I watched as they placed her on a pedestal in the town square.

She was like a goddess. A marble goddess in a flowing white toga. I noticed her small breasts and pouting mouth, her tightly-plaited hair and her downcast eyes. She seemed alone and vulnerable.

I watched as the two lethargic workers untied her from a cart and with groaning ropes and much cursing lift her unceremoniously onto a plinth.

Later that day she looked up at me and I looked back. Much later, after many such exchanges, she smiled. It was a small but perceptible gesture. One that lifted my spirits and filled my heart.

I have a recurring dream.

I sit astride my prancing steed. The day is bright and warm and children crawl over me as usual. The stickiness of their toffee fingers mixes with the dust about my shoulders — and the noise, the laughter and the yelling penetrate deeper and deeper into my being until finally I am able to move.

Children scream. People run. I dismount and walk toward her. The pandemonium increases but I continue. Someone shrieks, “Help!”, and someone else shouts, “Run! Run!”

I want them to run. I want the rain to come to wash away the dust and the stench from my smooth body. I want to be alone and walk toward her and touch her white marble flesh.

One day, when it’s right, I will go to her. I, the bronze horseman. The one who waits at the other end of the square.

I watched as Ito wiped his hands. He had completed painting and stood back for a moment allowing himself time to enjoy his work. It had taken many months. First finding the door and then hanging it in our apartment. I called it the ‘door to nowhere’ because that’s what it was — Ito’s beautifully painted red door that opened onto a blank wall.

When I asked him why? He simply answered, “Why not?”

In time, Ito knew every square inch of the door, every crack, scratch and sound it made. And yes, he believed he could hear the door talk to him, just as distinctly he said as he could hear the slow, methodical in and out of his own breath.

He talked of the door’s solitariness and if he dared swing it open, there would be nothing and yet everything. Every possibility. Every dream. Every kind and horrid word ever spoken. Every form of love. Everything in heaven and on earth, both good and bad, sat behind the door and so he left it closed.

Some nights he woke troubled by dreams and would walk naked through the dark apartment and then settle in front of the door, listening, waiting, seeking to understand. One night I heard Ito speaking the way a patient speaks to a psychiatrist or a child to its mother. It seemed he simply obeyed an impulse to start communicating with the door and from then on I often heard him leave his bed to sit on the floor, thumbing his Mala beads and, if the mood took him, he would speak softly and candidly.

I talked with Ito when he wanted and gave him space when he wanted that. We had been room mates for many years and it seemed the right thing to do. He was on a personal quest so why should I become an inquisitor. Anyway, I liked his quirkiness and how through all this he’d developed an air of serene melancholy, a quiet, non-verbal persona that seemed to authenticate and nurture him.

Ito disappeared on a Tuesday. The red door was open. On the floor beside it was a tin of black paint.

Initially, I thought he’d popped out for some coffee. That night, I was convinced he’d gone home to his parents. A few days later I thought maybe he just needed a break.

Now, two months later I’m certain Ito won’t return. So last night I decided to open the tin and start painting the door.

“Why not?” I thought.

Ten months after Samantha left I was still trying to find her, still trying to regain what I had lost. Although at nineteen, if you’d have asked me exactly what that was, I probably would have bored you with some banal statement about my feelings and my love and the unfairness of it all. I know now that whatever I felt back then was guided by only two things — my dick and my stomach.

My relationship with Samantha was never simple. In fact, it was closer to some grasping, sadistic thing that seemed to satisfy and delight both of us on one the hand and send me into severe bouts of depression and her into raging tantrums on the other. Her leaving was probably the only sane thing that happened over the almost two and a half years we were together.

It was sometime during the eleventh month after she left that I decided to cut my wrists with a shiny new Wilkinson Sword razor blade that was once my father’s. I found a packet of them at the back of the medicine cabinet, took one to my room and then tossed a coin to see if I was going to live or die.

“Heads, oblivion. Tails …”

Needless to say I didn’t die. I tossed the coin and it did fall head-side up, but after sitting on the corner of my bed for a minute or two thinking about oblivion, my stomach called.

“Hey John! John! Hows about some food? Get up off your ass and fill this gaping hole! Come on John! You can commit suicide later, on a full stomach.”

My stomach hasn’t stopped arguing with me to this day, but my dick — that old friend, that strictly male appendage, well these days, it lies quietly resting, warm and snug inside its cotton hammock. Sometimes I even forget it’s there, well, metaphorically speaking I forget and during those increasingly extended periods you might say I become somewhat freer. One elemental hunger, one primal urge has been conquered and finally satiated. Well, almost.

I never saw Samantha again but I always remember her and once a year I celebrate with the flip of a coin and that old Wilkinson Sword razor blade that was once my father’s.

His head newly shaven, he walks to the temple with a slow, regal demeanour. Each stride measured, each footfall quiet on the fine gravel path. His hands are soft and warm. His fingers entwined like tender lovers resting in some quiet ritual togetherness.

A misty rain falls. Feather-like droplets touch his ageing face but he is unconcerned with rain. He stops as he sees the temple rooftop appear above the trees — bright terracotta and angular, cutting the grey mist with waves of orange and specks of gold.

He hears the low rhythmic chanting of monks at prayer, a drumbeat and a frog whose call has a sadness that seems to match his own. And in the distance, he hears the faint step of a sandalled monk approach.
March had been cold and April even colder. No snow, just cold wind and a rain that had seeped inside of him, filling his lungs and his heart.

“Welcome home, Master.”

He smiles and bows his head but does not reply, preferring to hold back, to enjoy his silence a moment longer. He waits, listening as the monk’s tread slowly fades.

Again there is chanting, a bell sounds once, twice, three times and as he listens to its vibrations rise and fall like the waves of an endless ocean in an endless universe, he hears the frog call again.

“You know me old frog, but I know you too,” he says. His months of silence and solitude ended. Soon he would follow the monk to the temple and sit — just sit.

My father died three years ago and, although I didn’t realise it at the time, it left me with a sense of loss that I have yet to truly understand.

Your father died last night in his sleep, my mother called to say.

Losing my father was not like losing my keys. I mean, I didn’t take off in a panic running here and there, calling people and generally feeling frantic and with a pit in my stomach because I was sure someone was now going to break into my apartment, steal everything I owned and probably murder me in my bed as well. In fact, all I remember about the moments after my mother’s call is putting the phone down and repeating back to myself, Dad died in his sleep last night. That’s all. I don’t remember feeling sick — in fact I don’t remember feeling much at all.

One thing that did spur me into immediate action was the realisation that I was over here and Dad was over there. Over there being half a world, one hemisphere and a few continents away. So, getting from Australia to England in time for his funeral wasn’t going to be easy.

I arrived in the afternoon. He had been buried that morning, so I hired a car and drove to the cemetery from the airport. I walked the isles of mud and grass between the marble plaques, passed square-cut English hedge rows and a bright orange tractor and found his new abode, his grave — row 28H, plot 137.

I stood there for quite a while. I didn’t cry, in fact to this day I haven’t found any tears for him. I just closed my eyes against that miserable scene and remembered his face and the warmth of his hands and the stubble on his cheeks and the many, many hugs and kisses and impromptu winks and smiles and words that told me so unequivocally and throughout my whole life, that I was loved.

As is our way, I found a pebble and placed it on the newly turned earth and then sat on my haunches for a moment in front of this strange place the universe had chosen for us to say good-bye.

I think loss is a harsh word. Its sound, its taste as it sits inside my mouth gives it a harshness that I can’t really describe — and as I walked away from his grave, and as I thought about loss, about never seeing him again, I searched my pockets wondering what I’d done with my car keys, and a pit opened up in my stomach.

When I look at a forest I see living things — leaves, flowers, birds, trees. My sister Gail sees colours — greens, yellows, browns. She called me yesterday to ask if I’d meet her at Morococo for an afternoon coffee. We hadn’t spoken in months — said she had some big news she wanted to share. I arrived on the dot. She was fifteen minutes late.

“So, what’s the big news?” I asked, as a lanky waiter wearing a black t-shirt and a fez led us to a corner table next to a pile of hand-woven rugs. We both ordered coffee and I ordered a Moroccan coconut cake to share.

Gail wanted to tell me about her latest boyfriend, Jason. “He manages this really cool, newly renovated two and three dimensional fine art gallery out in the burbs.”

Then, halfway through the cake, she says, “But the big news is — I’ve started to paint.”

“Paint! Paint what?” I said.

“Paint! You know, paint things — people, flowers, trees, streets — anything really.”

“I didn’t know you’d been studying art.”

“Well, I’ve only just started — but Jason says my paintings are really good. He thinks my abstracts will speak to people.”

“Wow! That’s fantastic, Gail, you really must show me.”

A few minutes later we left Morococo and caught a taxi to Gail’s apartment. There, in her living room, were eight oil paintings propped against a wall. All of them were coloured white. We’re not talking white and red or mainly white, we’re talking shades of the same white colour — nothing else, just white on white on white on white.

“Is this all of them?” I asked.

“Yep! This one is called ‘Rusty Tin and Fruit’, and this one I call ‘Main Street’,” she said, lifting it high above her head.

“What do you think? Jason says it’s highly conceptual and extremely seductive. He says it eliminates everything and denies all external references,” she told me.

“Hmmm, do you think you’ll be using more colours in future?”

“Of course I will, stupid!” She put ‘Main Street’ down and picked up another she called ‘The Brightest Bloom’.

“When I run out of white, I think I’ll start using blue,” she said.

When your only true-blue friend is a cockatiel named Bird, your life cannot be lived the same as everyone else’s. On Tuesdays, when you visit the local library, your best friend is perched patiently on your shoulder, whistling a happy but obscure tune. And, as you approach the library door you notice for the umpteenth time the printed sign saying, ‘No Animals or Food Allowed’.

How do you feel?

How do you feel knowing your best friend is supposed to wait, perched on a railing in a draughty hallway, while you enjoy yourself hunting for this weeks’ read?

Maybe a more practical cockatiel owner would have left his bird at home, but not Tony! Tony and Bird were inseparable. Which meant, wherever Tony went, Bird went as well.

I’ll warn you now that you may end up thinking this story a little far fetched, a little too hard to believe. Yet I can assure you there have been many witnesses to Bird’s uncanny ability — including myself.

At first, Tony says, even he didn’t believe it. But in the end he couldn’t deny it either.

One day Bird just started: “What’s a Dacha? What’s a Dacha?” And he carried on like that until in frustration Tony said, “BIRD! For Christ-sake shut-up! A bloody Dacha is a Russian weekender, a holiday home for the rich and the bloody famous.”

That’s how Tony says it all began. How it finished was Tony realising that Bird had been reading over his shoulder.

Faced with that kind of knowledge, what would you do?

What Tony said he did, after he’d had a few beers to calm his nerves, was to walk resolutely into the library with Bird on his shoulder and before the librarian could utter a word, say, “What’s a bloke have to do to get a Library card for his cockatiel?”

As you can imagine that started a whole ruckus which ended a few weeks later with Bird not only getting a library card of his own but also a reading perch in a quiet corner.

It isn’t hard to imagine a wall: grey bricks, mortar between, neat, tall, 6-foot maybe. Behind the wall a narrow path disappears into the backdrop and looks as if it goes on forever. The path is leaf-strewn with colours from red to brown, green to orange. Small areas of gravel occasionally show through and we know the path will provide a satisfying crunch under foot. The doorway in the wall is arched, opens outward, fits tight, made of thick wooden planks painted almost black. A small pile of leaves sit this side of the door, not high, just enough to suggest the door has not been opened in a while. The lock is metal, no key, set to the right. The handle is also metal, waist-high, bolted to the centre of the door. A tree, maybe a Willow, grows behind and above the wall and to the left of the door. Some of its branches traverse to our side and we understand intuitively that it is possible, even easy to climb.

We hear the regular crunch, crunch of someone walking on the path. We know the sound is not that of a man, not heavy enough, not direct, not forceful enough for a man, so we think a child or maybe a woman. The tree moves, not from the breeze, a few branches dip and sway and we think someone is beginning to climb. We watch that space. We consider running, maybe hiding, but we’re too curious. Our hearts beat, our palms feel moist, our breathing quickens, our eyes flash from side to side then back to the wall. We see a hand, fingers, nails, small, very small, our breath slows, we relax, a small person, smaller than us. We focus. Now both hands, an arm and then the top of a head. Hair: shiny, brown, straight, long, maybe a girl, a young girl. The face appears, not a girl, a boy with thick brown hair falling to touch his shoulders. Small nose, angelic eyes. Is he smiling as he completes his climb and sits atop the wall legs dangling on our side, arms crossed. Is he singing? Humming softly, maybe.

We take a step forward and then another. He looks in our direction and claps his hands once, twice, like clap-clap. He stands, arms outstretched he walks, balances, maybe skips along the top of the wall. We know him, we’ve seen him before, spoken to him, called him and once, not so long ago, we knew his name. We take another step, we see him plainly now, but does he see us? Maybe.

What I have come to know is this — some bends in the road are made by God. They sweep left in a constant arc and as I prepare to lean my motorbike, my whole being becomes focused in that one moment. There are no distractions. No stray thoughts about bills not being paid, friends who haven’t called or lovers who’ve decided to leave because I haven’t given them enough attention.

I don’t think I ever really understood Kate. In the beginning she was happy. We’d go to the movies, we’d screw, lark around some and we’d sleep. I understand living with a woman requires more content. But things shifted and she didn’t wait for me to catch on or catch up. Her note on the fridge was full of anger. She was leaving, and I should wait before I called her.

I like to ride my motorbike — to get away and just ride. I like the way it helps fix me in the present. When I tour, there is nothing except now. No place except here. That makes decisions simple. Do I turn left, or do I turn right? It doesn’t get much easier than that.

Kate should have given me more of a chance, a bigger hint that something was wrong. Her way, I’ve been tried and found guilty, without knowing I had even committed a crime.

Maybe I did know a few things. I’ll admit she told me a few weeks ago about some things that pissed her off. She said I wasn’t attentive enough. Said, I used to listen to her, I used to hear when she called me and I would respond. Now, I ignore her. She also reckons I don’t touch her lovingly anymore. I don’t put my arm around her. I don’t spoon with her in bed, and when I do touch her it’s only because I want sex.

These are valid complaints. They are all sins I admit to freely, but are they crimes worthy of leaving a perfectly good relationship? Hasn’t she over-reacted?

When I ride, the most important things I need to consider are: When and where to stop for lunch; how much fuel do I have in my tank; when and where will I stop for the night? In the scheme of things, these are not some of life’s most perplexing decisions. Do I stop now and eat or do I wait and stop when I need fuel? Will I ride an extra hundred kilometres and make tomorrow easier or will I stop now, put my feet up and have a beer? This is what fills my thoughts as I ride. Complex problems are too hard, they take too much energy, too much concentration.

Last night, I decided I might call Kate and tell her she’d been too hasty and ask if she really wanted to kiss the relationship good-bye.

I thought I’d say, “I’m sorry, I’ll try harder — there are lots of things that were good so let’s not get all screwed-up with this small stuff.”

That’s what I decided last night.

This morning, as I jumped on my bike I made another decision. I decided to turn left.