1001 Nights Cast

We were in the middle of a cold spell, which is quite unusual for this part of Queensland. Most of the locals don’t own a coat. Don’t even possess a jumper. Walk through the town in the middle of what we call winter and you’ll see a parade of t-shirts. But that’s by-the-by. Except to say that it was cold—windchill factor of minus three—and the guy I was talking to was wearing a Guns and Roses t-shirt. Well, to be accurate about it, I wasn’t talking to him, he was talking to me.

And naturally enough his teeth were chattering.

I wasn’t talking to him because we’d busted up a couple of months ago which I’d figured must be permanent. Some things must come to an end. These slender cords that hold two people together—sometimes one end of them gets yanked loose. That’s how I was coming to see it, when I could get myself into a philosophical frame of mind, and when I couldn’t I threw things, or yelled insults at my own crying face in the mirror, or stuck pins in a little doll I’d made out of a ball of blue-tak. But that’s by-the-by. Except to say that when I saw him coming towards me on the bridge he was not exactly the person I most wanted to stop and chat with, even if the wind-chill factor hadn’t been enough to set my jaws into lock-down and make me determined to get across to the shelter of the buildings on the opposite bank as fast as possible.

So I was quickening my pace and keeping my eyes focused on the pavement, when suddenly this hand grabbed at my elbow and pulled me to a halt.

‘Hey!’ I kept my jaws locked and my eyes on the pavement. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘It’s you. The person in the world I most need to see.’

I didn’t say anything. He grabbed my other arm, so I was caught there, leaning against the wall of the bridge. And he just started talking. Talking and shivering, saying things like, ‘You don’t know how cold it’s been since you’ve been gone.’ Some such crap, though the words didn’t exactly penetrate because the wind was buffeting at my left ear till I thought it was going to blow my eardrum clean out the other side of my head.

He let go of my arms and took a step back, and for some reason I didn’t move, maybe because he was still talking and jiggering about there in front of me, his hands now clutching at parts of his own body—at his hair, his stomach, his ear. At one point he slapped the palm of his right hand over his right eye—exactly where I had stuck the pin in the blue-tak doll just the night before last.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘this is genuine. True blue, cross my heart and all that crap. I really mean it. I’m trying to talk your language. I’m trying. So far without success, evidently, but I’m giving it my best shot.’

His hands clutched the air and at that point a gust of icy wind shot between us. That was when I looked at him. When I met his eyes, I would not blink. ‘What you need,’ I said, ‘is a jacket. And as for this cold spell, I’m not personally involved.’

‘You are!’ He was yelling, now. ‘You are so. You keep coming into my dreams. You dissolve the air and make a vacuum where there used to be human breath. The stuff that’s coming at me now, I can’t breathe it. It freezes up my chest.’

I remembered I had stuck a pin through the place where his left lung would be, the lung I would feel heaving with a gentle rhythm next to mine when we were sleeping beside each other. Does blue-tak have such powers, I wondered to myself. These were not the ones advertised on the packet.

He brought his hands together over the region where I suppose his heart must be.

‘Something is missing in my life,’ he said. ‘Something’s gone. Well, not something, everything. Life is missing from my life. If it’s my fault I’m sorry. I’m sorry I called you a cold bitch. I didn’t mean it. Not literally. Really I didn’t.’

I shrugged and we left it at that. But when I got home I took the pins out of the blue-tak, rolled it up in a ball and put it back in the stationery tray along with the paper-clips. Then I looked at myself in the mirror and tried to smile. It wasn’t very successful at first, but with a bit of practice I managed to get the right sort of twitch into the corners of my mouth and eyes.

Next morning I woke up and the air around me felt warm and I wondered if I might be smiling. I looked in the mirror and found it was true. Smiling like a Cheshire cat. That gave me an idea.

A cat. A cat was what I needed in my life, one with a natural grin on its face. So I went down to the RSPCA, to find an abandoned cat, carrying a basket so I could bring it home with me in the back of the bus. They had two cats on death row—a black one and a grey one, miaowing in their separate cages.

‘I’ll have both,’ I said to the girl at the desk.

‘Fantastic!’ She was grinning from ear to ear. ‘But the grey moggie’s already taken. A guy saw her in the local paper and phoned up just before you came in. That’s probably him now.’

Through the glass doors I saw a familiar figure approaching, in a Guns and Roses t-shirt.