At first I thought that she didn’t want to talk to me, assumed that she wanted nothing to do with me. She wouldn’t look me in the eye, it seemed as if she wanted to draw away.
‘What are you doing?’ It was a stupid question but all I could think to ask.
‘Just browsing,’ she’d replied, and then added, ‘I’m working at the uni, just up the road. And you?’
‘I’m heading off to a film,’ and I pointed across the street to the cinema. I had quickly glanced at my phone; if I didn’t cross the street now I would be late for the movie. I had to say goodbye. She hadn’t even kissed me or hugged me — she wanted nothing to do with me.
‘Are you running late?’ she’d asked and I’d nodded, and then, even though it terrified me and broke the pattern of my day, I blurted out, ‘I can see a film anytime. How about we go for a drink?’
It was clear that the final word had alarmed her: she’d almost recoiled from it. Of course, of course, she was remembering the last night we’d seen each other. Shame beat pitilessly around my ears at that moment, shame was the earth splitting beneath my feet, shame was mortification and fire. She’s scared I’ll get drunk and become a violent ugly fool; maybe she thinks I’ll hit her. Of course she can never trust me again.
Shame. I am trying not to be overwhelmed by it, I am trying not to be beholden to it, to find a place for it where I can survive it, where I am not broken by it. I don’t know if it will ever happen, or if it can ever happen. I can’t bear the weight of all the apologies I need to make. That morning I had underlined a passage in the book where the woman working as a cleaner is asked what it is like to bear the memory of being molested as a young girl by her stepfather and she replies, Like carrying a house on your back. I’d underlined it so hard with my ballpoint pen that I ripped the page. That is shame, that is the cost and the burden and the irredeemable fact of it.
There were too many people in the street, there was too much brightness, too much noise. I wanted to be home, the door locked, just myself, my mattress, my books and my four walls. She didn’t want a drink with me, it was obvious that she wanted nothing to do with me. I was poison, I was contamination. I should just walk away, I thought, I should cross the street and go into a film, any film. I should just disappear from her world. So before she could reply, before she could lie and say she was running late or that she had work she needed to finish or a dinner that she had to prepare, I said the words for her. ‘Nah, of course you’re busy. We’ll make it another time.’ She had looked so sad then. Once again, I had misjudged words, I had made them into something despondent and crushing.
‘Danny,’ she said, finally reaching out to me, stroking my cheek tenderly. ‘Of course I have the time for you, mate. For you I have all the time in the world.’
‘It’s really nothing,’ I say. ‘I like helping them out. It’s certainly not heroic.’
And it isn’t. I feel resentment stirring in my belly, I can sense it in my sudden urge to draw away from her.
She is looking at me as if I am a child who has performed well on an exam, has brought home a prize. ‘Good for you, Danny,’ she says again. ‘You’re doing something really good, you’re looking after society’s dispossessed.’ But I bet she’s thinking, What a perfect thing for a loser like him to do, to look after other losers.
I want to tell her that I like the work, that I don’t feel judged or assessed or criticised by the guys I look after. The old German man whose brain has been fried from too much alcohol; the youth who had his skull squashed, driving high, driving fast without a seatbelt; the middle-aged carpenter who’d shot too much heroin into his body and had died for a minute. Rolf and Kevin and Jeremy. I do Rolf’s washing; he pisses himself all the time. I am teaching Kevin how to dress himself, teaching Jeremy how to wash himself, I help him sit on the toilet when he needs a shit — I do all this and I am immersed and lost in it. I know about bodies, how they need to be sculpted and moulded and twisted and made to work. There’s not a lot I know, but I know this, that the body can be trained, that the body can be changed, that the body is in motion, is never static. And I know that sometimes the body will roar out its limits, will tell you there is no further to go, that some possibilities will never be realised, despite desire and hope and will. I know this better than I know anything else. The body also fails. Rolf and Kevin and Jeremy know this too. Rolf and Kevin and Jeremy and I are losers, we also know this; but not in the way the world thinks. We don’t need the world to pity us, we don’t need the encouraging word or the pat on the back. We carry our home on our back.
Demet is saying something else, going on about my altruism or my fortitude, or, for fuck’s sake no, my courage.
‘Really, it’s nothing,’ I interrupt. ‘It’s just a job.’
She laughs again and my resentment is gone. ‘OK, Danny Kelly, OK. It’s a job.’ She has lit another cigarette, has finished her wine. ‘I bet it’s better than my job.’
‘You don’t like tutoring?’
‘I don’t like the hours, I don’t like that I’ve been doing it two years and I’m still a fucking casual, I don’t like the whingeing students at Melbourne Uni, and I especially don’t like their sense of entitlement.’ She groans. ‘Listen to me — and I call the students whingers!’
She takes a deep breath. ‘I’m exhausted, Danny, I think that’s what it is. I’m working on my PhD and I think I’m never going to finish it and I know that every bloody fool out there doing a PhD is saying and thinking the same thing. I’m boring myself, Danny. I’m not good when I’m bored, you know that, I’m terrible. I’m a bitch to my girlfriend, I’m a bitch to my students, I’m a bitch to myself.’ She looks again at her empty glass. ‘I’m going to have another. You want one?’
I have chugged down the wine the way a baby sucks on a teat. Desperately. But then so has Demet. We can’t settle, can’t find our way back to the easy freedom of our past friendship. Since we sat down she has not referred to prison again. It is as if the apology on the street was all that was needed, and she thinks she is now forgiven. But sitting here opposite her, being reminded of what we had, my shame has been banished by resentment. It did hurt that she didn’t visit, it had crushed me that she had made no effort to find out how I was, hadn’t even written a letter. I’ll never tell her but every visitors’ day it was her I expected to see. She had promised it to me: that we were soul mates. And she had betrayed that. I look down at my empty glass. Do I want another drink with her?