Challenger

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