raig was the full-time trucker and I worked weekends with the other girls in the store. The day that I came to work in hardware was the day that Craig became a kind of luminary in the timber yard. He shredded an order sheet in his customer’s face, screamed, ‘Don’t you treat me like this shitty job is the only thing that makes my life worthwhile, you smug prick,’ and then destroyed $600 worth of cement-board sheeting under the wheels of the delivery truck as he drove away with his middle finger out the driver’s window of the cab. The ill fit of his leather working glove augmented the length of his finger by a withered inch where the glove sat thick and high on his hand.

This small detail, coupled with the fine Marxist flavour of his short speech, transformed the incident into an iconic protest, a movement on behalf of all the dirty timber boys who worked hard hours for a poor wage. He swiftly turned his celebrity to his advantage. He came to work blind drunk and slept through whole afternoons in the shade of the cab. He shaved each pallet-load of whatever he thought easiest to steal. He clocked false hours on his time card and often left inexplicably in the middle of the day, vaulting the fence and stuffing his red uniform into the scrubby tussock behind the gate. I think he only stayed on as a trucker to steal the diesel. Every morning he drove the truck home to his garage to siphon it into his own van, and when the van was full he filled whatever vessel was closest until the truck’s tank ran close to dry. Every possible container in his garage was brimful of stolen diesel. There were drums and cans and barrels and buckets and jam jars lined up along his worktop bench. I even saw a sardine can – tiny, holding less than quarter of a cup.

At our Christmas party the store manager cocked his head at me and said, ‘You and Craig are friends, I guess.’

I said, ‘It’s someone to share a drink with.’

He said, ‘You’re too young to be a cynic, Francie,’ and handed me a beer. He must have kept watching from across the bar though, while I laughed at Craig’s five-second pint, no hands (he dipped his nose into the glass and gripped the rim between his teeth, then lifted the glass with his jaw and threw his head back, and the pint disappeared in three open-throated slugs), because after a while he came back to me and said, ‘What I mean to say is this. This is only a phase for you. This shitty job. Working weekends to earn a few bucks for a beer. But Craig is full-time. And he’s a father. His kids—’

‘His kids are grown up and they both live in Australia.’

‘You got to understand. This isn’t your life. Being a student is your life. Working here is just a phase for you. You don’t—’

‘It’s a phase for him too.’

‘Don’t be a tourist. That’s all I’m saying. It’s not fair on him.’

I got to be mad at that, which was pleasant in its own way.

After a while I asked about his wife.

‘You’d be surprised,’ he said. ‘I lucked out with Jen. You wouldn’t know to look at me but my wife is a very attractive woman. You wouldn’t pick her from a line-up. You’d guess too low, I’d make a bet on that. She’s a very attractive woman. I’ve had four affairs. Four affairs in thirty years. Christ, Francie, I’m a shit of a man.’

I asked about the women and he sucked on his lager and gazed up at the mounted row of trophy hoofs behind the bar, crooked downwards like tub faucets. He said, ‘You would have liked the first one. Pat. She had a hell of a laugh. But I’ll always remember: one night near the end I climbed up to her balcony to look in her bedroom window. She was there, with her husband, on her hands and knees. He was at her from behind and I’ll never forget it, he had a blue magazine, a porno, open on her back. He was turning the pages. I remember it. As if she wasn’t even there. God, she wasn’t a beauty or anything. But turning the pages. And she just knelt there, rocking, hands and knees. Course I just crept away. But the image stayed. She got a job in Sydney after that.’

n that New Year’s night above the bright lights of the city I asked him, ‘Have you ever thought you might leave your wife?’ I didn’t mean for me. My bottle was beaded with moisture, and cold. We could no longer see the small white streak of the yacht below.

Craig said, ‘My wife – my wife doesn’t want an adventure. She draws a blank. Me, I’m restless. I’d rather quit a job and start again. I’d rather give the finger. And I can strike up anywhere. And – God. She’s an attractive woman. You wouldn’t think, to look at me. You wouldn’t pick her for my wife.’

He fell silent. A bird called in the dark. Craig said, ‘I don’t know, Francie. How can I answer that? I left her before I even married her. There’s nothing there to leave.’

‘What’s she doing now probably?’ I said. ‘Tonight, for New Year’s Eve.’

‘Waiting,’ Craig said, and then he didn’t speak again for a long time.

All eyes turned to plump Tracy as she walked away with their boss, her head bowed a little. The second she disappeared past the door, half a dozen people stood up in their cubicles, some grinning while others shook their heads. Tracy had started working here long before Tian. He liked her, a good-natured thirty-something, though she talked too much. Others had warned her to keep her mouth shut at work, but she’d never mended her ways.

A few minutes later Tracy came out, scratching the back of her ear, and forced a smile. ‘Got the axe,’ she told her colleagues, her eyes red and watery. She slouched into her cubicle to gather her belongings.

When my parents asked what I wanted for Christmas that year, I told them to get me The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant, published in 1996. They honoured my request, and for the remainder of the winter I read little else but that volume, a total of 887 pages. The stories were mostly about North Americans and Europeans, many of them rootless either by circumstance or design. They were about uncovering the truth, about enduring disappointment and loss, about the recurrent shock of being alive. I was thirty years old that winter, a time when I was beginning to take the writing of stories seriously, but still lacked the conviction to regard myself as a writer. Reading those stories put an end to the questions, put the summit before me and put me on my path.

MG: Well, it’s a language you’re able to learn. I mean, I didn’t learn Finnish, I didn’t even try, because it’s not an Indo-European language, not anything I could cope with. I did speak English there, but I didn’t live there. I rented a car, was just travelling along. But I didn’t feel frustrated. It was their country, their language. But Mordecai resented having to speak French. He said, ‘Anyway, what can you do in a country that’s old and rotten and falling down?’ Those were his words. Well at that time, it was burgeoning with writers, French writers. It was really the great period of the twentieth century. Colette was still alive, all these people were still alive, writing, producing. Gide had only just died that year. You breathed the air, the same air as these people I so admired. One day I was sitting reading in a cafe. And Mordecai came drifting over and he sat down and he grabbed the book out of my hand that I was reading. It was The House in Paris, Elizabeth Bowen’s great novel.

JL: Which I just read.

MG: Oh it’s wonderful. And he read some in a mocking voice. A mocking English voice which he didn’t do very well. And he said, ‘You know, if you go on reading this crap you’re never going to get anywhere.’ So I just took the book back.

MG: At fourteen I wrote a poem called ‘Why I am a Socialist’. It began, ‘You ask?’ Of course, no one had ever asked me if I even knew what socialism was. I had got hold of A New Anthology of Modern Poetry, published in 1938. I was fifteen and that was the Depression. Left-wing poetry I admired enormously. I liked the marching rhythm. There was Auden and company. There was Ezra Pound, so they weren’t all left wing. I read this stuff over and over, knew it by heart. Muriel Rukeyser; the gang. And this inspired ‘Why I am a Socialist’. It was a better world. And my mother found this. She wanted to know who I was mixed up with. Mothers then were very interested in preserving their daughters’ sexual purity.

JL: Some mothers now, too.

MG: For the marriage market. She drove me cuckoo. She read everything. I never could keep anything to myself.

MG: She imagines the gardener looking up at her. But you know, she’s not unkind to her husband. I don’t think she’s an unkind woman at all. She sits beside him as he’s dying, she takes his hand. She talks about their future together. The fact that she has a lover doesn’t come into it. She keeps that in another compartment.

JL: There’s a moment in this story that’s so powerful. The children have come to see their father in the hospital, and he’s about to die. After the visit, there’s a description of them skipping down the stairway now that the obligation is over with, ‘taking the hospital stairs headlong, at a gallop’. To me it’s an example of why I love short stories. You can compress such enormous emotion and human experience into just a handful of words. It happens very seldom in novels. Novels have a more cumulative effect.