Winners of the Joe O'Sullivan Writers Prize 2008

Shared First Prize

Georgia Richter

'A drink at the Retro'

The girl from England wasn’t like us. Her legs were long but her ankles were thick. As if to draw attention to them, she wore ankle socks. She had no chin, but her eyes were as blue as cornflowers. I noted this with satisfaction; I had read enough books to know what the English were like. I was transfixed by the ferocious burst of sunburn across her nose. Her blonde hair had dark roots.
‘Too much dyeing,’ we whispered. At fourteen, we were into glossy hair with gelled up fringes. We only ever bleached with lemon juice. Our white school socks were pulled up tight below the knee.
‘She’s a bit freaky,’ my friends said, but I didn’t mind. She invited me to a pool party in the basement of her apartment. She told me there would be boys.
Laura was the only girl I knew who lived in a block of flats. When I went to Laura’s, she met me in the downstairs lobby, and took me to meet her parents. They were on the seventh floor. Her mother stood at the counter in the little kitchen. There were bottles of wine on the counter, and a bowl of nuts. Her father sat in the only armchair. His eyes were half-closed.
‘Mum and Dad, this is Erica,’ Laura said. ‘Erica, this is Constance and Brian.’
‘Oh—it’s Connie!’ said her mother. She wore an iridescent dress scooped low in the front. Her breasts were large and on the scooped halves I saw that the sun had bitten her too.
Her father had loosed his tie. He was one of those men who acknowledges baldness early and shaves his head instead. ‘Nice to meet you,’ he said, with lidded eyes. He took a handful of nuts, and chewed.
‘We’ll be in the pool,’Laura said.
‘Be careful won’t you,’ Connie said, without much enthusiasm.
Her father yawned.
‘What did you say your father’s name was?’ I asked on the way down in the lift. ‘Was it’Brain’?’
‘Brian,’ said Laura.
I thought: the Body and the Brain.
‘He travels a lot,’ she added. ‘Mum doesn’t like to be left alone.’
The pool was in the basement. Three boys came along that Laura knew. She let them in at some pre-arranged time. I wondered how she’d got to know them. She’d only arrived weeks before.
The boys brought beer. Laura took a bottle of gin from a bag.
‘Come on,’ she said, unscrewing the cap. ‘Let’s have fun.’
I tried to make my drink last. I disliked the way the alcohol ran into my veins and removed me from myself. I thought if I drank too much I might not be able to hold it all together.
One of the boys told me his name was Jo. He said he was Portuguese and he went to the local high school.
‘My parents run a restaurant,’ he said. ‘I can take as much beer from the fridge as I like.’
‘Do they know about that?’ I asked.
Jo laughed. ‘If they ask me, I’ll tell them it was my sister. If she complains, I’ll tell them she’s a lesbian.’
‘Is she?’
‘Probably,’ said Jo. ‘She isn’t interested in boys.’
I did not know what to say to this, so I didn’t say anything.
Laura turned off the lights. The water was blue and the underwater pool lights were orange. I took off my towel and jumped in the pool. Jo pulled off his t-shirt and put his beer down on the edge. He dived in too. When he surfaced, he swam up close to me.
We were fourteen and drinking without adult supervision in a basement swimming pool. My mother would have called it a recipe for disaster but she wasn’t there.
Jo took a mouthful of beer from his bottle on the edge of the pool. We were in the shallow end. He put his hands low down on my hips. They were warm in the cool water.
‘I’m drunk,’ he said.
‘Me too,’ I lied.
He kissed me. I kissed him back. My first kiss was left behind in more kisses. I closed my eyes. I had nothing to compare it with, but he was a good kisser. We kissed for a long time with our eyes shut and scarcely the water between us.
When I opened my eyes I saw Brian standing above me. His tie was still loose, but his eyes weren’t half-lidded.
He said, ‘It is time for you to go upstairs and get dressed. Your mother will be here soon.’ He said to the boys, ‘Good evening, gentlemen.’ He sounded like a proper Englishman.
On a different night Laura rang me to say that her mother had a knife. She said, ‘She’s going to kill Dad when he comes home.’
She was crying and hard to understand.
‘Where is your mum?’
‘In the kitchen.’
‘Where are you?’
‘I’ve locked myself in my room. I have to wait for her to go to sleep.’
‘Why will she go to sleep?’
‘She’s drunk. She always goes to sleep.’ Laura whimpered into the phone. ‘You have to help me!’
But I couldn’t think of what to do. ‘I’m going to put Mum on,’ I said. ‘If that’s okay with you.’
Laura cried harder. I don’t know if she heard me. I went to get Mum. Then I sat in the lounge and read a book called The Ogre Downstairs, but I couldn’t concentrate. I felt cross with Laura. I didn’t know anyone who did things like that. Why had she rung me?
In our kitchen, Mum spoke to Laura, and then to Connie, and even got her to put the knife away.
She came into the lounge after she hung up.
‘Why didn’t she call the police?’ I said.
‘Brian was away on business,’ Mum said.
‘So there wouldn’t have been a murder, because he wasn’t there.’
‘No,’ said Mum.
‘Why didn’t we call the police?’
‘It may not have helped,’ my mother said. ‘She’ll feel sorry in the morning.’ But she looked perplexed, as if the answer didn’t seem quite right to her.
It was past my bedtime. I felt cross with Connie too. ‘They don’t look like the sort of people who would do that kind of thing,’ I said.
‘Poor Connie,’ my mother said. ‘It must be lonely for her while he travels.’ My father had been gone so long she could make statements like that without any irony. ‘It’s not the first time, I gather,’ she said. ‘The poor kid. You should look out for her.’
What about the poor Brain? I thought. He’s the one she wanted to kill.
Jo got my number from Laura. He took me to Victoria Street, to the restaurant his parents owned. We went on a Monday morning. The restaurant was on a corner, with big windows facing both ways. Jo showed me the kitchen. Someone had been polishing the silver. It was all laid out on a table: forks, spoons, butter knives, steak knives. Hanging over the big stainless steel benches were rows of delicate looking hatchets, and cooking knives, their blades all facing the same way.
‘Do you want a drink?’ Jo said. He pointed to the big fridge.
‘No,’ I said. I wasn’t sure if he meant lemonade or beer.
We walked upstairs. Jo lay on top of me on the carpet. The chairs were stacked up on the tables. We heard the cleaning lady come in. She switched on a vacuum cleaner downstairs. The place was so quiet I feared what she would hear when she shut off the power.
‘My sister is a lesbian,’ Jo said, kissing me.
‘I know,’ I said.
‘How?’ he said, sounding surprised.
‘You told me at the party.’
‘I must have been drunk,’ he said.
‘Me too,’ I said. ‘But I still remember.’
Jo slid his hand into the waist of my jeans. ‘Do you want to have sex?’
I listened to the sound of the vacuum cleaner below.
‘No,’I said.
‘Go on,’ said Jo. ‘It would be fun.’
‘It’s too early,’ I said. In a few minutes, I realised, I would end my first relationship. But first I lay there while he kissed me and wondered if by too early he would think I meant Monday morning in a restaurant with a cleaning lady, or being fourteen years old.
My mother invited Laura’s family to dinner. ‘It’s the least we can do,’ she said.
When I heard their car, I went downstairs to open the door. Through the glass, I watched them come walking through the drippy winter garden. Laura stood in front, scowling. Connie was dressed in bold floral, showing flesh, as if it was always summertime in Australia. Brian wore an iron grey sweater, dark pants. His face was less tanned than I remembered. But actually, despite her dress, they both seemed paler versions of themselves.
I did not want to look as if I knew all about them. I arranged my face. I threw open the door. ‘Hi!’ I said.
Laura’s parents jumped, and nearly clung to each other in the weak light.
‘Mum’s in the kitchen,’ I said, and pointed through.
‘Come on,’ said Laura. ‘Let’s go to your room.’
Upstairs, Laura flicked through my CD collection. ‘Where’s your father?’ she said.
‘Oh, he’s resumed a life elsewhere,’ I said. I thought this was a nice, English answer: it showed all restraint, no grief.
‘It’s such a bore,’ Laura said.
‘What is?’
‘They’re always like this after a fight.’
‘Like what?’
She said, ‘I don’t know what is worse.’
‘Your parents don’t seem very ... alike,’ I said.
‘He met her in a vulnerable moment,’ said Laura, and then laughed, in an odd, English kind of way, so I laughed too.
I went to another of Laura’s basement parties. Jo was there. He went in the swimming pool again. He was talking and laughing with Laura. I was glad I had ended it with him, seeing how easily his affections were transferred. I wondered what other boys she knew.
When we were fifteen, Laura went back to England with her parents. They sent her off to finishing school. At school we giggled and said, ‘What? She couldn’t be finished here?’ I thought of writing to her, but I didn’t know what to say.
When I was twenty-seven, Brian came to Australia on a visit. He rang me and asked me out for a drink. He said he had promised Laura he’d do it.
I said I would. I’d just dumped my boyfriend. I knew from experience that going out was easier than staying in.
‘I’ll meet you in Victoria Street,’ he said. ‘There’s a bar I know.’
‘Okay,’ I said. I hadn’t been to Victoria Street for years.
It was called the Retro. It was on a corner. I could have sworn it was in the same place as Jo’s parents’ restaurant.
‘Have you been here before?’ I said. ‘I don’t remember this being a bar.’
‘I travel a lot,’ said Brian. ‘I like a few familiar haunts.’
We went upstairs and it didn’t look the same. But then, they can change a place in subtle ways.
It was early, and there was a decent crowd.
‘Is this all right?’ Brian said, finding a spot by the window.
‘Pardon?’
‘Is this okay?’
The music wasn’t loud, but the patrons were enthusiastic even though it was still late afternoon.
Brian got me a light beer. The drink he chose was a clear spirit.
‘Cheers,’ he said, and raised his glass.
He hadn’t aged. I felt as if I had caught up to him. His head was still shaved, but he wasn’t carrying more flesh. He wasn’t an unhandsome man. His eyes were cornflower blue.
‘So,’ he said. He smiled at me.
‘How is Laura?’ I said.
‘Wonderful.’ Brian reached into his jacket and brought out his wallet. He flipped it open to show me the grandchildren. He said, ‘She always wanted a happy family.’
‘I’m sorry?’ I said, leaning in.
He spoke a little louder. ‘She always wanted a family, you know.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know that.’
‘She said you were her best friend here in Australia,’ he said, frowning a little at my response.
‘Oh,’ I said. I never would have called her my best friend. The suggestion troubled me. ‘How is Connie?’
‘Connie thinks I travel too much. But that’s me, isn’t it?’ He took a mouthful of the spirit.
But it seemed that Brian did not particularly want to talk about Laura, or his wife. He wanted to know about me: what I had studied, where I was working. I wondered if he had invited me here to give me career advice, or to make me a job offer. I tried to remember if I had ever known what it was he did.
I felt irritated by his questioning, trying to hear him over the noise in the bar. Was he doing it for Laura? Comparing notes from afar? The only things he didn’t ask about were all the things I remembered.
‘Drink?’ he said.
‘No,’ I said.
He went to get another. I watched him walk to the bar.
‘Are you seeing anyone at the moment?’ he asked, when he came back.
‘No,’I said.
‘There’s still plenty of time.’ He frowned again and raised his glass. ‘Cheers,’ he said. ‘Here’s to not throwing it all away.’
Had I heard him right, over the crescendo of happier reunions?
I’m not the one with the unhappy family! I wanted to say. Why hadn’t they moved on to greener pastures? Why did they still have each other?
I was twenty-seven, without a man. I was in a bar with someone old enough to be my father. I looked at Brian’s wallet full of photos and felt as if I had done nothing in the intervening years but participate in a series of unsatisfactory events, somehow missing the moment when it should have fallen perfectly into place.
We looked at each other.
‘I had better get home,’ I said.
‘Of course.’ Brian finished his second drink swiftly.
‘Give my regards to Laura,’ I said.
‘I will.’ Brian took his wallet and put it in his jacket. ‘There’s plenty of time,’ he repeated, or may have, in the happy crowd.
Outside the sky was deepening into evening blue. The street lights were orange. Laura’s father rose to his feet before I did and stood a moment, looking down at me. Then I stood too. He followed me down the stairs, his hand almost, not quite, touching the small of my back.