he repeated, as though the word were foreign.
“It was . . . ” I was searching for a way to put it that wouldn’t sound lame. Unfortunately Andy got there before me.
“. . . for a bus shelter.”
“A bus shelter,” Hal repeated.
I knocked back my wine. Andy refilled it and gave me a ‘be nice’ smile. The waiter cleared the plates. One course down, two to go. Hal looked like he was still processing something about me, my bus shelter perhaps. I prepared my comeback based on the fact that it was a large interchange in a busy part of town. It wasn’t just some bus shelter, it was a massive structure that housed four or five major city bus routes. But Hal went in a completely different direction.
“Dad didn’t help?” Hal said to me innocently.
“What?”
“Dad, just drop it,” Andy said, his composure slipping momentarily.
“So you don’t get Dad to help out. Just thought he might give you advice, sort of work with you on things.”
“Ah, no.” It was all I could manage.
“So you’re not that close?” Hal kept on. “To your dad?”
“Yes. We are very close.”
“But you don’t discuss work?”
“Sometimes we do.”
I believe the expression is painted into a corner.
“Nell’s very talented, Dad,” Andy broke the rhythm.
“So she’s on the big money then?” Hal said.
“She’s doing fine,” said Andy deflecting the reality that architects don’t actually earn as much as people think.
“But it’s a pretty prestigious title, award-winning architect,” Hal was drilling down. “Sort of more prestigious than garbage coordinator.”
Andy chuckled, it was a brittle noise that had no air in it. Andy worked for the city, overseeing the waste management program that covered the entire central business district. He was not a garbage coordinator. He worked at Town Hall for Christ’s sake, with the Lord Mayor himself.
“She’s quite ambitious,” Hal said, as though narrating Andy’s thoughts for him. “That can be a bit emasculating.”
All this was said in a light, bantery way. Not in a nasty tone of voice. If you weren’t listening properly, it would have sounded like we were all having a nice conversation over lunch.
“I’m very proud of her, Dad,” Andy said with a forced smile.
“Oh, he’s very taken,” Hal crooned, now talking about Andy as though he wasn’t here. “Look at him, he’s done his balls.”
Things went downhill from there. After the mains, he started on Maude. Andy had warned me about this.
“He’ll start calling Mum names,” he’d said.
“Why?”
“Because he thinks he’s been hard done by.”
I’d tuned out by that stage. I’d realised it was actually easier to let Andy and Hal conduct their conversation around me. Whenever I got drawn into it, Hal said something that made me want to punch him in the face. And apparently, I wasn’t allowed to do that.
So I didn’t notice it happening at first. He said it in the same sort of voice that you’d say, ‘Your mother forgot to collect my dry-cleaning.’
“Of course, your mother took all my money.”
“No, she didn’t Dad.”
“And gave it to that fat cunt.”
“Hey, settle!”
“You know, she assured me I wouldn’t need any super, because she had this inheritance. Then she just nicked off with it, leaving me nothing.”
“She left you the house.”
“Well, all my super, you know, I’m in pretty dire straits.”
All the while he guzzled as much of Andy’s wine that could possibly be consumed within the time frame.
“How’s Helen?” Andy redirected, referring to Hal’s second wife.
I tuned out again after that. I looked at the ocean, I looked at the specials board, I looked at the people opposite us, having a normal time. They were laughing occasionally with real, unguarded happy faces. I wished I was at their table where you didn’t have to enter the conversation with your dukes up defensively, ready to jab and duck.
I heard Hal and Andy talking, occasionally I heard Andy say, ‘settle,’ or ‘now, now’. But I didn’t listen. Certain words floated across to me and I sort of batted them away like flies: ‘humpers’ and various forms of the verb ‘to hump’, ‘bitch’, ‘your mother’, ‘my money’. It went on. I screened it out. What else was there? Except to come across all stitched up, like a school teacher, saying things like, ‘Here, here, I will not stand for such vulgarities.’
But it must have been bad. Because after we’d bade Hal a false fond farewell, after he and I had done our ‘fake to the right, to the left dance’ where he tried to plant a big wet kiss on my lips and I offered only my right ear, Andy took my hand and led me across to the beach.
“Feel like a swim?” he said, breathing fast like he’d just done a workout.
I looked around me. The sun had gone behind thick grey clouds by then and there was a big coastal wind whipping off the ocean. It was cold. The water was dark and violently rippled by a gusting wind. It wasn’t swimming weather.
“Ah . . . no,” I said, with a very clear ‘I’d rather stick toothpicks in my eyeballs’ inflection.
Andy kept walking and led me down to the sand. He removed his shoes.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Going for a swim.” He was drunk and completely wired. “Come on!” His eyes were like spinning tops. He laughed in a mad, ‘I’m completely off my rocker and if we were on a cliff I’d jump off it’, sort of a way. I felt myself pulling back from him. After months of unguarded intimacy in the flush of new romance, I suddenly pulled back and realised I hardly knew this person standing in front of me. This person who was now disrobing at an alarming rate.
He dropped his jeans. He didn’t even have swimmers on. Just a pair of boxers. He pulled his shirt over his head and, leaving his clothes in a pile at my feet like shed skin, took off to the water’s edge. He bolted for the waves, which were dumping violently right on the shoreline.
I winced as he took two steps into the water, arched up and took a great leaping dive into the grey churn. He disappeared. Then his head popped up again and he shot upwards into the air, like a rocket, arced and then head-firsted into the next wave, and the next and the next.
Was it just me, or was that a bit odd?
6.
From a parent’s perspective, Andy was a pleasing prospect. He had a good job, he didn’t say ‘youse’ and he didn’t wear thongs to dinner. But my mother has a sixth sense for people’s peccadillos.
“He’s very handsome,” she said to me later, in a way that spoke of caution. My mother didn’t trust ‘handsome’. I think it was the overlapping thing she was picking up on.
Around that time my parents were three years into living without an oven, because the one in the kitchen was broken and my father had grand plans to redesign the whole house around a new one. While it’s true that if you live with an architect you will live in your dream home, it is often a long wait. Perfectionism and grand visions go hand in hand with indecision and procrastination.
Luckily,