The world imagined through fiction…
A quiet conversation
This piece was written for an assignment for a short piece around the idea of ‘gone’. The characters are based on real people, their names changed. The storyline is a concatenation of real conversations.
THE HISS of a gentle rain comes through the open windows. Along with it comes a light breeze. It is more a waft of cooler air than a breeze but it refreshes the humid night. Darkness fell three hours ago. Looking out, May sees only the blackness of the tree canopy that partially hides the scattered lights beyond.
There in the back room, the evening is a rare coming together for the two. They live in different cities now so don’t get to see each other all that often. May’s busy life as a caterer limits her freedom to travel although she takes most of every January off to attend the annual Rainbow gathering where she sets up her tea tent at the start of the month, and to run the performance poets’ breakfasts at Cygnet Folk Festival at the end of the month. I guess it’s the contrast in people and lifestyle between the straight world of those she deals with in her one-woman catering business, the assumed gentleness and countercultural innocence of the Rainbow people and the arty musical types at the folk festival.
She sits at the small table, her hair still long and dark though Tim can see the grey at its roots. She has lost weight since he last saw her. May was never what you would call overweight, just what you might call compact and solid of build.
Tim is the opposite. Thinner, not a great deal of hair left on his head, clean-shaven and dressed in well-worn board shorts, white Tshirt with the brand name ‘Patagonia’ emblazoned across its front, slip-on sandals that the British call flip-flops, New Zealanders call jandals and Australians call thongs.
More than half the bottle of wine has disappeared since they sat at the table an hour ago. So has the cheese and biscuits, the bluevein going first, and rapidly, as it is May’s favourite.
“It happened so quickly”, Tim quietly adds to what has been a rambling conversation that flicked from past to present and back again.
“Yeah”, responds May. “Seems like that to me too. But was it really that sudden?”.
“Maybe”, continued Tim. “It was because we all lived then in what I call the eternal present. You know, we didn’t plan our futures, we just lived day to day and took things as they came”.
“Like drifting… drifting in life”, May says as she lifts her glass and takes a sip of wine, her green eyes looking directly at Tim in the way he finds both alluring and confronting. “For a ship without a destination any port is home. I think that applies to us, to how we’ve lived.“
“It was the times, the spirit of the times. That’s how people lived then. Now they plan their lives in what seems to be to be unrealistic detail. It’s like they’re coding a piece of software and everything will pan out according to the code”, Tim responds.
“Unlikely”, May says. “How many plans have I made that never happened? Some did, for sure, but seldom in the way I imagined.
“My daughter is like that, like you say. As you know she married and she and Andrew joined that happy-clapper religious group. It’s not bad or cultish or anything and they do good social work with homeless people. I think she and Andrew are a couple who will realise the plans they make. I think that’s because their plans are modest, not grandiose. They’re also conventional so there’s already a road map for them to follow. I had nothing like that.
“I think theirs’ is a lifelong bond, unlike any in my life have been. There’s this strange assurance about them as though they know they will achieve whatever it is they want to do. Unlike my wild, wayward son who ran into all sorts of trouble but now seems to have calmed down, though there’s still an edginess about him”.
“But back then… it was so different then. In comparison to today’s youth we were so much less pressured, so much less worried and concerned about life”. Tim puts down his wine glass and looks at the condensation dripping down the sides.
Silence for a moment. May rotates her near-empty glass. She seems pensive. Then she looks up at Tim. “I think my daughter rebelled. Not like we did back when we were her age but in the opposite direction. Having been brought up by me with my sometimes chaotic life and my unconventional friends, she rebelled by becoming socially conventional… a career in the bank, house in the suburbs, a child, finding religion.” She puts the glass on the table and gazes out the window, a wistful look on her face.
“It’s the times”, says Tim. “The rapidity of change, the economic uncertainty, the environment, the geopolitics. There was change during our youth but it was slower paced. There was still certainty. Sure, the world, the economy and life generally was changing around us but we were at the forefront of that change. We lived it and thrived in it. Its pace made doing that managable. Now the pace of change is so rapid it has vanquished certainty and what we see as a result of that is an instability in society and in our lives. Maybe with your daughter it’s less rebellion and more adaptation, more searching for a personal anchor point and for certainties like career, family and religion.”
Tim reaches over to refill their glasses. The wine pours from the bottle as a pale yellow stream. May lifts her glass and sits back in the chair, crossing one leg over the other in a pose of relaxation. Tim notices the short boots she wears and thinks about how different she is now to the young woman whose sole footwear was sneakers or sandals. And the dress. He could count on two hands the number of times he had seen May in a dress. Her usual attempt at sartorial elegance seldom extended beyond jeans and Tshirt, though once she owned a kangaroo-fur coat.
“That sharehouse in Woolloomooloo lasted a couple years, didn’t it?”, asks May. “Have to think about that. The years have melded together into a kind of temporal blur, a blending of people, places and events. A mental salmagundi.
“There were the core people, like me and you and Sash my sister, Rob who was always so quiet, Wendy the strange woman with the bushy hair and Peter who was arrested for trading in illicit pharmaceuticals. There were others who stayed awhile then drifted off to who knows where. And visitors. Some faces I see in memory but I can’t put a name to many.”
May looks away as if trying to access some part of a deeply-buried memory.
It is a bit like the last few times they met. Talk about what each are doing lapses into talk about people and times they have known. It was like they are trying to reconstruct some kind of shared memory, each filling in the details the other has forgotten. Is this how it is as you get older? Is this how it always is between people who are long-time friends but are separated by lapses of time and distance? Talk of the present followed by reminisces and maybe a laugh of two or a moment’s pang of sadness, then with news of some old friend or acquaintance rediscovered.
“Strange, but in my memory some of those times in that house are just like they happened last year. They’re fresh, but in a faded sort of way,” says Tim.
“For sure, those years were good years, we did so much, met so many people. Yet, in terms of our lives they were only a handful of years, they were really only a short time. So why is it that we remember them fondly, even the less-pleasant parts, and why is it that we always talk about them when we meet up? It’s like we get it all out of proportion in the time sense… on the scale of our lives”.
Tim picks up the knife and slices the remaining piece of cheese. May wastes no time in placing the larger piece of bluevein on a crispbread and eating it. Silence for a minute or so, that comfortable kind of silence between friends.
His gaze moves from May to the darkness beyond the window. For a moment he sees her as the young, vivacious woman she was. He sees her in winter, a grey woollen pullover over her Tshirt the main difference to her summer version of herself. Maybe she’s not so young anymore but she still is vivacious although in a different sort of way.
“So, two, maybe getting on for three years you think… for that sharehouse?”. Tim has never been good with dates and May’s recollection of the time the sharehouse was there had been troubling him. He would have put it at something over two years, but he knew that her figure is probably the right one.
“Definitely”, responds May. “It was no more than two years. It was like a movie, those years in that house. Intense, lots happening, people coming and going. It was like a movie in that it started with a rush and continued as one. Then suddenly it ended. People left. Life all of a sudden changed and took on a different tempo in a different place. It was as if that movie came to an abrupt end. That place, that life we shared there… it was there and then it was…gone.”
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