wasn’t being serious.’
Then the checkout chick said ‘Next please’ and they moved up and started their transaction.
—
One night out of the blue I remembered where I’d seen Matt Gray, and it wasn’t at the pool. I think it was that photo of Kevin with the 4WD and the picket fence in the background that made me remember that I met Matt once at a party just before I left for Spain and we talked about a leaf-blower.
It was at Vernon’s place, which is a big sprawling house backing onto the Yarra in Hawthorn. It’s got huge verandas all round enclosed entirely in fine mosquito mesh stuff and is painted a pale pale faded apricot (amazingly) which doesn’t seem to me a colour anyone in their right mind would choose to paint their house.
Perhaps it’s an undercoat that was never painted over. It looked like a low-security prison. Melanie christened it the Malaria Ward, which kind of describes it brilliantly. The garden is totally overgrown with quite lush plants (even in this drought—I wonder whether you’re allowed to pump water out of the Yarra for your garden?) which effectively hide the fact that there’s a large river at the edge of the garden. Vernon loves to tell a story of a guest of his going missing, only to be found three days later floating face-down some odd miles downstream, with his fly open and his dick out, victim of a full bladder and a lurch in the dark.
Anyhow, I remembered, just as I was drifting off to sleep that I’d met Matt on one of those weirdly huge verandas overlooking the Yarra. Everything happened on the verandas at Vernon’s house. There were a few men standing there looking out at the bend in the Yarra through the overgrown garden. They all held beers and stood around in that slightly formal half-circle that forms at Australian parties when there is a view, a game to watch, or a BBQ to stare at. Matt was one of the semicircle. Taller than me. Heavily built with a square jaw, squinty eyes and thick features. A real Anglo-Aussie type. That night he was all fresh-shaven, damp-haired and pink-ear clean. Not a dog, but attractive because of his size and fitness rather than his face.
And he was talking about a leaf-blower. It was autumn. There were shitloads of leaves around everywhere. In gardens and gutters. He had just purchased a leaf-blower and was telling the group about what it did and how he’d got a good deal on it. I of course didn’t give a flying fuck about his leaf-blower, but I said, ‘Oh yes’, or something else non-committal and a little dismissive and I’m sure, I’m absolutely positive, that he threw me a look then. Although what that look meant I can’t quite remember. I must have had an impression at the time, if I bothered to think about it, but I don’t remember now.
His companions in that semicircle were ‘his kind of people’ with ironed chinos and crisp checked shirts. All holding a beer. Some, most, were a little older, but they were all of a type. I imagine they all had property, with gardens, some maybe even pools, and probably all with leaves. Some had wives. Vernon had a thing for straight and usually married men. Matt, as we now know had a ‘husband’ in Kevin. It was one of those comfortable but fairly limited home-ownership types of conversations—the type in which I am never much involved or interested, unlike Matt who seemed to fit in OK.
But that look, that fleeting little look. What was that all about? I closed my eyes and tried to call up the memory. I could see it fine. It was an amused, self-deprecating, eyebrow-raising kind of look that said something like, ‘Boring I know.’ And maybe, ‘Aren’t we funny?’
I nodded and smiled at him, then went in search of Vernon and Melanie. I didn’t, I don’t think anyway, see Matt again that night at Vernon’s. It was a sprawling party and I had arrived late.
How much of my memory of that small interaction with Matt back then is real and how much of it isn’t? How much do we touch-up our memories? Give them a careful brush with turps to bring up the colour a bit clearer, or airbrush them, tuck in the edges? Especially when we remember, or tell ourselves we remember, something that happened on the hop, in the peripheral, without at the time having taken a moment to stop and stand still and make a concerted effort to commit it to memory.
And now of course, writing this, I’m trying to remember what it actually was that I first remembered months ago. So my memory is two or three times removed from that moment at Vernon’s place and only getting further removed each time I think about it. No matter what I do, no matter how hard I try, it’s like I’m reciting my 7x table or something and the distance between the moment I spoke to the missing swimmer and a reliable memory of that moment multiplies.
3
Now, I like a nice golden glow as much as the next man, but I didn’t want to end up as brown as Bastey Boy. He was at the pool almost every day that summer, and every day he lay in the exact same position on the grass in the pansy patch, oiled himself up and cooked himself in the sun. He was the most disturbing colour, I think because it was literally brown. Not the nice light golden colour that I think of as like the little peaks of a shepherds pie when it comes out of the oven, but literally brown. Can I say it again, Brown? It’s not a really nice colour for your skin. Seventies furniture yes, skin no. He was a hard one to name actually. There were a few possibilities. He walked kind of like a ballet dancer (feet pointing out) looked a little bit like he was maybe in a Duran Duran cover band (white blond fluffy hair), so it was either gunna be Rudolph or Duran but Bastey Boy stuck so Bastey it is.
So the point is, yeah, I decided to have a day out of the sun and had re-settled myself in the shade this day when Red Trunks showed up and saw me. I mean, let’s be honest, I knew, you knew, we all knew this was going to happen the moment I saw him at the sauna, right? I just looked up from Bastey and there was Red Trunks, standing near the exit of the changerooms looking straight at me.
I did that chin-raising backwards-nod hello thing that you do when you kind of don’t really know someone to talk to but want to acknowledge them.
He stumped directly up the steps towards me, not particularly graciously or anything. His face was stern with a kind of studied disinterest.
‘You’re in the shade today,’ he said. I’d never heard his voice before and it was deep, serious and slightly off somehow. Maybe his ‘r’s had a little bit of ‘w’ in them or something like that? Whatever it was, and it was only subtle, it was hot. I’m a bit of a kink about speech impediments.
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