How To Gurney A Balcony

Did you know you can tell someone you love them with a gurney? Harry hadn’t done Abigail’s balcony yet for a number of reasons. One of these was that he was not much of a handyman so he found himself overthinking the ordeal. Standard. Abigail didn’t care whether the water went off the edge, if it splashed onto the downstairs neighbour’s balcony, but Harry did. They’d mostly talked about mopping instead but he knew a gurney would be better almost all around. It just takes time to work up to the act of it. He couldn’t clean it as a surprise because he didn’t yet have a key, nor the other way around, but he could do the other part of it if he came to actually saying it out loud. He’d get there. That would come in time and before the gurneying itself. He’d been hoping but not expecting to find the words to say it with needing to get it done. 

They’d met online, as you do, and their first date had run long. They met at 6pm at a rare alleyway bar with a good reputation, a good neutral ground, and by 7.30 they were eating elsewhere with beer instead of wine and then about 8.15pm they were crossing through the city and over the river to the promenade at South Bank where they kissed for the first time. They did that a lot after more drinks and some dancing — which Harry was not much good at — and after a jazz bar closed around them they walked until 2.30am to the top of the cliffs above the wharves and they got, at her insistence, separate Ubers home.

“That’s a bad sign, brother,” Harry’s driver had said.

“It’ll pay off.”

So far, it had.

They had a flurry of dates before Abigail whisked off to a friend’s wedding in Italy and then Harry disappeared to Newcastle for a long weekend with work and they played at an early, intense game of long distance Google-Translated-Italian flirting. They were back in each other’s arms for maybe a month before the brakes squealed on for the same reasons Harry was trying to say it with a clean balcony and not out loud. In another life, earlier that year, on one of the days that he was in Newcastle instead, he’d have been getting married. What persisted was a leftover ring that only emerged when he was quite drunk or quite sad. Quelle surprise: often the two overlapped. It’s gone now to the same kind of place the wedding dress went last February. That was a key part of working out how to say it.

It’s not that Abigail didn’t know about all that. In their respective Ubers on their ways home after that first night they’d looked each other up on socials. Her Instagram locked and her profile picture not quite then what she looks like so Harry wasn’t sure which was hers. Her Facebook, he recalls, private too but the photo was more obvious. Abigail found his, open to the public, and she scrolled deep. He’d never far gone back and archived the old bits. He figured simply no one was going to go digging. Frankly he thought it might be easier to explain that way than to raise it directly, as he’d not done so far with the women he’d met new.

The weather began to warm, winter over for sure, and the slower entanglement in which they now found themselves persisted, but neither of them said it. The balcony at Abigail’s place, with longer light during the day and warmth with which to enjoy it, became somewhere that wasn’t just a place to rig up a clothes horse for the overflow that didn’t fit on the line. It was probably October, with their having met in August, when Abigail mentioned getting the mop out to do it and Harry agreed that would work. Then he’d considered a gurney. Either way: he’d not done it.

The balcony in question: faces south towards the Airtrain line over Kedron Brook. You can see the Toombul shopping centre still standing aimlessly beside it. That had been an asset when Abigail had bought the place but the start of the year had brought brutal floods. She was less worried about that now that number five sold for a good salary more than she paid for it two years ago. On the balcony is a dead fridge, a work couch, that clothes horse against the wall past the air conditioning unit just there on the right as you come out from the living, and a pair of things that fit Abigail, much too small for Harry, and then the thin dirty layers over the top of the tiles not of neglect but just of not being a focus.

The last thing Harry had gurneyed was a painted-over brick patio. He’d ripped up the edges of it, uncovered the bad cover-up job upon which had rested two concrete pots filled with things long dead when he and Joan bought the place. A general sense of the outdoors the less-loved child but the inside was more or less immaculate. They’d been working on the outside as he left. The garden matting next to the pool, last time he was there, was still exposed because they’d not gotten one more small load of white stones to finish it off. They’d uprooted lilly pillies that were too close to the brick, hewn apart a fern that was apparently unfriendly to the dog they planned to get, and then they’d fished mulch from the pool with a net the last owners had left behind. Now he had a balcony on the eighth floor wide enough for two chairs and city views. He had a few ideas about what to do there. He would have to gurney that too at some stage.

He remembered the kick of the house as the motor roared and the water burst out. He remembered how he caught his toe with a gurney once when he was younger just to know how it felt. He remembered regretting that pain specifically but an afternoon spent on the driveway had kept the front of the house he grew up in looking clean for ages. He only remembered that as he wondered how the gurney would kick and where the water on the balcony would go. If it would drip downstairs. He would have to find a way to keep the overflow at bay. To dam the dirty balcony and contain it. Whether he would find the opportunity to do so in secret? He would have to ask Abigail for a key. He’d worked from home there in her absence but she’d taken the keys of course. It had made walking out the door final both as a metaphor and a practical reality.

They’d thought in November, after the slowing, after the unsaying of it out loud or through the gurney, and after Harry wasn’t invited to her thirtieth, that they were about to end as she packed up for Europe for a month. That was mostly straightforward. You’re on time or you’re not. They’d both seen endings before. Good times, good memories, and a quiet peace about their going separate ways and not forcing the issue. They talked on the phone briefly, not at all like Italy, and his texting left much to be desired. He had been uncertain in general at the time, uncertain at work, uncertain at home, uncertain about himself and everything. It was disappointing, even as potential, but it would not have been the same kind of pain that sent him shooting off into the world alone again at the tail end of the year he was beyond excited to leave behind. But they’d come full circle from what would have been a mutual ghosting after she’d flown home from Paris. Harry had realised just before Christmas that he missed her — her specifically and not just company in general.

He picked her up from the airport in his new car, ready for his own new apartment soon, and they’d taken it slow and gone to a pub by the beach at the Redcliffe peninsula up north for lunch, and then returned and spent the week together through to the Saturday when between dinner and a show they took the first couple picture that would become their phones’ backgrounds. The show was stand-up and Harry knew some of the acts, winning tickets for the show after the show from the doorman when no one else turned up to claim them. By the end they’d been drunker than they both expected and so by the time they got home there wasn’t a lot of funny business but there didn’t need to be.

“It’s a yes or no,” she told him.

“Can I think about it?”

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

So he said yes. And then he sort of slurred some other things by way of an explanation for his hesitations so far. They rejuvenated it all, official, labelled, and slowly they came to meet family and friends that weren’t just housemates or in coincidence passing. Through summer the balcony would have been fun to sit on, an interesting way to mix up where they spent their time together largely working and fucking, but the TV was inside. They kept it indoors because it was easier. That was when he started to get the cleaning idea.

The gurney thing calcified when he went down to see Joan in his old house to get some paper and he found the place just as he left it. The crack down the glass in the window in the dining room from where the bird hit it two Julys ago. Weights he’d used to force the pool filter seal ring back open still there after a year in the elements. A glass vase on the air conditioning unit by the pool machinery. It was raining then, just a little, and the mower had been on the grass where its batteries had died. Its plastic shell was made to cover its motor and its blade from the weather but he felt the need to bring it back under the patio as he trod through the clippings in the leather loafers he loved but had overspent on. Wet, leather, grass-covered brown loafers. He’d removed the batteries from the mower while Joan had gone to the bathroom and he put them on charge under the bench, beneath the cracked window, where that charger had always lived. He’d returned to the table and Joan had returned too and seen it and said nothing, but she’d offered him water.

“I can get it.”

He could. He did. They talked for a time after that, a bit about everything, Harry revealing Abigail to her. It was not a shock through the soft launch social grapevine. At the table it felt like all he could think about and talk about was water. The rain, the glasses, the oceans over which they’d flown and returned, the seas to which they’d travelled, and then everything else just came in like backfill. The house landlocked in relative terms. His place now just about with river views. The grass was half-done, a strip of it along the bricks at the edge of the path at the back of the house to a neat square to match with the bulk of the rectangular yard and lapped back around the Hills Hoist to close in on another square, there where the mower had died, and all he could think about was how he could he could say he still loved her if he just waited for the battery and finished it off. It would have taken him twenty minutes. And then maybe the rest of his life if he’d found a way to get through, this time, all of the things they’d promised they would. But he didn’t.

It took him longer than that with Abigail.

How he said it to her in the end was tipsy but not drunk like he’d been the night before. The night before they’d had total darkness in the room and he could have let it slip there, staying with her family for a long weekend island escape, months after he didn’t say it with the lawn. He had moved on from ten years of it always so easy from his lips, and he’d not have needed to face her when he said it but he was working now on not being a coward about these things. The funny feeling of knowing you’re going to but not knowing when or how. He was cautious of dodging the saccharine moments, small milestones that might undercut the momentum, and in the end it came out not as much of a plan. It was searchless, ungoogled, its exact insistence unprepared unlike the gurney would have to be. He knew how to say the words in general but specifically… What he’d not worked out yet was how to do it forever.

After he did tell her he loved her, Abigail said, with the dim light on, that she’d felt like it was true long before he’d said it. True before the balcony, which, now that they’re heading again into winter, wouldn’t be a priority for a while. But then again there’d just been today’s autumn midday topping 30 degrees so who was to know? Not Harry.

“You’re cute,” they’d both told each other beforehand — to say it without saying it. Abigail understood that first. And yet: the balcony still not gurneyed. More importantly for Harry, for Abigail, for everyone, as far as he knows: the old lawn remains half-mowed.

For Valentine’s Day Abigail got Harry a one-pan cookbook because his apartment is small and he’s keen to learn. Harry forgot to get her a gift and got her, late, only a card. They’re still working through the book together on the more involved recipes but Harry’s cooking for himself is simpler than it could be. His oven remains stained with the bursting fat of a pork belly they slow cooked together for four hours at 220 degrees. In the book is another pork belly recipe but it’s slower again, five hours, and then shredded, and they’re keen beyond belief but it will take a whole free day which means it would probably have to be a Saturday. There’s a tentative date for it in four weeks. Right as they’re about to go out to a movie and a drink for a Friday night Abigails turns to Harry, love now in the air and out of their mouths and part of a habit of things to say, and she asks if they can do the pork belly the day they do the gurney.

In the front half of the year there are a lot of public holidays. One was coming up so it could be then. He’d just have to remember it, planning ahead, because he was getting important dates wrong. They’d been together four months yesterday, not tomorrow.