So I am happily ensconced with my wine and my chips and it not even 1pm, but there you are. And the chips are so crispy and hot and salty and the aioli so generous; and the New Zealand wine has those hits of jasmine and cool river stones.
It is an old kind of pub – very 80’s with the dark paneling and worn axminster carpet. Long bars and shiny bottles. Heavy doors and mirrors. Worn, weary looking servers.
I will be honest with you, I’m kind of the most settled when I am alone in bars or restaurants or in my writing room back on the farm. Or libraries: of course I love to write in libraries. I love being in public spaces all alone. This is why I like traveling or maybe traveling has made me like that. People everywhere but no one watching. I am the Unwatched. I am nobody to anybody and can therefore be anybody I want.
But here is the truth of it, before I go any further: I hold myself together best when no one is watching me do it. I am the most confident without a person. This struck me as I sipped on my wine.
I warm up and shrug out of my coat, watching a woman walk past me, obviously in pain, but intent on hiding it, moving carefully; she’s young, her hair blonde and well cut, but she is hitching her hip, her fingers graze her ribs. She walks as though holding herself in, as though sheer will is all that keeps her organs from loosening. My heart thuds. Like I suddenly feel my heart beat in recognition.
She gets a napkin from the bar and slowly walks back past me. I look ahead of her to her table, where a man sits looking at his phone. Is she being stoic? Did anyone else see her hands dart to the pain then go still – her face down.
Little alarms go off in my head.
An older man is sat across from me, at another table, casually but nicely dressed, clean-shaven, with a beer and a walking frame handy, his phone sits on the table but he never looks at it, a schooner of beer that he sips at and he spends half his time directing lost men to the gents. The men’s toilet is on the opposite side of the bar to the women’s, so when he sees a man trailing behind a woman to the toilets he calls out; it is kind of endearing and a little unnerving. He’s definitely a regular. Probably was a middle manager in his old life. The guy who knows everything about his facility, answers all the questions with a smile. He misses that I think. Retiring is hard on a person. Excuse me, he calls, when he spots someone adrift, and windmills his arms, points behind him, loudly: back the other way, down the steps, turn left. The poor unsuspecting man goes through a “me?” mime, then appears relieved as he changes course. (We have a rule in our family: one must never point when directing someone to the toilet in a public space. You have to give clear floor directions with no indication at all of what’s been asked. Down the steps, turn left at the pokies, down the little corridor with the sunflowers. On your left. Stuff like that).
He is a kind man, I think. Feeling the loss of his working life. But sanguine. Nonchalant.
My coat slips against its own pastel lining and slowly seeps onto the floor with a gentle shushing sound. As I gather it up and lay it back on the banquette next to me. I note the twitchy dad two tables over who has his phone clasped in his hand, shooting brief urgent looks at it, then getting lost in the screen for a while, jabbing furiously as his kid climbs all over the chair like it’s her own jungle gym: happy, for sure, but deeply bored. He is in a golf shirt and beige pants. Shiny leather shoes. The child is in a wild collection of sparkly clothes her pony tail hours old and sagging. I smile at her mentally rummaging through my bag – trying to find something that might entertain her. He doesn’t seem to notice her. She smiles at me and I smile back. He should be noticing. I am a stranger, and I feel desperate for her.
A bouncer guy has come over to shoot the shit with the retired middle manager man. He is tall. The bouncer. Has one of those deep rumbly accents. Dark. Eyes like souls. Kind of handsome, I guess. His eyes rove as he chats. He catches my eye by mistake twice. I can never keep my eyes on my work – it gets me in trouble all the time.
Then the dad gets up and walks away entirely, around the corner into the sports bar. Leaving the little girl abruptly and quite alone at the table. I can’t believe he just did that. I’ll watch her for you, I think.
The bouncer watches the dad walk past him, and then notes the kid alone at the table. He looks at me. Not mine, I shake my head. I can see the dad, his eyes say. I nod. He’s good, I think.
Did I tell you I dated a bouncer once? He read body language with a precision that was scary. His work was all noise and colour and sparks, and grind, and the smells of a ruined, stinking bar floor. A good bouncer has to be able to cut through all that. He was strong, my old lover, not muscle bound like some of these guys; those big tight muscles slow a person down, he reckoned. He was light on his feet and quick. He was like a stealth bomber. I would be chatting to some bloke at the bar where he worked and all of a sudden he would be beside me. Just being quiet and all broody-like. Intense. His eyes saw everything but never physically roved. I had been pinned like a butterfly they forgot to kill. Those eyes. He could talk a guy into throwing himself out. You know, it is a literal throw: a couple of bouncers and the drunk, they escort them out headfirst. And I do mean headfirst. The bum’s rush.
The bouncer leans on the wall chatting with the middle manager, adjusting the walker slightly so it is out of traffic. I realize he has turned his attention but not his head to the blonde woman in the corner. The one I think is hurt. There is a particular laserness to the bouncers alertness. He is still listening but he is watching the couple. The man with the woman puts his arm defiantly along behind her chair his hand on the woman’s neck. A posture that makes me shudder – inwardly. His head rises slightly to the bouncer’s. Kind of forehead forward. I lean back from my work. The atmosphere has sharpened, a primal scent lifts into the air invisible but enough to enable a particular clarity to the room. A muting of the laughter around us.
I watch the woman as she gathers her things then sense the bouncer step back and gently wave an old man past, an old man with a newspaper. Shaking his hand the way men do: shooting from the hip, quick clasp, I see you, boom, done. Message received, moving along.
A newspaper: where did he even get one of those.
The connection is broken though. The imminent shoot out subsides.
The twitchy dad is back with another drink for himself, he also moves through the space made by the bouncer, momentarily obscuring the couple. Followed by a server from the direction of the kitchen with that clever timing good servers have. Their food has arrived. No mama coming soon, then, I guess.
The bouncer (I guess we call them security now, right?), pats the middle manager on the shoulder, nods my way then moves with light feet back into the sports bar, I can see him roll his head, shunting tension about.
The little girl, bless her, just told her dad: I don’t want this now, I want something else. Without a word, dad immediately swapped plates with her; now she has a hamburger and chips, so all is well. I kind of like him for that. It’s the first crack through the muted sounds in the whole afternoon: someone saying exactly what they need, plainly, and someone else simply meeting it. No discussion. Just the swapping of the plates.
Let’s pause for a minute while I tell you something. Something pretty mundane, actually; maybe even too personal, oversharing possibly, but it explains me today. I’ve been feeling a bit dodgy lately: not quite well, though perfectly fine, a little discombobulated, like I don’t quite fit in my body. Or my brain. I’m off the tracks ever so slightly. Like if I take a corner too fast, I’ll fall. And I say this with great compassion for myself but I admit that I might be, ever so quietly, binge-reading awful, deeply predictable romcom novels. Rubbish. Absolute rubbish. Back to back. I can’t even remember what I’ve read. Don’t tell anyone; it’s embarrassing.
You know, when my mum was dying, she who’d left school at fourteen but was amazingly well read, an artist, a writer, a counsellor, all that stuff, she started reading Mills and Boon books. She’d send us to buy them from the supermarket, no Kindle in those days of course, and she was so horrified at herself for reading such trash that she’d rip out the pages as she read and drop them in the bin by her bed. We always shared books in our house; we had a room with three walls covered in shelves of books, high ceilings, in that old beach house. We were all always reading something. But she did not want us to even think about sharing those books. She told me she read them because didn’t want to think anymore.
I understand her now. And I think about the cast in the bar today with her eyes, the middle manager man’s loop-the-loop directions, the woman holding her own inner self together, the dad lost in his phone, the bouncer holding barely concealed anger, my mum ripping out the evidence page by page. We would all rather manage alone than let anyone see what we actually need. We cannot admit weakness because the pack will smell it. So we bury it. I guess I don’t want to think either. So I’m reading crap books that make me laugh out loud in bed at night. Good enough. That’s not a weakness. Keeping one’s feelings close is armour. Knights had armour and survived battles, right?
And I am right?
I look back to the couple in the corner but they are gone. The middle manager man has been replaced by a Gary Oldman look alike in a hat.
I repack my bag. Swing my long grey gabardine coat around myself so it settles perfectly on my shoulders showing just a flick of lining. I am wearing black under of course. I think of Zorro and smile to myself and Gary Oldman as I sling my bag onto my shoulder and leave the warm pub. Out onto the pavement teeming with people who part before me as I walk briskly with purpose and my signature long stride to the train station.
The Kitchen's Garden 