Chapter 93

It’s a strange experience to be married to someone who dislikes you but loves your body.

I do not recommend it.

It took me a long time to understand this. I don’t know if David ever understood it about himself. It probably wasn’t good for him either. Perhaps he tried to resist his feelings. Perhaps he woke each morning and told himself, I will not find her annoying, just as I woke each morning and thought, I will not be annoying.

I think this kind of relationship is only possible when you are young enough to fully inhabit your body. When you are older there is more separation between yourself and your physicality. Your body lets you down, it creaks and cracks and aches, it often feels unfamiliar, but back then my body was me, and his body was him, and if our bodies loved each other, that was enough.

Although, of course, it wasn’t.

He was never cruel. Perhaps if his feelings had been articulated more specifically, I would have understood sooner the fundamental truth: This man simply does not like me.

When you live with someone who dislikes you in a mostly unspecified way, you begin to dislike yourself too, especially if you are someone, like me, whose self-esteem, at least regarding my personality, has never been high. A different person, a stronger person, would not have allowed her sense of self to be blown away like grains of sand in the brisk winds of Perth.

Perth is one of the windiest cities in the world.

Sometimes, even now, if I feel a hot dry wind, that strange time in my life comes back to me in choppy fragments, the same way a scent creates an instant memory.

Living at Beachside Blue was a little like time spent in a cult. Asresidents, we had our own culture, our own customs and practices. Nobody had children, and everyone was in their twenties and had come from somewhere else. Our families and childhoods were far away.

The Friday-night rooftop parties were like ceremonies: intense and dreamlike.

They began just before sunset. There were no skyscrapers around us. The sky and the sea were ours, and the alcohol hit our bloodstreams at the same time as the sun set.

Growing up on the east coast, I had seen pale pink-blue sunrises over the Pacific Ocean, but I had never witnessed the symphonic magnificence of the sun sinking over the Indian Ocean, turning it indigo and the light a molten gold. Being up on that roof as the colors spread like spilled paint across the sky was both sensual and spiritual, like being ravaged by God.

I’m sorry, Grandma, for that blasphemous remark, but that’s how it felt.

Or perhaps it was just drunkenness, because, like many an unwilling party attendee before me, I discovered the solution to feeling awkward was to drink as much as possible, as quickly as possible. Not only did the awkwardness vanish but David much preferred me that way. Drinking improved my personality. I was not so uptight.

Before I’d moved to Perth, I’d been tipsy, but never drunk. I did not know a room could spin. I did not know you could wake up with unexplained bruises all over your legs and black nightmarish spots in your memory.

I drank Bacardi and Coke, vodka and orange, Tequila Sunrises and Harvey Wallbangers. Galliano was big at the time. The only food was bags of potato chips and pretzels. There was always plenty of beer, cheap wine, no soft drinks, no water. We didn’t really drink water back then the way people do now. Most people smoked. There were drugs. The host was not required to provide them, but somebody always had something, of good quality, because most of the residents were medical professionals. I didn’t bother with the drugs; alcohol did the trick.

We sank rows of empty bottles and cans into the gray dirt of a long-since-abandoned garden bed as if we were planting them. Three empty Eskies were lined up against a wall, and when it was your turn to host you had to fill them with ice and alcohol. (It sounds so silly now, but it felt so important at the time: this vital curating of the alcohol.)

A previous resident had hung colored Christmas lights around the edge of the terrace so that once the night turned dark people’s faces were flecked with color. Someone’s old portable cassette player remained permanently on the deck, and if you were hosting you were DJ for the night and brought along a selection of cassettes.

There was dancing. As you know, I can’t dance, but when I was drunk enough I could sway on the spot in a way that one of the doctors told me was “mesmerizing.”

There was a lot of flirting. David liked it when other men paid attention to me. He told me to read people’s palms and I did. I pretended to read them, anyway. I could never really see their palms in the shadowy light. One night Stella and I kissed, cheered on by our partners and everyone else. I didn’t enjoy it. She tasted of pretzels. I’ve never liked pretzels.

On very hot nights there was a plastic children’s wading pool to cool your feet, or your whole self if you chose or slipped or were pushed. On very cold nights we lit a fire in a gallon drum.

People sat on the low brick edge of the balcony, their backs to the sea. There was no railing. It would never be allowed now. It was inviting trouble. I had a recurring vision of two people falling. One grabbing at the other’s T-shirt sleeve. Both disappearing into the night. The drunker I got, the more I talked about this vision. Everyone knew my mother was a “famous” fortune teller, so it was a running joke that Cherry was predicting deaths, which made the men pretend to lose their balance, tipping their bodies back as far as they dared, which made the women scream, which made them do it even more.

Did I love those parties or did I hate them?

It’s not clear. Each one felt like a fever dream. I guess the simple answer is I both loved and hated them.

At the end of each party David and I would lurch down the flight of stairs to our apartment, fall into bed, and have sex. It never got stale. It was often very angry sex. To be frank, and once again I apologize for being vulgar, the angrier we got, the better it got. It was like we were punishing each other for I don’t know what. For our behavior at the party? For not being different people? For our aggravating habits?

I know I was aggravating.

For example, when I looked for something in my handbag, I bent my head into the bag to find the missing item, and in doing so I appeared like a “dithery old lady.” When I sneezed, I made a squeaky sound, like this: eee! eee! eee! Nobody should sneeze like that. When I cleaned my teeth I tapped my toothbrush on the side of the basin multiple times. Once was enough. When I ran into the ocean I held my arms up like chicken wings. This made me look deranged. When I woke each morning I cleared my throat far more often than the average person. When I locked the apartment door I always forgot which way to turn it, and hence turned it the wrong way before I remembered the right way, and this was aggravating to witness. My taste in music and in fact all forms of popular culture was boringly mainstream, my underwear insufficiently sexy, my repartee insufficiently witty. I sometimes tried to be funny and I was not. David was witty. I was not. I should never try to be witty or funny. It was embarrassing to myself and to all.

I could go on, but I won’t.

Gosh.

I see now that David’s dislike was articulated quite specifically on numerous occasions! Or perhaps these were just quibbles, normal in any relationship, and the fact that I remember them all these years later is evidence of my overly sensitive nature, which was also annoying.

I do know my mother, who loved me very much, was also aggravated by my throat-clearing in the morning, but her annoyance was never laced with acid-like contempt.

You may wonder why none of this came out that first year in Wahroonga, where I assume I sneezed, tapped my toothbrush, cleared my throat, tried to be funny, et cetera. I think it was to do with his parents. David loved his parents, and his parents loved me. Hence, I was more lovable. Once we were out of the dappled green light of Wahroonga, and in the exposed fierce light of that white-walled apartment in Perth, David could see me more clearly.

Never mind. It wasn’t all bad. I was very happy with my new job! I got a position at the Perth branch of the Australian Taxation Office. I worked in data matching in a team of mostly men. It was interesting because—

Well.

It’s probably only interesting to me. I won’t go on. I explained data matching to someone at one of the rooftop parties, in what I thought was very concise detail, but David could tell the poor man was desperate to get away from me and bored to death.

The Friday-night drinking seeped into Saturday night and Sunday night and eventually every night. I never missed a day of work, but I often slept away entire weekends while David was out diving, exploring fascinating shipwrecks. Stella became his dive buddy. She was not an air pig and breathed like a normal person. I’m sure those breasts helped with buoyancy.

I kept forgetting my contraceptive pill because I was so often tipsy or drunk and then, one day, I told David I might as well stop taking it altogether and we would try to have a baby.

David was thrilled. I can still remember how he looked at me when I told him. It showed me I was making the right decision. This would save our marriage. I could see he loved me again in that moment. It was him again. It was us again.

As you know, I was not especially keen on children, but David adored them. He smiled at babies on buses. He talked to toddlers incafés.

I assumed I would like the baby when it came. I saw the baby as the missing variable in a tricky equation. A baby would make David love me. A baby would bring me my mother and my auntie. A baby would bring me my mother-in-law and father-in-law.

The months went by and I didn’t become pregnant.

I continued to drink. There were no public service announcements on the radio about not drinking when you are trying to conceive. People knew about fetal alcohol syndrome so my plan was to stop drinking after I missed my first period. To be honest, I was relieved at the prospect of having an excuse to stop drinking. I was starting to suspect my drinking might be the cause of my constant fatigue and low-level depression, but it didn’t seem to occur to me to just stop.

I was as surprised as every woman is when she stops avoiding pregnancy and doesn’t immediately become pregnant. I don’t know if I was disappointed each month, because there was always that tiny sense of relief, but I was bemused.

After a year, David said I should get some tests done to find out what was wrong with me. It was Stella, who was studying obstetrics, who said at one of the Friday-night parties that actually the man should be checked out first because it was an easier, less invasive test.

That’s when we learned David had a zero sperm count.

There was zero chance of me becoming pregnant.

David had never failed a test in his life. He’d never failed anything. He’d never had his heart broken, never lost anyone he loved, not even a pet. His mother insisted that when David learned to walk, he never fell. Michelle said it was so funny, he just stood up and began strolling about the place.

I went to touch him, to offer comfort. He tossed my hand away.

He was furious. He had no coping mechanisms. I could see he badly wanted to blame me for this, but there was no rational reason to do so.

He said, “Don’t you pity me.”

And then I saw it come to him: a reason to be angry. He said, “I bet you’re relieved. You never wanted children anyway. I overheard you tell that woman at Baashir’s party.”

I was shocked. I couldn’t believe he’d never brought this up before.

I said, “Why would you have married me if you wanted children and you thought I didn’t?”

He didn’t answer. He said he was going for a swim and he didn’t invite me to join him.

I watched him from the balcony as he walked across the scrubby dunes toward the sea, a red towel over his shoulder, his head bowed in an unfamiliar defeated way, and my heart broke for him, but it also occurred to me that the reason he’d never asked me about my feelings toward having children was because my feelings were never especially relevant.

I went back inside because our phone was ringing.

It was Auntie Pat telling me Mum was unwell and had been refusing to go to the doctor for months now. Auntie Pat said I should come back to Sydney right away, because Mum had read her own cards and determined she was dying, and Auntie Pat was so angry she could wring her bloody neck.