Angles – pastiche inspired by a photo of modern architecture
“Julian!” A slow drawl at first. No response except the crunching cascade of ice behind chrome doors, echoing off polished surface.
“Julian!” Sharper. A fly buzzed behind the lines of grey strung by cord across the windows. Her eyeballs followed his whirling slams from one slat to the next.
“Julian!” An order now. Crisp. Loud. Exacting. But still the micro-climate rang silence in response.
She pushed back the sheets and padded across the Tasmanian oak, hand-cut, hand-laid, hand-polished. Lights heralded her entry into the creamy blankness of the bathroom. A cascade of water spurted. Vacuum suck expelled the whisper of steam.
Leather boots, white shirt, jeans. Hair pulled back. A curve of coffee-coloured lipstick. She strode out across the expanse of lustrous floor. Tat-tat. Tat-tat. Tat-tat. The gleam of the screen; a touchpad revelation – Julian already on his way to Heathrow; Julian had left earlier than normal today.
She perched on the black leather stool, lifted her chin and stared out an endless gaze. At nothing.
Grieve
The latch clicks shut behind me. The metal gate has scraped tiny abrasions along my fingertips. Memories of the softly mouldering five wooden bars that used to stand here play in my palms. The old timber gate – friend, climbing frame, castle and perch.
All morning, the sniping scorn of my wife has poured over me. This place beckoned, drew me here. Refuge.
And so, as I turn towards the pasture of my childhood, the arches of my feet flex, ready to curl around tufts of grass and moguls of river sand. But no. Instead the nugget crunch of concrete slides beneath my soles. I look up and my eyes narrow in the flint-grey glare. No flash of emerald grass. The creek bed has gone, embalmed in a precise bed of concrete.
My pupils draw staccato lines across the landscape in sudden, frantic search of familiar markers. No crown of gum above me. No mounds of lyrebird scratchings. An interloper, a sturdy hillock of rubble specked with weed sprouts, lies to my left. Even the blazened trunks of blackbutt that should have clustered to my right have been erased, as if some draughtsman has dragged his rubber across them, an inconvenience to the angles of his plans.
The breeze whirls up a slap of concrete dust which spatters my face, gritting my tongue. I toe-kick the ground. Solidity slams through my legs. Tiny red gumboots used to sink into muddy hollows here, tramping through pools of pennywort and kicking up rainbows in the puddles. Echoes of boyish chuckles ring in my ears.
Machinery, limp in bent repose, stands and waits. I begin to walk.
Out of – what? Habit? Respect? – I trace the lines of the creek bed. I zigzag disjointedly remembering long-ago leaps from peak to hollow. Deft as a hare, I once threaded my way through the rocks that lay here, shivering in terror of black cracks where tiny feet could slip and jam. I feel again the tendril spill of ancient lomandra against my shins. I walk until the concrete yields to loamy earth, until my neck involuntarily cranes to see the tumble of the river. But the muddy flow ahead gouges a slow, cynical leer through these meadowlands, baring two rows of white-toothed, angular rocks that eclipse the platypus-clawed furrows of the riverbanks. Beside me, a blackened timberpile denies the koala whisper on the breeze. A ragged plastic sack flaps hollowly. In response, the peep of a solitary moorhen carries across an unhearing, flattened land.
An animal howl wells as the moorhen’s lost offspring dreams thread spirals through me. I respond to the bird, to my land, to my country, to myself with a clotted, ragged sob.
Hospitality in the time of COVID
“It’s business as usual, guys!” Every day, Dave’s insistence sends my gaze outside, beyond the café. I focus really hard.
This job is part but not all of my life, I remind myself, as Dave sneers at the news and hands out the staff tips, germs and all, at the end of each day.
Savour. Dave set the place up six years ago. I’ve been here five. (“From farm to fork”, “Local – organic – with love”, “Find us on Facebook!”). It’s only six minutes’ walk from my house, where I used to live.
My mum is eighty-one and dying. She has MS. MS? You might say. That’s not dying. True, but she’s also got this auto-immune disorder. They both dance together, around her, my mum in the centre, and we all watch on knowing that one of them is going to get her soon.
So, I serve the coffee to the groups of women with their tattered-haired kids and I clear the plates from the tradies as they lick their fingers and guffaw across the cutlery and I serve wines to the couples pushing their laptop buttons and logging off at the end of another long day. I smile as I take their money, wiping their tables down with a damp, grey-green cloth.
And then at seven on the dot, I pull the tee-towel out of my waistband and I drive those three long kilometres to my mum’s house in the gathering dusk, my heart beating just a little too fast, hoping.
I try not to rush. I stop, wash hands carefully under the outside tap, before I let myself in. Joanna’s been there at lunchtime, I remind myself; Joanna, in the wine-coloured uniform and with a wide smile to match.
But I know my mum will need the loo, will have dropped something from her feathery fingers, will be just a little bit breathless, need her puffer, can’t find it.
So that time spent with my hands under the tap feels like an obstacle, a barrier to getting her sorted. I feel guilty somehow, as I tarry. I need this to be done.
But no. I need to slow down. I need to keep washing. I need to breathe in lungfuls of clean air. I need to shake that café and Dave and all those customers out of my hair, before I put the key in my mum’s front door and enter the darkening hallways with a cheery hello and a careful smile.
