A Winter Fugitive, Part I
Wherever you go, there you are
Gentle Reader, this is the first part of a three part short story called The Winter Fugitive, which describes the narrator’s journey across three countries, in his bid to escape the winter, and to find himself. You can read Part II here.
Australia: Winter.
I moved under the leafless boughs of barren trees, under the spire of a church, etched into the sky.
It was here, the winter I had long-awaited, with dread.
I stowed my hands in my pockets and thought about how it was like being back in Ireland again where the wind cuts you and the rain comes in sideways. Except in some ways it was worse because you didn’t expect it, because the cold came in through the thin walls and took up residence, and there was no roaring fire to vanquish it or to offer solace in the flickering dance of its flames.
It wasn’t that bad. But I was habituated to the heat and felt the sting of the change in the weather. I knew a nice café on Church Street that had a stove and so I headed that way, down the hill, bidding my breath appear before me and then watching it float away as the sun, low in the sky and wan, unspooled her pale and almost heatless rays, sharp in the brisk of morning.
With the change in the weather I knew I wouldn’t stay long, now. Just like the bats that nightly speckled the soft twilight sky as they flew over the house we rented on their way westward into the parks, I too would go northward for the winter, but further, crossing the equator.
Very soon, I thought, I will go.
I kept going and, reaching the base of the hill where parked cars were slumbering under blankets of dew, I saw that the droplets on the windscreens traced patterns which were like pastiches of those stark trees by the roadside.
I looked at every windscreen until I came to the café. It was open and, like the winter before, they had put up a plastic wrapping for warmth around the terrace.
I went in, it, my footsteps hollow on the wooden boards. It was full of early morning quiet – not a soul.
I took a table at the back near the stove and unpacked my laptop. The whole day was mine and I didn’t want to waste it like the ones before. There was an Australian girl that I was seeing at the time and I thought that if I got some work done I could see her. She was tall with mid-length brown hair and a fringe and eyes that were not uncompelling and maybe we would get a drink later. She had a softness about her which I was thinking of, when the waiter came over.
He knew my order – I ordered the usual. He went away and I took out my laptop and began to write.
This is how this story starts, in the café. But in reality it started long before that: and it followed me. Wherever I went, there it was. And it was here, I realised, in the café, by the stove, on the table, and I couldn’t get away from it, from the fact that I wanted to write and the words would not come, not then nor when the waiter brought the water bottle, amber in colour, and glasses, nor when the clock struck the first hour.
For distraction I looked at the photographs on the walls. The café used to be a barber shop and there were photos of men in bow ties standing beside sinks and chairs and of cut-throat razors, of bristly neck brushes, and of a ceramic shaving mug, the sight of which evoked the smell of a felt that i and I felt almost as if I could smell the spumy lather it would give off.
The heat from the stove began to percolate through me and soon there was the telltale double knocking thock thock and then the familiar whirr and grind of the coffee machine. I began to search within for the stirrings of a muse. There was a fear of seeking too keenly, of frightening her off further into the depths of the subconscious, where, presumably, she sequestered herself. I probed tentatively; I needed her, but the nullity of my creative intellect felt every bit as barren as the vast nullarbor that stretched west of me, and the blankness of the page was a mirror to the blankness of my soul.
Just like on the bad days, I felt that I would never produce a single word of merit again, and desolation crept into my heart.
People began to file in to the café. The words began to file in too, but without the blessing of the muse. They were hardfought words, artless and unevocative. They bore no secret sign; I dismissed them with callous keystrokes and I began to colour the page with work which, later, I knew I would disregard.
The morning passed and the words slackened. The chef was visible now above the patisserie display cabinet, and fumes of smoke curled before him, amidst the hissing of a pan. Cooking smells began to waft towards me, beginning to appetise and distract me.
I thought of the girl. She had a tattoo below the nape of her neck that I couldn’t recall exactly, something intertwining or helical. I thought of the rhino beetle she had taken up into the palm of her hand and let clamber over her fingers as she bade me listen to its angry little hiss, up close, late at night. Hers was a country town, somewhere northeast, with two pubs and a shop, where she fell asleep listening to the kookaburra’s cackle, the cicada’s throttled hum, the cricket’s stridulating chirrup: her lullabies.
I pictured it: The Never Never, the outback, the woop woop: the tumbleweed and the terracotta dust and a car coming up in the far distance, fuming a gentle jet of smoke into the heated air that miraged above the tarmac.
But I couldn’t write. The words were drying out, the words that weren’t very good anyway, the words that reached too far and came up short and I was leaving anyway and leaving her but deep down I knew it would be the same anywhere else: wherever you go.
Then it grew cold: a sudden chill. Someone had opened the back door from the store room, and a nipping breeze infiltrated the café.
The door closed; warmth began to tiptoe back in on silk slippers. But it was too late:
My pimpled gooseflesh, an empty cup of coffee, vapid words.
I unravelled them, found underneath a virgin page, steadfast in its featureless pallor.
I had seen it before; I would see it again.
Thanks for reading and I hope you will stay tuned for Part II – Click below to receive it straight to your inbox.
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