He folded his arms. “We’re going to do this now? Argue about my future in Maccas on a Saturday night while the Village People and The Breakfast Club look on.”
She mirrored his posture. “Just for that quip, yes we are.”
“Why do I need a phone?”
“Because that’s what friends do, they phone each other, they text. They don’t meet at the third beach pavilion on the right.”
He almost smiled, but he must’ve figured she wasn’t joking. “Casual. That’s what you said. If I see you, I see you.”
“That’s what I said. And you said nothing at all, but you’ve spent time with me all the same. And that was six weeks ago.”
“Are you saying casual has a time limit?”
She grimaced because hell yes, they’d moved on, they were in the city, they were holding hands, he’d let her buy him a meal, empty calories though they might be. She’d spent almost all of her leisure time with him and when she wasn’t with him, she was wondering about him.
This was more than casual and the way he looked at her, the way his body reacted when she was near, none of that was casual. It was duelling chainsaws, it was leaf blowers breaking the peace of Sunday morning, and whatever Drum thought of his future, Foley would fight for it never to be begging outside a train station.
She could do nothing for random homeless people, the ones in her council or across the city, beyond simple compassion, beyond supporting their rights, but she could do something for Drum. Never let him forget he had a future.
“I’m saying friends can be more than casual.”
“And what does that mean?”
She threw her hands open, exasperated. She didn’t understand herself enough to explain it to him, but they’d moved beyond careless and spontaneous. “This, being in each other’s lives.”
He looked around and she braced for him to deflect with another clever comeback, a semantic argument. He smiled in his slow, shy way. “This is good.”
It was Maccas on a Saturday night, on the way to an event she wanted to check out for work purposes, but it was progress.
It was progress when he held her hand on the street, when he used his size to make sure she wasn’t jostled in the crowd at the dance event, when he allowed her to pay his bus fare back to the beach and listened as she raved on about what was good and what was within her own scope to do better with a similar event of her own next year.
And when she next saw him and it wasn’t for a run, he wore jeans that fit him, old and wash-faded, but at least long enough to reach his shoes, and that was progress too.
18: Meteor
It’d been a long time since Drum had to plan on pleasing another person. Not that Foley was hard to please. She was easy to please. Now. That’d happened somewhere after she’d given up trying to evict him and before they’d worked out their version of friendship.
Being friends meant he took on extra labouring work and hunted out clothes from Vinnies that fit better. It meant he was prepared to leave the area, be around her in front of other people with less fear he’d dirty her reputation. It was simple things like strolling past the old Beeton house she loved to check it wasn’t more tumbledown, catching the bus together, riding in her car, lying in the park in the sun with a book each.
It meant they touched. A definition of friendship he knew they’d stretched but was unwilling to think too much about, because having Foley near, being able to lay his hands on her, was worth more to him than he was prepared to admit to. It was a fresh kind of sanity, a new way of balancing himself in the world. As long as Foley, his bright star, his fixed point, thought he was tolerable, he could tolerate himself.
She’d changed too. She’d stopped trying so hard to get under his skin, into his head. She quit pushing him to create a different future. She let it go. Like a meditation, she let the biggest of the questions she wouldn’t ask, he wouldn’t answer, rest. He knew they weren’t going away, they were in a kind of suspended animation, not real, not present, without meaning or influence.
Some mornings when they ran together, he remembered that was simply another form of lying to himself, to her, but the necessity of seeing her, having her presence, overrode all his usual survival instincts and rules for living.
She lay on his couch with a book, reading by the light of a kerosene lamp while he cooked. It was a cold night, but with the fire blazing it wasn’t too terrible and they were both rugged up. Foley in a scarf and beanie that deserved ski fields and mountain vistas, her own snowman with a carrot nose and pebble eyes. He was going to give her barbequed snapper fillets, did them wrapped in foil with lemon, following Paul’s instructions, along with baked potato and steamed vegetables. He had milk and cocoa powder. He had marshmallows.
The irony of the fact he’d never cooked for a woman before amused him more than the fact she’d wiped the floor with him shooting hoops with a borrowed basketball. She was a bloody little hustler, telling him she hadn’t shot goals since she was a kid. He needed to roust up a deck of cards and tempt her into a hand of poker soon to see if she had game there as well.
“What’s amusing you?” She’d put the book down, rolled onto her side and propped her head on her hand.
“This.” He waved a fork. He’d acquired two and they were metal. He meant the simplicity, but it was more than that, it was the lightness. What he felt when he was with her was an absence of the weight of remorse and culpability. Foley was the holiday he didn’t deserve, taking him away from the consequences his ambition had wrought. What he felt was joy and it was alien and compromising.
“Drum, you okay?”
He shook his head and moved a tinfoil parcel out of the flame. He’d thought denial, restraint, removing himself from the world would be enough to calm the temper, the restlessness inside him, allow him to go on when it seemed an impossible ask. Joy, happiness, comfort, security, companionship, all of those emotions belonged to worthy men. He was not worthy.
“You look like you’ve seen your own ghost.”