Teretere

The yellowed paperback was called ‘Tom Swift and His Triphibian Atomicar’, and, tempted by its fabulous title, I read it as I drank coffee. This second-hand bookshop, its espresso machine, questionable sofa and dark-haired, knowing members of staff, sat successfully in a row of part-derelict shopfronts. Behind it ran a newly defunct train line. Opposite, the civic hall was in partial disarray, its scaffold-wrapped bell tower circled by mournful Australian crows. At sundown, this faded flank of Newcastle was a display ground for tattooed young men driving low, roaring utility vehicles, trailing weed-smoke in the humid air.

I looked over the top of my book, away from Tom Swift’s cold war swashbuckling, distracted by the man who had noisily entered the shop and headed directly to the biography shelf. He wore a denim jacket covered in badges and a shocked expression on what looked like a prematurely aged face. He was minutely active, setting down and picking up his plastic bags, rifling through a dozen or so titles, talking rapidly but quietly, and raising his voice, mid-sentence, to ask the room if these books were in the sale. A staff member didn’t look up from his newspaper as he responded, not cruelly - ‘Yeah, course mate’. This was a regular visitor. I watched, and thought of another man we’d seen on consecutive evenings in a café on Darby Street, where the restaurants spill out on to the pavement, a mile from here, past the fountain on the good side of the civic hall. He was white haired, bent double at the waist. He walked with great, dignified effort around tightly packed wooden tables to what was clearly a favourite spot at the rear of the café. We never heard him speak, and he completed crossword after crossword as the smiling café staff brought him desserts and tea refills, until he paid and edged his way out again.

The man in the bookshop handed over a few coins and left quickly, past a crammed notice board and out into the morning heat. I closed the novel; Tom Swift’s world of monochrome idealism had lost its sheen. Later, after an evening dip in the surf on Bar Beach (unwittingly at ‘shark time’, a disbelieving friend noted later, staggered at my naivety), I meandered past power-walking locals and one hopeful paraglider, and I thought of these men, made prominent to me by their very invisibility. They were like bookends in this city, equally vulnerable, equally embraced for at least part of their day in a place where they felt safe.