wall music joint that happened to be built into the lower level of one of Sydney’s old piers. This was back when the area was a ragged fringe edge of the city. Rows of abandoned wharf buildings in the ominous shadow of the Harbour Bridge. He knew the girl on the door, she greeted him with a squeal and stood up to receive a kiss on the cheek. It was too loud inside to speak so we were spared the small talk. She stamped our wrists and we walked into a room full of sweaty bodies dancing to a live funk band. The bass physically pummelled my chest and I considered for a split second abandoning this whole idea of stealing some other poor woman’s boyfriend and just going home. My life could go on as it was, without this increasingly complicated entanglement.
Then, as though he sensed me about to scarper, he took my hand and led me through the dark, noisy room to the waterside platform on the outside of the building. The dark harbour sloshed around the pier piles beneath us and the outside bar area was haphazardly dotted with moulded table and chair ensembles, the kind that are prefabbed in one piece out of fibreglass. He settled me at a table and then went quickly to the bar. He brought back two cold beers, set one down in front of me and took a long swig of his before he spoke.
He was still living with her. The relationship was volatile. She once threw a phone at his head and nearly knocked him out. He showed me the small scar up near his hairline, where his head had been stitched back together. Her name was Lindy and they’d been together for five years. She was a heavy drinker, on her way to being labelled an alcoholic, as it turned out. But back then, everyone just characterised her as a party girl, a hell-raiser, a girl who liked a drink or two, or ten, before passing out on the bathroom floor.
“When she met my father for the first time,” he said, “she wore a Lycra cat suit.”
“As a dress up?” I asked, confused.
“No,” he laughed. “It was a full body cat suit, really low cut and I couldn’t believe it.”
“A cat suit?” I couldn’t believe it either. I was trying to picture a cat suit in my head and where one might buy it.
“If you knew my father, you’d know how totally wrong that was,” he laughed.
“It’s wrong regardless of that,” I said, missing the clue about his dad. “How did you meet her?”
“We worked together.”
“Do you still work together?”
“No.”
He grabbed my hand across the table.
“But anyway . . . ”
“Anyway, nothing,” I said, but I left my hand in his.
“I’m moving out,” he said to the table, not meeting my eyes. “Soon.”
I sat back, eyed him and took a big gulp of my beer. I set it down. Then I picked it up again and drank the rest. I stood up, a bit unsteady as the beer rushed to my head. “Call me when you’re out,” I said.
I walked back through the funk and the bodies to the roadside of the pier. I got in a cab and went home.
A few weeks later, he called me. Like most men, he needed something to jump to before he jumped: an overlapper. He jumped to me. I was his next landing point. I was his final landing point, as it turned out. An anomaly in a history of damaged, broken women.
He chose me and now I know why.
When Andy and I started going out, Hal’s name was mentioned in dark, comical asides. I recall more than once, one or other of Andy’s friends asking me ominously, “So, have you met Hal yet?”
The question carried in it some bleak joke that seemed to amuse them. This led me to believe that Hal was merely someone to be suffered and largely a source of amusement. Indeed the very mention of his name seemed to plant a wry, knowing smile on all of Andy’s friend’s faces. It also led me to believe that Hal was harmless.
What I should have been paying attention to was the sense of remove between Andy and his father. The very fact that he called him ‘Hal’ and not ‘Dad’ should have been a red flag that there was more to Hal than a potentially insufferable in-law. I should have noticed the change in temperature that came over Andy when Hal’s name was mentioned. The frozen smile, the far-off look. The way he said, “Now, now,” as a way of shutting friends down on this topic as soon as it was raised. What I don’t get is why his friends thought Hal was an amusing topic.
There really was nothing funny about Hal.
4.
Most Fridays we went to Tom and Anita’s house for beer, takeaway and cards. They lived in Glebe then, in a terrace that Anita’s father owned. Still in their early twenties, Anita and Tom were both eternal students and living that scratchy, minimalist existence where there’s never enough cutlery for the takeaway and none of the plates match. If we drank wine, we drank it out of middy glasses pinched from the local pub.
Anita was a sweet-faced pixie of a girl with a beautiful round face and the kind of short-cropped haircut that only certain women can get away with. She smoked elegantly, along with the boys, but was more considerate about blowing her smoke away from me. She spoke the Straw family lingo—this and that was ‘reeking’, said ‘balls!’ instead of bullshit, ‘base’ instead of bum, ‘you larries’—but her soft girlish voice made it all the more endearing. She held her own and she shuddered helplessly when she giggled, which I loved.
If my affection for Anita is somewhat magnified it is because she and Tom, high school sweethearts, eventually petered out before reaching that point where they should have married. We all miss her terribly, especially when you consider the way things turned out.
Anita’s brother lived in the other room but he was something of a Boo Radley character; we never saw him and if we did, he was lurking in the shadows of the hall with his spooky eyes and then gone before we could ask him to join us.
The first time I went there and met Tom, I was confused. Firstly, he was so much younger; eight years. Plus, they did not look like brothers at all. Tom was blonde—the proper white-blonde that stays until adulthood—and fair-skinned. Andy, on the other hand, was so cohesively olive-skinned, brown-eyed and dark-haired that people often mistook him for a Greek. But when they opened their mouths and spoke, the family tongue was unmistakable.
The house was typical of Glebe terraces back in the ’90s. It was dank. Attached on one side to its sibling terrace, the freestanding side then smacked up against a rock wall that absorbed moisture like a sponge. We sat in the kitchen at a formica table with the doors open to the courtyard on a hot summer night. The kitchen was updated, but not in any practical way; just a galley along one wall, with trendy down lights that left us sitting in semi-darkness in the no-man’s land between the kitchen bench and the wall. The smell of damp stalked us intermittently throughout the evening.
Anita was an art student and the entry hall was an eclectic gallery: her art; old framed photos from her childhood; a photo of her and Tom as teenagers and an old black and white of Hal and Corky.
When I first saw it, I thought the blonde teenager in the photo was Tom, but the era wasn’t right. It was clearly taken in the ’50s or ’60s. It had that deliberate and meticulous artistry about it that old black and whites have: a perfectly plain-lit backdrop; a beautifully art directed paling fence; Hal as a fresh-faced teen grinning on one side and Corky the aggressively upbeat puppet on the other.
“Jesus,” I said, peering closer when I first saw it. “I could’ve sworn that was you, Tom.”
“Spooky,” Tom agreed.
“He was quite the larry,” Andy said, a hint of pride. Larry, in Straw-speak, meant larrikin.
“And who’s this guy?” I asked, pointing to the puppet with its manic red-lipped grin.
“Corky, the puppet.” Tom sniggered. Then, both of them announced in unison, “The Bubble