Excerpt One: Quill

Quill From Chapter One

Quill
By Neal Drinnan

Accursed from their birth they be
Who seek to find monogamy
Pursuing it from bed to bed---
I think they would be better dead.
"Reuben's Children," Dorothy Parker

A clot of guilt pulsed through the valves of Blaise's heart when Woodrow poked his head out the door. Woodrow looked curiously at his lover, who sat on their newspaper-strewn balcony. It was that heavy time of year in Sydney. Everything weighed twice as much as normal and even though autumn was just around the corner, summer lingered on. On and on.

"Whatcha reading?" Woodrow's words were cool and light.

"Oh, Spectrum, the book reviews. Elliot's just put another book out, it's called Je Louse."

"J'ai crabs would be more like it. I thought we'd been through the Elliot thing?"

"It's an interview, for God's sake. I'm hardly going to not read it." Blaise folded into himself, his neat brown hair too short to shield his eyes. He didn't want this discussion but it was going to happen, and his body always lurched into positions of defence and confession way before his mind had charted its course. "You're such a puppy dog," Elliot always used to say.

In truth, Blaise hadn't begun to read the review. He was busy looking at the photograph of Elliot Bernard and his playwright boyfriend, Lex Constantine. They were sitting beneath a Keith Haring painting on a large cream sofa in their Long Island home. Elliot was playfully fighting off a slobbering bloodhound while Lex smiled wryly, pretending to read the New Yorker. The heading read:

PAST TENSE: FUTURE CONDITIONAL.

"I don't see why you go on living in the past, Blaise. It stirs things up every time he puts another book out. And they're not even any good -- I thought we'd agreed."

Author Neal Drinnan

"Woodie, I lived with him for six and a half years. I'm bound to notice these things."

Woodrow snatched the Spectrum from his lover's hands, looked at the photo of them, pulled a face and tossed it over the balcony. It floated like a half-remembered dream into the lush tropical garden below. Blaise felt too proud to go down three floors and fetch it.

"How long before we can stop living in the shadow of Elliot-bloody-Bernard? We read the last book and it was a waste of trees."

"I liked some of it."

"Elliot's mind is an environmental hazard. You were glad to get away from all his games and deceptions. He used to cheat on you constantly -- you said so yourself."

"And who was I seeing for the last six months of my marriage, hey? Who did I leave him for?"

"What else could he expect? He treated you like shit."

"He did not treat me like shit -- I've never said that. We had some great times."

"Yeah -- right, him dragging his tired old box around every sex club in town is OK now, is it? Him living off your money for six months while he wrote that crappy first book... "

"It was his bloody flat, I didn't have to pay rent or anything and he was lecturing part-time."

"Let's not get into this, Blaise. You were a mess when we moved in together. These days all you do is defend him. Perhaps you should fucking well go back to him now you've decided the sun shines out of his behind."

Woodie was satisfied. He knew -- they both knew -- there was no chance of this last scenario transpiring. It was a ruse. Elliot Bernard now inhabited a different stratosphere. The cruelty of the truth didn't need to be laboured; it just hung there like cling wrap on the humidity, mingling at a nasty frequency with static from a neighbour's radio.

Blaise didn't bother to mention that the reason he had been in a mess was precisely because he'd left Elliot Bernard, formerly Bernard Elliot. He didn't explain that even though he'd known the relationship was doomed, he still mourned its passing. He could never explain to Woodrow how some of Elliot's wayward morals had taught him more about life and emotional survival than he was learning from the increasingly stuffy and dysfunctional monogamous dynamics of this three-and-a-half-year cohabitation.

"I just don't think you should read that book -- end of story." Woodrow stormed into the bathroom.

Blaise felt a flush of anger and self-loathing that things should have come this far: that the article he so wanted to read was down in the shrubbery, that the house and car were in both their names. Blaise had entrenched himself. He felt he'd spent years doing anything he could to keep Woodrow happy -- to avoid his outbursts. But the more he did, the more he had to do. It was like a treadmill. Some people are just like that. Treadmills.