“I wish you wouldn't,” he said. “Buy me things. Shirts and that.” He was trying not to seem ungracious, she saw, but was not happy. “I don't need shirts.”
“But you do,” she protested. “Look at the one you've got on.”
He glanced down. “What's wrong with it?”
“It's in rags.”
“Does me,” he said, looking put out.
“So. Will you wear these things or what?”
“I'll wear them,” he said. “They're bought now. But I don't want you to do it, that's all. I don't needthings.”
He refused to meet her eye. Something more was being said, she thought. I don't deserve them — was that what he meant? In a sudden rush of feeling for something in him that touched her but which she could not quite catch, she clasped him to her. He relaxed, responded.
“No more shirts, then,” she promised.
“I just don't want you to waste your money,” he said childishly. “I've got loads of stuff already.”
“I know,” she said. “You should send the lot of it to the Salvos. Then you'd have nothing at all. You'd be naked, and wouldn't be able to go out, and I'd have you all to myself.” She had, by now, moved in.
“Is that what you want?” he asked, picking up on her lightness, allowing her, without resistance for once, to undo the buttons on the offending shirt.
“You know I do,” she told him.
“Well then,” he said.
“Well then what?”
“Well, you've got me,” he said, "haven't you?”
He had a ukulele. Occasionally he took it down from the top shelf of the wardrobe and, sitting with a bare foot laid over his thigh, played— not happily she thought — the same plain little tune.
She got to recognise the mood in which he would need to seek out this instrument that seemed so absurdly small in his hands and for which he had no talent, and kept her distance. The darkness in him frightened her. It seemed so far from anything she knew of his other nature.
Some things she discovered only by accident.
“Who's Bobby Kohler?” she asked once, having several times now come across the name on letters.
“Oh, that's me,” he said. “ Was me.”
“What do you mean?”
“It's my name. My real name. Mitchell Maze is just the name I work under.”
“You mean you changed it?”
“Not really. Some people still call me Bobby.”
“Who does?”
“My mother. A few others.”
“Is it German?”
“Was once, I suppose. Away back. Grandparents.”
She was astonished, wanted to ask more, but could see that the subject was now done with. She might ask but he would not answer.
There were times when he did tell her things. Casually, almost dismissively, off the top of his head. He told her how badly, at sixteen, he had wanted to be a long-distance runner, and shine. How for a whole year he had got up in the dark, before his paper run, and gone out in the growing light to train on the oval at their local showground at Castle Hill. He laughed, inviting her to smile at some picture he could see of his younger self, lean, intense, driven, straining painfully day after day towards a goal he would never reach. She was touched by this. But he was not looking for pity. It was the folly of the thing he was intent on. It appealed to a spirit of savage irony in him that she could not share.
There were no evocative details. Just the bare, bitter facts. He could see the rest too clearly in his mind's eye to reproduce it for hers. She had to do that out of her own experience: Albury The early-morning frost on the grass. Magpies carolling around a couple of milk cans in the long grass by the road. But she needed more, to fix in a clarifying image the tenderness she felt for him, the sixteen-year-old Bobby Kohler, barefooted, in sweater and shorts, already five inches taller than the Skip Daley she had known, driving himself hard through those solitary circuits of the oval as the sunlight came and the world turned golden around him.
One day she drove out in her lunch hour to see the place. Sat in her car in the heat and dazzle. Walked to the oval fence and took in the smell of dryness. There was less, in fact, than she imagined.
But a week later she went back. His mother lived there. She found the address, and after driving round the suburb for a bit, sat in her car under a paperbark on the other side of the street. Seeing no one in the little front yard, she got out, crossed, climbed the two front steps to the veranda, and knocked.
There was no reply.
She walked to the end of the veranda, which was unpainted, its timber rotting, and peered round the side. No sign of anyone.
Round the back, there was a water tank, painted the usual red, and some cages that might once have held rabbits. She peeped in through the window on a clean little kitchen with a religious calendar — was he a Catholic? he'd never told her that — and into two bedrooms on either side of a hall, one of which, at one time, must have been his.
He lived here, she told herself. For nearly twenty years. Something must be left of him.
She went down into the yard and turned the bronze key of the tap, lifting to her mouth a cupped handful of the cooling water. She felt like a ghost returning to a world that was not her own, nostalgic for what she had never known; for what might strike her senses strongly enough— the taste of tank water, the peppery smell of geraniums — to bring back some immediate physical memory of the flesh. But that was crazy. What was she doing? She had him, didn't she?
That night, touching the slight furriness, in the dark, of his earlobe, smelling the raw presence of him, she gave a sob and he paused in his slow lovemaking.
“What is it?” he said. “What's the matter?”
She shook her head, felt a kind of shame — what could she tell him? That she'd been nosing round a backyard in Castle Hill looking for some ghost of him? He'd think she was mad.
“Tell me,” he said.
His face was in her hair. There was a kind of desperation in him.
But this time she was the one who would not tell.
He was easy to get on with and he was not. They did most things together; people thought of them as a couple, they were happy. He came and went without explanation, and she learned quickly enough that she either accepted him on these terms or she could not have him at all. Without quite trying to, he attracted people, and when “situations” developed was too lazy, or too easy-going, to extract himself. She learned not to ask where he had been or what he was up to. That wasn't what made things difficult between them.
She liked to have things out. He wouldn't allow it. When she raged he looked embarrassed. He told her she was overdramatic, though the truth was that he liked her best when she was in a passion; it was the very quality in her that had first attracted him. What he didn't like was scenes. If she tried to make a scene, as he called it, he walked out.
“It's no use us shouting at one another,” he'd tell her, though in fact he never shouted. “We'll talk about it later.” Which meant they wouldn't talk at all.
“But I need to shout,” she shouted after him.
Later, coming back, he would give a quick sideways glance to see if she “calmed down.”
She hadn't usually. She'd have made up her mind, after a bout of tears, to end things.
“What about a cuppa?” he'd suggest.
“What you won't accept—" she'd begin.
“Don't,” he'd tell her. “I've forgotten all about it.” As if the hurt had been his. Then, "I'm sorry. I don't want you to be unhappy.”