Stuart Spence

June 1952, Martin Place

Kovacs meets William at Prego for lunch, which then turns into dinner.
There is tension, obviously, Bill’s wife is an issue, a substantial one, The Lie he calls her, but after the second bottle, she fades, easily.
“Could …”
“Don’t even think it,” Kovacs snaps, throwing a quick glance over to the waiter hovering to his left. “You know the dangers, Billy boy.”
He looks again, and seeing the waiter is attending to another table, reaches over and quickly runs his fingers across the back of Billy’s hand. Billy feels his face burn, body coil, suddenly ready to move, to go towards, rather than away. Maybe he’d always been ready? Could such silly things be true? How many years had he thought them? Jesus.
He flips his hand over and grabs for Kovacs’, but the hand has already been withdrawn, swiftly.
“Soon darling Billy, soon.”
A younger woman at the corner table turns to her companion and whispers something, never taking her eyes off Kovacs and Billy. They laugh.
“I think of time,” Billy says, his fingers pressed flat on the base of the wine glass around the stem, pushing it gently in tiny circles on the crisp table cloth, “wasted time, never …” He turns and looks out of the huge window into the last of the day. The lights are just turning on in that grand mall; office folk scamper for buses, purple air, cold, overcoats, hats, fountain, a gull, fear, fleeting joy, heat, somehow he feels it all.
So very clearly.
“But, love knows how to wait, Billy,” Kovacs says, his foot now touching Billy’s, safely under the table, a table that is growing ever so smaller as time moves forward, away from the wastelands of history, and into the new night.