A Perfect Waste of Time

I’m taking a bus to Eaton, going old school down the Forrest Highway to see my father. I have an hour wait at the Cockburn Train Station first, so I’m whiling away the time making small talk with my fellow travellers.

There’s a middle age couple holding hands on the bench directly next to me. Like me, slightly overweight, wearing comfortable shoes. We didn’t take much trouble with our outfits. She is tapping in her phone and sighing. I think the grandkids are being troublesome. He’s stroking her hair and she’s worried he’ll loosen her scrunchie. When I was younger I would have thought them beyond capacity for romantic love. Too old. But he’s watching her like she’s the Joanne Woodward to his Paul Newman, he can’t contain his delight in her, he’s planted a kiss on her head and the scrunchie is history.

An older man in long denim shorts, a pressed check cotton shirt and a neatly clipped grey goatee wants to make conversation. He has a heavy, ornate silver bracelet weighing down his wrist. It looks bespoke. Maybe a gift from a girlfriend or perhaps his daughters clubbed together for his 60th birthday to get him something special. He’s from Victoria and doesn’t understand why Bunbury doesn’t have an airport and the train takes almost five hours. He tells me you can fly further south into Busselton in less than an hour then drive up the highway but it feels like going backwards. He asks me to watch his bags while he goes for coffee and I say yes, then worry he’s a terrorist. Then I figure he’d be more likely to choose a bigger crowd if so. Three victims waiting for a bus feels like a pretty limp effort, even for practice. Still, I’m on edge until he returns.

I read the latest newsletter from my flash fiction heroine, Kathy Fish and she sends me down a Mary Robison rabbit hole. Mary Robison is a so called ‘minimalist’ short fiction writer from America, but as part of my burrowing I find an interview she gave to Bomb Magazine where she gives the suggestion short shrift. Along with the suggestion she pioneered the genre ahead of Raymond Carver. ‘That’s hooey,’ she snorts in response to the Carver claim and then she details why minimalist is a lazy description for her form and never considered it a compliment.

 “I detested it. Subtractionist, I preferred. That at least implied a little effort. Minimalists sounded like we had tiny vocabularies and few ways to use the few words we knew. I thought the term was demeaning; reductive, clouded, misleading, lazily borrowed from painting and that it should have been put back where it belonged. However, it did a lot for me (laughter) in that I received some attention other deserving writers did not.”

Then she says something about hanging out with Richard Ford and alligators and I download all her books.

The bus arrives, I get two seats to myself and it feels like a win. From my window seat the Perth sky is softened with scattered cloud, a relief after a summer of unrelenting blue.

I feel like I’m having a small adventure. I’m 17 again travelling on the longer haul bus from Perth to Melbourne. I’m running away. On my way over the Nullarbor with my thermos of cold tomato soup and a box of Ritz crackers which is all I can afford for the three day trip. The bus is full and I’m trapped beside a Saint Kilda bogan who wants to play me audio on her Walkman from all the parties she’s attended on her holiday. I don’t have the confidence to say no. It’s all Jimmy Barnes and jangled roaring for joints and cans of Bundy rum.

I don’t know yet what it’s like to long for home and for my mother.

I feel like I’m back in France again on a six month trip just a year ago, taking the bus to Barcelona with my husband, a last minute dash for transport when a train strike caught us by surprise. It’s also crowded and cramped, my knees are pressed into the back of the seat behind me and a smell of old sweat is embedded deep into the upholstery. But our hearts are full of plans for catching up with an old friend, touring tapas bars and long walks through historic neighbourhoods.

I don’t know yet that when I see Gaudi’s masterpiece, La Sagrada Familia, I will be overwhelmed by its ornate beauty and I will stand in its cathedral halls bathed in coloured light, and cry.

I don’t know yet when I walk outside the Barcelona sky will be an unrelenting blue to rival my home city, and I will hold hands with my love and he will brush a small leaf from my hair and I will kiss his face, because I can’t contain my delight in him.

“Toss me a cigarette, I think there’s one in my raincoat.

We smoked the last one an hour ago.

So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine.

And the moon rose over an open field.”