Australian Love Stories by Cate Kennedy Page B

blood in her long black hair, and a little on the very fair skin of her forehead; and her eyes, when she looked at me, were deep, indigo blue. Irish colours. Eyes which faded minutely toward the outer iris; which, though they showed pain, focussed so intently on mine it was as if they held them with fingertips. At the bottom right corner of her lip was a scar, the size and shape of a small fishhook; it looked like it had been made by a stone in a ring. It looked like its healing would have been slow, like it would have torn again and again. It was a beautiful face in every way.
    I wanted to help her. She said, ‘I know you. You’re my connie.’ She had to go home, to her father, she couldn’t stay out. I asked what happened. She said he hit her on the head with a bottle, he was angry because she hadn’t cleaned the house.
    â€˜Who did,’ I asked, ‘your father? ’ Of course.
    Outraged, disbelieving, I said, ‘You can’t go home. We’ll get you to hospital.’
    â€˜No, no, I have to go…’
    â€˜Stay; I’ll get a policeman, they can advise you what to do; just stay, okay?’
    She nodded.
    I wasn’t supposed to leave the tram unattended, ever, for any reason; I ran up to Fitzroy St and there, as I’ve always found when I needed one, was a policeman. We jogged back. She was gone. The other passengers knew nothing at all.
    Quite apart from the sense of having failed a passenger—my charge—and a woman in distress, I thought about her a lot; her herself. I watched for her on my St Kilda run, and on the others too. A couple of times, on days off, I walked around, hoping to find her. She was too young for me, I knew, maybe seventeen, but maybe a tall fourteen, I honestly couldn’t tell, and I was in my twenties then. I told myself I needed to know if she was alright, but really, it was her face. It swam about in my inner vision, her face, her skin, her eyes. It hurt. I’ll admit, I fantasised about her. The scar at her lip was the hook in my mouth; my tongue made its shape on the back of my teeth.

    That’s just a young man’s life. Time goes by, there’s other people, your old obsessions come to seem a little silly, even to you; and your friends see nothing in it but prurience. Again, you fool , falling for nature’s old tricks, her rouges, glycerine, narcotic musks… Maybe that self contempt was what my father was really expressing. There were girlfriends, then I fell in love. It ended so badly I don’t want to spill it all out here; but looking back, the morbid cliché of my stupid behaviour, the fug of alcohol and ego and bad faith…well, you probably get the picture. I did some damage, and ended up on my scuppers, somewhat, living in a terrible house, working as a waiter in a pseud restaurant. Michel, the owner, was an arrogant disgusting pig, but I needed the money, so I put up with it andquietly hated myself. I suppose this was four or five years after the girl. Then, on a Sunday night, she came in.
    She sat in the other waiter’s section, so I didn’t see her at first, though the place was brightly lit and I’d walked by a couple of times. Then the man she was with asked me for more water; I asked if she wanted some too, and she barely looked up as she answered no—just a flicker of those indigo eyes. I felt—I mean, I really did, though it’s going to sound ridiculous—like javelins had pierced me and pinned me to the floor.
    The first thing to say—and I admit, it’s in my defence—is that I was enormously relieved she was alive. I’d often wondered whether her father had killed her, or she’d ended up on the street, or addicted, or prostituted by any of those dirty devices this world’s so replete with. But anyone could see at a glance she was healthy, un-fucked-up, beautiful; more beautiful than before. A clear memory: she wore a dress of indigo linen