Читать книгу The Shallow End - Ashley Sievwright - Страница 7

In the days immediately following the disappearance I was back at the pool, just as I had been in the days prior to the disappearance. There were a string of hot days just after Matt went missing and so there was a relatively thick smattering of patrons at the pool each day, but one day blended into the next during that time.

The packet-of-crumpets woman was often there. And one day Red Trunks made an appearance. I watched him walk from the changerooms to the end of the pool. His bum was so lovely, each cheek bulging as he walked, left right left right left right. His thighs were big and wobbly, the muscles were there somewhere, but loose like a swimmer’s, not tight like a runner or a bike rider or a body builder. I decided I liked his thighs almost as much as his bum.

I lay down on my stomach, turned my head, closed my eyes and listened to the sounds of the Prahran pool. There was the sound of water constantly flowing as the pool spilled over into the filtration system, and splashing of course, but surprisingly the loudest noise was the sound of children screaming. Close your eyes and it’s quite disconcerting.

It would soon be New Year’s Eve and there were a number of poofs at the pool topping up their tan for the big night out. A little gaggle of them closest to me were talking about what tickets they’d got and whose place they were getting ready at, but amazingly I heard no mention of the missing swimmer. In fact, in those few hot days that melted into each other, everything seemed exactly the same as it had been the day before Matt Gray went missing, which was somehow a bit disappointing and kind of horrible.

The whole thing had grabbed my interest, I admit, but in the way that other summer pastimes do. Like Sudoku or crosswords or books written especially to be read on the beach. Things to pass the time when passing the time is all you have to do.

Lazy and hot, various things about Matt drifted through my mind like they were carried past on a conveyor belt, steadily slipping past the viewfinder before I could properly grasp them or think about them in any detail.

Then sweat dribbled down and tickled my ribs. A sign I was officially too hot to think. Bliss.

—

When I got back to Sharon’s Place that day there was a message from my sister on the answering machine. She hoped that everything was OK and that I had to call her. Notice that, I HAD to call her. That was so her. So I called her mobile, hoping for the voicemail, but she answered.

‘Hello.’

‘I’m just calling you to let you know I’m OK,’ I said. ‘But I’m not going to talk about anything.’

‘Well hello and thank you to you too, you little shit. Are you sure you’re OK?’

‘Yes I’m sure.’

‘You’re wallowing. I can tell.’

‘Like a pig in shit.’

‘OK. Call me again soon.’

—

You know, I think if you’re going to disappear, either from a pool or up your own arse, the time between Christmas and New Year’s Eve is the time to do it.

When Ava Gardner came to Melbourne to do that film On The Beach, she apparently said something like, ‘Melbourne’s a great place to do a film about the end of the world.’ It’s one of those moments in Melbourne’s history that everyone knows, like Jean Shrimpton wearing a miniskirt to the Melbourne cup, or Picasso’s Weeping Woman turning up in a locker in Spencer Street Station. I think Ava got it right, personally. There’s a scene in On The Beach where Ava and her co-star, whatever his name is, walk down a Melbourne street and there are empty cars in a motley arrangement all over the streets and there’s not a soul around. This is the end of the world as we know it; this is Melbourne between Christmas and New Year. There’s little traffic and hardly anyone in the streets. Everyone’s either holidaying elsewhere, or staying indoors because it’s so hot and everything’s closed anyhow.

It’s the kind of feeling that can conk you on the back of the head if you’re not careful, especially if you don’t have family and friends around you to bicker with as a distraction. It’s the kind of time when someone who’s come back to town with fresh wounds can creep into a stranger’s porny apartment to lick them (the wounds not the stranger) without telling anyone he’s even there, and who might just possibly, well might just possibly not make it.

Just before I left Barcelona I booked into a ritzy hotel I couldn’t afford and proceeded to drink my way through the entire contents of the mini-bar and a bottle of vodka, only stopping when I went to lie down on the bed for a moment, miscalculated and ended up on the floor wedged between the wall and the bedside table where I passed out, only to come to in the freakish dead-time of 3 am in the morning, horribly hung over, and with no more vodka.

I decided that I didn’t want to have escaped that Barcelona dead-time (thank God for 24-hour room service and Spanish soap operas) and come so many miles only to get conked by Melbourne’s own dead-time. No, what I needed was a night out on the tiles so that at the very least I could get drunk somewhere other than Sharon’s Place.

For a split second of madness I was going to call an old friend and long-standing companion of nights-out, Melanie. Possibly the only thing you need to know about Melanie is that she is very loyal and asks few questions, I guess mostly because she wouldn’t appreciate any questions about her own lifestyle which I know includes table-top dancing and suspect also includes Centrelink fraud. But even Melanie would require some explanation of what went down in Spain and I just couldn’t, so I decided against it.

No, what I needed I felt sure was the comfort of strangers, male strangers, gay male strangers. To make it any more specific might be pushing things.

—

Your everyday workaday gay bars aren’t all that different the world over, which I guess is not surprising in that the common denominator is that the patrons are, of course, gay.

Sitges is a little town down the coast from Barcelona. It’s a summer resort and attracts all sorts, but it’s mainly got the distinct whiff of the international gay tourist. During the summer along the main esplanade the nightlife thumps out of gay bar after gay bar until sun-up. Leo and I headed out one night to taste the delights that Sitges had to offer and found ourselves in one of those clubs. Apart from the fact that there were more Spanish men standing around (which admittedly was a major plus), I could have been at the Xchange Hotel on Commercial Road in Melbourne, just a block or two down from the Prahran pool. The same blacked-out windows to the street, the same bar, pool table, banks of televisions playing film-clips, the same watchful standoffishness of the patrons. They were even playing Let’s Get Loud by Jennifer Lopez. Or I might be making that bit up. I do know that Kylie made it into the mix.

Even so, the Xchange Hotel seemed particularly uninspiring that night when I got there. I went up to the bar and ordered a drink. I didn’t know anyone, but then again I didn’t think I would— this wasn’t somewhere me or my friends had frequented when I last lived in Melbourne, which that night was just the ticket. I moved away from the bar, found a little ledge to put my beer on and checked out the room. I wasn’t the only one doing so. Again, here were people watching people. It was kind of the same as at the pool. And the same as the club in Sitges. Probably it’s the same in gay clubs and pools the world over.

All this watching could be either comforting or stifling and that night I felt stifled. I didn’t want to stand across the room and look at people and then maybe chat to someone and maybe strike at least a deal if not a genuine connection. I didn’t want to have to bother and so in the end I decided it wasn’t too early to go to the sauna. At a sex-on-premises venue there’s just as much looking, but not as much standoffishness. And to be honest, I just wanted sex. Not because I was horny, I wasn’t particularly, but just because I felt like gorging. I wanted to be a pig and eat with my hands and stuff my cheeks full of sex. I felt lonely. I felt blue. I felt bored with my own company. I also felt, strangely, a little bit scared to stay cooped up in that fugged-up apartment for another night. I know from past experience that these feelings are not erased by piggy sex, but like a sugar pill, it fools you into thinking things are going to be different.

When I got to the sauna, I took off my clothes and put them in the locker, put a towel around my waist and headed through. First thing you see is a row of showers, with usually a couple of men underneath lazily soaping their dicks, strategically placed to see newcomers and at the same time put on a bit of a show if necessary. Then there’s a spa with no one in it, a sauna, and out the back, through a pair of saloon-like swing doors, dark passageways and little rooms with glory holes in the walls and packets of lube and condoms left like offerings. In some cubicles there is someone waiting and watching those walking past, or a couple already engaged, or more than a couple.

I kept on walking past door after door, looking in, getting a feel for the place, like some tourist. Stupidly, I was reminded of a cathedral I visited in Spain. It was on a rocky hilltop and to get there you had to walk around and around the hill towards the cathedral and along the way there were little grottos hacked out of the rock and a little white statue of some saint in each one. Every grotto had a different saint, and sometimes there were offerings left there by previous pilgrims, usually ordinary things like strings of plastic flowers or little folds of paper with poems or something. And you’d look for a second, and maybe make the sign of the cross, or leave something. And then you’d walk on until you came across the next grotto. I asked Leo what the different saints were the patrons of, and he could tell me because he’d had a Catholic upbringing and remembered a lot of them. And as he told me I found myself liking the statues based on how interesting I found their calling, but I guess you’re allowed to have your favourite saint. Saint James the Great is a patron of Spain and also of rheumatics, which I thought was kind of a weird grouping. Saint Jude is the Patron Saint of Lost Causes which appealed to the skinny-black-pants wearing art student I used to be. But my favourite was Holy Mary of Guadalupe. I can’t remember what she was the patron saint of, but it’s just such a cool name. So yeah, I was thinking about my favourite saints when I joined a solitary traveller in one of the cubicles, went straight down on my knees and found myself face to face with my first dick in weeks. Hallelujah.

Basically I went for it. And after a while of slopping this guy’s dick right into my throat and snorting like a truffle-snuffling pig at his pubes, I pulled my head back, closed my eyes and concentrated on how my lips felt fat and my throat felt stretched. It felt wonderful to have a dick in my gob again, I must admit. But it wasn’t enough. Now that I’d got started I had ants in my pants and I wanted one with the lot. I opened my eyes and nosed up this guy’s stomach and chest. He turned me around, bit on my shoulders and the back of my neck. Soon enough I felt the nudge of his dick and it was all on. I smiled and closed my eyes.

And so I was fucking again for the first time in, what? Three weeks? Four weeks? Maybe even five? For the first time since, when? Since Leo bent forward in front of me, swayed his back and widened out his stance, opening his hips out like a butterfly to take in every bit of me?

After a while my asshole tingled like my lips and for a moment there was nothing else in my head. At one point I found myself twisting from side to side on the end of this guy’s dick, my head back, eyes closed, smiling stupidly, like a blind man swaying to music. I know. Embarrassing.

After I’d showered, collected my clothes from the lockers and was changing, I noticed someone I recognised also changing back into his street clothes. I didn’t at first see his face, but I certainly recognised his thighs. It was Red Trunks. He saw me at the same moment I saw him. His eyes widened, then he looked away and his cheeks went steadily and very prettily red. I got a jerk of disappointment that I hadn’t found him in a cubicle back there instead of that other guy, which was totally unfair as my guy was hot and definitely a good fuck. But there you go, the grass is always greener.

—

By the way, I remember also that St Anthony is the Patron Saint of Lost Articles and Missing Persons.

—

I don’t quite understand why the story of the missing swimmer caught the public’s imagination so much, or whether it was the media’s imagination and the public just trailed behind obediently. News stories sometimes have a life of their own and it’s hard to know why. The story of the swimmer going missing from the public pool seemed just what people needed in that fuck-off dead time between Christmas and New Years Eve. It was mysterious, a mixture of soft and hard news, and somehow a perfect summer story. In short, the story wasn’t out of the news for a single day, living on through a press conference with tearful loved ones, a weekend of editorials, letters to the editor and profile pieces.

There was also an incredibly high number of sightings of the missing swimmer. Dozens of them. Not all could possibly have been him, but perhaps one or maybe even two of them were accurate. He was seen walking alone (fully clothed) through the park behind the pool that afternoon (a definite possibility not taking into consideration the fact he left his clothes in the pool with his friends). He was seen on the Malvern Road tram the afternoon after he went missing, looking disoriented and apparently mumbling to himself. He was also seen that afternoon in Chapel Street at a certain restaurant (possibly just an attempt to create advertising for the place). He was seen repeatedly afterwards at various clubs in Melbourne, as well as in Sydney at NYE celebrations, as if he was doing guest appearances like a Big Brother housemate or something. He was spotted at the Melbourne airport. At the Brisbane airport. At the Darwin airport. He was seen at St Kilda beach. At Sandringham beach. At the Brighton Sea Baths. At the Fitzroy Pool. At the Footscray Pool. At the Albert Park Pool. In fact, a number of males of around the right age who made the mistake of purchasing those green and white striped Speedos that summer must have been cursing their choice.

I can’t remember exactly when it happened, but one morning, I think it was the morning after I’d been out to blow off a little steam at the sauna, the missing swimmer was finally OUTed. I was wondering when it would come. I mean, it’s not that I’ve got a finely tuned gaydar or anything. I’m usually clueless. But even I was adding up the circumstantial evidence myself during the previous week and coming up with gay gay gay.

Firstly, Matt Gray disappeared from the Prahran pool so right away the odds are up. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this was case closed, but the odds are stacked a bit higher at that location than your usual one in ten. This was even hinted to Mr and Mrs Suburbia with ‘I saw him but he’s not my type’, quoted, remember, without further comment, in one of the first few articles about the missing swimmer.

Then there was the press conference that the family had done a day or two after he went missing. This was the usual deal, with the family pleading with the public at large, and with Matt if he was watching, to come home, be safe, etc, followed by a few questions. The footage was used very briefly on every major news broadcast that day but nothing very extraordinary was revealed, except perhaps for the fact that alongside Matt’s tearful Mum, stoic Dad and pretty but conventional looking sister (how Australian it all was) was a man who looked a little like the food guy from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, smartly groomed with rimless glasses. You know the type. This man could have been another member of the family, Matt’s brother perhaps, although he didn’t look anything like either Matt or the rest of the family. But I didn’t think he was another family member. It was something about the way he was referenced by name, Kevin, but never by relationship to the missing swimmer. Talking about the one in ten rule, I bet more than one in ten people watching the press conference asked the question, Who’s the guy on the end? But the implications were clear, Kevin was Matt’s partner.

Perhaps they didn’t know what to call him and so opted for calling him nothing at all. I can kind of understand the thinking behind that, but how horrible to reduce him to some kind of hired-mourner character. Surely if they weren’t comfortable with husband or boyfriend, they could have just gone with the non-threatening ‘partner’ or even, if they wanted to get a bit racy, ‘life partner’. Perhaps they didn’t want to highlight the fact that Matt was gay and that Kevin was his partner, because it was considered off the point, maybe, not really relevant; or perhaps because it seemed a little too sensational when they were dealing with very upset people. I suppose often the safest option for the media regarding gay relationships seems to be the don’t ask, don’t tell, no need to mention it mentality.

The point is I was already well and truly there when the headlines trumpeted that the missing swimmer was a poofter. And trumpet they did. What’s the point of outing a missing swimmer who has inexplicably caught the attention of the public, unless you can do it like this: GAY SWIMMER STILL MISSING. Pats on the back all round on a job well and subtly done guys. Is the story that he’s still missing, or is the story that he’s gay? The latter. Obviously. In fact, there was no new news about the disappearance at all. A police spokesperson said a few words along the lines that they were ‘following up a number of leads’ (unspecified) and appealed for anyone with any information about Matt’s disappearance to come forward. That was it. No, the point of the story seemed to be primarily that Matt was gay and that the well-groomed Queer Eye looking guy at the press conference was his partner. He was finally given that title, officially, in the article.

The interview, such as it was, with Kevin was quite a disappointment. For a start he didn’t have anything particularly gay to say, which I’m sure disappointed the journo just as it did the public. In fact, the life that Matt and Kevin appeared to live before Matt’s disappearance was hardly a Mardi Gras parade. Don’t get me wrong, I know not every gay life is all drag queens and rainbow flags, but that headline, you know, it kind of promised more. At least a glory hole or two.

Kevin came across in the article as a nice, simple, heartbroken man. He was quietly spoken, I presumed, his answers to the questions being considered and short. He was an engineer. He and Matt had been together for 15 years, had met at university, travelled together a little, then returned to Melbourne to ‘settle down’, mortgaged themselves to the eyeballs in a suburban dream/nightmare in the gay heartland of Prahran.

Matt was, Kevin said, hard-working and ‘law-abiding’. Yes, he really said that. So I guess Matt didn’t speed or, you know, jaywalk or anything. He was also, Kevin said, generally of a positive and easy-going nature. And of course he loved swimming his laps. He would get home from work, walk through the park at the rear of their property, then zig-zag through another couple of streets to the Prahran pool. Almost every day he would do his laps and would swim up to 1.5 km a time. He had some mates he used to go swimming with, but mostly just went by himself. It was, Kevin said, a solitary pleasure to him.

In short, all in the garden was lovely, a bit boring, and definitely, somehow disappointingly, not ‘gay’ in any spectacular way, but lovely nonetheless. In fact, Kevin was photographed for the article in his own front garden and behind him you could actually see a picket fence and a 4WD. The whole picture screamed inner suburb sophisticate at me.

As for the disappearance, Kevin said that he couldn’t understand what had happened, but that he didn’t believe Matt would voluntarily leave his life and his loved ones, would just walk away like this without word, without explanation. Matt was quite close to his family and especially his sister’s kids. Nor did Kevin think Matt could have been overwhelmed or abducted by a third party. He was a fit young man, and alert, and he disappeared from a busy public place in the middle of the afternoon.

So what did Kevin think had happened?

Disappointingly, and quite stupidly I think, Kevin said he thought there must have been an ‘accident’ or a ‘mistake or something’. It seemed a pathetic head-in-the-sand thing to say, but I thought I knew where it came from, and felt sad for him.

In any case, the end result of the article was a lot of not very much. The most important thing that came out was a real sense of Kevin’s affection for Matt, and a real sense of quiet, dignified sorrow at his disappearance. Also, the fact that Kevin who was presumably closest to Matt had no idea what had happened to him made the whole disappearance even more mysterious, more final.

Oh, by the way, at the same time as all this, the Prahran pool was also ‘outed’ as having a ‘largely gay clientele’, which I thought was hilarious. As well as not being news in any meaning of the word.

—

New Year’s Eve I stayed in. Surprise surprise. There were fireworks, two lots actually, one above the Yarra and another right there in the Docklands. It was a bit funny considering the state of the browned-out sky not a week or so before. But the fireworks and the celebrations down below Sharon’s Place made my situation feel a whole lot more shitful, in the way that little treats and niceties can make hardship seem harder. I mean, I didn’t feel as hopeless as I did in the brown-sky days, and yet perversely I found myself thinking back to those days and how easy they were in hindsight. I lay down but I couldn’t go to sleep, I made myself a sandwich but then didn’t feel hungry, I ran a bath and couldn’t be bothered sitting in it for more than five minutes, and then suddenly the idea of staying inside when everyone else was out with sparklers, drinking champagne and dancing and kissing strangers, began to feel like I’d somewhere, somehow, made a really big mistake. Perhaps it was a good thing, me feeling that there was something going on out there that I was missing out on. I guess in a way it was quite positive.

—

The most interesting aspect of the media ‘outing’ was that Matt became, in a way, a bit of a poster boy for gay men. It was as if the whole city was in the thrall of the gay-best-friend syndrome. I can see it I suppose. I mean, I never met the man, but Matt Gray on paper was definitely easy to like. He was an Anglo Aussie with a middle-class suburban background, healthy, fit, good (enough) looking, and living something close enough to a typical suburban Australian life that would be familiar to many other Australians, with a partner and a job and a mortgage to chip away at. He would, people might think, be the type to be into sport and barbeques, who would dutifully wash his car and mow the lawns on a weekend, the type who would chat to the neighbours over the fence and bring in their mail while they were away. He would be all these things, but also gay in a non-threatening, non-confrontational, out-of-sight, inside-the-house kind of way. He seemed knowable, like a brother or a mate, he was nice-guy regular, he was palatable, consumable on a broad scale, and he became, as such, some kind of absentee ambassador for gay men.

Joe Public’s opinions about Matt in letters to the editor were amazingly positive, even gushing. Some were along the ‘I don’t like gays, but he seems like a good bloke’ kind of track. Editorials on the subject of Matt’s sexuality were less gushing but just as positive. A councillor in local government, whose big topic the previous election had been gay marriage and the Government of the day being against it, even went so far as to use Matt and Kevin and their suburban ‘marriage’ to illustrate his point in the gay media, both in a column he wrote in a fortnightly gay newspaper and on the gay radio station. I didn’t hear that last one, but I heard about it and found the transcript online.

Unfortunately, all this guff was horribly off the point. The missing swimmer’s absentee ambassador status as gay-poster-boy had absolutely nothing to do with his disappearance or with what efforts were being made to find him. Police reiterated their plea for anyone with any information about Matt to come forward, but these pleas were, sadly, if not drowned out then at least pulled under water now and then by the more abstract ra-ra of the poster-boy stuff. The absence of any real sense of police activity, let alone progress, made it feel very much like there was none. At just over the two week mark people started to suggest knowingly that Matt would never be found, and that his mysterious disappearance would never be solved. I tended to agree with them. It just didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel like it was voluntary, like he’d engineered his own disappearance to start a new life. It also didn’t seem likely that he’d been on the end of some kind of ‘foul play’. Heaps of possibilities, but no probabilities.

Actually, with the absence of any publicised activity from the police, the way Matt’s loved ones were so ordinary and so baffled, and also I suppose with the objectification of Matt as gay poster boy, the whole thing started to feel, to me anyhow, more abstract. Or do I mean more literal? It felt to me like Matt Gray had quite simply vanished into thin air. Somehow you just felt he was gone for good. That he would never be found. It was terribly sad.

—

One other thing about all that poster-boy stuff. I knew it wouldn’t last. I could smell the backlash like ants smell rain.

—

I was at Priceline buying another vat of Vitamin E cream. Part of my routine when I got home from the pool was to have a shower, smear myself over with Vitamin E cream, then let my skin slowly absorb it while having a beer and a cigga on the balcony. I’m a great believer of toxins-in-toxins-out, a Zen, Karate Kid kind of attitude to indulging in the naughtier things in life, like sure you can smoke crack, as long as you eat broccoli and wear 30+.

Anyhow, I was in the line at the checkout and heard these two young fellas in front talking.

‘Did you see him on the news this week? He looked nice. He was crying his eyes out at the launch, press conference thing.’

I guessed they were talking about Kevin.

‘I don’t believe in all this gay poster boy stuff. There’s something rotten there somewhere. In fact, I think he did it.’

‘Did what?’

‘Offed the swimmer guy somehow.’

‘He wasn’t even there at the pool that day?’

‘He could have been.’

‘People would have seen him.’

‘Maybe he was in disguise.’

‘What as?’

‘Not as anything. Just in glasses and a hat maybe. Or with his hair parted on a different side?’

‘What did he do with the body then?’

‘Maybe just left him on the grass with all the people sun baking. One dead body amongst them wouldn’t be noticed.’

‘But what about closing time? It’d be discovered.’

‘I wasn’t being serious.’

Then the checkout chick said ‘Next please’ and they moved up and started their transaction.

—

One night out of the blue I remembered where I’d seen Matt Gray, and it wasn’t at the pool. I think it was that photo of Kevin with the 4WD and the picket fence in the background that made me remember that I met Matt once at a party just before I left for Spain and we talked about a leaf-blower.

It was at Vernon’s place, which is a big sprawling house backing onto the Yarra in Hawthorn. It’s got huge verandas all round enclosed entirely in fine mosquito mesh stuff and is painted a pale pale faded apricot (amazingly) which doesn’t seem to me a colour anyone in their right mind would choose to paint their house.

Perhaps it’s an undercoat that was never painted over. It looked like a low-security prison. Melanie christened it the Malaria Ward, which kind of describes it brilliantly. The garden is totally overgrown with quite lush plants (even in this drought—I wonder whether you’re allowed to pump water out of the Yarra for your garden?) which effectively hide the fact that there’s a large river at the edge of the garden. Vernon loves to tell a story of a guest of his going missing, only to be found three days later floating face-down some odd miles downstream, with his fly open and his dick out, victim of a full bladder and a lurch in the dark.

Anyhow, I remembered, just as I was drifting off to sleep that I’d met Matt on one of those weirdly huge verandas overlooking the Yarra. Everything happened on the verandas at Vernon’s house. There were a few men standing there looking out at the bend in the Yarra through the overgrown garden. They all held beers and stood around in that slightly formal half-circle that forms at Australian parties when there is a view, a game to watch, or a BBQ to stare at. Matt was one of the semicircle. Taller than me. Heavily built with a square jaw, squinty eyes and thick features. A real Anglo-Aussie type. That night he was all fresh-shaven, damp-haired and pink-ear clean. Not a dog, but attractive because of his size and fitness rather than his face.

And he was talking about a leaf-blower. It was autumn. There were shitloads of leaves around everywhere. In gardens and gutters. He had just purchased a leaf-blower and was telling the group about what it did and how he’d got a good deal on it. I of course didn’t give a flying fuck about his leaf-blower, but I said, ‘Oh yes’, or something else non-committal and a little dismissive and I’m sure, I’m absolutely positive, that he threw me a look then. Although what that look meant I can’t quite remember. I must have had an impression at the time, if I bothered to think about it, but I don’t remember now.

His companions in that semicircle were ‘his kind of people’ with ironed chinos and crisp checked shirts. All holding a beer. Some, most, were a little older, but they were all of a type. I imagine they all had property, with gardens, some maybe even pools, and probably all with leaves. Some had wives. Vernon had a thing for straight and usually married men. Matt, as we now know had a ‘husband’ in Kevin. It was one of those comfortable but fairly limited home-ownership types of conversations—the type in which I am never much involved or interested, unlike Matt who seemed to fit in OK.

But that look, that fleeting little look. What was that all about? I closed my eyes and tried to call up the memory. I could see it fine. It was an amused, self-deprecating, eyebrow-raising kind of look that said something like, ‘Boring I know.’ And maybe, ‘Aren’t we funny?’

I nodded and smiled at him, then went in search of Vernon and Melanie. I didn’t, I don’t think anyway, see Matt again that night at Vernon’s. It was a sprawling party and I had arrived late.

How much of my memory of that small interaction with Matt back then is real and how much of it isn’t? How much do we touch-up our memories? Give them a careful brush with turps to bring up the colour a bit clearer, or airbrush them, tuck in the edges? Especially when we remember, or tell ourselves we remember, something that happened on the hop, in the peripheral, without at the time having taken a moment to stop and stand still and make a concerted effort to commit it to memory.

And now of course, writing this, I’m trying to remember what it actually was that I first remembered months ago. So my memory is two or three times removed from that moment at Vernon’s place and only getting further removed each time I think about it. No matter what I do, no matter how hard I try, it’s like I’m reciting my 7x table or something and the distance between the moment I spoke to the missing swimmer and a reliable memory of that moment multiplies.