Sale of the Century eat your heart out!
He fed me, too: an old family recipe, he said. His ma’s scrambled eggs, with chicken noodle soup flavouring, on white buttered toast.
Surprisingly delicious!
In the corridor leading to the makeshift studio, I spied photos of Marty as a little boy. I was reminded of the thought I had the first time I saw him—he looks like a cherub! A very tall cherub! His face had not changed since childhood. There were more photos of him holding his nieces, cradling them in his long arms like a total pro. He was so big, and they were so small. He looked confident. God, said my ovaries. He’d be a bloody great dad!
I was in such a cheeky mood, I said it aloud. I told him, ‘My ovaries are flipping out, just looking at these photos.’ I said, ‘Dude, did you put these here on purpose to impress me?’
He laughed. ‘No! I mean, yes! I mean … you know how much I love kids!’ And then put on a cheesy smile.
And I said, ‘That sounds like the kind of thing someone who wants to shag you would say, just so you shag them.’
Now it was his turn to turn pink.
Yes! I thought. Still in with a chance!
A week later, Marty called to say he’d finished the first mixes—would it be okay if he dropped them over tonight for a listen?
I said, ‘Cool,’ and he said, ‘Oh, I’ll bring dinner too.’
Wow. I mean, wow. Who even was this guy?
At 6 pm, Marty made his way through the Compost rear entrance, and knocked on the back door. He was carrying a CD, a bottle of champagne and a white paper bag, inside which was later revealed to be a big platter of fresh oysters and prawns.
Ilka and I laughed so much—you just didn’t see meals like that at a place like Compost. Lentil soup, beetroot and carrot salad, yes … but oysters and champagne?
Ilka looked at me with a hooley-dooley-I-think-he-likes-you expression.
Holy crap, I thought. She’s right. Oh my God. This is happening! Naturally, as always on the cusp of everything good in my life, Frank cranked the fuck up.
What if this is a terrible mistake?
What if this ruins everything?
What if the only reason he is so nice is because he is already married and has children and …
Fuck off, Frank! I screamed in my head, but he was loud that night. Persistent.
I went quiet.
Later, in the backyard, under the grapevine, under the stars, I made the mistake of letting Frank speak for me. Out my mouth they tumbled, every little thing that could possibly go wrong, blurted out for no good reason, except that I was freaking the fuck out.
Safe to say, it spoiled the mood.
I mean, he hadn’t even kissed me yet! And there I was, listing for him all the reasons why we couldn’t, well … you should have heard me! I sounded as though I was trying to put him off proposing, or something!
You know how Marty responded?
In typical, Marty Brown fashion.
He heard me out, he said he got it, but then he said that it was probably time, now, to make a choice.
No, really—either we were going to go all in, or not at all.
I was shocked by his directness. I didn’t know he had it in him, actually. And I saw clearly then that, when it came to love, Marty wasn’t like other guys. He wasn’t going to play it cool and string me along. He wasn’t going to tell me he loved me, and then treat me like I didn’t matter. He just put it all out on the table. Apparently, it had been clear to Marty for a long time that I was the one for him. Years, in fact. He said he had known it from the first day we met. It was the day John and I had our first jam together. He had walked into the house, heard my voice, followed it down the hallway, leaned on the wall listening, and just knew, before he’d even seen my face, that he was in love with me.
We were twenty-two years old then.
We were twenty-six now.
Would it have killed him to say something sooner? I thought.
Before I could say that aloud too, he kissed me, straight on the lips, gentle and sweet, and then just looked into my eyes, said goodnight, and left.
Marty says that when he walked out of the wooden Compost gates that night and drove away, he had already resigned himself to the fact that I was never going to have the courage to jump in. That was okay, he said, because at least he knew now what he wanted: someone like me.
I, in the meantime, was already inside, listening to our demos, thinking, shit, we sound awesome!
Marty says he was surprised when I called the next day and asked what he was doing that night.
‘Just … stuff,’ he said.
‘Do you want to go to the Punters Club with me and see a band?’
‘Okay,’ he said.
We drank until the early hours of the morning. After that, for kicks, he wheeled me around the streets of Fitzroy in a discarded shopping trolley.
‘So strong!’ I said.
‘Why, Ms Bowditch, you flatter me.’
Back at his mate’s place, still happy and drunk after everybody else had long gone to bed, we lay down together on the sticky share-house carpet, kissed again, and both proceeded to fall soundly, happily asleep.
In the morning, as I peeled myself off that carpet, I saw Marty’s buddy ironing his shirt for work. When he walked past us, I thought I heard a small round of applause. Had I imagined it? Was I still drunk? No, apparently everyone had known this was coming. It was only me who had missed it.
The love story of Marty and Clare had finally begun.
Around this time, I started a new job as a sort-of-secretary for Defah’s aunty, Fabian, a high-level leadership expert (who
