owlrigh

Any customer who came into the supermarket I work at today would have wondered at the sombre mood and the red-rimmed eyes. There were few happy smiles in the younger contingent and amongst most of the ladies.

"Are you okay?" I asked a fellow grocery worker when I glimpsed her watery eyes. She nodded, but then later --

"Has the manager spoken to you?"

"No ...?"

"Jesse died last night."

The store was hit hard.

( Read more... )

Ben thought I was dead once, dead and left lying on the road after an accident, or perhaps attacked by some man and thrown onto the rock wall along the riverside. This was when I was working nights at Mackay, when I'd leave the store shortly after all the clubs had closed and drunken people roamed the streets at will.

I would usually finish between midnight and 2am, and took the dinghy ashore with me, leaving Ben stranded on the boat until I returned. This time we had a huge shipment arrive, and nobody else wanted to stay to finish it off except for me. I put off sending Ben a message saying I'd be late, as I didn't want to wake him up. The hours flew by, and the next thing I knew the day staff had begun arriving.

"Phone call for owlrigh, line one," came over the P.A. at around 7am, and when I took it, Ben's mum was on the line. She was visiting at the time, and she passed me onto Ben.

"Oh, you're alive," he said. "When are you coming home?" In the midst of my apology for not sending a message.

I answered, hung up, and thought no more of it. When I returned to work my manager told me off for not sending him a message to let him know I'd be late.

"At least it shows he really loves you," she said. "Make sure you send him a message next time. Use the phone here if you need to!"

When I got home a bit over an hour later, however, I found things had been going very different to I'd imagined.

Ben was silent, lying in bed and not responsive to any cuddle. His mother was shooting me meaningful looks, and as soon as he could get up and go to work, he went.

"He was frantic," she told me. "He thought you were dead and he couldn't get ashore! He was going to move the boat downstream so he could swim ashore and go looking for you. Luckily I thought to ring the supermarket when I did. He calmed down when he heard your voice."

I felt bad. So that was why he didn't talk to me when I got back, and only said, "send a message next time."

After that he insisted I always send him a message just as I was leaving work, so he'd know I was arriving fifteen minutes later. After a month or so of this I began to think it a bit excessive, that perhaps it was time he got over being worried I was going to cark it, and then berate myself as being callow and mean-hearted for thinking that.

A year later and a change of scene: Ballina, and Ben was busy building the shed every day, so that the catamaran could get started. He was onto the roof stage, up a rickety, unsafe and too-short ladder every day.

I was busy keeping myself occupied and looking for work during the day, returning to the boat for the evening, making food or just reading and waiting for Ben's call to pick him up. It got darker, and before I knew it night had arrived and he'd still not called. He'd always before arrived before dark, so I wondered what he was up to and rang.

No answer.

Perhaps he was in the shower.

I rang half an hour later. No answer.

Bah! Maybe he was still busy doing something. I rang again, a niggly worry beginning to creep up my spine, remembering the ladder. No answer.

I imagined the ladder finally folding in two, Ben crumpled at the bottom, neck twisted and eyes glazed, his phone ringing in his pocket, him dead.

I tried to put this out of my mind and I hopped in the dinghy and crossed the suddenly interminable river stretch, wondering whether to call the cops to come to the yard just in case. The yard would be locked, I thought, but I could climb the barbed-wire fence all the same. I didn't have anybody's number from anywhere in the area, and he was the only person in the yard all day long. He could have been there all day. No, I wouldn't think about that.

I pulled the dinghy up, impatient with the time it took to lock it up, and jumped on my bike for the 20-minute ride to get to him. I pulled out my phone and tried ringing as I rode, but there was still no answer. Shoving it into a pocket, I crouched over for more power and speed and headed off.

Rrrrrrrrrrrrring.

It was Ben.

"Sorry! The phone fell out of my pocket and I was talking to Damo," a chap from a nearby yard, "and didn't realise the time."

"I thought you were dead," I said starkly, and began to cry. "I was riding to come find you."

"Sorry sweetie! I'm coming home now! I'll meet you at the dinghy!"

He must have driven fast, because he was there shortly after me, screeching to a stop, jumping out of the car and running up to give me a hug.

"Sorry, darling!" he said over and over. Finally I stopped snivelling on his shoulder and just a wobbly lip remained. "Well, you know how I felt that time then."

I did, and I felt worse than ever about the time before. It took a week or so of images of him dead to go away, and I found myself teary-eyed for no apparent reason during that time -- and all over the possibility of him being dead, nowhere near an actuality! Poor Ben'd probably gone through the same thing back when at Mackay and I'd not been sympathetic!