The Lodger, That Summer

by Levi Huxton

Luke flicked my nipple, winked, and walked out the door.

We went to very diferent schools, dammit

I’d been volunteering for a couple of years now, so I knew most of the homeless in the area, at least by sight. He was wearing navy overalls that seemed clean enough, and he looked healthy. In fact, he seemed pretty fit. Of course, that didn’t mean much. I knew by now that anyone could become homeless, sometimes overnight. In this day and age, it didn’t take much for your life to suddenly take an unexpected turn: underlying mental health issues, abuse, losing your job, spiralling debt, even a bad break-up. The richer the country, the thinner its safety nets.

Tell me!

Grief is a strange beast. When it’s in the room with you, there’s not much space for anyone else. There’s no silver lining to losing someone you are married to, the mother of your children. But the one thing I’d come to appreciate, to seek out even, was alone time.

Indeed.

Soon, I found myself roaming an empty house, the kids increasingly either out and about, or locked up in their rooms studying or playing video games or doing god knows what. I had a bedroom – and a bathroom – to myself. I could watch the footy in my underwear with a six-pack and a pizza. I could flick through hours of porn on my laptop or my phone. I could jack off in the bath or at my desk or on the bed or in the closet for all anyone cared.

Ha!

One afternoon I’d run over to his house and walked in on him masturbating in his room. He winked at me and I blurted out something incoherent as I blushingly shut the door and ran home.

There it is: the fuckening. A filthy w-bomb!

I’d only just recently turned forty.

I thought he was 42?

He started with my neck and shoulders, unknotting the tension that had built up there. My back was next. There was a sense of release. I’d read that grief and trauma could lodge themselves into the body, tightening your muscle tissue, locking your joints, haunting your spine. I’m sure it was only my imagination but Cary’s hands seemed to be hunting down these parts of me that had been stunned into paralysis, unlocking me like one of those three-dimensional wooden puzzles. He was mostly gentle but also knew when and where to firm up and go in deep. I felt myself yield to him, unwinding and unravelling.

...and falling in luuuv

I turned the shower on again and sat down on the floor, my back against the wall, feeling the water beat against my face. It took a while before I was able to collect myself and clean up.

...sooo...this was not where I expected to go...but go there we did.

Mack rustled up a Christmas feast from a visit to the fish market, putting his culinary skills to good use. There were oysters and Balmain bugs, grilled prawns with garlic butter and a whole snapper steamed in sheets of drenched newspaper on the BBQ. He had even made a Bûche de Noël, a chocolate cake rolled into the shape of a log, a traditional Christmas desert in France meant to bring a family luck.

I think "Balmain bugs" are langostino

There was an illicit thrill at being able to stare. Everything was quiet but the punk band playing in my rib cage. Adrenaline was on the drums, guilt on bass and lust about to play an epic guitar solo.

That is so cute!

At best I was sidekick, a supporting actor. At worst, I was an extra in my own life. Then there were the deleted scenes, left on the cutting room floor of my memory. In these I was still the same guy, laughing a little too loudly, perhaps, after a joke at my expense. I cringed as I replayed these fleeting moments which now read as minor humiliations. A guy from the rowing team dry humping me in the locker room, dick heads zipping my sleeping bag to another guy’s at a slumber party.

Hellish

I gulped. He winked.

Guh-ross! The goddamned w-bomb!

Jemma thanked the driver with a wink

Insulted him you mean

We returned to our food prep. We made a good team in the kitchen. Frank moved easily around me, knowing when to duck out of my way and when to jump in and lend me a hand. There was an unspoken choreography to it. Not many people have an innate sense of how to move in a busy kitchen, like having a sense of rhythm or perfect pitch. We spent a couple of hours in there, sometimes chatting like old times, other times focused on the task before us, sharing a comfortable silence.

You don't get many friends like that in life.

There’s something awe-inspiring about discovering new physical sensations, four decades into inhabiting a body you think you know inside out. There’s a flash of vertigo as your brain contemplates fight or flight reactions, quickly assessing the new experience on a danger scale. Once the threat is discounted, the mind opens wide, nerves feeding back every aspect of the physical epiphany. Who knew what accelerant chemical in MDMA amplified this sensory overload. I could only surrender to it.

The guy is a sex psychopomp

"Love hangs about thy name like music round a shell, no heart can take of thee a tame farewell."

Henry who?

Was adolescence just a long process of unpicking the lies you’ve being told - sometimes for your own benefit? Of reassessing a past you might have misunderstood? Of reconsidering what you thought you knew in light of the bits you gleaned here and there? Of slowly realising how little you understood, deep down, about how the world really works, even just the bit of it that unfolds right in front of your eyes?

Yes. So is adulthood.

All I knew was it had to do with needing space to unpick the parts of myself I wanted to keep from the parts I’d created for others, the ones I was perhaps ready to discard. I had been performing a role, or a series of roles, really, depending on who I was with. If I was going to stop acting, I needed to be surrounded by strangers who wouldn’t notice the change, let alone comment on it. I’d spent so much time and effort adapting to my surroundings, blending in, that I couldn’t tell who I was anymore, like a chameleon that’s forgotten its original colour.

Gay kid grows up

I could tell from her raised eyebrows and the way she winked at me in the rear view mirror that Jemma didn’t believe half of it.

Eye disease epidemic strikes Australia!!!

“Guess I don’t have time to take care of this then?” He winked.

What? The eye disease?

When you’re an eighteen year-old boy, it’s surprising how few people actually care what you have to say.

He was 19 a minute ago

Instead I now knew confidence had everything to do with being desired in return: a reciprocated lustful gaze, a gentle touch, a complicit chuckle. It had everything to do with being seen, finally: a sisterly hug, a pat on the back, a father’s confirmation. It had everything to do with the right to do nothing less than exist. For years I had been waiting for my life to start. And now, I decided, it finally had.

Real adulthood

What do you hang on to when those you love leave you behind? Is it what was taken from you when they left, or what you were able to take from them in the time you had together?

Good question