I was confronted by two wrist-vignettes the other day that I have been unable to get out of my mind.
Early on Thursday morning I went to the gym at Victoria Park Pool and afterwards, heading into the showers, I ran into a group of three women in their late 20s/early 30s who were heading out. The last of the trio held the door for me – she had beautiful chestnut hair that hung wet around her shoulders and she was laughing loudly at the other two, her face turned away from me. I looked down to take the door handle from her and saw a latticework of white scars all of the way up her arm. On the soft pale skin under her forearm there was a mess of scar tissue – there must have been more than fifty healed cuts, or more. And yet she was laughing.
The second moment happened that evening on the train back from St Peters to Redfern. An old withered man held himself up by one of the carriage-poles as we jolted out of the station. He looked like a drunk – mismatched clothes, swaying beyond the push-pull of the train, a plastic bag with not much in it. But then I saw on his right wrist a hospital tag and noticed his too-thinness. As I stood beside him to get out I realised he was a young man – something was forcing him to stoop, pushing his spine over like a blade of grass in the wind.
This is my dear friend James Wilson. This is what the train-man looked like except more Indian/clothed.
There’s something about train travel that skewers me. It is the place where I am most constantly surprised by the flush of humanity.
I spent most of this morning’s commute eyeing a very handsome, very smartly dressed Indian man who was leaning against one of the mid-carriage poles like a Calvin-Klein-underwear model. I presumed he would be launching himself at Martin Place due to his charcoal suit and sharp-white-shirt (isn’t it amazing how we make meaning so quickly, so meaninglessly? Suit jacket and shirt? Business. Suit jacket and pithy T-shirt? Advertising) and, indeed, he began to stir as we drew into the station. It wasn’t until the doors were beeping open that I chanced to look down at his feet.
Surely we’ve hit humanity’s peak with these.
He was wearing a pair of Vibram FiveFingers shoes. “The main characteristic of this extraordinary shoe [is] the sole with five fingers made of Vibram® rubber, which, as a flexible glove, helps the natural articulation of the foot stimulating muscles of the lower limbs and therefore gives a higher sense of well-being to the whole body.” They forgot to add that it makes you look like a human/frog hybrid. The intense train-attraction that had been building since Redfern vanished in a shock-cloud. My Calvin Klein businessman was in fact a walking amphibian.
Frog-man was preceded in the train-trip by a gaggle of old women who were heading for Town Hall. Although I don’t think ‘gaggle’ does this group justice (the allusion to geese is a little too patronising for comfort). Trawling through the list of collective nouns (is it even possible to have a rabble of butterflies? All I can picture is a group of young boys pulling their wings apart) I still cannot place the right word. I’ll put it on my to-do list.
These women all must have been post-75. The extraordinary thing was the way in which they helped each other negotiate the still moving carriage versus their arthritic balance. Not once did their hands leave a supporting arm/pole. They helped each other along, heaved each other up the stairs and onto the platform. It was as though someone, pre-dawn, had strung a life-line through the carriage which was only visible to these beautiful old hands. They all grasped the same rope with their swollen knuckles and loose-ringed fingers.
None of them were beaten down in this same way but I think they would all have sought plum-solace at some point in their more recent years.
vimh 