I wake for the second time at around 11am. I wake to the clean light from the blind-less window illuminating my small, delicate white room with a happy glare, and the tender buzz of my banged up iPhone. It rests frankly, in the centre of the left side of the bed, looking up at the ceiling.
I roll myself sleepily to the left and take the phone in my hands.
James. ‘That sounds like a nice ritual to me. I like a good ritual. Sorry to hear your dream was strange. What was strange about it?’
I roll back; leave my phone resting on its face. Late on a Saturday morning, one of the few perceptible sounds is the periodic ricochet of a child’s basketball on the courtyard pavement, two stories below my window. Its lopsided drumming makes me smile. Petersham is the easiest, friendliest suburb of Sydney’s inner west.
My sleepy mind scoops up the thought of last night’s strangeness, and of James. My thoughts wander over our Saturday brunches at The Counter – that quaint café with painted fold-up chairs hanging on its walls. They lingered on the funny awkwardness of our conversations.
The image of the thick, pastel green cup raised to his clean, remarkably straight and symmetrical Russian face is, at this moment, awfully pleasing.
It often strikes me afresh, just how handsome he is. Like last night as we ambled, late, across the pavement that traced our route home from the Oxford Tavern. Up until a few months previously, it had been a topless bar. But then it changed owners and the neon sign on its darkened windows which read ‘girls girls girls’, is just a relic of a time now past.
We’d walked with our arms linked, chatting away, warm with red wine sangria and $3 tacos.
He’d suddenly stopped walking, turning to look at me with his intense, Russian eyes. I was still smiling.
‘You’re very mysterious’. He’d said. ‘You have this way of reacting to the world, like you’re seeing everything for the first time, or the last time. You’re funny, the way you talk to strange elderly men on trains, and the way you leave them smiling. I just wonder… how you are the way you are.’
I’ll never forget the way we’d just stood there, in the hushed streets of Petersham that smelled faintly of their famous barbeque chicken, of Portuguese coffee, and frangipani.
I pick up my phone again and type.
‘Come over for a cup of tea and a pancake. I’ll tell you all about it’.
