By: Ian C Smith

I wanted to defeat time visiting the boyhood manor of my father, that remote relation, who fled the travails of his life by emigrating.  Envisaging touring his biography that nobody would write I thought, so old, yet desirable, at his former address, like much of time-worn urban England.  Slums had transitioned through working-class to trendy, with hardly an unfilled parking space in sight, me gawping, wondering what secrets his streets could unlock.  I worked odd hours as a cleaner-cum-dogsbody in posh Richmond for a wealthy family at their extended property with an attic like a movie set.  David Attenborough, who approximated my fantasy of an ideal grandfather, lived nearby.  Learning he commuted to the city by Tube, I kept a sharp lookout imagining a breathless impression of his voice as we screeched through the dark.

In Britain behaviour can tend towards that which is private, even furtive.  Observe how this young female of the species extracts guilty pleasure from her meagre circumstance by slyly glancing from her paperback to the young male with a rucksack who remembers playing Monopoly as a boy when he reads the station names.  Minutes pass, yet neither attempts eye contact.  Instead, they both peer out at the black tunnel as if they might discover something other than their own reflections.  Ah!  Now he engages her directly.  How unBritish?  Notice his tentative smile.

We would always recall that train ride.  For seconds I couldn’t place her accent, that mirror of mine, both expecting the other to be English.  Later, we talked the way the thirsty drink, this communication what we liked most about each other.  We seemed to share an understanding helped by Australian days that cross-referenced, not minding minor interstate differences or time gaps.  She encouraged me in my real work, writing.  Although delighted, I was embarrassed by my lack of success.  She claimed to be content and seldom lonely, and I admired her independence, wondering when I should kiss her.

In my bedsit she looked at the time, and my hands.  Nervous, I didn’t want her to think me inept.  Because I only had one chair we sat on my bed.  Then she watched the News while I fried a snack.  I had made a backrest against the wall from pillows hoping the unseen rats that plagued me wouldn’t choose this time to resume gnawing in the cavity.  When the football scores were announced I stood listening, spatula in hand.  I asked if she followed a team.  She said, No, so I suggested she follow Spurs, like me, like my father.  Who? She asked.  Tottenham Hotspur, pride of North London, I said, which she said was a ridiculous name for a football team.  When she thought I was having her on about Sheffield Wednesday I kissed her, still holding the spatula.  Now that was ridiculous.  Hotspur, I then told her, our chests heaving, is a nickname for a rash person, and a real knight in Shakespeare.  Then we treated ourselves to a second helping of kisses, oblivious to the smell of our burnt bacon butties.

She worked as an emergency nanny, so, part-time.  We lived on our lean incomes, savings, and our wits.  Avoiding the humdrum, I love being immersed in atmosphere, but then, who doesn’t?  Discovering London in that mostly wan light we heard the same revived classic-inspired hit song everywhere like an anthem.  Not musically minded, her thick hair grown long and wild to save funds turning heads, she could never remember the band’s daft name.  Her hips swaying languidly to its cadenced organ melody whenever we heard it I would challenge her to name it, tempting her by pledging a forfeit that inflated to stripping naked in Piccadilly Circus if she did, but her memory always baulked at it.  Eventually I knew my luck was in jeopardy.  Getting smart, she could expose my shallow enjoyment of trivia’s trove.  If caught, I planned to whisk my jocks off and back on again in one swift public motion.  We heard the busker’s guitar and echoing vocals before we saw him in the Tube’s long tiled walkway glorifying the wistful tune, its absurd baroque lyrics.  Well, she said, stopping.  Aren’t you going to ask?

We searched together for, and found, my father’s sister, wilfully missing for years.  A sleuth with that rucksack, a portable typewriter, and phone booths in lieu of an office, I outlined an episode of a popular show featuring reunions that interested its television production company in London.  In the Green Room I felt triumphant.  She fell silent, her eyes welling with tears matching the ageing siblings’ after my father had been flown back across the world.  I was on my writing way.  Sort of.  Pinned to gravity, she was on her way, too, our light fandango over, with no encore.

These many seasons over, my father is long dead but I understand his life better for having prowled his old haunts.  My idealism, spark, dampened, I still want my writing to impress.  That girl’s hair is cropped short, grey.  She has a career in a caring profession.  From time to time, my mind far away, the light touching her hair, I remember with clarity her leaving for the coast alone, perhaps with torn thoughts later listening to the train’s rhythmic threnody.  A train.  Where we began.  As she walked to the station I watched from my window with the broken blind.  There was the usual rubbish in a slight mist.  A lone dog barked.  The foreshortening effect of buildings’ uniform facades merged into a series of close parallel lines.  I thought the scene would make a good ending to a story about a short, sweet overseas affair, and a melody, both lingering.  A young man, heart on alert, would watch until the blackened street was deserted except for sparrows fornicating in gutters, the truth plain to see with no backward look from her.

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Ian C Smith’s work has been published in BBC Radio 4 Sounds, Cable Street, Griffith Review, North of Oxford, Rundelania, The Spadina Literary Review, Stand, & Westerly.  His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide).  He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.