Max
Richards
| Last
Night in Lygon Street Hear that fiddle, quavery but singing a familiar tune? ‘Greensleeves’ - so evergreen. To its wordless melody phrases float up from my imperfect memory. She’s jilted him, he’s lilting on – the other words, I’ve never quite got them sorted out. Keening through the dusk above the traffic noise, it’s some busking violinist under the Lygon Street curving tin verandas by the flower stall – look, isn’t the fiddler man familiar too? – old colleague, McCann (philosophy, retired), still with the sad face and the gaberdine mac. Pension (I might ask) not enough? Neither’s mine – I ought to busk myself, but lack the tools, the nerve, the skills. And there’s not much in his hat – how much could he earn? Honestly, this smallish coin is all I can spare him. I sidle past unrecognised. Could it be money’s not what he’s after, but to test some theory once sketched in ethics class, when someone objected: 'In the real world...'? Or in aesthetics, what if the less-skilled version moves one more than the most? Lost Children Such a dream he’d never thought to have: so many years apart, he and she, weren’t theirs closed books, their shared histories? Their two adult children showed even-handed affection. This meeting, it seemed her prolonged anger with him might have faded. On once-contested territory they watched from a balcony sunset’s glory darkening over a river valley. Below, someone – two someones – caught their attention: they were about to see emerging from the darkness hand in hand their two lost children, the ‘terminated’ one, the ‘miscarried’ one. All those years had not been stolen from them! – elsewhere they’d had to endure and make lives for themselves. Now they were moving this way, about to reveal themselves in some other glory. What might they say? ‘We sensed we had a part in dooming your partnership’? – ‘inadvertent, of course; mostly it was your own feelings undefined, unexpressed, finding darker outlets. No, we can’t stay.’ He still had nothing to say. Soon gone; without his even saying to her ‘did you see?’ – nor her any word to him. >>>Andrew Burke
Back to Contents |
|||
| |
|