Killing time in London as I waited for my flight, a matinee of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard drew me in. I knew nothing about it at the time and I remember nothing about it now. Nothing about the play. But at a few moments throughout, the young woman in velvet next to me giggled with a crescendoing trill of such pure childlike delight that my attention was stolen from the actors, and I marveled at her. I felt desire. Not of a sort that might make a person hide their wedding ring; a purer longing for something she had.
I draped a scarf around my neck at the outdoor café. I should have been checking work emails. A pigeon pecked at a cigarette butt, then turned away, then saw it and pecked it again. Her eyes had captured the light and she had been engulfed by the moment, sitting forward in her seat, her velvet elbow on our armrest. Untainted, unjaded.
Yesterday I drifted into a secondhand bookshop. I had a night on my own ahead of me, this time in Sydney. A hardcover with gold lettering on the spine caught my eye, and I pictured myself thumbing through it in a leather chair, with the odd bypasser noticing and raising their eyebrows at my cultured taste. I pulled the book out. Oh. The Adventures of Pinocchio. ‘Children’s Classics Edition.’ I bought it anyway. Something to do.
I wasn’t in the mood to have dinner at the mess with the others from the transit lines. Army this, army that, I didn’t need the conversation. One night on my own, then back to early mornings and school lunches and Sirs and Ma’ams and the scowling canteen lady and barking in the evening. I wandered up Randwick and found a patisserie where I could do my own thing.
I chased a marshmallow around my tepid drink with my spoon. One more pastry to justify the length of my stay. It arrived and I offered a dumb smile. I licked chocolate off my finger and turned the page. Pinocchio was promising yet again to be a good puppet, and yet again it was less than a page before he was doing something disastrous. I couldn’t help but shake my head. ‘Oh Pinocchio!’ I whispered.
I heard a gasp to the side and turned to see a middle-aged lady looking at me with marvel in her eyes. The lilt of her head and the drawing in of her lips betrayed… envy. Of me, absently stirring hot chocolate and chiding Pinocchio. I tried to check a sting of sadness as I thought back to the Chekhov play, and to that other woman, who had drawn my own desire. She had seemed so pure, so thoroughly free of pretense. Her image had become for me the evidence that something other than jaded cynicism was possible. That laugh, those flashes of light in her eyes. I had never suspected that I’d just caught her at a good moment.