During the following weeks Joe learned that you could locate Lola at any time – you just had to listen. Sometimes, her infectious laugh emanated from her office up on the balcony. Occasionally, you awoke from your reverie to a surreal silence somewhere in the shop and imagined, quite correctly, tradesmen had laid down their tools to peer from their locos and watch her pass.
It was the day before the Christmas break and inside the locomotive of station five the tone had grown positive. Minutes before the siren, it occurred to Joe he would not see Lola for several weeks. He carried his toolbox to the cab door to where he could see her office and began loosening the chuck of his power drill. Finally, her door opened then she stepped out and he followed her petite feminine gait along the terrace. The floor was noisy with the shutting down of machines and the chime of metal tools. Seconds later, she was gone, lost in the noise and activity, and likely not to be seen until January. His heart began to ache and he now knew he was getting it bad.
That evening around sunset, Joe leaned back in his wooden chair, watching the river from the balcony of the Victorian Hotel. He rested his foot up on the railing, feeling the daytime heat transfer through to his heal. Over time, he witnessed the orange seep from the water and the day slowly turn to twilight. He glanced down at the bottle in his hand and realised his thoughts were drifting. He was thinking about Lola.
Up the veranda three men from the crew stepped out onto the boards. Their boots were noisy and their voices clear in the night. Joe watched dreamily as they approached and recognised that in recent days he had been pretty feeling good. He removed his baseball cap and ran his fingers through his hair and watched the men arrive at the table. They were in a good mood and he let them talk, not wanting to speak. He slowly took his feet from the railing, placed them on the deck and listened to the road noise coming up through the boards. The barmaid placed beer bottles on the table and there was a long period of silence as the men drank. Joe waited, watching the beer slosh about Ken’s upturned bottle. He didn’t know why such things were now snaring his attention.
He looked out at the river and watched a set of headlights passing along the far bank. They began to flicker through the trees then slowly disappeared around a bend. He followed a trawler going up river and watched it pass behind the yacht club. Finally, it drew into the lamp light of the bridge and glided gracefully underneath. It was the oddest thing, he thought, but everything that evening seemed to have a stark, cinematic clarity about it. He didn’t know what, but something tumultuous and fundamental was happening to him.