Two summer nights

     It was another stinking hot day. The tenth in what was clearly now a heat wave. Ten scorchers in a row. This time the South Australian summer was really striking with a vengeance.

A haze blanketed Adelaide from a major bushfire on Kangaroo Island to the south of the city. `Under control' the evening news had said. Pig's arse, he thought.

     The smell of wood smoke that came with the light south westerly somehow seemed to add atmosphere - a sense of things about to happen - to what otherwise promised to be another humdrum evening in a generally humdrum life.

It was New Year's Eve again. 1995 was nearly behind him with 1996 yet to come. That hadn't taken long, he pondered. These days for him one year merged into another in a sort of nondescript greyness.

After breakfast he'd moped about the house until well after lunch doing nothing in particular. Then, because he was bored, and had nothing else to do, he spruced up a bit and got an early start on the evening by having tea in Hindley Street in downtown Adelaide at around 6pm.

       He'd always liked the street. It had a feel to it. He liked its seedy, tawdry, sense of character and drama. Lots of movement and colour. Prostitutes. The police.

       It got to half past eleven and he was still sitting at his table on the sidewalk. He'd long ago finished his meal and was sitting there drinking beer and smoking cigarettes.

The mood in the street was just starting to change. A feeling of festivity, and beyond that -something else.

The police in blue uniforms were more visible now ambulating up and down the street in pairs. Their presence and behaviour added to a building mood of expectancy in the street. Nearby one of the patrols had stopped to talk to a group of teenagers. The patrolman was making what appeared to be an urgent radio call

     God it was hot. By now he should have got himself to the New Year's Eve party. He'd miss the auld lang syne.

      But somehow he didn't care. The party would, when it was all said and done, be in the end just another piss up. There would be no sense of occasion. No feeling of history to mark another year down the spout. Just another one chalked up in his fifty year life span so far.

      What looked like a scuffle had started up at the other end of the street. There was the sound of breaking glass. One of the foot patrols could be seen running towards the disturbance. 

He suddenly felt disconsolate. His thoughts had drifted back in time. The years since Nasho and Vung Tao had been generally disappointing for him. When he'd got back from Nam he'd finished the teaching qualification he'd started before his call up and spent a few years teaching with half hearted enthusiasm before giving it away completely. 

    He'd done a bit of this and that since his teaching stint. Pen pushing in the public service. For a while he sold books to schools for an educational publisher.

     He'd ended up flogging insurance to strangers and, as he became more desperate, to an increasing number of unsuspecting friends and relatives.

    Downsizing, they called it, when they gave him the push with a package he couldn’t refuse. Bastards.

    He had no family of his own and, since his discharge, next to no love life. Come to think of it, he hadn't really lived since his two year military stint now decades in the past. Even then, his only regularly active sex life had been with bar girls during his R-and-R stints in Vietnam and other ports of call in Singapore and Thailand.

The sex had been exciting then. In part this was because it amounted to a sort of sexual awakening after the emotionally repressive years of his adolescence as a Methodist church goer.  

On his arrival back home he had continued sporadically to similarly indulge himself with the local equivalent from time to time. But by then, for some reason, the shine had gone off such encounters. It just wasn’t the same.

In all that time since his call up – it had been about a quarter of a century - the nearest he'd come to romance had been a February one night stand in Adelaide while he was on leave from Pucka and basic training. He'd joked about it back at the base with his mates: `In ta, three ... out ta three ... in ta three ... out ta three ...'

   But for all the casualness of that clumsy lovemaking, and even though he hardly knew the young woman of that night, the encounter had meant something to him beyond the sweated heat of the moment. He had been left with a clear and lingering memory of her and their night together which had haunted him down the years.

It’d been hot in the city that night too.

     There was a fight down the other end of the street. The scuffle had developed into a brawl with blue uniforms and flashing lights (one an ambulance) an authoritative presence amidst the flailing fists and pushing and shoving bodies. A siren could be heard over the shouting.

    A group of four young women approached his spot on the sidewalk. They were laughing and jostling. One had a bottle of something - something strong by the look of it - from which she periodically took a precarious swig as she wrestled her way with her girl friends along the street.

    Suddenly, the one with the bottle broke away from the scrum and lurched forward colliding with his table. As she did she dropped the bottle and it spun around like a top spewing its potent contents onto the pavement. With the impact her audacity faltered. Her dark hair fell across her face as she steadied herself with a grip on his table. 

    In that instant he was suddenly struck by an avuncular concern for her safety. Their eyes met briefly as she struggled with her balance. `Sorry', she giggled. He could see she was having trouble maintaining a visual focus.

 `I wonder if she's on anything other than the grog', he thought. ` Hope she makes it home alright'.

She seemed impish and vulnerable in her state of intoxication. So many of them come to grief these days, he thought. You read about it all the time in the papers.

He was unsure why he felt so protective towards someone who, as far as he knew, was a total stranger to him.

When he looked into her eyes during the brief moment of panic when she thought she was going to fall he thought he experienced a fleeting flicker of affinity of some kind with her. But he couldn’t be sure. Why, when their eyes met, had some vague recognition of some sort stirred within the deep recesses of his memory? For him there was a certain familiarity in her puckish smile as she turned to rejoin her friends. For a brief moment it seemed to him that he could see in her another person at another time. Momentarily, she was somehow just recognizable in a deja vu sort of way.

   As the foursome sang and manoeuvred their way west away from him down Hindley Street he was engulfed by a sudden and overpowering memory of that other hot summer night in Adelaide some twenty five years ago.