By Gabrielle Blondell
Photo by Mads Schmidt Rasmussen on Unsplash
Harriet is rushing through the smoky streets toward the pub.
‘You’ll love him, Harry! You will,’ Sylvie had said that morning.
Standing beside the smudge of red which is the DON’T WALK sign on the corner, Harriet is hoping Giles isn’t too inquisitive, not too much of a talker. Sex is a better icebreaker, she thinks. Doesn’t require a personality.
A woman huddled at the 114 bus-stop coughs, a deep rasping sound, and Harriet feels her own throat tighten. Perhaps she should buy some of those surgical masks people seem to be getting around in. She heard somewhere there had been a run on them. Almost impossible to get now.
The red smudge flashes green and Harriet hurries. She hears the car just before its on her. No headlights, despite the thick smoke. Harriet leaps backward toward the traffic island in the middle. ‘Bastard!’ she cries after the vehicle. Silver grey, barely visible.
The street lights hum, flicker on, and cast their grainy searchlights. Safe now on the other side of the road, they draw her on. Equidistant between them, it is dark, almost black for this is Brisbane and night comes quickly.
She’s seen a photo from Giles’s Facebook page. Sylvie assures her, he’s nice looking. ’Nice-looking actually,’ she had said, as if this is not to be expected. Harriet stops under a streetlight and checks the photo again. She can’t tell if he is nice-looking. She has lost her ability to discern such things because inside her chest her heart surges erratically.
Harriet puts her phone away and moves toward the next streetlight. She is walking down a small hill and the smoke is even thicker here. It swirls around the streetlights and taints the neon green sign of the BP service station. So many trees gone, Harriet thinks. Animals, too. She ponders the need for masks again. She has been drawn outside even more since the fires. She wraps herself in smoke. She sits on the grey rendered wall near the carpark of her unit building watching the cars move along the street. Stands on the corner outside her work building, like the last smoker.
She is turning the corner when she is brushed aside by running figure, dark coat spread like wings. Something trails and scratches across the skin of her arm, a belt buckle perhaps, and she draws back. “Sorry love,” she hears, before the figure dissolves into the smoky darkness. The voice hooks at her too, reminds her of her father. She remembers him tying her shoe laces and chanting as he showed her.
Over, under, around and through,
Meet Mr Bunny Rabbit, pull and through.
She imagines him still working at the kitchen table in the house where she and her mother once lived, newspaper laid flat, farm parts arranged on top of it, the grease gun poised. Her fingers find a rip in the fabric of her white top. It is just above her elbow. She probes it as she hurries along.
Harriet slows when she realises nothing is familiar. She thinks back to her collision with the running man. Perhaps, in the confusion, she has been spun her around. She peers ahead. Might that dark shadow jutting over the sidewalk be the new Bunnings? Panic blooms in her chest, crowds out her sensible self.
A loud and jaunty tune cuts the smoke and Harriet is stunned until she feels her phone’s vibration in her pocket. It is Sylvie. ‘Are you there, yet?’ she asks.
‘No, I’m not there. I’m lost and I think I’ve hurt my arm.’
‘What? What’s wrong with your arm? How can you be lost?’
Harriet whirls around searching for clues. ‘I don’t know. It’s the smoke. It’s really thick now.’ It was. Even the potential Bunnings has disappeared.
‘You walked?’ Sylvie is incredulous.
‘Yes, I walked.”
‘No one walks these days.’
‘I do.’
‘Well that’s stupid. Now Giles will be thinking you stood him up.’
‘I know, but I’m lost, Sylvie. I literally don’t know where I am.’ Harriet coughs raggedly into the phone.
‘Jesus Harry!’
Harriet clears her throat. ‘Sorry.’ She can feel wetness on the palm of the hand cradling her arm. ‘I think my arm is bleeding.’
She hears Sylvie sigh deeply. It’s pure exasperation.
‘Well, you can’t go to a date with blood all over your arm. What will Giles think? He might have a phobia.’
‘A phobia?’ In Harriet’s mind, the unknown Giles would be helpful. Dress the wound, maybe. At least, blot at it with a bar napkin.
‘Yes, some people are not okay with blood, Harry.’
Harriet remembers the gush of it and a calf spilling onto the grass, all legs and goo. Sylvie could be right. Giles might be city-born.
‘Anyway, why don’t you use your map on your phone?’
This idea slides into Harriet’s mind, sloshes about a bit and then solidifies. “Yes, yes, of course! Just let me put you on speaker…’
Sylvie grunts.
Harriet has located the navigation app, when her friend says, “Promise me you won’t talk too much about your work.”
Harriet pauses. “What?”
Sylvie clears her throat. ‘It’s just that Giles only buys coffee from the smart cafes. You know, the ones with the single origins. He’s not really the kind to drop into Coffee Mart.’
Harriet doesn’t speak.
‘And lay off talking about the bush fires, while you are at it.’ A harshness has crept into Sylvie’s voice.
‘I can’t see how that would make any difference.’ Harriet’s voice is trembling.
‘It’s a little try-hard, Harry. It’s like you are wanting a gold star for caring. It’s like you are one of those people who are big on the floral tributes every time some lunatic runs over someone in a public place.’
‘I don’t do that,’ Harriet spits back.
‘I know you don’t, but it’s like that, isn’t it? It will all be forgotten soon and we can get on with it.’
‘What will be forgotten?’
‘The bloody bushfires.’
‘I hope they won’t, actually,’ Harriet says, aware that her voice has risen.
‘Oh, they will have an anniversary every year I’m sure, but people will go on like it never happened.’
‘Not the people who have lost friends and family and not the people who have lost their houses.’
‘Right, yeah sure.’ Sylvie is exasperated again. ‘Don’t you have a date to get to?’
‘Yes,’ Harriet says. She is staring hard at her phone, as if the streets on the map are all wrong. She knows they are not, but it’s all she can do and then comes the click of Sylvie’s disconnection.
She thinks of Giles sitting at the pub waiting, staring pointedly at the door. Her mind is clear now, acid-washed by Sylvie. She recognises a grouping of shops on the corner, the cracked pane of glass on the empty one no one has bothered to fix. She has located herself. Just one more block and she will be at the pub.
Giles is easy to spot through the large front window. He is sitting at a table near the bar, pale and slim, all in black. Nice-looking. She can only see his profile and is grateful for it means he cannot see her. A young woman in a black apron stops at his table and collects two empty glasses. She smiles at him and he frowns, says something and then compresses his lips. Harriet watches him rotate his wrist to look at his watch. He glances impatiently toward the window and Harriet turns away to hide her face. It is a stupid thing to do. A normal person would wave and smile, walk in and apologise for being late, but she stands teetering on the edge between this and that.
The door to the pub opens and she retreats into the shadow cast by a brick pillar. She sees the back of his black shirt and jeans. She watches him pause for a second. He looks up and down the street, his eyes passing over her and not seeing. Then, he walks quickly across the road and she loses sight of him. She hears a beep of a deactivated car alarm and in the interior lights she sees his profile again. Nice-looking actually. The car engine starts and the lights sweep along the smoky street. She waits until he moves off and watches as he brakes to turn a corner, the red of his tail lights flaring. In his wake, the street is quiet. She pulls out her phone and dials. ‘Dad, it’s me.’
‘Is it really, Harry?’
It’s like he can’t believe his ears.
‘Yes Dad, it’s really me.’
© Gabrielle Blondell 2020