A man and a woman; a hotel room in a foreign city; an affair maybe at an end, certainly winding down; a flight home; a reunion with an adult child. In some ways nothing much happens in this story, but in the neat witticisms the lovers exchange – because it’s too late for the big conversations – and the touching banter between mother and son, as well as the careful shapelessness with which Helen Garner allows it to unspool, one thing after another, it flows like life. I vividly remember reading this story over breakfast in St Kilda, Melbourne, putting the book down on the table and having that rare thought that arrives as a complete sentence: “That’s how you do it.” Garner’s stories are close and intimate: they are a friend who sits down beside you, slightly overfills a wine glass for each of you and says, “You won’t believe what he did next.” But it might be the self-ironising smirk of its title that makes this story so great.
Collected in Postcards from Surfers, McPhee-Gribble/Penguin, 1985
A Personal Anthology 