Small talk with your left-behind

I wonder whether she’s praying, or meditating, and whether she’s prone to impatience, but the 01:01 train arrives before I work it out.

My phone’s run out of charge again. It was at 3% in Sarah’s kitchen, 2% when I googled the mating rituals of praying mantises, and now – at 12:53am, on Platform 7 of Redfern Station – it’s dead.

“Fuck.” I exhale through my teeth and scratch this sentence into the margins of a Grassroots flyer.

There is a straight-backed, silver-haired woman sitting at the platform across from me.

Her hands are on her knees, her palms upturned to the flaccid tangle of telegraph wires.

Her eyes are closed. There is a scab above her left eyebrow.

Her feet, which are small and reedy, float centimetres above the cement; and

Her dress is papery, apricot-patterned, frayed at the ankle. It flutters in the tepid September breeze.

I wonder whether she’s praying, or meditating, and whether she’s prone to impatience, but the 01:01 train arrives before I work it out. It takes four minutes to depart; four minutes to expose the translucent creature perched in her place.

[It’s difficult for me to separate the memories of people from the places they once inhabited. Absence has pinned lots of my ghosts to brick and footpath and sag-seated armchair. Now there is always some nonchalant, soft-edged memory loitering in my peripheral vision, given my eyes and heart have had enough time to adjust. This feeling – that absence is more permanent than presence – is what I’ve tried to draw.]

Tomorrow morning Mum will ask how my night was.

She will want a street name, a jaundiced suburb, a yawning stretch of concrete blemished by potholes. I, too, will want for something cement-like, and unearth the chipped edge of a crimson bathroom tile, a compost bin upended over a rotting wattle bush; steam rising, slowly, from a bowl with ‘Sarah K2’ scrawled on it in faded Sharpie.

I’ll brush past my real memory when I’m running late for my Tuesday 10am.

A flash of silver, of gold-grouted palm – like a shining fish in shallow water – the apricot woman will resume her prayer.