Every time I think about my first questions-and-answers regarding physical love, a few symbolic objects appear before my eyes, dating back to my childhood in Ceausescu’s Romania: the tetra underpants; the “butterfly pack”; the kitchen table; and, far away, nonchalantly floating over and above the world of contingencies: Veronica’s robe de chambre. It is difficult […]

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Abel Musundire might have been the child narrator in Emmanuel Ngara’s celebrated poem on Nyadzonia, a Zimbabwean refugee camp in Mozambique, which was wiped out by Rhodesian security forces at the height of the Second Chimurenga. Both his parents and his older sister had been killed, and it was only the shelter of his mother’s […]

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I’ve never told anyone. To think about it makes my hands sweat and nausea rise from my stomach. It happened the year I turned eighteen on a sunny late afternoon in February, on the top floor of a building in Double Bay. I was recently engaged to be married and the wedding was booked for […]

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You’d never have credited it, of Moffat. He was such a grey, precise little man. The sort who is always at his desk a full fifteen minutes before anyone else. The kind whose desk resembles some general’s abstract plan of attack—never the messy reality of the battlefield. The type of irreproachable bachelor who’s just that—not […]

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When Bradson showed the taxi driver the address, the cabbie pronounced that restaurant to be the best in Sweden. Bradson didn’t know about that. But as he waited to be taken to the table booked by Matthias, it seemed to him the cabbie just could be right: Bradson saw people he knew—some a little, some […]

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Maxine and I are drinking coffee at my place and I am telling her about it. He arrived at my door on a Friday night. I’ve got the lights down low so I don’t see him clearly at first. I am standing at the top of the stairs waiting, when a person with long hair, […]

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Of the Director of the Writers’ Centre’s preoccupations, the most prevalent and pressing was balancing the books. “Balance?” said Henry. “Let the national broadcaster worry about governmental demands for balance. I think we should accept any books donated to us. And buy anything else that we think is important. Forget balance.” “What are you wittering […]

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There was a part of the road he never remembered. The first time it happened he panicked. It happened like this. Work took him up and down the Hume to Sydney every week and most of the road was vaguely familiar. He always took the M5, loving its fast and smooth escape, once he’d got […]

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Mass that Sunday was devoted to First Communion for children from the local Catholic school. When he’d heard this the previous Sunday he made a mental note to go somewhere else for Mass but, like so many mental notes he made, he forgot it when the time came. Arriving at church and finding preparations under […]

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This chapter is from a picaresque novel-in-progress entitled The Poets’ Stairwell. It tells the story of two youngish Australian poets travelling about the British Isles and Europe in the mid-1970s in search of their respective muses. One of the poets is in the process of a religious conversion, the other is troubled by the authenticity […]

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