All of that fourth form year I sat in the back row, left side; the quiet corner, equidistant from the exit door at back right of the room and the teacher on the platform at the front. Classrooms were large in those days; more like lecture theatres. I used to smuggle in a cassette player and regale nearby students with early 1970s progressive rock.
My deskmate Robert was a Bob Dylan fan and owned Dylan's entire opus. (We had only one Dylan record in the house - my older university student sister's copy of Nashville Skyline. One day my mother - of seven children - burst into the living room where I was innocently playing the album to shriek at me that the lyrics of Lay Lady Lay were not acceptable. I was of course lost for words. It's just a song, I thought.)
As well as a complete Dylan collection, Robert also owned a whippet, an Indian runner duck and a ferret; and he had a sister, Janice, who was a year older. I did not care about the duck, the dog or the ferret.
During the cold winter of that year Robert and I spent Saturday afternoons watching football at Windy Hill, home of the Essendon Football Club. Late in the year we watched Essendon smash its way into the finals in the dying minutes of the last round, beating Collingwood via a sacrilegious last-quarter goal kicked by captain-coach Des Tuddenham, a notorious ex-Magpie.
Years reeled. After leaving school, I married early and had children; and school friends drifted out of my circle, and I out of theirs. I lost contact with Robert; we caught up again at a Dylan concert at the open-air Sidney Myer Music Bowl on a cold night in 1978. It rained heavily and in the watery clamour Dylan, lit in the dark distance by a weak spotlight, sounded like a bullfrog in some distant pond. I drove home at midnight in my 1965 Humber Super Snipe, dropping Robert off at his share house in Ascot Vale.
Decades passed. One day last year, I was walking through Victoria Mall towards the cafe where Sam, the octogenarian owner, makes the kind of strong, bitter coffee that only Italians can stomach. The coffee is pungent, unforgiving; nothing like the sweet nutty mildness of the hipster cafe versions that can be pleasant but inoffensive. But enough about the coffee.
As I approached I saw a figure sitting at an outside table. It's odd how you recognise a person's posture or gait or physical characteristic even after years have gone by. He was still lean, and he had the splayed-leg posture and back curvature of the tall man sitting at a table too small for him. He was wearing jeans and boots, and he wore an overcoat and had a panama hat on his head. He looked like a tired Tom Waits, or at least some local musician affecting the look. He was neither. I could see at first glance that he was not well. But he had seen me first, and that told me he still had the same sharp-eyed intelligence he'd had at school. I called his name, as if with an exclamation mark. He was a little haggard, and a little slower, than he had been all those years ago. He told me about the health things in summary and without any voice inflection, as if it didn't matter, and then we talked about our old school friends; and who he had seen recently, and who he hadn't, and I felt that slightly guilty pang of the person who has been too busy or too occupied or too uninterested to keep in touch.
Then we talked about Bob Dylan as if it were yesterday; and it kind of was, except Dylan has released over thirty albums since then.
I enquired politely about his sister; and he told me, and it was 1972 again.
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