The four afternoons before that one, which look completely different to me now.
We met on the Tuesday in a café on the front at Winnamurra, over a dropped book — his, a detective novel with a terrible cover, and I picked it up and said I had read it twice.
Wednesday: the records came up. He asked me what my mother used to have on in the house, which I thought at the time was an unusually specific question and which I now understand was not a question about music.
Thursday: Marley Bridge. He asked where I was from and I said a town he would not have heard of, and he said try me, and I said Marley Bridge.
And he said — I remember this exactly — "Oh, right." And then he asked whether I wanted another coffee.
That is what that man did with it. A sixty-two-year-old search ended at a café table on a Thursday afternoon and he said oh, right and went to the counter.
