There is only air

Australia, Part II.

Cameron dashes around the house with one shoe on, hair rumpled, phone ringing, mumbling and cursing under his breath. There are only three trains out of Yarraville every hour. From the kitchen table, still on my first cup of tea, I sit watching him. The house is suddenly quiet and I think he's left. But here he is in the kitchen again. I look up from the trashy Australian tabloid magazine I'm reading. "I've missed the train again," he says sheepishly. He fills the electric kettle, flicks it on. That's when we start laughing. On the days that he works at home, I never leave him alone. I bring him bowls of cherries, fresh loaves of sourdough from the bakery in town, chunks of Toblerone. I wave to him from outside the kitchen windows, startling him, to come out to the backyard and hear a woman two houses down singing "New York, New York" loudly in her living room. I pop into the office room, where he's busy on his laptop, just to show him something silly in a magazine, or tell him what the Italian lady down the block said, or to ask him to walk into Yarraville with me. I adore him. "Tell me everything" I say to him once, on the train. But he just laughs; Birdy is secretive. "Guess what, Birdy?" I say over and over during those two weeks, before I blurt out my latest inane little bit of news. Like a little kid. Sweet Birdy: if he minds these constant interruptions, he's too kind to show it.

I walk all over Melbourne, miles every day, all kinds of neighborhoods. I start a new vacation hobby: talking to people who work at hair salons. From the fanciest salons to the loveliest old barbershops, I go in to chat and to ask questions about Australian hair trends and the secrets people reveal when they're getting their hair cut. Sometimes someone offers me tea. One place gives me a beautiful comb, which I accidentally leave at a park.

The house in Yarraville is haunted. We are sure it is. There are odd sounds when it's dark, and Jess and her friend saw an old man. Or maybe it was an old man and old woman. Ghosts? In any case, I'm terrified to walk around at night. One evening at home, we are about to sit down to dinner and I tell Jess and Birdy that I had a dream there was something bad about the little ceramic head that's in the backyard. (The head must be from a little lawn statue owned by previous tennants, but there's no sign of his body anywhere). Jess puts her hands on my shoulders and begins jumping up and down frantically. "When we found that head," she says, out of breath, "I had the feeling, this is where it's all coming from." She says, "We have to get rid of it." Silently, we all stand up together. It's a ceremony now, a mission. We're laughing, but I believe it too. The head must go. It's sitting innocently on the ground there in the backyard. We scoop it up and walk purposefully to the front yard, where the bin is. The path to the front yard is dark. I reach for Jess's hand. The head is tossed in the bin, the three of us all peering in to watch it drop. It makes a deep clanging sound when it hits the bottom. Back in the house, we rummage around for candles. It seems like the right thing to do, a kind of farewell for the ghosts. And protection from them. The beer is poured and dinner begins. We're giddy by now. Loud and ridiculous. The feeling of relief is palpable.

At the end of a long alley in Chinatown, there is bar with samosas and a bartender with a lisp. Inside it's one of those bars that's so dark it makes you forget what time it is outside. It's hot and I'm there for a beer. I strike up a conversation with a man at the bar. He works in an office, thinks New York is overrated. And he has a car, he says, it's just outside. We could roll down the windows and drive out of town. We could go to the beach. And it's not the thought of driving off with a complete stranger that is the immediate reason I say thanks so much, I'm sorry, I have to be going. The real reason is ridiculous; this man is wearing a Richmond Tigers shirt, I am a brand new but already avowed St. Kilda fan.

Everyone else who stayed over at his house last night has gone home, and I am watching Connal Parsley make us breakfast. Eggs and bacon, tomatoes fried in just a bit of pomegranate oil. And maybe it was that last scotch as the sun was starting to come up, or the records we listened to last night, or that it's summer outside, but by the time Connal turns around something has changed. And he can see it in my face. He stops talking suddenly, plate in his hand. "Are you alright?" he asks. I tell him yes. Yes, I'm fine. See, I'm smiling. We sit down to eat. Later, when he drives away in that battered old car, I watch from the sidewalk in front of his house until it's gone. Then I turn and sprint down the sidewalk in the other direction to catch my tram.

On my last Saturday in Melbourne, Cameron and Jess and I drive up into the Dandenong Mountains outside the city. And it becomes, without meaning to, one of those perfect days you remember for years, the details getting blurrier and blurrier but that feeling of everything being exactly right still intact. It's so easy to forget what fresh air is like, what it tastes like. But it's all I can think of while Jess and I are chasing Cameron down a steep path, all of us laughing, on our way to a waterfall. We climb up on a big rock to eat the cake we've saved from lunch, an amazing lunch. The water is freezing. Cameron dips the top of his hair in it and then shakes his head all over like a golden retriever, laughing. There are kookaburras here, and some kind of green and red bird that looks amazing to me, just flying around wild, in such vivid color, but they don't impress anyone else; they're common here. The afternoon's ending and we need to get back. And there's something about driving on a day like this that seems to makes music sound better than it ever has before. Song after song. From the back seat, Cameron says suddenly, "It's the penultimate day of summer." Sunlight is streaming through the trees, dappling the road in front of us. Valleys and hills and the bay glistening in the distance. It's so beautiful I'm speechless. When I look over at Jess and Cameron I can tell that the same thing has happened to them. The car is quiet until we're almost back to Melbourne.

Jess drops me off at the airport. I make her go to all the stupid gift shops, just to keep her with me a few more minutes. But it's time to go. It's time. I step through the silver sliding doors that lead to customs. She's still standing there, my friend Jess, just a few feet away. And she's lovely. I pause for a second to wave goodbye one more time, and I'm thinking about the backyard at Hodgkinson Street, Connal's basil plants, the bike rides in the middle of the night when no one else in the world was awake. All the little things that brought me to Melbourne, the little twists of fate. The things we know and don't know about our friends. The things we'd do for them. I smile at Jess, blow her a kiss.

Only when the doors close do I bury my face in my hands.



*Typed while listening to The Zebras (Thanks, Marky).

The Fog of Trujillo

Australia. Part I.

The electronic doors in customs slide open and we step through, exhausted and blinking in the sudden sunlight; it's early in the morning here in Melbourne. And suddenly Jess and Cameron are there, right in front of me, and everything's all blurry with joy. I throw my arms around them. Outside, only 20 feet away, it's summer. Jess is holding the list of things she and Cameron have planned for us to do. The possiblities are endless. Jess puts her arm around my shoulder. "Time for breakfast," she says.

I ride to the end of every train line, just to see what's there. I write my favorite station names on the back of my hand with a pen I stole from Cameron. Diggers Rest. Batman. Sunshine. Craigieburn. Crowds of teenagers fill the platforms in the afternoon. Uniforms and ipods and glitter nail polish. I love the old ladies with tanned faces and flowered sundresses, sitting primly at the Yarraville station. I ask them questions, anything, to talk to them. "What's that?" I ask a tiny, ancient woman with a cane, pointing out the train window at an ugly and non-descript building. "That's a meat pie factory, Dearie" she says sweetly.

Marky and Marty meet me on the train platform. They have been in the studio for days, finishing their new album, and they are tired. We have lunch at the only cafe near the studio, the amusingly named New York Tomato, on the corner of New and York streets. The waiter will tell us several times in the next few days that his boss is thinking of changing it.
There are months and months of gossip to catch up on: babies on the way and sloppy seconds and mutual friends who get in hilarious scrapes. I sit across from them, laughing, at this sunny table here in the middle of North Richmond. In the middle of nowhere. I love them. These boys I so rarely get to see.

We spend the afternoon in the alley behind the studio, drinking bottle after bottle of beer and silkscreening t-shirts for the upcoming Candle Records showcase. Sunlight filters down between the buildings. When the shirts are done and drying on the line, Marky and I look around for random things to attack with the screen. There is now a very weathered old armchair in that alley that says, in bright white letters, The Lucksmiths. Inside the studio, we sit with Pilko and listen to the same songs over and over and over. And it's funny how different their hearing is than mine; so close to music, they hear blips and sounds and glitches that I would never notice. To me, these new songs sound perfect.

Cameron's band, Architecture in Helsinki, is playing a free show in the park. Marky and I walk there together, singing little made-up songs. It's dusk, the end of a day at the end of the summer. The most beautiful night in the world. Jess's grandmother is there, an octogenarian birthday girl sitting calmly in a lawnchair in the middle of a noisy crowd. She squeezes my hands and smiles up at me. Jess's family has spread a picnic out on blankets. They order me to eat. Later, a chocolate cake will be pulled out, secretly, and candles lit. "Turn around!" everyone will call out. And I tell myself fiercely that I am never allowed to forget her face, how beautiful it is, when she sees that cake. When we leave, she pulls me in close for a kiss. She smells like lavender. "Happy birthday," I whisper in her ear.

The Lucksmiths play a show later that same night. I haven't seen them play for more than a year, and I'm happy, really happy, to see them play again. So it's a mystery why there are tears streaming down my face in the middle of the set, tears I'm trying hard to hide with the help of a crumpled cocktail napkin. But it's not really a mystery at all; these songs are old memories. I am standing in Melbourne, Australia and I'm acutely aware that things can be thrown off by a split second, a missed glance, the wrong season, lack of experience, bad friends, heartbreak and happiness. The way things turn out is so tenuous. So gorgeously precarious that I have to cross my arms across my chest to keep from shaking. If things hadn't happened the way they did, I wouldn't be here, in the summer, laughing like crazy with Marky and Marty, with a sunburn and fingernails caked with paint from the the t-shirts we screened earlier that afternoon. There wouldn't be Jess and Birdy, muddy-kneed, planting succulents in the front yard on Sunday afternoons, Tropicalia on the record player and the jar of Tasmanian honey and loaf of fresh bread on the counter. There wouldn't be Julia, and how she makes me laugh, and the way we joke about my ridiculous crushes, and how I always feel like dancing when I see her. And I wouldn't be standing here with you in the back in the dark with these bottles of Coopers green and those loud girls in front of us laughing with Darren Hanlon. This first night of not knowing you. I was thinking about all of these things and how they worked out so beautifully when I turned to you and said "This is perfect."

And you nodded. Perfect.

Marky is late for dinner. But this is the final night to finish the new album; Marky leaves for Tasmania tomorrow, and everything needs to be done before then. Here on Hodgkinson Street, Erin is making pumpkin risotto, Connal makes fresh corn and guacamole. I make cocktails. Marky and Kellie get home, and the kitchen gets loud with laughter. I have brought vodka and blood orange juice over, and I make them drinks. "What's this called?" Marky asks. "A paper moon," I tell him, making the name up on the spot. "Really? he asks, and I say yes. Really. But he's giving me such a funny smile. He can tell I'm lying, but it's warm outside, and it doesn't matter. We decide to eat in the backyard. Kellie fiddles with some plugs. "Look!" she says, and suddenly there are stars everywhere; the giant palm tree in the backyard is glowing with little fairy lights. "It's amazing," I tell her. "I know," she says. She and I slip out the back door and under the palm tree where there are old railroad ties that serve as benches. Squinny the cat is furiously hunting mice in the vines and plants at the edge of the yard, but when I pull him onto my lap he decides to stay for a while. Marky appears in the doorway, balancing two plates and a glass. Grinning. "Champagne for my real friends. Real pain for my sham friends" he says.

The house has been shared by this extended group of friends for seven years, but now it's being packed up and dismantled room by room and everyone is moving. Marky is in love; a few months from now, he'll be living in London. Things are looking so good for you, I tell him in the note I leave in his bag the next morning. But tonight is a little wistful; it's his last night in this house, the last night in his old room. Late that night, before we all go to bed, Marky puts a copy of the just-finished Lucksmiths songs on the battered old stereo and he and I stand there, silently, arms crossed, listening to them. When the last song ends, he walks quietly to his room to finish packing.

*This update typed while listening to Country Got Soul.