Lunch with Miss Grover.

Imet her in the foyer of the Novotel, just north of Wollongong. She was sitting at a glass table behind a grand piano, reading a newspaper. She wore a denim skirt and a green and black lace top that she'd bought second hand the day we saw a film about Richard Nixon. I hadn't met her in the day before. Her hair was held back by a comb and she looked older. It showed around her eyes. Maybe she is too old for me, I thought. Eight or nine years? I had never asked.

We left the hotel and walked towards the water. Down to the beach we went and sat on the grass above the sand. It was the middle of winter. A tender sun of twenty degrees compassed arcs into the cloudless sky. Freighters stood off the coast from Port Kembla. She told me she had never used a computer and that she liked to paint fruit, mainly pears. She liked to study light and space. Lately she'd been painting a small lamp with lead-light glass that sat beside her mother's bed in Mosman. It was very dark and heavy when I first painted it, she said, but the longer I studied it, the more luminous it became.

The wind blew long strands of hair around her cheek and into the corner of her mouth. I watched this hair, inside her mouth. The wind pushing it into her mouth and onto her teeth; a white picket fence of polished stones, enough to build a home from. I wanted to tuck those hairs behind her ear and let my fingers touch her cheek. I did. We kissed. I massaged her shoulders and we lay on the grass as if we were in bed together. Green sheets alive beneath us. Her leg over mine. Hours of this. Hours of it. We didn't want to eat. Didn't want to move or wake up from this connectivity of mouths and ...