Christos Tsiolkas - Barracuda

She squeezes my hand. ‘Missed you too, fucker.’

The third thing I noticed is how finely cut her clothes are, how fashionable she is. Not that Dem didn’t always have style: she always stood out in high school. But back then her fashion was a jumble of shapeless long op-shop coats, Che Guevara badges and thick-soled workman’s boots. Her appearance is still masculine — it’s there in the severity of her haircut, in the pragmatic cut of her long pants, the flat-heeled shoes — but the red coat she has buttoned up to her neck is made of a thin fine textured leather; the fabric of the shirt that peeks from under the cuffs of her coat is delicate, her trousers tailored and stylish.

She lets go of my hand and sips her wine. ‘Have you heard from Luke?’

I shake my head. ‘Not lately. I got a card from Beijing a few months ago, but nothing since. I imagine he’s busy.’

‘I think he’s riding the Asian tiger for all it’s worth. I guess that’s our future. I got an email the other day from him, a group one, telling us all about the money to be made in totalitarian capitalist China. Blah blah blah. You sure you didn’t get it?’

‘I’m not on email.’

‘What?’ She is incredulous. I’m used to that response. Not having a computer places me outside the world, renders me invisible. But I also know my time of concealment is coming to an end.

‘I do have to get a computer. I’m starting a course next year and as much as I can’t stand the bloody things I’m going to need to be on email.’

‘What’s the course?’

‘Human services. Or “community services”, they’re calling it. It’s a certificate course, nothing fancy. I’m working as a volunteer at the moment, working with adults who have acquired brain damage — you know, through injury or accident. I thought doing the course might make it easier to get a job.’

I find that I am blushing, that in revealing something of myself to another person I am awkward and embarrassed; I almost fear that I don’t know how to stop. I haven’t talked intimately with someone for a long time. It strikes me, speaking to Demet beneath the gaunt naked elm trees in this freezing courtyard, that I have almost forgotten what it is to reveal oneself to another.

‘Anyway,’ I mumble to a close, ‘that’s the plan.’

She is looking at me intently, squarely in the eyes. It is disconcerting. ‘Good for you, Danny. I am so proud of you.’

Because I am not fucking up? Because I am not embarrassing you? Because I am not a loser?

I had literally crashed into her in Lygon Street. I’d been rushing to catch a movie, something I had been doing for a few months, catching a film, any film, on half-price Monday. Attending weekly gave me both the pleasure of routine — and routine is still everything to me — and at the same time forced me into the world. I only saw movies on my own, and conversation was limited to the dry transaction with the cinema staff over tickets. But it was still a forward step into the world. I was running late because when I got home from the night shift at the supermarket I’d started reading Philip Roth’s The Human Stain and found myself still engrossed in it by mid-morning: here was shame, here was rage, here was indignity, and here was retiring from the world. I’d set the alarm but slept through it and had only forty-five minutes from waking to get to Carlton. I’d jumped off the tram in Swanston Street, had run blindly down Cardigan Street, frantically weaving through the crowds of students, and as I was careering down Lygon Street I bumped the shoulder of a woman coming out of Readings. Hey, she had complained, and I, puffing, was drawing in my breath to prepare an apology when I noticed — no longer overweight, her hair short, her clothes stylish — that it was Demet. Her face turned from a scowl into shocked recognition. Danny? Yeah, I answered, Yeah, it’s me.

At first I thought that she didn’t want to talk to me, assumed that she wanted nothing to do with me. She wouldn’t look me in the eye, it seemed as if she wanted to draw away.

‘What are you doing?’ It was a stupid question but all I could think to ask.

‘Just browsing,’ she’d replied, and then added, ‘I’m working at the uni, just up the road. And you?’

‘I’m heading off to a film,’ and I pointed across the street to the cinema. I had quickly glanced at my phone; if I didn’t cross the street now I would be late for the movie. I had to say goodbye. She hadn’t even kissed me or hugged me — she wanted nothing to do with me.

‘Are you running late?’ she’d asked and I’d nodded, and then, even though it terrified me and broke the pattern of my day, I blurted out, ‘I can see a film anytime. How about we go for a drink?’

It was clear that the final word had alarmed her: she’d almost recoiled from it. Of course, of course, she was remembering the last night we’d seen each other. Shame beat pitilessly around my ears at that moment, shame was the earth splitting beneath my feet, shame was mortification and fire. She’s scared I’ll get drunk and become a violent ugly fool; maybe she thinks I’ll hit her. Of course she can never trust me again.

Shame. I am trying not to be overwhelmed by it, I am trying not to be beholden to it, to find a place for it where I can survive it, where I am not broken by it. I don’t know if it will ever happen, or if it can ever happen. I can’t bear the weight of all the apologies I need to make. That morning I had underlined a passage in the book where the woman working as a cleaner is asked what it is like to bear the memory of being molested as a young girl by her stepfather and she replies, Like carrying a house on your back . I’d underlined it so hard with my ballpoint pen that I ripped the page. That is shame, that is the cost and the burden and the irredeemable fact of it.

There were too many people in the street, there was too much brightness, too much noise. I wanted to be home, the door locked, just myself, my mattress, my books and my four walls. She didn’t want a drink with me, it was obvious that she wanted nothing to do with me. I was poison, I was contamination. I should just walk away, I thought, I should cross the street and go into a film, any film. I should just disappear from her world. So before she could reply, before she could lie and say she was running late or that she had work she needed to finish or a dinner that she had to prepare, I said the words for her. ‘Nah, of course you’re busy. We’ll make it another time.’ She had looked so sad then. Once again, I had misjudged words, I had made them into something despondent and crushing.

‘Danny,’ she said, finally reaching out to me, stroking my cheek tenderly. ‘Of course I have the time for you, mate. For you I have all the time in the world.’

‘It’s really nothing,’ I say. ‘I like helping them out. It’s certainly not heroic.’

And it isn’t. I feel resentment stirring in my belly, I can sense it in my sudden urge to draw away from her.

She is looking at me as if I am a child who has performed well on an exam, has brought home a prize. ‘Good for you, Danny,’ she says again. ‘You’re doing something really good, you’re looking after society’s dispossessed.’ But I bet she’s thinking, What a perfect thing for a loser like him to do, to look after other losers.

I want to tell her that I like the work, that I don’t feel judged or assessed or criticised by the guys I look after. The old German man whose brain has been fried from too much alcohol; the youth who had his skull squashed, driving high, driving fast without a seatbelt; the middle-aged carpenter who’d shot too much heroin into his body and had died for a minute. Rolf and Kevin and Jeremy. I do Rolf’s washing; he pisses himself all the time. I am teaching Kevin how to dress himself, teaching Jeremy how to wash himself, I help him sit on the toilet when he needs a shit — I do all this and I am immersed and lost in it. I know about bodies, how they need to be sculpted and moulded and twisted and made to work. There’s not a lot I know, but I know this, that the body can be trained, that the body can be changed, that the body is in motion, is never static. And I know that sometimes the body will roar out its limits, will tell you there is no further to go, that some possibilities will never be realised, despite desire and hope and will. I know this better than I know anything else. The body also fails. Rolf and Kevin and Jeremy know this too. Rolf and Kevin and Jeremy and I are losers, we also know this; but not in the way the world thinks. We don’t need the world to pity us, we don’t need the encouraging word or the pat on the back. We carry our home on our back.