Free Geography by Sophie Cunningham Page B

of bed. ‘I’ve got family stuff to do,’ he said. ‘But I’ll see you tonight.’ He paused. ‘I mean, if you’re around. If you want to.’
    â€˜Both,’ I said. ‘I want and I’m around.’
    My friend Tony rang me when he heard I was in town. ‘A few of us are going to the movies,’ he said. ‘Join us?’
    â€˜Maybe,’ I said. ‘I’ll meet you there.’ But I never turned up. I was waiting for Michael to call, which he eventually did, around nine that night, asking me if I felt like dinner. I said yes despite the fact I’d already eaten.
    Tony called again the next morning. ‘Where were you last night? Waiting by the phone?’
    â€˜I was tired.’
    â€˜So you were. Waiting, I mean.’
    â€˜No,’ I lied.
    I lied a lot over the next few days. I only had time for Michael, for the idea of him. I stood up friends, cancelled arrangements at the last minute. I hung around a flat that was not my own. I waited for him to have a moment to drop by. For the rest of the time I was in Sydney, I didn’t go anywhere, do anything with anyone other than Michael.
    In his absence I spent my time in Bondi, falling in love with that place. One day I went to the beach and there was a flotilla of bluebottles, thousands and thousands of them, floating in to shore. They were bright and shiny blue, so pretty it was hard to imagine they were dangerous. I’d had one brand me down my thigh the first day I swam there, a line of scarred skin that bubbled and itched for the next six months. Later, one wrapped itself around my wrist when I was paddling my surfboard and I had to pick the tail off delicately, fighting my instinct to panic and brush the sting and its poison across me.
    Each night Michael would arrive later and later for our date. One hour, two hours, three, and I’d sit on the balcony, waiting, looking out over the water. When he did arrive he would often talk to me about Sydney, how beautiful it was, how much he missed it. Other times we wouldn’t talk much at all, he would come over and walk straight into my bedroom. It was always hot, it was always humid and I would lean over the windowsill into the evening air while he held me by the hips and fucked me.
    As the fires got closer to Sydney the air became thicker. We would wake up in the middle of the night, coughing in a smoky room. There were two hundred fires burning around New South Wales; it was as if everything was swimming in a sea of smoke. Each night on the news there were fire stories and, one night, a shot of a reporter in the centre of town gesturing to the fiery suburbs behind him with a broad sweep of the arm. Houses were burning; the city was ringed by fires. A man in a torn, blackened singlet was filmed in front of the wreckage of his house. He shrugged.
    â€˜Everything is ash,’ he said.
    There were stories of heroes, of fifteen thousand fire fighters from New South Wales and volunteers pouring in from around Australia. Of people abandoning their cars on the highway. Of a family pet exploding into a ball of flame as it tried to escape. Of fire cutting people off so they couldn’t drive out backwards or forwards. People in outer suburbs started to clear their gardens of dead wood, clear the land around their houses and hose everything down. They stood on their roofs with their hoses; waving them at the flames as if they could shoot the fire, kill it dead. Five houses in a Sydney street burnt down and the tabloids went crazy, running photos of the charred remains of a little girl’s Christmas presents on the front page.
    â€˜It’s Christmas,’ the people who had lost everything said on the news. ‘Things like this shouldn’t happen at Christmas.’
    But things like this always happen at Christmas. I thought of my friends whose father had walked out on them on Christmas Eve. Remembered getting up to fetch the newspaper on