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).