But then my gut plummets. I remember: I am catching up with Luke's friend tomorrow. The cocoon of stillness has gone. My joy evaporates, instantly.
It was an email, out of the blue. The subject heading read: Danny, is that you?
I had to make concessions to the twenty-first century when I started college, when I began the diploma in community services. I still don't have internet at home. If I am honest, I am fearful of what I would do if I had the leisure to roam that still-uncharted territory on my own. If I am honest and accurate, it is the world of pornography and anonymity that compels me and terrifies me. It is just a hunch I have, that, lured into the world of the screen where I don't have to reveal myself, not my voice, not my body, not my truth, I would be engulfed and be lost, roaming that world. When I swam, how strange that phrase sounds to me, as absurd as if I were to say 'when I was a woman', so distant and so foreign is that experience to me, no one had to tell me not to masturbate, to insist that it would dissipate and corrupt my will. I just knew. As I think we all did, all of us boys, in the team, in the heats, in the competitions, in those pools and in those change rooms, we all knew what giving ourselves over to another thrill that could equal swimming would do. And now I know it about porn and about the internet. I know how it taints desire, how it poisons memory and corrupts time. I have a second-hand laptop given to me by Regan on which I do my course work. I log on at the TAFE library or the Vietnamese internet cafe on Main Street. I save my work on a USB stick and I print it off at the library.
I feel a stab of something like pain. It must come from thinking back to the swimming, recalling being back with those boys. A rush of shame sluices right through me, as real as a blade disembowelling me from my groin to my throat. Those boys. The shame: the weight and the cost and the dishonour of what I have done.
I sigh so deeply that Hassan turns around. I'm OK, I say apologetically, and he doesn't answer. He leaves the bucket upturned just outside the cafe door and goes inside to fetch his broom. But not before he squeezes my right shoulder gently. Again, wordlessly. He's been making me coffee for close to a year and, apart from the most generic of pleasantries, I still don't know if he can speak English at all.
It is the email from Luke that has unsettled me. I thought at first that it must have been Demet who gave him my email, dk03101980@hotmail.com: my initials, my birthday. His first message was cursory'Danny, is that you?' but since my equally brief response 'yes, mate, it is' he has been emailing me every fortnight or so, with news of China, of work, of family, sending me photos of Katie and their child. He had found Regan through Facebook and she had passed on my email address. Are you on Facebook, Danny? he asked. No, I typed back, I haven't heard of it. I enjoy his letters, am proud of my friend, the shy fragile Eurasian boy who is now an executive in China, who emails me photographs in which he wears expensive suits and has a stylish haircut, and who has mastered both tennis and squash and lives in that exotic-sounding place Shanghai, a city more populous than the whole of my vast country. You have to come over, he wrote, and I replied, Do they accept ex-cons in China? A week later I logged on at a computer at Sunshine Library and I read his six-word response: Lie on your visa application, dickhead. And then three capital letters: LOL. I was puzzled and had to ask Sophie in my class what it meant. 'Laugh out loud,' she snapped, her eyebrows arching, appalled at my ignorance. 'Oh my God, Dan, get with the program!'
Katie has a friend, a classmate from the university she attended in Glasgow. All I have been told about him is that he works in film and television, 'in production'. He has been living in Sydney for over a year and is only now making his first trip to Melbourne. And Luke couldn't help it; when he asked if I could meet up with this man Clyde, he joked that it was no surprise that Clyde had been in Australia for nearly two years but had not yet bothered to visit Melbourne. Arse end of the world, Luke typed.
I finish my coffee, I walk home, I read one hundred pages of Dostoevsky's The Devils, immersing myself in the nineteenth-century novel, in all its digressions, its cul-de-sacs, its world in which fate determines destiny far more ruthlessly than does choice or desire, where youth is cruel in its creativity and righteousness. I don't want to talk, I don't want to struggle to find words and conversation. I don't want to be in this world. But I will do it for Luke. I will meet this Glaswegian, we will have a coffee, I will be polite and answer his questions about my city. The thought of it brings a smile to my face. I am the last person to ask about what to do and where to go in my town; Luke should have asked Demet. I will put this stranger in contact with her. And then I will have peace.
Once again, I will be safeguarded by my solitude.
The first thing I notice about Clyde is that his accent reminds me of Granddad Bill. There is a similar bass tone and rumble to his voice, the same lilt to his speech. I want to close my eyes, just listen to that voice, masculine, musical and resonant, as if someone just notched up the treble in his voice box by a degree. Then I notice the sparse cadmium hair on his wrists, and it is disconcerting how much I want to lay my fingers there. It has been so long since I touched another's skin.
It took me an age to decide where to meet, as if it were a date. I paced up and down my bedroom, unable to make up my mind. First I thought it should be the city, of course he would want to see the city, it is his first time here. Then I decided against it, as I didn't know where to go in the city. I wondered if it wouldn't be best to meet just down the road from my flat but I quickly decided against that option. It was a train ride out, it was the suburbs; why would he want to see the suburbs? I finally settled on a small cafe in Brunswick where Demet took me a few months ago, a small place so nonchalantly trendy that you have to sit on upturned milk crates, so chic that sitting there hurts your arse. Then I spent a fitful night wondering if I could remember exactly where it was, so first thing the next morning I walked to the internet cafe near my flat and googled a map of Brunswick. I located Demet's house and traced the route we took, where we turned left onto Sydney Road and how far we walked before we took a right. I worked out exactly where the cafe must be.
I texted Clyde the location of where we would meet.
Ten seconds later I got a text back. Cool, it read. Looking forward to it x. I stared at that x for an age, astonished. It seemed so audacious. I didn't dare text back, I could never sign off in that way. x.
Clyde has finished his coffee. There is a chilling wind blowing up the street but he wants to sit outside where he can smoke. I wish I had thought of bringing a scarf. It is spring but winter hasn't yet unwrapped itself from around the city, and I am shivering. A young waitress with Islander tattoos on her arms comes out, picks up our empty glasses, and asks, 'Another?'
Clyde looks across at me. 'Yeah, sure,' I say, 'I'll have another,? and he grins. As she walks back inside I mumble, 'Sorry about the shit weather.'