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Sport 29: Spring 2002

Kathleen

Kathleen

‘I haven't lived like this in a long time,’ I say. Kathleen nods. We're accustomed to apartments and mismatched furniture, to compression. My parents' house seems even more peculiar, given they're at work and it's the middle of the day. Surely my right to be here has expired by now. The tour continues. In the kitchen, I open the fridge and remove a jar of bottled pickles. They spin in brine like the preserved organs of a folkloric desperado. Kathleen and I, we're not old but we're old enough to need an excuse for mooching around in the suburbs.

We have one.

Samantha, our mutual friend, phoned me last night. ‘Guess who's standing beside me?’ she asked. ‘Crikey dick,’ I said and Samantha gave a beautiful rendition of her trademark giggle. Samantha's boyfriend is called Shane. I know, Shane and Samantha, it's too much. Shane is handsome, and dumber than a bag of hammers. They've been together for yonks, which means the only practical use Samantha might have for unconnected people such as myself is as objects of charity. Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful. When I was first overseas, every human contact was distended by loneliness. When shop assistants counted change to me I felt as if they were sharing their life stories. I don't feel so alien now but nor do I fit here.

Samantha put Kathleen on. She said, ‘Hi.’ She sounded uncertain. Once I hated Kathleen so much. She, Samantha and I flatted together in Kathleen's house. Kathleen used post-it notes to identify her food in the fridge, and wrote carping memos about late bills and general hygiene issues. She stole a CD of mine then denied it. She almost succeeded in poaching Shane. Samantha moved out in floods of tears; I very righteously poisoned her replacement against Kathleen.

I've spent the last two years travelling. It's a rite of passage for page 120 young New Zealanders. Travel offers heightened experience, which in your 20s you crave. I hoped to change; nothing spectacular happened. Getting back, I find that my old friends, in a lovely and horrible development, haven't altered one bit. The first couple of times that we went out, I was unaccustomed to the amount they drank. When I vomited, they cheered like we were 21. I'm having trouble readjusting. I lie in bed until my parents leave. Everyone on the phone has this cute accent. I feel like a conqueror, like I sacked villages and screwed women on five continents, roaring mindlessly yet in tune with a primordial music. Domesticated, cloaked in gore, I'm faintly ridiculous.

The distance between the present and the time when I hated Kathleen occurs most poignantly a week after her visit. I sit at a table eating the superb roast lamb her Dad has prepared. I overdo the compliments to the chef, a rumpled forbidding man with two sons and one daughter. Kathleen's Mum was a glamour-puss. She abandoned her husband for a younger guy then was killed by metastasising cancer. Kathleen's Dad may have lost love, but he kept life. He now lives it for his kids and, less intensely but with equal indulgence, a Jack Russell called Tommy.

Following the walk through my parents' house, Kathleen and I have a ceremonious lunch. I am a model of disorganisation. I fuss. Twenty-five minutes later the corned beef sandwiches are just about made. I go into raptures over the spring onions, as if praising this crisp and innocuous vegetable contains a secret penance. Forgive me, I never thought we would live this long. I slice and Kathleen tells me about her Mum, whom she always said was a bitch. I get the feeling that Kathleen is still composing notes to her re: the mess left.

Kathleen suddenly brings up Shane. I'm brisk. ‘We all know how neurotic Samantha is.’ I remind her of the CD, the performance I made about it. When I tell her that I found it the other day, her laugh passes like a spasm, pushing her shoulders up. I couldn't locate the cover, but I keep quiet about this.

‘Have you spoken to Kirsten?’

‘No.’ We drop it immediately. Once, we could have filled a week's worth of afternoons with Kirsten and Neil.

We lie on the grass in the backyard. It's summer and the air is page 121 sticky like hot sugar; clouds sunbathe with no thought for their health. Now and again a jet beetles across the rigid blue of the sky. Kathleen sprawls over the lawn. Her Dad paid for her air ticket, his kindness another of the strong forces that Kathleen habitually (and profitably) finds herself at the mercy of.

When we were flatting, a drugs squad detective lived next door. Our kitchen overlooked his back yard. I didn't work at all then; she worked sporadically. We were both on benefits. Christ we were lazy. Kids these days work like dogs. I've worked like that myself—hard graft has a narcotic quality, but lying here on the grass I can't help feeling it's also a form of self-abuse. Sometimes Kathleen and I smoked dope, played CDs and drank beer. Paranoid, we would crouch at the kitchen window, peering timorously past the cabbage tree to that lawful rectangle of suburbia. Once we spied him with a plastic rubbish bin in one hand. He waved. We nearly jumped out of our skins.

That was the honeymoon of our friendship. If Kathleen judged the moment was right she would drive up the road and return with an excellent white wine or what we hoped would be a ‘temperamental’ European liqueur. We would finish the thing, call friends then go out and sit in a nightclub, where we would feel underdressed and compensate by performing extravagant dance routines.

Periodically Kathleen visited the detective. His name was Tarrant. He jogged every day with his girlfriend and had the regulation grunty moustache. How these guys ever think they're undercover I'll never know. I didn't see her leave but she usually got back mid-evening, looking placid. ‘I've been having a beer with Tarrant,’ she would say, appending a sympathetic remark about some or other difficulty of policing. What a good neighbour, I thought. Maybe I wondered if she was afraid of being burgled. Her visits were so rare that I never questioned my opinion.

Seven years later, on the eve of Kathleen's return, Samantha told me, ‘She was fucking that cop.’

‘But didn't he …’

‘Yes.’

So, life is as simple as schoolboys believe.

‘Everyone we know is the same,’ says Kathleen, rolling over. Her page 122 outline remains in the flattened grass.

I interrupt. ‘Chris is the same.’ Her shoulders close around her and, for the second time today, she laughs, remembering the night we bought cough mixture and a crate of beer. We didn't care about Tarrant. We turned on every light in the house and left every door open. We played Elvis at full volume and sang, ‘We're caught in a trap.’ I remember Chris smiling beatifically. He was so munted he thought Kathleen's room was the bathroom. We found him in her wardrobe, her shirts draped over his head like colourful shrouds. His zip was open, his hands fumbling. Chris maintains he pissed over her shoes, Kathleen swears we caught him just in time.

‘No one is as sure of themselves as they used to be,’ Kathleen ventures. She pulls a cigarette from a packet she's had for weeks. Kathleen only smokes when she wants to.

‘Everyone's fat,’ I say, taking the pack. She agrees, Travel makes you slim.

‘When I got back,’ I add, ‘I sensed fear.’ I'm being dramatic I know, but the wider world insists on drama—bombs explode in the Middle East, South American economies collapse. All that stuff seems incongruous here in the heat, with so many trees about. But we rattle on like two old tragedians. Then Kathleen says she has to go. She'll be back in the world soon, and I'll be here, reminding myself to avoid the dramatic mode.

Some weeks later I bump into Samantha. We go to a café. Kathleen is now back ‘home’. Samantha has a terrible hangover. Lantern-jaw has been giving her trouble lately. She shivers, wants sit out of direct light then changes her mind. Samantha brightens. ‘Remember how Kathleen was learning French?’

‘Don't tell me,’ I deadpan, ‘she fucked her teacher.’ Samantha giggles.