Salient

It was a kind of euphoric feeling, as if I was holding perfection itself between my little fingers.

I waited patiently for my grandmother to come back into the room. She put a glass of peach juice in my hand, and took a long draught from her tumbler of schnapps. She carefully studied what I held out to her in my hand. She didn’t say anything, but just looked at me with a sort of wild and fierce pride.

There it was, crisp, straight, and beautiful. I was eleven, and I had just rolled for her my first perfect cigarette.

Ninny, as I called her, was not your average grandmother. She couldn’t knit or bake, and when you jumped on her bed you could hear wine bottles rolling about underneath. None of this mattered to me in the least; I liked that she was different. I preferred the smell of booze and cigarette smoke to talcum powder anyway.

The pub took her life in the end. Quite literally—she died of a heart attack whilst cleaning one. I never felt sorry for her though. She was 70, and lonely without Grandy. The way I saw it, if she wanted a bloody drink she was quite entitled to have one.

I thought I saw her again this Sunday. I noticed her as soon as I walked into the Adelaide. She looked out of place there—too colourful in her turquoise two-piece suit. She liked my dress, she said as she sat at our table. We introduced ourselves. It wasn’t Ninny; it was an Adelaide local named Barb.

After our third or fourth drink we had learned quite a lot about her. When Barb was our age she was eighteen stone and desperate to be married. In her day it was scandalous, she said, to be single for so long. This changed for her after a mixup in Wellington hospital. A nurse had come to her bedside with a glass of iodine and popped off to watch the news. It was the day that Kennedy was shot. Barb, obedient as she was, drank the whole glass. She doesn’t remember much of the next ten days, but you can find her before and after photographs in medical textbooks. She lost half her bodyweight in ten days.

Barb stopped her story, took a long sip of wine, and said “You’re not planning on going are you? Get another drink”. We obeyed immediately; she had us captivated. “You know, in my time us girls all had curfews. If anyone came home after ten-thirty the whole street would know. The neighbours would call you a tart”. She winked and savoured the word tart, as if she’d thwarted the neighbours once or twice in her youth.

As she continued, it became clear that she would have been better off eighteen stone and scandalously unmarried. She and her husband had parted ways years ago. They were driving to his therapist one day when he said “Before I park the car I’d better tell you, when you get home you’ll see a ‘For Sale’ sign. I’ve gambled everything away.”

Shaking, she entered the therapist’s office. Her husband grumbled “If she bloody leaves me, I’ll kill myself.” The therapist told Barb to go home to decide what she wanted to do. Before she met that therapist, Barb didn’t realise that she had a choice. She left him. Brave woman.

Barb was sipping on Sauvignon Blanc. By the end of the afternoon I was swaying on my barstool, trying to stomach a glass of wine that she’d bought me whilst I was in the bathroom. I heard about her daughter having kids to a priest, her wonderful mother who also liked a drink, and about how the wind in Wellington used to be so strong that there were ropes on Stout Street for passers-by to hold on to.

The bar staff started cleaning up around us. She nodded her head at me as I was expertly rolling a cigarette, and launched into another story. She was in the army corps when she was younger, she told us. She had saved every cigarette she was rationed and returned home with a suitcase full of them. Her mother gave it straight to her uncle. I got the feeling that Barb has never quite forgiven her for this.

The bar was closing, we had to leave. “I like you”, she said as we parted. I like you too Barb.

I lit my cigarette and stepped out onto Adelaide Road. It was perfectly rolled—crisp, straight and beautiful. Ninny would have been proud.

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