Baci ladies.

His fingers—hands—were always busy. They had a life of their own, drumming, twisting, elucidating; not in the Neapolitan gesticulating sense, but in a kind of hand language of his own. 

We sat in the cafe—teenagers on the brink of twenty—and drank coffee, and talked about our lives, because they were ahead of us. David’s hands unfolded like a bird’s wings or a carnate Greek statue, his symmetry disturbed only by the heavy black curl over his pale forehead. So there was European in his blood, probably Spanish.

The café, at the top of Bourke Street, was long and narrow, with red-topped stools running in a row back to the kitchen. Behind the bar, the bow-tied waiters smiled and made coffee and spoke stage Italian. After drinking coffee, enlivened, we would cross a lane into a cramped bookshop, and browse, and envisage our unfolding lives represented in the pages of the authors and poets to which we gravitated: Whitman, Genet, Joyce, White, Bellow, the usual French and Russians; the Beat writers, the pop philosophers, the post-moderns, and the latest ephemeral literary fads; even if we sometimes bought them in Penguin paperback and left them half-read on the windowsills of our Victorian share houses.

On this day we were joined by two girlfriends; Jane, who worked with David in his city office, and whom I had been seeing for a year; and Penny, his friend from school days in Montmorency. Jane was fine and blue-eyed with long auburn hair and a small, delicately freckled nose; Penny was tall with cascades of sun-bleached curls over a face of intelligence and sensitivity. She wore denim and scuffed boots, a true woman of mud-brick Eltham.

We had drunk coffee and we were eating hazelnut chocolates. The chocolates were wrapped in foil of silver and blue, with under-wrappers of waxed paper. David’s hands played, of course, with his wrapper, twisting its lower half into a kind of flared horn. The top part he fashioned into a one-dimensional torso and tiny head. He stood it on its end. He did the same with our wrappers—we had had several each, you can’t stop at just one. The waxed papers looked like petticoats under their blue and silver foil gowns and the little figures seemed to swirl about the dark timber table, as if celebrating their brief lives before being crushed.

Later, when we went into the bookstore, Bourke Street was in orange-tinged semi-darkness under the streetlights.