Confine

You had to laugh, or at least remember the old reflex. Thought had been to hang the note on the other side of the door: Please Service My Room. JOKING! J But, no…. The other example was in regard to a replacement journal. A writer of a certain vintage needed his hard-bound A5 notebooks for initial pen-on-paper, scratching over the lines with the curls and flourishes. Yes, yes, sometimes it went straight onto the Pad or even in desperate straights the phone, but the h/b and the Pentel 0.7 was indispensable. While a spare pair of specs had been forgotten, there had been sufficient presence of mind for the h/b. Unfortunately stores were closed by then. Damn! What to do? Where procure?... Hey, what about the green A5 Accounts volume bought mistakenly a couple of years ago and gifted to Auntie H? Aunt really had no use for it either, she had been using it as a paperweight on her outdoor chair beside her door for the newspapers. (Old girl would be missing those now. Sometimes the other Cat-ladies in the neighbourhood pleaded some sheets, highly useful indoors. At the fridge on the last night Helen had masked her dolour at the departure.) Well, simply ignore the columns; the black Pentel would pour out its ink smoothly and override all. Only thing was the yellow smear on the covers, like water stain. Well, it was a deeper, more brownie caramel colour. You still had your sense of smell, but nothing discernible there. Testing again…. Nothing. Same tone as that over Aunt’s  breasts on her nightshirts that had raised the unavoidable thought of suckling. Nursing or cuddling at the very least. Certainly there was more than enough audible tenderness for her indoor litter flowing through our party wall. Anyhow, dried now whatever it was. Precious soap & water and leave it on the window sill for drying. Down in Melbourne the stores would likely remain closed into next month. Spill of ink running these many years at about six weeks +/- per volume, you did need some foresight. Caught without would be a calamity; it had never happened previously. In Bab’s back garden shed, stored in one of Lazar’s old chests that he had brought out from internment in Italy on the ship, together with a few other cases, about 150 items now sitting in the archive. Up in Sing another, what, 50-60? (Some packages had been mailed back.) It needed a Dickens-era portrait of the author sitting by his candle quill in hand and nose smudged. No joke.

                                                                                 Intercontinental, Macquarie Street Sydney

       April 2020