By the time the sun went down that day, Luke knew that where he was going was heaven, and the family he belonged to was God’s forever family. From then on whenever anyone asked him what he was, he answered with confidence and pride, ‘I am a Christian.’
‘So that’s it then. My entire life story. I bet you wish you’d never asked.’
‘No, I . . . Fuck, Luke, no wonder you’re alone. Do you still wonder about your parents?’
‘Never. Since I found my Heavenly Father, I’ve stopped worrying about the earthly one.’
Aggie sighed, then lifted his arm, shuffled across so her body was pressed into his side, and put her head on his shoulder. He reached up and her curls swallowed his fingertips. He wondered how he would ever get free of them.
Aggie began to gently stroke his leg, just above the kneecap. Luke held his breath, closed his eyes and told himself not to panic.
‘You’ve gone all quiet on me. I hope I haven’t depressed you.’
Luke cleared his throat. ‘No. I was just thinking that the kids will be here soon.’
‘I better go then.’ Aggie lifted her head, giggling as he untangled his hand from her hair. ‘It’s awful, sorry.’
‘No, it’s lovely.’
‘I’m leaving before you tell me any more lies.’ She smiled. ‘I’m surprised to hear myself say this but I had a nice time.’
‘Why surprised?’
‘Because I thought you would just lecture me about God the whole time. Okay, so I’ll see you later?’
‘Wait. Do you know why you’re here?’
‘Because you asked me over?’
‘No, I mean . . . why did I do that?’
She rolled her eyes. ‘I don’t know. Because you wanted to convert me with your family values propaganda? Because you wanted someone to drink coffee with? Because you cut open an orange and saw a vision of the Holy Virgin pleading with you to save my soul?’
‘You think I’m a joke.’
‘I think you’re too bloody serious.’
He nodded. ‘Would you like to stay for the meeting?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘I’d love it if you would.’
Aggie looked over his shoulder, staring at nothing. Luke placed a hand on her shoulder and her eyes returned to his face. ‘Please, Aggie, I’d like you to see what I do here. It would really be great if you could stay.’
‘Okay.’
Thursday nights were VIBE night, which meant thirty kids between the ages of thirteen and fifteen listening to a presentation and then putting together skits about the topic. Tonight’s presentation was about alcohol, and the kids enacted scenes of drunk husbands beating wives, drunk boyfriends being sick on their girlfriends’ shoes and drunk drivers rolling their cars.
Luke felt sad at how little needed to be explained. In fact, when it came to drink, drugs or sex, the kids often taught Luke a thing or two rather than the other way around. Tonight, for instance, he learnt that there were tablets one could take which delayed the symptoms of over-indulgence. As the thirteen-year-old telling him about it said, you could impress your mates by drinking hard all night, then just secretly throw up when you got home. Another girl told how her friend just sticks her fingers down her throat every two hours so she can keep drinking.
‘Getting sick is far from the worst thing that can happen if you drink too much,’ Aggie said. ‘The first time I ever drank alcohol – and I was eighteen at the time – I went way overboard and ended up marrying the taxi driver who took me home. I don’t know of any tablet that could’ve prevented that disaster.’
The kids laughed but Belinda shot Luke a look that indicated she thought him insane for inviting this woman to participate. ‘You’re exaggerating,’ he whispered to Aggie.
‘I wish,’ she whispered back.
The next night Aggie came and helped with the preparations for the sausage sizzle. Every Friday night during football season the game was projected on the big screen and an indoor barbecue cooked up. It was the only officially organised activity without explicit personal development or Bible study aims, but Luke considered it one of the most important parts of the program. The casual atmosphere bonded the group as friends, and some of the deepest, most satisfying connections he had made with his kids had been in impromptu chats after the game.
‘I don’t mind helping out,’ Aggie said, scrunching her nose at the trays of raw sausages and steak, ‘just don’t ask me to touch the dead cows.’
‘The onions are all yours then.’ Luke picked up a steak and tossed it from hand to hand. ‘Personally, I love the feel of raw meat.’
Aggie made a gagging noise. ‘That’s the flesh of an animal you’re tugging on. One of God’s creatures.’
‘Mmm. Yet another reason to praise Him. Such delicious creatures He has given us.’
‘There’s like a hundred cows there.’ Aggie waved her knife at the piles of raw meat, blinking her eyes fast to expel the onion tears. ‘Surely you don’t expect too many kids. Friday night is party night in teen land. It’s getting wasted night.’
‘Not for these teens.’ Luke took the knife from Aggie, pointing her to the non-tear-inducing task of bread-buttering. ‘They all either grew up as Christians and would never consider getting wasted or they grew up with New Age atheist liberal types and are now craving some wholesomeness and stability.’
She laughed. ‘They’re rebelling against their parents by being good?’
‘Why not? Teenagers are natural seekers. They want truth and meaning, not relativism and ideology.’
‘They’ll find truth and meaning in football?’
‘Some would say yes.’ Luke laughed. ‘But that isn’t really the point of Friday night. Friday night is just for fun.’
Parramatta beat the Broncos twelve–ten, their first victory for the season and Aggie Grey charmed fifty-seven teenagers, four youth pastors and one senior pastor so thoroughly that when she tried to leave at ten o’clock she had fifty of God’s children begging her to stay. So she stayed and played charades with the younger kids, drank hot chocolate with the adults, talked to a gaggle of girls about their shoes and a gaggle of boys about their X-Boxes, promised Leticia that they would have lunch together one day next week, begged Kenny to use his boasted-about mechanical skills to fix the clanking in her engine, checked to make sure every single kid had a lift home, stacked chairs, swept the floor, dried dishes, declined coffee, exclaimed her exhaustion, and then stood with Luke in the open doorway.
‘I don’t know if I can cope with this,’ Aggie said.
‘With what?’
‘This . . . this getting to know you. Watching the way you are with those kids . . . You’re so good. You’re generous and compassionate and smart and kind and –’
‘I can be meaner and stupider if it would help.’
‘See!’ She jabbed a finger at his chest. ‘You’re being cute. You’re joking. But the sick thing – the thing I find it hard to cope with – is that you are meaner and stupider. You are!’
Luke laughed. ‘I don’t under–’
‘You judge and moralise and – My dad killed himself, Luke, because he was heartbroken and weak and sad. You believe he’s burning in hell being punished over and over for that. My mum is gay; so is my best friend. You think these wonderful, loving, good people, should be condemned. You – Oh, fuck it.’ She ran her hands through her hair and looked out into the night.
‘I’m sorry, Aggie. Truly sorry for you. But I don’t believe these things because I’m mean and stupid. I believe them because the Bible says they’re true. The same Bible that guides me in everything I do and believe. Your praise and your criticism are levelled at the same belief system.’
‘That’s crap. You are not your belief system.’ Aggie grabbed both his hands and held them tight in her own. ‘I knew what you believed before I met you. Knowing what you believed, I hated you. Yet, here I am, still hating what you believe, but unable to deny that I am dangerously far from ha
ting you.’
Luke stared.
‘Sorry, that was . . .’ Aggie released his hands and covered her face.
He stood silent and still, watching her.
She peeked through her fingers at him. ‘I’ve really embarrassed myself, haven’t I?’
‘No.’
‘No?’
Luke shook his head.
‘Why are you staring at me?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Oh. Do you want to have dinner with me tomorrow night?’
‘Yes.’
Aggie smiled.
‘Oh, no! I have a conference in Newcastle; I won’t be back till late.’
‘Sunday night?’
‘I’m preaching at the seven o’clock city service.’
‘Come over after. I’ll cook you dinner.’ Aggie picked up her handbag, rifled around inside and pulled out a pen and scrap of paper. ‘My address,’ she said, scribbling on the paper.
‘You could come to the service.’
‘No, I really couldn’t.’ She kissed his forehead. ‘See you Sunday.’
7.
Although she was almost thirty, Aggie had only ever slept with three men. The first was Kip McLean, the driver of the cab she caught home from her father’s funeral. He talked non-stop the entire trip from the funeral home to her house, and she was thankful because she really didn’t want to have to think about anything anymore. Kip was thirty-five, twice divorced and only driving cabs while he saved for a fishing boat.
A week earlier Aggie would have been terrified of this big, weather-beaten man with a booming voice and green vines tattooed up his arms, but ever since she’d been kicked in the head by her father’s dangling slippers, she had been fearless. She invited Kip in and he smiled slowly, picked up his radio and told base he was signing off. He roamed around Aggie’s newly-inherited house, drank gin from her newly-inherited liquor cabinet and smoked a cigar he took from the drawer of her newly-inherited antique writing desk. He asked her to go to bed with him, and she said yes because nobody had ever asked her before, and because she was lonely and angry and ugly, and because she had no one to be good for anymore.
Within a week, Kip McLean had moved in. Within six weeks, Aggie had married him. She loved him in that intense, needy, awestruck way that she had since discovered is characteristic of first love. But Aggie was not Kip’s first love, and he was neither needy nor awestruck. He was affectionate, protective, charming and fun. He was also opportunistic, greedy and deceitful. When she felt him slipping away from her, she used a large proportion of her inheritance setting him up as a commercial fisherman, madly hoping his gratitude would reignite his love. He was indeed grateful, and for a few weeks he was as passionate as he had been in the first mad month. Then he shrugged helplessly, took his boat and a random pretty girl and sailed to Byron Bay.
Aggie did not grieve. The day after Kip left she threw herself at Matthew Rinehart, a dreadlocked anarchist from uni who had been asking her out ever since he discovered she was married. He moved into Aggie’s house and introduced her to Tantra, deep ecology, anti-consumerism and hallucinogens. Matthew did actually love Aggie, but he had this thing about monogamous relationships being spiritual death. After six months, he told her he was becoming too attached to her and that he had to move on. Aggie was six weeks pregnant; no surprise considering Matthew had refused to use man-made barriers when making love. But he was gone, and she was alone, so she had an abortion and then a year later, after Matthew had come and gone again, she had another. He returned to her once more, nine months later, and she told him about the two pregnancies. He wept, saying he had never gotten anyone pregnant, and to have managed it twice with Aggie must mean that it was meant to be. Four months later he got another girl pregnant – a stunning raven-haired pianist – and although she too had an abortion, the fact he had impregnated someone other than Aggie with his seed meant his belief in the predestination of their relationship was shaken. He left to explore the possibility of bliss with the other almostmother of his most recent never-to-be-born child.
Aggie was alone for three years. Then she started working as a drug and alcohol counsellor at St John Hospital where she met Dr Simon Keating. He was a decade older than Aggie, devastatingly attractive and very married. Aggie knew better than most the pain caused by infidelity and abandonment, but when Dr Simon Keating declared his passion and asked to move in with her she was so overcome with gratitude that she managed to bury her guilt at being a homewrecker. She had two years of sex, holidays, parties and dinners and weekends spent taking his kids to the movies or Australia’s Wonderland. Then one morning as he was getting ready for work, he announced that he had been having an affair with his wife and was going home.
Sometime later, Matthew returned, transformed from radical student to up-and-coming human rights lawyer. He wanted monogamy and he wanted it with Aggie. He moved back in, and this time Aggie really thought it would work. But after a year, he found a prettier woman to be monogamous with. He swore her looks had nothing to do with it: he fell in love with her soul, just as he’d fallen in love with Aggie’s all those years ago at uni. He would love Tara even if she was as plain as anything. He didn’t say, as plain as you, but Aggie understood that was what he meant.
So that was that. Three relationships, intense and corrosive. No one night stands, no flings, not even a single date. She had not, like most women she knew, formed any theories about why men are the way they are, or what a woman should do to find, enthral, keep one. She did not believe men were such a generic bunch that simple tricks like never accepting a date after Wednesday or touching his arm when you said his name would work for each and every one of them. Men were just like women: varied, likeable, detestable, human.
So it was not any philosophical or sexual political stance that led to her lack of romantic life, it was just that men did not ask out giants with frizzy hair and thick calves. And Aggie did not ask out men because she had never actually met one she liked enough to make the risk of humiliation and heartbreak worthwhile. Until now.
Aggie called Mal and told him she had a date tomorrow night.
‘Bullshit,’ he said.
‘Is not. I met a bloke, I asked him over for dinner, he said yes.’
‘Well, I’ll be blowed. You did warn him he’ll have to clear the cobwebs out of the way before he can get it in, didn’t you?’
‘How amusing. So you wanna come over and keep me company tonight?’
‘Love to, Ag, but Will and I are on our way out the door. Dinner with Marsha.’
‘I hate her. She always tells me she could do wonders with my hair.’
‘You should let her try. That mop of yours gets worse every day.’
‘Fuck you.’
‘And you wonder why you don’t have any friends.’
Aggie hung up. She and Mal met through his friendship with her mother and when he started running a homeless shelter he hired Aggie as counsellor. She had worked for him ever since, following him from the lost cause of the shelter to the bureaucratic nightmare of hospital-based rehab to the freedom and stress of independent sexual health counselling. He was her first, best, only friend.
She didn’t know why this was so. Throughout her school and university years she had envied other girls and women their friendships, blaming her mother for not passing on the seemingly secret rituals and traditions of women, the things that allowed them to bond and stay bonded. By the time she graduated she had accepted her inability to form close female friendships the same way she accepted that her hair would never look nice and her father would never come back to life.
But then something remarkable began to occur. Standing guard next to paper-draped examination tables, squatting in vomit-filled gutters, stroking sweat-soaked foreheads, Aggie began to love women. Holding the hands of women at their most frightened, most vulnerable, Aggie knew a closeness and kinship that could not be found in a thousand slumber parties or shopping excursions. But these were not friends
hips; the connection disappeared with the solving of their problems.
Aggie loved women, empathised with them and yearned to help them, but she could not be friends with them. She didn’t know why, she just knew that when she tried to talk to a woman about anything other than how she, Aggie, could help her, she forgot how to be comforting, approachable and non-threatening. She saw the expectation of reciprocity in the other woman’s eyes and panicked. She never knew what to say if it wasn’t ‘how can I help?’ She didn’t know the language of female bonding outside of pain and tragedy.
Last week, standing in a bank queue, Aggie eavesdropped as the woman behind her told her companion about her upcoming hen’s night. We’re renting an apartment in the city, she said. We’ve hired a bartender. We went shopping for outfits on Saturday. It struck Aggie that she never used plural pronouns unless she was talking about work. We meant her and Mal, the clinic, the business. We never meant Aggie and a lover or Aggie and a friend or Aggie and her family.
Except, she closed her eyes and hugged herself, except tomorrow night, we are having dinner together. Luke Butler and I. We.
8.
Ordinarily, Luke enjoyed the state conferences; they gave him an opportunity to exchange worship inspiration and ministry plans with the other pastors, and they were a spiritual boost, feeling the joy and energy of all those servants of Christ crammed into one big room. He had been especially looking forward to this year’s since he finally had a senior pastorship, even if it was of a youth centre and not a church. But no matter how hard he tried to concentrate on the presentations and follow the discussions, his mind drifted again and again to Aggie.
She was brand new to him, yet he felt he knew her deeply. She was as much an orphan as he was, with her tragic father and her deviant mother both abandoning her, leaving her to be defiled and discarded by some rough plunderer. Luke was heartbroken at the loss of that lanky, awkward, freckle-faced girl, whom he would have adored and protected. It was too late to save that child, but it was not too late to save the woman she had become.