Buenos Aires, 2am by Rob Hindle
I had a friend who told this story. He'd been to a party and caught the milk train home. In the twelve minutes between stations, he'd fallen asleep, waking only at the sound of seagulls and the smell of the docks. With an hour until the first train back, he'd wandered along the harbour to a cafe, where he sat with a mug of tea, surrounded by grinning dockers, listening to their hard, low Viking voices. On the train, he watched people getting on at each station with their suits and phones, and thought how landlocked life could be.
I don't know how true it was, but it was a good story - good enough to explain why, suddenly, he packed his job in and went travelling. I got postcards from the usual places - Changmei, Uluru, Macchu Picchu - and short messages on the back: "This is real life"; "I'm in love".
Then nothing. A last message from Buenos Aires: "It is 2 am and I am going out to drink cheap wine and dance the tango with beautiful women." Nothing more. It's been four years, four and a half.
And it's me who has moved to live by the sea. We don't have the big ships, just the few boats going out before dawn, coming back before lunch. We buy fish from the same man each week. Last night we had fish. It was warm and we sat out on the balcony late into the night. There was a party down by the landing, and bursts of music came up over the roofs. I thought of my friend, tried to picture him dancing the tango deep in the night; but this is a northern coast, a Viking coast, and the noise that drifted up was Viking music, table-thumping music. No romance.
Rob Hindle’s Website.
