buy a smoke

I went and sat in a church for an hour. Outside and around us the traffic and screaming world swirled. I sat limply, examining nothing, letting my gaze rest like butter on the high colour windows and glowing long pews. God was there for me, the god who is not grand but great and not distant, proclaimed by all the world’s most dangerous people and who doesn’t really exist, I think, but to whom I somehow cry out in moments of deep joy and crushing down grief. I gazed at the flowers, the candles, the keys of the lovely old organ. Afterwards trailing up the street with a frangipani tucked in my bag I smiled at two celebrating ladies, with their backs to a wall of constructing industry, all the ingredients of their afternoon laid out: smokes, supermarket catalogue, bottle of a possibly mixed fizzing drink. “You look beautiful!” said the younger one; I nearly fell over with surprise. I mean, I tripped. I went into the post office. “Has this got a battery?” she said. “It’ll go by road but not by air.” “Ok,” I said. I paid for the parcel. In the Chinese grocer’s I brushed my knuckles across all the fronds of the barrel of brush brooms to choose by the feel which I would carry home. Paid four dollars and balanced it across my arms like a bayonet. The Aboriginal man who spends his afternoon by a tree on the hillside said, How are you. His mate, a red-faced white man with a spreading lap, said, judgelessly, “Saw you eating something off them bushes there.” “Lillypilly,” I said, “you want one?” And uncurled my hand to show a pink-stained palm lumpy with fruits. The first man reached across himself for a pocket. “Buy a smoke off you,” he said. I said, as I always do, “I finally quit! Sorry ~” and spread my hands, because my first thought is not to make a smoker who’s not yet quit (every smoker) feel bad in their still smoking cave. Around us the afternoon was fresh and untamed. Up the hill little houses crept, clutching their gardens. The two old men had a bag of wine plump between them like a jellyfish beached and slowly dying in the sun. I went on up the hill and behind me another climber approached, this time a man in a suit, already reaching into his breast pocket as the old man sang out, “Hey, Michael!” “Heya, Marty.” “Buy a smoke off ya?”