Saturday 3 February 2007

Images from a stormy evening...

I walk out of No. 21 The Esplanade and turn east, heading toward the shops. A man on a green Harley-Davidson chuckles past, immediately indicating that he will turn right into Fourth Avenue.

I cross Third Avenue, past a cotton tree and the big poinciana on the corner with the orchid-shaped, deep-pink flowers and seed pods half a metre long that hang down like monkeys' tails.


The air is cool and moist. It rained heavily earlier, a tropical downpour lasting only a few minutes. A brief sound like the applause that follows a theatrical performance. It soon stops.

It's not raining now as I turn south past the cigar shop. The bakery is shut now, so a pie is out of the question. A hot pie and a glass of beer make the ideal repast for the cricket. The bushpigs in the park played through the rain, working up a sweat they would assuage at the blue eski placed by the kerb, next to their parked cars.


In the bottle shop a young woman wearing a green halter top and with a six-pack of some modern alcoholic beverage clasped to her abdomen joins the queue behind me. I pay for my beer and a packet of nachos cheese Doritos.

She overtakes me as I walk west on Cotton Tree, her white tennis shoes — no socks — tapping away at the pavement like a neophyte at a keyboard.

As I sip my third stubby, I note the players have abandoned their patch of brown grass under the paperbark tree. And I give thanks. Not to any god, but, perhaps, to my country.

The treetops wave, a darker cloud passes, like a cross between a horse and an ocean liner. The lights are starting to switch on.

I give thanks for the fact that I only have to get half drunk to visit my parents.

A pelican takes off, low over the water. Black and white slowly beating in the fresh air. A cloud of seagulls banks and turns. A man in a blue kayak stirs the water of the estuary.

Returning after dinner, with the taste of mango still in my teeth, I enter the atrium of No. 21, to the smell of egg.

The rain keeps falling on and off throughout the evening. Soft applause. Thunder. My beer tastes of sand.

No comments: