Fed, watered and chaperoned

I wasn't expecting to be sucked into a glass bottle and stoppered as I sat sipping at my soy latte with vanilla. Sitting in my usual island cafe at my usual table I might expect nothing more than to sit and sip my coffee and stare at Creamboy as he talked. It wasn't that I couldn't think of anything to say its just that I'd been sucked into a glass bottle and stoppered, Newtown has a way of turning on me when I least expect it.

Isolation does that, it swirls somewhere merrily above while I walk below, happy in my own way, then it tires and comes to rest round my shoulders. Creamboy was talking about Bathurst but my mind was in Mudgee. I left something in Mudgee once but he was talking about Bathurst. Creamboy's going to Bathurst for a few months, its a doctor thing, he was saying I should come and visit him but I was thinking about Mudgee.

I was thinking about the last time I saw Mudgee, I drove over the mountains in my old roofless 70's jeep to stay with a friend of mine who'd kicked the city one last time before buying fifty acres, a tall pair of wellies and a herd of cows. The contents of her house were there all there in Mudgee flashing city lights across the dusk in her front paddock. She was taller and thinner and had hair like a stranger. She lost things in the city, her lymph nodes and her younger brother. I left something in Mudgee once, something important, something reflective.

Crowds surged round the cafe and I remembered why I call it the island cafe, Superman won't sit there and I know why, he told me once with a forkful of cake halfway to his face and a magnetic chess piece in his left hand. Creamboy downed his hot chocolate in three mouthfuls and set the glass on the table with a careful thump and a wry smile. There is always a strange temptation to ask him to heal me somehow as though I could lay down and by naming the parts of me that whirr with universal noise he would quiet the human condition but I think that about a lot of people, not just doctors.

Creamboy was talking about Mudgee and saying it was in the middle of nowhere, not like Bathurst, that's not quite so nowhere as Mudgee. He was talking about the separate pockets of his life, how his friends sit in quiet opposition to each other and he floats between them unconnected. He was saying I must know what that's like, when everyone is separate but I was shaking my head and sipping at my coffee. Newtown was waist deep and sinking. I sipped at my coffee ever grateful for my island, shaking my head and rattling my invisible boat shuttles and bobbins. I was thinking its a weaving thing, my existence, I weave people through each other tight as I can. I dance through the gaps with my drawstrings and cupcakes pulling invisible threads until everybody knows everybody and you could pull focus on them one at a time and we'd all be there. Its a matter of existence. Its about glass bottles and frames of reference and knowing that I'm not enough.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Ah, that's where Mudgee came from. I thought perhaps a truck had driven by with 'MUDGEE' on it.
DS said…
That would have been timely, if such a truck had driven past.
karen said…
Bathurst is a hole. Mudgee is at least nice. Bathurst is full of bogans and missing women, and is only near Lithgow, which is even more of a hole. I lived there for 3 years and don't recommend it to anyone, unless you are hoping to be drunk the entire time.
DS said…
Maybe Creamboy will find the missing women accidentally kill the bogans (doctors can do that sort of thing) and generally make Bathurst more pleasant?
karen said…
He could be like a superhero. Creamman? hmm...