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| Warning Hazchem by Adrian Scottow from Flickr |
Emptied of the night’s mad dreams; old grief, boyish expectations, in my blood, I boil a kettle on my stove, discreet about smoke’s egress, check my phone to see how much I can afford to eat today. If you sought me you would never track me here, a wraith hidden behind a nondescript door I bar from inside on which I attached a HAZCHEM sign, my lone caller the wind, industrial traffic belching past. I imagine I am shipboard, master of a creaking galleon.
Since my arrival, the only time people thronged these West Melbourne streets was when their football team won the championship after sixty-two barren years. Stricken by lost time, their revelry alarmed me at first. Small finds like the trove of abandoned sawn wood discovered when scrounging for sticks to crackle my stove into life, delight. I relayed the small logs to my squat accompanied by an unseen barking dog’s forlorn protest, fantasising about a chance meeting with a kind, intelligent woman as if we were characters in a novel. As if.
Gossiped about by pigeons on high, I sip tea wreathed in steam, click on old messages from habit, ward off remorse with poetry archived in memory, perfect words rubbing together read in a shaft of sunlight like a stage set: through willow-herb, cranesbill, and meadowsweet, I roamed, ghostlike companions savoured during solitary seasons, a faith against troubled times. In vile contrast, the newspaper that flamed my fire was filled with atrocities and moneyed politicians’ damned lies among other abuses. When I venture abroad again, in fine rain preferred, so, nobody else afoot, shielded by that traffic noise and my hoodie, I hope to magpie more serendipity to improve my Robinson Crusoe freedom.
On my reconnaissance of this derelict district of rusted steel I am borne back to scarred tables in dim bars of distant cities once more: Glasgow, Barcelona, Berlin, Gothenburg, dissecting my life. With a woman then, both of us wearing the long-term travellers’ monotony of wretched oft-rinsed same clothes, we see vehicles, Matchbox toys, traversing a bridge soaring over an historic river as we explore the beautiful havoc of ancient Europe bickering in our clapped-out van that amused Austrian border guards. Acting nonchalant to mask my true anxious self, I google enigmatic maps, all these yesterdays leading me irrevocably back here.
I treasure vignettes, my print of Vindstille by the Danish painter Anton Dorph special. Depicted from behind, a woman holding a child stands on a revetment gazing across still water at a fishing boat. When I bought it I admired its timelessness in a bar, glasses tinkling, a barmaid flirting on the phone, wondering what Dorph’s watching woman represented. A man’s return? Hope? The calm before a storm I thought in italics. Then, through a window, I noticed a woman cross the street in a gust of rain. Downing my drink in one draught, I paid, rushing, not for the first time, into the drama of a teeming city, breath catching because of the familiar way her curls bounced.
Stepping around ferries’ and refugees’ jetsam, a shimmer of wintry salt blurring our eyes, we scoffed at the idea of deckchairs in pebbles on what some might call a beach after retreating from Europe across the English Channel’s murk to our ancestral home. A single tourist railway line ran behind our cheap off-season coastal let; Romney Marsh beyond better days, stubble, thistles, a goat chained to a water trough. At dusk wan yellow lights blinked on in bungalows, a daguerreotype now recalled in sepia. How could we imagine the future? Were we lovers, close teammates, tourists creating scenes, or just curious about genes? When it was over we left no trace. The goat had fouled its patch, stench powerful. After the sweet slow train of the past’s shrill whistle faded I remember hearing that lone goat bleating at the end of its tether.
