| Saturday was a blisteringly hot day. It was far too hot to do anything other than lie underneath the ceiling fan, watching the blur of its white blades, a monstrous dandelion in perpetual motion. | |
The weekend newspapers carpeted the floor, the dishes were done, the clothes were tumbling in the washing machine, and Rita Coolidge was insisting that your love is lifting her higher. I felt restless, torn between giving into the languor of the heat or stirring myself in to action. I am, by natural inclination, lazy. My favourite past-times are sleeping, resting, reading and chatting with friends, in that order of ascending effort. And yet a short while later, despite the good sense of staying indoors, I found myself sitting in the shade of a white timber pergola, at the end of a short pier leading into the sea at Sandgate.
The breeze blew in gusts of furnace-oven heat. The sea shone with the shimmer of silver fish scales, stinging my eyes with its hot light. I felt the scorch of the heat through my shirt, saw the burn of the sun on the water, but I was relieved to be outdoors. The world felt large and full of promise when just an hour earlier, hope could only be measured by the rotation of the ceiling fan.
I had my journal with me and wrote experimentally with my new red fountain pen. Words rushed out of the pen’s nib onto the page. I looked forward to seeing what they were, the order in which they arrived, the message they carried. I stopped every now and then to take in what my pen was telling my pages. I was lost in this magic of word-arrival when a pink angel landed on the seat next to me.
At first, I thought she was just a plump woman for whom pink was her world. Rose-pink hat with a strawberry brooch clipped on the brim. Fairy-floss pink dress loosely draped over her fleshy-pink body. Amethyst-pink crystal beads around her neck. Flushed pink cheeks from heat exertion and red-pink lips from a tube. She was breathless from the heat but she had the sound of bursting joy in her voice. Her speech quivered with bubbles of laughter. Undeterred by the business of my open journal and pen in hand, she spoke to me as if it was her right to do so; as if, in fact, I was demanding that she speak to me. ‘Oh dear. It’s too much. This heat! It’s too hot for us to be out and about!’ and she laughed at the folly of us sharing this space by the sea.
I agreed, thinking that she was firing the opening salvo of chit-chat that would trail into a series of banalities before lapsing into the necessary silence that signals departure. But no. She had a lot on her mind that she wanted to share with me. She was on a mission. She ambushed me with her mission to carry my spirits aloft and to imbue me with her joy. She leant forward and nodded authoritatively towards my journal. ‘You’re writing.’ Again, I agreed. She smiled and changed the subject, ‘Look at the sea!’ She flung her arms wide open. ‘Look at the dogs splashing about in the water! Dogs are so wonderful, full of soul.’ She swiveled back to me and announced, ‘If you spell dog backwards, you get "god." Doesn’t that tell us something special about them?’ I was less inclined to agree this time but didn’t see the harm in smiling back at her. My lack of consent didn’t deter her. She tumbled on, in a hectic rhythm of acclamations, reflections and enquiries. ‘This is a great place for pining, isn’t it? It’s so peaceful. What are you writing about?’ By now, I would usually be making packing-up gestures or murmuring noises of withdrawal in an effort to put a boundary between myself and the stranger, but this pink woman was so childlike in her cheerful confidence that I wanted to be in her conversation that I found myself answering her question. ‘I’m writing a story of loss.’
‘Ah, you’re writing about love,’ she declared. I waited. She shook her head, stirring a cloud of sadness across her face, and delivered her prognosis, ‘You’ve had much grief but you’ll find great happiness. I promise you this.’ I felt the pang of her sense of personal responsibility for me. I looked down at my journal and saw that I still held my pen in my hand. I rested it across the open pages of the journal. I didn’t know what to say in reply. It didn’t matter. She had words enough for both of us.
She was willing to carry me across the tide of my silence. I watched her as she spoke of love. She laced her epithets with cheek-filled smiles. Her shoulders trembled when she laughed. She told me that love ebbs and flows, but that love always returns to us. She said that each love prepares us for the next person. We must keep our hearts open to all that comes our way; don’t close them against hurt. That’s what she said. She predicted that the man I love would eventually come back into my life . . . or then again, he may not, she said. It didn’t really matter because, she reminded me, all our life is filled with love, the love of friends, of work, of talents and interests, of all that is in the world around us. Her words lay on my heart like ointment.
I was jostled from her reverie on love by the change in the sea’s hot breeze which now surged into sand-whipped winds. The woman pressed one hand on her hat to stop it from blowing away, and with her other hand clasped the material of her dress across her legs to hold it down. The pages of my journal were rippling. I closed it and stood up, glancing at my watch as I did so. An hour had passed since this woman had arrived to share her wisdom with me. I said, ‘We’ve got to get out of this wind.’
We walked away from the pier together, back towards the road, and at the junction where she turned right towards Redcliffe and I turned left towards Brisbane, I took her hand and said, ‘We don’t know each other’s name, but I’ll always think of you as the Pink Angel.’ She let loose another bursting-with-joy laugh and waved at me as she leant into the wind, still holding onto her floppy pink hat. I won't see her again, but her light will shine in me at the most unexpected of times. I am sure of this.
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