Free Love on the Road 2015 by Sam Tranum Page A

she had bought for him when they were together, three decades ago. He wears this shirt every time they meet. Winter in Amsterdam, summer in Sydney, spring in Addis. Always this shirt. At first she stands a few metres away from him. The room is messy. A creative man’s disorder. She sees that crankiness has just left his face and his chin juts out, raised, ever-searching. He lifts an arm that has becomewomanish. His fingers are lean, reptilian, nails bitten to the core.
    She takes his hand, feels the cool pads envelope her sticky digits. She folds to her knees and cries in his lap. It smells of an old man’s trousers, old man’s urine.
    The same young man pushes his wheelchair out to the patio. Before following, she removes her espadrilles and feels her feet embrace the tiled floor, a kiss on the tarmac. She looks at her bent toes, black nail polish. It hits her that he can’t feel his anymore, he has to look at them like dirty mementos in a house-girl’s soapy hands. She remembers his toenails scratching her in bed, his knees cool behind her knees. She smells food: the ponderous palm-nut soup she hasn’t eaten in an age.
    She hears his summoning from outside. If anything, his voice booms louder now. Perhaps because he feels imprisoned? But he has always snapped at her, snapped at most people. Her views of him have not yet shifted from able to disabled. She thinks of centaurs. The upper body fused to another creature, the surging of the arms, the tossing of the head and neck. She remembers sweat clinging to the fine hairs of his chest, the taste of it. She thinks his smell has altered.
    It is a shock to see how crowded the yard has become. The palms lofty above the rooftop. No one has cut them. His fingers plunge into the red soup, wear a glove of its viscous colour.
    ‘Sit down.’ He points to her. ‘You know I hate to eat cold food.’
    The young man uncaps her beer. She sits down. The soup steams. The scent reaches into her. The sea, too, sends her tendrils through the dusty, clacking leaves. It’s not farfrom here. The veranda rails are rusty. Chunks of concrete have fallen off, landing in soft dirt below where, she hears, there are children. Are they his children? Begotten long before he fell to the ground here? A friend – Nana Yaw – had said there were dozens of them, an unchecked, almost tribal reproduction. But Nana Yaw had a bitter tongue.
    ‘You don’t look any different,’ he says to her.
    She raises her eyebrows and looks out. Once, they were accomplices. Now she wonders about the smell coming from his trousers and whether the young man takes him to pee or there is a bag for it. And whether this mercy mission is going to include sitting on the loo all night after downing his cook’s food.
    ‘Not used to this anymore?’
    ‘Not really,’ she says. ‘But I’ll give it a go.’
    He pushes his plate away, half-eaten, and drinks his beer from the bottle. She thinks he drinks a lot of beer sitting here. He has a paunch. He watches her wash her hands and begin the soup.
    ‘You know I like to watch you eat.’
    He stares at her; he has often stared at her. Occasionally, her eyes cross his. Long ago, she begged him not to make a study of her, an understanding of each flinch of her nerve-endings. He once wrote a poem to her nipple. ‘Morning nipple, mid-morning nipple, my nipple.’ Better poems have been written. The soup is hot and her eyes water. Her mouth feels like a ravaged cavern and she feels the food sending a marker into her chest. A flag planted deep.
    He looks away from her when one of the children cries. She notes his lips twitch: he usually shouts at them. He casts his eyes back at her.
    ‘They your kids?’ she asks.
    ‘No, why?’
    He has always lied to her face. They weren’t meant to last more than a minute. A hot night, a dirty fusion, they were secretive. Then she let him tower over her. They once met in a street bar. The street bar closed. They stayed on the grubby metal chairs