ON TIME by Dave Wellings

The elasticity of time can be a blessing or a curse. Some time ago, I wrote a short story recalling the trauma of a motor racing accident. I limited the story to 3,000 words but could easily have gabbled on to 6,000; the slow-motion sensation of the car somersaulting to destruction had lasted seemingly for hours. Logic tells me it would have lasted for less than ten seconds.

The idea of someone having their ‘time’ was suggested to me by the lives of two old friends. I had known ‘Gunga’ (short for Gunga Din) through infant, primary and high school. To say that he had blossomed into an attractive youth would be apt because he was indeed like an exotic plant, watered by flattery. From being a pretty-faced boy with rosy cheeks, ruby-red moue and a cute quiff that hung over his forehead, he had developed into a tall, handsome teenager. No one was more aware of this than Gunga himself: he could never pass a mirror or a shop window without whipping out his comb to primp the quiff and exchange an approving nod. His indestructible self-esteem was carried onto the sporting field where his elaborate bowling action would make today’s Sri Lankan spinners look boringly orthodox. He was equally visible on the soccer pitch in his brief tight shorts and flashy reflective boots, decades ahead of David Beckham. Being Gunga, he insisted on playing as striker although he had the build of a goalpost and to my knowledge never actually scored. If I have made him sound insufferable, I should add that he was an amiable, likeable lad who believed, quite rightly, that he was a chick magnet. It was no surprise to learn that shortly after leaving school he had married and started a family.

A few years later we met up again at the favourite watering hole of our old clique. It was a jazz club in the basement of a local hotel and I was home on leave from a Middle East posting. I barely recognised Gunga, standing alone at the end of the bar. His open raincoat revealed a small pot-belly; the famous quiff had gone and his damp hair line suggested an out-going tide. For the next half hour he poured out his woes to me – about his dreary home life where he was “outnumbered by bloody females” – a wife and two daughters. About the foundry where he worked, waiting for the foreman to die before there would be any hope of promotion. The foundry’s toxic fumes were apparently killing both of them. And then, reluctantly he shuffled off homewards, the flame quenched, the flamboyance gone.

My mate Terry was the opposite. He had been a gangling, awkward youth with a naff haircut and an ill-advised suit: he made ‘social misfit’ sound like a compliment. Like me, he had wandered around Africa and being a perpetual foreigner fitted him well. In middle-age he seemed merely odd. Although he was quite well off and generous (Africans soon realised he was a soft touch), he rarely spent money on himself. When the cuffs of his old shorts became frayed he simply turned them up and sewed them by hand, each turn revealing more of his spindly white legs. He darned the heels of his khaki socks with pink wool. By his fifties he was a true English eccentric: his rejection of materialism in an increasingly materialistic world would have made him a marvellous grumpy old man, a nugget that writers prospect for – a genuine character. Alas, he was killed in a motor-cycle accident and I felt he had been cheated. His time never came.

Someone once said that time was nature’s way of ensuring that everything didn’t happen at once. Albert Einstein confirmed that time was a relative phenomenon but it was an anonymous Queenslander who provided the indisputable truth: Time flies like an arrow but fruit flies like a banana.

Dave Wellings © 2006