Writer:- Mardi May, Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers' Centre
Western Australia
MIND THE GAP
My father’s feet whisper along the pavement; sssht, sssht, sssht. A walking stick punctuates his progress; stomp, stomp, stomp. My impatient feet are two steps ahead. I half turn and slow, half turn and slow, trying to close the space between us.
As I draw level, I study a profile led forward by the defiant jut of his chin. His favourite red cap reading, ‘Mabel’s Whore House’, is pulled low over a frown, his eyes shadowed.
We make our staccato way along the path to a coffee shop where we will have mugs of cappuccino and play Scrabble. We sit at a table for four, us, the Scrabble board and the rattling bag of tiles. Dad parks his walking stick against one of the other chairs, where it will fall with a clatter and trip a waitress.
'Why don’t you get a stick with feet?’ I ask him. He’s suddenly busy trying to use his ‘q’ without the ‘u’ and ignores me. We are on the edge of a new word here, the walking stick on the floor between us. We have a list of two-letter words and it is not long before ‘qi’ is laid down with a flourish. He grins at me with cappuccino whiskers, eyes daring me to challenge.
In his creative life, my father has always made up his own rules as he went along, and believed laws were made for others. This was a big point of difference between my parents, and the gap became irreconcilable. With the divorce law, he met his match. Scrabble however is another game. Some might call this cheating, but Dad is a wordsmith who is not limited by the Oxford Dictionary.
As he drains the coffee cup, I study a hand speckled with age spots and scaly skin, signatures of a life celebrated in our damaging sun. I have a picture from Post magazine, portraying the proud physique of an aging Aussie male; my father at 70, lean-muscled and tanned and wearing only a pair of leopard-skin jockettes. A child once asked him, ‘Uncle Morrie, were you ever an aborigine?’
He wins today with a dodgy triple word score. We pack up the board and the letters that formed a shaky bridge between us. He lunges at the stick and misses. Finally, he grabs it by the rubber stopper and manages to hook a chair leg with the other end. If I assist him he will think I’m siding with the stick in his fight against infirmity. We set off down the path with the stick between us measuring our steps.
My father makes only one more visit to the West. I meet him at the airport as he is being ferried off the plane in a wheelchair, shoulders hunched, eyes glaring at me beneath Mable’s grimy cap. Lying across his lap is a walking stick with a four-pronged foot.