Lady Lime

At this very moment, she was probably catching the first VLine out of the dusty small town they had called home for the first 20 years of their lives.

They called her Lady Lime in town. Never to her face. That stone faced expression, oozing with superiority and ambition; her small town-big fish type narcissism was never meant for Dingley. She never fit in. So, one day, she had simply left.

The only thing left behind, a memento of sorts, bearing witness to her once being there were a pair of heart shaped, cherry red plastic sunglasses, the type that Sue Lyon wore in the movie Lolita. Lady Lime was far more Hollywood than she had ever been Dingley. Lady Lime was never meant to fit in in a small town in rural Australia.

He stared at the abandoned glasses, anger and confusion mixed with sadness and disbelief. How long had she been gone? She had never fit in properly in Dingley, where time passed and stood still all at once.

He had always thought of them as a team – he knew she was always destined to leave, but he had never imagined she would leave without him.

He sighed and put down the glasses on the dusty table. The Japanese have a saying: “Don’t be sad that it’s over; smile because it happened in the first place”. Lady Lime had been almost an addiction to him, and he often questioned whether meeting her had been a good thing in the first place. She made him miserable, yet she had been intoxicating. Intriguing. Different.

And now, she was gone.

He picked up his cold cup of coffee and walked out on the porch with a great sense of Before and After, and that the After was beginning just now. Lady Lime had liberated him, in her quest for something better than Dingley. Something better than him.

What did he want to do with himself? He had never harboured any ambitions of leaving: he was Dingley, Dingley and its dusty, sleepy streets were him (“Where is everyone?” The streets were quiet and empty). In a few years, Lady Lime would just fade away to become a creature, a fragment of a memory, a cautionary tale of letting yourself get wrapped in something against your better judgement.

Coffee cup still in hand, he wandered off, into the day, not quite knowing in what direction to go.

The streets were still empty under the burning sun. Dingley felt different: stifling. And smaller, somehow. Its streets full of memories of endless summers, of Lady Lime as a child, peculiar and precocious at once. How they had enjoyed their little bubble of secrets, their world of make-believe and ambitions. For him, it had been dreams, a childhood game; for her it had been a pledge, a promise, a placeholder in the universe for what was coming, what she deserved. He could see that now. In playing these games, she had caught a glimpse of her future, and boy, was it brilliant! He grinned at the memory, wondering whether there was ever a second thought to her ambitions? Did she ever stop in her tracks to ponder whether there was any room in this brilliant future for him?

He looked up at the sun. It would have been around mid-day, and Dingley was hot and dusty. It was never a bustling town in the best of days but during the scorching, unforgiving desert sun, the streets would empty and Dingley would seem abandoned. A few lone row of houses, surrounded by the endless Outback.

He glanced back down the street. It was as if time itself had suspended, hanging in the air in endless stagnation; one minute, one second suspended in a cosmic struggle, hopelessly trying to transition into next minute as in if it was in an arduous uphill climb.

There was not a soul in sight as he walked down Main Street in suspended time, clutching his coffee cup and his memories of summers gone.

Dingley was the end of the line for the diesel trains, and the turning point for the VLine as well as the turning point for the entire world. The line itself would only come to Dingley every 2 hours, often only going as far as Greensville and not as far as Dingley. When it did come to Dingley, you could hear the cheerful whistle in a distance, announcing the arrival of news from the outside world. He stopped at the realisation that he had not heard the whistle in a while… hours? Days?

He filled with a strange sensation. It wasn’t loneliness, he reasoned. It was feeling alone.

Time was still suspended.

He started walking faster, almost running. “…If I can just…” he thought, not wanting to finish his sentence.

-“…I need to see…”

He knew what he was thinking before the thought had formulated in his mind, as he raced in direction Dingley train station.

As he came around the corner, he instantly knew what sight would greet him. In a way, he had always known. He stared forlornly at the boarded up station, the layer of dust on its signage and the bench seats that once had been occupied by passengers, waiting to board the train. It had been hundreds of years since a human being had set foot in Dingley.

“How long have I been dead?”, he thought to himself. He wasn’t sure. He didn’t care.

A maniacal thought entered him mind and he started laughing, cackling to himself in the burning sun.

“Lady Lime never left”, he grinned, as he regained his composure.

“I did.”