And, as with Sybil, I truly believed I’d have her in the end.
That’s the essence of unrequited love. You’re convinced you’ll be rewarded for your suffering, as if there were some just God with a soft spot for toiling lovers waiting for the right moment to dole out your reward. I’m amazed at my stupidity. I sit here, a stranger in a strange country, a stranger to myself, shocked at what I’ve done and terrified I’d do exactly the same if circumstances were to repeat themselves.
I truly believed that eventually she’d be mine. I would imagine her coming to me full of love, and taking her into my arms knowing at long last she wanted me as much as I’d always wanted her. She’d allow me to undress her, and I’d stroke the lush white skin and make love to her with the deft caress of the lover who knows he is desired. This I imagined, over and over; wherever I went I lugged my romantic baggage with me. Thus the will to continue, and the pleasure. But not the only one. After we had made love, after I had wallowed in her desire for me, after I had gazed at her sweet adoring face, I’d imagine my love shrinking to normal size, then smaller still, until it evaporated completely. Then I’d walk away.
It never happened. I gathered my secrets and my sick, swollen love and fled. And while I realise it’s the sort of act that precludes going back, I hold on to the knowledge that I, and I alone, constructed myself; more than fifty years of selecting, discarding and refining, I made myself as surely as a car emerges from the production line. And I want to believe, even after all that’s happened, I can remake myself, assemble a new life, and happiness — damn Edwina’s theories — will be mine once more.
‘Are you happy yet?’ Paula used to ask Eddie. ‘Are you happy yet?’
Eddie is sitting in the café, the newspaper in front of her. She stares at the photograph, she stares at the newsprint, Paula is back in Melbourne. Slowly and carefully she tears out the article as if that will smooth her puckered nerves. The coffee is cold, she orders a glass of wine, sinks back in her chair willing herself to be calm.
‘Are you happy yet?’ Paula would ask.
And while there were moments, breath-stopping, gilt-edged moments, Eddie never managed to get a grip on happiness. She was happy to sit in the audience while Paula sang and marinate in her honey-rich voice. She was happy in that skin against skin silence in the minutes before sleep, and walking in the strange lemony light before a storm; happy during all those times when Paula was offering the world but not demanding a response. And happy perched in Paula’s fifties-green bathroom while Paula cut her hair. The light touch on her ear, the fingertips on her cheek, gentle and so persistently accidental, and sliding down her neck to the top of her spine to linger in the notches at the base of the skull. Snip, snip go the scissors, and how, Eddie wonders, can Paula play at being a barber when her fingers are making love to Eddie’s neck?
‘The curls’ll hide my mistakes,’ Paula says, stepping back to admire her handiwork.
Don’t stop, Eddie is thinking. Butcher the curls, leave me bald, just don’t stop.
And her mother’s comment: ‘That girl is turning you into a boy.’
‘Are you happy now?’ Paula asked after Eddie had helped her move house. They’d spent the day packing and chatting and laughing together and at last the old place was empty. The mattress was tied to the roof of a borrowed Mini, the cabin was choked with Paula’s possessions. There was barely enough room for one person in the car, much less two.
‘You drive,’ Paula said, and clambered on to the roof to sit Buddha-like on the mattress, her feet looped under the ropes.
‘You can’t do that,’ Eddie said, more concerned about being caught than Paula’s falling off.
‘Just watch me. Or rather don’t. Watch the road.’
It was not the first time they went to bed together, although it easily might have been, the two of them lugging the mattress up a couple of dozen stairs, dumping it on the floor and themselves on top.
‘Are you happy now?’ Paula says, reaching across and touching Eddie’s forehead. ‘My, real sweat. And on a brow that would frown at perspiration.’
Paula’s hand on her forehead a mere fraction of a second, and Eddie is on her feet and fleeing that too-sweet touch she absolutely must not want.
She was happy just to look at her. Paula singing or playing the piano, Paula alone or with friends, luxuriant Paula in her flowing red clothes. ‘You’re my ruby-dazzler,’ Eddie once said after too much wine.
There was an extravagance to Paula. ‘You act as if life’s too short,’ Eddie said.
‘Not too short,’ Paula replied. ‘There’s simply too much of it.’ And would drag Eddie off to see a pair of huge dragon gargoyles atop an inner-city building, and then to the beach to watch the waves in the moonlight. Later still, she’d pull her to the ground in a shadowy park to search the sky for falling stars.
‘This is heaven,’ she’d say. And seeing Eddie wide-eyed and stiff in her arms, ‘Relax sweetheart, there’s no one about, not at three in the morning.’
But how could Paula know?
‘You can’t wait for the orchestra to begin,’ she’d say, ‘not if you want to sing.’
And the next day her mother would fuel her unease. ‘She’s a bad influence on you, Edwina. What do you think you’re doing with your life?’
Paula rode a motorbike with a sidecar. The latter was primarily for Dinah, a playful thirty-eight kilograms of Bernese Mountain dog, although was shared by Paula’s stream of friends. ‘But you’re Dinah’s favourite,’ Paula assured her, as Eddie and Dinah squeezed into the sidecar. And Paula would mount the bike and careen down the road singing above the roar: ‘Eddie, Eddie, give me your answer do.’ As the drive lengthened so the singing became more bawdy, until they would be blistering along the Nepean Highway with Paula embellishing well-known tunes with lyrics to make a libertarian squirm.
Paula’s blood was spiked with explosive. She was wonderful and exhausting, she was exciting and terrifying. Her place was centre-stage and that’s where Eddie had to be if she wanted her wild spark.
‘Are you happy yet?’ Paula would shout, and Eddie would wonder what on earth she was doing.
Before Paula crashed into her life, Edwina always knew exactly what she was doing. It was a situation that did not make her particularly happy, but it supplied the security she wanted, and a measure of comfort. And it was comfort she was feeling one autumn evening as she made her way from a quick dinner at the union to the library and a few hours with Chaucer. Her marks were good, her friendships were under control, she had managed to remove Russell, her latest boyfriend, with a minimum of fuss, her mother was off her back and she’d just had her first short story accepted for publication. Very comfortable indeed. And might have remained so if she’d been watching where she was going, or for that matter, stayed for coffee with friends rather than rushing off to the library. But instead she was in a glazed-eyed walking, books and folders clasped in her arms, and then she was on her knees and hanging on to a pair of crimson legs.
‘Have I killed you?’ were Paula’s first words.
Eddie was very much alive but more than a little winded by the figure in front of her. From red hat through flowing red dress to red
