He was walking towards me on the footpath, limping slightly, favouring the right knee.
He was about my age and had clearly lived a bit: a battered, lop-sided face, imperfectly shaved, a florid nose. He wore jeans, loosely, a jacket that had also lived a bit.
For I was walking, in my seventieth year, to maintain some degree of fitness.
I spend most days at the desk either writing stuff or thinking about writing stuff, then late of the afternoon, before the sun goes down and the drinks cabinet unlocks itself and glows like Aladdin’s Cave, I take myself on to the streets and hills of Lyttelton and I push myself along, go faster than a natural pace, to make up for my sedentary life.
It isn’t jogging, but it’s kissing cousins to it.
All my adult life I have felt cheated if I go to bed having not at some time during the day worked up a sweat.
It used to be through sport, all sport, any sport. I’d chase a squash ball, a cricket ball, a rugby ball.
But there are few balls left to chase, and for obvious reasons of self-respect I will not join a gym, and running does no good to hips and knees and so I walk.
Briskly, for the good that’s in it, and to justify, if nothing else, the drinking.
And so we came towards each other, he limping, me walking with brisk intent.
‘‘Gidday,’’ I may have said as he approached — I don’t remember — but I do remember how he looked at me, appraising, as it were.
And then as we drew nearer still, approaching the random point in time when our two paths, which have been criss-crossing the surface of the globe for 70 years or so, at last, and quite inevitably, coincided, he smiled.
Or at least his old face crinkled like wrapping paper, and his eyes narrowed a little and he spoke.
‘‘You’ll get there,’’ he said, and then he was past.
‘‘You’ll get there.’’ That’s all. And he said it with a smile that seemed composed of one part sympathy to one part pity.
At first thought, it seemed an odd thing to say. Rather than a standard greeting, an empty courtesy, what we writer johnnies know as phatic communion, like the wordless chirping of sparrows each to each, he’d chosen to say something that felt more personal, like some sort of commentary on who and how I was.
‘‘You’ll get there.’’ Where would I get? Where was the there he knew I would reach?
Because of course I wasn’t going anywhere. I was on the move all right, but my destination, the there I was tending towards, was the here I had started from, the car I had parked on Voelas Rd and to which I would return.
I was on a journey to nowhere, a parody of moving forward. I was the donkey at the wheel, the prisoner on the treadmill, the only difference being that I had chosen my fate.
‘‘You’ll get there.’’ He reminded me of a Swedish youth I met in a bar in Dublin a thousand years ago, a handsome, easy-going lad who seemed wiser than his years.
I drank a beer with him then said I had to go and he said why? Was I not enjoying the beer, the company? I said I had to be somewhere else.
He said they had a saying in Sweden, ‘‘wem har brattom?’’ ‘‘who’s in a hurry?’’
So I stayed, of course, and got him to write ‘‘wem har brattom?’’ on a scrap of beer mat and I kept it in my wallet for years.
And here was the Swedish youth come back as a battered old man, his message still the same as 50 years ago.
Who’s in a hurry? For we will get there, every one of us, whether we hurry or not, we’ll get to the point we’ll get to and no further.
And I turned to look at the man I’d just passed, now shrinking away from me into the winter’s evening, limping at his own sweet pace towards wherever he was going and not looking over his shoulder.
‘‘You’ll get there,’’ I said to his distant back, ‘‘and thank you.’’
• Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
