Nothing Compares to You
The days edge into the haze of the last of summer and still, the grass seems to be flowing in green waves before your eyes. In the evenings, windows open and crickets talk along the fence line, probably about the weather. Beside me on the couch is A, my husband of forty seven years next month. We’re watching our latest compromise tv show. We each have preferences, so we play it right down the middle, soft murders constructed for television.
I first saw A when I was around nineteen and he was twenty four. He was from the group of cadets before mine. One morning, he arrived at the dungeon of a classroom at News Limited looking for a signature from Judy the incomprehensible LIverpudlian shorthand teacher.
So, there I was sweating away on my miserable shortforms, when the doors opened and in bowled A, all dark hair and beard. Around the other cadets and I heard a few snippets: who he was, that he’d just come back from one of his trips but wasn’t staying. Also, that he’d been in Perth building a boat. Or maybe that he came from Darwin, swept to us by a cyclone? There was so much not to know.
At that time, I was in another relationship that was already drifting apart. I did the drifting. That day in cadet class though I didn’t talk to A, but I remembered him (unlike my shorthand). Just in a passing sort of way though. He seemed nice but looking back now, it seems like a sliding doors moment, something unlabelled and a bit unsettling. In those days there were many of us journalists, with someone always having a party, so not impossible I thought.
Three years later, a riotous party was underway (probably at the Celtic Club) to celebrate the graduation of our group’s cadets. We were all graded! And I looked across the room near the bar and A was there surrounded. I had no idea what I was doing but I did it anyway. It did feel like this would bring change for me but still, I went to talk to him in his lion-coloured shirt and it wasn’t long before we got out of there. It really was like the line from the INXS song ‘Never Tear Us Apart’: ‘I was standing, you were there, two worlds colliding.’ Possibly corny, I know but I was instantly comfortable with this kind, amiable, beautiful person.
Another line from that song applies to us: ‘I told you we could fly.’ He was that person in my life, and he still is. We started talking on that first night and have seldom stopped. The other night he made me laugh so much, I wet myself (I’m not proud).
Within a month of our meeting, he’d sold his Kombi, quit a new job at ‘The Australian’ bailed on a place in a share house with a friend and we were holed up on a mattress on the floor above Mum’s dress shop in Footscray, waiting for our student charter flight to London.
Friends at work had given me a pale blue Samsonite suitcase. For him, there were puzzled looks because he quit after three months and that was strange because he has an epic work ethic. I never expected that. The thing is, apart from being a journalist, he was a dreamy hippy who threaded flowers through my long hair by the banks of the silver Ovens River one sunny green day.
But in London, we were alone on a tight budget, so the city was not for us. We went south maybe because south reminded us of our southerly natures. We got jobs, found a house to rent called ‘Journey’s End’ and being wrapped in his arms at night was all I wanted. After a year working in Exeter, Plymouth, and St. Austell as journalists, we got married in a Registry Office with two subs as witnesses. The paper we worked for, the Exeter, Express and Echo, gave us and a steak dinner at the White Hart. Pretty soon though A’s restless spirit broke through and we decided to get some bikes as a cheap way to see Europe. He wanted a boat, but finances didn’t allow. I’d never have tried such a trip without him. The E.E&E put us on the front page us with the head ‘Honeymoon on wheels’.
I’m not much of an athlete but he was very strong and would push both bikes up hills as we rode from England to Greece, a jar of Vegemite in our panniers. We camped in a two-man tent by roadsides and in paddocks and once woke surrounded by nosey cows. On the Peloponnese when we were hot from riding, we swam in blue and green sea. Then we took the bikes on a ferry to a Greek island.
And, slowly, it dawned that we had almost no money left. The people at our little hotel let us stay until the money came. Possibly we were semi-prisoners, but it was kind of heaven that took a month, and the island became beloved to us. In the mornings I took my bike out to get food at the market. I found a stray dog I really liked. I did the washing in a bucket beside a wall of red geraniums. A was gathering his strength for the life he knew was coming, and I think he was daunted. There was a pause in him. Eventually his dear dad wired us enough to get home and we arrived with fourteen drachmas left.
We got our jobs back and rented a house in North Melbourne. We became other, better dressed versions of the lovers we were. Relationships change as we change and there were moments when the grind got us, the long haul is a different place from the moment the door first opened. Though the idea of ‘work’ in a relationship always struck me as odd. If you keep talking and listening, you will hear each other.
Anyway, A edited two newspapers and worked in television. We had three children plus far too many dogs and cats. I wrote for magazines and did a degree then wrote a bit because I liked it. A found me a room above a coffee shop (now a burger shop) in Glenferrie Road where I wrote my first unpublished novel (for the best really).
My beautiful hippy was always busy now and sometimes we lost sight of each other. It’s tough to be everything to everyone but that’s what being a parent, and a partner can mean.
Then the years started to roll by in decades and like all lovers, time has changed us physically, but I think not mentally. And yet he keeps working hard. It’s as if he’s still pushing our bikes up that hill. And he can still make me laugh as if it were yesterday.
