Me Without You (2 page)

The gentle breeze stirred her hair, and a lock fell over her eye. I reached down and tucked it behind her ear and saw her swallow. It was a strange chemistry that hummed between us—uncomfortably intense, but somehow innocent and pure in spite of the river of sexual undertone. I wanted to kiss her already, and I knew she wanted me to. For the first time in my entire life though, I wanted to savour every second and prolong each step of the journey.

‘Sounds like a meal I can’t afford to miss.’

The cheeky grin was back, and the moment ended. Lilah pulled away and stepped inside.

T
he restaurant was
half empty but the menu was packed. I’d been there before but hadn’t found any particular dish worth braving the exhaustive menu for. Lilah knew exactly what she wanted though.

‘The vegan thin crust, please.’

‘Vegan?’

‘It means no meat, no egg, no dairy. No animal products at all,’ the helpful waiter informed me. I was genuinely confused.

‘How does that work in a pizza?’

‘Cashew cheese is bloody amazing,’ Lilah informed me.

‘
Cashew
cheese?’ I winced. ‘How is that even a thing?’

‘I think we better share the
large
vegan thin crust,’ Lilah said, taking my menu from me.

‘But I was going to order the extra meaty meat lovers, with extra meat, and a side of meat.’

Her gaze challenged me.

‘I’m not an evangelistic vegan by any means. But if you’ve never even heard of cashew cheese, don’t you think the least you should do is give it a chance?’

She could have suggested we share a plate of dirt and, with a flutter of those eyelashes, I’d have asked for a sprinkling of gravel on top.

‘I can always swing by the steakhouse shop on the way home,’ I muttered.

‘So, you aren’t above flirting with a stranger in public but you
are
scared of a meal without a dead animal in it.’

‘Multiple dead animals. I’m an overachiever.’

‘You live near here?’

‘My apartment is back a few blocks.’

In other circumstances, I’d surely have missed the subtle way her eyebrows rose or the gentle curve of her lips. She was thinking about coming home with me. We locked gazes again for just a moment before she corrected her posture and tossed her hair away from her face.

‘I love Manly,’ she said. ‘I love the scent of the ocean on the night air, the delight on the backpackers’ faces when they get off the bus, and most of all, the fact that the CBD is in another universe.’

‘I actually have a very unhealthy love affair with Sydney itself,’ I admitted. ‘I lived in the CBD until last year. The energy fuels me.’ More than that; the energy had fuelled my creativity, and I felt somehow that it was the city that had inspired me to work as hard as I had over the years. The city, and the feeling that my career really was the sum total of my life’s worth, so I had better make it count.

‘So why did you move?’

‘I started to suspect that you can’t be
on
all of the time,’ I said. ‘It was wearing me thin, the constant bustle. I didn’t want to move too far away, and the idea of jogging on the beach before work then catching a lazy ferry across the harbour was enticing.’

‘Do you jog on the beach before work?’

‘Not as often as I thought I would.’

‘And you catch the fast ferry.’

‘If you can afford to buy property in Manly, you don’t have time to catch the slow ferry,’ I sighed.

‘That’s very sad—but I suppose it’s true.’

I’d never understood what it was like to be so enchanted by someone that I could genuinely not tear my gaze from them. I’m sure I’m an appalling listener—I’m invariably self-absorbed, a reality I’m sure my many exes would attest to. But with Lilah, I didn’t want to miss a word.

‘I inherited my grandmother’s house when she passed away,’ she said quietly. ‘I went into commercial law first, made a bucketload of money, and thought I could quell my do-gooder leanings with some half-arsed tending to the enormous garden my grandparents cultivated when they were alive. It’s a few acres of fruit trees, right near the ocean at Gosford, the most beautiful place I’ve ever been—but within a few months I’d just about destroyed it.’ She laughed. ‘I had no bloody idea what I was doing, but the very idea had just seemed so… romantic.’

‘Reality versus expectation,’ I surmised.

‘Exactly. Now the older couple across the road tend the orchard, and they’ve planted a substantial market garden too, and in exchange for caring for it properly for me they sell the produce at farmers’ markets on the weekends. And I visit every now and again and gorge myself on fresh fruit and veg. The only way the dream worked was to let go of the expectation.’

‘I think that’s what I’ve done with my Manly move, actually.’ I surprised myself with the depth of the realisation even as I said the words. ‘It is what it is. Even if it’s not the leisurely life I’d imagined, that’s okay.’

‘Did you grow up in the city?’ she asked.

‘Cronulla. How about you?’

‘Oh, we lived all over the place.’

‘Do you have family in Sydney now?’

‘Mum has a place at Gosford. Dad passed away a while ago.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I hesitated. ‘My parents are both gone too.’

‘I have a theory that even if you are ninety when your parent dies, it must still make you feel like a child all over again.’

‘I think you’re right.’ I hated—still hate—talking about my parents' deaths, especially to women, and most of all to women I was interested in. It was just such a tale of wonder and love, and they always got this miserable look of longing on their faces. By the time I reached the depressing end of the tale, I either felt like I was breaking their hearts or that they’d missed the point and only saw it as entirely romantic, which annoyed me even more.

‘Have yours been gone for long?’ she asked.

‘It’s a bit of a long story.’ I wasn’t fobbing her off, not exactly. This just wasn’t the sort of tone I wanted to set for the meal. Before I could figure out how to change the subject, she rested her elbow on the table, her chin on the back of her hand, and she flashed me a soft smile.

‘I’m not in any rush.’

Maybe three times I’d talked about my parents with women I’d been seeing, and maybe three times I’d walked away from the conversation feeling irritated. Once upon a time I’d asked out a woman I met at the gym, and when the conversation turned around to our parents and I told her about mine, she’d actually
cried
. I’d wrapped up dinner early and gone home alone. I remember resisting the urge to snap at her, to point out what
should
have been obvious—there was no
happy ending
to the tale.

I suspected Lilah might have a different reaction to the story—I’m not sure why, maybe it was an instinct. I started talking about it before I even decided to.

‘Mum was American. She and Dad met in New York. He was twenty-one, and a few years into his career as a journalist. He took an extended break to go looking for adventure, and somehow he wound up over there. They bumped into each other in a supermarket, the canned vegetable aisle I believe, and were inseparable from that moment on. Mum used to say that they literally didn’t have a moment apart until he went back to work a few months later. She followed him back here, they were married within a few weeks, set up a house and just generally got on with being blissfully happy.’

‘A fairy tale.’ Lilah didn’t look impressed. ‘Where’s the wicked witch? There’s always a wicked witch.’

I grinned.

‘A hippy
and
a realist. I like it.’

‘I want to be optimistic and believe in the good of the human race, but the reality is, as a species, we suck. So where did it sour. Divorce? Infidelity?’

‘Oh no, they really were blissfully happy for forty years. I was born, my twin brothers, numerous cherished dogs and cats came and went, they bought and paid off their home, took fabulous holidays quite regularly and flourished in their careers until they retired at a sensible time—and, worst of all, I never once saw them speak a single disrespectful word to one another. It was an unbelievably stable family—I had literally only had one bedroom until I moved out when I went to uni.’

‘What a frightful fucking childhood.’ She raised an eyebrow at me. ‘You poor thing.’

‘Don’t worry, it
did
sour.’ It always felt like a thunderstorm rolling in, remembering the loss. I tried to keep it light. ‘Mum died of a stroke, very suddenly when she was sixty. She was as fit as an ox, and then a minute later, she was gone. A week later, Dad dropped dead too. They said it was a heart attack.’

‘But you know it wasn’t.’

Her words caught me by surprise.

‘Yeah, I
know
it wasn’t. There was nothing suspicious about his death—he just stopped living. They’d built their whole lives around each other—when Mum went, Dad had nothing left. Hell, I’m surprised he lasted a week. That’s the problem with fairy-tale love—and there’s your wicked witch. True love is just a synonym for desperate dependency.’

‘I don’t even believe in true love—what utter bullshit that concept is. And your story isn’t sour—it’s beautiful. They had forty years of happiness, and a great life together. Your mum went quickly, and your dad subconsciously chose to follow. I’m sure it was horrendous to lose them both like that, but at the end of the day, just like your move to Manly, it is what it is. Besides which, you and your brothers are the product of their relationship, so in a sense, their union lives on.’

It was my first taste of blunt Lilah, and for a moment I wasn’t sure what to make of her. I leant back in my chair and surveyed the beautiful contradictions—the empathy in her eyes, the hard lines around her mouth. It suddenly struck me that Lilah was
listening
to me—really listening, as if I was a subject that commanded an intense focus. Her dismissal of my grief stung a little, but this was tempered by the surprise of her full attention.

I’ve used romance to market products a hundred times, feeding the public with the line that you can meet someone, and they can understand you and you can understand them, and together the world will be an easier place for the both of you. We usually dress it up as sex in an ad campaign, but at the end of the day, people are looking for connection, and that’s why sex works so well as a sales tactic.

And there was me, who’d understood the concept intellectually for as long as I’d been an adult, sitting in a slightly dingy pizza shop at nearly forty years old and maybe wanting that for myself for the very first time. There had been lovers, even girlfriends, who had passed through my life without ever really knowing me, and when they moved on, I was left unchanged. Even if Lilah stormed out of the restaurant midway through our pizza, I had a feeling that wouldn’t be the case.

‘I have just revealed more about my family to you than some of my lifelong friends know. And you’ve just been more brutal to me than any of them ever were, even though I still do enjoy a good wallow on this very topic even a decade later.’

‘You just need better friends,’ she told me, and we both laughed.

The pizza arrived, silently slid onto the table between us by the effectively invisible waiter, and Lilah waved her hand over it.

‘Survey the wonders of an environmentally sustainable approach to food, my friend.’

It did look like a regular pizza, except that where meat should have been, there were chunks of pumpkin and olives. I sighed and reached for a slice, the largest slice, and somehow it felt too light in my hands.

‘The next time I pick up some filthy stranger on the ferry, I’m sending her home for a footbath and some shoes so we can go somewhere with real food.’

‘Literally every single time
I
pick up a stranger on the ferry and bring him here, he complains when I make him eat the vegan thin crust.’ She slipped a slice of pizza onto her plate and grinned at me. ‘Bon appetite!’

‘Why be vegan?’ I asked her, after my first few bites. The pizza was surprisingly tasty, but not substantial. I knew I’d be starving within a few hours.

‘The cashew cheese hasn’t convinced you?’ She feigned shock. ‘It was a revelation when I first tried it.’

‘A revelation enough to abandon pretty much every delicious food known to man?’

‘I spent a bit of time in China a few years ago. I was travelling with a friend, and one of his uni buddies was working in healthcare in an isolated village. A bunch of elderly people in that village were still amazingly healthy—but their grandchildren were all obese and sick. It all came down to diet. Even as available healthcare improved, more meat and dairy crept into what they were eating, and so in spite of what
should
have happened, the new generation was in serious trouble health-wise, while the old guys carried on.’

‘So that was enough to inspire you to give it all up?’

‘Not even a little bit.’ She grinned at me. ‘I went on to Europe, then months in Central America before I finally came back and committed to a plant-based lifestyle. But, yes, I have completely eschewed animal food products since then. My carbon footprint is at least nine tonnes a year less than yours.’

‘And that’s a good thing, right?’

Lilah rolled her eyes.

‘That’s a good thing.’

‘Was this when you were at uni? A gap year?’

‘Oh no, this was only a few years ago,’ Lilah said as she reached for more pizza. ‘I took a year off work and went to see the world.’

‘I keep meaning to do that.’

‘What’s stopping you?’

‘I have absolutely no idea. My brothers are in Melbourne and Paris; from time to time they email me and ask me when I’ll visit. There’s nothing much keeping me here other than my job. But, you know, there are a bunch of things I just can’t get around to, and a holiday is one of them, even though I know I really need to go see them both, or meet them halfway, or, I don’t know… something.’

‘Life is short, you know.’ The blue eyes twinkled. ‘I could
very
easily have thrown you overboard on that ferry today and you’d never have seen your brothers again, or ever caught a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower.’