scene in which the narrator walks to the tram stop

Kirsty Harding went to see her dad. Though I trusted her to her word enough to believe the hip replacement story, I had a hard time getting the image of a complete invalid who said ‘ey’ after everything out of my mind; an incredibly fat bloke with his daughter’s exact face – a beautiful face I now thought – stuffed into his beige Back Bay slacks and Fila sweater like wool into a burlap sack. Before leaving she had given me her phone number. For a moment I was sure she’d given me my own phone number as a joke because the numbers were exactly the same, only in a slightly different order. To clear up any confusion I pranked hers while she was standing next to me. It rang. Her ring tone, I noted, was nothing but a single beep, which I liked. She asked me how I spelt my surname. Then she left, but not before telling me sarcastically, as if I’d asked the question, that she was a graphic designer and environmental activist, a fossil fuel divestment campaigner. That must’ve been why she didn’t wear perfume.

I watched her until she disappeared from sight, the colours of the German flags on her sleeves lighting up occasionally, on certain swings of the arms. I gauged the pace she was walking at to be about medium. Then I stood kind of shell-shocked for a few moments, dead to the world, before looking up the sky and then down to the baseball diamond sand, which I’d started to walk towards. The cloud cover hadn’t cleared yet, hadn’t given any indication that it would clear, and yet I felt sure after looking upwards that the afternoon was going to be blue. By dint of empiricism, I guess. Soon I ducked under the metal fence and found myself standing right where the batter would’ve stood. The plate was missing, probably locked away so it didn’t get nicked between games, and the sand on that spot was darker than the rest. It felt more sunken underfoot, too. The plates on the other bases looked bolted in. Bending down, I swished my hand back and forth like a fishtail in the sand, maybe to see if there were any worms. It was fantastically fine-grained, clayish almost, like ochre dirt, and yet there was no other name for it but sand. I stood up and dug my toes in deep. In the corners of my eyes I could see a few people and even more dogs, some walking, some running. Next thing I knew I’d drawn four large, and impressively straight, cubes, around the shadow of the batter’s plate. I think I was smiling. I bent down again, grabbed a handful of sand and put it up to my nose. I found the smell to be lovely beyond comparison. The Brothers Grimm fairy tales, especially Hansel and Gretel, spurted through my head, as did a vague memory of running up and down mulch heaps at a humungous plant nursery, with shoes that lit up with every step, as did angels and all their aesthetic platitudes: golden coronets, haloes, clouds, trumpets, golden hair, Roman faces, white dresses/skin/teeth.

I’d only just put the tip of my tongue to the sand when, as Sarah’s dad might’ve said, the sheer fuckedness of what I was doing suddenly hit home: I threw it all over-arm into the air, watched it blow away, and started heading towards the tram stop on Plenty. I crossed the cricket pitch; it reminded me of Mckinley, the ponds, the boy. I passed the footy clubhouse, with its locked, bashed-in canteen roller-doors, and wheelchair ramp leading to the canteen, and change rooms that said Titans and Visitors, and its empty car park and its empty Albert G. Gordon Pavilion, and its scoreboard that still registered a comprehensive home-team defeat. The car park looked brand new but the still-gleaming cement gutters were in fact already full of little arterial cracks, which I found unbelievable. I was even mouthing, what the fuck, what the fuck, as I studied their unbelievably premature dilapidation. From the stitch in my chest I realised I hadn’t been breathing all that much. Then I broke through a thicket of yellowish bushes I didn’t know the names of and stepped out onto the footpath. Closer to the traffic, there was an even stronger stench of traffic. Of KFC chips, too. At the crossing I took out my Ipod; the song I chose was Moon Rover. When the light went green I ventured out slowly, catching the eyes of the drivers at the front of each lane; all three were trying to send text messages on the sly and seemed to react less guiltily to having been busted than pissed off, shocked and incensed, as If I’d just kicked open the front doors of their houses.