"As it was I thought as little of it as I might. But my mind could not go by it and leave it, as my body did; and it usually awakened a long train of meditations. Coming before me on this particular evening that I mention, mingled with the childish recollections and later fancies, the ghosts of half-formed hopes, the broken shadows of disappointments dimly seen and understood, the blending of experience and imagination, incidental to the occupation with which my thoughts had been busy, it was more than commonly suggestive. I fell into a brown study..."
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield.
We were closely linked, all those years, with a sudden blast of creature comforts and a startled consciousness wrapped up in the passing trees. I sped out of that forest at well over the 100 kilometre limit; but while often the thought formed these days; I'm never going to see that person again; that didn't happen here. All I wanted was to get out. The townships were all dead at that hour. This sadly repressed, chronically over-governed country, had served us all so poorly, we who were spinning out our lives here.
We were dancing, in the middle of the night, in a London bar; and like all those episodes, I formed liaisons against the craziest of backdrops. In earlier years I had ridden the London underground just to keep warm. Now, more sophisticated, or at least more cunning, I knew the bars to go to. I was always looked after. Someone was always lining up. And he was cute, they were all cute; and life was the ultimate adventure. He was from New York and I remember to this day him saying: New York is the centre of everything. And why would you want to live anywhere else but the centre?
Australians can never pretend we are at the centre of everything. The great socialist republic. A law against almost everything. All for the common good, of course. And cruel time passed, slowly, slowly. I wanted to see him there, pert faced upturned, legs in the air was always for late, when I was drunk and didn't know what I was doing anyway; and truly didn't care. Not anymore. Why live anywhere but the centre? But once again, just as always, my time would run out and I would be back on a plane, winging back to Australia and another life. The full international junky, John Bygate would call me. But JB, who was the person I wrote a story about which was the first money I ever made out of writing, co-winning the Adelaide Festival's short story competition in 1974, is gone from a brain hemorrhage, and his crazy laughter is remembered by almost no one; his legacy carried into the tide by dying friends.
Sylvia Platitude, he scrawled in graffiti on his own lounge room walls, during an obsessive episode where he clutched her poetry books for days; read us all verses. And he'd raise a glass of Southern Comfort, here's to Janis, Janis Joplin of course; his ultimate hero, the girl on the barstool; and they're all dead now, all of them. And I remain, a choppy spirit on a broken sea, calling out to a world that has changed utterly and completely. We can never be the same. We can never go back.
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