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About the Book

‘I was an agent of Dan, a captive of his, really. I went where he wanted me, and did as he wanted, and for a long time, in this way, I was happy.’

It’s been a long winter in a creaky house in Brunswick, where a young man has devoted himself to recreational showers, staring at his phone, and speculating on the activities of his best friend and housemate, Dan. But now summer is coming, and Dan has found a boyfriend and a job, so the young man is being pushed out into the world, in search of friendship and love.

The Adversary is a sticky summer novel about young people exploring their sexuality and their sociability, where everything smells like sunscreen and tastes like beer, but affections and alliances have consequences. It asks what kinds of stories are possible – or desirable – for which kinds of friendships, and what happens when you follow those stories to their natural conclusions.

Dedication

For Mum, Dad, Pete and Mandy

PART 1

DANCE OF THE HUMBLE MOSQUITO

Beauty that knows no love,
sorrow or pity
repeats the colours of
the burning city.

Amy Witting

A smart man once told me to be careful around gifts, as they’re often more complicated than they first appear. The savviest recipients plumb their gifts for hidden questions, such as what secret agenda has been furthered by this gift? And why have I been chosen to receive it?

The smart man who said this had just given me a gift, which caused me to regard it with considerable suspicion. It was a birthday gift, and it came to me from my housemate Dan, who explained that although the gift at first may have seemed innocent – it was a month’s membership to the Brunswick Baths, a gym ten minutes’ walk from our crumbling townhouse – what he really wanted was to give me a reason to get out of the house, something he’d noticed happening much less throughout the winter, meaning he came home from work or his boyfriend’s apartment and was not able to spend any time in the house by himself.

‘But don’t stress,’ he finished. ‘Nothing’s wholly altruistic. Why do you think the gift horse doesn’t want you near its mouth? That’s where it keeps its money and its motives.’

I used the gym a few times that month, the deepest dark of winter, but when September came, and with it spring, I did not renew the membership; the gym contained too many fluids, too many weird-eyed men, and one day I finished a full forty-minute workout before realising I had done so while wearing a pair of jeans, a situation that filled me with a queasy kind of terror. No good things come to animals that stop paying attention to their surroundings. It suggested a particular evolutionary fate.

But I was reminded of Dan’s advice just a few months later, when I happened to meet a few pretty interesting gift horses, and sometimes even had to work out what to do with their mouths – if I should kiss them, scrutinise them, grab a towel and wipe them down? I was often given gifts that summer, free advice, free rides, and in all cases these gifts were most completely understood not as magic freedoms, being hurled around the world, but always as the leavings of complicated creatures, some of whom wore costumes that concealed their intentions.

There was no hiding in our house, and Dan had not been wrong to want me outside of it at least some of the time. It was a townhouse on Park Street between Lygon Street and Sydney Road, with a half-view of the fountain at the north end of the park, the hesitant edge of dirt tracks and bike-lock-beringed light poles, the thin-grassed area that guarded its vast, green, jogging innards. Behind the sloping balcony, through two windows that clunked, were my room and Dan’s room, and downstairs was the kitchen and the weedy little yard.

The house was long and narrow, with large bedrooms and loud floors, and I always had the feeling, moving up those shaky stairs, of stepping up and down the house’s secret central organ, an old muscle that wasn’t going to take it anymore.

It was a slow tram into Carlton, and a quick walk to Barkly Square, where I’d recently decided to shop at the tactical hours of dusk and dawn, so I had more chance of running into people from uni and engaging them in friendly conversation.

I was definitely not a shut-in. I had this thought all the time. I was just a guy standing in front of a door and almost never opening it, because I’d finished my assignments, and swot vac, and exam block, and also because my youth allowance was at its most effective in funding a life spent quietly indoors.

I thought the Barkly Square idea was clever and inspired, and it wasn’t until I voiced the plan to Dan that I realised these were not the main qualities it signified.

‘Making friends at dusk and dawn,’ he said. ‘Like the humble mosquito.’

Possibly because it was met with this response, I never enacted the mosquito plot.

I ramped up my showers as spring stretched on, I read a lot of books; I discovered a dark red at the Mediterranean Wholesalers that cost four dollars even but was absolutely good. I drank on the balcony in the drowsy light of dusk, which was sticking around later and later, an orange presence reaching from the eights into the nines.

Everything smelled like jasmine and looked like jacarandas. The clocks added their hours. Then one Saturday morning I woke up to a text that turned out to have substantial repercussions.

‘WHAT R U DOING TONIGHT WOULD U COME OUT WITH US PLS DAN.’

Dan, who used to send amazing text messages – ‘WHAT is the numerical version of the alphabet? If A is the first in the alphabet, 1 is the first in the WHAT?’ – had lately become the tersest texter to have walked the earth, writing messages in a neutral form of old-fashioned chatspeak, like he was taking an early shot at being a suburban dad: ‘CAN U PICK UP THE AGE,’ he’d write. ‘HAVING A GOOD DAY U.’

It was an interesting gesture, but difficult to support when I knew he had the full deck of syntactic possibilities at his disposal, and when catch-up opportunities were thinner on the ground than they had been this time a year ago.

He was sitting in the kitchen in his thick bathrobe of deep green, casually opening the weekend paper to the quiz page and smelling the surface of a cup of homemade brew. It was warm today already, it would hit thirty degrees, and the sweatiness of his dressing gown would somehow be the point of wearing it: a general refusal to roll with the punches, especially if no punches were right then aimed at him.

‘Hi,’ he said.

‘You want me to come out tonight,’ I said.

He peered over his paper, a wonderful prop.

‘We would like you to come out tonight,’ he said.

‘We’ was he and Lachlan, who was also in the kitchen, leaning on the bench and also drinking coffee, heavy in the matching deep green robe he called his own.

Lachlan looked at me seriously. He nodded at me seriously. He was a serious person, a serious Lachlan, a serious boyfriend for my housemate Dan. And I was not against this, at least not every part; but I could not help resisting the very swift progression from his Fitzroy apartment into our lives and home, first hooking up with Dan, then sleeping in Dan’s room, then sometimes appearing in the kitchen in the mornings, where he stood stoically waiting for Dan to finish showering and then shepherding him out of the house and to their jobs.

The truth was that this was an increasingly rare scenario, because Dan stayed at Lachlan’s more and more of the time. I probably would go out tonight because I knew that if I didn’t, I would go to sleep by myself at this townhouse in Brunswick with Dan and Lachlan having gone to bed in Fitzroy, given that Lachlan’s Oxford Street apartment was closer to the queer party they planned to attend.

‘Who’ll be there tonight anyway,’ I said.

‘Nobody knows,’ said Dan.

I stared at him. He stared at me. This was a frequent pattern.

‘You’re just going out tonight with nobody else there?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘As a couple.’

‘Doing what?’ I said.

‘Drinking and talking.’

‘Drinking and talking?’

‘It only sounds fake when you say it back like that,’ he said.

‘Chris L will be there,’ said Lachlan.

‘Will he,’ I said.

Dan closed his eyes, because the jig was up: Lachlan had exposed the ulterior motive.

Chris L was a fearsome person we used to call Mysterious Chris, both for the long silver cape he wore in his internet photos and for his large, black, bug-eyed sunglasses. Sunglasses are not mysterious in and of themselves, they are only covering two things, and both of them are eyes, but taken together, and applied consistently, a silver cape and large sunglasses in multiple pictures created a vibe that was mysterious indeed.

He was the news that walked like a man, and I did not understand how he had ended up living with Lachlan, the man who stood like a plank. But this difficult-to-process fact is exactly what I’d learned not very long after Dan had started sleeping over at Lachlan’s apartment. Their living together suggested that Lachlan was more mysterious than he seemed, or that Chris L was less mysterious than we’d judged him to be. I did not know which scenario was more likely.

Recently, Dan had been treasonously suggesting that I should make an effort to meet and befriend Chris L, which was clearly not to do with our personal similarities but instead to do with making life easier for Dan, the idea being that Chris L and I could bond and create an atmosphere conducive to the construction of a wider friendship group. This way, Dan, who had once walked into my room, apropos nothing, and told me that he felt oppressed by the doctrine of queer family, could have me in place, and Chris L in place too, the better to advance his own romantic ends – a family in two houses, with Chris L and me like children, and Dan and Lachlan doubling in the role of dad.

I was not against being in place – I was proud of my stillness – but I was against, as we all are, being crudely manipulated by those who know us well enough to more finely pluck our strings. There was no finesse in this plan. Real friendship took effort. I would not give them the pleasure of participating.

‘Hey, Lachlan,’ I said.

He looked at me, alarmed.

‘I heard Chris L lathers and rinses, but never repeats. Is that true?’

‘Come out with us,’ said Dan.

‘Why?’

‘It’s important,’ he said.

I rolled my eyes around the room and walked them up the stairs.

Later that afternoon, after Lachlan had left – I knew when he’d gone home from the absence of his baritone voice as much as the footsteps down the creaky stairs – I walked across the landing between my room and Dan’s.

His door was ajar. This was not necessarily an invitation to chat: one of the charms and horrors of our house was that doors had to be wrenched into their doorframes, then lifted up until you heard the click of the bolt in the latch, a consequence of Brunswick being built on sinking ground.

Dan was lying on his bed and looking at his laptop. I stood there pressed up against the gap in the doorframe until he noticed me out the corner of his eye and jumped.

‘Hi,’ he said suspiciously.

‘Hi,’ I said.

I went in and sat on the bed. He went back to his laptop. I looked around the room at his books and plants and clothes, and the two green dressing gowns hung on hooks like dead green men. I knew so much about this room, where the bowl of silver coins was, and where he kept his antiretrovirals, and the dregs of his pouch. I knew which drawers were boring, full of irrelevant things, and which drawers might contain objects of benefit to me.

‘I need one more reason to come out tonight,’ I said.

He looked up from his laptop and once again peered at me, his favourite expression, curling the recipient in a cone of scrutiny.

‘So think of one,’ he said.

Then he went back to his weekend, his vacation from a working week I could not comprehend.

I was back in my room, lazing on the bed, when I heard his wardrobe open, and his footsteps descend, and the front door open, and the front door close.

I went and investigated. His nice new shoes, white and clean and puffy, were gone, which suggested he would not come home before going out for the evening. I went down into the courtyard and looked at his herbs. I lay on the bed and looked at the corner.

The obvious reason to go out was the onset of summer. It was November 30, the last day of spring, and summer was traditionally a time of public appearances and self-discoveries. Could I build a case against this? Not against the temperature, which was a fact of record, but against the need to humour it with summery behaviour. Like everybody, I spent twelve months of the year preparing for weather – I had no patience for the false belief that weather is dull, it was hard to think of anything more consequential – but it was disturbing to contemplate the way its implications might be used to influence behaviour. This time last year, a group of people at my uni had made fun of the Bureau of Meteorology for calling certain nights ‘oppressive’, this being one of the more innocuous instances of oppression and yet one of the only times the word was used by a government body. But, in a certain light, it was a reasonable judgement, given the expectation that summertime be fun.

I felt grubby after the conversation with Dan because it worked on the assumption that I was pointless and depressed, when in fact I was mostly happy and did have a point, which was to read books, take a break from study, and stare all day at Grindr, none of which are activities that harm the fabric of society. They are the same kinds of activities as having a boyfriend, having a job when appropriate, spending time at clubs – just drinking and talking – or smelling the wholesome surface of a coffee cup.

I was worried that in all this hasty talk of summer behaviour, I was not getting enough credit for the careful way I had conducted my life through the end of spring. I had recently impressed myself with a newfound ability to walk down the tender staircase and grab a cleanskin, retrieve a glass, fill it to the tippy-top, and walk it back upstairs, all in perfect darkness, all without spilling a drop.

As the day turned to its bluest hour, blue and late and sour, going out came to seem not just intolerable but impossible – not when I could be lying there with my head close to the window and listening to the washing in and out of cars on Park Street. What I mostly wanted was to hang around by myself, and I wondered what Dan would say if I told him so.

On hook-up apps I’d long since made the horrible commitment of turning myself into one of those negative-zone profiles, black squares that told you nothing interesting about themselves except that they were watching you and everybody else. When I was a teenager, in my small seaside town, I’d represented myself with a languid, ailing-looking selfie that made me uncomfortable not because the photograph was bad but because it was a true and faithful representation of the subject. This suggested it was best to conduct my business in secret, and confirmed the disappointing feeling I’d had when I came out: that I’d been swindled into giving up what might turn out to be the most interesting secret I would ever have. By becoming a black square I felt like a fixing agent, jellied and business like and quivering.

Because everyone appreciates a blank square that is super chill and mellow, I still seemed to scoop up as many drifts of Hi mates and What’s happenings as anyone.

‘heyyyy’ a person said.

‘heyyyy,’ I wrote back, quicker to type the letters out than copy-paste the message. I went and showered. When I emerged it was night, and I was so hot from the shower I could barely peel my socks and undies on. There was no wine left in the house, just the bottles of gunk on the top shelf of the pantry from the people who’d lived in the house before us, Erins and Steves whose mail was still delivering.

When I came back upstairs, a message on my phone. ‘big plans tonight? ;-P’

I sent the guy a picture, very square, very clear, nothing below the neck, like it had to pass approval by the passport scrutineers. I admired his profile, an anonymous white person in his early mid-twenties, a bit older than me. In a beer garden, at the gym, at a music festival; I swiped through the pictures, it was all the classics.

‘Yeah big plans,’ I said.

He wrote back straight away. ‘oh yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

‘where?’

I blinked at the phone. I didn’t want to say where, because it was here. But I guessed I was too drunk – on a glass of gunk on ice – to read a book or even pay attention to a movie, so I might as well go out and do things.

I did not trust the developers of these janky hook-up apps, which stole and leaked locations, words and pictures, so I sent him my mobile number, saying, ‘Sorry, the app crashed.’ But because free will is a problem that has yet to be vamoosed, he continued asking questions in the same leaky in-app chat screen, and on the screens of every government in the Five Eyes group.

His profile read, ‘If it’s on, it’s not on ;-P’, which sounded very modern, Zen and fun, kind of like saying there was no ‘there’ there.

‘Was thinking about Fitzroy,’ I typed, sighing to no one.

I walked away, but buzz, buzz. He said, ‘I’m going to fitzroy’.

‘Oh yeah,’ I said. He had distance on; barely a kilometre. ‘So give me a lift.’

‘great’ he said.

I stared at the phone.

I stared out the window.

‘Great,’ I said.

I put on a short-sleeved shirt, and also put on jeans, because this was only ten at night on November 30 and by midnight it would probably be cool-to-cold again. I explained to the stranger I was not quite ready yet and went into the bathroom and paced it in my shoes, counting my notes and coins and managing my silhouette by tucking my earbuds into the rolled cuff of my jeans. I went onto the footpath and stared down oncoming cars, the joggers’ edge of Princes Park, its shadowy middle.

When the person picked me up, he was apparently post-gym, in a grey shirt with black blooms where it stuck against the skin.

‘Hey,’ he said.

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘I’m just going to Fitzroy.’

‘You already told me that,’ he said.

‘Oh yeah,’ I said.

He drove down Park Street towards Nicholson, past gelati-eating couples and long rectangles of roadside space, blank with grass.

‘So,’ I said. ‘Thanks for the lift.’

‘No, it’s easy,’ he said.

He looked at me, smiled at me, and looked away again, being a calm and responsible driver.

We drove a while in silence, past a church, a pizza place, following the sloping road towards Alexandra Parade.

‘So what were you doing in Brunswick,’ I said.

‘Just the gym,’ he said.

‘Oh cool,’ I said. ‘What kind of gym?’

More silence.

‘What do you mean what kind of gym?’ he said.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘A night gym?’

He looked at me strangely.

As he did this, I noticed his hands massaging the steering wheel; the traffic was stalled at the intersection ahead, with very few cars funnelling left on Alexandra Parade. I watched another green light turn yellow and then red.

‘I don’t think you really want me to tell you about my gym,’ he said.

‘Okay, don’t worry about it,’ I said.

He looked at me, smiled, and looked away again. The light turned green, then changed again to yellow.

‘It’s a nice place,’ he said. ‘Not super busy. I have a routine.’

He was squeezing the steering wheel with both his hands.

Then whatever stalled us freed us and the car moved forward again. I could feel his tension easing.

‘You tried to make me tell you so many boring things,’ he said. ‘I almost told you about my gym routine.’

‘That’s okay,’ I said again. I was counting the cross-streets.

He looked over at me meaningfully.

‘I can tell you have a really generous heart,’ he said.

‘Just anywhere here,’ I said.

He checked his blind spot and pulled into the bike lane.

I unclicked my belt.

‘Nice to meet you,’ he said.

I’d already opened the door.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Nice to meet you,’ he said.

‘You too,’ I said.

I left the car and closed the door behind me.

The queer night had spilled into a long dark lane, which opened into a parking garage. Everyone was smoking, some people holding cans, like this was a house party and not really a bar.

They were polished, pleasant, murmuring, huddled closely in the night: Dan and Lachlan, both in shorts, sleeves pressed crisp and perfect. Dan, whose ramrod posture had met its match in Lachlan’s, was regarding the people around him with one swivelling eye. Lachlan was deeply drunk and gazing liddedly at his phone.

I navigated through clumps of people and threw myself towards Dan and Lachlan. And, as I did, a small dark shape unmelted from the wall next to them.

It was Mysterious Chris, wearing a sheer black shawl, which I guessed was more of a night look than his traditional silver cape, but because it was less theatrical it was also more strange.

I stared at him. His dark glass eyes stared back at me, for he was wearing his large sunglasses, despite the night-time hour, like a nocturnal creature with an unguessable specialty.

‘This is my housemate,’ said Dan and Lachlan at exactly the same time.

They looked at each other.

‘Did you just say . . .?’ said Dan, while Lachlan said, ‘Did I just do . . .?’

They smiled at each other, excited about being so cute.

‘You guys,’ I said.

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