A SOLITARY PERIOD

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

MAN ALIVE

Maida Vale, Marylebone, Paddington, St John's Wood, Queen's Park, Victoria, Westminster, Paddington, were the libraries most frequented by Boris on his walks around London. It had been a while since he had seen her, and then suddenly there she was again, sitting at a table across from him in Paddington, reading the same edition of the International Herald Tribune. He couldn't help but imagine that she was reading the same page as him, and not just the same page but the same article too, and not just the same article but the same part of the article, the same line, the beginning of the same word. Everything seemed to stop then. The light in the library took on a hue more akin to a dream, or at the very least a balmy dusk, when it was in fact midmorning. He knew he had to act. Now was his chance. He knew, but he did nothing. And he still curses, even now, his behavior that day, although the distance of time has, of course, made it all a lot easier. He can, in fact, actually laugh about it all now, and thereby proceeds to demonstrate. Ha ha. Ha ha. But yes, it still haunts him, like a hungry ghoul sometimes, he says. The ghoul can go get out of here. Go on, ghoul, go on. It's funny, he can remember the girl clearly, he says, and the day that his brother arrived in London too, and even how the city smelled that particular morning, whether at the airport or inside the library, but when it comes to trying to recall that book he was reading, that book whose lines still come to him every now and then, no, he cannot recall the name. At best he can scramble after a line once it appears in his thoughts and try with all his might to hold on to it, reach for a pen, if able, and jot down what he can, before it disappears once again into the aether. Then Boris changes the subject and says he hasn't seen me around much of late. I've been working on the other side of the village, I tell him, ripping up ivy which has overrun the garden beds near the hospital, climbing up and sucking the life from some of the surrounding trees. It's been a monotonous slog. And there's a resident nearby, I tell him, who doesn't appear to approve of me sitting under a conifer tree to eat a sandwich during lunch break. I overheard her the other day hanging out some towels to dry and saying as much to another woman, and that I shouldn't be entitled to a lunch break anyway, but that even if I was legally entitled to one, the least I could do would be to stand and eat my sandwich, if I insisted on being in view, for the residents of the village are, after all, helping pay a percentage of my wages, and by sitting under a tree it makes me look as if I'm lazy, which reflects badly on everyone, don't you know. Boris seems to know the woman in question, laughs, and shakes his head. German she is I'd say. So don't let it worry you. Some of them are still smarting from losing the wars.

RED RAW

He could barely meet her eyes. He was so, so timid then. Terribly timid. Often he'd shed weight in shame, it was really that bad. Such a strange, strange sense of self disgust. Often a run, only a run, a wild silly run, would do the trick. He would, afterwards, feel sort of clean again. So strange. Run run run. But never enough, to ever escape. Are you, Boris wanted to know, aware of the relationship between the word timid and the word intimidate? It was a horribly excruciating time, he said. Do you know what it means to be lonely? I mean lonely. I knew menus better than men, and yet I had nothing to pay. Eventually I forgot how to speak. Women looked at me like an untamed dog. And I never knew that that could be an advantage of sorts, not until it was too late. I was simply hungry, that was all. Clueless, and hungry.

WAS SHE WORTH IT?

One day, at Paddington, Boris spotted a  dark haired beauty, who he guessed must have been an Italian. Yes, she must have been a student of English, an Italian student of English who thought that the best place to learn the English language in all its glory would be the English capital itself. London. Of course. How could she go wrong. Oh. Oh. But he never knew for sure, no, Boris never knew for sure, he simply guessed, yes, she looks Italian, she's Italian, that's what she is, that's what she must be, Italian, yes, Italian, unless proven otherwise. 

MAKE THEM WAIT

I tell Boris he's the first Boris I've ever met, and ask if there's any Russian blood in his lineage. No, nothing at all, he says. Apparently his mother had a fondness for the works of Boris Pasternak. He was also close, he tells me, to being called Leon. Boris is a strong sounding name, I say, and I remember watching as a boy Boris Becker win Wimbledon at the record age of seventeen years old. Yes, he remembers that too, watching the match surrounded by two of his daughters, eating turkey pies and mushy peas. After a tea break, I watch Boris from a distance working on a wall. He's seated on a plastic milk crate, rolling a piece of rock around in his hand. Then he stops and reaches into his shirt pocket and takes out a pen and a piece of paper, which he unfolds carefully, as if it were a treasure map. He jots something down, recaps the pen, and folds up the paper again, and puts it away out of sight. A small smile comes to his lips, and then a slight shake of the head. I finish my tea and think about approaching him to talk, but something in me makes me think to leave him alone, I don't know why exactly, but there's something incredibly private about the way he's sitting, pondering, and wondering, and trying to imagine, I can't help but think, the next place to place his latest piece of rock ... He looks as if he's reminiscing, or in some kind of meditative state more akin to a monk. And then it's like he all of a sudden comes back again, it happens just like that, all of a sudden, from a private world of a dream to the public world of being - just being - and I seize my chance and walk up to him, and as I do so, I can't help but try to think of something suitable to say, and silly thoughts such as how much has he seen since coming here, to these parts, to this retirement home, come to mind, how many different people have come and gone, that kind of thing, and then, as I get closer, he seems lighter, younger, and I say as much, and for some reason add that he looks as if he's just found out that he's picked the right lottery numbers. That's nothing but another tax, he says, the stupid tax I call it. He tells me he's thinking of his brother again, he can't help it, it just comes, just like that. He remembers picking his brother up from the airport, Heathrow, or Gatwick, he can't remember which. And he remembers a book his brother brought with him, a book highly recommended that he should read. But Boris, for the life of him, can't remember the name of the book, no, it just won't come. He can, however, remember, and easily, what his brother was wearing, for instance - brown jacket, white shirt, red scarf - and the bags he brought with him too, just the couple, if he remembers rightly, one beige and leather, the other a dark canvas  ... But no, not the book, not the book at all ... Not the book that Boris can recall reading in one sitting once he had it in his hands, the book he felt as if he'd almost devoured, once it was in his grasp, no, not the book.

ALL THE FEATHERS

Unlike Boris and his cockatoos, the sound of a lawnmower, for me, is starting to sound like the end of the world. The upside, apart from the smell of freshly cut grass, is how you notice the slightest sound once the machine is shut off. It is the end of autumn here, some of the last of the fallen leaves get caught in a slight breeze, emitting dry, crunchy whispers as they hit up against and swirl around the corner of a wall. The lawn is mown again, likely one of the last times before the onset of winter and the sleeping of the grass. Hopefully the last. I keep checking the machine but can't figure out why the catcher isn't working properly, the result being that lines of grass are left behind, that remind Boris, he says, of the lanes in a swimming pool in London that he used to frequent, where most mornings he would swim lap after lap after lap. Looking back now, maybe I visited that pool so often in the hope of meeting some pretty girl that I otherwise never would have had the nerve to approach. But now there was an opportunity, we had swimming in common! Strange how such things can suddenly come back to you. He says he was in France for a while too, and starts to speak in French, to which I reply 'Oui. Ca va?' and he laughs like he's heard one of the funniest things in the world. He taps me repeatedly on the shoulder and then says he's going for a beer, before adding: Mind those birds, my boy. Today could be the day. 

GATEWAY TO HEAVEN

Boris has been a resident of the village longer than anyone else. He secured one of the units soon after completion, way back when, he says, around the beginning of the eighties. So he lives in number 2, having been beaten to number 1 by a whisker. A cat's whisker, as it turns out, for pets were forbidden, and it took Boris a little longer than expected to find a home for his moggie, since each of his four children spread around the country were reluctant to receive a fluffy ginger addition to their household, a daughter finally acquiescing on condition of a sufficient monthly financial incentive. She'll ask for it now one way or another. A cheque here and there. That first day just got the ball rolling. And the cat's now been dead for donkey's. But at least I get photos of my grandchildren. One of them could pass for my wife, she really could. Unless the weather is particularly foul, Boris can usually be found somewhere on the grounds, working on one of his dry stone walls. His inherent modesty prevents him from detailing his achievements, but according to Mrs Shearer, whatever wall you come across within the boundaries of the village, chances are Boris built it. He tells me that he was never a builder before coming here, that it was just something he picked up, bit by bit, as he found all kinds of rock left behind following the village's construction. A lot of it he moved too, bit by bit, to the unused space beneath his building. And then, bit by bit, he would start making little walls here and there. Something to accentuate a garden bed perhaps, or to add a little texture, or counter balance the boredom of the tarmac with some nicely arranged stones. It wasn't rocket science, he wanted me to know, but what was, apart from rocket science? Usually he'd just set off anywhere and start fiddling around. He'd pick a piece, roll it around in his hand, get a good feel for it, and then take it from there. He'd familiarize himself with the edges too, and essentially, he said, in the end, it was just like a giant jigsaw puzzle, except that, more often than not, there was always more than one place to go for any particular piece. And so it became second nature after a while, a part of his day as important as washing his face with cold water in the morning, before a strong cup of tea. Besides, he didn't want to agitate himself with the superficialities of the newspapers or the nightly news anymore. The world is always ending. I may as well build a stone wall in the meantime. Often he lets the screeching cockatoos late in the afternoon signal the end of his day. They made him think, he said, of the sky tearing open in two, and he half imagined shiny brass horns to follow, almost as if announcing the final meeting of the world above with the world below. And then we would all be able to see how his walls held up.