grand finale

Grand final day. Hawks versus Swans. Go Swans: they play my type of footy, totally team-oriented; they never argue with umpires, remonstrate with team-mates or opponents. There’s no glitz, no glam, just a relentless attack on the ball, or opponents with the ball, their defensive skills paramount.

My good woman joins me just before half-time. She has no allegiance, decides to support Hawthorn: they’re Victorian. So are South Melbourne, I tell her. After two and a half hours of captivating theatre the Swans prevail. They are behind in every vital statistic but in front in making every possession count.

We don’t watch the presentation of the premiership cup but walk the JRT instead. The late afternoon chills, the wind bites. Nothing much is said. We have a truce on words, lest we get them horribly wrong as we have for the past six weeks. Last Sunday we go to the movies, with a moratorium on heavy discussion.

Tonight after six weeks of tortured inability to come to grips with our fractured relationship we have the discussion we couldn’t manage through two counselling sessions and three disastrous dialogues. Tonight we understand what has gone wrong. There is regret but no rancour. We have stuffed it up because we could never express our deepest fears to each other.

In five years neither of us ever said anything that could not be unsaid, not be forgotten, that would be terminal. But we have lost the spark, the thing that ignites us. We didn’t want to lose it, but acknowledge that it is extinguished. Our journey together has come to an end.

Around ten my good woman leaves. We will meet again, but only as friends. We will hug, but only in memory of what we shared for five years. She will no longer be my good woman, though I don’t know what to call her now. Maybe one day she will be someone else’s good woman, but I don’t want to think about that.

In Serbian her name means truth. 

An hour or so after she leaves I take the JRT out the front for a piss. Maybe a hundred and fifty metres up the hill over the road a possum blunders into a transformer. Electrons crack, a magnesium flash leaps into the sky, every light in the neighbourhood goes out.

Rock on.