DIARY – LOVE AT CUMBERSOME CORNER – TRISTAN – PT 9

By Bruce Williams

We’ve come back from church, Lisa and I. Lisa is a cleaner; I am clean.

Two years ago, Lisa quit her job at Currency Press for a better-paying job doing exactly the same thing at Random House.

It was during a lunch break at Random House ‘ a break that was both too brief and way too long ‘ that Lisa, a gentle soul, was imagining how each of her work mates, sitting around the lunch table, watching Dr Phil, would react to a bullet in the head. Not contemplating doing it herself, mind, but just musing about how it would work out if such an event were to take place.

During that time, her thoughts strayed (Lisa has straying thoughts) to Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction, cleaning blood and brains out of a convertible. And she thought: I could do that.

Now she earns $800 per hour as a trauma hygienist, cleaning up blood and shit – the great gobs of it that are left behind in living rooms, garages, bathrooms and bedrooms ‘ once the police have taken away tiny bits of it in snap-lock plastic bags.

I always shower before heading out with Lisa. And sometimes afterwards, too.

At St Saviour’s church, Redfern, we’d seen the Tristan Project by Bill Viola. A multimedia doodle on the only love story that matters, including mine: Tristan and Iseult.

This is how the story goes’

In the dark-age, cross-channel, Celtic world of France, Cornwall, England and Ireland ‘ the orphaned Tristan earns the love and trust of the good King Mark of Cornwall. Tristan, by bravery and sheer stabbing excellence, rids Cornwall of the marauding Irish. Then he brings back the Queen of Ireland, Iseult, as Mark’s bride-to-be. It’s an allegiance that will build bridges, or causeways, or whatever it was that they had in those days.

On the voyage home, Tristan and Iseult, by mistake, take a potion, then fuck, then fall in love.

Back at the Viceroy in Cumbersome, one of the pool tables has been jettisoned, and the phalanx of pokies has been moved a metre or so back. This has made way, Melbourne-style, for a couch, a couple of arm chairs, and a bookshelf. On which I find, next to a pile of copies of the City Hub, Love in the Western World, by Denis de Rougemont.

Here’s the dilemma, says Denis: Love is supposed to hold us together, right’ Love, marriage and family are the building blocks of community. Right’

But the love story of Tristan and Iseult, the great romance of the Western tradition, is about adultery. It’s about tearing down the house ‘ not building it.

Lisa and I leave the Viceroy at Cumbersome, kiss on Cumbersome corner, and go our separate ways.

Sometime tomorrow (or the next day), over dinner, lying in bed, or watching Underbelly Uncut, Betty or I will say: I love you. Three words: I. Love. You.

When I say them, I’m not sure what any of them mean. When I hear them – I say: I love you too.

In the inner-Sydney suburb of Cumbersome, love is currency. Talk is cheap.