by Bill Collopy

One day earlier, we were navigating a road without curves. It bisected hills under cloudless sky bright as a test pilot’s eyes. Pebbles rattled our undercarriage when someone’s old Ford almost collected us, crossing over into our lane. Drunk or sleepy – there’s no excuse. I swore. I reeled. Keeping hold of the steering wheel, Guy grabbed my arm.

‘Steady on, mate.’

Our fellow travellers were looking back at that disappearing sedan. The blond one, a Canadian called Tom, tried to lighten the mood.

‘I’d like to go over these rules again. What exactly is a ‘googly’…?

Guy and I laughed. Our other passenger, called Tom, did not. Born and educated in Munich, he had long ago given up trying to untangle the riddle of cricket, with its identically dressed teams, meal breaks and unfathomable terminology. As if to underline this bemusement, Guy was trying to describe the game for both Toms using equivalent baseball idioms like home run, pitcher and foul. The more he tried the funnier it became, like translating Chinese into Portuguese using a Mandarin-Spanish dictionary.

Presently a dust-caked sign welcomed us to the town: population 1,472. Was that last digit for someone’s twin babies? It didn’t look as though anyone had updated the count in a long time.

Up from the Latrobe Valley we had come, our car floor bottle-littered as we sang all the way from Sale to Orbost. Sang every song each driver knew – in several tongues, with varying degrees of crudity.

Into the town we cruised past two hotels and parked outside The Royal, where Guy’s other friends had gathered for a drink. He’d organised this event for the long weekend, assembling two teams from collections of old and new friends. Born in Ararat, he had played cricket with me since university days, before his career took him north of the Murray. Still a city-country boy, an in-between, he had opted for Sydney over Melbourne. Now he wanted his university friends and his silver city friends to meet. He told me he was about to turn twenty-eight, and this match meant a lot to him. Hardly anyone said no to Guy. Via email, he had arranged this interstate meeting of mixed teams in neutral territory, a town equi-distant between the two capitals. Our task was to collect him from his parents’ house in Kew. He would then drive back home to Sydney with his new friends: all very symbolic.

When I phoned him the day before departure Guy sounded odd, as though he wanted to tell me something but kept skirting around the subject. On the road, with Tom and Tom in the car, he dried up. 

Beer in hand, I stood on bleached planks of a pub verandah, regarding blue-green hills and some trees marred by last summer’s fires.

‘From Victoria, are you?’ said the bartender, when I went back inside for refills, asking for pots rather than middies.

Three beers down, I could feel my nose starting to numb.

‘What happens on weekends around here?’

The bartender shrugged.

‘Not much. Got a concert tonight. It’s Australia Day. There’ll be a band, I reckon. There’s usually a band.’

Since graduating, I had travelled to Bangkok and to Bali, shopped in Singapore and backpacked through Ireland and Wales. But on my own continent I’d never ventured further inland than the snowfields. Boyhood vacations tended to be coastal, or else day trips to the mountains. So here I stood, a thousand kilometres from the nearest beach, feeling as if I had opened some hatch and found a secret garden; except that nothing lay inside, only wilderness – parched, desolate and huge.

Of the concert I remember little, just that the host talked in an Austral-Yankee drawl. Never a successful combination. Pick one or the other, in my opinion. A girl in tassels yodelled, singing about paper roses, which were only imitation, you see. Everyone drank beer. I looked for Guy, wondering if we could talk. I had begun to wonder if he might be sick. Then one of his female friends from Sydney absorbed me and we retired early.

Next morning everybody was shaking off hangovers, which meant that both teams played indifferent cricket. My only sweet moment was hitting a six into gum trees, before I was caught behind on twelve. Worse, I bit my tongue when a sharp off-break caught me in the cheek and I tasted bloody humiliation. Sun burned my neck while dust parched the tongue. When it was our turn to bowl, I managed only a single wicket. Both teams agreed to call the match a draw, and we went back to drinking.

Come evening we headed for the RSL, where I ordered rum and Coke. There was a momentary frown from the barman and then a shrug. He looked old enough to be a veteran of more than one foreign war.

Guy joined me at the bar.

‘I’ll have gin and bitters, with a slice of lemon.’

The barman looked up.

‘No lemons for you, mate, not till you take that plum out of your mouth.’

The bloke had to repeat it, as neither Guy nor I were sure we’d heard right. That took a little sting from the jeer. Ignorant old bastard. Just because we were from out of town and Guy had lost his country boy accent. Just because we weren’t old enough to be war veterans and our haircuts gave no hint of military service. So what? I felt like asking him what were returned servicemen’s leagues for nowadays, if all they could do was sneer. Would they carry a 1940s grudge against Tom from Munich, and refuse to serve him? They might assume that the other Tom was from Wisconsin and not Winnipeg, and call him a Yank. The rude buggers. I was ropable. If this were just a place to keep old soldiers soaked and sedated, they’d soon have to close up as the ageing warriors died off. Didn’t they need the custom of younger patrons? I was ready to make a scene but Guy dissuaded me.

‘Forget it. Been meaning to talk with you. Come outside.’

On the landing we sat with drinks, watching stars; diamond-bright away from city diffusion, here at the back of beyond. 

I asked if he was okay. Guy and I had met ten years ago, freshers. I was trying to grow a beard and he was trying to flunk medicine. Neither of us achieved our aims.

‘It’s sort of personal,’ Guy said. ‘Should’ve got around to mentioning it earlier.’

‘Your health?’

The smile could be wistful or self-mocking: hard to tell with Guy.

‘Fit as a mallee bull. No, the trouble’s in another area.’

‘Money?’

‘Sex.’

This was unaccustomed territory. Guy and I used to go to football matches together. We played cards. We drank. We didn’t talk of intimate matters. What had my old mate done now – got some girl pregnant?’

‘Been working through issues,’ he said. ‘Told my parents. Told Michelle. She took it well, considering. Took it better than my Dad.’

‘What’s going on?’

I really had no idea. When he explained, I gagged. Not cool. But how was I supposed to guess? Idiot. So obvious later.

‘Hope we can still be mates,’ he said.

Guy meant it. He wasn’t pulling my leg. Easier for him at that moment. He hadn’t been landed with this bolt from the blue. In fact, he had working up to moments like this for months, even years.

I churned with betrayal. Desertion. Anger. There was no time to cover up. How did I not see this? Was it the lack of giveaway mannerisms, or those speech habits they put on? So he was a fitness nut, spending hours in the gym. Where’s the warning bell in that? Everything felt upside down. Guy was the honest one here. I fudged my reply, falsehood by omission. How could I bear to picture my mate with other men? It made me sick. No way, I wanted to yell. You can’t be.

‘Let’s go back inside,’ I said.

Lights had dimmed inside the RSL, save for a ring of globes around the Queen’s portrait: dusk salute. At the going down of the sun we remembered them, the fallen; men like my grandfather and Guy’s, who both fought in Flanders – while Tom and Tom’s forebears crouched in enemy trenches on opposite sides. If an old-fashioned war broke out tomorrow, Guy was the type who would volunteer – a medico of conscience. I might’ve been angry at that moment but I was a teacher not a fighter. I might choose not to march with him to the Dardanelles or Kokoda or Khe Sanh. I might turn deserter and risk being shot, or sit out the conflict in prison, vainly objecting. My homosexual friend was the brave one, keeping his secret for years like an undercover cop or double agent; not wanting to upset his family; sleeping with women who loved him under false pretences. Far from proving his cowardice, to come out of his closet like this showed real guts. Did I perhaps envy him that freedom? He could be whatever he chose now; make rules or break them, or do without rules.

I almost wished him luck but the words wouldn’t form. He was the one standing on the doorstep of an unexplored land. What did he see from there – and how far – beyond bushfire-prone scrub, floodplains and a million hectares of the wild? Next day it would be my turn behind a car’s wheel but an angry fool like me wasn’t going to glimpse much beyond blown-out tyres by the roadside and hours of unbending highway, winds dry as any prairie or steppe. I would see little further than memories, just skeletons dancing in the dust. Without my friend, the car would feel empty.