Almost every day he would do his laps and would swim up to 1.5 km a time. He had some mates he used to go swimming with, but mostly just went by himself. It was, Kevin said, a solitary pleasure to him.
In short, all in the garden was lovely, a bit boring, and definitely, somehow disappointingly, not ‘gay’ in any spectacular way, but lovely nonetheless. In fact, Kevin was photographed for the article in his own front garden and behind him you could actually see a picket fence and a 4WD. The whole picture screamed inner suburb sophisticate at me.
As for the disappearance, Kevin said that he couldn’t understand what had happened, but that he didn’t believe Matt would voluntarily leave his life and his loved ones, would just walk away like this without word, without explanation. Matt was quite close to his family and especially his sister’s kids. Nor did Kevin think Matt could have been overwhelmed or abducted by a third party. He was a fit young man, and alert, and he disappeared from a busy public place in the middle of the afternoon.
So what did Kevin think had happened?
Disappointingly, and quite stupidly I think, Kevin said he thought there must have been an ‘accident’ or a ‘mistake or something’. It seemed a pathetic head-in-the-sand thing to say, but I thought I knew where it came from, and felt sad for him.
In any case, the end result of the article was a lot of not very much. The most important thing that came out was a real sense of Kevin’s affection for Matt, and a real sense of quiet, dignified sorrow at his disappearance. Also, the fact that Kevin who was presumably closest to Matt had no idea what had happened to him made the whole disappearance even more mysterious, more final.
Oh, by the way, at the same time as all this, the Prahran pool was also ‘outed’ as having a ‘largely gay clientele’, which I thought was hilarious. As well as not being news in any meaning of the word.
—
New Year’s Eve I stayed in. Surprise surprise. There were fireworks, two lots actually, one above the Yarra and another right there in the Docklands. It was a bit funny considering the state of the browned-out sky not a week or so before. But the fireworks and the celebrations down below Sharon’s Place made my situation feel a whole lot more shitful, in the way that little treats and niceties can make hardship seem harder. I mean, I didn’t feel as hopeless as I did in the brown-sky days, and yet perversely I found myself thinking back to those days and how easy they were in hindsight. I lay down but I couldn’t go to sleep, I made myself a sandwich but then didn’t feel hungry, I ran a bath and couldn’t be bothered sitting in it for more than five minutes, and then suddenly the idea of staying inside when everyone else was out with sparklers, drinking champagne and dancing and kissing strangers, began to feel like I’d somewhere, somehow, made a really big mistake. Perhaps it was a good thing, me feeling that there was something going on out there that I was missing out on. I guess in a way it was quite positive.
—
The most interesting aspect of the media ‘outing’ was that Matt became, in a way, a bit of a poster boy for gay men. It was as if the whole city was in the thrall of the gay-best-friend syndrome. I can see it I suppose. I mean, I never met the man, but Matt Gray on paper was definitely easy to like. He was an Anglo Aussie with a middle-class suburban background, healthy, fit, good (enough) looking, and living something close enough to a typical suburban Australian life that would be familiar to many other Australians, with a partner and a job and a mortgage to chip away at. He would, people might think, be the type to be into sport and barbeques, who would dutifully wash his car and mow the lawns on a weekend, the type who would chat to the neighbours over the fence and bring in their mail while they were away. He would be all these things, but also gay in a non-threatening, non-confrontational, out-of-sight, inside-the-house kind of way. He seemed knowable, like a brother or a mate, he was nice-guy regular, he was palatable, consumable on a broad scale, and he became, as such, some kind of absentee ambassador for gay men.
Joe Public’s opinions about Matt in letters to the editor were amazingly positive, even gushing. Some were along the ‘I don’t like gays, but he seems like a good bloke’ kind of track. Editorials on the subject of Matt’s sexuality were less gushing but just as positive. A councillor in local government, whose big topic the previous election had been gay marriage and the Government of the day being against it, even went so far as to use Matt and Kevin and their suburban ‘marriage’ to illustrate his point in the gay media, both in a column he wrote in a fortnightly gay newspaper and on the gay radio station. I didn’t hear that last one, but I heard about it and found the transcript online.
Unfortunately, all this guff was horribly off the point. The missing swimmer’s absentee ambassador status as gay-poster-boy had absolutely nothing to do with his disappearance or with what efforts were being made to find him. Police reiterated their plea for anyone with any information about Matt to come forward, but these pleas were, sadly, if not drowned out then at least pulled under water now and then by the more abstract ra-ra of the poster-boy stuff. The absence of any real sense of police activity, let alone progress, made it feel very much like there was none. At just over the two week mark people started to suggest knowingly that Matt would never be found, and that his mysterious disappearance would never be solved. I tended to agree with them. It just didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel like it was voluntary, like he’d engineered his own disappearance to start a new life. It also didn’t seem likely that he’d been on the end of some kind of ‘foul play’. Heaps of possibilities, but no probabilities.
Actually, with the absence of any publicised activity from the police, the way Matt’s loved ones were so ordinary and so baffled, and also I suppose with the objectification of Matt as gay poster boy, the whole thing started to feel, to me anyhow, more abstract. Or do I mean more literal? It felt to me like Matt Gray had quite simply vanished into thin air. Somehow you just felt he was gone for good. That he would never be found. It was terribly sad.
—
One other thing about all that poster-boy stuff. I knew it wouldn’t last. I could smell the backlash like ants smell rain.
—
I was at Priceline buying another vat of Vitamin E cream. Part of my routine when I got home from the pool was to have a shower, smear myself over with Vitamin E cream, then let my skin slowly absorb it while having a beer and a cigga on the balcony. I’m a great believer of toxins-in-toxins-out, a Zen, Karate Kid kind of attitude to indulging in the naughtier things in life, like sure you can smoke crack, as long as you eat broccoli and wear 30+.
Anyhow, I was in the line at the checkout and heard these two young fellas in front talking.
‘Did you see him on the news this week? He looked nice. He was crying his eyes out at the launch, press conference thing.’
I guessed they were talking about Kevin.
‘I don’t believe in all this gay poster boy stuff. There’s something rotten there somewhere. In fact, I think he did it.’
‘Did what?’
‘Offed the swimmer guy somehow.’
‘He wasn’t even there at the pool that day?’
‘He could have been.’
‘People would have seen him.’
‘Maybe he was in disguise.’
‘What as?’
‘Not as anything. Just in glasses and a hat maybe. Or with his hair parted on a different side?’
‘What
