Rain lashes my windows like rain in a Hemingway story. I wander these rooms, pick up another old book I first read long ago, lower it, stare down the past, this rain like a worry always at memory’s edge. I read further pages of artfully simplistic prose about a Ray Carver character who can’t move on, drinking, in pain. In the darkened middle of this tempestuous day I feel jittery, a cat before a storm.
I never did get around to telling her my back story, the crazy wolf-chase that was my youth ending in the Young Offenders Group, a squalid confinement of tattooed boys slouching amidst the façade of an upright community. Before this, bored by school, attracted by anything forbidden, we truants trekked stormwater drains five feet in diameter, cool on hot days, murk illuminated by our cigarette lighters and freedom’s distant openings beckoning like ambition ever larger ahead, or, looking back, smaller.
Memory’s mirage luring me, I bookmark the page. At the end of those days of anticipation I met her nowhere, place unimportant, a dark clearing where an owl calls, or the stitched grass of a disused railway line, echo of times past, two cars shaken from the moon. She always arrived late, left first. I would drive away from nowhere too fast blinded by yet another tryst too swiftly over, the louring clouds of our imminent, then final, embrace.
In those drains between school and the railway yards, oily water inches deep at their centers, we sometimes stepped around furred and winged viscera, a bestiary of small drowned creatures , their animal cunning over. Constantly stooped, pants tucked in socks, legs straddling the gunk, we waddled into our futures, voices reverberating with bravado in that reek. Blood pumping my untried heart, I imagined subterranean cartographers, or convicts escaping through darkling catacombs.
Before the rain an enraged wind rushed across the land shaking this house, empty but for me, a riot in trees, shrubs trembling in the dark earth. A cold reality of stillness like sorrow followed. Craving art’s solitude, mistakes mounting, I wanted freedom to dream. Now this jangling life review squats in my mind. Rain spatters leaves, stains stones as black as those culverts’ dregs, Coltrane’s haunting serenade of obsession descending, volume down, on my sound system.
The waft of patchouli, body heat, her sheepskin coat, car’s upholstery, the recipe for soft pangs of anxiety, has never fully left me. As quickly as an illusionist, she wriggled from her ragged-kneed boutique jeans after evening art classes, her smooth thighs remembered when I interrogate my masculinity in an emptiness spanning years, thoughts ever bearing me back to her haste, the husband, her fervid breath now elegy.
— Ian C Smith’s work has been published in BBC Radio 4 Sounds, Cable Street, The Dalhousie Review, Griffith Review, Honest Ulsterman, Offcourse, Stand,&,Westerly. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.