They take a
seat in the pizzeria after removing their overcoats. He takes his daughter’s coat and hangs it on
the back of her chair and is nearly cleaned out by a young man who is fully
engaged in his phone as he navigates his way around chairs, toddlers and people
carrying pints of beer and soft drinks with straws. He sits and looks at the menu with his wife
and two young children. He already knows
she will opt for Super Supreme with a crispy base. The thirteen-year-old will
want vegetarian, gluten free and her brother will want meat and anything
covered with cheese. Other parents are
out with their kids, most of whom are oblivious to the goings on of the
restaurant and are furiously playing phone games and sending inane messages or
videos to each other. The man would be
not surprised if some of them are even sending them to their friends in the
next booth.
The
wall-mounted television screen overhead plays a ‘Beyonce vs Lady Gaga’ video
battle. The man is not captured by the
image of Beyonce dancing like a precision watch in painted-on clothing but of
the Challenger shuttle exploding as part of the background montage. It reminds him of running back to the cabin
in Tahuna to tell his parents of the news of the explosion. Now he’s no longer in the city, he is back in
his coastal hometown where he’s seventeen.
It’s 1986 and it’s not his wife he’s looking at across the table but
Karen. They’ve been going out for five
months. Tonight’s the night he thinks. She is
not distracted by any hand-held devices, if anything, her eyes are focused
solely on him. People in stone-washed
jeans and denim jackets are talking as Icehouse’s ‘Electric Blue’ fades out to
Dire Straits and their new ‘Money for Nothing’ riff. He has just added Brothers in Arms to his growing
compact disc collection (now fifteen!) and he’s nearly learned every song off
by heart. Karen waits with a Southern
Comfort and L & P while he goes to the counter. He peels a twenty and three
two dollar notes from his small brown pay packet and returns copper coins to
his pocket.
In eleven
months Karen will drive across the hill and change her city scape, her own
views inevitably conforming to those of her newfound friends. He remembers no seasons in those final
months. Just the remaining time holding
hands at the cinema, listening to John Farnham and pretending to feel grown up
by drinking Miami wine cooler under age at the Cobb.
He still
looks for where her place was when he drives through on holiday. It seems so much smaller now.
Andrew
Hawkey
