Well now, an ancient couple used to live just down the road from me, had lived there all their married life. He was more or less housebound but she still tottered down to the shops every day or two and then slowly back up the hill. One afternoon I saw her with a bag of groceries and I pulled up beside her and lowered the window.
"Want a lift, Alice?"
She jumped, put her hand to her startled heart and then burst out laughing, which was typical of her.
"Oh, you made me start. I was in 1957."
Because that was the street for her, a quilt of memories she walked through on her way to and from the shops, a palimpsest of yesterdays, which she could dial up at will.
She’s long dead now, her husband too. The earthquakes killed them both, though you won’t find their names on any memorial. Their house was damaged and the authorities forced them out and that was the end of them. They and the house went back too far. They’d reared their children there and grown old there, and they were tied to the place umbilically by time and memory and habit. To break those ties in their 80s was too much. He was dead within months. She within a year.
The house was fixed and the young couple who moved in have had children and acquired a dog. And so it goes on, of course, until they in their turn become that old couple, living in a world like a Hardy poem, a world inhabited by ghosts and shades. And it all happens so very fast.
Just today I went into the local Asian store to buy the sort of sauce that only Asia makes and there was someone at the counter before me and as I waited I remembered that this had been, until perhaps a dozen years ago, a post office, overseen by a man with a thinning flop of hair like a dish scourer. He wore a low-slung tie and a cardigan and a perpetual harried look, for he held the business together.
At that post office you could register your car, pay utility bills, invest in government schemes and engage in all manner of official business that could be conducted nowhere else.
And every one of those transactions required a different form and he alone knew which and where to find it and how to fill it in and where to send it.
Alongside him there was a constantly changing cast of younger employees who were forever coming to his seat to ask him about this and that, and he always knew.
Where is the man with the dish-scourer hair? Retired I guess, with his head still packed with redundant knowledge, his little paper empire all dismantled, the forms long since discarded, all their transactions done these days, bewilderingly, online. And every form he ever completed and submitted, to who knows what authority, gone to landfill.
And as I emerged from his former empire carrying a bottle of Malaysian fish sauce — repellent stuff in its own right but a brave ingredient — I recalled that the shop next door, now a bright-lit laundrette, had been a butcher’s shop, its window sloped with plastic trays of chops and steaks and livers, a seep of blood in the foot of each tray and between them little walls of vivid plastic grass.
But then the supermarket came and the butcher’s fate was sealed. Where is he now the butcher man with his dark blue apron and his cleaver and his wooden block?
In heads like mine is where — the heads of those of us who’ve been here longer than we once thought possible. Tick tock.
• Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
