![]() Roy and Mandy had had other backpacking adventures, but hasn’t every middle-class Australian? Weren’t we all at one time nineteen years old and sweet, oblivious amateurs? There was a night on the roof of a hostel in Marrakech that I’ve told my husband about another in Penang, in a hotel full of Belgian doctors, that I haven’t a full-moon party on Kuta Beach that explains the small scar beneath my left ear. The details changed over the years eventually, the girls became Czech, and they ran from the room shouting, “God save the Queen!” Mandy told it with genuine pleasure, as if she were astonished at herself for having lived a life in which an incident like this had taken place. Roy told it as if someone had informed him that, if he didn’t tell a slightly risqué story at least once every year or two, he’d be considered terminally unadventurous. I heard Roy and Mandy tell this story multiple times, separately and together. There was the time at a hostel on Mykonos when, apparently, Roy sat on a top bunk, his legs dangling while Mandy stood between them sucking him off, and some raucous Croatian girls burst into the dorm. The hostel was shabby and loud, but Roy and Mandy claimed to like it they said it reminded them of their own student travels through Europe, of being nineteen and crawling into each other’s beds in crowded dorms. Sometimes Roy and Mandy walked down one particular street that had a backpacker hostel on it. Each night, they strolled hand in hand through the streets of Newtown, Mandy’s belly beginning to show, while Sydney Uni students rolled joints in the tiled front gardens of their rented houses and the employees of Thai restaurants ferried bags of fragrant rubbish out into narrow alleyways. They were both lawyers with good salaries, and the timing of the pregnancy was part of a long-term plan that took into account the rising property values in their neighborhood. The kitchen, too, was new, and they’d painted the front door an intrepid red, as if to advertise their plucky personalities. You could sit on their guest toilet and see the undersides of airplanes. They were part of that gentrification: they’d bought a tall, shuttered terrace house in north Newtown and fitted it with many skylights, so that sunlight filtered down like luminous smoke through the stairwells and woke them each morning from a gleaming square above their bed. Or, of course, a queen.įiona McFarlane on murder’s ripple effects.Īt the time, Roy and Mandy lived in Newtown, which, I’ll explain to my husband, is a crowded inner-city Sydney neighborhood that, back in the nineties, was grimy but beginning to gentrify. A polite king, I mean, who coexists with a constitution, and whose irrelevance now and then sparks a complicated optimism about the possibility of a republic. His opinions and tastes and desires were as carefully bland as a king’s must be. If someone asked, “How was your trip to Fiji, Roy?,” his answer might be “I’d describe myself as having enjoyed it.” The trouble was that he took his humility to such lengths that he actually came across, in the end, as kingly-detached, benevolent, devoid of individuality. He lived his life-at least his public, social life-as if he were answering a survey about it. ![]() His given name-much to his embarrassment-was Royal, and, in defiance of his parents’ grandiosity, he’d cultivated an unroyal persona. It would be hard, though, not to reveal Roy’s, which seemed almost to have shaped his personality. ![]() And I’ll start by telling my husband that I used to know this couple who, on learning they were going to have a baby, began taking long walks together in the evening. That will remind me of Roy and his wife, and I’ll feel like talking about them. We’ll be waiting for a storm to bluster in from the south, and I’ll see the relevant part of him lying flushed and heavy against his thigh, and I’ll think about how I’d consider taking it in my mouth if the room were cooler by as little as two degrees. I’ve never told my husband this story, but I suppose I will eventually, on some sticky night in, say, February, as we lie naked in bed with the ceiling fan set at its highest speed.
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