So we talked for a while, until I realised that Miriam was being increasingly left out of the conversation. Then, when she and I began to discuss whether we should walk home or get a cab (like we had a hope in hell of flagging down a cab in King’s Cross on a Friday night), Matthew asked me for my number. Naturally, I didn’t give it to him. I mean to say, a large, shaggy King’s Cross bartender with tatts? You might as well walk naked down William Street and have done with it. But he insisted on giving me his number, and I took it without the slightest intention of ever using it. After which I went home with Miriam, to find that Briony was busily entertaining a total stranger who looked even larger and shaggier than Matthew.
I can’t believe we weren’t all murdered in our beds, during Briony’s occupation of our house.
Anyway, I didn’t call Matt. I figured he probably scattered his telephone number about like grass seed, hoping that a little interest might germinate here and there. (He was a bartender, after all, and a tall, dark, handsome one at that.) But about three weeks later I ran into him on Oxford Street, and we arranged to have coffee together that afternoon. A tentative first step— pretty harmless—nothing too extreme. Yet within a month we’d run through the entire, predictable cycle: dinner, movie, bed, breakfast, endless phone calls, picnics, weekends away, meet the parents, shared parties, expensive birthday presents . . . you know the sort of thing. All because of that cup of coffee.
It was the sugar, you see. When we first ordered coffee together, Matt asked for a cappuccino. He took one sip and then sat behind the steaming cup for about ten minutes while we made awkward conversation, commenting on the parking in Taylor Square, the Greek restaurant up the road, the rents in that part of the world, until I was finally driven to ask, ‘Aren’t you going to drink that?’
‘Yeah. Sure.’ He eyed the cappuccino for a second, picked up a packet of sugar, and dumped its contents into the coffee. As he reached for another packet, I stumbled onto the subject of Briony, who turned out to be a real Godsend. Matt enjoyed hearing about Briony almost as much as I enjoyed talking about her. We discussed Briony’s rune-reading. We touched on her eccentric taste in men. Matt was quite sure that he knew one of the shaggy interlopers trundled out for my inspection, every Sunday morning: we tried to work out if it was the same guy— known as ‘Relic’ to his mates—but couldn’t be sure. All the while, Matt sat behind his cup of coffee.
Finally I said, ‘You’re not going to drink that, are you? What’s the matter? Is it too strong?’
Matt gave a shamefaced grin. ‘It’s these bloody packets,’ he complained.
‘The what?’
‘The packets. Of sugar. They’re not like the old canisters— you could use as much sugar as you liked, with them, and no-one would know what a wuss you were. With these packets . . .’ He gave the crumpled remnants a poke. ‘You get up, and the waitress knows you’ve been pouring six sugars into your coffee.’
I put on a serious expression.
‘Matt,’ I said gravely, ‘you can pretend three of them are mine. Your secret’s safe with me.’
‘Nah.’ He shook his head with exaggerated sorrow. ‘Nah, I know what you’re gunna do. You’ll walk away and tell your friends, “I met this woofter today, he was trying to be hard, but he snuck six sugars into his coffee”.’
‘You mustn’t let sugar define your self-image, Matt. Napoleon liked cream puffs, you know.’
Matt looked surprised. ‘Really?’ he said.
‘Oh sure. I wrote an essay on it.’ But I couldn’t keep a straight face any longer. ‘Shit, I don’t know, how should I know? Don’t be ridiculous. Woofter, indeed. We don’t talk like that, in the public service.’
‘’Zat so?’ He was grinning by now. ‘What do you say, then? “Masculinely challenged”?’
‘We say “ten-sugar screamer”.’
And that was that. He fell about laughing, and I was hooked. I was landed. Because he was a real find—especially for someone with my background.
You have to understand, he was so hip. So hot. For one thing, he was a drummer in a band that you could actually go and see (on occasion) in clubs and pubs that people actually went to. The Breaks, they were called, and they played mostly covers, though the lead guitarist wrote a few songs. Drummers aren’t generally the pin-up boys of most bands, so it wasn’t as if Matt was exactly beating off the groupies, but still—there must have been any number of groovy young things who had cast an acquisitive eye over him.
And then there were the jobs. Matt had jobs with real street cred. To start with, there was the bartender job, which allowed him to become acquainted with all kinds of seedy King’s Cross personalities: bouncers, spruikers, drug dealers, crooked cops— and the barmaids, of course. Barmaids as hard as nails, as sharp as razors, and sometimes as exotic and bizarre as the cocktails they served, which were all tarted up with suggestive swizzle sticks and glacé pineapple. Matt was a good bartender. He had endless patience, never lost his temper, and was quite skilled; he’d done a cocktail course at the Silver Shaker training college. In fact he had quite a memory for noxious mixtures. I tested him once, out of a book, and the only one he got wrong was Kelly’s Comfort. He remembered the Southern Comfort, the Bacardi, the vodka, the milk, the ice and the strawberries, but he left out the grenadine. (And a good thing too, in my opinion.)
Then there was the recording studio job. He worked parttime in a dingy Darlinghurst recording studio—as a sound mixer, or something. I never did find out quite what he did because, when I visited him there, he and his colleagues seemed to spend most of their time stealing each other’s cigarettes, arguing about who was going to wash the coffee cups, and laughing about a guy called Clifford. Even so, Matt must have done something of importance, because he got paid, and was even acknowledged on the odd album cover. It was through his influence that The Breaks made their one and only recording: an original dirge called ‘Stone’ that sank like one. I think it only went on sale in one store, a funny place out near Central Station, owned by a friend of the bass guitarist.
Anyway, that was Matt. And I know he sounds frighteningly cool, but the thing is, he wasn’t really. Not in himself. He was simply doing what he liked. He wore black jeans and T-shirts all the time, not to make a statement, but because he couldn’t be bothered washing his clothes much, and had discovered that stains aren’t so obvious on black. He wore his hair long because he couldn’t be bothered cutting it, and favoured a trendy stubble because he couldn’t be bothered shaving every day. Any fears that I might have had about the self-consciousness of his image were utterly dispelled when I first visited his flat, which he shared with another band member. It was reassuringly untidy, and completely lacking in the faintest pretence at style. I swear, the only thing those boys spent any money on was their sound equipment.
This isn’t to say, however, that Matt had a problem with style or cleanliness. On the contrary, he admired them. He didn’t aspire to them—I guess he didn’t feel capable of anything so out of character—but he did admire them. He admired me. He admired the state of my kitchen, the smell of my sheets and the gloss on my shoes. He called me ‘dazzling’. My hair was so shiny, it was ‘dazzling’. My schedules were so tight, they were ‘dazzling’. He didn’t see anything risible about suits, or graduate programs, or the public service. He seemed proud to take me to lunch in the central business district, where I looked just like everyone else with my black pantyhose and my briefcase and my hair scooped up under a tortoiseshell slide. He especially admired my beautifully organised Filofax, which was, I have to admit, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. (These days it’s all electronic organisers, of course—and even back then the sun was setting on the Glory Days of the Filofax. But I still have a soft spot for my old leather-bound companion, scuffed and scratched though it may be.)
Miriam also had a Filofax—in fact Miriam was just as well organised as I was, if not more so. But for some reason, Matt didn’t admire her as much. Perhaps she was a little to
o crisply starched for him. Perhaps her sense of humour was a little too dry. Or perhaps it was because she was naturally organised, it was in her genes, whereas my organisational skills were simply a way of heading off my tendency to panic at the slightest setback. I have always had an inborn propensity to fall into a dithering heap when confronted with crises of any sort, especially domestic ones. Miriam, on the other hand, took things like leaking pipes and flea infestations in her stride. She wasn’t the type to start squealing like a stuck pig when she discovered that the fish was off, just before it was due to be served up to eight people for dinner.
I remember that occasion very well. Matthew was fantastic. Very laid-back, very reassuring, very helpful. While Miriam and I frantically prepared an alternative menu, he entertained the other guests by mixing lewd, absurd and entertaining cocktails with ridiculous names. He had such an easy, relaxed air about him that everyone else relaxed. We didn’t sit down at the table until half past nine, but nobody seemed to care. Certainly not Matthew. And though I thought that Miriam had emerged from the episode looking a lot more competent than I had, Matt still seemed to prefer me. He said that I’d been ‘cute’. He gathered me onto his lap, and tucked my loose hair behind my ears, and said that I ought to trip up on my own hemline more often.
It was at such times that I felt I knew him through and through, as if I was looking into a mirror.
But then I would hear about how he’d met some miners in a bar, and gone off with them to the dog races, and had ended up rock-fishing off Clovelly because their car had broken down, and suddenly I would feel as if I didn’t know him at all. He could do these things, you see. He had it in him. He had Aboriginal friends, and television actor friends, and biker friends. He had a sprawling, extended family situated around Newcastle and Morrisset and Fassifern, which entertained on its fringes all kinds of ex-con third cousins and religious maniac great-uncles. He had a long string of bizarre experiences and extraordinary jobs under his belt. Sometimes, for instance, he would talk about his spell at a chicken farm, where he had culled cockerels and collected eggs while wearing a red-and-white suit that was supposed to make him look like a chicken, and he would seem as strange to me as a man from Mars. Or he would relate to me the story of his lost tooth, which had been knocked out while he was shooting pigs in Queensland, and it was as if he was talking about another person.
That other person, I should tell you, was the only person my parents saw when they first met him. It was the tatts, needless to say. I would look at Matt and think: pig-shooting is not his first choice of pastime, but he’s an easygoing guy with a wide circle of acquaintances, and the sort of amiable character that would lead him to take part in a pig-shooting expedition simply because his mates were interested. My parents, on the other hand, would look at the tatts and think: pig shooting. Drug dealing. Unsafe driving. Dogs in the kitchen. Kids with rat-tails. I could see it on their faces, when I brought Matt to my sister’s twenty-first birthday party. I’ll admit that he did look somewhat out of place, among the Regency stripes and the Laura Ashley florals. The leather jacket was probably a bad choice. In fact he pretty much presented the appearance of someone whom I had deliberately, in a fit of post-adolescent defiance, brought home for the purpose of annoying my parents and upstaging my sister.
My sister and I get along pretty well, most of the time, but there have been some rough patches. Being the youngest sibling, she’s more of a party girl than I ever was; my parents always worried about her rebellious streak, which manifested itself in things like her bellybutton piercing, her decision to go backpacking around the Northern Territory after high school, and her wish to become a fashion buyer. (Rebellious streaks on the North Shore aren’t quite what they would be in, say, a Detroit trailer park.) The fashion-buyer fad didn’t last long—much to my parents’ relief—and by the time she was twenty-one, Danielle was studying business management. As a matter of fact, she’s a very sharp girl. She’d have to be, or she wouldn’t be working in London, now, organising sales conferences or whatever it is she does.
At her twenty-first birthday, she was busy flaunting a new boyfriend called Crispin, who was a pleasant surprise for both my parents. Previously, Danielle had spent something like two years having fiery arguments and passionate reconciliations with a troubled med student who flunked university during the course of their relationship. Crispin was a great improvement. He was from a family of wealthy graziers, he was receiving high marks in law, and he was innately placid and well organised. My parents liked him very much. They were also immensely gratified that Danielle, at the time of her twenty-first birthday, seemed to have actively rejected some of her unpredictable friends, and was going through a conservative stage. Her twenty-first was quite a sedate affair. There were linen tablecloths, candelabra, and many North Shore girls with gleaming blonde hair and perfect teeth. The boys, too, were pretty well buffed. Nearly all of them seemed to have mobile phones. When Matt appeared on the doorstep, wearing his scuffed leather jacket and shabby sneakers, he ruined the whole effect.
In his defence let me point out that he had shaved, and that his hair was tied back. Also, he was absolutely gorgeous. Danielle saw this at once; she’s not stupid. As a result, she became a bit temperamental with the unfortunate Crispin, while my parents fluttered around, smiling and sweating. Poor things—I do sympathise. No sooner had Danielle begun to settle down, thereby lifting a huge weight from their minds, than I had suddenly turned up with a large, hairy, King’s Cross bartender. They couldn’t help worrying, even though they tried not to show it.
Both my parents have very good manners, you see—so good that Matt never realised just how worried they were. He loped around, smiling his big, larrikin’s smile, while my mother introduced him to my extended family, invited him to sample her salmon vol-au-vents, and twittered on about the garden, which is her pride and joy. My father’s pride and joy is his library. Matt was transparently awestruck by the flawless state of my mother’s lawn, and the extent of my dad’s book collection. He expressed reservations about sitting in certain chairs, in case he should break them, and was careful to wipe his feet thoroughly before stepping from the patio onto the pale living-room carpet. He laughed his radio announcer’s laugh at every one of my father’s jokes, and praised with genuine feeling the excellence of my mother’s butterfly cakes. Most impressively of all, he chatted away to my Great-Aunt Ida, balancing a Royal Doulton teacup on his dirty black knee. Ida’s a bit deaf, poor woman, but she heard Matt, all right. He told me later that his Nonna was going deaf, so he knew how to pitch his voice for Aunt Ida.
In other words, he did everything right. He even apologised, afterwards, for not cutting his hair. As for the tatts, he informed me that he had been drunk when the bet was made with his brother’s friends . . . He’d won seven hundred dollars all up, having those tatts done. But it hadn’t been a smart thing to do; they didn’t usually make a good impression.
‘Next time,’ he promised, ‘I’ll get some new clothes. And a shirt—a proper one. Maybe some chinos.’ Like a tourist from another planet, he had taken note of the outfits worn by Danielle’s friends. ‘Maybe you can help me,’ Matt added. ‘Maybe you can point me in the right direction, so next time I visit the ancestral home, I won’t feel like something the cat dragged in.’
He was so sweet. When I heard him wondering aloud if my mother would approve of paisley prints, I realised suddenly that he was The One. There was no doubt about it. Only a man with a truly lovely nature would have breezed through that party, ignoring snubs and finding things to admire. He wasn’t a moron; he knew that his appearance had caused some consternation. But with his generosity of spirit, he didn’t realise that my parents were hoping desperately that he never would turn up again.
They couldn’t fool me, though. I knew the signs. When my mother pressed a doggie bag of sponge cake on him before he left, it was a dead giveaway.
I was determined, however, to follow my heart. I was grown up and reasona
bly intelligent—I knew what was good for me. Matt thought I was wonderful. He was entranced by the fact that I could put up my hair without consulting a mirror. He got a kick out of the way I would cry at practically anything in a movie. (Perhaps he liked comforting me afterwards.) He was flattered by my interest in Italian culture—though, he said, he couldn’t help me out much, since the closest thing his family ever got to culture was the old Botticelli calendar hanging in his mother’s kitchen.
As for me, I adored every square centimetre of that man. I felt like a groupie. We would have such great laughs, together—that’s something I remember very well, the way we heaved with laughter in the most peculiar places. At a municipal waste depot, once, after getting rid of the most disgusting couch in the world, Matt had looked around and declared, in a voice heavily larded with cockney: ‘Wot a bleedin’ dump’. In a monumental traffic jam, when somebody had finally got out of their car and stepped behind a tree to piss, I had hummed the first few bars of ‘Everybody Hurts’; we were already almost hysterical after the endless wait, and that pushed us right over the edge. We had the same sense of humour. We both loved Italian food. We shared identical views when it came to films, books and television— though Matt had a taste for football which I couldn’t share, and my admiration for certain musical performers left him cold. But his giggle filled me with rapture, and the sight of my feet in high heels drove him crazy. We had similar memories of kids’ TV shows and past fashion fads. Our reactions to things like elections, sashimi and the nocturnal house at Taronga Zoo were so close that I started talking about soul mates—just to annoy him. He’s got a fairly low tolerance for New Age lingo.