Dave stumbled in through his front door, dragging his petulant and slightly injured suitcase behind him. At some stage between him depositing it in Bonn and him collecting it in Melbourne it had managed to lose a wheel. Strangely, this seemed only to improve its handling. It was still petulant and refused most instructions, but was more like a absent minded four year old rather than a tantrum throwing child of three. It was possibly the one upside of his ordeal of a return trip. Given the chance to leave his training session early, Dave decided to scarper and get home a few days early to surprise Erika. Of course, reorganising the flights left him with a 27 hour trip from Germany to home, but 2 days early was 2 days early. It was worth it.
Harry reminded himself that aging spares no one but the deceased. This was worth repeating on a day when any alternative to decay seemed preferable.
Things started the way they tended to: slowly. Firstly, the passengers for today’s trip were late. Not all of them, but on a day trip for five elderly ladies and their equally past-his-prime driver Harry, time was surely of the essence.
My friend, Neville aka Nev is 71 and suffers from a form of dementia called Lewy. That’s okay, he gets by. He does some odd things though, like falling over head first onto a brick pathway, or locking himself in his own backyard or putting his track suit pants on back the front or inside out, sometimes both.
Without going into the details of my axed ex, life had got me down a bit, and I had been ordered into our cafe for a ‘needed talk’ by my best friend Julie and her new partner Ingrid.
Walking up the driveway, she bent down and scooped up a rock from the garden. She bounced it in her hand to test its weight as she climbed the stairs to the porch and across to the front door. Not caring about being quiet or if anyone was looking, she hurled the rock through the thin window beside the door. Careful of the shards left, she reached in and undid the deadbolt, unlocked the door, and went inside.
I knew that the Churchill Road house was close to being demolished when the builder’s security fencing was erected in front of its low brick fence. It had been a family home built upon a very generous block of land in the outer eastern suburbs, ripe now for re-development.
She awoke as the dull flat light of morning seeped in at the edges of the blinds. There was stillness in the room and outside. The sounds of birds came to her distantly, and even further away, the hum of traffic – life in transit – was just discernible in the quiet. Her first attempt at opening her eyes was fruitless; sleep still had its drunken grip on her will. But awareness was taking hold, and her mind had already, involuntarily, started working.
Yesterday I was staring at a blank screen in Word. I’ve been here many times before. Generally I have an idea, a name or an event. Generally I have some idea of what I want to write about. I begin with an opening sentence, any sentence will do and then I just keep writing in the hope that some of it stays on the page. That’s how my writing began, looking at a blank screen after the children left home. I bought the computer for them, not me. Then they grew up and left home to discover themselves, or something like that. But the computer stayed. It became part of the furniture like my dog, Rufus. Every time I looked at it, it looked back, just like Rufus. Rufus is a black, grey, tan, gold and white German Shepherd who, when he’s not madly running in the park trying to catch a Frisbee, will often be seen camped at my feet wherever I am. The local children love him. He tolerates them because he knows he has to; it’s a rule I impressed upon him in the early years. He’s more mature now and doesn’t get excited as quickly as he used to. He has a friend who lives next door; a cat named Ginger. They are soul mates. Ginger comes over the fence each morning after her breakfast and they sit together on the back landing and enjoy the warmth of the sun.
He takes my arm, leads me to a chair. “I must talk to you.”
“Yes honey?” I say hopefully.
He makes that face, eyes hooded, features gathered, under control. He sighs, his usual ‘the man’s gotta do what the man’s gotta do’ sigh and says, “The thing is I don’t love you anymore.”
“Ok, so it’s bad.”
“Bad? BAD? I WISH it was bad!! It’s worse than bad!! It’s terrible! Awful! No, it’s worse – it’s HORRENDOUS! APOCALYPTIC! CATASTROPHIC! Our plane has gone down in flames killing everyone onboard except for us, we have no food or water, we’re stranded on what seems to be a deserted island, there’s no radio, no phone and no hope of rescue!”