Nathan Hobby’s blog

   The fourth last time I visited him I brought a block of Roast Almond chocolate without wrapping paper.  I talked to him about my assignments.  I asked him about the hospital food.  He was so pale.  I used his bathroom and this is the bare fact of death:    That on the basin sat his shaving brush ( probably older than me), his rusted razor, his shaving stick with the paper torn back and the light green froth drying, and a bottle of cheap coal tar shampoo Gran bought in bulk from WA Salvage.    
  Outside, dry leaves scraped along South Terrace.  The hospital is a hundred metres from the Cappuccino Strip.  From the hospital canteen you can see the ocean stretching all the way to Africa, one of the many places he never got to.  From his room you cannot see this.  You can see only a grey plastic TV made in the early 80s – when I was born and he was just past middle age – that you must pay seven dollars a night to watch.  You can also see on the table the untouched National Geographics Uncle George left and the Get Better Soon star my cousin made.
      Afterward, I walked from the bus stop through the university under cold stars.  Philosophy oozed from me.
       ‘That tears are the way of things.   That God thrusts us into this world and expects us to solve the Puzzle.   We stake our lives on our answer.             
      ‘Or some of us do.   Most of us live caliban existences.   We live drugged by Channel Seven news.  We are content to spend our short time watching recycled cliches and working for capitalism in order to buy things to distract and comfort us.    
        ‘The life of the consumer society is essentially one of a cocoon against the harsh reality of existence.  Yet sometimes existence breaks in on us.  In death we are confronted with the true nature of things.  We see reality.  We must live with death -  2 Corinthians 4 -  if we do not live with an awareness of death we do not live truly.   We live with a… a perspective  distorted.’      
      The university grounds were deserted.   No-one heard my profound reflections on existence.   Rabbits hopped away from me.   Echoes of Auden.
             But the stars burn on overhead
            Unconscious of final ends
            As I walk home to bed,
            Asking what judgement waits
            My person, all my friends,
            And these United States.
             I remembered a night like this, after an argument, when I walked along the same path with Kirsty, looking for rabbits.
     We found none.  It was very cold. 
     That rabbit hunt was one of our last chances.  We kept on kissing – not too well, too familiarly.             When I got to the student village I heard people laughing and an American exchange student drank beer on his balcony.  He was wearing a baseball cap backwards.     When I hugged him he was slimy against my skin.  He was perspiring cancer and all today the smell of it has lingered on my hands.       
       As I went to bed, I remembered being five and holding his red rough hand as we walked all the way to Rockingham Beach.  He was smoking  and when we got there he bought me a chocolate Drumstick, the first one I’d ever had.  He had one too, slurping at it with his false teeth and we ate them in the sun, the icecream melting and running down over our shirts.  It was only early afternoon.  There was still so much of the day to go. still so much of the day to go.