There have been a lot of pretty strange people in this neighbourhood. There was grubby Emma, with her dirty stained skirt, going from rubbish bin to rubbish bin, pushing her ancient cane pram; 'salvaging' many items of sheer uselessness to anyone else. Nobody ever found out what eventually happened to her. I would have hoped everybody would have wondered what did, but at the end of the day, who cared? I mentioned The Walking Man to my friend, Jack.
- “What was he, in real life, do you think,” asked Jack.
- “I imagine he imagined he was in real life then,” I suggested.
- I tried to imagine The Walking Man doing something really meaningful and valuable for humankind, like we all try to do so long as we get paid for it. This man, however, spent his whole day walking…..
- “But why back and forth like that?” asked Jack. “From the Esplanade right along the footpath to Cargill's Corner - past all the shops, then… all the way back again. Then all the way back to Cargill's Corner again. And so on.”
- “All day, too, amazing!”
- “One wonders what he used to do. Maybe he was a stockbroker fallen on hard times?” said Jack.
- “They'd never let him on the floor of the exchange, with a ragged beard like that.” ventured Jack. “You could hardly see his face.”
- I remember the time when I went into the bank and The Walking Man was there, at one of the tellers, a huge split in his pants. You could see right through, but the jacket tail stopped you visualising anything too hard to imagine.
- “What was the rigmarole about the bottle of soft drink?” Jack asked.
- The Walking Man would make his unsteady jerky way along the footpath (no he wasn't drunk; some people just walk like that), holding the bottle by its cap, with thumb and forefinger. Nobody ever saw him drink out of it.
- “He didn't just walk, though.” I said. “I saw him talking animatedly to the man in the Chinese Restaurant, but that wouldn't have been about stocks and shares.”
- “He'd probably worked for the Railways,” Jack suggested, “and lived in a rundown cottage on his own.”
- Jack said that it is always interesting to speculate, as one often did, about people in supermarkets, movie theatres, at the football and other places where you can let your mind wander a bit.
- “It was the unsubtle strangeness about the man,” I said, “as if you were expecting him to say something to you because you thought you knew him so well; always on his own, walking, and seeing you buzzing about on your daily business”
- Jack agreed that the man certainly looked like he had owned the place, and probably had a 'special agenda' for us all, walking up an down the street, all day, past the empty derelict pawn-broker's shop; the pacific islanders resource centre, always empty, with its lone unattended computer and pool tables - past the shops that used to be butchers' shops but were now used commodities emporiums.
- The Council and the electricity authorities had embarked on a program of putting all the electric wires that had been up on posts, underground; maybe so that people wouldn't run in to them or earthquakes topple them and have deadly wires draping themselves all around us etc. This resulted in a series of manholes (no, NOT person holes) spaced along the pavement so that the men could get down there to make sure everything was connected to everything else.
- “Yes, they put those horrible plastic orange webbed fences all over the footpath so that you had to dodge them.” Jack said.
- It was a long inconvenience, too, some months of beavering away above and below ground but soon, the job was nearly over. The men in their yellow trucks began gathering up their stuff and taking it away… but I did notice an open manhole in the footpath. That was when I was making my way to the bank to deposit the daily cheques from the little business we ran. Some people, I thought, could make themselves busy even if The Walking Man couldn't, or wouldn't.
- “That was when you saw him again?” asked Jack.
- “Sure,” I said, “coming along the footpath as usual. Left arm swinging oddly out of tune with the rest of his body, right hand holding the drink bottle with thumb and forefinger; you know the whole usual deal.”
- “Wearing the same grubby old long stretched cardigan thing?” asked Jack.
- “Sure, what else?” I replied.
- “There was this bloody great manhole in the footpath and I couldn't see the cover for it anywhere. They'd long since taken away the orange webbing fence things that were around it, and then I suddenly saw The Walking Man walking towards it….”
- “Didn't see it, I guess,” said Jack “so can I guess what happened?” he asked.
- There was no need for Jack to guess, The Walking Man walked right up to the hole and fell down it. I heard a light clink of glass somewhere away down underneath, and that was it.
- “Then the men came?” asked Jack.
- “In a cluttered yellow truck, with witches' hats in the back, yes.” I answered.
- The men pulled a heavy circular cover plate out of the back of the truck and placed it carefully over the manhole.
- “You didn't see The Walking Man after that?” Jack asked.
- “No, funny that, but I must say I didn't miss him terribly,” I said, “and neither did anybody else, it seems.”
