More and More

More and more it looks like the holiday was the right thing to do. More and more it looks like there is a price to pay, for those who dared to run completely against the stream. Col was down for a couple of days, well it was only meant to be one but turned into two through unfortunate circumstance; and he just looked haunted and not very well. I was a bit shocked by the whole thing, or disturbed anyway. It is like the arc of other people's lives dissecting your own. The kids weren't pleased to have him around, wanted him gone, particularly now he has lost his teeth in one great humiliation, and appears to them enormously, frighteningly eccentric. He said he was dying and he looked like it. I prodded him awake a couple of times because I thought he had stopped breathing.

Then by accident, when Henrietta was bustling him out the door, he forgot his money and everything else in the morning and waited outside the house in atrocious muggy heat all day for us to come home. You could have rung me, I said, I only work ten minutes away. I don't like to disturb people at work, he said. I didn't have anything much to do, it was a boring day, I remonstrated. But the deed was done. He slept all the next day, until after three o'clock. He just didn't look well, lying there. All the days of outrage and youth are gone. I want to die honourably of an Aids related disease, he said.

Death with the brotherhood. These things had been mirrored in this city a thousand times. He had only seen a few of them, in the weight of the grief, and that had been enough. There are the memorials in the star observer. The last issue a group took out a whole page for the tenth anniversary of the passing of some sunny faced long haired bloke. Most of the ones I had known had died complicated, addled, messy deaths. Secretive and unfortunate. We could telescope back to the good days; lay those over the current skeletons, the brain not working properly. Not everything was fine, but he wasn't going to roll over yet. He said goodbye, and the phones didn't answer after that. He didn't even know if he had made it back; or if he was in hospital; if this was the way it was going to end.