Savings - by Rachel Leary
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I watch her and I want to tell her she’s the most beautiful woman in the world. I’ve felt this way about her for a long time. It’s not desire. I don’t know if this is normal, but some humans elicit this in me: I find them so damn beautiful I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t want to have sex with them, just watch them, photograph them, if they’d let me. But especially her.
We shared a house when we were undergraduate students. She was always partial to an afternoon nap, and I’d sometimes join her in her double bed. We’d chat and she’d curl her feet around mine. Once, years after that, I visited her in Sydney where she was living then. She spooned me like in the old days, but then suddenly pulled away. ‘I do that to Phil.’ She was in a long-term relationship by then, and it seemed like she’d just freaked herself out. I wasn’t sure why. She was seeing blokes all through university, all the time we were hanging out in her bed, locking feet. What was so different now? We weren’t as close? Her boundaries had tightened in the five or so years since I’d last seen her? She was policing herself differently? Or was it just that we were older? I didn’t know what her reaction meant, but I knew it meant something.
Now, it’s a cold Hobart night. She moved back here to Tasmania years ago, the place where we both grew up and went to university. I haven’t done that yet. I think about it all the time. I feel like I’m in exile. Even this time when I flew in, having moved away 23 years ago, I saw that big old mountain and thought, It’s nice to be home. That thought only shocked me for a moment. I know I don’t know where my home is. I’ve been homeless for as long as I can remember. I don’t mean sleeping rough, and I don’t mean to put my existential homelessness on equal footing with those sleeping in parks, laneways, on footpaths, in cars. Although, I did do that for a while – slept in my car. But that’s another story. It’s a cold Hobart night, early June, and we’re in a courtyard at an event her son has organised. After I left uni, I lived for a few years on welfare benefits (you could survive on those back then), while I tried to save the world. I was a part-time activist, campaigning to save old-growth forest, part-time navel gazer. There are plenty who’ll tell you that living on good tax-paying people’s money when you could be working is not saving the world. That could be a long conversation. But my friend’s son is trying to save the world, and he and his friends remind me of myself, of the years in which I lost contact with his mother because I’d rejected mainstream society, gone fringe. I hope these young people aren’t as lost on the periphery as I was. Back then, I was travelling around, trying lots of things, moving on from all of them, wondering what life was for, what to do with it, and whether people would let me photograph them if I asked, or if that would just be weird. I’d grown up in violence. My biological family was irredeemably fractured. I was trying to make sense of things that would never oblige me in such a way. They’d persist in being resolutely unfathomable. Meanwhile, my friend had gone to Sydney, got a job and a relationship, stopped spooning her wayward ex-flatmate. The next time I saw her, after that time in Sydney, she and Phil had two children, seven and nine years old.
I’m having trouble staying in the courtyard here – in my telling, I mean. The thing about a courtyard is there’s a lot going on around it, which is also true of most moments.
It took a while for us to gravitate back towards each other. I think it happened partly because we found ourselves facing similar challenges, sat in muddy, mid-life trenches, fighting the same life-wars. We lived in different states, passed each other a flask over the phone. Chewed the gristly fat.
Her son has organised this event to raise money for an environmental cause. His band and his friends’ bands are playing here. My husband has come to the island with me. He’s standing alone watching the band with great concentration. He’s a musician and he teaches these days. I can’t help wishing he was watching our child play. I turn away from him and that thought. My friend is dancing. She’s grey now, and so gorgeous that I can’t keep my eyes dry. It’s the context too though. I can’t tell how old I am. This is like a trip, a time warp. I look around and these young people – they are the people I knew, the people I spent time with. They’re defying all the ‘this’ and making up the ‘that’ and trying to create something better. Most of them appear to be having a good time doing it, but who knows if that’s true, what their private dramas might be.
There’s a drag queen performing and the crowd cheers and whoops. I join my friend and feel my body recognise this; I’d forgotten how much we danced together. The first time I met her we were drunk. It was a night at the uni bar. She must’ve been more drunk than me, because I saw her in the library the next day, went up and said hi to my new friend who seemed a little confused, didn’t know who I was. We bop and boogie now, jump around, and I have a flashback to a 90s Hoodoo Gurus concert. But I feel self-conscious. Older people aren’t meant to be too silly when they dance. These unspoken restrictions frustrate me, but I’m mindful of my neck, it’s easily upset these days. Her son walks past and smiles. I ask her if we’re embarrassing him and she says no. ‘They’re all so nice.’
They are nice. I meet my friend’s son’s flatmate in the toilets. She asks someone what their pronouns are and when the person says they’re not sure at the moment, she tells them, ‘That’s fine, that’s totally fine.’ Jesus, I don’t want these young people to get slaughtered – emotionally, I mean. Can they just stay like this? Please. I can’t help wondering how many years it’ll take for them to find out that just because you believe it can be beautiful, it will be. I once had a quote stuck with Blu Tack to the wall in my share house bedroom. It said: ‘Do what you love and the money will follow.’ That line was the entirety of my bible. Where believing it got me, I can’t say now, but I’m in half a mind to write back to the person who wrote it: ‘Make some difficult compromises and the money will follow.’ This is what has become of me. And it’s part of the reason I’m crying when I watch my friend. It’s because she’s beautiful and she made this person who’s trying to do the things he’s trying to do, but also because this is killing me. The courtyard is full of hope, and that hope has hold of my guts, it’s twisting them and asking hard questions. You remember? You remember what it was like to hope? To believe? You were going to make the world a better place.
If that happened, I missed it. I definitely missed it. Instead, I discovered that if you rock the boat, you’ll get wet. You will likely end up splashing around in the water while the boat keeps going on its planned trajectory. I discovered that ‘the market’ – which has no empathy, and no remorse – will have the last word on just about everything.
Like I said, this is what’s become of me.
Here in the courtyard on this clear winter’s night, the drag queen – who is the Greens candidate for Franklin – is singing ‘I will survive’ and I really hope that’s true, dreams and all.
I sit at the table with my friend and her partner who isn’t Phil anymore but someone else, someone we went to uni with. I knew him. He once rescued me when I accidentally wandered off the track on a bushwalk. I used to go out with a friend of his. It’s fucking cold but my heart is almost unbearably full. My friend was always more conservative than me – at least, I thought so – but she’s made two fairly radical children whom I admire, and if I’d had children, I would have liked to have made ones like them. They let me be their aunty. We play Bananagrams together. Now we sit at a big timber table in a cold courtyard surrounded by years and events, hopes and dreams, and all that normal awful stuff like disappointment, and for a while, no one speaks. This feeling is something new. I don’t have a name for it.
We drive to her house where my husband and I are staying. In the morning her partner gets up for work, but she has the day off. I have too. I’m on holidays. Her partner is making breakfast and I’m standing in the bedroom doorway in my PJs talking to her. She pats the bed. I hop in and call out to her partner to let him know we need tea. When he brings us in a cup each, we giggle and thank him. I can hear the men chatting in the kitchen. We drink tea and she takes hold of my arm. ‘I love you. We’re lucky’. She looks up at me. ‘Aren’t we lucky?’ I tell her I think we are. Her partner goes to work and mine digs into the washing-up – we went off to the fundraiser straight after dinner last night, left a big mess.
We talk about last night’s event, her new leadlight projects, ask each other questions, tease each other. I think about the questions I have that I won’t ask; I know her well enough to know the areas that are her quicksand, the ones she’s roped off, the no-go zones.
We’re quiet for a moment. She sighs, puts her head on my shoulder. ‘Tell me a story,’ she says.
She’s always been a squealer. That morning, I told her something designed to make her shriek. It worked. ‘Oh!’ She hit my hand. ‘You’re making that up!’
She called out to my partner. ‘She’s making things up!’
He came and stood in the doorway. ‘Oh yeah. She does that.’
Her grin exposed the little gap between her two front teeth. ‘She’s so evil!’
I felt that feeling again, the one I experienced the night before that I had no name for. The news these days is appalling. Donald Trump just signed his ‘big beautiful bill’ into law. In all the reporting about the likely consequences, there’s little about its impact on climate change. But some modelling says that by 2030, the US will have added seven billion tonnes more of emissions to the atmosphere than it would have under the former Paris Agreement.
I don’t know how those youngsters are going to fare. If you do what you love, and that thing involves making art of some kind, it’s very possible the money won’t follow. I don’t know if anyone will save the world. I’m not sure I even know what that means anymore. But I do have these rich moments with no name – I’ll bank them, keep them tucked safely away to draw on in dark days.
Savings, I’ll call them.
This is it, my beautiful friend.
You asked me to tell you a story.
I didn’t have the words then, but this is it. This is the story.
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Image: Anastasia Pivnenko - Unsplash
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