The gym on Central Avenue, some five years ago now

When I regularly attended the gym on Central Avenue, some five years ago now, I occasionally saw a man around my age whom I am unable to forget. But I must correct myself already. I say he was a man; really, he was only nineteen or twenty. Maybe the word “man” suffices. 

This man, then. He was tall and athletic and surly, and when I saw him, he was always with his tall, athletic, surly friends. They stood around the gym in tight bunches and would converse in monotone voices and make single, percussive barks of laughter without humour. On occasion they grinned at each other and caught themselves and looked away, ashamed of what they had done, and looked around the gym to check whether someone had seen it, to challenge anyone that had seen it, as if to say, “You dare not have seen that, you dare not.”

He didn’t seem the agreeable type, too haughty for me, like a preened bird, strutting and flaunting to every person he saw with an easy nonchalance, but there was also something wrong in his manner, something upside-down. 

I’m sure to be colouring it that way now—retrospectively I mean. I cannot help but colour it that way. He was probably just any other person, at times the way he was to me, at times not. The drooping, upside-down quality to him, in his eyes, in his face, may have been reality. But it may have been the lacquer of memory, out of time, poured over his eyes, his face, seeping down and down until he was unrecognisable. I cannot say whether it was real or not, him or me. 

It was probably more me than him, that idea of him. I couldn’t help it, because now he’s in prison in South Sydney. He ran over a woman with his car. She was eight months pregnant. The news said he sped up going into a yellow light, too fast to stop before he hit the car in front of him which was turning into a street on the left and had slowed to let the woman cross. He ran up the back of the car, and it went right over her, swallowing her up underneath. It swallowed him up too. The charges, the plea-deal, the prison time. With good behaviour, he’ll get out in another five years. 

The memory of him seems almost symbolic now. Like a meerschaum penholder with a long-remembered seaside holiday trapped inside, the gym on Central Avenue, with cigarette butts in the car park and an automatic door that clicks twice when it opens, is—for me—forever occupied by the memory of him. Stood there, in the corner, by the benches, or over by the dumbbells, or where I sit, by the door, beneath the custodial lighting of fluorescent bulbs. Strange that he and I were the same age once. 

I often wonder whether he’ll come back to the gym on Central Avenue. If he does, I’ll ask him how he’s been, “Do you remember me? I know we never spoke.” I’d ask why he’d been away so long. I don’t know what he’d say to that, maybe he’ll tell it how it is and I won’t have to pretend any longer. I won’t have to pretend that I didn’t see his surly, drooping face on the news, the grin he gave to one of his friends on the street outside the District Court, the way he looked around to challenge anyone that had seen it, to say, “You dare not.” If he told me how it was, then I would have to decide what to say. And I don’t know what I would say. I cannot know until I say it. 

by Samuel Dickson