Tram Through South Melbourne

It is Tuesday morning and we are lurching comically through the streets, as though the tram is drunk on sunshine. I am cheerful. Everyone is cheerful. We’re all giving each other smiles, like something unusual and pleasant just happened. I have the urge to shake hands with the man next to me, to put a hand on the shoulder of the woman behind us. But don’t, of course.

And so we glitter and glow in this giddy way around leafy corners, and a white, white haired woman stands, steadying herself between seats. She is elegant and aged and extends a long, knuckled finger to the buzzer. The light pressure is adequate. The tram hushes to a pause and she alights, strands of that white, white hair sparking in a sudden blast of wind. The warm, green trees swoon in one rolling Mexican Wave and then they are still.

The tram reanimates and as we move away I watch the woman until she is gone from view and a blue thought bleeds like dye through me and I am full of the very real feeling of being an elderly woman walking slowly in sun-warmed clothes to my white terrace house on a leafy street in South Melbourne, reaching the fence, clicking it open, shutting it, the smell of my hot garden, the cool stony shadow of the balcony as it draws across my head and neck, the cold feel of the metal doorknob, the thick way the heavy door opens, the smell of my wooden floors and fabric softener and the smell of the looming gape of the hallway, the living room, the padded clunk of the door as it closes, the heady silence.