Life reimagined as fiction…
A letter from Virginia
I look up and out the window to where the sun beats down. It is one of those humid, mid-summer Sydney days when on walking out of your air conditioned office onto the street you are met with a blast of hot air. Walk only a short distance and you soon feel the trickle of sticky sweat from your armpits.
It is lunchtime. Got to get out of this place for awhile. The cafe down the road, yeah, that‘ll be today’s lunch spot.
Might as well see if there’s any mail worth reading. I diverge into the staff room and flick through the half-dozen envelopes in my mailbox. I glance at those with little transparent windows. I don’t like envelopes with little windows. I put them back. Whoa! That’s interesting. A hand-addressed envelope. I put in my pocket.
The cafe is a favourite lunch stop because the meals are cheap and the strong, nutty-flavoured cuppuccino is good. Not like the weak dishwater that passes for coffee in so many cafes. That’s not only my opinion. I remember being in a cafe one day when the woman at the next table returned her coffee to the waitress, asking for something stronger because the cup she was served ‘tasted like camel piss’.
Meal finished, I sit at the table gazing absent-mindedly out the window. I occasionally switch off like that. Not having to think or make decisions is like a brief mental holiday. I just sit and watch the world pass by, not making judgements nor thinking about what passes before my eyes. Still, thoughts arise unbidden. I‘ve been coming here to this cafe maybe two times a week. And, it’s now three years at the college. How many more? I feel a hint of the restlessness that has accompanied me through life. I know that, sooner or later, I might act on it and look for new opportunities, maybe in another city somewhere. I don’t know, though. I’m kind of content here. The job is easy. The staff don’t have the dramas you find in other places. The pay is good.
Then I remember the envelope. Retracting it from my pocket I open it, unfold the pages and sit back to read. There, that early afternoon in that corner cafe, the past surges back to life…
Dear Rusty,
I had no expectation you would come back. You just went and I carried on here. You said you would return. You said you would come back to us here. Only, you didn’t.
I understand your offer to stand in for that photographer who had come home for a few months to recover from his accident was an opportunity too good to say no to if they accepted it. I knew you would accept it as soon as you told us about it over dinner that night.
You said you had three days to make a decision, but I knew your mind was already made up. I knew that because I would see you reading those Life magazines with their photo essays about the war. You got that job with that news agency — AAP wasn’t it? — some months before and that led to your offer to replace that injured photographer. I know the offer was a rare opportunity and that you might say that you were thinking it over but I knew you had already made up your mind. Your saying that you were thinking it over was just some kind of mind game you were playing with yourself.
I remember you rushing off to the print lab in town to get together a portfolio of images the agency wanted to see before considering you for the stand-in job. Wasn’t it because their other photographers were already working somewhere and they didn’t want to move one just for a few months?
A couple weeks later you were gone.
I wanted to come to the airport to say goodbye that morning. You said no, no need to. But I wanted to because I wanted you to come back here after your assignment though, as I said, we had no expectation about anything even though we had started what I can best describe as a casual and desultory relationship. Was that really what it was?
There was something I wanted to tell you, but I didn’t because I didn’t want to have any expectation of you or you to have any of me. I thought we would work something out when you came home. But you didn’t.
Well, those few months became more months. Sure, we would get your occasional letters and Rob would read them to us as we sat around the table after dinner. We were concerned for your safety though you said you spent most of your time in Saigon. Was that true? Did you tell us that just so we wouldn’t worry about you?
Then we heard nothing from you. Where were you? Were you okay?
We didn’t know that after that assignment ended you went to California. Sure, we found out later, just before we all went our own ways. When was that? Seven, eight months after you left?
And so we went on with our lives. You disappeared completely. I did think of you, well, I did have a reason to. When I ran into Rob again… what was it?… years after that time… he told me he had recently seen a story in some magazine and saw you credited as photographer. He didn’t know if it was actually you or some other photographer with the same name. But were he to hazard a guess, he said, he would think it probably was you. But what were you doing wherever it was… something about Pakistan, or Afghanistan, was it? I don’t remember the details.
Rob also asked me about what happened just after we all went our separate ways. Hadn’t we made any arrangement before you left? Didn’t we have expectations of each other when you returned? I told him you didn’t know, that I thought it best not to say anything that morning when you took the taxi to the airport. Was I a moral coward for doing that?
Now I have found you again. You won’t know that until you read this letter. I found you because just by chance I was flicking through a course prospectus, I think it was, that someone had left in a cafe where I was having lunch. And there was this information about a media course. I started glancing through it in that disinterested, absent-minded way you do when you’re waiting for your food. Then, suddenly, something grabbed my attention. It was the mention of your name as photography teacher in the course.
For weeks I agonised about contacting you. Then I found the courage to write this letter. And now I don’t know how to tell you.
I’ve said that back in those days when you left I had something that I wanted to say to you that morning you took the taxi to the airport. I guess it’s why after you said no need to come to the airport to say goodbye I didn’t insist on coming with you. I just stood there on the footpath and watched you drive away, watched you drive out of my life.
I said nothing then because I didn’t want to burden you, especially since our relationship, such that it was, had none of the commitment that people make when they plan to start something more serious. I also didn’t want to burden you with something that could limit what you did in your work.
So I just want to let you know that she is doing well and has followed you in working in the media. She’s a journalist and for the past few years she has been working with an NGO in Asia and Africa, coming and going to produce stories and photographs for the agency. Just last week she informed me that she was going to be stationed over there, probably for a few months while someone was on leave while recovering from illness. It was like deja vu and my mind leapt back all those years to that morning you closed the taxi door and drove away.
So, in letting you know about what I wanted to say to you that morning you left in the taxi, it occurs to me that maybe it’s something genetic, this business about journalism and photography. Anyway, I thought you would like to know our daughter is doing well in life.
…Love from times past
Virginia.
More short fiction…
