The old sofa — a short story by Des Molloy

It was a non-descript old sofa. Pete liked to think of it as his Goldilocks sofa … not too short, not too long — just right!  If he had to describe it … he could think of no reason why he would have to … he’d say it was of a roll-arm, traditional style with a coarse green fabric covering, possibly wool, with short bandy, probably rimu, splaying wooden legs.  Yes, one of the stubby legs was beginning to migrate out of mirror-image alignment.  This minor loss of symmetry neither concerned him, nor affected his enjoyment. This was his happy place.  Stretched out, with his head propped up to a suitable angle on a cushion against the north end roll arm, a good book to hand … this was almost nirvana … well, as nirvana as things get these days.  Looking out through the open back doors, he was positioned perfectly to look straight up the sloping lawn to the back of the traditional Kiwi quarter acre section.  In the foreground abutting the glazed double doors was a large decked area with the archetypal wooden picnic table where many family repasts had been enjoyed.  And up the top of the lawn in front of the compost bin was the wire washing line that gave Marion so much joy when they had strung it across from the fence to the apple tree.  She loved supping on her mid-morning coffee and looking out to a full line of freshly laundered washing.  Back in the day when the kids were tiny she’d revelled in seeing the line full of cloth nappies, marvelling at the whitening powers of the sun.

“Well those days are long gone … good days, but you can’t get them back.”  Marion was gone too, ashes buried under the plum tree with Xena their old dog, just as she’d wished.  Looking around, Pete could see that standards were possibly slipping a little.  He felt that he didn’t do too badly, all things considered.  Possibly he should vacuum more often, and do the dishes every day, but there was not really anyone to comment on this.  His mates who dropped in from time to time were as myopic as he had morphed into being.  He puzzled on how when Marion was alive, she did laundry most days even though there was only two of them.  “Maybe, it was just to have a full line to look at and enjoy.”  Pete usually did his washing on Saturday and it never filled more than a third of the line.  The vacuuming was always a struggle.  He had a mostly hate relationship with the old Tellus. It fell into two every time he lifted it, and one wheel on the tripod carriage was jammed and damaged beyond repair, so it just skidded along behind, always trying to make its way off to the side and crashing into furniture.  He knew he should get a replacement, but couldn’t really see the point, knowing that he could get by with just a few swear words and judicious kicks.

It was reading that gave him the most joy now.  The library was a haven of social interaction and advice.  He treasured his burgeoning cerebral relationship with the assistant librarian.  Pete had never been a man for fancy words and as a working man, his fellow shearers’ vocabularies had been limited but usually effective.  Marion was a nurse and a closet academic.  Cerebral, had been one of her words and his use of it maintained a link to her in Pete’s mind.  There was also a local book fair every three months, and bags of books went to and fro from this hospitable event.  He’d decided that his genre was the crime thriller.  Progressively he’d enjoyed meeting and journeying with Inspector Lynley, Dalziel and Pascoe, Morse, Rebus, Banks, Jane Tennyson, Comoran Strike, Guido Brunetti, Jimmy Perez and Vera Stanhope.  He’d never taken to Jack Reacher, too American, too egotistically formulaic.  He’d loved the older Neville Shute books too, with their gentle, very human stories and relatable characters like Mr Honey from No Highway.  Good plots, good story telling.

His life now contained plenty of time for meaningless cogitation.  With no specific task in hand at any one time, random thoughts would often pop into his consciousness. A while back he recalled the anecdote that supposedly a leader from a Communist country was out in the West for the first time and upon learning that the country being visited had unemployment, had asked. “Why … has all the work been finished?”  Pete couldn’t help but apply the same criteria to himself.  “Why do you spend your days on your old green sofa reading?  Are all the jobs needing to be done … done?”  “Well no, but no one warned me of the accelerated decline in capability as I aged through my eighth decade.  I didn’t know, I’d get coughing asthma, emphysema, start having balance issues, and constant low iron levels would mean that I often barely had the resolve to get out of my own shadow.”  It was fortunate that Pete was an easily contented person, and the green sofa and a mountain of books provided a level of pleasure that was probably out of proportion with the effort and input to attain it.

Until his mid-years, there had been little time for reading, his days were filled with arduous toil and nights were for fleeting family interactions and recovery.  For many years they’d followed the availability of shearing work.  Part of every year was spent away. Pete was a journeyman, not a gun, clipping a steady 300 per day, 350 on a big one … steady and reliable, so always in demand. The work had taken them all over the world from the narrow combs of Aussie to the small pens of Scotland and Scandinavia.  Usually Marion could get nursing work and somehow they managed to bring up three healthy kids with education from both hemispheres and three continents.  The children — Mary, Brian and Dominic had all transitioned into functioning adults, successfully embracing and conquering tertiary education, trade training, relationships and now families of their own.  Mary was two hours away, so although busy with her family, it was her brood that Pete saw the most of.  Brian worked in the aquaculture world of pearling in Broome, whilst young Dominic was a super yacht skipper based in the Mediterranean, usually in or near Saint Tropez.

Sometime after Marion’s passing, the kids raised the idea of Pete being ‘shared around’ like he’d told them had been done with his grandma.  “What about three months with each of us and three months at home?  Us kids will pay your travel and you just chip in the living costs from your pension while you are with each of us.”  Brian had always been a bit of an organiser and Pete imagined that this was his idea, which the others went along with, as they always did.  This plan was stalled for two years but it was agreed to try it out with a winter stint to Broome.  Of course the winter climate of Broome was one of perfect blue-sky days of more-or-less always 30 degrees and low humidity.  If you were dreaming of Paradise, this was it. Brian, wife Julie and kids Gracie and Morgan lived well.  They had a pool with sophisticated outdoor entertainment capability.  There was a shaded area with what they called ‘loungers’.  There was a well-stocked outdoor fridge.  As well as keeping himself hydrated by drinking chilled beer most of the day beside or in the pool, Pete did explore the busy town centre.  Of course he stumbled upon the iconic Matso Bar and Brewery, taking a shine to the Mango-infused specialty lager.  It was here that he first interacted with the ubiquitous Grey Nomads.  Winter was tourist time and the town swelled to full capacity with the wealthy fleeing from the cold climes of the south.  It took Pete a while to realise that whilst these folk appeared to be his peers on the surface … same age and appearance … deep down he recognised there were few values that he shared with them.  They oozed bonhomie and largesse, generous with invitations for Pete to join their ‘wines at four’ gatherings at the holiday park.  But It was all about opulence and demonstrations of such.  Pete also defaulted to his quiet rumination “Would Marion like these people?”

Deep down Pete felt that everything was too nice, too perfect, too advantaged.  The flies weren’t even too intrusive.  Life shouldn’t be this good, Pete thought to himself.  He even felt guilty about a family-treated night out, when he finished an unsurpassable day with a reasonably posh meal of dukkah-encrusted kangaroo loin with veggies in a red wine jus. The de rigueur, stunning sunset that put the day to bed confirmed the Grey Nomads’ mantra that every day above ground ... wasn't bad.  But Pete felt he wasn’t deserving of such overt enjoyment, and deep down he was missing the ordinariness of his life back home.  He was missing his old green sofa and the views up the lawn, the constant and intrusive memories of his Marion.  Deep down he was also even missing the worry that Mary would drop in unannounced … as occasionally she did to dispense a ‘wisdom’ of life as she saw it.  This was usually a lecture about fresh air and exercise, whilst she did a quality check on how Pete was coping, sniffing the fridge and running her eye over the state of cleanliness of home and self.  Pete wouldn’t mind a bollocking, it would bring a bit of gritty reality to his life.

And so it was that during the interminable 16 hours of flights home that Pete made the decision that whilst all of his family members were more capable than him, he wouldn’t be bullied into being their possession or responsibility.  He would freely spend his time in his favourite position of repose, working on enlarging the Pete-shaped furrow on the slowly subsiding family heirloom, reading more books. “My house, my rules!”

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