Month: August 2018

Always there are the moments we never seem
to forget: the sweat sad ghosts of sweet
rave nights, and screwed down cigarettes.

I remember that I spent at least three mildly angst-ridden years, during what was I think an indifferent kind of youth, keeping company with a somewhat pretty, dark-haired young woman who could never make up her mind.  This girl used so much grass you could have nick named her “couch”. Sitting cross-legged on her rumpled bed, eyes glazed, and her sweet mouth splitting from five different types of grins, she would roll out endless plans for the both of us; fat roaches full of choices, the discussion of which was best not refused.

But then again, she was a fanatic vegetarian who eschewed the flesh of this world in favour of kidney beans and herbal teas. She forced me on occasions to imbibe foul-tasting comfrey when I had raging flu or simple colds, always breakfasted on the lounge room floor on Vegemite and toast, and encouraged me in the habit of tobacco – an addiction I have till this day.

So, after I was firmly hooked on her and our love affair, she decided to give up smoking herself. I was then berated for months on end as to the state of my own health. She still kept using the drugs though and wanted at one precious, lost moment, to have our child. We were to escape to the outback of country New South Wales, city life at that time of legend being the epitome of the evils of the later twentieth century.

For the purposes of this short fiction, let’s call her Cat. She was enrolled at New South Wales University for a time, studying economic history and complaining endlessly about the Basser Steps. For those who like exact geography, they run in the open uphill from the top of College Road past the Basser College, and on to University Walk and the centre of the Campus itself. In those days gone by they were more commonly referred to as “the idiot stairs”. If you venture on them wearing a wraparound dress and carrying a string bag full of books and your pencils, you can’t quite get up a proper striding rhythm as you walk. It’s really no better in a suit with a fountain pen; in shorts and thongs with a biro, or in jeans either – one and one half steps or strides on and off, all the way to the top. Cat always claimed that making this improbable journey a couple of days a week gave her the idea for her doctoral thesis topic. Of course, she never managed to complete even the undergraduate degree – that was as I remember, the winningness of Cat.

Finally, and painfully, our time having been spent, we parted ways. Some years afterward, when I returned from a long sojourn overseas, I heard she had married and then wound up somewhere out west in the dry baked back blocks of the bush. But it’s been still more years than I feel like really counting now, and I have never heard another whisper of Cat.

Underneath it all though, I know I still miss the girl. I don’t use myself anymore and have more or less left off the gentle sport of drinking, but as I’ve said I still smoke; and it’s in fact really the century after our time. In the passing decades, I’ve managed to finish my own mostly useless degree, travelled a bit more, and had a purely accidental career of sorts in the City. Finally, I have collapsed back into the old habits once again – long, idle days of gossip, the questionable pursuit of art through occasional scribblings like this, and the reading of too many dog-eared books.

Anyway, I have another splendid, loyal girl now who loves me in the real world. I find myself living in sunny, inner city Erskineville – a short uphill stroll from King Street in the precarious republic of Newtown – and it’s almost a peaceful, productive kind of life at that. Then I go on some days to think I am in truth, just deep down, some sort of failed, aged urban hippie. And then, living maybe in what amounts to “an after-dinner sleep” (something that happens to often these days after a good cafe lunch), I often without any particular purpose still find myself dreaming of the distant country and Cat.

I should say that the idea for this current diatribe came to me as I sat on the stone wall of a planter bed by the rubbish bin in the square, outside of the Bakery on Erskineville road. It was a late autumn afternoon – warm, with a slight chill hidden in the evening’s approaching shadows. I was idly watching the grumbling traffic and the other passers-by. Grey Trilby, greying hair shaved back to the skull; a t-shirt and knee-length shorts; an ear-ring stuck jauntily in my left ear. I was also, of course, smoking yet another endless, hand-rolled, sneaky cigarette. The title of that unwritten economic history thesis? Would you like to know? It was “Urbanisation and the decline of the village idiot”. Funny that.