His answering laugh is as strong and hoarse as my granddad Bill's. He pretends to look at a non-existent wristwatch and says, 'I cannot believe it. A half hour has passed and it is the first mention of weather.' His grin broadens. 'I think I'm going to like you, pal.'
Pal. I like the word, it is unfamiliar but warm. Pal.
We are surrounded by students, girls in op-shop jackets buttoned to the collar, with seventies tinted sunglasses; guys in tight black jeans and Converse sneakers.
'You're all obsessed,' Clyde continues. 'It's such an Aussie trait, to always go on about the weather. That's all they can fucken talk about in Sydney. 'Is it going to be sunny? Can we get a swim in?' It drives me mad.'
What would his chest look like? His nipples?
He tells me how bored he is with Sydney, that it is too white and too stratified and that the brute strength of the ocean scares him. And that it is too full of English people.
What would his legs look like? Would his thighs be solid, would his calves be firm?
And he tells me that he already likes Melbourne, that it is ugly, like Glasgow. He smiles at a young scarfed Turkish woman navigating her pram past the upturned milk crates.
Was his cock thick? Did he still have his foreskin?
What would his sweat taste like?
'My father would agree with you,' I answer. 'He's a truckie, he's driven all over this country and he reckons it is apartheid.'
'And you, do you agree with him?'
The direct question is disconcerting. I know I am blushing. It is a question that has no adequate answer. Of course I agree and of course I don't, there is no possible answer that can encompass the breadth of the continent.
I'm never going to see him again. Fuck him if he can't take a joke. 'You don't get a get-out-of-gaol-free card, mate. You're a European, you pricks caused this mess.'
It is the way he abandons himself to his chuckling that makes my mind up: I like this guy. He laughs so much he nearly falls off his crate. I am aware that everyone around us is staring. I look down.
When I look up, he is eyeing me carefully, appraising me, and it is then that he seems to make a decision.
'I was meant to come over with my partner, we'd been planning it for a year. And then the prick goes off with some Polish twink he met at a disco.' Clyde elongates the word, makes it sound ugly, makes it sound like the most hideous of words. 'So I thought, fuck it, I'm going to go anyway, I'll go to the other end of the world and see if I can forget him. And I woke up this morning and it was drizzling and I was freezing and I looked out the window of the hotel and it was grey and miserable and I realised I couldn't remember the cunt's face. That's when I thought, I'm going to like Melbourne.'
We are silent for a moment, then the coffee arrives and he says, 'So tell me about you.'
Slowly, hesitantly, I begin to talk. About study, about working with men with acquired brain injury. He asks more questions, asks about what Luke was like at school, and says something about how my parents must have worked hard to afford to pay for me to study at such a school.
Then I know that Luke has told him nothing about me, about my scholarship, about my swimming, what I was and what I have done. And I am grateful, but I am also hurt: maybe Luke is ashamed of me. So I don't say anything about my past; instead I tell him about now. I hope that the now is enough.
The waitress returns to collect the empty glasses. Clyde looks down and says, 'I can't really have another.'
'That's OK,' I say. 'I guess I should go.'
Clyde looks right at me, and I notice how grey and certain his eyes are, the rigid line of his nose, the sharp cleft in his chin. He hasn't shaved and there is a smudge of drying coffee at the bottom of his lip. He says, 'Do you want to go out for a drink tonight, Danny? I was going to meet some work people but I'd prefer to have a drink with you.' He says it straight out, no hesitation.
I clear my throat. 'Dan,' I say. 'I prefer to be called Dan.'
'Oh.' He's taken aback.
And I am wondering, do I want to go out for a drink with him? Don't I just want to enjoy my version of a long weekend, walking and reading, lost in my own space, not talking, not seeing, not answering to anyone?
'Luke just keeps talking about Danny, so I thought,'
'It's OK,' I interrupt, 'I just prefer Dan. Danny was a long time ago.'
His cool grey eyes are questioning but he remains silent.
So I continue. 'Yeah, yeah, I'd like a drink.'
What would it be like to kiss him?
Labour Day Weekend, March 1997
‘This used to be the front entrance, but Dad had it all torn down before we moved in.’
Danny and Martin were on the balcony of Martin’s bedroom. To get there you had to step through the enormous open window, its frame carved from a heavy hardwood painted white, with lead ballasts on either side. There was just enough space on the balcony for four people. Martin pointed to the houses across the street, three- and four-storeyed with front yards as big as football fields. Houses like Martin’s.
‘Most of those houses,’ he said, ‘are owned by Jews. Dad didn’t want us to live on Jew Street so he spent almost as much money as it cost to buy the place knocking down the original walls and putting the entrance on Orrong Road.’
Danny nodded as though he understood what Martin had said, though he didn’t. He thought that there was something obscene in what Martin had just told him. He also thought there was something very stupid in what Mr Taylor had done, something wasteful and ignorant. It was more information he would have to keep from his parents; his father would rant and rave, his mother would shake her head and say, How awful. And of course he would have to keep it from Demet, who would go spare. Fucking racists. He could hear her saying it. He blocked it all out. Demet and his mother and his father were in the other world. It was like his two worlds were parts of different jigsaw puzzles. At first, he’d tried to fit the pieces together but he just couldn’t do it, it was impossible. So he kept them separate: some pieces belonged on this side of the river, to the wide tree-lined boulevards and avenues of Toorak and Armadale, and some belonged to the flat uniform suburbs in which he lived.
Martin pointed to a house across the street with what looked like castle turrets on each corner, and with two tall liquidambar trees in the front yard through which Danny could see the Yarra River. ‘That’s Jacob Latter’s house,’ Martin said. ‘Ugly, isn’t it?’
Jacob was a Jew. Sometimes the boys at school would tease him and say, ‘Hey, Jacob, can you smell gas?’ If Demet were to hear them she would be furious: it was all politics now with Demet, all New World Order and Srebrenica and Arafat selling out the Palestinians on the White House lawn. She’d say that the boys who teased Jacob at school were rich racist scum. But it wasn’t like that, he knew, it was just something that happened at a boys school, you just mocked and teased and joked. Like in the showers when Scooter would joke about being careful not to drop the soap around Tsitsas or when they said to Luke, ‘We’ll-have-six-spling-lolls-and-one-sweet-and-sour-pork-and-two-flied-lice.’ It was no different to Demet and Yianni calling him a skip or a bogan, or calling Boz a blackfella or Shelley a curry muncher or Mia a Leb. It was no different, but he couldn’t get the pieces to fit, they wouldn’t go together. He couldn’t explain it.
There was a knock on Martin’s door and a soft voice called, ‘Where are you?’