cate

She’s 25 minutes late. I don’t mind. I expect her to get lost; Collingwood confuses her. She’s been looking for number one instead of 134. She’s 60 in September and has had a stroke, years ago, running in the old railway cutting at Deepdene. Her memory’s fickle, she says; she needs a minder.

We feed coins into the meter, over three dollars’ worth for the hour we’ll spend together. I don’t see her often, every couple of years maybe, and that’s only the last decade. We probably go ten years without communication before that. I email her on her birthday but she never replies, says she doesn’t get technology.

We get lunch orders at Yim Yam on Smith Street, sit at a tiny table, me looking down the stairs, she out into the street. She asks about my new job; I ask about the job she’s been doing forever, teaching science at an exclusive girls’ school. Last time I saw her she had a broken arm, hated her job, her husband and the kicks in the guts life has delivered. She wept silently. I sat quietly.

Last time we spoke her husband had some god-awful wasting disease. Now he has cancer too. She was going to leave him, now she’ll stay. He has a ten to 15 per cent chance of survival.  

I tell her about my blog, writing about places I’ve lived, confusion about some dates and events, like our last weekend together, December 1975, going to Melbourne months later to tell her about my change of heart, being gazumped by her engagement. She too is confused by the timelines, but remembers the look on my face.

She tells me how much she loved me. I knew how much she loved me. I nearly burst with it too. Funny to talk about it now; we couldn’t then. I was her first lover, she mine, but I was never going to stop at one. I tell her I’ve wondered for 35 years if we might have made a life together, that I always doubted it; it’s never been my nature to hang in through tough times.

We wander back down Peel Street, past the single-speed bike shop, closed Tuesdays. I’m not sure if it’s strange, I tell her, but I like that we can still meet, talk candidly. I know I hurt her, and others, and have been forgiven. Those past lovers are all part of me, inside, and I’ll not forget them or be ashamed. I’m a lucky man.

She asks about my good woman. She’s courageous, astute, the sanest woman I’ve ever known. Cate asks if she’d be threatened by past lovers. She’s no need to be, I reply.

Rock on.