AUTUMN

They flutter like red-gold confetti

A nuptial mass of hopes

well tempered by

PING

I put a load of washing on. Could you deal with it later? Ta.

by experience.

A nuanced word

for resignation

PONG

Medication reminder

Yes, yes, I took that before breakfast. 

Talking to a phone. 

Eye-roll emoji.

Enjoy every sunset in 

the season of goodbyes 

Yuck.

KNOCK

The flouro clad back of the postie. 

She rides an electric scooter.

Almost my age

but still working.

Book on the doormat.

“How To Look After Your Brain”. 

It won’t get read, of course. 

File with the others. 

Where was I?

Memories.

Recollections more colourful 

than today’s drab prospect, 

another medical con

PONG

Thank you for choosing the LubDub heart monitor. 

Follow the link to complete the registration process. 

PING

If you go down to the village, could you see if they have any fresh passionfruit?

Sure. 

It’s for the cream sponge, a ritual almost as old 

as the young man whose birthday it will mark. 

I recall passion 

fruit. 

More vivid, him riding his little 

push car around the house

plastic wheels rumbling

over red-gold polished boards 

bare feet pattering

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

What the hell is that. Not the washing 

machine, it’s five beeps and out. 

Not the recliner couch 

I can’t hear that anymore. 

One of the blinds? 

Ah, the dishwasher. F11. 

Blockage. 

Fortunately I know the drill and it

KNOCK

For fuck’s sake. 

Wash hands dry hands open door pick up new kettle. The greedy Big A bastards aren’t even putting boxed items in shipping boxes any more. Just a sticker with name and address straight on the packaging. Suppose that’s not a bad idea. The new vacuum cleaner came the same way. They had even slit the carton open to insert the spare dust bags. Sixteen hundred bucks for a barrel vacuum cleaner. Should’ve gone with the robot model, but couldn’t quite trust it. Like driverless cars, except indoors. He grinned like crazy has he zoomed down the hall to get the chequered tea-towel.

.

.

.

SMALLS

I need to buy some new undies. Several pairs reveal a parting of ways between the elastic and the cotton fabric and, as my mother used to say, what if you were taken to hospital and were wearing those? As a child I had no real idea what she meant. Like when I had my appendix out? Is there special hospital underwear? But like a puppy I picked up on the tone of voice. Shame. It would be shameful to have decrepit underpants viewed by… well, by anyone. I remember her repairing her own nylon undergarments, sitting by the window where the light was best, bending over the needle and thread. It was a necessity;  she had no income of her own and the only way to purchase personal items was by putting a few pence aside from the weekly housekeeping. That scrimping and saving was preferable to the stressful, yet ultimately inevitable, conversation with my father about increasing the housekeeping money. Though conversation isn’t the right word. Inquisition. Interrogation. Ritual humiliation. Any and all of those. 

Last week I threw a pair in the bin. It felt odd, uncomfortable, profligate. A kind of betrayal. There was even some annoyance that I couldn’t think of an alternative. Who, nowadays, has a bag of cleaning cloths behind the laundry door? No way I’d be offering my discarded underwear to the cleaning lady who visits once a fortnight. Mum, I wish you could see the look of distaste, repugnance even, as I reveal we have a cleaner. Once a fortnight, I plead in explanation of this bourgeois indulgence. But back to the smalls. (British vernacular, commonly referring to undergarments, in case you were wondering.) They are easily purchased at the supermarket, and are periodically on special just like sausages or cucumbers. It feels odd creating a new item on the shopping app I use each week. Undies—male, large. I like to group the list into sections that match my route through the supermarket but where does underwear sit? Is it near the food containers? Or next to the batteries? Maybe I’ll put it at the end, so searching for them will be like a victory lap before heading to the finish line of the checkout. 

They probably have socks as well, and I need those too. That’s much more annoying because not long ago I bought half a dozen pairs in two packs of three, or a six sock bundle if you are following the arithmetic. Twelve new items of sockery just a few months old. But already several have developed holes in the vicinity of the big toe. How can that be? Didn’t socks used to last until you grew out of them? Clearly not any more. Already a couple of pairs have been binned, with all the furtive guilt that entails. In a faded snapshot I see my mother sitting in the lounge room, next to the standard lamp. On an occasional table sits her battered sewing basket, in her lap a ball of wool. She holds a pock-marked wooden darning tool. Just this pair, Allan? she asks. My father’s head appears briefly from behind the newspaper. Yes, he nods, but also one of my business shirts. The top pocket seam has torn. She mumbles assent, and inserts the darning mushroom into the sock. I’ll do the shirt tomorrow, she says, when the light is better.

GAME

The boy was very excited when we got him the PS3 for Christmas, or perhaps birthday. Secondhand, but not yet redundant. Its successor, greater and grander by a whole integer, was still relatively new. People were selling old consoles as they sprang for the new improved model. Like cars, like hi-fi gear, like bicycles or food processors or any desirable apparatus. The need for new.

Games were purchased, at the on-line marketplace or from the trade-in bins at the shop in the big centre. He worked it all out remarkably quickly. This is what it means to be a digital native, I thought. I remembered the first video game I ever saw. Fittingly, for it was built to resemble a coffee table, it sat amongst the abused vinyl armchairs in the Student Union’s second floor coffee lounge. Imitation woodgrain with a coin slot on the side, a button to start the game, and a couple of knobs. Glass topped, the upper surface was pure coffee table around the edges, but had a cathode ray screen the size of an 10″ record cover in the centre. On this miniature television the game flickered into monochrome life. For one player, a one inch rectangle about the size of a slim cigarette butt moved side to side to block a small white square from passing the bat and entering oblivion. If you got the bat in the right place to block it, away it bounced to the other side of the screen where it cannoned into an invisible wall and returned. So it went, backwards and forwards, bouncing off invisible walls like a game of ghost squash. There was a two-player version where your opponent also had a bat. For a while people would stand and watch this novelty. Good players achieved some level of fame, or at least recognition. Eventually, everyone realised it was as exciting as watching traffic lights but less colourful. Cups and saucers began accumulating, leaving brown circles on the glass. When Space Invaders arrived downstairs, it became just another coffee table covered in cigarette ash and lunch crumbs.

Watching the boy on the couch, concentrating on the bouncing scenes of Lego Star Wars, I felt a pang of guilt about him being a single child. This is what siblings are for, shared play. So I tried to join in. Mastering the controller did nor come naturally, nor did working out what the game required. Frustration was intense. A refrain emerged. Which one am I? What’s happening? I’m dead. It would have been funny except I was grinding my teeth so hard I couldn’t smile. Despite my contribution he enjoyed playing, finding a child’s capacity for being immersed in the moment. I withdrew from lounge room gaming but later, in the era of more sophisticated worlds, would pause behind the couch as he sat under headphones, tapping the controller like a mad typist. I’d watch the images on the big TV. Assassin’s Creed captivated me… renaissance Florence never looked better. My favourite bit was when the main character climbed high on a parapet or spire to gain and eagle’s eye view of the city. To return to street level he would launch himself into space, hurtling earthwards to land in a cart full of hay. The boy said it was called ‘The Leap of Faith’. Would you do that? Probably not, I said. Hay is quite spiky. 

He’s at the same uni now, though the Union Building is fenced off, awaiting demolition. I feel sad about that. The Undergrad lounge where I first witnessed Dungeons and Dragons being played, the cafeteria where you could get a cup of almost drinkable coffee for twenty cents, the fourth floor snooker club with its intimidatingly large tables and hushed atmosphere. Now the cream brick edifice looks pale and anxious, expecting the wreckers any day. A bit like retirement. Cracks, wear and tear, pointless memories; life shrinking, structured only by medical appointments and the activities of others. Waiting for the inevitable. The most exciting part of the day is when he shares some of a history or literature lecture over dinner. Life has shrivelled, though I’m not altogether sad about that. What’s out there now? To find out would take a leap of faith.

HALFLIFE

A couple of days ago I pulled Malone Dies from the fiction shelf. Penguin books, 1962 printing; orange cover, nicotine stained pages, price five shillings and sixpence. Translated from the French by the author, Samuel Beckett. Glanced at the paperback in profile, surprised to see how far into the slim volume the bookmark had progressed. Had I really read half of it? Page seventy-four of one hundred and forty-four. More than half. Astonishing. When did I first open it, gazing at the stern thumbnail photograph of the author on the inside cover before carefully turning the title page to the beginning of the text? Gingerly, because the pages seem somehow frail, parchment like, friable like dry earth that falls from the shovel in a puff of dust. “I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all.” Not a particularly shocking opening, given the title of the work. He had two copies, my friend. Offered me one, a winter Friday evening almost ten years ago. We could both read it, he said. See who finishes first. Always, with him, a dash of competition. It was the same with our endless and often circular conversations about music. But a deep respect for the enigmatic Irish playwright and novelist was a point of agreement. He’d taught Godot; I’d performed Krapp’s Last Tape. One all. Sure, I said, why not? I even started it the next day, some kind of momentum from the conversation propelling me through the first few… chapters? Not a bit of it! Pages? Only just. Oh, it is hard work, this drifting on the jumbled reminisce of an aged man. Yearning for a chapter break, or even a centre-justified asterisk. Something to mark the passage of time, to permit, encourage even, the satisfaction of partial achievement; to draw breath. Eventually it disappeared under the TV guide, a music magazine and some memoir by a middle-aged rock star. During a tidy up of the coffee table, it was returned to the bookshelf. But it must have been retrieved at some point, because the bookmark is halfway through. Half way! Several years ago I asked my friend how he was progressing. He pulled a face. Pretty hard work, isn’t it? Boasting, surely, I revealed my arrival at the mid-point. Eyebrows were raised. Good effort, he said. Pause. Will one of us finish before one of us dies, I asked? You’re well in the lead, he said. A couple of days ago I pulled Malone Dies from the shelf once more. Still page seventy-four. But only one of us has the chance to finish it now.