A man who loiters

My friend told me how surprised she had been to realise that the youngish man she often passed on her way home from work in the mid afternoon – a youngish man who usually walked not on the footpath, which was narrow, but in the middle of the street, walking slowly, without shoes on, as if he had no good, no honourable purpose, and so was beginning, in her words, to freak her out – was in fact none other than the trombonist whose virtuosic solo performance nearly a year beforehand at Angel Place had astounded her, since it had come from a man with so slight a frame and whose moustache, in her opinion, had been grown only to hide his gentle, too effeminate lips. She now saw him, she told me, in a completely different light.

The jazz singer

My friend, a woman from Neutral Bay, who in the last ten years has gained moderate fame as a jazz singer, told me that it was only recently that she had been able to get any perspective on her achievement. She had gone to have dinner with a couple she had known for many years - a couple who still lived in the street of Victorian terrace houses in Marrickville where she and her ex-husband used to live - and the conversation at the table had turned on many things but inevitably, as she put it, on her sudden rise in fortune when she had been invited to sing at a festival in New York. It was while she was leaving the dinner party - in fact she had gone no more than two paces from the gate of her friends' house - that a young, roughly dressed and overweight man she didn't recognise hailed her by her first name and subjected her to a violent hug. It was lucky, she told me, that the man had been drinking. He kept exclaiming how good it was to see her and then went on to talk for so long and with so many repetitions that it soon became clear she had just met one of her former neighbours whom, when she had seen him last, had been no more than a thin, pale and spotty boy. He had come to see the old place, he told her. He too had moved away, although he didn't say where. In the last two or three years when she had lived in Marrickville, this young man, then a teenager, had made her life unbearable, my friend now told me. Surly during the day - he never addressed a single word to her - he would often become violent and irrational at night. These episodes would start in the early hours of the morning, beginning with a sudden noise as if he had fallen out of bed, and would escalate into what would always sound like one side of a desperate and vituperative argument, his bitter invective resounding through her house as if he were pacing around her kitchen or even closer - at the foot of her bed. In the mornings she would often see the boy's mother hurrying up the street to knock on the door of a friend's house. She had felt sorry for the family then, but more sorry for herself. Wanting now to say something in return, she had then asked after his mother, and this question of hers seemed to make him extraordinarily happy. His mother was wonderful, he said, though her ticker had been giving trouble and she was working too hard, but really, he wanted to say how much he had always loved living in this street, and particularly next door to my friend and her husband, who had always been fantastic neighbours and good to his mum and his dad. She and her husband, he said, had never complained about him and his parents, and he and his parents had never complained about them. In fact, he now said, he used to like the wailing she used to do with that trumpet music, as he called it, and that little playing up and down on the piano, always missing some notes - the wailing and the playing going all over the place - and just thinking about it now was bringing it all back to him. It was making him remember how happy he had been as a kid.

The Ginger Cat

That ginger cat has been lying on the road all day, I was thinking. When I saw it in the morning it had been lying there, still, stretched out on the asphalt in front of a parked car. It might have been enjoying a lie in the sun. For a very short moment I thought that the cat was only lying in the sun as cats like to do – but there had been a small, soft, pink bundle of something on the road a short distance from its head – a small, soft, pink bundle of something that, more than the stillness of the body, had alerted me to the obvious: that the ginger cat was dead.

The bundle of pink had seemed fresh, I remembered thinking. I hadn't been able to stop myself looking at it. I hadn't wanted to look at the body of the cat either, but even so, without looking at the cat straight on, I had noticed that its head was flat and had been tucked in an unusual angle to the body, and as such it should have been obvious that the ginger cat was dead. There was something, too, about the stillness of the body – the quality of the stillness – and this I had gathered without looking straight on at the body of the cat on the road. I am a wimp, I had thought – not only a wimp, but a wimp that is morbid and curious. I should have looked at that dead cat’s body straight on, I was thinking. I should have placed the body of the dead ginger cat at the centre of my focus rather than only at the periphery.

There was something shrunken about the cat now, I could see from the bus stop. It was nearly four o’clock in the afternoon – many hours had passed since I had last seen it. Even from where I was standing I could see that the cat had shrunk and stiffened, looking less like a cat. I had forgotten to look out for it as I passed by the car (still parked) on my way up the hill to the bus stop. It was only as I looked back from where I was waiting for the bus that I saw that the cat was still lying on the asphalt in front of the car, but when I looked for the small, soft bundle of something near the head, I could see no trace of it and so I began to think that, perhaps, it had shrunk in the sun, or that another animal or bird had eaten it. From the bus stop it wasn't even clear that what I was looking at had once been a cat; it might have been a towel or a jumper that had stiffened with dirt. Many people would have passed the dead ginger cat since the last time I’d seen it. If the cat had been a human an ambulance would have taken it away, but you don't call an ambulance for a cat, I was thinking. I should have stopped and done something for the cat that morning. Even now, at the bus stop, it wasn't too late – not too late to save the cat from a foul and gradual disintegration on the road. But I didn't have anything with me – this was what I told myself: I don't have any newspaper or bags or anything that I could use. Soon I began to think about other things; the thought of newspaper and bags must have lead to other thoughts into which I slipped as gently as into sleep.

I didn't see the arrival of the man, but I saw him bent over the cat with his legs wide apart. He had a young man's way of bending over. He was wearing rubber gloves and with one hand he held open a stiff white bag that looked to be the kind of parcel packet you can buy in a post office; with the other, he slid the dead ginger cat into the bag, sliding it in easily without lifting it far from the surface of the road. The man carried the bag to the footpath, holding it a little out from his body. Once on the footpath he bent down once again to push a thin ginger limb – or what looked to have been a thin ginger limb – further down into the bag. He then seemed to be doing something to secure the top of the bag. I was thinking about this word ‘secure’ as I watched the man working. He seemed to be trying to fold over or tie or stick down the top edges of the bag, but from where I was standing I couldn't tell how he was doing it. The cat is probably already beginning to smell, I was thinking. Perhaps the man wants to avoid looking at the cat any longer. Soon the man had secured the cat, I could see – or at least such I imagined him describing it. Now nobody would get see the body of the cat again. Even the owner – if she or he existed – would never see the cat again or learn what had happened to it, because the dead ginger cat had been successfully secured as the man, as I was already imagining, would soon be telling everyone in his office – all of them standing for a moment at the windows to listen and to nod – an office which very likely overlooked the parked car and the bus stop on the other side of the road, its long line of windows watching over us all.