Almanac Life: Crossing The Road

 

 

I’m in the office wearing a mask, looking like Ben Hall. But I’m not covered in real mud and dirt and calamity like he was. One of my great grandmothers arrived here not long after Ben Hall was roving the dirt roads of the colonies. I’ve seen a picture of her. Her look was sure and steady, but a furtiveness lurked close to the surface. Perhaps she wasn’t sure of herself but of her burden, her life, what she must do. Those generations had a certainty in the fragility of their existence. Now we seem to have a fragility in the certainty of ours.

 

“Lock down again,” someone says poking their head into my office. “Starting at 8pm.”

 

I gather up files and notes and papers and the laptop. What else will I need? Others in the office go into the now familiar drill. Pack bags, wave goodbye. Only two more lock downs until Christmas. Ha! We laugh and depart.

 

The roads are full. People dashing before dashing is outlawed again. Perhaps shops? Or schools? Or the hairdresser? Hoping to avoid the bushrangers.

 

I look at some faces behind the wheels. They’re blank. Blank resignation worn where once there may have been a smile. Or a frown. Something. Now nothing. The radio is on. Absently I switch to Spotify. A Pogues song. Fairytale of New York. Its appropriate. Melancholy. Fun. Direct. Irish. Hand in glove. Love it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“So happy Christmas. I love you baby. I can see a better time when all our dreams come true.”

 

Yeah right.

 

Home again. Eyebrows raised as the news plays on the TV. We don’t need words. We’ve been here before. I go to the front room and put my laptop on the makeshift desk upon which I will take phone calls, make decisions, tax plan for clients, rub my eyes, scratch my head, determine outcomes, for at least the next week.

 

A desk is important. People’s lives are changed by decisions made at desks.

 

“You’re insolvent” I might have to tell someone in the next week. Or month. Their world will crash. They won’t care that I arrived at this conclusion at a makeshift desk or a real one. It makes no difference. Effort has come to nothing. Dreams smashed like a café avocado. Perhaps houses lost. How will we feed the kids? Self- worth will be questioned.  Relationships strained tight like a Talakhadze clean and jerk. These people won’t be in the covid statistics. But the virus might kill them as sure as hell.

 

I look out the window. The bees are busy this morning. A winter sun sprinkles their little home. A worker bee emerges from the opening to the hive and drops a drone out onto the ground. Discarded. Surplus to requirements. The drone buzzes in the dirt. It rolls over. Its legs flick. Life leaves it as I watch. The bees have their own battles to fight. I wonder if they gaze through our windows at times?

 

The Pogues are still playing on my mind. I’m taken back to July 1987. I’m in the Connemara on the west coast of Ireland. The music has taken me back there. The sun is warm on my back. A road stretches before me; a grey strip of bitumen that has the rainbow at its end, surely? I’m surrounded by green. Blessed I am. Alone. Just me, a pipe full of tobacco, and my backpack. I’m young. I light my pipe and recline in the grass. I’m waiting for a car to hitch a ride up the road but also waiting for the next adventure. A pub lock-in tonight maybe? Lashings of Guinness, laughing, new friends, free souls, effortless joy. Tears drip down my cheeks. I remember it well. I still don’t know why I cried. It was easy. Funny that I laughed too. With tears. Unfettered freedom is dangerous.

 

New people are in my life now. Peter Bol. Rohan Browning. Stewart McSweyn. Ariane Titmus. Names with smiles and medals and achievements and personalities. We don’t see the work they’ve done. Dark winter mornings running or swimming or lifting weights and tearing muscles. Failing. Repeatedly failing. And falling and crying and questioning it all. Is it worth it? That’s where success is born. In that question. And the answer isn’t always yes. They lie in their beds at night aching all over. But the fire burns. They keep going. And I can’t look away as they risk it all on my TV.

 

Once I roved and now I am locked in. That bitumen road in the Connemara is still there. I can see it. I can almost feel it. I’d like to think a piece of me is there too. The dead match I tossed into the ancestral grass may still lay where I left it. When the world was young and without boundaries. A few tears may dwell in the soil.

 

The phone rings. An unsteady voice is on the other end.

 

“Mate,” he says, “I need to come and see you.” I’ve been expecting the call for a while now. Each lock down has been another lash for this bloke. Hanging on. Is it worth it?

 

I hang up and lean across the desk to flick open the shutters. People walk past our house to the park opposite.

 

“We just have to get across the road,” says a woman to her child.

 

Yes indeed.

 

 

 

The Tigers (Covid) Almanac 2020 will be published in the coming weeks. It will have all the usual features – a game by game account of the Tigers season – and will also include some of the best Almanac writing from the Covid winter.  Pre-order right now HERE

 

 

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