Reaching the End

We sat on the verandah and didn't want to leave. Everyone we talked about was dead. Well not everyone, but a lot of them. We were amongst the last traces of living memory for these people. Billy Paton. The dancer from Hair that everyone fancied and who we had all got to know. He was beautiful, I said, and Col agreed; and I asked, discretely, were you around for the funeral? No, I was in Brisbane, he said. I don't know where I was, I said, maybe overseas. One minute he was there and the next he wasn't. The same sadness illuminated many of our conversations. They were all gone, the people we had thought were such fun, were the centre of everything. Instead there were robust farmers and young explorers and families everywhere; and we sat perched as if in a great eirie; not just remote in location but remote in time.

There somewhere on the white beach the pain, strangulation and confusion of Sydney disappeared; and I gathered, or tried to gather, the energy to do it all again. Status had not come my way. I never got promoted. They were nice when they needed something, an extra shift, a hole to fill, something to be written in a hurry. But that was it. I complained about the treachery of news rooms and people said no, that's not news rooms, that's offices. They're all the same, absolutely treacherous. Someone will rise to the top but many won't. The old blokes know where the furniture is, and that's about it. They won't be treated with respect; they're never treated with respect. Even now, I look around at the reporters older than myself and not one of them is happy, not one of them is treated well. They show up and survive and that's about it; elderly forms and a faded cynicism; still hoping to find decency in the day to day struggle and instead finding nothing of the kind.

Sometimes I wonder why they continue to show up; and the answer of course is the same; money. To work to live. The fundamental flaws inside us keep us down in the muck. But it didn't matter, here on the beach I struggled to find the resources inside to face it all again; the daily struggle and the daily rubbish. Camped outside people's houses. Regurgitating press releases. Trying to keep quiet and doing nothing of the kind. Coming to be regarded as a character; because it was the last refuge against failure. Billy had been a wonderful person and all we saw, or all Col saw, I didn't see anything, was a notice in the Star Observer, Sydney's gay rag. I knew he had moved back to his parents; I had visited him there once. But he had been healthy then, and nobody knew much about Aids in those days. Instead I had only heard through the grape vine; he's gone, she's gone. We collected our melancholy pasts; and here in the future, not one of the bright young things, with their multiple degrees and multiple enthusiasms, could even imagine the lives we had lived. Neither imagine, nor care, as we settled into silence.