to the shop assistant, apologised in my own thin way. I found you outside, sitting at a café table, ignoring the waiter hovering at your shoulder. Something in your eyes always scared away customer service. I sat down in the opposite seat. So where now, I asked. The first words I’d spoken all morning. Nowhere, was your reply. Just nowhere.
When I got to work, it was all anyone could talk about. That picture of the bearded guy—the scientist, we supposed—walking out of the Borneo forest, cradling it like a baby. The thing, whatever it was, looked a little bit like a cat, but hairless. Those green piercing eyes, that foot-long neck. Do you think it’s really a dinosaur, said one woman. Not a real one, said someone else, it’s like a—a—descendent or something. How did it survive, said our boss, who’d come over to join the conversation. I guess it just kept its head down, I said, and this proved to be sufficiently funny to elicit stooping-head dinosaur impressions from my co-workers for the rest of the day. Then the rest of the week. When they were still doing it after a year, I had to ask them to stop. But by that time, of course, they’d all done such permanent damage to their backs that they couldn’t stop, even if they’d wanted to.
At the séance, there was another couple who had lost a child. They were older than us, parental-looking, I guess. The wife had on a long red ribbon, tied into her hair and let fall all the way to the backs of her knees. I asked her if the ribbon was a special sign, and she simply started crying. We took our places at the table, each couple side by side. You never let go of my hand. Even as the medium asked us to stand and move around the room, even as the husband from the other couple began to shout animal sounds, even as the temperature dropped and grief cracked at the edges of our eyes—even then, you held my hand, tight, as if to let go would be to lose that last part of us.
For my birthday, I set up a blue screen in my lounge room. I wanted memories of my life projecting on the screen, me sitting in the foreground. Me, the age I am now, seemingly sitting with my younger selves. Talking to them, advising them, laughing at their follies and nodding with their mistakes. Smiling at their achievements, clapping at their proudest moments. Then taking a large knife from the kitchen and slashing the blue screen down, tearing to ribbons my face at all its ages, destroying the memories, the anniversaries, the milestones, every last one. I really hate my birthday.
