Content Warnings (click to reveal)
Depicted: Sex, Death of partner/friend
Discussed: Homophobia, Suicide, Drugs use, Self harm
Missing Nick
On the eighth of January, a week before my one-way flight from Sydney to Melbourne, Nick tried to get me to fuck him under a jetty. He held me against one of its wooden pillars. He wore raggy football shorts and a sweater with nothing underneath it, which I confirmed when my hand gripped his side. My knees were capped with sand. I thought he’d show me to his bedroom, finally, but the relatives he was staying with didn’t know he was gay and apparently I wasn’t worth making up a story about. He sprawled himself out on the sand and pulled my hand to his crotch. ‘Fuck me,’ he said. There was a cascade of stick-and-poke tattoos down each of his lean tanned arms. His hair was bleached blond and cut just shy of being cropped.
‘What? Here?’
He leaned forward and crawled on the sand toward me. I looked out to the ocean and saw a sailboat out on the horizon. I felt like I might just want a nice cuddle; maybe it wasn’t too late to pop back to the house for a chaste watch of a Blu-Ray. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not here.’
‘Come on,’ he said. I stood up.
‘I thought we’d have a bed.’ I said.
I pulled him up and he kissed me again. His breath tasted like coffee. When his hand reached my crotch I drew back. ‘Don’t be such a… such a prude,’ he said, smirking. His teeth were crooked and when I saw them it always gave me a squeeze of affection for him.
‘It’s not that,’ I said.
‘Zac,’ he said. ‘Please? I’ve never done it out here before. I come out here every day, and I keep thinking it’d be a good thing to do. With you.’
I laughed at him, and he made a sulky face.
I met Nick at a friend’s gig, at a pub in Lewisham. He was a keyboardist in a dream-pop band, and he gave me the first cigarette I had had since I was a teenager. It was the weekend of my final exams, and I was done with everything. I decided to loosen up a little, and then it was 2:30am and I was fucking him in a sharehouse bedroom that smelled of dampness. C’est la vie. In the morning, I asked if he wanted to get breakfast, and we quietly ate toast at a café on the street where he was living at the time. Afterwards we went back to his place, and back to his bed. I remember lying with him on his mattress, sheets kicked to the floor, while the fan blew just enough air to keep the temperature bearable. He kissed my neck a few times and came to rest with his head on my chest while I drew circles on his shoulder with my thumb, looking blankly at the spots of mould in the ceiling.
Across a number of dates I learned that he had been kicked out of home at the age of eighteen after a fight with his father, after his mother had found his weed stash. Since then his life had been a series of stints in share-houses and part-time jobs that didn’t stick. ‘I’m going to get it all together,’ he said, ‘next year. I applied to the Con, the other day. Going to get serious about my music. Sort it all out.’
I am aware of a compulsion I have towards falling for wayward men and being seized by the impulse to fix them. This is not the same thing as being able to stop it.
‘I don’t want to fuck you here,’ I said.
Nick recoiled and pouted at me. ‘Fine,’ he said.
I followed him on the sand and kissed him. ‘We can go to mine…’
He shook his head. ‘Too far out.’
‘So stay the weekend.’ I said. ‘What else were you going to do?’
He rolled his eyes at me. ‘Don’t assume I don’t have plans,’ he said. We looked at one another on the shore and then he said, ‘Do you need a lift to the station?’
In the car-park, with the rattling of a train going past, I lingered a little in the passenger seat. He smirked at me. ‘What do you want?’ he asked.
I shrugged. He leaned forward and kissed me again. ‘I’m leaving in a week,’ I said. ‘I wanna see you again before I go.’
‘Maybe,’ he said.
I didn’t really think of him again before my flight. There was a family dinner, a few evening drinks, and a picnic the day before I left. Nick was invited but he didn’t turn up. I got a call for an interview for a position in the mail-room of a production company. I arrived during the hottest week the city had ever had and my first few days were spent in a haze, bare-chested in shorts as I unpacked. The only reasons I left the house were to get groceries and for the job interview. My housemate, a receptionist, promised to not get in my way and then we spoke twice a day, max. Less than a fortnight after the move, I was logging incoming packages into an iPad and sorting out missing deliveries. The ease with which a life fell into place around me felt miraculous.
I found out Nick was missing during a phone-call from Jo, a friend I’ve had since high school: ‘Nobody’s seen him since he went to work on Friday. You haven’t spoken to him lately, or anything?’
‘Nah. I saw him a while before I left, but that was it,’ I said. ‘We weren’t really a thing.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Did he seem unstable?’
‘No more than usual,’ I said.
‘But I don’t actually think he’s…you know, done anything stupid to himself. He probably just went on a trip without telling anybody,’ Jo said. She pondered for a moment, and then sighed. ‘He always makes me anxious. There’s a kind of patient he reminds me of.’ She worked as a nurse at a suburban hospital.
‘You mean, people with bad depression?’
‘No. More like, the motorcyclists and the ones who get in fights,’ she said. She texted me later that night to tell me one of Nick’s friends had notified the police of his disappearance.
From my distance of 900-plus kilometres, I watched with an anxious curiosity as the torrent of social media posts about Nick began. There was a photo of him on an old armchair somewhere, staring at the camera with that signature smirk, his nose-ring shining in the light. There was also a photo of him, barely recognisable, in a school blazer with a tidy undercut. With a shock, I noticed one of the photos that was circulated was my own. He was sitting cross-legged in grass with a bridge in the background, wearing a blue flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He was shaved clean, which was rare. It was taken after I mentioned I wanted to do something out of the city so he planned a day out to this river, with a picnic blanket and bottles of wine and some chicken sandwiches. It was the closest we ever came to feeling like boyfriends, and I said, ‘You do know I’m leaving soon, right?’
He shrugged. ‘I know. So I figured we’d do something really cute before it’s too late.’
Looking back I think our mutual honesty about its fleeting nature made it my least neurotic ‘thing’ with a guy I’ve ever had. I worried about what to call what we had: An ‘affair’ is what you do when you are married, but a ‘fling’ didn’t suit the seriousness of my feelings for him, and it was not, by any metric, even in the ballpark of a ‘relationship.’
The first news report was shared a bunch of times. When his father appeared, red-faced and choking back tears, I slammed my laptop shut.
It was odd that I didn’t speak to anyone about it, in retrospect. I was busy learning the names of everybody I worked with and keeping an ear out for positions opening up. I spent Friday nights going to after-work drinks that have since blurred into a montage characterised by Edison bulbs and wooden fixtures. On Saturdays I’d weigh up the pros and cons of going out on my own and inevitably slide into evenings on Netflix and Seek.com. Every now and again I’d break up what I was now thinking of as ‘the grind’ by setting out time to make use of a hookup app I had. I turned up on guys’ porches like an ASOS package and more than once found myself thinking about sorting mail with my hand coiled around the end of a bed as I went inside and outside of somebody. I was putting off a romantic life until sometime in the future, perhaps when I didn’t have to say I worked in a mail-room.
I made a return to Sydney in April, for my graduation ceremony. It was only for two days, but I felt guilty for taking any time off at all so early. Jo invited me to an EP launch in Marrickville. I was sitting in her room, after zipping up her dress. She was leaning into the back of her desk chair and we had just about finished updating one another with our lives. Then I asked, ‘What happened with Nick?’
‘I can’t believe it. Nobody’s seen anything.’ She said. ‘I think…’ she closed her eyes, ‘I think he may have had a breakdown. He had something similar happen when he was sixteen or so. He walked out of the house and nobody saw him for a weekend, and he was meant to meet people but just didn’t show up. He was uncontactable.’
‘It’s been two months,’ I said.
‘I know. The odds aren’t good,’ she said. ‘I was talking to someone who knew him from work and they replaced him in two weeks. Job abandonment, they called it.’
In a backyard shed, I sat on a torn couch, with a coffee table whose surface couldn’t be seen for the empty drink bottles, chip packets, and tangle of Nintendo 64 controller cords on top. I watched a group of people I might have known smoking from a bong and rejected it when it was passed to me. I felt like I was inhabiting a photo of myself in a time before this. I was scrolling on my phone and thinking about leaving when I heard, ‘I reckon he killed himself. I think he went out somewhere nobody would think to find him and killed himself.’ It was said by a thin, blonde girl in an orange dress which washed out her skin.
‘Nah, no way. I know for sure what suicidal people are like. He didn’t have that in him,’ someone else said, sipping his beer bottle.
‘So, what do you think, then?’ asked the girl.
The guy leaned into the table and stared at the ceiling for a moment. ‘I think someone killed him and had to hide the evidence. Maybe it was a drug deal, or something. Or a mistake. Like maybe he overdosed on something.’
‘Was he even doing hard drugs?’ the girl asked.
‘It’s not only hard drugs which can kill you. It could’ve just been a bad pill. That can happen.’
‘Maybe he just drove elsewhere. Changed his name, dyed his hair. Like he just got sick of being himself,’ said a guy I’d slept with once. From memory, his name was George.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ said the girl, as if we were going to solve it that night, if we focused. ‘Be realistic.’
‘Whose ideas are realistic?’ George asked.
‘Zac, you’re smart. What do you think?’
I blinked, taken by surprise that the girl was speaking to me. ‘I think,’ I said, unsure how I was going to finish the sentence, ‘nobody knows what happened to Nick, and I don’t think we ever will, now.’ The comment came out to no reply. Somebody changed the topic, and then I decided it was time to leave the party.
I came to recognise that the prevailing emotion I felt, after this time, wasn’t loss, exactly, but rather a sense of disbelief. How could somebody slip away?
On my trip home from Sydney, I thought I saw Nick. There was this guy in trackies and a hoodie across the aisle of the aeroplane, and he looked enough like him that it made me do a double-take. I could imagine Nick wearing something like that. I opened up Nick’s Facebook on my phone and looked at his profile, and back and forth between the two. I couldn’t remember what he really looked like, out of photos. The man saw me staring and squinted at me, and I looked away. In the terminal, drearily rolling a suitcase towards the baggage claim, I had a last look at the man and convinced myself that it wasn’t Nick.
It wasn’t the last time I thought I saw him, either. I would glimpse strangers at bars and the parties I was eventually invited to who looked like him, even barely. I would prolong the time between having that sense of seeing him again and finding out that it was not him. I would read and reread news articles about the disappearance, which escalated into reading about other missing persons. I discovered something strange about missing persons: you can’t look at photos of them without their eventual fates seeming apparent. Like there’s something in their eyes that suggests teasing, or a slight misapprehension or unhappiness that seems to hint an awareness of what will happen to them. I would wake up, catch the tram into the office, work in the mail-room, come home, drink, and then catch myself at my desk again, with the lights off, scanning the internet. Missing Nick became a reflex.
I went on a movie date with a man named Daniel. It was getting warmer, so we had wines outdoors after, at a trendy bar. He kept trying to make eye contact and I kept avoiding it. Instead I surveyed the street below, nodding as he told me about the new kind of substitute meats the restaurant he worked at was trialling, and how they tasted. ‘What are you thinking about?’ He asked.
We stared at one another for a few seconds. I’d forgotten where I was. ‘Nothing. Sorry. What does a tempeh burger taste like?’
He smiled and kept going. Afterwards, when I kissed him goodbye on a tram platform, I thought about how little choice people have, in terms of who hooks their attention.
At another party I went to, when I returned to Sydney for Christmas, the toilet became blocked and it seemed like I would have to piss elsewhere. I stepped down onto a street and saw that at the end of the road was a park. There was a fig tree and I walked across wood-chips towards it, leant on it with one hand, unzipped myself. It was only when I was done and walking back to the party I realised that one of my dates with Nick started here. We sat on the grass and he laid down and leaned on my side. ‘Do you reckon your band will be, like, successful?’ I had asked.
‘Depends what you mean by successful. I think if they got their act together a little more, we could really get our name out there,’ he said. The question had tapped into a vein of seriousness I hadn’t seen before. ‘But I don’t think of it that often, to be honest.’
‘You don’t, like, think about where it’s all headed?’
He sniggered. ‘Nah.’
There was something comforting about identifying a difference between us that seemed irreconcilable. Like I knew if I wasn’t leaving, I’d try to manage his life. It had happened before and it had not worked out well for either myself or the managee.
I realised I was standing alone in a park at night and moved on back to the party. I was starting to shake off Nick quicker.
There’s still not been a memorial for Nick. Every now and again I’ll see a Facebook post about the disappearance, but that’s about it in terms of his presence in my life. One day I remember that habit I had of seeing his face on other people, and I realise it’s been months since it’s happened.
Here is what I decided: After work that night, Nick went home. His housemates were both out, as I’ve read, and he went to sleep. He woke up early in the morning and was struck by an urge to go to that river he took me to. He felt like a swim, so he took off his clothes and dove from the bridge into the water below. He didn’t know it but it was more shallow than he thought, and he hit his head on the riverbed. This killed him in an instant. He didn’t tell anyone where he was going, because who was he going to tell? It is the only option I can think of that does not involve violence, suicide, or the active decision to leave everybody wondering what happened. The one with the bridge is the ending I settle on and that’s the one that, after a time, stops me from thinking about Nick much at all. It’s not an ending I can believe in entirely, but then again, what would be?
Cameron Colwell is an author from Naarm (Melbourne), Australia. His previous publications include Overland Journal, Kill Your Darlings, and Cordite Poetry Review. Beyond fiction, he also enjoys performing his poetry.
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