When you miss the moment, watching it pass…

30 October 2024

The time 30 October once fell on a Saturday. The stop here had been unintentional. Unplanned. But that’s how it is for a lot of these stories. I hadn’t been to this place before, yet here I was. At ten minutes to midnight. It would be Sunday in eleven minutes. Not twenty minutes earlier, the taxi I was riding home in was almost outside of where I lived, when I asked the driver to take me over to Bondi Junction. The vehicle had sped efficiently through the late night streets of Sydney’s eastern suburbs, and delivered me here.

Now I sat at the bar. Counted myself lucky to find a seat, in this overcrowded room. Irish and British backpackers, who called this place their home away from home, went about their revels oblivious to my presence. I tried to figure why I was here. I split my attention between two television screens, one to my left, the other to my right. To my left, the Shawshank Redemption was screening. It was my first time watching the jailbreak classic. It looked good, but I couldn’t hear a word of it.

To my right, a game of International Rules football was screening. Peil na rialacha idirnáisiunta, to refer to the game by its Irish language name. Based on Australian Rules football, the Irish variant made an equal amount of sense to me. But then something else caught my eye. Someone whom I thought was alone, but couldn’t possibly be. A girl sitting at the far end of the bar, by herself. What’s wrong with this picture, I asked myself. This woman cannot possibly be alone. Her boyfriend must be nearby. Playing pool perhaps. Or something.

Two hours later, the girl, who as it turned out, worked at the bar and had been on a short break when I first saw her, walked up to me. What, she asked, is happening at the far end of the bar? You’re not paying the least attention to anything else in here. I pointed at the television screens. Nice try, she said, with an air of confidence that was disarming. How do you know so much, I asked, how could you have even noticed me in this room, where people were almost hanging from the rafters?

Oh, that’s easy, she said, you’ve been at it since ten minutes to midnight, there’s no missing it. We may be the best part of one-hundred kilometres from that room on this day, but we go back every now and again. It’s where the story began, and I’m always waiting for what happens next, because sometimes I have trouble paying attention to anything else.