Demet’s eyes flashed but then she shrugged and chuckled. ‘Well spotted, Scotsman,’ she said as she took a sip from her champagne. ‘I am a hypocrite.’
Dan saw Clyde’s brief bristle of irritation. It was the inflection she gave the word, Scotsman, the stress on the second syllable. I don’t know how she does it, Clyde had complained to him, how she makes it sound like an insult every time.
‘Hypocrisy is inevitable.’
They all looked at Margarita. She was holding her cool glass to her cheek.
‘What do you mean by that?’
Margarita touched her lover’s forearm. ‘I don’t mean to be heavy about it, mate, I just meant that it is hard not to be conscious of how hypocritical we all are. You know, we all believe in reconciliation, we all believe in Aboriginal statehood, we all believe in social justice, but here we are on the day that should be about acknowledging how this land was stolen from its original owners and we’re living it up on one of the most expensive coastal strips in Australia. That’s all.’ She wasn’t like Demet — she didn’t have to announce it to the world. She’d said it softly, a statement just for them to hear.
‘I mean,’ she added even more quietly, as if ashamed of what she was about to say, ‘is there even one Aboriginal person in this whole fucking town?’
Clyde patted her hand. ‘Don’t worry too much about it, sweetheart. You’re the darkest person here.’ He made a gesture that took in the whole restaurant. ‘I mean, they all probably think you are Aboriginal.’
Demet’s laugh was a roar, a crack of thunder that made the couple next to them flinch. But Dan didn’t mind. He just felt relief every time Clyde said something that got a laugh out of Demet. I can relax, thought Dan, as Clyde lit a cigarette. It’s going to be alright.
The waitress rushed over, exclaiming, ‘Sorry, sir, but it’s no smoking here.’
Demet jumped in. ‘But we’re outside.’
The young woman looked serious. ‘Yes, but we serve food in this area and so there is a no-smoking policy till eleven o’clock.’ She pointed across to a boat landing a few metres from the restaurant. ‘If you like you can smoke out there. As long as you’re at least nine metres from the eating area.’
Dan felt that they were all being given a reprimand.
Demet had pulled out her pack of cigarettes. ‘Come on, Clyde, I’ll come with you.’ But as she left the table, she called back over her shoulder, ‘I mean, for fuck’s sake, it is a Greek restaurant.’
The waitress looked mortified. ‘Right,’ she declared, turning on her heel, ‘I’ll come back with the specials when they return, shall I?’
Dan watched Clyde get drunk. There was the first gin and tonic, and then the second when Clyde and Demet had returned from their smoke. Not that Dan was counting; he was just glad that Demet and Clyde had found common ground and bonhomie in their shared outrage at the pettiness of Australians. He could tell that Margarita was also relieved that the night hadn’t turned into another sparring match between their respective partners. Dan had heard the mantras before; Clyde’s dissection of Australia had become both more bitter and more resigned the more his frustration with the country grew.
So Dan sat and listened while Clyde listed all the things he found perplexing and annoying about Australia. ‘You all think you’re so egalitarian, but you’re the most status-seeking people I’ve met. You call yourselves laid-back but you’re angry and resentful all the time. You say there is no class system here, but you’re terrified of the poor, and you say you’re anti-authoritarian but all there is here are rules, from the moment I fucken landed here, rules about doing this and not doing that, don’t climb there, don’t go here, don’t smoke and don’t drink here and don’t play there and don’t drink and drive and don’t go over the speed limit and don’t do anything fucken human. You’re all so scared of dying you can’t let yourselves live — fuck that: we’re human, we die, that’s part of life. That’s just life.’
And Demet was his chorus; Demet answered every insult, every jibe with her own litany of complaints that Dan knew off by heart — he could have recited it along with her. We are parochial and narrow-minded and we are racist and ungenerous and we occupy this land illegitimately and we’re toadies to the Poms and servile to the Yanks; it was an antiphony between Demet and Clyde.
The elderly couple at the next table had fallen silent and Dan wanted to say sorry to them, to explain that Demet and Clyde didn’t know they were insulting them, they just didn’t see them, and the young waitress wasn’t smiling anymore; she refilled their water glasses and brought out more drinks without glancing at any of them, she no longer found Clyde’s accent charming. As both of them finished with a flourish, Clyde saying, ‘It’s soulless here,’ and Demet instantly echoing him: ‘You’re right, mate, it is soulless here,’ Dan kept his mouth shut because he knew he could say to his lover that that was because it wasn’t home for him — that was what people meant when they said a place was soulless, it meant it wasn’t home to them and they didn’t know it — but what could he say to his friend? Where are you going to go? Where are you going to find peace? Where will you have to go to find soul? This is the only home we have.
It was just after the plates had been cleared away, after the waitress had asked if they wanted dessert. Margarita had smiled, shaken her head, and asked her to bring the bill. Dan was looking up at the moon straining to reach its full brilliance, and listening to the waves slapping against the posts of the jetty. The tables around them had been cleared and on the foreshore a group of teenagers were playing loud thumping dance music. That was when it all started to go wrong.
The bill arrived at the table and Demet leaned forward to say, ‘This is on us.’
‘No, you don’t have to do that,’ said Clyde, shaking his head in protest.
Margarita took Demet’s hand and held it to her chest, as if the two women were about to make a vow. ‘No, it’s our shout because we wanted this weekend together to ask you both a favour.’
Demet was nodding, encouraging Margarita to continue; and stumbling at first, then gaining courage, she blurted out the words: ‘Demet and I want to have a baby, we want to become parents, and we can’t think of two men we’d rather have as fathers to our child. Are you interested? Will you think about it?’
Dan barely had time to absorb the meaning of the words when Demet added, ‘Of course, it would be totally up to you how much or how little responsibility you want to have in rasing the child.’
That made the words break through and Dan thought, No, I want to know her, I want to know my daughter, because his very first thought was of Regan and how a child of his and Demet’s might look like Regan. His next thought was that Clyde, next to him, had stiffened. And that made Dan unable to answer. That made him unable to speak.
‘So, what do you think?’ Margarita was searching Dan’s face, clearly shaken and dismayed by Clyde’s resolute silence.
Clyde was also looking at him and Dan couldn’t speak or look in his direction. The moon was reflected brilliantly and solidly on the surface of the calm water. The spears of light were paths to a future. Demet and Margarita were offering him a future. But he couldn’t speak, he couldn’t bridge the in-between of Clyde and Demet.
Margarita turned to Clyde. ‘What do you think?’
Clyde cleared his throat. He no longer sounded drunk. ‘I don’t think that is for me to answer,’ he said, chillingly polite. ‘You’re not asking me to be the father, you’re asking Dan.’