My Friend Melinda

The first time I meet Melinda is in line at the supermarket.

She’s in front of me, searching for a two-dollar coin in the mound of her emptied purse on the counter. The woman behind the cash register twirls her hair into multiple sighs. The look on her face says Hurry up, geez, just pay with your card or something, you old kook. As if she has something better to do.

What catches my attention most about Melinda is her hands. They’re striking in the same way steel blue eyes are striking. Or in the way broad, muscular shoulders that climb out from the neck of a giant man are striking. They soak in your attention, blur the background till it’s just abstract shapes and movement.

Her fingers are long and bony. Blue veins twist across a maze of brown spots and wrinkles, which travel all the way up her wrist and disappear into her shirt cuff. She doesn’t wear a watch, but there’s a ring on her wedding finger – a dainty silver strap with a little white pearl in the middle. It’s beautiful.

In her woollen cap and tweed coat, Melinda must be hot. Her hands, however, look frozen cold. She moves them with a kind of precision that makes them seem like prosthetics. Detached and without feeling, like an arcade claw playing a sad game: find the pensioner’s two-dollar coin, pass it to the cashier, collect your prize.

Carefully, she reaches for each of her belongings on the counter and shifts them around like chess pieces. Grabs one thing, a stick of red lipstick, moves it left. Then grabs something else, a ring of silver keys, separates it into individual parts.

But no moves produce a gold coin.

Melinda apologises to the cashier, grabs the avocado, and turns away. I have time to act because of how slowly she moves. I put my hand on her shoulder and say that I can pay for her avocado.

I’m in a bit of a rush. This option suits us both.

Of course, I don’t say this out loud. Melinda’s experienced enough embarrassment for one outing.

Without hesitation, she accepts the coin and then packs her bags into her trolley before disappearing into the busy footpath outside.

*

The next time I see Melinda is at the café I work at.

She enters through the large wooden doors and sits at an empty spot. The café is empty, and Melinda is well and truly capable of taking her own seat, thank you very much.

I lay a menu and some water on the table, while Melinda fishes for something in her bag. My shadow startles her into an upright position.

She straightens herself against the chair and I see a pebble of recognition drop into her memory. It ripples from the inside out, working first through her mind and then smoothing the creases in her face.

Darling, I know this might sound silly, but have we met before?

After I remind her, she says she’d like to buy me a coffee to return the favour. I tell her there’s no need. I get them for free and I’ll take the good karma as payment enough. We both laugh and keep chatting.

Conversation comes easy, as if we’re old friends. Melinda is funny in the pointed way that elderly people can be. Her humour is slow and sharp. If you don’t like what she says, that’s not her problem. She will say it anyway and you will listen. She commands attention without trying to, and we keep talking until a young couple wanders in and I have to excuse myself.

A few days later Melinda returns to the café. She takes the same seat in the corner by the window. Just the usual, please, darling. A long macchiato with one sugar. That is my usual. From then on, she visits every second or third day, sits in the corner if it’s unoccupied, and I bring her usual, sometimes even before she’s settled into her seat.

On most days, Melinda will stay for an hour or so, following the same routine: first, she pulls a little black book from her bag. Then she begins to write.

From afar, I often catch myself watching her.

With a blue pen and her tongue sticking out, she’ll start to move her eternally cold hands across then down the page in short, thoughtful strokes. Occasionally she’ll come up for air and look about herself, but it’s clear she can’t see anything in the room: not the crying baby, not the bickering couple, not the chandelier dangling from the ceiling. Not even me, as I balance plates and weave in and out of tables. She can see only the contents of her notebook, growing limbs, sprouting out and dancing in the café, more real and more alive than any anything that might happen, exist, out here.

Occasionally she’ll remember that her coffee is sitting there, getting cold. Her long macchiato must be room temperature by the time she gets halfway through, but the laws of thermodynamics don’t seem to bother her. When she writes, I know to leave her alone.

Melinda wears nice clothes, nothing flashy or out there. It’s all elegant coats that hang in sharp, straight lines. Neat and practical shoes that look cleaner than new. She doesn’t seem like the kind of old person who must scrape coins to buy her morning coffee, but that is precisely what she does. Every single time she pays, she empties her purse onto the counter and counts out $3.80. If there are extra coins, she’ll drop them into the tip jar before leaving.

On cooler days Melinda might wear a felt raffia hat with a muted pink ribbon wrapped around the middle. I learn that it was a gift from her mother, passed down through five generations of Sullivan women. It survived two wars, a musty closet almost evaporated by moths, the grubby hands of nieces and nephews. It even survived her grandmother’s dementia, which jammed the hat into an old sewing tin and then stored the tin in the attic. It was lost for almost five years, poor little darling. But the hat was always found and somehow came out unscathed. Held its shape, too. It suits her.

We talk in disjointed spurts between me serving tables and Melinda pouring magic into her little black book. Conversations jump from fashion to dinner recipes to what flavour feminism is in vogue this decade. I learn that Melinda hates wearing bras and abhors the idea of stuffing her ankles into black stilettos. Just the thought of it makes her body wince. And for what? To impress some vastly unimpressive suitor? Eek.

Occasionally Melinda will wade into more personal waters. She married a man who was taken by cancer in 2008. Said their I dos in their 20s, and that was that, together for 53 years. Melinda doesn’t believe in love at first sight – it’s not love that’s making your insides tingle, darling – but she could tell almost immediately that Chester Smith Montgomery was the man for her.

After Chester died, she had flings, sure. Bonfires that warmed her body and rekindled lonely flesh on cold nights. Yes, even at my rickety age. But her heart was spoken for. Buried seven feet under, where it would live as nothing more than worm food.

Melinda was as curious as she was morbid and wanted to know what I did when I wasn’t being a darling waitress. I told her that I painted, with oils mainly but sometimes with sauces and muds, any old slimy thing I could spread on canvass. I liked to experiment with everyday materials, disgusting materials no person in her right mind would use to make art and Melinda loved that idea. She bent over with laughter at the thought of scattering the result of last night’s dinner onto a blank page. Dee-e-SGHUHh-sting, darling! I abso-LOOOT-ly love it.

During this conversation, I discover that Melinda is a poet and that her little black book is filled with poems. I don’t ask about the poetry itself. It somehow seems too personal, a place you access only when you’re invited. What she does tell me is that she prefers to feel words as she writes them. I know it may sound silly, but it lets me think clearer thoughts. And clearer thoughts let me write truer sentences.

Melinda asks me if I would like to visit her home one day. She has quite an art collection and thinks I might like to see it. I tell her that I’d love to, so she asks me to write down my phone number and home address. One evening, she says, she’ll cook us dinner. We shall have a girls’ night in.

*

It’s always clear when a friend turns into an enemy, but it’s never quite clear when a stranger becomes a friend. My feeling is that it’s when that person leaves a little hole inside you, one that’s cut precisely in her shape and whistles when a cool breeze passes through.

Not long after Melinda took my details, I had a missed call from an unknown number. There was no voicemail, so I assumed it was a telemarketer. Later that day, I bumped into Melinda on the street and discovered she was the one who called.

She wanted to make us a slow-cooked curry the coming Sunday. If I was a drinker, she was going to buy her favourite tawny for dessert.

I told Melinda that I’d have to let her know. But if not Sunday, another day. Definitely one day soon and I’ll bring the wine. She gave me a hug, our first. She pulled me close, squeezing tightly and keeping me there for a few extra heartbeats than expected before we parted ways.

Sunday came and went, no curry, no tawny, no Melinda. Days yawned into nights and life kept humming along as it does.

It was a busy time for me. There was nothing major happening, no big holiday or family death, nothing like that. It’s just that life was moving quickly. Like when you’re on a train and watching the platform recede into the distance, thinking it was only seconds ago you were looking up the timetable. How’d that happen? I didn’t have a destination, but I did have a series of events lined up like dominos. Jessica’s 30th. Mum and Dad’s anniversary. A commission from a local council for a mural at a skate park – money I desperately need.

It was a chaotic few months, is what I’m trying to say. They blurred by so fast I didn’t even realise that Melinda had stopped coming into the café. For weeks, months? Hard to tell. It felt like it was only yesterday we’d made plans for our girls’ night in.

I check my letterbox on Sundays, and I’m lying in bed when I see the letter with my name on it. It doesn’t look like a bill. It’s mysterious and formal, so I sit up before I slide my fingernail inside to tear it apart.

My window is open, and through it, a breeze pushes itself into the room. It closes my bedroom door, blocking the white noise of the fan that still spins in the living room. As I begin to read, the door opens again and ushers in the sound of the fan.

The letter informs me that I’m the beneficiary of $20,000 and four paintings. The words terminal cardiomyopathy jump out at me, scare me, wrap around my neck and strangle me with cold, blood-deprived hands. A mystery that’s come to light, like a snippet contained in her little black book, where, I read, my name is mentioned.

My eyes start to well. I hear a crow land and squawk on my balcony. A whir from outside dips into my ears before the ghost of the wind closes my bedroom door, subtracting the fan’s gentle thrum.