Australian Love Stories (12 page)

His best friend, Amy, told him he represented her mother.

He said, ‘But I'm a man.'

Amy replied, ‘It doesn't matter, Jason. Its symbolic.' She paused to look at some handbags in the window of Scally and Trombone. ‘A mother can be any gender.'

They went into the new café on the corner of Johnston and Brunswick Streets and sat by the window. A waiter came over. Cute. He had a nice, tight little arse. Normally Jason would have said something about him to Amy but after the mother stuff he thought, fuck you, I'm keeping my erotic fantasies to myself.

Amy stirred her coffee and raised it to her mouth. She sighed and said. ‘I'm sorry, Jason, I can't be friends with you any more. I have to break free from all the mother figures in my life.'

Outside a tram clattered along Brunswick Street. The shock of Amy's announcement had caused Jason's mouth to open. I must look like a goldfish, he thought, my mouth a perfect O. Then he decided she had to be joking. That was it, she was mucking around.

‘
OK
', he said. ‘As long as I'm a glamorous
Mommie Dearest
like Joan Collins, or was it Joan Crawford?'

Amy's face was stern as she put her coffee down. ‘I'm not joking, Jason. I have to get away from friends who represent the negative aspects of my life, namely my mother.'

‘What's that supposed to mean?'

Amy answered slowly, enunciating each word as though he was some low intelligence kid. ‘My psychiatrist…says…I have… to reject…those people in my life…who represent…my mother. I'm sorry, Jason, but she says you're one of them.'

‘How does she know? She's never met me.'

Amy had the grace to look guilty. ‘I tell her about you.'

‘Why?'

‘I talk about everyone.'

‘Your real mother?'

‘Of course.'

‘But what have you said to the doctor about me? How can she know what I'm like if she's never met me?'

Amy shrugged and signalled to the waiter to bring over two more coffees. ‘I tell her about all my friends.' She spread her arms wide to take in their table, the café, Fitzroy, the Saturday crowds of shoppers outside. ‘About all this.'

‘Your sex life?'

‘Yes. And yours.' She gave one of her grim little smiles.

Jason sighed. Amy's sex life was hell. It always had been, but his, well, his was pretty good. Only last week he'd finally summoned the courage to go out into the alley with Peter, a man he always danced with at the club. They'd gone to the wall where the Banksy was supposed to have been painted—a mouse running up a drainpipe—not that he and Peter were thinking about that at the time. Pete had long eyelashes and a mouth that tasted of wine and a hard, flat, six-pack stomach, and a cock just as hard. The remembered pleasure slid down Jason's spine like something molten, something rich and gooey.

Amy was looking around the café as though she was hoping to pick up someone too. She'd been online dating for the past
few years. She got upset when the dates never went past the first night. Jason had given her his views on that. It was a mistake to always sleep with the guy on the first night. He said, ‘There's no seduction in that, no tease. String them along a bit. Do the romantic thing with dinners and flowers and getting to know all about them before you fuck them.'

Amy was not convinced. ‘I thought gay men were supposed to just jump into bed with anyone. I thought you liked to just go for it.'

Go for it?
he'd thought at the time.
If only you knew
.

As the coffee machine huffed and puffed he remembered the alley again. His spine tingled. He was getting hard. He and Pete had sashayed around one another at the bar for weeks before getting hot on the dance floor, weaving and flirting and brushing their bodies against one another. They were like a matador and a bull, fencers keen on penetration, steeplejacks climbing a bloody tall steeple. Metaphors failed him. Peter liked dry white wine. He sometimes ate the complimentary peanuts as he waited at the bar. He smelled of aftershave—Jason had never been able to work out which one—a musky smell, pampered and confident. Then came the more intimate touching, the words of seduction shouted over the music, the drinks taken back to the club's leather armchairs, the alley outside and Peter's urgent kisses.

Jason looked around the cafe too. He knew most of the people. Heidi from the bookshop had popped in for a takeaway coffee. A young family he recognised from his block of flats was ordering babyccinos for their kids. The two gay men from the homewares shop were over by the door. He'd been clocking their relationship for the past six weeks. How long had they been a
couple? He'd fancied the muscular one since he'd first seen him dressing the shop window.

Amy made a funny little noise in her throat. She could have been choking or perhaps he just wished she was. ‘Jason, I don't mean to be cruel. I just can't see you any more.'

He heard the panic in his voice as he spoke. ‘But we've been friends since I arrived in Melbourne.'

She was already rifling round her bag for her purse. ‘I'll pay for these.'

So determined was her tone he let her be. He let her pull her coat off the back of her chair without helping her put it on. Let her walk out the door and turn toward Collingwood. What else can you do when someone says you represent their mother? He stared into the café's mirrored wall and deep into his eyes. No mother looked back though he could see the family resemblance, his own mother's dark hair, her olive skin, her propensity for laughter lines around the eyes. He thought about all the vile mothers he could muster. Joan Crawford, certainly. She at least had glamour. Judy Garland. Too tragic. Margaret Thatcher's nasty politics seemed to de-sex her. He certainly couldn't imagine her enjoying moments of maternal tenderness. The mother in
Psycho?
He shivered. If he rang Amy later would she tell him when this metamorphosis happened? Was it after they went up to Sydney for the Mardi Gras and he put on red lipstick and a red wig? She'd told him her mother was a redhead when she was young. Was it when they were on South Melbourne beach and he'd lectured her about freckles and the dangers of melanoma? Drinking cocktails together at the Double Happiness Bar in Chinatown? Was it when he said he was falling in love with Peter? He'd told her everything about his sex life until then. The
long, slow penetrating sex with a former boyfriend, Dave, the soapy showers afterwards, one when Dave pushed him against the tiles and knelt down in front of him and let his lips graze Jason's inner thighs as the water played gently on them and Dave worked his way slowly, determinedly, up and up. He hadn't told her about Pete though. Their love was different. There was something fragile and melting in it. The wrong move and it might all disappear.

Jason pulled himself back into the café. He and Amy had always done the fun things together that a nice mother might do with her daughter, or his kind of mother with her kind of son. He ordered another coffee and sat for a while, stirring the coffee slowly. Amy had always had a difficult relationship with her mother but he'd liked Mrs Griffiths from the very first time he'd met her. He could never say that to Amy, of course. Mothers were to be experienced in certain and specific ways by their children. Friends generally saw only the best of them and that didn't quite count. He'd been over to the Griffith's house in Kew lots of times, mostly when Amy needed to pick up something she'd left with her parents—a pot plant that needed to be watered and fertilised when she was on holidays, a hem that needed taking up on a new dress—Mrs Griffiths was very good at sewing and mending. Another time he'd gone with Amy to a Sunday lunch, a birthday celebration that Amy attended as a duty, the real one being with friends a few days later. Her mother's gift had been a hand-knitted sweater that he'd liked a lot and said so. Mrs Griffiths surprised him a few weeks later with an express post parcel containing a scarf for him in the same wool, dark and soft and red. He wore it to the bar that night and Pete ran his hands along it, hooking it around his fingers and pulling Jason toward
him for a kiss: ‘Is this
pure
wool?' Peter asked, his emphasis on pure and Jason felt his cock harden impurely, his face flush as red as the scarf. ‘I think so,' he whispered, his face close to Pete's ear.

Amy was less impressed with the gift. ‘Emotional blackmail', she called it. ‘Colonising my friends.' Jason sent Mrs Griffiths a thank you note anyway and wore the scarf all winter. Then one Sunday evening as he and Amy were crossing the Princes Bridge after a concert at Southbank, Amy pulled the scarf from his neck and tossed it into the Yarra. They'd watched it fall in a long, curious line like a question mark, like it was asking him why it had been discarded like that.

‘I've been dying to do that ever since my mother gave it to you,' she said.

Jason was so shocked he was unable to answer. He just watched the scarf float toward Williamstown, a soggy, dark red streak.

Jason paid the waiter and left, smiling a greeting to the men from homewares as he passed them. He'd go to a movie at the Kino or the Nova, though he hadn't checked the program of either so didn't know what was on. Carlton, he decided. It was an easy walk and if none of the Nova's movies appealed he'd wander the clothes shops. He hadn't intended spending a Saturday afternoon alone but he didn't feel like calling anyone about their Saturday night plans. He might call Peter, and then again he mightn't. He'd been going to poke around the furniture shops of Johnston Street with Amy, walk up to Northcote afterwards and to an early dinner at their favourite Turkish restaurant. Peter. Not Peter. No, he'd better not call him. Sex. Love. Surely Peter wanted both? Oh well, Jason thought, shrugging at his reflection
in a shop window. Amy's words hit him again. ‘You represent my mother.' He straightened his shoulders.

As he walked he thought about his friendship with Amy. He'd known her for six years. They'd been introduced just after he arrived from Sydney. She'd flirted with him at first, doing that thing he'd seen her do with other available men. She smiled a lot, her conversation sometimes veering toward the nasty. She said it turned men on if women were provocative with them. One day, when she'd asked him home to a special dinner he'd said gently, ‘I can't that night, I have a date with a man from work', and the light bulb went on in her eyes. She was okay after that. ‘My sexless friend', she called him, ‘My gay friend, Jason'.

Had she told her mother? He'd often wondered. He and Amy had done the walk to Carlton numerous times over the years, on their way to films or dinners with friends, arguing, sharing secrets, his early homesickness assuaged by entrée into Amy's life, and to outings uniquely Melbourne. Australian Rules, Sunday lunches in St Kilda, shopping trolley promenades through the Victoria Markets, eating brunch at a sausage stall—
weiswurst
, onions on a doughy white bun—serenaded by a busker. There was nothing like it in Sydney, he'd told her, and Amy laughed and said no, there was nowhere in Sydney like Vic Markets.

In Rathdowne Street he stopped outside a second-hand shop, attracted by a tweed jacket which carried a history of wealth in its tailoring. Beside it an old television was showing some news, boats of refugees drowning. He rarely watched
TV
these days. It was too depressing. There were too many bad news stories about murders and robberies and refugee boats in which whole families died. As he watched this latest group he thought about
Sydney Harbour and its yellow and green ferries, the harbour water silky as it brushed against the steps by the Opera House. It wasn't homesickness exactly, it was more tactile than that. He wanted to take Peter to Sydney so they could experience it together, its water and sandstone buildings and frangipani trees and double-decker trains, and for the first time in ages he really missed his mother.

When he arrived at the Nova he scanned the program and decided on the latest Clint Eastwood film,
Gran Torino
. He queued with middle aged, middleclass women who reminded him of his mother, girlfriends doing what girlfriends do on a Saturday. He followed them upstairs to wait for the theatre to open and eavesdropped on their conversations. They all seemed to be talking about their kids.

He found it difficult to concentrate on the film: it was too pat, too neat a fairy tale about redemption. He glanced around the dark cinema at the rapt faces, the air scented with popcorn. The last time he was up in Sydney his mother had offered her own version of a fairy tale. He'd gone over to her flat, the harbour dancing distantly outside her windows, sequinned by the sun.

‘I have something to tell you', he said. She was making coffee and warming the croissants he'd picked up at the French bakery in Darlinghurst Road.

She smiled and said, ‘I think I know what it is.'

He'd been silenced by that but went on nervously. ‘I'm gay.'

And his mother said, ‘Oh sweetheart, I've known that since you were fourteen.'

‘You have?'

She nodded. ‘Mothers do know these things.'

‘But you didn't say anything.'

‘Why would I? It was up to you to tell me.'

He could hear the accusation in his voice as he said, ‘If you'd let me know earlier I'd have felt easier with it.'

‘Would you, sweetie?'

‘Yes, I think so.'

‘Oh well, we've both reached the same place now. Jam and butter or just plain?'

‘Jam.'

‘Raspberry or strawberry?'

‘Raspberry.'

They'd sat in the sunshine and watched the shadows move across the blocks of flats between them and the harbour, like soldiers resolutely marching. She'd touched his shoulder as she got up to take his cup. ‘And is there anyone special?'

It was too early to tell her about Peter. ‘No', he said, hoping she wasn't going to give him a lecture about safe sex.