My friendships have mostly been with people of a similar age, but that all changed when my 85-year-old neighbour left a CD in my letterbox after hearing my young son drumming wildly in our garage. She wrapped the CD in a note written in her finest hand, explaining that she thought he might enjoy the sounds of her friend’s band, The Necks.
Others in our street had understandably complained about the endless noise because the sound reverberated through their walls, creeping into their quiet spaces, and ruining their days.
But my neighbour did not. She delighted in it, sometimes standing outside our garage door and listening to him bash away at a song like it was her private concert. She walked the streets most days with her rescued greyhound who tottered along in fine leather booties to protect the pads under his feet.
Back then, we were living at opposite ends of the same street. Her in an apartment in a converted underwear factory and me in a rented townhouse. When the townhouse sold, my kids and I moved by chance into an apartment three doors down in the same factory and now, instead of sharing a street, we share a hallway. She was the first person I befriended in the building.
She’s not from here. She’s a blow-in from the United States via a number of countries along the way. She has lived everywhere, from Thailand to Ghana, Japan to the New South Wales South Coast, gathering friends with each new address. An artist, she has exhibited in galleries across the world, and the many students she has taught are now friends. Sharp and curious, mischievous and thoughtful, she wades into conversations with a joyful openness.
We chatter in scraps of conversation as we enter and exit our building at similar times. Sometimes our chats find us meeting up in cafes or outside each other’s doors, often lingering until we finish a thought. Recently we have begun sending wordy text messages back and forth, like a conversation that is always gathering speed.
One day, she tells me she is death cleaning, despite being in good health. She is pragmatic about her age and her physical limitations, while longing to clamber up a ladder like she once did. We talk about ageing and how frustrating it can be when your body doesn’t do what your mind wishes it would.
She employs my son to help her move things and sell them online. Awkward in that way that 16-year-olds can often be with adults, he is not with her. Perhaps it is her frankness and honesty that teases the same out of him. It’s as if she knows exactly how to speak to him to make him feel they are equal. She does the same with me.
While separated by many years, we share more than an address. We talk about music and misogyny, our fear of another Trump presidency, of the changing climate, the genocide in Gaza and how to install solar panels on the roof of our building. She is a fierce feminist, a seeker of new ideas and thinking. Like many of the activists I see at rallies, she isn’t young, and yet despite knowing that environmental doom and global unrest will not affect her the way it will other generations, she remains outspoken, passionate, and alive to the world in ways that many aren’t.
And like any good friendship, ours has grown to include the offer of borrowed books and home-cooked meals, sending both journeying up and down the hallway in an endless trade.
Recently, she knocked on my door to drop off something or other and asked me in hushed tones if I was in love. It was a delightfully direct question and I laughed. She already knew my history, that my partner had died four years ago, and that I’d been trapped in grief and single parenting ever since, but she had clocked something had changed.
Perhaps it was because I’d started wearing lipstick again, or the fact that I’d stopped wearing the same clothes from the floor and pulled out things that had settled in my wardrobe waiting to be rediscovered. I’d also begun swimming in the bay during winter, stroking out into the cold depths of the sea, and slowly shocking my body back to life. I told her that I wasn’t in love, but that I had started tentatively dating, reigniting something in me I assumed had died when Aidan did. She told me she saw all this in my face, my body, and the way I walked along the hall.
We decided it was a conversation that needed more than our usual allotment of time, so we met for coffee early one morning. Drinking cups outside in the strip of shadow on the street, she asked direct questions, and I spilled honest answers, enjoying the telling. Giggling, we traded stories of past flings and moments lived before. As we talked, the years stripped away from us both until we were just two friends laughing over coffee at six in the morning.
