Life reconstructed as memoir…
The street
Sometimes it is the brief moments we remember, the passing detail of some setting or something said…
WE DON’T meet all that often these days because we live in distant cities. It wasn’t always like this. Once, we shared an old and grotty three-level terrace house on a street called Cathedral, probably called that because at its city end there was, still is, a cathedral. It seems long ago. It is.
We sit at a table sipping chilled sauvignon blanc. I look at the tiny image on the mobile phone screen she holds up. “Yeah, I remember walking past these buildings”
“I was trying to remember which street this was,” she says. It’s in the ‘Loo for sure, somewhere towards the William Street side. But… just where… well, who knows?”.
She sees the look of curiosity on my face as I look from the screen to her. Is he remembering me as I was then when we wandered these streets, she wonders?
I glance from her screen as my mind races back to those times. I see her in her T-Shirt and jeans. On her feet, her usual sandals, or was it the sneakers that were her usual footwear when we shared the second storey backroom looking out along the length of dingy Charles Street?
“I think this street is where we walked along to go to that restaurant in the Cross. You know, the one at the William Street end of Victoria Street? Don’t remember its name. We went there a few times, with Rob and Bron, I think it was. Can’t remember anyone else going there with us but maybe there were others.”
“McElhone… Brougham… it is one of them,” she says. “… the street where we walked past those buildings. Are they even streets in the ‘Loo?. I think so.”
“Don’t know, but yeah, I think they were streets close to where we lived. Were we to walk down there again I wouldn’t be surprised to see those building gone. That’s the city isn’t it? Constantly being rebuilt.”
I sit back, cross my legs and look at my long-time friend. Her green eyes are the same as they were then, but the dyed auburn hair, coloured leather boots and the classier clothes are not.
Like our lives, she has changed since we said our farewells to each other and to that house on dusty old Cathedral Street. But those old buildings in the photo outside of which small children play as a dog patiently awaits the adults holding a doorstep conversation, have they changed? Are they still there? And who lives in them now?
Soon we will say farewell again as she returns to the southern city that is now her home. This is how it has been for the last twenty or maybe more years. Comings and goings. Brief catch-ups. Dinners. Then another going. We are geographically distant from each other but we are still emotionally close. It is an enduring friendship and for that I am grateful.
I lift my glass and take a sip as I look at my friend and silently thank her for bringing me to that grotty place all that time ago from where we would look along the dusty length of Charles Street. How different would life have been had she not done that?
