Free Love in the Years of Lunacy by Mandy Sayer

and for one crazy moment she imagined her solo had somehow transformed him into a bird and he’d flown away and out of her life forever. She looked across the rose garden to the iron gates, and back down a path that led to the water. There was no sign of him.
    â€˜Lesson number one,’ a voice boomed.
    With a gasp, she looked up to see him directly above her, straddling a branch of the Moreton Bay fig. ‘Don’t ever be late for a lesson.’ His face looked cross in the leafy play of light and shadow.
    â€˜Lesson number two: in order to play fast you gotta play slow. Real slow. Practise everything like it’s a ballad.’
    She shielded her face from the sun with her hand, confused. ‘I hate ballads.’
    â€˜Play the tune again,’ he ordered. ‘This tempo.’ He began clicking his fingers at a ridiculously slow pace, so slow she could hear the honking of ferry horns and chirps of birds between the beats.
    After her first lesson with James, she was a bit shaky. She hadn’t expected him to be so stern and exacting. It was as if he became a different man when he was teaching, one who was abrupt and impatient. Still, they parted on good terms, with a furtive kiss and a hug behind the fig.
    Later that night, after playing at the Trocadero, she met up with him at the back of the Booker T. Washington Club and he smuggled her through the basement kitchen and up the stairs to the ground floor. He led Pearl into a walk-in linen press, where he turned on the light by pulling a string. He undressed her gently, sliding her woollen jacket off first, then undoing the mother-of-pearl buttons of her blouse one by one. He slipped down her brassiere straps, cupped her breasts and kissed them. She could smell the tart scent of starch and Sunlight soap and everything inside the press was white, except James. He rubbed the small of her back gingerly, as if she were wounded there, then he slid his hand between the waistband of her skirt and garter belt. That night she wasn’t wearing knickers—she hated the bite of elastic against her skin—and with time and a little probing his fingers found places that made her insides ripple. Everything was slow and rapturous and her legs grew so weak she thought her knees would buckle. She could hear the faint laughter of men. The sound of approaching footsteps. Short gasps for air that she realised were her own until everything swooned through her in a rush and she was biting into James’s shoulder to keep from shouting.
    Days later, James told Pearl that when he was out at the Granville base, unloading trucks and sweeping out offices, the imprint of her teeth was still there on his shoulder. When he went to bed at night on his straw-filled mattress, when he was bawled out by his white sergeant, when he was put on latrine duty for the third time that month, when he felt anxious or bored or just plain frustrated with the army, he’d raise his hand and finger the oval-shaped branding and recall her salty taste.
    But it wasn’t all lust and longing between them. Sometimes, when he could secure a leave pass, they would catch the tram down to Bondi and picnic on the beach. James had never seen surf before and his first sighting of the huge rolling waves left him wide-eyed and speechless. There was nothing so powerful in Louisiana, New Orleans, or even along Brooklyn’s Rockaway Beach. Pearl tried to get him to come into the sea so she could teach him how to body surf. She wasn’t sure if he was afraid of the breakers or just plain modest about his own body, but the closest he came to swimming was allowing the water to lather around his bare brown feet. While she swam he often played with small children on the shore, building castles and digging tunnels. Once, she emerged from the breakers to find that a group of kids had buried him in sand right up to his neck and had crowned his head with a wreath of seaweed. The children were