Do You Love Me or What? Read online

  Praise for Do You Love Me or What?

  ‘Has Sue Woolfe revived the short story in Australia? You would believe so if you read this range of stories, elegant and satisfying, and so percipient of human yearning and loss – that is, with the eternal concerns of human existence. An innovative and charming novelist, Woolfe brings the same qualities to these tales.’

  Tom Keneally AO

  Internationally acclaimed author, historian and playwright, Booker Prize winner and two times winner of the Miles Franklin Award.

  ‘These stories are so achingly intimate, so immediately known, so emotionally satisfying and moving, and written in such luminously simple prose that it’s impossible not to be enthralled at once and lost for hours in the joy of reading. What a gift to the hungry reader!’

  Alex Miller

  Bestselling author, two times winner of the Miles Franklin Award and the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award, and winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize.

  ‘A beautifully crafted journey through the complex chambers of the human heart, each story with its own revelation of what love might mean. There is rare insight and compassion in these stories, especially for those who don’t “fit in”.’

  Patti Miller

  Bestselling author, essayist, academic and life writing mentor.

  Contents

  Do You Love Me or What?

  Her Laughter Like a Song of Freedom

  Passport

  Shame

  Small talk

  The Dancer Talks

  The Last Taxi Away From Here

  The List-maker

  Acknowledgements

  More About the Author

  Do You Love Me or What?

  I’ve never been really sure what friendship is about, and at what point it melts into love. Other people seem to know, as if knowing it is something you’re born with, as solid as a part of the body, your arm perhaps, or your leg. Sometimes I’ve managed to ask, ‘What is friendship?’ but it marches out of my mouth in a grand uniform, as if I’ve trumpeted, ‘What is truth?’

  So now I’m on the boat with the achingly pretty her, the last boat ride we’ll have, and the river that used to unite us is rushing by too fast and all the things we haven’t said are rushing away as well. When I look around, that swoop of trees recedes where we had our secret adventures, our wash breaks on that sunny stretch of sand as it has always done, all as if nothing heart-wrenching is happening – there, it’s all gone into the distance. What’s falling away are the claims that the things we’ve shared will have on her life; the person leaving easily forgets them, but for the one who stays, memories are like a city of clouds weighing down the sky, a city of black stones where you put down your suitcase on a dark footpath and know you’re going to be desolate from now on; there’s a storm that will refuse to break, but refuse to drift away. You’ll just be left waiting, waiting, waiting.

  We’re not on the boat she wrecked, of course, but on another boat she found washed up in the reeds, and helped me fix, in penitence, and I was grateful for that, though it was no substitute.

  Some things are solid, there’s no dispute about that. Years ago, I’d flown from Brisbane to a memorial service in Tennant Creek for a man I once loved and shouldn’t have, sitting through eulogies from people who thought they knew him but didn’t. I was babbling in pain and fury for anyone who cared to hear, and everyone heard but didn’t care. It was she who took my hand. ‘I know how you feel,’ she said. I’d never laid eyes on her before, this young, pale, pretty blonde stranger who took my hand. She nodded at each fresh outburst of mine, she kept nodding all day. I know how you feel. Grief had not singled out me alone to torment; her kindness gave me belonging, made me one with the heaving, grief-swollen world. Later she introduced me to two Aboriginal women, who both echoed, ‘I know, I know. I know how you feel.’ Both of us – she and me – had lived with their people out in the desert, me for one year as his tormented lover, her for ten years as a community nurse. I know how you feel. I’d already met Aboriginal women like that – something about the way they looked at things, something about the way they were brought up. They understood how you felt.

  It was a memorial because the man I shouldn’t have loved had been missing in the ocean for three breathless weeks. It wasn’t his funeral, no one was admitting to that yet; we were just remembering him. In my dreams I had watched his body as pale as a fish, a human body undulating as helplessly as weed, his small compact body with its magnificent chest that once sat so proudly on his narrow hips. I’d blamed his chest for a lot. In the life he’d led in the desert, being a leader in desert communities, he was always missing, always turning up in some unexpected place, he and his chest had been too busy to ring to tell me where they were, they’d been out doing something more important than remembering to ring me, they’d been rescuing. When I’d told his best friend he’d gone missing, the friend had just laughed: ‘He’s always missing. He always turns up.’ But he had dived, this desert man, into a boiling ocean to rescue a stranger.

  At the memorial some of us kept saying he’d drowned, and some, like me, kept saying he’d turn up. Both of us were right. He was washed up on a beach three weeks later.

  You don’t forget people who hold your hand and say, ‘I know.’

  At some moment in my babbling, she interrupted me to say:

  ‘Where do you live in Brisbane?’

  I was cross at being interrupted, but I managed:

  ‘On an island.’

  ‘What island?’

  I didn’t want to think about my island.

  ‘You won’t know it.’

  ‘What’s its name?’

  Some people persist in asking questions. What’s the street address? they say. How can you live without a street?

  She waited.

  ‘I’ve lived there since I inherited my mother’s house. She bought it when I was grown up, in her old age, looking for peace.’

  Her hold on my hand was slackening. She didn’t ask about my mother and whether peace is findable, she just asked again: ‘What’s its name?’

  She was persistent, this one, but I wanted my hand held, so I told her.

  She didn’t let go of my hand.

  ‘It’s my island too,’ she said. ‘When I was a kid, we lived there.’

  She named a valley on the island. I knew it, though I hadn’t been there for a while. A well-watered creek flows into it.

  We were two and a half thousand kilometres away.

  When I could make my mouth speak, for coincidences always startle, I said:

  ‘Must’ve been a while back.’

  ‘A while back,’ she said. ‘A great place for a kid.’

  I was jealous of her straightaway. I wished my mother had brought me up on the island, away from my father. I knew there’d been only one house in that valley.

  ‘It’d be fallen down now,’ I said. ‘Your house.’

  ‘I went to see if there’s anything left, and we didn’t have much luck,’ she said.

  ‘When?’

  ‘A few years back. Now my parents live in’ – and she named the nearest town, thirty kilometres to the mainland – ‘and we hired a boat to have a look.’

  ‘Must be something left,’ I said, a plan already forming, not quite a plan, more like a glow. ‘A well, a fireplace or something.’

  I didn’t think there was.

  Some months later, on my island, when the dreams of the man tossing like a fish were starting to fade, I traced her and invited her to come and stay in summer. After all, I’d been in the desert, I knew that whites like to leave when the temperature climbs above forty – those who can. I remembered the mention of her parents. I offered everything I could th
ink of, that she could stay with me and come and go to them in my boat. And we’d have adventures in my boat, we’d go and look for her old house and see if anything was still standing.

  It took three years of invitations before she accepted. Perhaps, looking back, she wasn’t all that keen. Maybe, as my mother always said, I push people too far.

  I seemed to have weathered the years well; I married the man everyone said I should’ve loved all the time, a kind, dependable man who painted pictures and came with an inheritance. I felt lucky to get him. We’d known each other at school in Brisbane, though I’d never spoken to him, being too ashamed. He’d come from what my mother would’ve called ‘a good home’. My mother had been brought up in an orphanage herself, abandoned there by her mother who didn’t want a daughter with a withered arm. My mother would’ve been delighted with my new married life, its regularity and a plan for every day and meals on time – except that she’d died long ago. I wish that all her sadness was buried in the ground, but it wasn’t, not quite.

  The only thing wrong with my marriage was that there was something missing. The way things that can’t be named persist.

  The thing was, it was good in bed at first. He was accommodating and generous as a lover. But then, after some months, the old problem came up. My mind is always such a nuisance. I feel I could get by well enough, if it wasn’t for my mind. To be excited in bed I started acting as if I was glamorous and taunting, eager to abandon all modesty to sex. I tried to tell him, I even tried dressing that way, going to a sleazy shop when we were in town and buying scarlet tassels for my nipples and a black corset that looked good on the mannequin, though not good on me. But he said:

  ‘What’s come over you?’

  ‘Just trying out stuff,’ I said. ‘Different selves, you know.’

  ‘I like us the way we were,’ he said.

  So after that, I kept quiet.

  But he was dependable and we loved each other and I was glad to have his boat because we needed something to get safely to the mainland, and my mother’s boat had fallen to pieces by then. Often the waters are troubled. You could be swept out to sea. He had children in their twenties on the mainland and we’d ride over the waves to be their parents, trying to be a family, trying, all of us, to come from good homes.

  I should’ve known she’d be trouble when I met her at the airport, but when I hope things will work, I keep on hoping. Pushing people too far. She stepped off the plane reeling drunk. The man I love had no sympathy for drunks.

  ‘Where’s she going to stay?’ he’d asked, uncertain from the start.

  ‘The cabin,’ I’d said.

  I’d spent weeks painting it and hanging curtains. It was looking like a little home, a good home.

  ‘I thought you were going to start writing your novel there,’ he’d said.

  ‘Soon,’ I’d said.

  I earned a modest income writing online advertisements for real estate companies. I’d become good at ‘3 bedders’ and ‘district views’. Writing like that can give people grander schemes for you. You don’t like to disillusion them, in case.

  ‘You ought to give a novel a try,’ he’d said.

  I knew he’d like that, because then we’d both be struggling with the muse, a flighty creature and often a lonely struggle for him. But I had, at the moment, more important fish to fry. What he wanted had to wait.

  I got her to our boat moored on the mainland, and I was relieved that by then she’d sobered up. I didn’t want him to get cold feet. I’d pretended all the trip that I hadn’t noticed her state, the way you can do, you can look away when drunks hiccup and even when they laugh at nothing like galahs. I drove the boat while she stood beside me, obviously itching to drive herself, but it was his boat and I didn’t think he’d like that. When we got to the island, I was proud to show her around the cabin. We put her bags inside. It felt a very large act, the tiny movement of putting her bags inside. She seemed delighted.

  She and I spent that summer boating and laughing and getting stuck in the shallows and lost in the mangroves. We yahooed like kids, searching for the remains of her childhood. She remembered a dam but the lantana was impenetrable, even when we went there with axes. I secretly didn’t care. The sky was a limitless blue that you hoped would go on forever, never a whisper of clouds. The sun was always the luscious colour of bananas, apricots, peaches. We’d take sandwiches I’d slopped together, a thermos made to her liking with strong, sweet black tea. I learned to like it too. Looking back, I think I was trying to borrow her former self, to steal it somehow.

  I couldn’t tell her, couldn’t tell anyone about my handsome, charismatic father who brought glamorous mistresses home, while my mother with her withered arm pretended she didn’t care. I pretended it as well, while inside I was ready to murder one of them or both of them or all of us out of shame and pity and jealousy too. The first time I heard one of his women in orgasm, I started to run up the hall to her, thinking that Dad was attacking her. My mother grabbed me, digging her nails into me, her face stretched taut. ‘No, no,’ she kept saying, though I knew she wasn’t saying it just to me.

  In those long listening nights, we lived intensely – she in plummeting despair, me – I must say it – me in a crimson bewilderment of excitement and hate. Afterwards, in the school playground, I walked away from games of hide-and-seek and chasings and snakes and ladders, like an alcoholic offered a mere sip of lemonade.

  Now, too late, I was insisting on playing. Not even the man I love wanted to play with me, not even in bed. I reasoned that she was my guest and should be a good guest. On our adventures, she’d take a bottle or two of wine, but that was all right, it helped her horse around, though I didn’t ask why she needed its help. Perhaps I should have. Perhaps they hadn’t been such great days, before the lantana tangled up everything. I didn’t join her in drinking the wine. I’ve never been able to develop a taste for it, its tartness makes me shudder. I’m more a prim water drinker. It’s no virtue, it’s just my taste buds.

  And, I admit, there was something else at the bottom of my hopes. It turned out that she’d been friends with the man I shouldn’t have loved. In the way of whites in the desert, their lives had brushed several times over the years, they’d lived with the same desert people. Oh, they’d never slept together, she assured me before I even thought to ask, but she carried somehow a whiff of him before he’d become a fish, almost as if he hadn’t died.

  ‘When’s she going home?’ the man I love asked.

  ‘End of summer,’ I said.

  He asked the same at the end of summer.

  ‘Still hot over there,’ I said. ‘Maybe at the end of this month.’

  By then it was March.

  ‘When’s she going home?’ he asked at the end of March.

  By then her mother had fallen sick. It would’ve been cruel to ask her to leave.

  ‘When her mum’s better,’ I said.

  He asked the same in mid-autumn.

  ‘She’s no trouble to us, is she?’ I said. ‘Up the back, tucked away in the cabin.’

  Often she joined us for meals, because she’d run out of supplies – there’s only one shop on our island and all it sells is fuel. It’s for men at sea, the shop owner says – you have to get him to open his doors by sending him an email – and when I asked if he’d stock emergency supplies, just dried goods such as rice and lentils, he said no, he’d be always battling cupboard moth and weevils, and besides, real seamen don’t eat lentils. So on our island you need to keep an eye on your supplies.

  But if you’re cooking for two, it’s no more trouble to cook for three. She ate like a bird.

  ‘In the desert they called me the name of a bird they loved,’ she laughed. ‘They loved me.’

  She had a pretty way of throwing back her head. It made her laughter infectious. Except that the man I love didn’t laugh. I think he didn’t like being reminded of the desert, of my life when I’d loved someone else.

  She’d begun
to sculpt our bush block into a garden. She was good at gardening, and we talked endlessly about it, even at dinner. She believed everything depended on fertiliser.

  ‘Chook manure makes the best fertiliser,’ she’d say. She was most captivating when she knew she was being mildly unseemly, talking about manure at the dinner table. The man I love didn’t come from a home like that. She liked teasing and he would shift his legs in annoyance, and get up to check what the tide was doing. I took her side, I thought that since we lived on the land, he was being precious.

  ‘Finished yet?’ he’d ask, gazing out the window.

  ‘Chook manure?’ I’d echo. ‘Hen’s or rooster’s?’

  That started a long discussion that left him out.

  As I washed up that night, I stopped, the dish mop in my hand like a wand. It came to me, as a sudden thump in my stomach, that perhaps she teased the man I love because she knew she was captivating, and she was exasperated she couldn’t captivate him. Then he walked in, and I dismissed the thought. It was more a feeling than a proper thought, at that stage.

  He was thinking about her too.

  ‘She’s rough on the boat,’ he said, finding a fresh, folded tea towel from the drawer. Sometimes I secretly opened and shut my drawer of folded, clean tea towels because to me the squares of tea towels showed how good our home is. There’s something very endearing about a man you feel you’ve alienated opening the drawer and standing with your freshly folded tea towel in his hand.

  He lavished endless attention on his boat. It was an old runabout from the 1950s. He’d just then put in new floatation under the floor, and painted a new name on the side – The Carefree. It was my idea, that name.

  ‘Give her rules about the boat,’ I said. ‘I’m sure she’ll follow them.’

  ‘She thinks she knows everything about a boat,’ he said.

  ‘Doesn’t she?’ I asked in surprise.

  ‘At that old house, she’d have just had a beaten-up old tinny,’ he said. ‘Not a boat you have to nurse.’

  Maybe it was my fault, the way it all turned out. I wanted those adventures so much, nosing amongst the lowlying tangle of muddy mangroves and laughingly leading the boat like the dog I’d never had, and tying it up to rocks where it’d slip its mooring and we’d have to swim to catch it and give each other leg-ups to clamber back on board – the boat was our passport. My passport. Once, in a mere breeze, it swung around from the rock it was tethered to, and hit another rock. It was only a knock, no more than a thud. But we’d ignored one of the boat rules he’d given her, to always tether it at both ends. So from then on, I’d insist that we find two overhanging branches, to tie up at both the bow and the stern. Sometimes the search for two branches the right distance apart, as well as the right shape, made it impossible to go where we wanted, but I said we had no choice: I loved him, and he loved his boat.