On 10 January 2000 I started my first job in journalism at the Brisbane News. I was 20 years old, a starry-eyed rube from suburban Bracken Ridge who didn’t even know what a flat white was.
On my first day my editor had the rest of the journos join us at a cafe to welcome me to the team. That’s when I met Fiona. Fi. She’d been out on assignment and arrived late; the only seat left was right next to me. She was so natural and warm in the way she chatted with me. What was just polite small talk felt to me like an enormous show of generosity; like a light shining on me. She also reminded me of my childhood screen crush Toni Pearen. I was instantly taken with her.
Fi was a reporter but she also subedited a lot of articles. For months she corrected my dodgy apostrophes. Four months in and she’d had enough. After work one evening, when everyone else had left, she quietly ran through the rules of apostrophes with me – to save her own sanity and my dignity. What a woman, I thought.
Fi was a few years older than me; she’d lived and worked in the UK as a journalist. This was the height of sophistication to me. I was fascinated and enamoured with her. But I didn’t think she’d ever entertain the idea of dating a bloke like me; I was just a kid trying not to blow his big break with errant grammar and misguided affections.
Then spring rolled around, the jacarandas were out and Brisbane was awash in purple. Local band Powderfinger were just about to bring out one of the greatest albums of all time, Odyssey Number Five. As a perk of my shit-kicking job I was invited to the industry launch. There was only one person I knew who was a bigger Finger fan than me.
At the venue on the night of the gig Fi and I ended up on a back landing smoking Peter Stuyvesants and drinking beers, having the kind of conversation twentysomethings do. I was 21 by then and trying to channel Ethan Hawke from Before Sunrise.
When Fi began riffing on how she was over dating, over love, I doubled down on it, agreeing with everything she said. Who needs romantic love? We were serious journalists! John Pilger didn’t give a shit about love; we’re hard-boiled, we’ve got Steinbeck and Down and Out in Paris and London and Kurt Cobain and travel; we’re no cream puffs – we don’t need anything as lame as love!
But in my head I thought: holy shit, I do actually love this girl. I wish I could just tell her right now how amazing I think she is, how I think we should be together, but I didn’t have the guts.
Then our beers ran out. I walked back to the bar to get us some more and every beautiful person in Brisbane was in there, swooning around Powderfinger’s lead singer, the great Bernard Fanning.
There he was, like a light in the darkness. And there I was, the Elvis Costello to his Jim Morrison, trying to convince myself that I was too cool for love.
Who was I kidding? I ripped a Powderfinger poster off the wall and squeezed through the crowds feting Bernard and interrupted his conversation. I apologised, congratulated him on the album and then rambled: “There’s this girl out on the landing, man, and she loves you even more than I do. I really like her, right, and I figured if you sign this, then her love for you might bounce back and get reflected back on to me somehow.”
Impressed and bemused, Bernard took the poster from my hands and scribbled on it. He rolled it back up and told me to take it to her and not to look at it.
Back outside, Fi unfurled the poster as I looked on. She read aloud: “Fiona, this boy really likes you, love Bernard.”
Time stood still. I could have gone and made a sandwich, come back and still been waiting for her reaction. It was pure vulnerability, the knife’s edge. I felt as though I would either have to move to Sydney or we’ll be together for ever.
But that was it. That was the moment my life cracked wide open and love poured in. This beautiful rock god had swung open the door to the truth I was too scared to admit: love is the coolest thing there is.
We shared a cab home at the end of the night without acknowledging this big elephant in the room – the poster and what Bernard wrote – but I think we both knew this could be the start of something big. It was only a few days after, on the night of Fi’s birthday, that I told her outright that I loved her and she said it back.
Twenty-four years later, I still think about what might have happened if I had kept wallowing in self-doubt and tried to stay too cool for the truth of love.
And it terrifies me because the joy that came after that moment – it sends a chill through my bones to imagine my life without it.
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An adaptation of Trent Dalton’s book Love Stories is being staged by the Merrigong Theatre Company in Wollongong, New South Wales, from 28 February to 8 March
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