Autumn chill fights with winter cold and winter cold is winning. Outside: the wind, the cold, relative solitude. Inside: warmth, the artificial wind of central heating, a mass of people escaping outside.
I sit cross-legged on a wooden park bench, my backpack a heavy weight against my hip. Across from me is one of the campus libraries, entrance beckoning. People walk past me—sometimes quickly, but sometimes slowly too. Some are dressed as though for the depths of winter in heavy wool coats or puffer jackets, layered with scarves and hats and gloves. Others, more used to the weather, wear hoodies over jumpers or t-shirts, holding stubborn against the unseasonable cold.
A selection: two women, heads together and faces drawn. One of them, short hair, practical shoes, a single heavy textbook held in one hand, a stylishly ugly sweater vest hanging on her thin frame. The other, long hair, a large handbag stuffed full of readers, of books, of all the things she has to do, and a canvas tote with even more shoved inside. Then, two men: heads up, walking with a specific, deliberate amount of space between them. No—not walking, they don’t walk, they stride, taking up as much space as their bodies will allow. They speak loudly, from their chests, with the surety of men new to this, new to being men. Bravado, you might call it, if you were feeling ungenerous, which, truly, I am. Youth, if you were feeling kinder. Whatever you call it, it’s false—an act put on to mask what they have no desire for anyone to see. A necessary mask, maybe, but false, still. They know less of the world now than they will and are happier for it. Hand no part of yourself over for knowledge—it’s not worth it. Take the falsehood. It will serve you better.
This mild contempt is the closest I’ve come to a feeling today, other than dread, which must be something like a feeling or a knowing or a desire. Come, disaster, justify my feeling. Justify all this, the smallness of the person I have become, am becoming, have always been. It’s hours until my next class. Worse: it’s my least favourite class. (Be honest: most hated, most filled with coifed, confident people who scrape at every small wound of the child who played alone. Whatever joy may have been found in the learning is squashed by the fear, my own arranged rejection. I have placed myself in solitary. It is so very safe here.)
Every week, this stretch of time expands, but today is worse than usual. Today is—it’s my birthday. Nineteen. It doesn’t matter, not really, not at all. Other days, days that go by unnoticed, I would eat a cheap lunch: a samosa, a grilled flake, a chocolate bar. Go to the library and try and fail to do anything—reading or writing or research. Instead, I would wander the aisles, sit on the floor with my back against the wall in the Russian history section. Imperial history running into revolutionary history into Soviet history and on and on and on. And yes, I read while sitting there, but not for class, not for work, not for anything that will do anything except pass the time.
Today, I do something else. I go to the tram stop. I check movie times while wrapped around a pole near the tram door, to catch the chill air when it rushes in. I’m down to my jeans and a t-shirt, jumper and hoodie over the backpack resting between my feet. It’s late autumn outside, a false summer in here.
At eleven in the morning in the middle of the week, there is only one other person in the movie theatre. He sits in the middle; I sit near the back. He’s dressed in a suit, jacket discarded, tie loosened, briefcase on the seat beside him. A long lunch, maybe, or a job interview that will either go nowhere or somewhere. Perhaps he’s one of those men who take the train into the city, too ashamed to tell anyone he has no work, waiting hours till he can go home. I do that too, I think.
I enjoy watching him watch the movie more than I enjoy the movie itself, though the movie is fine, all war and glory and spectacle. He pumps a fist, murmurs the occasional line along with the characters, slumps back in his chair and then straightens back up, staring up at the screen with what I can only imagine is a kind of hypnotised elation. When the credits roll, I leave first. His face is shining with exhilaration, with joy. It’s a false feeling, inspired by a certain kind of melodrama created to make men feel like this, but it’s not an act either, not a performance for others to observe. It’s unvarnished, unironic, a thing done for nobody but himself.
The cinema had been hot, outside it is far less so. Wind blows through the underground station, which no amount of heating could make warm. Still, I leave the jacket resting on my backpack as I eat a birthday cupcake, red velvet with cream cheese icing. Once I step onto the train, I’ll miss the cold. I pull the back of my jumper away from my back, sweat that doesn’t yet exist brought to life with remembered discomfort.
I smile a little anyway. I feel better at the end of the day than the beginning. Sometimes, that has to be enough.
Clare Bardsley is a writer from Melbourne. She has one dog and both too many and too few books. Clare has been telling stories since she first started talking and loves history and reading and writing in varied genres.
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