An innocent mistake. Innocent, then progressively less so. I acted immorally, but what did literature have to do with morality? Looking back, it all seemed inevitable, the first mistaken identity leading to the second, leading me to the bedside of the last, great Australian writer, observing her in her natural habitat: captivity. It had nothing to do with me – the deception, the slip of the tongue I couldn’t take back. At least, that’s what I told myself, until it was all too late.  

It began after my discharge from the Alfred Hospital in the first week of February. The tests proved there was nothing wrong with me, yet I felt anything but fine as I waited for my Uber on Commercial Road. I’d been in and out of the hospital many times over the years. I’d learnt to rate my negative feelings on a scale of one to ten, be it discomfort and numbness, dizziness and flatulence. That day my stomach ache was a six going on seven, growing more acute the closer I got to Footscray and home.  

We hit the Bolte Bridge, the cranes and crates of Port of Melbourne visible far below through the suicide fence, the sluggish Yarra and the skyscrapers scattered with coins of light from the late-afternoon sun. I realised then what was causing the ache: shame. For the incident with the night nurse and, more than that, for who I’d let myself become: an unpublished, barely solvent pig. Impossible I should allow my girlfriend, Ruth, to see me like that, achingly myself, so I took evasive action. In a snarl of traffic on Racecourse Road, I cleared my throat and addressed the driver.  

—I want to change where I’m going.  

The pool was in the complex of buildings at Victoria University, overlooking Footscray Park, sloping down to the Maribyrnong River. Clouds of bushfire smoke flocked above Melbourne’s skyline, which seemed slightly unreal through the pool’s main window. I bought goggles and budgie smugglers from the pustular attendant and descended into the change rooms, hoping they would live up to their name. In the mirror I was shocked by what I saw: myself, whippet-thin from three weeks of calorie restriction, looking every inch the emerging writer I still unfortunately was. I had lost a lot of blood in the hospital – a lot of time, too – and I vowed to do something, anything, to ensure I never returned there.  

I hacked through the first ten laps until I fell into rhythm. Perhaps the doctor had been right and I was going to be okay, relatively speaking. By the time the cramps set in, my discharge seemed a distant memory. I almost felt good. I wallowed through the last few metres, levered myself onto the lip of the fast lane, where an aquarobics class was in full swing, to the strains of Kylie’s ‘Locomotion.’ I waited to catch my breath, my eyes drawn to the face of a woman with sharply chiselled cheekbones, like the bust of a deposed dictator. She must have been eighty, maybe even older, but there was something about her that was maddeningly familiar: the eyes that were all pupil, the grim hyphen of a mouth. I knew her from somewhere, I was sure of it.  

It was still sweltering when I emerged onto Ballarat Road, a northerly blasting up from the Maribyrnong, the sun reluctantly setting. I was waiting at the pedestrian crossing, feeling butch and pleasurably sluggish when I saw a line of oldies, bedraggled from their swim, being escorted by a nurse (how I now loathed them!) into a minivan parked in an access road. The van had bald tyres and its windows were caked in dust. Words were emblazoned on its side, in capitals so faded I could only make out the first: MERCY. Fitting, as it was a quality in short supply, especially in myself.  

The woman with the cheekbones was at the back of the line, trying to get a cigarette lit. She was slight and wiry, barely up to the bus’s window, wearing a grey singlet, straight-cut jeans and workboots too hot for the weather. They were the clothes of a shearer, a wharfie, a Melbournian prose poet. Despite its dampness, her hair sprung up from her scalp. Again I had the feeling I knew this woman, but this time the feeling was more acute. I couldn’t look away. Finally, she puffed a plume of smoke, eyes closed in contentment. When she opened them, it seemed she was staring back at me. Without stopping to think what I was doing, I snapped her photo with my phone.