Marguerite Bunce

Word Count 1180

It almost didn't end.

I was expecting another boy when Robert turned up, after the Fresher Meat Parade. 'Girl college virgins meet boys' next door college' was a coy social event which Robert gazumped by cheating his friend to get the girl...

Robert was too tall for anyone's good. With red hair and a snort giggle, he stood out. How could I not spend the next year convulsed with him? He played tennis like a lazy McEnroe, and in the holidays Harold, Robert and I watched McEnroe bounce balls endlessly in a dark room. Robert and Harold were twins, their father was an astronomer, a famous boffin. Robert had painted his bedroom ceiling dark blue, with stars. Their cat was called Rigel. His mother was condescending. I was uncomfortable in their home, but I was used to that, I was uncomfortable anywhere. I ate them up.

But after a year, I felt too safe. Robert was a permanent fixture, if I wanted him to be.

I tried other boyfriends, but Robert was still in the background after I broke it off. He was nice about it, in a scathing wit kind of way. We'd do naughty stuff, and giggle. No one else really took his place. Until he was asked out by a girl who'd been at my school. A hockey player. My former prefect. A Christian girl who followed all the rules. I saw them together in the Senior Students' Common Room. She wore too much baby blue eye shadow to be ignored. And, of course, that was that. Robert was gone. Our rooms looked onto each other. And for the first time, he closed his orange curtains.

I saw him around. We were both doing an honours year. She moved into the Witches' Hat – the coolest rental palace in town. Her hockey balls rolled in the corridor while the Stones' Some Girls smoked and growled from inside someone's room. I was still in college, going home every weekend, and here was Prudence sharing with Robert's best friend, Jones. ( Only just that summer, I'd wandered Malaysia with Jones and his girlfriend.) Robert was there all the time. Then they got engaged. She'd told him she needed a ring on her finger to stop harassment. They moved out together. One day I ran into Robert, and he took me to have a look at their domestic scene. It was still the same. He divulged, and we giggled or snorted together, effortlessly.

Robert stuffed up his honours year. His mother apparently typed his thesis, writing it for him at the same time. I never liked her once she gave the chocolate iced cake to Robert and the vanilla to Harold for their 19th birthday.

A couple of years after Uni I ran into Robert in George Street. He and Prudence were working at the stock exchange. He visited me at my flat with a bottle of gin, and we, you know, just giggled.

When Prudence was headhunted by P J Morgan and Robert had been dumped, they moved to London. I visited their house near Hampstead Heath with my boyfriend Kevin on one of our vagrant tours of Europe. We woke to a note Robert pushed under our door asking us to leave. There was a vacant disused toilet in Morocco he'd suggested we could try. It was a joke. Prudence was always working, and Robert spent a lot of time listening to the radio in bed. But he was enjoying himself. Soon after that, Prudence said she wanted kids. Robert became a giggling father.

When Prudence was promoted to private banking for select clients, they moved to New York. They had a house in Greenwich, Connecticut, with spare rooms. I rang him the day I arrived. Four of us were part of a short exchange between Tisch NYU and AFTRS (the Australian Film Television and Radio School). By the time he picked me up from the station, I'd spent an unfortunate night with my professor, who was also with us, setting up his future student affairs at NYU. We visited Prudence's office, high up in one of the World Trade Centre buildings on Wall St, Robert pushing the pram, for all the world like McEnroe arriving on court. We came back to Sydney together, on separate flights, meeting in transit halfway. We were deliriously careless.

Back in New York, Robert discovered porn videos in their garage. Prudence was not just a workaholic. She'd been having a long-term affair and many other stolen moments with whole hoards of high flyers. Advised by his unscrupulous friend, (with whom I'd had a short relationship at some point), Robert got on a plane for Sydney. Despite being upset, it was a jaunt. International police just missed him in Amsterdam, then Bangkok. He'd stolen the kids. I visited them all at their waterfront house each weekend. The kids were great, we liked each other. The custodial battle went on in the Sydney courts, and eventually, when the price was right, Robert sold the kids.

I wasn't happy with him for that. But Robert became more of a feature in my life. I was sick of moving house, and I asked him if I could rent a room. It was a hoot. For a year, I assessed film scripts from my desk, which was crawling with wild native birds, overlooking the tiny Forty Baskets beach – a hundred yards from his parent's house at uni, and the room with the ceiling painted blue with stars. Twenty years gone.

I travelled to Borneo to research my own film script (after a fling with a local native tour guide), then to London to stay with Kevin, then back to live at Robert's. Loose endings. That was what I was good at. Boyfriends who never really went away, for good.

Robert didn't want to do anything. I couldn't understand a life spent lying in bed listening to the radio, then going for a jog along the beach to keep fit. Robert had had a girlfriend who got pregnant with him after they'd broken up. Now he had another girl who was interested in him. She was married, and they hoped her husband would die soon, just like his father had. She wanted to have sex with him on his fancy big oven top. Robert still told me everything, and I was, after all this time and my own lax behaviour, judgmental. I didn't want to like this new girl, so Robert asked me to leave.

I moved next door. Crashed my car on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Went into a deep depression then left Australia.

I searched out Robert when enough time had passed. Emails were friendly between us at first, until the scathing wit was turned on me. I felt despised, possibly with reason. He'd called me Little Slut for some time. (I'd begun to call him Blobert)

Robert had never been a boyfriend. He'd been a luxury – a portal into a life of flamboyant cynicism, a childhood bubble of farts and fun. An antidote, then a black hole.

*

Marguerite grew up in Sydney, Australia, where she published poetry in some anthologies and won a couple of prizes. When her poems became too long for traditional publication, she wrote a libretto for an opera based on a Bocaccio story from the Decameron. “The Remedy” was performed by the Sydney Metropolitan Opera company. Short films she wrote were shown at the National Film Institute in London and elsewhere. She currently lives in the south of France where she is experimenting in new forms of writing, such as the essay published here.