The rain thumps against the angled glass and then runs in rivulets toward the original façade, where it trickles between the red brick and darkens the off-white tuckpointing until it is the colour of bile. I angle across the road and take a quick two-step onto the pedestrian island in a vain attempt to dodge the ute splashing toward me. I clutch my bag to my chest and shelter my eyes with an insubstantial magazine I’ve grabbed from the mall. The rain is worsening and the slate coloured sky promises more, heavier, and soon.

I head for the bus stop and, amidst the bedraggled suits and exchange students, you’re standing there, bouquet in hand. I realise you’ve spotted me as soon as I step off the island and head for the tiny rectangle of dry space under the angular bus shelter.

“Just keep walking,” you say as I approach, “keep walking” and I do, pulling up my collar and stepping back into the rain.

I look up the line of identical shelters and weigh up my options, there’s another just over the hill I can catch a bus from. “Hey.” It means I need to walk a little further at the other end, but hopefully the rain will have let up by then. “Dan.” I’m lost in my thoughts when I hear you behind me, and I stop and turn around. The flowers make for a poor umbrella and stray drips wander down your forehead and play havoc with your mascara. “Hey. Hey, look. Sorry. Look, I’ve got twenty minutes. Get a drink?”

It all seems perfectly ridiculous, you looking like you’ve just escaped from a wedding and me, work clothed and soaking, hands stained from the running ink of the x-press I’m now holding beside my ear.

We descend the stairs and take a seat at the back. The lights make ragged oblongs of white on the worn purple velour, a bainmarie steams slowly on a table against the wall and the ancient man behind the counter keeps a rheumy eye on the television as he mops the counter with a dirty cloth. The warbles of Coltrane’s sax issuing from tinny speakers are a perfect accompaniment to this pop-art-painting view of little city depression.

It reminds me of the tiny coffee shop we stopped to have breakfast in, that day we spent roaming the back streets of Osaka for an exhibition of Australian art, hidden in an ivy covered warehouse near the port that stunk of fish and kerosene and sweat.

The night before we shared a tiny tatami room in a run-down business hotel in Tennoji and every wall had a cupboard built into it. Our room backed onto the tracks, and there was no bathroom, only a stained and chipped communal bath in the basement. You pushed the futons together and we had slow, quiet sex to the vibrations of the late-night cars stuffed with commuters headed for Bentenchō. I lay on my back, fingers locked in yours, and studied the roof; the train illuminating cracks in sequence, like car headlights from an old movie in jerky fast forward. When you came you lashed out with your foot, caught the TV, and the room filled with smell of the powdered green tea now floating in the air around us.

Funny that the trains were still rumbling westward long after they’d locked the front doors and wrapped a chain around the machine dispensing hot water in the lobby. Funny too, that the next building down was the gargantuan edifice of spa-world, a sprawling six storey spa complex that would go broke three weeks later: its vision of a pristine chrome-plated future too out of place amidst the crumbling suburbia around it. We’d planned to go, before we knew of the curfew, and arguing with the octogenarian in brusque dialect changed nothing.

Judging by his scowl, this guy mopping the counter could be a long lost cousin. I think Coltrane is playing “After the Rain” and this makes me smile, as I can plainly hear it drumming against the sandwich board outside.

We order roast veggies, but no meat, and sit picking at peas in the dim. I marvel at the oddness of us sitting at this table, together, and eating roast pumpkin. I realise I have absolutely no desire for small talk. “How is it then,” I ask, “are the goods as good?”

You put down your fork and flick an errant pea away from the bouquet on the table. “You know, it’s different. I think, for us, for me, it was the bad that kept me.”

Posted in Mwah on Sunday August 17, 2008.

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