Why shouldn't I be angry? A man and I were close. Then he went. Like wishes spoken in a well, the touch has flown. He said he wouldn't tell his wife about me. But I made him no promises.
      I could write. I could email people we know, putting names to our naked details. What does he suppose I'm going to do; roll back on cold debris and hope for a sleep and a forgetting? I can do neither: only howl without opening my mouth, as if I have no tongue, just rage. The green mornings have shrivelled to afternoon. I thought that I had found someone to fill my emptiness but he was only marking time.

* * *       Huddled at a deal table with no lamp I write longhand, stalling in mid-downstroke. It's bitter cold. My sock heels drum to aid circulation: the skin a frosted hull, which might as well be ice. This kerosene burner emits barely enough heat to justify igniting it, the stink not quite neutralising garlic and onion odours; from my inedible dinner, unfinished, ill conceived. Our walls form a fibro-cement colander for Antarctic draught, our uninsulated house shivering behind a cyclone wire fence.
      Student fools, we grabbed this place in summer, just after re-enrolling. Through February and March we were content. Then at Easter the temperature tide turned. May cooled and darkened. And then June set in. Our chests have gone bronchial, rattling with bacteria; a rising sap that congests the nose and the will. Winter wraps its claws around my throat. When we took over her lease, Bill's sister did warn us. Oh, but we knew better. Surely it was just a short ride to lectures? Then our luck deteriorated. A month into first semester my bike got stolen. Bill's car died. Jodie lost her job at McDonald's when she turned nineteen. Out in the street her car freezes and rusts, awaiting a reconditioned engine that she can't afford. We catch the bus or we walk.
      Damn Victor's cold heart.
      While he sits in some centrally heated faculty office in Canberra, I remain here, thermally challenged. I shiver in the lee of a glacial lounge where textbooks accuse me of neglect. They are right. I've continued to huddle in verse: an urge that usually arrives when I'm supposed to be engaged in analytical thinking, either revising case notes or plough through obiter dicta. Verse is more satisfying, if bittersweet.
      One time I did agree to show some of my poems to Bill. He was polite about it, if a little patronising. At least he gave me the courtesy of a reaction--more than I can drag out of Dave.

* * *       In the warm evenings of my first semester we would languish at her open window, pinpointing the galaxies where giants and dwarves were said to strut. We listened to wind chimes ting-teng as if shrill wives were swapping the faults of their husbands while enjoying elevenses: Two-teas. Tim-Tams… I remember that every fourth ring was slightly husky, like a sob. Laura and I made loud critical assessments of those almost-men swaggering through our quadrangle. We disparaged their haircuts and their clothes and their callowness. By second semester Laura got into smack. She disappeared from the college corridors. I drank alone. In the summer vacation I had a beach fling with a boy from the caravan park who was all grown up, on the outside: but at heart he was a child like the rest.
      Returning for my second year, I answered an advert on the accommodation notice board. The householder's name was Bill. His sister and friends had moved out. He was taking over the lease, despite sisterly fuss about cold winters, which he pooh-poohed. Jodie and I were the only applicants. Bill hadn't planned on a ménage à trois. He planned to have a household of guys like his school friends, who could drink and smoke and make noise. So if he thought sharing with two girls would turn out to be a porn flick, he was soon disillusioned.
      He had a lot to learn about toilet seats and market shopping and cleaning up rosters. We three have little in common. An engineering student, Jodie sings in the university choir. Majoring in Linguistics, Bill spends most of his time rehearsing for musicals and drama. I write poems to avoid Economics-Law. The occasional meals we share are a Scrabble board of interlocking words. We make polite chat, our talk very small.
      Jodie and I have a different attitude towards men. She plays down her intelligence, exposing her flesh in inverse proportion. Yet I do share her need for being held at night. Recently I acquired Dave. It's six weeks since Victor left.
      Left me without a word.
      Left me with this.
      When he's not insulting people, Dave isn't so bad. He has feathery eyelashes and wheat-coloured chest hair. The contradictions are less irksome in private. We clutch after lovemaking, though even he wonders why I bother with him. Grabbing my shoulder last week, Dave turned me over for explanation. I told him that he and I share quietness, like the gap between album tracks before noise floods back: no falsehoods in that silence. But it wasn't enough for Dave: he needed satisfaction. I gave him head. That shut him up. He slept: I did not, hulled like a strawberry.

* * *       Tonight, in the exact moment of lifting my pen, I heard an engine cut out. Car doors slammed on a man's rant in some other language. Poor woman. One time she called to me at our fence, asking in cracked English why a magistrate would be sending her a letter. As the husband smouldered--and peeked me up and down--I corrected their misunderstandings. I explained jury service and the electoral roll. Next day a basket of zucchini and sweetcorn graced our doorstep. Despite hair salting at the roots, Nyana retains the lips and eye-smiles of a bride. By contrast, her husband evokes my father: short and chest-thrusting, demanding absolute rule.
      I used to think that my poems sprang from a need to articulate thought, or a desire for conversation.

* * *       Last year I sashayed to parties, playing with the glands of men and boys--and even a girl once. I could thumb my nose at school-age gropes and pashes. Then I met Victor, my Torts tutor: attractive, and married.
      Touch first happened in a library queue. Always I'm to be found waiting. We both reached for my fallen book. Victor's eyes were egg-albumen panes fixing me, windows of a sky that promised flight. I believed in them. I believed we were twin masses of air-current about to slam.
      "You like coffee?" He asked.
      In neutral ground of a cafeteria we eased, first sharing looks then later wine-softening tongues. Stealing into my college room that night, we pulled lapels and sheets with a self-conscious calm: no rending or panting. We touched. It was not mating but entwining. Our breath formed pearls.
      In the coming weeks we pounded and smeared that mattress several nights a week. Often I did not want to wash, so I could smell him on me throughout the day. Under stars he would finger a zigzag of window condensation; while I breasted the night, arching over a courtyard I could barely see for bliss. We tongued and touched in whispers, climbing an erotic stair. We skin-burned carpet in his office, lost in dusk, stroking the rim of another's eyebrow: unmeasured moments down one another's ridges, smooth as angel skin. I asked what his wife might say.
      "Frightened of AIDS. She would regard lesbianism as a lesser risk."
      I suggested that she might already have tried it. Silence is equivocal, I said. We're alone behind the face.
      "You're too honest," Victor told me.
      Yes. I did not relish thieving someone's love.
      But he was even less honest. He only borrowed me. Thwarted by a Department that deemed him ineligible for tenure, Victor did not want to remain on contract, with his wife pregnant. He had been searching interstate. I did not know. Ignorant as a child, I helped to fill his pause: waiting for appointment, waiting for fatherhood. Even as Victor was fucking me, he'd accepted the offer of a lectureship at ANU. He said only that such a thing might happen, in the future.
      For a whole week I heard nothing from him. He would come around, I was sure. So I waited. When finally I asked, another tutor told me that Victor had gone. Packed. Flown. Didn't I know? They'd given him a farewell lunch, even passed the hat around for a gift.
      As my pen scuds over pages that ought to feel the imprint of prose, I've begun to forget his face. Maybe I also write to expunge. Doggerel rambles, self-editing. Presently Jodie returns home to rescue me.
      "This is Alan," she introduces.
      "Adam," he says.
      Like it makes a difference. While her latest man searches the kitchen in vain for coffee, Jodie signals with eyebrows.
      "You must have seen him around," she murmurs. "Isn't he a hunk…?"
      I enquire about Matthew.
      "Matt's always studying. But this one's a real specimen."
      They're all alike in the dark, I say. This sets her off. Men enjoy Jodie's giggle. They enjoy her lipstick pouts and her tight tops. Dave is no exception. He bragged about conquests until I told him it was bourgeois. Now he says nothing. Yet he doesn't lie.
      Waving goodnight, Jodie is impatient to warm up with Alan--or Adam. Sooner or later I'll hear creaking bedposts. By breakfast it will be monosyllables. One of them at some point will break faith with the other. I recall a song about love. I have many songs lodged in my tear ducts. They leak sometimes. Every boyfriend has managed to peel another shell until there's only a husk remaining.
      Of course I am angry. But these frozen fists knock on Limbo gates.
      Amid bathroom walls mould-stippled I disrobed earlier tonight, revealing a fluorescent phantom: lime-nude skin in a mirror spattered by toothpaste. I studied the neck muscles tensing and I pulled back my hair. I tightened thighs to view a dimpled rear. In that light my tits veined, bulging, each aureole seeming to turn brown--and my abdomen swelled. Moaning became echo. Smile contours blurred. I felt two headaches in one skull.
      Well after Jodie had retired with her new pal I could hear Bill's key in the front door. In he shuffled, wafting beer, and lurched over to me.
      "Dedication or insomnia…? Hey, my audition went well… Want a cuppa…?"
      I followed him to the kitchen. Under those whiskers, Bill might be considered okay looking, but for me he lacks corpuscles. Flapping through cupboards, he asked me whether Dave was out on the tiles, said that I looked red-eyed and suggested I give the books a rest. He took his time with mugs and spoons, a gentleman drunk--unlike Dave, who turns feral. At last it dawned on Bill that we were out of coffee.
      "Worried about something?" He asked.
      Only found out this afternoon, I told him. Under the circumstances, I was doing okay. His mouth popped like an uncertain fish.
      "You're sure…? Stupid question. Sorry. You're waiting up for Dave, which is a waste of time. You… have plans?"
      Polite thickhead. Didn't he see that I have to swap a life, that it's either-or? He hadn't yet considered the problem of house sharing. One of five boys, Bill ought to know that babies smell worse than cats; and he can't put them out at night. No different from other men, despite good manners, he masked an urge to offer advice.
      "You can always have another," he said, "when you're older."
      How to explain the dichotomy of secular damnation? I cannot be forgiven whatever I choose. Bill doesn't see: ruled in pristine lines, while I'm blotted and stained. He's unable to project himself to age thirty-five, leaping a chasm to lament this child that might have turned sixteen.
      Rising to put away empty mugs, he nodded in conclusion
      "Dave will come through."
      I said that it wasn't Dave's.
      "Oh. Well, then. Mr What's-his-name. I'll keep quiet. Mum's the word."
      I told him to piss off.
      Bill faltered down the hallway to bed, untroubled by scruples, free to express peer-acceptable passion for the injustice of asylum-seekers. He won't have to reckon on some little unborn queuing with Pan worshippers and false Popes to languish in a Hades green room. He can devote adult energy to advocating for humanitarian causes without wondering how much abuse may go unreformed and not represented while he breastfeeds: sleep-bankrupted and cash-starved, risking dismissal for time off to care for a sick pre-schooler. And he won't hide behind such a utilitarian ploy--or moral cowardice.
      Of course I am angry.
      Fuck that man. And fuck me…
      Future lovers won't understand. I'll see a perpendicular frown split their foreheads when I crave embrace without question, each year as a calendar date descends like moon madness. Beneath sympathy talk, my men will wriggle for space: making polite sounds, one eye on the clock. A vehicle heaves past, shaking my walls. After I put down the pen I'll move closer to a feeble heater, rubbing hands to try and shake off this cold.