imminence

Last Friday I lunch with a friend. We first meet in grade six; now we are sixty. We have known each other fifty years. We see each other about once a year and always say as we part that we must see each other more often. Rob lives in Clifton Hill and I now work in Collingwood, so I have suggested we have lunch once a month.

His routines are erratic and so are mine: between us we have no routine at all. I’m supposed to work Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday but don’t. Rob is currently at a loose end. When I arrive at his place before going to lunch he is sitting on his front verandah reading. Non-fiction.

I unclip and march the Red Star into his hall. His wife Mary sits on the edge of a chair tapping at the keyboard of a Mac. She is dusky, handsome, Greek Cypriot, wearing zebra-stripe stockings. She’s as dark as Rob is pale and red-haired.

Rob dons a long black coat over his black daks and jumper. His shoes are black and he sports a black pork-pie. I’m in lycra head to toe, no advertising. Mary is taken by the unlikely couple we present and takes photos. Rob unhooks his walking-stick from a hallstand and we depart.

We enter a vegetarian establishment in Brunswick Street. I am vegetarian and I’m also pretty sure the tucker here will not appeal. It doesn’t. Too righteous. But the atmosphere is fine and we can hear each other. We resume the conversation we’ve been having for 50 years.

We talk work because neither of us has a clue what the other is doing. I ask about his son, seventeen and most unusual, according to his father. He’s doing VCE, works at a local cinema, won’t get in a car, travels only by public transport, seems to have figured out how the world works. He goes off day and night with cameras and takes marvellous black and white photographs.

Rob has cardiovascular disease and has been five times in an ambulance this year. Last time his heart ceased functioning. It’s a family thing; his father died at 61. I remember Rob telling me how he went with his mother to view his father’s body, watched his mother say good-bye to her lover. He’d not thought of his father that way until that moment.

He regrets that his father thought his pursuit of a life in theatre as a waste, never got to see what Rob achieved, attend the ceremony I go to last year honouring his life’s work.

He tells me he does not want to die any time soon, but gives away that he’s prepared himself, and his family too, I surmise. Two more years and his son will be right, he says. Mary has bought a bar in Sydney Road and she’ll be OK. If he goes tomorrow, he’s happy that he’s had a great life. I tell him that as a road cyclist I share much the same thoughts.

  

My father’s friends have been dying for years. I have long wondered how I will feel when my friends leave this place. It seems only yesterday we did boyish things together.

I look forward to our next lunch. My shout this time.

Rock on.