A Certain Flavor
by
Nicholas Galt
* * * * *
Smashwords Edition
Previously Published in Offset 2005
Copyright 2011 Nicholas Galt
http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/NicholasGalt
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A Certain Flavor
She hadn’t seen his smell before; it wasn’t an ordinary smell like burnt toast or jonquils. Not at all. It was more like eucalyptus and mothballs, homebrew and rollies. Champion Ruby, yes, she could smell Champion Ruby rolling tobacco on a Tally-Ho paper.
She was walking along Espy View, three streets up the hill from her own house. There were flowers blooming, including jonquils, and her nose made pictures in her head, pictures of an environment in the heat of the south end of the year. Though there was a fine line between relaxation and over exposure. She had seen the sun trickle people into the ocean for years; they were hunted seasonally by the yellow ball and made to march down the Ocean Road by their thousands.
The man whistled while he walked and she wondered if he was the only one, other than her, that did whistle to themselves, in public. The tune was nothing that played on the radio nor was it a tune of a bird or the old ice-cream van. It was an exhalation of thoughts through pursed lips guided by a metronome heart. She could hear this. She could see this. She felt this.
The man stops out the front of the Beaton’s place, sits on the kerb and continues to sing with compressed air. He doesn’t notice the girl who has been watching since his ascent from the foreshore, he doesn’t notice her inquiring eyes or her shallow breaths. All he does notice is the view from between the eucalypts onto the main beach where from this difference tourists and locals can’t be divided. They are all just forms that make tracks from towel to towel, towel to sea and to the kiosk along the beach road. Though he knew at sea level lines were drawn in the sand. Not from dawdling fingers contemplating the number of grains or by the teenagers that wrote ‘I love’ someone or ‘Help.’ Instead by the minds of the distrusting locals and the minds of the sand-blinded rubbernecks. He was neither a resident of this town or the next for that matter, just a man who liked to move, like sand, unaccountable, uncountable, a postcode with four question marks.
The girl watches as the stranger places his bag between his thighs and butts his rollie against the concrete curb. She notices the fuss he makes as he realises his tobacco is being extinguished against a gutter that seems out of place. It was no longer a piece of channelled earth dug by old water weary residents. Instead solid curbed progress. An artefact of change.
For as long as she could remember she had never seen a person other than a resident this far up the hill from the beach. Of course shiny cars on sunny days sauntered through with their windows up, the strangers looking at the weatherboarded houses with sea views, pointing sometimes and occasionally sliding a window down so as to get an untinted view of the auction dates. But she had never seen a stranger, like this, dressed as he was, whistling like he was home.
‘Scuse me mister, are you from here?’ The old man rolls another Champion. He shifts slightly so he is facing her, and then licks his paper.
‘And where’s here little miss?’ The man asks rhetorically with the hindsight of more years than the girl could count.
She looks at him sideways and rolls her eyes into a place where only a child’s clarity can see.
‘Well I s’pose’ she stops and twists her body taking in her environment ‘we are on Espy View, aren’t we?’ She points to the sign four houses down and the man huffs a snicker. She crinkles her forehead at his amusement and holds a breath before her next question. His eyes never leave her face, instead watch it sort through inquisitive uncertainty.
‘Yes we are. You are right, though this strip of houses,’ he lifts his short arm and sweeps it left to right ‘was once all trees with a small dirt track.’ The girl sits down next to the man and crunches fallen leaves in her palm. She stares at his lined face and thinks how it looks like a sand dune when the wind blows a certain way. He continues to stare between the gums, taking reflective breaths between drags. The girl flicks a small black ant from her calf then sprinkles the leaf dust like sand.
‘Were you alive when this was all trees, or was that a long time ago?’ She leans her head to one side, scratching her ear on her shoulder. The man smiles, takes a drag and smiles again. He looks forward but his mind falls backward to the first time that he visited this seaside town, so different then, yet not so long ago.
‘Alive, huh! Sure I was alive. I’ve sat here plenty of times. Hell in your lifetime there has been a lot of things change.’ The girl bites her lip and thinks real hard with her brow. She was only nine and her earliest memory was the beach, the cadenced thud of wave onto shore. She didn’t remember more trees or fewer houses, just the beach.
‘It’s been the same as far as I can think.’
The man pushes his rollie into the earth.
‘That can’t be true. Think a bit more, what is present now? What’s absent?’ The man creases his forehead and waves a fly from his face. The girl squints and breaths slowly through her nose. Sea, eucalypts, stale smoke and sweat.
‘Well I used to like just chocolate and vanilla ice-cream from the shop. But now I can’t choose cos’ there’s thirty-one flavours…and three different shops.’ She touches her tongue to her lip and sighs. The man smiles, nods and he too sighs. His eyes follow the reflection of a European car along the foreshore, another cigarette already rolled and smouldering.
‘You understand little miss.’ He reaches down, grabs his bag and lays it across his shoulder. ‘You go and have chocolate ice-cream at the first place you tasted it, and try to remember…’ He turns his palm to the sky and the girl understands.
The man bows and the girl tenderly raises a hand. He turns and starts to walk and whistle up the hill. The girl watches him; she smells the seas salt and his tail of smoke. She looks out to the ocean, then back in the direction of the stranger. He’s no longer there. She smells tobacco, salt, jonquils, exhaust fumes and then she forgets.