From: kelso_j@cs.uwa.oz.au (Joel K Kelso)
Subject: The Chain
Organization: Dept. Computer Science, University of Western Australia.
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1992 07:21:20 GMT


	"What do you want for your birthday?"
	"_Don't_ ask me that!
	I was suprised at the vehermence of the answer, from such a calm
face, someone who I'd never actually seen angry.

	"I know what you can get me for my birthday."  She leaned on the
doorway of my room and handed me a knotted tarnished fine-link chain.  "I've
been meaning to get it replaced for years.  It was a eighteenth birthday
present."  I looked at it, uncertain of it's value.

	I turned away from the basement jeweller/pawnbroker and wandered through
the city, thinking about a girl who I'd shared a house with for two years,
and whay it was that I didn't really know her.
	I wondered what she would leave the world when she was gone.  Some little
furry stuffed bears, some crosstitch patterns, numerous pictures of lions and
tigers, a back garden where there'd been a weedy, prickly, dry jungle.  Fine
stuff, but nothing that was really _her_.  Nothing she'd _created_.
	I walked past a newsagent.  I thought of buying her a blank, lined
exercise book, wrapping it up and telling her to write a story in it.  Any
story.  Not a story she'd heard, not a story from a book, not a catalouge
of events from her life, but a story from her head.  Maybe she'd show
something of what was inside her; become a creative being.
	Maybe not.
	I walked into a big department store and spent a week's living allowance
on a shining, nine caret fine gold chain, and then carefully destroyed the
docket.  She'd wear it around her neck and never think of the friend who
gave it to her.

								----//----

	"... here.  How are you?"
	"Doin' OK.  How's your day been?"
	"Allright.  That's the small talk over.  How would you like to come ..."
	I'd rung her up a few times and now she'd rung me and asked me to her
sister's high school concert, saying she'd promised to go and wanted some
company.

	"..." A pause, like all the others.  She watched the road, eyes looking
back and forth and mouth tensed, and I watched her.
	It was fairly painful.  We were two people who never learned the art of
small talk, so there were long silences and gaps of halting conversation
and occasional laughter.

	That night I couldn't get to sleep.  Normally I read or fire up my 
computer and sit in the dark with the eery monitor glow for light and write,
but the night after she first asked me out I just lay there, sinking into
deeper and deeper depression, with snatches of Fleetwood Mac echoing in
my head...

		"... have you any dreams you'd like to sell ?
	 	Dreams of loneliness drive you mad
	 	In the stillness of a memory ..."

	Damn.  She actually _likes_ me.

		"Loving you
	 	Isn't the right thing to do
	 	But how can I
	 	Every change things that I feel?

	 	If I could
	 	Maybe I'd give you my world
	 	How can I
	 	If you won't take it from me ..."

	I get on better with her _sister_.

		"... the chain."

								----//----

	We were talking as we walked around the big pond thing.  I'd been coming
to these junior youth things to help a friend who ran them out.
	We kept talking as we stopped to read the plaques that describes the
transformation of the place from a watering hole before white settlement
through to a smallish park near the centre of the city.  The plaques were
spaced aroung the pond, and we go left behind by the others.  Our conversation
was easy, natural full of laughter, impressions, voices and ranged to any topic
that seemed to come up.
	We stopped and climbed a huge Morten Bay fig tree, scuffing through the
falled leaves and clambering up the massing roots into the branches, each
re-living a little bit of childhood.
	Which made me stop and consider...
	I had four more years between now and my childhood than her.  What had I
done with those years?  It occured to me at that point that I was alone on a 
Friday night, up a tree with a sixteen year-old girl who's youth group I was
suppose to be supervising.
	I got down _rather_ quickly, before anyone noticed.
	Later on I was watching her messing around on a swing with her friends,
taunting them as they shrieked and screamed.  She stood on the seat of the
swing, going higher and higher and laughing, gripping the chain at the side
with white knuckles.

								----//----

		"... I've got a chain of contradictions hanging aroung my neck.
		So I go down.
		I go down.
		I go down on my knees."




	Yes, this is about three different people and happens within a week, I
case you were trying to figure it out.
	Oh, and if anyone can help me with the artist who sung the last set
of lyrics above.  I've forgotten who it was.


J Kyle Kelso 
email: kelso_j@kultarr.cs.uwa.edu.au
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"...All my great aunts / who never got married
 And lived to a hundred / does that tell you something
 Not to jump to conclusions / I make no assumptions
 But alone I sleep better /  and it sure makes you wonder
 If they found it..." Deborah Conway - "Buried Treasure"
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