kylie ladd

“The thing is, I fell in love with Luke, not Cary. Fell for the sheen and the sweat, the adrenalin of the hunt. Faltered, reeled, collapsed. There was no falling with Cary. Loving him was gradual and logical, inevitable as the path of a glacier. But Luke was a thunderclap, appearing out of a clear blue sky, soaking me to my skin, then moving on leaving everything looking different. And post-Luke nothing was the same.”

“The best way to describe it is that it was like eating Vegemite toast again after weeks of rich foreign food and complicated sauces—good and satisfying and familiar. I’ve always loved Vegemite toast.”

“I had learnt from my work: that all pain is erased in the passage of time. Not just by, but in. In ten decades hence it would be as if nothing had ever happened. There would be no relics, no scars. No jug to piece together, no bone fragments to date. Emotions fade and leave no trace. Only the inanimate remains.”

“Tired, yes, but it was more than that. Watching everything unfold had lurched me from anger to disgust and finally sorrow, had reminded me that love is fleeting and precious and should never be taken for granted. All of a sudden I felt the need to seize it with both hands, to assure myself that the same pain wouldn’t be mine.”

“I literally felt gutted, as if someone had hollowed me out, removed my core. Patients in the final stage of dementia revert to an almost neonatal state, their brains so atrophied they can only breathe and digest, suck and pout. That was how I felt. I continued to function, but only at the most basic level, my existence little more than a collection of primitive reflexes.”

“I was out of control, manic, less myself than I’d ever been. Like Eve must have felt after the fall, I reflected as I drove away. Leaving Eden for a land unknown.”

“Loving and losing. They’re such similar words.”

“For a second I felt content, an emotion so unfamiliar it took me a moment to identify it.”

“I’m not proud of any of this, truly I’m not. Looking back I can’t believe how I acted, how each deceit flowed so seamlessly from another. My only excuse is that I was addicted, and like any addict all I could think about was my next hit. Hurting Cary didn’t seem of any consequence, neglecting Sarah or my work was unimportant. All that mattered was Luke and the singing in my veins whenever we were together.”

“There’s an old joke about a man who buys a cookbook for his wife and a negligee for his mistress. Somehow, though, the two parcels get mixed up and he fears that all will be lost. But on the contrary both women are delighted: the wife thrilled to be viewed in a sexual manner after years of domestic tedium, the mistress overjoyed that her lover considers her as more than just a body. I imagined the scenario as I trudged my way through Myer and David Jones. Should I look for lingerie for Cress, reassure her that despite all the hiccups of the past few months I still loved and wanted her? I thought I did, but a leopard-print G-string didn’t seem the right way to express that.”

“If I let myself think of it the pain and anger were still fresh, adrenalin racing down my limbs to pool, hot and itchy, in fingertips and toes.”

“Chemistry is an overused word. I prefer ‘fit’, that indefinable sensation when a man takes your arm as you move through a door, or leans into you to light your cigarette. (I gave up smoking for Cary and sometimes I still miss it.) Fit is an understanding between bodies: that you’ve been designed the same way, that you speak each other’s language, and fluently. It’s all about physical compatibility and has nothing to do with whether you’ll last or even have anything to talk about afterwards; fit is no relation to the brain, and only a distant cousin of the heart.”

“She was never malicious, but she was careless. Kate is the sort of person who is always forgetting where they put their drink down at a party and wandering off to get another, so that by the end of the night they’ve left a trail of half-empty glasses in their wake, and don’t even notice the wastage. I wondered if she misplaced friends as easily.”

“Maybe it was because the friendship had been forced on us, or because, with her careful grooming and precise sentences, Joan always made me feel messy.”

“Maybe a better illustration would be a migraine. One moment you’re well, the next you’re in so much pain you can’t open your eyes. Everything is changed. Nothing exists except the throb and fret between your temples, though underneath it all you’re still perfectly healthy.”

“Oh, I already loved my husband, of course, but this was different. That had been a decision; this was out of my control, an impulse as difficult to resist as gravity. Mad love, crazy love, drop, sink, stumble. The kind of love where every little thing is a sign, a portent: the song on the radio, his Christian name staring up at you from a magazine you’re flicking through, your horoscope in the paper. Normally I don’t even believe in horoscopes, for God’s sake. Love without holes or patches or compromises, soft as an easy chair, a many splendoured thing.”

“That’s the thing about falling. It doesn’t go on indefinitely, and it rarely ends well . . . plunge, plummet, pain. Even if you get straight back up, even when you regain your footing, after the fall nothing is ever quite the same.”

“At first I enjoyed it. A fall is a surrender; you can’t help it, you didn’t plan it. Maybe you could have been more careful, but it’s too late for that now—you might as well enjoy the swoop and the speed, the unnerving sensation of having your feet higher than your head.”