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silently by the bar, he would watch me waiting for him. Then his scent would always give him away. Pungent and slightly oily, it would drift across and I’d swing around and see him in all his maleness, grinning his sardonic smile, his ageing, pock-marked skin still handsome. Humphrey was an original.
    Humphrey’s reputation as a notorious womanizer made me curious. I didn’t consciously find him attractive, but I found the idea of so many women falling under the spell of this odd and in some ways shy man fascinating. In the same way I found certain insects fascinating. There was even a rumor that the sound of the orgasms of all the women he’d ever made come followed him around like a faint echo, like the ocean trapped in a seashell. Besides, he found me attractive. I liked that; it restored my battered confidence.
    Humphrey was an artist. Primarily a sculptor. You can divide sculptors into two categories, ones that subtract to arrive at the form and ones that build to create form. Humphrey was a subtractor, as if he instinctively knew the shape that was trapped beneath the stone, the lump of clay, hidden under knots of wood. I’d been to his studio once and watched him free one of his figures. Thin and nubile, she emerged from the pink marble like a woman shaking out her hair in sunlight. I watched him working on the piece, polishing the marble as if it wereskin, drawing out the shape as if he were pulling at his own flesh. His large, heavy hands spoke of work, of instinct, bypassing intellect altogether. I guess this was one of the things I was drawn to, this communication through the flesh.
    Humphrey was not a storyteller. When he did speak, it was in short, cryptic sentences or, on occasion, long monologues of lateral witty observations. When he was younger he used to stutter, so badly that until the age of thirty he was practically incomprehensible. Perversely, I found that irresistible.
    It was the end of summer, a hot night when all of Darlinghurst goes in search of a party. The humidity gets under the skin and creates a sexual friction, and before you know it the streets are crawling with people in search of some kind of contact—the brush of fingertips, a kiss, anything. I was in huntress mode, adorned to swallow some man up. Dressed in a blue skintight number, stretched tightly across my breasts and pulled down to expose my shoulders, I felt hot. Let’s face it, I
was
hot, my vows of celibacy evaporating every time my garter belt rubbed against my thighs.
    The party was held in a converted garage, tucked away behind high offices and a desolate row of terraces abandoned by the city planners. The basement had been transformed into a dance floor complete with colored lights, a strobe and a sound system that pounded off the walls. There must have been about three hundred people crowded into this tiny, hot building. I pushed my way through the usual collection of faces—students, journalists, fashion models, unemployed actors, junkies and would-be film directors—down toward the dance floor.
    The walls sweated as people gyrated their bodies like fish in a tank. To one side of me was a lesbian couple. One of the women, resplendent in chain mail, bright red cropped hair and Viking helmet, slithered down the glistening body of her partner. Behind me a young man in sixties bell-bottoms cradled his fourteen-year-old girlfriend. Next to them a man in his fifties, dripping with love beads and feathers, undulated in his own time warp. The whole place was bouncing with a kind of childlike abandonment.
    I could feel men watching me. The hunger in their faces made me wet. Ignoring them, I continued to dance on my own. The music coursed through my blood and up through my womb. It was like dancing in thick honey.
    There was that scent again. Faint but totally distinctive, it floated past my face. I opened my eyes to find Humphrey dancing in front of me. Normally clumsy, he had real grace. He moved as if he was making love;