The Client Who Wrote Letters

There is a shoebox on the top shelf of my wardrobe. Inside are twenty-three letters, all in the same blue ink, all in the same neat, slightly backward-leaning hand. They're from a man I've been seeing for about four years, an engineer who works on fly-in fly-out rosters at a mine out west and comes to Townsville on his weeks off.

He doesn't write about anything scandalous. That's the thing people wouldn't expect. He writes about the red dirt, the dongas, the cook who makes a famous curry every Thursday, a wedge-tailed eagle he saw on the haul road, the way the stars look when you're four hundred kilometres from a streetlight.

How it started

After our third booking, he asked, very carefully, whether he could send me a letter between visits. He said he wasn't good at talking but he liked writing things down. I thought about it and said yes, to a post office box I keep for work, on the understanding that I might not write back often. He said that was fine. He just wanted somewhere for the words to go.

What the letters are

They are not love letters. He's always been clear about the nature of what we have, and so have I. They're more like postcards from a life. Sometimes he asks a question: what book I'm reading, whether the mangoes are ripe yet, whether I've been out to Magnetic Island. Sometimes I write back, a page or two, and send it to his home address before his rotation ends.

Today

A new one arrived. He wrote about a storm that came across the plain like a wall and knocked the power out for the whole camp, and how the men all ended up sitting outside in the dark, not talking, watching the lightning. He wrote, "I thought, I'll tell her about this. It's the kind of thing she'd like." He's right. It is.

He's in town next week. We'll have our time together, which is always warm and easy and kept between us. But I think the letters might be the part I'll remember longest.

Tonight

I sat on the balcony with the new letter and a glass of cold water, listening to the ceiling fans hum through the open doors and the curlews wailing in the park across the road. I read it twice. Then I put it in the shoebox with the others and wrote back about the curlews.