with the bureaucratic demands of all the organizations that now impinged upon my life, from the university itself down to the shared house groceries subcommittee. In the last few weeks, though, I’d finally started hitting my stride. I’d got a part-time job, stacking shelves in a supermarket; the pay was lousy, but it was enough to take the edge off my financial anxieties, and the hours weren’t so long that they left me with no time for anything but study.
I doodled harmonic contours on the notepaper in front of me. “So what do you do for fun?” I said. “Apart from complex analysis?”
Francine didn’t reply immediately. This wasn’t the first time we’d been alone together, but I’d never felt confident that I had the right words to make the most of the situation. At some point, though, I’d stopped fooling myself that there was ever going to be a perfect moment, with the perfect phrase falling from my lips: something subtle but intriguing slipped deftly into the conversation, without disrupting the flow. So now I’d made my interest plain, with no attempt at artfulness or eloquence. She could judge me as she knew me from the last three months, and if she felt no desire to know me better, I would not be crushed.
“I write a lot of Perl scripts,” she said. “Nothing complicated; just odds and ends that I give away as freeware. It’s very relaxing.”
I nodded understandingly. I didn’t think she was being deliberately discouraging; she just expected me to be slightly more direct.
“Do you like Deborah Conway?” I’d only heard a couple of her songs on the radio myself, but a few days before I’d seen a poster in the city announcing a tour.
“Yeah. She’s great.”
I started thickening the conjugation bars over the variables I’d scrawled. “She’s playing at a club in Surrey Hills,” I said. “On Friday. Would you like to go?”
Francine smiled, making no effort now to appear world-weary. “Sure. That would be nice.”
I smiled back. I wasn’t giddy, I wasn’t moonstruck, but I felt as if I was standing on the shore of an ocean, contemplating its breadth. I felt the way I felt when I opened a sophisticated monograph in the library, and was reduced to savouring the scent of the print and the crisp symmetry of the notation, understanding only a fraction of what I read. Knowing there was something glorious ahead, but knowing too what a daunting task it would be to come to terms with it.
I said, “I’ll get the tickets on my way home.”
To celebrate the end of exams for the year, the household threw a party. It was a sultry November night, but the backyard wasn’t much bigger than the largest room in the house, so we ended up opening all the doors and windows and distributing food and furniture throughout the ground floor and the exterior, front and back. Once the faint humid breeze off the river penetrated the depths of the house, it was equally sweltering and mosquito-ridden everywhere, indoors and out.
Francine and I stayed close for an hour or so, obeying the distinctive dynamics of a couple, until by some unspoken mutual understanding it became clear that we could wander apart for a while, and that neither of us was so insecure that we’d resent it.
I ended up in a corner of the crowded backyard, talking to Will, a biochemistry student who’d lived in the house for the last four years. On some level, he probably couldn’t help feeling that his opinions about the way things were run should carry more weight than anyone else’s, which had annoyed me greatly when I’d first moved in. We’d since become friends, though, and I was glad to have a chance to talk to him before he left to take up a scholarship in Germany.
In the middle of a conversation about the work he’d be doing, I caught sight of Francine, and he followed my gaze.
Will said, “It took me a while to figure out what finally cured you of your homesickness.”
“I was never homesick.”
“Yeah, right.” He took a swig of his drink. “She’s changed you, though. You have to admit that.”
“I do. Happily. Everything’s clicked, since we got together.” Relationships were meant to screw up your studies, but my marks were soaring. Francine didn’t tutor me; she just drew me into a state of mind where everything was clearer.
“The amazing thing is that you got together at all.” I scowled, and Will raised a hand placatingly. “I just meant, when you first moved in, you were pretty reserved. And down on yourself. When we interviewed you for the room, you practically begged us to give it to someone more deserving.”
“Now you’re taking the piss.”
He shook his head. “Ask any of the others.”
I fell silent. The truth was, if I took a step back and contemplated my situation, I was as astonished as he was. By the time I’d left my hometown, it had become clear to me that good fortune had nothing much to do with luck. Some people were born with wealth, or talent, or charisma. They started with an edge, and the benefits snowballed. I’d always believed that I had, at best, just enough intelligence and persistence to stay afloat in my chosen field; I’d topped every class in high school, but in a town the size of Orange that meant nothing, and I’d had no illusions about my fate in Sydney.
I owed it to Francine that my visions of mediocrity had not been fulfilled; being with her had transformed my life. But where had I found the nerve to imagine that I had anything to offer her in return?
“Something happened,” I admitted. “Before I asked her out.”
“Yeah?”
I almost clammed up; I hadn’t told anyone about the events in the alley, not even Francine. The incident had come to seem too personal, as if to recount it at all would be to lay my conscience bare. But Will was off to Munich in less than a week, and it was easier to confide in someone I didn’t expect to see again.
When I finished, Will bore a satisfied grin, as if I’d explained everything. “Pure karma,” he announced. “I should have guessed.”
“Oh, very scientific.”
“I’m serious. Forget the Buddhist mystobabble; I’m talking about the real thing. If you stick to your principles, of course things go better for you-assuming you don’t get killed in the process. That’s elementary psychology. People have a highly developed sense of reciprocity, of the appropriateness of the treatment they receive from each other. If things work out too well for them, they can’t help asking, ‘What did I do to deserve this?’ If you don’t have a good answer, you’ll sabotage yourself. Not all the time, but often enough. So if you do something that improves your self-esteem-”
“Self-esteem is for the weak,” I quipped. Will rolled his eyes. “I don’t think like that,” I protested.
“No? Why did you even bring it up, then?”
I shrugged. “Maybe it just made me less pessimistic. I could have had the crap beaten out of me, but I didn’t. That makes asking someone to a concert seem a lot less dangerous.” I was beginning to cringe at all this unwanted analysis, and I had nothing to counter Will’s pop psychology except an equally folksy version of my own.
He could see I was embarrassed, so he let the matter drop. As I watched Francine moving through the crowd, though, I couldn’t shake off an unsettling sense of the tenuousness of the circumstances that had brought us together. There was no denying that if I’d walked away from the alley, and the kitchen hand had died, I would have felt like shit for a long time afterwards. I would not have felt entitled to much out of my own life.
I hadn’t walked away, though. And even if the decision had come down to the wire, why shouldn’t I be proud that I’d made the right choice? That didn’t mean everything that followed was tainted, like a reward from some sleazy, palm-greasing deity. I hadn’t won Francine’s affection in a medieval test of bravery; we’d chosen each other, and persisted with that choice, for a thousand complicated reasons.
We were together now; that was what mattered. I wasn’t going to dwell on the path that had brought me to her, just to dredge up all the doubts and insecurities that had almost kept us apart.
As we drove the last kilometre along the road south from Ar Rafidiyah, I could see the Wall of Foam glistening ahead of us in the morning sunlight. Insubstantial as a pile of soap bubbles, but still intact, after six weeks.
“I can’t believe it’s lasted this long,” I told Sadiq.
“You didn’t trust the models?”
