Mug Shots by Barry Oakley Read Free Book Online

imagined them saying. Our response would have been a puzzler: ‘We’re fighting about the Symbolist Movement in French poetry.’

Do you think he’s normal?
    None of these rigours gave me the slightest help in my quest for maturity and poise. Valerie had already noted the oddity of a Catholic taking her to see a Communist film at the New Theatre, and I had more in store. She agreed to come with me to a symphony concert at Melbourne Town Hall, in a tone that suggested this could be my last chance.
    We arranged to meet under the portico, and to calm my nerves I had a couple of beers beforehand. Unable to say the words toilet or bathroom in her presence, I didn’t go at interval. The concert finished with Brahms’s First Symphony. As the music built, so did the pressure on my bladder. The adagio—come on! The andante—get on with it! At last, the finale (which Brahms was accused of pinching from Beethoven). My companion’s transported, while I’m about to explode. Will row five disappear in a golden shower? Would I have to rush out and suffer irretrievable loss of face? With only a couple of minutes to go, with crescendos thundering around me, I suddenly got up and pushed past endless knobbled knees to the exit. All the evidence was now in. Valerie was out with a madman.
    Jane from my student teacher days had long gone elsewhere, but there was still the handsome Heather, my tormentor from behind the frosted glass. How to ask out the girl next door? Planning was needed. She lived with her aunt, so her car had to be out, and my mother had to be out too, and Heather had to be in.
    Three planets had to be in alignment. When the time came, I took up the phone and dialled, and was so unmanned to hear it ringing next door that I put it down again. I took two nips of my father’s whisky, dialled again, and heard it again, counterpointed by the high throbbing of my heart. Heather answered. I heard her voice on the phone and, distantly, off it as well.
    â€˜It’s me,’ I said, attempting insouciance, ‘your next-door neighbour.’
    She sounded interested: ‘We haven’t really met, have we?’
    â€˜What about the Alma Road bus stop in twenty minutes?’
    â€˜Okay.’
    To avoid the absurdity of our both going up the street together to meet, I walked round the block. I was there, waiting, as she—to again Mills-&-Boon for a moment—swayed towards me, statuesque and smiling. The auguries were good.
    Over the next few weeks we pooled (Olympic, Batman Avenue), pictured ( Attila the Hun , with Jack Palance) and parked (Alma Reserve)—but why, she wondered, did we always meet at the designated place, and not go there together. It’s hard to explain, I’d reply, because it was.
    Our sunny relationship ended in the usual way—in embarrassment. One night I’d made the customary covert arrangement to meet Heather, this time outside the Town Hall, in the city (‘You’re seeing a lot of Dick Hughes,’ my mother said—after I’d overheard her saying to my father, ‘D’you think he’s normal?’). I waited and waited, then gave up and went home. ‘Heather rang from next door,’ said my mother, in a voice in which hurt and triumphant discovery were mingled. ‘She said she was sorry, but she couldn’t make it tonight. She’s not well.’
    As her own marriage gradually failed, my mother had built up a powerful emotional relationship with me (and my brother), and as well as being hugely embarrassed, I felt I’d let her down. I’d let Heather down too. Why the secrecy? Why my mother’s shock when she answered the phone? Was I ashamed of her? Why a man of twenty-three had to conceal a relationship with the attractive girl next door from his mother is something even now I can’t fully explain—though Ron Conway would have been only too pleased to. The affair cooled and