pool

Text: Excerpt: Fire and Fuel Chapter 6

from Cruux, 21.11.09

After the whole “Batman-Spider-Man Controversy” at work, I’ve had to get out. I called up some old mates and we headed out to an Edge of Madness concert. And that’s where I saw her for the first time.


    Well, the first time that I can remember. We were at the Mary Ellen, a small pub on the south edge of <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Newcastle proper. It’s probably a normal-sized pub, really, but when they have a band it’s packed. They don’t have a back room for performances, like the Delaney (another faux-Irish pub in Newcastle where the lads play). The duo sets up right next to the bar, and the sardines – I mean, audience – pack in to bob up and down in place to the sweet tunes. The concert goes well, the boys rock away and I enjoy myself. This is a Work-Dave-free zone. Peace settled over me.


    At one stage, however, I happened to look across the bar at one of my mates, Chris, who was talking to a tall blond woman I didn’t know. Something about her caught my eye and fixed her in my mind. I saw another life that I had missed flicker before my eyes and then disappear. What? Yes, that’s what I felt. Not that I could have a life with her, but that I should have had it already, that I should be blissfully happy and in the middle of such a life right now. And then – pop – it’s over and I realise that I’m not. I’m not blissfully happy, I’m not in the middle of anything except a downward spiral and I’m certainly not with her. Bummer. Ripped off.  


    “Who was that?” I asked Chris when he came back over to our group.


    “Huh? Oh, that’s Tracey. We went to school with her.”


    “At St. Mary’s?” I asked.


    Chris looked at me like I was losing it a little bit. “No, St. Francis’. For senior school. She went to a different junior high, but was in my year at S. F. X.” St. Francis Xavier’s was a senior college for Years 11 and 12 and had about a thousand students in the two years. Most of my friends were in the year above or below me at S. F. X. and I didn’t know many people in their classes. Chris and this “Tracey” were in the year above me.


    I nodded and looked back across the bar to where she stood with some friends, laughing and chatting away. “She looks familiar somehow.”


    “Right. Well, that’d be it then, I guess,” he told me. “Oh, and she knows the band too. So you might have seen her in here from time to time.”


    “Right.” Tracey was about my height and had the healthy build of a sports person. She was not one of those dainty little things or under-nourished skinny models that I can’t personally stand in any form – like many of the girls packing the sardine can. She was naturally beautiful, not all done-up, and she looked very kind and happy and I had a sudden longing for those things in my empty, empty life. Happiness, I had always assumed, was an overrated commodity; like love, relationships and petrol. But looking at her laughing and smiling with her friends, I suddenly felt as if I might have been wrong about that.


    I was like a guy who always took his coffee black and didn’t know the joy of milk and sugar. In one of our few arguments over the years, Chris told me that I was a self-righteous bastard who was set in his ways and believed in his own opinions too firmly to see the point of view of others. Only certain people are set in their ways in their early twenties and at the time I was such a self-righteous bastard that it didn’t seem to me that it could possibly be a bad thing. Maybe I was wrong about that, too.


    “What’s wrong with you?” Chris asked, snapping me out of my inner monologue.


    “Nothing,” I answered. “Just thinking about something you said once.” He looked at me expectantly. “Never mind. Does she work around here?”


    Chris shook his head and smiled slightly at me. “She just moved back from Cairns. She’s been up there for a couple of years.”


    “Maybe I met her when I was up there?” I asked, more to myself than him.  


    “I doubt it. She’s a school teacher and you’re a drongo.”


    I raised my eyebrows in pleasant surprise. “A school teacher? Kindergarten?”


    Chris laughed at me. “Sorry, no. High school Phys-Ed.” Physical Education. Ooh, that hadn’t been one of my best subjects. He waved me off. “Anyway, why do you care? Come back over here. Jimi’s gotta go in a sec.”


    I shook my head and glanced across at Tracey one last time and reluctantly went back to say goodbye to my friends. When I next looked back, she was gone.  

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