' ... the Present evaporates continually. It's the Past, distilled, bottled, ... which is eau de vie, the cognac of existence.'
- Hal Porter, The Extra. University of Queensland Press, 1975.
*
It was too dark to read the menu, so I didn't. I gazed out at Market Lane, the narrow thoroughfare our window table-for-two looked out on. In the late-summer light of Sunday evening a cast of accidental actors were taking part in a pantomime; hi-vizzed Indian cyclists, playing oriental kings, bearing gift-meals for hungry baby-Jesus adults reclining in their strawless sky-byres; fast boys spidering into their carelessly parked crackle-exhaust sports cars, having not held the opposite door open for their vacantly-botoxed passengers; skeletal homeless pilgrims moving drug-shakily, like marionettes, towards some dead-end mattressed Mecca. Harlequins, columbines, pierrots, clowns. I took in all this cinéma vérité with a ten-second glance, and then a waitress materialised beside our table. Tracy and I ordered meals against the volume of the band, and the waitress seemed to lip-read what we'd said.
*
It was an anniversary. We had a seventh-floor apartment at the top of the Little Bourke Street hill across the lane from the Princess Theatre. One entire wall was a window over the western skyline, giving on fading Victoriana dwarfed by brutal but not brutalist 1990s towers; while a few irrelevant church spires reached vainly for some blue sky between the glass and steel. The buildings mangled the city's horizontality into shards of broken geometry; bisected vertical signs and old neons, flaring pools of sunlight on brick walls, flashes of road and roof and gutter, split-second takes of speeding car or rumbling tram, like subliminal advertising.
Earlier we had walked up out of Melbourne Central into thick afternoon heat, along bluestone laneways, under the shadows of the old Buckley and Nunn building, and through the cooler gardens of the State Library. When we passed the Wesley church in Lonsdale Street opposite the Greek quarter, someone had called my name. The someone was like a ghost. A photographer and producer I once worked with, he disappears for years on end, and occasionally re-enters the present. We talked for five minutes—or rather, he did, lucidly; but completely free of context. A worn overnight bag at the fence outside the church suggested he had parked himself there for the day. His re-appearance, stepping out from the dusty stage-sets of the decades into the sun-powered spotlight of a Lonsdale Street pavement was almost supernaturally coincidental: on 11 March 1995 he had taken the black and white wedding photo that hangs on our wall.
*
Immeasurable Sunday nights ago, I am in the same restaurant, sitting at the same table, and looking out the same window at the same streetscape. I am 17, 18. The 1976* window shows much the same theatrical backdrop I will see decades later, but without the pierrots and columbines - Sundays are much quieter then. I might have gazed at a wind-blown rubbish tin lid clattering along the shiny rain-wet bluestone-cobbled lane to crash ringingly against a down-pipe, thereby witnessing an unrecorded one-off performance of a Russolo étude. (*I know the year, because a friend, living in the USA during its bicentennial, has sent me a postcard from the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. I have the postcard in my pocket. I show it to my dining companion and she asks me, playfully, because she knows the answer already, if we - meaning the Kennedys and I - are related; and I say, no, parrying with: are you a cousin of the New York Times Sulzbergers? and she replies, still playfully, 'possibly'.)
*
The waitress’s slender arm bore several plates as she materialised through the wall of sound, placing our lip-read orders on the small table. What, is all this ours? If this is an age of minimalism, Hofbräuhaus exists in another dimension of robust Bavarian abundance. The side dishes of red cabbage and potato salad could have fed the people at the next table. Tracy's lemon schnitzel was about the size of Carl Maria von Weber's left hand, and my Weisswurst sausages were accompanied by a 'bretzel', a burnished fold of warm dough like a thin baguette tied in a knot, and a pot of house-made mustard. If there is a better match than the latter with a Schneider Tap 9 Eisbock I'd be surprised. The band played on. People danced. The laneway pantomime actors improvised, unwatched now. We left, unable - regretfully, to order apfelstrudel.
*
Later. Directly across the lane rises a massive cliff-like expanse of red bricks: the pre-brutalist western wall of the Princess theatre where in March 1888 Federici, playing the role of Méphistophélès, fell to his death on the opening night of Gounod's Faust. It is said Federici still walks; restively, endlessly, because time no longer exists for him.
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