Diary – Love at Cumbersome corner – Autumn – Pt 3
By Bruce Williams
In Cumbersome, where nothing goes terribly right and nothing goes terribly wrong, Autumn has come. The Indian mynas, which are as native as the rest of us, find the going easier as the ground softens in our table-cloth backyards, and the worms and wood lice poke their heads out of their compost heaps, only to be picked up and deposited, post-myna, as a greyish paste onto the barren windowsills, balconies and ledges of Cumbersome.
Autumn coming to Cumbersome is like Autumn coming to Autumn. Weird. Inevitable. But most of all ‘ inevitable.
For instance. Cumbersome lies on the train line. The one that leads from Sydney Central to just about everywhere else. But there’s no station at Cumbersome. We’re neither Newtown nor St Peters, neither Erskineville nor Stanmore. Which means that to leave Cumbersome, you must first go somewhere else.
And Autumn is the season of the annual return of the former Mayoress of Marrickville.
The end of Summer brings her out again through her front doorway, no longer shunning the sun, but seeking it.
She appears in her slippers and her ankle-length dressing gown ‘ which may explain her difficulty with Summer ‘ and will begin by standing, at around about noon, where the sun strikes to the north of her tiled veranda. By three, she’ll have moved half-way south, staying in the light, as the shadow shifts. That first half of her veranda, you’d hardly notice her moving at all, like the hour-hand of a clock. But the shadow-pace picks up as the afternoon extends, and you can hear the grit scratching beneath her slippers as she edges and edges across and across. South. South. The Cumbersome two-step. In Autumn.
And there she is at last, with the sun almost spent. Old, so old: her hair the last of her to catch the light. And what light! The beautiful, rich, golden light of Autumn in the dying of the day. The brassy, golden sheen of chemist-dyed hair, fluffed up to hide the baldness which, really, isn’t so very bad.
And then the Autumn sun falls behind the Fijian tabernacle, and the myna birds stop fighting with each other ‘ and with the rock doves, the magpies and the lorikeets that the mynas try not to share the trees with.
The evening descends over Cumbersome like a Boeing. You hear it come. You hear it go. But somehow, with so many things standing in the way, you miss seeing it.
Like love.
