Love came and went, but a great rabbit recipe remained

Kissing on the train was as far as it went, but that wasn’t the only delicious memory of Melbourne.

The rabbit was destined for an Elizabeth David recipe she had committed to memory. Picture: Heather Prince - Making Rabbit Stew.

She wanted to buy a rabbit. Not a pet one, a dead one. We were at the Queen Victoria Markets. I’d never been there before, but she knew all about food and said we had to go there. She said stuff like that all the time. You have to eat this. You have to drink this. They were always excellent instructions.

We had come over from Adelaide on the Overland. I’d only ever been to Melbourne with my family on a driving holiday through Victoria in the early 80s. The high point was stopping at Sovereign Hill to pan for gold and have our photos taken in olden days clothes. This trip was a more adult proposition.

I had just started uni and was on my own with a girl. We weren’t dating. We never did. I never asked her out and she never asked me out. But for a couple of years there we had this spontaneous, pleasant arrangement where we would see each other at parties or the pub and peel off and pash each other, like a PG-rated version of friends with benefits.

We spent a fair bit of the trip to Melbourne kissing on the train. Nothing spells romance like kissing in the economy class smoking carriage of the Overland. You had to choose your moment, obviously, between passing pensioners who were on their way to play the pokies over the Victorian border, and angry bogans being ejected from the drinks carriage after consuming their tenth West End. I didn’t mind. I would have kissed her in an open sewer. I thought she was amazing. She was smart, she had a great laugh, great eyes, and she also had a dead rabbit.

If you define love as both a giddy, sick feeling combined with a desire to spend the rest of your life with someone, then I guess this was it, for the first time. It really hit me when she was buying the rabbit. The clincher was that not only did she want to buy the rabbit, but specifically asked if it still had its liver and kidneys which she wanted to pound in a mortar to flavour and thicken the sauce. She had committed an Elizabeth David recipe to memory. We needed dry white wine, pancetta, shallots, garlic, thyme, parsley, mushrooms and a rabbit with its liver and kidneys.

“Will you marry me?” I thought.

We went back to a share house in Brunswick where some friends of hers lived. But we had the place to ourselves, just us and the rabbit, for our first dinner that night. I thought this was going to be our chance to move out of the kissing stage towards something more substantial.

It was all going terrifically well until he turned up.

For starters, he was wearing a scarf. He had foppish hair. He was a director of plays. He smoked cigarettes with great intensity. He carried a book with him at all times – on this occasion it was The Drunken Boat by Arthur Rimbaud. He flashed his book around ostentatiously in the same way that a mandrill presents its gaily-coloured arse towards the ladyfolk. Not so much a book as a mating ritual. His record collection alone was enough to confirm my inadequacy – Prayers on Fire by The Birthday Party, Treeless Plain by The Triffids, all the Ed Kuepper albums. She rifled excitedly through his LPs as the rest of the rabbit went cold.

I had nothing on this dashing, artsy bastard. I was at the time deep in my Sandinista phase, which was a double edged sword in the scoring stakes. It made me superficially exotic enough to attract the odd chick, but profoundly boring enough to convince them in record time that they were barking up the wrong tree. I could talk at length about the Iran-Contra scandal and the massacre of nuns in El Salvador and the shameful complicity of the CIA. Usually while I was doing this the woman I was with would start looking around for someone else to talk to, which was kind of what was happening in Brunswick that night.

Whatever self-pity I felt at this unsatisfying end to the evening should come with a recognition that I wasn’t the victim here; rather she was, stuck in a Brunswick share house with a couple of shocking undergraduate poseurs.

But my disappointment at the fact that nothing happened between us was offset by the fact that nothing happened between them, either. We all stayed up late talking, but he eventually wore us all down with his existentialist chat and we retired to our respective beds.

The rest of the trip was great. More new food that she knew about, more great wine that she knew about (that came in actual bottles), a bit more economy class smooching on the train back home. And while the stand-off with my scarf-wearing mate ­cruelled my baser intentions, it did mean that this PG-rated period of my life retains a happy innocence, with the added bonus of coming with an absolutely cracking rabbit recipe.