The Pole

We never did discover where the old Pole lived. Possibly it was in Al’s housing block in Hanmer Street, as Johnnie Good surmised. A couple generations ago a man like that would have jumped ship in the port like old Peter the Fin’s grandfather and one or two others. Because no one had ever heard the man speak, how long he had been in the country was unknown; it had only come down that he was a Pole. After his afternoon stint on his bench by the canon slugging his sherry, the man often took a leak in the bushes by the tennis court on the corner, never taking much care to seclude himself properly. One afternoon he had collapsed there, an ambulance carting him off and the local Facebook chat expecting that might have been the end of him. Passing by the café tables the man always held a steady course, all unseeing and never any deviation from his goal. This afternoon wheeling by he was found sitting in his place by the water, angled against the northerly at his back, and when a seagull came up to his feet in a glance without inclining his head or altering his stony visage, the Pole dropped like a tiny crumb his colourless eyes down to the bird.