Wanderlust (22 page)

But I had no idea how to break it all off. I felt guilty about causing pain. I had a debt, one now being covered by Stu and a renter in the basement, but how long could I let that go on? I pushed it out of my mind. I didn't want any weight to intrude.

I swam every morning, or whenever I got up, in the little cove. I floated on my back, drifting and weightless, then lay on the white sand below the tangle of spiky pandanus and piccabeen palms. What if I just stayed, I wondered. I could get a job, something mindless, and never leave. What if I just chose pleasure, chose the beach and the sun. That's why people saved for retirement, wasn't it? And here it was rolled out before me, all too easy. “What then shall we choose?” Kundera asks. “Weight or lightness?”

It was Kristin, several weeks richer, who spurred us on this time. She might have been concerned for my state of mind, or might have felt some obligation to protect my engagement as long as it was still in play, or maybe she just wanted to get on with things. She was an aggressive sightseer, and a whole itinerary lay ahead. She didn't see the romance in doing nothing. We declared ourselves done with buses and tacked a note to the bulletin board at the Koala Blue. A Canadian named Bruce called; he was traveling
north with his girlfriend, Liz, and he had a big sturdy Range Rover with a roof rack, the kind of vehicle Australians call a ute. For a share of the gas, he would take us farther north.

The best kind of travel—the kind I wanted to experience—involves a particular state of mind, in which one is not merely open to the occurrence of the unexpected, but to deep involvement in the unexpected, indeed, open to the possibility of having one's life changed forever by a chance encounter. After several months of phone calls, letters, and that one long fax, I determined that my tie to Stu, which is to say my tie to home, was not letting me be completely open to the world. It wasn't letting me be entirely weightless. While I'd already come far away, I wanted additionally to be able to feel that any life was possible. I wanted to be different people, and just as much, to see what sort of core remained as I shifted from skin to skin.

Bruce, Liz, Kristin, and I stayed overnight in Yeppoon, a sleepy beach town near the Tropic of Capricorn. A flat, sandy island called Great Keppel was the designated backpacker destination here, and so Liz, Kristin, and I took a ferry over to spend the day. Bruce, who didn't think it was worth the price of the ticket, stayed onshore and tinkered with his engine. We planned to leave in the evening.

Before we left, while Kristin and Liz were in the supermarket getting bread and cheese, I stepped into a phone booth and called Stu.

I had to cut my ties, I explained, adding that I didn't want to get married and was not coming home. It was agonizing to hurt him, and frightening to think that this was it between us. We talked and talked. I knew that the other three were waiting in the car for me, but I couldn't bring the conversation to a close. When, after an hour,
I stepped out of the phone box, night had fallen and a full moon was on the rise. For a long time thereafter, the sight of a full moon would remind me how many months it had been since that phone call.

We drove through the night. Once you're north of Brisbane, to continue northward is to move farther and farther from the urban rhythms of civilization. Human settlement spreads out. Miles of cultivated fields or long wild stretches of nature take up the distance between towns.

I awoke when we stopped for gas, in a town where the houses had corrugated tin roofs that sloped down over the decks. It was called Marlborough, Bruce said, and then we moved on into cattle land and I fell back asleep, my head on Kristin's shoulder. I awoke again when we slowed through fields of sugar cane, which looked like high, thick, densely packed grass. We'd come more than six hundred miles north of Noosa and more than eleven hundred since I'd looked at Sydney and decided we couldn't stay. We turned northeast toward a village called Airlie Beach, where we parked on a hillside at two in the morning. The three of us girls stretched out in the back and slept there. When the sun began to beat on the windows, I awoke and climbed onto the roof. The dawn was pink, and a white field of sailboat masts undulated below. I knew instantly that I wanted to stay. This was consummation. I was now fully open to the chance encounter, the thing that could change me. I had finally unloosed my ties, and by force of will been born again. I was open to whatever the world put in my path.

chapter seventeen

I
said good-bye to Kristin and she
climbed into a yellow station wagon with a pair of Swedes bound for Cairns. We promised to meet up later. I would catch up with her in the Northern Territories, or she would come back down here. The car pulled away and I looked down Airlie Beach's one main street, Shute Harbour Road. The buildings were painted and decorated to look different from each other—dark wood for the Hog's Breath Café, turquoise for the dive shops, pastels for the two-story apartment blocks—but underneath they were all made of cinderblock and corrugated metal. The architecture had a purpose: When a roof was ripped off in a typhoon, it was easy to replace.

Kristin had been a kind of tie to home, and now I was on my own. To stay I needed two things, a job and a place to live. They would buy me time on boats. The day she left I met a dark-haired guy in long surf shorts at the bar in the Hog's Breath Café, outpost of a chain that crammed its interiors with old signs and hubcabs, carefully strewn around to look haphazard. Stewie, who was twenty-three and a pleasant drunk, said he could hook me up. His name seemed symbolic. I let him take me by the elbow and lead me outside, where he pointed up the hill to a white house standing sentinel over Shute Harbour Road.

“You see the house with the red curtains?” he slurred. “We tie-dyed those ourselves.” I told him they showed beautiful workmanship. “Come wake me up in the morning. Go into the house and it's the room with the sock on the doorknob.”

At ten in the morning, I climbed the stairs to the front door, pretty sure Stewie would have forgotten me, but I had nothing better to do. Next to the door, nailed to the stucco, there was a black cursive sign that had once read “Airlie View,” but someone had replaced the
A
with a
G
so that now it said “Girlie View.” I pushed open the door and found a linoleum foyer, a living room with colorless wall-to-wall carpeting, and a giant television in front of the picture window that would have otherwise framed the bay. Grayish mattresses were stacked against one wall, for a makeshift sofa, and the tie-dyed curtains cast a rosy light on the dust motes and a potted marijuana plant.

“Hello?” I called and stepped inside. The house was silent, and I wondered if it was unoccupied, but I glanced in the kitchen just beyond the foyer and saw piles of dishes in the sink, and empty cartons and cans on the floor. A door led off the living room, and I was wondering if I should knock on it when a boy came out. He had long, curling, sun-streaked hair and a goatee and wore only a sarong. He was gold all over, and I looked away, as though from a bright light.

“The door was open,” I said.

He rubbed his forehead.

“I'm looking for Stew?” I couldn't always bring myself to use the diminutives.

“The door with the sock on it,” said the naked-chested man. I followed him and found the second door, which was cheap and hollow and also ajar. I peered into the crack and saw two men, one
of them my acquaintance from last night, asleep on a mattress on the floor. I stepped back and knocked, listened to the silence of the house, and knocked again.

“What time is it?” Stew groaned.

“Hi,” I said brightly and stepped into the room.

He stared at me.

“Beth? From last night? We talked about a place to live?”

“Oh yeah,” he said. He scratched some part of his body under the sheet and looked over at the figure next to him. “That's Brendan.”

My shrug came out exaggeratedly, as I tried to signal that whatever went on here, it was cool. Brendan was silent and still, hair splayed across the pillowless mattress, sleeping the sleep of the passed out.

Stew looked up at me.

“Bethy, give me five minutes, will ya?”

“Sure,” I said, and retreated to the living room. Boys started to appear. They came out of bedroom doors, in from the backyard, in through the front. They were cheerful and disheveled and unsurprised. Stewie emerged and made introductions. They
were
surprised when Stewie said I wanted a place to live. They had had lots of people stay, but no girls. Seven or eight people resided in the house, give or take drifter friends, all in their early twenties. Most of the principal residents worked in the kitchen at the Hog's Breath Café.

The boy I'd met when I first walked into the house was Laurie. He was the tallest and finest of them all, and probably as a consequence, the most easygoing. He played music and kept a guitar and a didgeridoo in his room. My new friend Stewie was from Perth and had been on the dole, but now was getting some kind of government student subsidy so that he could train as a dive instructor. Nathan was the only serious sailor in the house, as well as the only one with his
hair trimmed short. He'd done well in high school physics, he said, which made him so good on a boat. He had his own room in the basement and a girlfriend down south in nursing school. Brendan was a shorter, rougher version of Laurie, and was between bedrooms, catching as catch can every night. Muzz was nineteen and had just showed up; he slept on a bunk bed in the basement and collected the dole. The others treated him as a sort of pet and called him Muzzy, Muzzo, or Muzzer. Dutchie came into town from his job at a mine.

Later I'd meet a couple of orbiting girls. There was Tracy, a zaftig blonde with a crush on Stewie. She had an air of competence and a restaurant job. And there was a brunette they called “Crazy Dog Woman,” which I thought was cruel until I found out that she had two big dogs. She came to try to have sex with Laurie. So did other women; it was generally known that if Laurie was sleeping naked with his door open, he was fair game.

The house was set to be torn down, Stewie explained, and the landlord had rented it to them for its last year of life. It was the cheapest five-room house in Airlie Beach. Behind the house there was a large, empty metal boat shed with a concrete floor, and two boys were moving out of it today, headed down to Surfer's Paradise. I could have the shed and a mattress for thirty dollars a week. I went and got my backpack from my hostel and moved in.

The house had a stove but no telephone or refrigerator. When someone bought beer it was necessary to drink it all at once. The boys threw their orange peels and fish bones out the window, and sometimes left messages for one another on the walls, which was ineffective because no one remembered to look for new scrawls. When I wanted to shower I tromped across the backyard to the open back door of the house, toilet kit in hand, as though in a campground. I carried my own toilet paper. I wore flip-flops in the shower for protection
against the grime and mold, and stashed tea and noodles in the kitchen cupboards. I thought of Graham Greene's
Journey Without Maps,
where he writes, “There seemed to be a seediness about the place you couldn't get to the same extent elsewhere, and seediness has a very deep appeal.... It seems to satisfy, temporarily, the sense of nostalgia for something lost.”

I quickly counted Stewie as a friend. He ate ketchup on rice when he was out of money, but after he picked up his government check, he was able to buy toilet paper, toothpaste, and tomato sauce, items he usually wrote on a list ahead of payday. “Clean bum, clean teeth, full tum,” he'd say, settling onto the mattress pile and tucking into his meal.

I bought candles for my bedside, and secured them on the concrete floor with hot wax. The landlord's random belongings, stored and forgotten, were stacked along the perimeter of the shed: lawn chairs, a dishwasher, outboard motors. Though I had the most utilitarian space of all, it had a feature that none of the rooms in the house shared: I could shut it from the inside with a heavy metal bolt. No open doors for me, no random mattress guests. I craved total freedom, and I envied boys because I thought they could have it. But there was a way in which, as a girl, I could act free but never quite get there in my head. However many expectations I escaped and constraints I threw off, there would always be that nagging caution at the back of my mind that said I'd better lock the door.