A letter from Louis arrives, it's there waiting in the cold metal mailbox when I get back from another day pulling out ivy cascading down a rocky embankment. It's written over three postcards, numbered, and placed in an envelope.
1 - JR - The entries in the journal I've been keeping - Since coming here again - To look for Susie - Have been getting shorter and shorter - And it's not a matter of finding the time - Oh there's time - I'm still at the hostel, and there's an arrangement now for board in return for helping clean the rooms - Vacuum the halls - Sign in new guests - Oh there's time - But still the entries are getting shorter and shorter - So I've stopped - Stopped before I make an entry under a date that has nothing more than a question mark - Or maybe not even the squiggle of a question mark - Just a period, a solitary period - She's gone - Susie - I don't expect to see her again - Or at least anytime soon - Maybe she's somewhere in London after all - I don't know - It doesn't matter - Too late - And yet still an old scene plays over - As I hand over a room key to a couple of Swedish girls in shorts and long shiny tanned legs
2 - An old scene - Back in London - Before all this unfolding - This unravelling - Leaving our London flat one night to follow a lead - A meeting in a hotel - When Susie wanted me to stay and talk it out - Sort it out - But there wasn't time - I had to go - They were waiting - No she said - Something's not right - There's too much left unsaid - Something's awry - Awry she said - Her fine senses kept speaking to her - Prodding her - They wouldn't shut up - She yelled after me down the hall - We haven't finished talking she said - Don't walk away we haven't finished - But to me nothing looked as if it was going to be resolved - It's hard enough to argue with a woman at the best at times - Impossible when time's against you - Everything has to be explained - Clarified - Laid out fully - But the cab was waiting - She yelled after me some more - South Kensington I said to the driver - And left - And the following week I was on a plane to Sydney - Susie was staying with her parents - Or that friend in Clapham Common - I don't know - She was somewhere - It was hard to say - There was no note - And no answer when I called
3 - I thought keeping a journal would help me find her - I was looking for an answer - But I should have listened more carefully on that first day when I wrote that first sentence - Outside at a pub on a headland in the dot town of Tathra - Overlooking the sea - The great heaving sea - The great heaving silent sea - I should have known right then - I should have let it all go - Go over the edge - Into the great heaving silent blue - When I wrote down those first words - Never never never never - That's what I wrote - Shakespeare it wasn't - But it was a start - And I drove on from there - And now here I am months later in Melbourne - Washing sweeping wiping mopping - Smiling - Making do - Like a determined monk - LA
Posts
