sixty-one

A strange birthday.

Yesterday I drive my good woman down the Geelong Road to Queenscliff. On our right sun bursts into the car from behind the You Yangs, black horizon ahead. We edge our way into Geelong through the deluge. We talk overseas holidays, my good woman’s plans to ski Europe with her kids, mine to ride one last time in the Pyrénées. Can we get a week together in Paris?

We check into a Victorian-era Queenscliff hotel designed for bedroom farce: dark narrow corridors, staircase landings, secret alcoves. The furnishing reeks antiquity, polished, scrolled, stuffed with horse-hair. Our room is taller than it is long or wide; it fits a double bed on a thick floral rug, no chair, no television, no cuppa, no surface on which to lie a book.

We wander Queenscliff, look over The Rip from a sandstone cliff. Icy winds tug at our clothes, blow my good woman’s hat off. The place is closed for winter, dinner options limited to a Chinese café run by people who look like Belgians, and three empty hotels. We settle for pizza. It’s good.

We huddle and cuddle in our echoing room. Affection tries to lead somewhere, fails. Long silences and nervous laughter give way to broken sleep, the morning no better. Polite but eerie quiet dogs us in the bathroom, the car, the ferry terminal, in the passenger lounge as the ferry ploughs the choppy opening to Port Phillip.

We breakfast in Sorrento, make the smallest of small talk. The same in the car is we semi-circle the eastern side of the bay returning home. Somewhere near Dandenong my good woman asks what happened last night: one minute I am there with her, then gone.

I drive, rub my chin. She says she hasn’t known whether to say something—it’s my birthday—or let it go as imagination. Oh, no. It’s real. I explain that something fractured, about two months ago, the day she of her bike accident; her arm breaks, and something between us too. Last night doubt about everything I think I know and feel grips and paralyses me.

In her kitchen she wonders if it’s her or me or us or culture or circumstances. I’ve wondered all this too, I say. Perhaps it’s time, that our relationship keeps coming second to children, jobs, distance. We are honest, no fudging, no avoiding the potential here for pain. Neither of us knows quite what it means, now, tomorrow, the day after.

Time runs out; she has at her Doncaster office client at one. We hug each other and I drive home.

I am sixty-one and know nothing about anything.

Rock on.