Love & Virtue, page 3
‘Sackers? We were in his room last night. The one with the weed.’
I thought back to last night, to Emily’s chicken nugget story and the skin-coloured couch. ‘The one with the fluffy blond hair?’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought he said his name was Jack.’
‘Jack Sackville.’
‘How am I supposed to know that Jack is called Sackers? This is like a Russian novel.’
Claudia scoffed and picked at the grass, putting it in her coffee cup like it was a bin. ‘I think he might want to get with you.’
‘As if.’
‘You don’t think so?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘He thinks I’m a lesbian.’
She looked at her coffee cup thoughtfully, and placed the plastic lid back on. ‘He’s probably just f lirting,’ she said.
‘It seems a circuitous way to flirt, but okay.’
We were silent for a moment, and looked out across the oval. A man wearing high-vis was riding a lawnmower on the other side, zigzagging slowly towards us. The cut grass smelled dry in the heat.
‘You know, someone was murdered on this oval,’ Claudia said, like she was commenting on the weather.
‘What?’
‘Yeah, like decades ago.’
‘A student?’
Claudia nodded. ‘She was visiting a St Thomas’ boy. They found her in the morning all beaten up. And dead, obviously.’
‘Do they know who did it?’
‘No. They never caught him.’
‘Was it another student?’
‘Surely not, right? Surely St Thomas’ is the first place they would’ve looked.’
‘You’d think.’
I went back to my room and read about the murder online. My head throbbed and my stomach was suggesting the possibility of being sick, without making any commitments one way or the other. I read that around thirty years ago a girl had been raped and murdered on the St Thomas’ oval. I wasn’t shocked to read that she had been raped as well as murdered, even though Claudia hadn’t mentioned that part. It was depressingly implicit. What shocked me was her age. Like me, she was eighteen.
I KOWTOWED TO my mother’s advice. Like most parental advice, it was as sound as it was unsolicited.
My mother believed in the age-old adage that if you want to make friends, you have to be a joiner-inner. I found this a contemptible, fascistic sentiment, but I did want friends and I did like singing. I thought, amid the drinking and the drugs, it couldn’t hurt to meet some people on more familiar turf. So I auditioned for the St Thomas’ Chapel Choir and, because I could read sheet music and there were very few altos that year, I got in. We rehearsed every Monday and Thursday evening, and performed on Sunday evenings in the little chapel at St Thomas’.
The chapel, which would have been a free-standing structure at one point in time, had been subsumed into a wing of first year rooms. The bricks were pale yellow, and the windows were covered with a copper grille, which shed tears of green rust onto the exposed bricks every time it rained. This gave the building, which often smelled of a sweet, acidic cocktail of pot and vomit, a weepy appearance.
Inside, the chapel was small and filled with music stands and empty pews. It was in this room that I auditioned before the choirmaster, and it was there that we gathered after our first rehearsal, late one Sunday evening. An alarmingly thin boy—thinner than Jesus on the crucifix above our heads—with a f lop of thick black hair and negligently long fingernails had brought beers to rehearsal.
‘And what do you study?’ I asked Nicola the soprano, another first year in the choir. I still felt ill from the night before, and was stroking the label on a beer bottle in soothing regular motions. The label was wet with condensation and peeled off under my thumb.
‘Music,’ she said. ‘At the Conservatorium.’
‘That’s cool,’ I said. ‘Is your instrument singing? Or voice, I suppose. Do they call it voice?’
‘They call it vocal and opera studies.’ She had eyes like plates, round and white, and a very flexible mouth. Underlining it all was a weak little chin, which she dropped when she spoke. Every utterance was apologetic.
‘Right. So are you opera or just vocal?’
‘I play the cello.’ She tilted her head down, like she was very sorry for burdening me with this tiny piece of biography. I decided to spare her and turned my head to the other side of the room, trying to pick up a loose thread of conversation.
Eve was holding court, talking about how she’d spent her gap year. Her particular focus was how reductive it is that people associate tourism in Colombia with cocaine, while also hinting that she had, of course, partaken. I laughed like the thought of cocaine didn’t send a shiver of the illicit up my spine and Nicola, sitting at the edge of her pew, made a noise that I can only describe as a squeak.
Eve had a way of steering conversations around to her experiences and interests. As a result, she often appeared the most informed and interesting person in the room.
The boy who had brought the beer was on my other side and he turned to me, seemingly as tired of Eve as I was of Nicola.
‘I don’t think we’ve met.’
‘I’m Michaela,’ I said. ‘Thanks for the beer.’ I took a sip.
‘Not a problem. It’s disgusting, isn’t it?’
I pulled the bottle from my lips and laughed, which caused me to cough into the back of my hand. He patted my back so vigorously that other people stared.
‘Nothing to see here! Nothing to see here!’ he said, still hitting my back and waving with his other hand. ‘Just a cool girl trying to down a big delicious beer.’
‘So, Michaela,’ he said, when my coughing had subsided. ‘We’ve never met before, so I’m obliged to ask (in order of importance): What school did you go to? What ATAR did you get? What degree are you doing?’ He ticked the questions off on his fingers, jiggling his head as he did so.
I laughed again. He was funny—without the simpering insecurity that often suggests humour is a crutch. I didn’t feel, even, that he was trying particularly hard to impress me. He seemed most intent on amusing himself.
‘I went to school in Canberra. A random Catholic school.’
At this, he stood up so quickly the whole pew pushed back with a scrape and started to walk out.
‘I’m kidding, of course,’ he said, sitting back down. ‘We Catholics have to stick together.’
‘I’m only nominally Catholic. Like, I don’t practise.’
‘Michaela’—he put a hand on my shoulder—‘this is a safe space.’ Looking at his pale face, his eyebrows knotted in faux concern, I suddenly found him ugly. He seemed a sweaty, slippery, beanpole of a person. I wasn’t sure how he’d slid away from making fun of himself to making fun of me, or the exact point at which the line had been crossed.
‘I don’t think safe spaces are for the benefit of white Catholics,’ I said humourlessly, taking an imperious sip of the beer he’d bought me.
‘No safe space jokes,’ he said, miming taking notes, and because of his commitment to the bit, the way he straightened his back and widened his eyes, mime-writing with prim strokes, I gave him a laugh.
Eve, apparently tiring of the other side of the room, had approached the pew where we were sitting and stood in the aisle.
‘Eve, we meet again.’ He stood and kissed her on the cheek, which was not a way I had seen a boy greet a girl before.
‘We did musicals together in high school,’ Eve said, pointing to him.
‘Michaela was just telling me she’s from our nation’s capital!’
‘Oh yeah? Do your parents work for the government?’ Eve asked. She sat down at the edge of the opposite pew, her feet spread in the aisle, and leaned forward, resting her beer on her knee.
I swallowed. ‘No. Well, sort of. My mum’s a teacher.’
‘I think teaching is such an important job,’ Eve said, like it was very insightful.
‘That’s lovely, Eve. What about doctors? Are they important too?’ the skinny boy asked.
I laughed, then wished it hadn’t been quite so loud, because Eve sat up, crossing her legs, and I wondered if she was offended.
‘It’s different. It’s not a traditionally female job, and therefore undervalued by society. Nurses, however . . .’
‘Ugh, don’t get me started!’ he interjected, throwing up his hands.
‘You don’t like nurses?’ Eve smiled, and I sensed that they were playing a game.
‘I adore nurses,’ he said. ‘I worship nurses.’ He paused as Eve took a sip of her beer, then said in a quick burst, ‘I’m downright priapic at the thought of a nurse.’
Eve snorted, but managed not to choke on her beer. ‘You almost got me,’ she said with a finger-wave of admonishment.
‘What does priapic mean?’ I asked.
‘It’s a medical condition where you have a constant erection,’ Eve said, without a whiff of condescension, which made me glad I’d asked.
‘Why are you laughing?’ the boy asked, his voice shrill with mock indignation. ‘It’s a very serious medical condition. It’s very sad. Can you imagine going through life with a constant erection?’
‘I can’t imagine that, no,’ I said.
‘Well it’s not beyond imagination, unless you’ve got very limited empathy. You could imagine it if you tried. You’re not trying hard enough. Think about it. You get up in the morning, you have an erection. You go buy a coffee and everyone in the cafe is like: oh my god, is that an erection? It’s so early in the morning!’
‘We get the gist, Balthazar,’ Eve said.
I assumed I’d heard incorrectly. ‘Balthazar?’
‘Oh, sorry, we haven’t been properly introduced.’ He turned to me and held out his hand.
‘Your name is Balthazar?’
‘My parents are sadists, that’s correct.’
I laughed. A hard, cackling laugh that was much louder and more fluent than any of my other laughs that evening. ‘That’s the bougiest thing I’ve ever heard.’
‘Everybody calls me Balth.’
‘That’s not better.’
‘I was going to change my name when I came here—you know, start fresh. But I went to a Sydney private school, so you’re basically the first person I’ve met who I didn’t already know. My past haunts me.’
‘And how did Balth go down at . . .’ I raised my eyebrows expectantly.
‘Grammar.’
‘Ah. How was Balth received at Grammar?’
‘With much ridicule, until I joined the debating team. You see, debating is to Sydney Grammar what First XV rugby is to other schools.’
‘That sounds fake.’
Eve leaned forward and said, with enough force to reassert herself as the centre of the conversation, ‘That is fake.’ She reached across the aisle to jab Balth in the arm, but the distance was wide, and the stretch awkward, so she only landed with a soft prod.
‘It’s true! It’s true!’ he said.
‘Just because I’m from Canberra doesn’t mean I’ll believe all your bullshit stories about being cool in high school.’
He turned to me, blocking out Eve. ‘I like you, Michaela. You know what day it is.’
‘She knows you’re full of shit,’ Eve said. ‘You know Michaela and I have rooms next to each other?’
‘No, I did not know that, because I’m not obsessed with you.’
‘Good for you. I’m going to try to meet some new people. Good to see you again, Balth.’ Eve said this last part with so little conviction that it was almost intimate, like she was only pretending to dislike him for the fun of it.
‘So . . .’ Balth turned back to me. ‘You two are very close?’
‘We have rooms next to each other, like she said.’
He brought his beer up to his lips, and raised his eyebrows.
‘What?’
‘Nothing,’ he said.
‘Are you going to tell me I’m obviously a lesbian because of my haircut?’
‘What? No. What a bizarre thing to say.’
‘Oh, sorry. You wouldn’t be the first.’
‘Well I’m not so reductive. And your sandals gave you away.’
‘Ha.’
‘I’m kidding. I just think it’s funny you’re friends with Eve, that’s all.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s just . . . I’ve never known her to sustain very functional friendships.’
‘Right.’ I didn’t know why I was so defensive. Eve and I really weren’t friends at all. In fact, I hadn’t spoken to her since the night after her drama performance.
I must have seemed prickly, because Balth excused himself. I sat alone for a moment, eyeing the room. I detected a slight pain behind my left eye, and told myself it was probably a headache. With that, I felt it expand, feeling less like a twitching pain and more like a throb, taking up half my head. Making friends, the hovering, the awkward entry point, answering their questions with another follow-up question—it all seemed too hard.
BACK IN MY room, I lay on my bed and, with an energy that shocked me, I cried.
Those early days at Fairfax exhausted me. Sleeping and waking in that room, with its paper-thin single mattress and plastic orange curtains, I heard my thoughts echo and expand, and watched the surfaces around me faded to unreality. The snatches of remembered conversations, like foul-tasting shots, accumulated, until I awoke each morning with a throbbing head and tender stomach, unable to say whether I’d found a single person I could really talk to.
The people—Eve, Emily, Claudia, Portia, Sackers, Nick, Balthazar—paraded through my mind like I was f licking through their Instagram Stories. The conversations we shared had no significance or resonance. We all overlapped without touching. I could chat to any of them: I could quip or question until they liked me, superficially at least. But what I wanted most was to talk about them. To clarify whether I was laughing with or at Balthazar; was in awe or scared of Eve. I wanted to talk about all of the things that had happened to me in that first week—some of which I could only remember in snatches, and some of which I wished I could forget. I needed someone who could confirm that the world as I perceived it was real to someone other than myself.
Several hours later, while I was fending off sleep with my laptop on my chest, I heard muff led talking and the thud of Eve’s door swinging against the wall as it opened. Two voices fell into the room, like the volume had been turned up. I could make out stray sounds—the rumble of Balthazar’s words, and the tumble of Eve’s giggles—before there was silence, which I could only assume contained a kiss.
Forgetting I had nobody to tell, I felt a gossipy thrill.
A moan emerged, and I felt, in addition to the tingling anticipation in my heartbeat, a stirring in my groin. Not quite arousal, but a call to attention: a pricking of the ears.
The moaning formed words. It was a high-pitched baby voice. I cringed, but leaned closer, until my ear brushed the cold wall. I couldn’t quite squeeze meaning from the words. The voice, whiny and cartoonish, was speaking French.
I lay down and resumed my TV show, keeping the volume on three bars so the sound through the wall would only travel one way. In the background, Eve’s baby-voiced French sex talk continued, cloying, into the night.
3
THAT FIRST SEMESTER I had lectures in the Quadrangle twice a week. I was lucky to have classes there, in the university’s most iconic spot. It’s where tourist buses unload, and where people pose for graduation and wedding photos. Inside the Quad, there is no view of the rest of campus or the Sydney skyline. There is a great belltower, which chimes in the early evening, and just beneath it an archway covered in ivy. Sometimes the carillon play modern tunes, ringing out anachronisms, like the Game of Thrones theme song, in a gentle church-like tone.
Whenever I stood in the Quad, particularly at golden hour, when the bricks were honey and the shadows were long and thin, I couldn’t help but take myself—my ambitions and my pursuits—a little bit seriously. The building impressed upon me a sense of narrative and character. This was university as it appeared in films and books. It looked exactly how it was meant to, and I, uprooted and settling here, must therefore be exactly where I was meant to be.
The first year subject I was taking was a crash course in moral theory. Its title was glibly alliterative: Morals and Mores. I had never studied philosophy before. I chose it because it sounded similar to English literature, and I figured I could read novels in my spare time—not that I did much of that in my first year.
The lecture hall was stuffy. The windows were slits of glass carved into the sandstone, and they opened only a sliver. There were steep wooden benches with clunky fold-out tables where students could rest their Macs or Moleskins or etch graffiti with an empty pen. When I stood to leave, I would touch the back of my thighs, trying to work out whether the gaps between the slats had left a striped imprint on my flesh.
Our lecturer was Professor (‘call me Paul’) Rosen. In all physical respects, ‘Paul’ was unremarkable. He dressed like he was in denial of both his age and size. He wore the jeans and boots of boys I knew around the colleges, and his button-up shirts attempted (not quite successfully) to disguise his stubborn beer belly. He always lectured with a bottle of Diet Coke. When he took a sip in between sentences, he’d wipe his mouth with the back of his hand.
Somehow, in between the beer belly and the Diet Coke, he dripped charisma. His was a masculine, unapologetic charm: an imperviousness to being liked which was, ironically, immensely likeable.
I arrived late to our first lecture. I sat at the back and looked down on the rest of the class. I saw Eve in the front row.
Professor Rosen took a sip of Diet Coke and, setting it back on the lectern, attempted to impress upon us that there were many different fields of study within morality, and that what we would learn in this course would scarcely make a dent. ‘By the time I’m finished with you, you will know less than when you started,’ he insisted with pride. It was as if knowledge were a trap, and he was here to rescue us.
