Cheryl Wilson 

Late yesterday I arrived back from the West.  In Bridgetown it was hot and blue now it is dark and sultry in Melbourne.  Then I see him on the wide concrete fronting Flinders Street Station.  The bagpipe player.  Nursing his tartan bag.  He has long dank hair, he’s in a drover’s hat, and Reeboks, and still looks young though he’s been busking in the city for years.  As he pipes I think of Rod Stewart singing something old, something evocative – Every Picture Tells a Story – don’t it? – and I’m back in the bush where my sister and I walk the dirt track beside Warren River.  Her dogs, a fat Lab and a feisty Jack Russell swim in the slow river as we unrelentingly talk.  About failed relationships mostly.  We look up and smirk as Daisy the Lab corners a rat.  The bagpipe player suddenly stops – and reluctantly I draw myself back.  He is talking with a black man.  To be a black man where I’ve been might brand you a curiosity.  Though the bagpipe player would go down well.  Could make a killing, on Friday nights, in the front bar of the Provincial Hotel. 

“Where’s your friend gone?” a voice hisses at a boy in singlet and black beanie perched on a step near the Station.  The boy answers him something. I miss it by seconds.  I see him unhappily flick ash between his skinny bare legs.  Life can also get boring down in the West – I’d like to tell him – only the slow Warren River helps dull the senses.  You almost don’t care that in the fierce midday sun the main street is empty – though still dumb lights go:  Red. Green. No Right Turn. Walk. Don’t Walk.  Only my mind turns again to the slow silent river, I imagine a snake glints in the long grass skirting the water.  “Let’s walk beside the river?” my sister had suggested, so for the last time we leashed the dogs against the snakes and set off.  And now that I’m here the boy’s disappeared while the bagpiper is loudly at it – I catch a Japanese student eye him with disbelief all over his face.

About Cheryl Wilson 

Writing stories may be a way of life or as an escape from real life. I enjoy inventing characters and placing them in surroundings once familiar to me – especially our inner northern suburbs during the seventies. I also write shorter pieces about real people who are closer to my heart.

Copyright Cheryl Wilson, February 2025. All rights reserved; this intellectual property belongs solely to Cheryl Wilson.