Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.
Once upon a time there was a woman, with long lashes and high cheekbones not unlike your own, who also possessed your general disregard for convention. She wandered, as she was wont to do, in ankle-high boots, through the streets of St Kilda on a weekday afternoon, meandering to work in no particular rush. For although she liked her job, she loved the walk even more.
Everyday was much like the last for this woman. A late emergence from her futon in a tiny art deco unit, two black coffees in quick succession, a squirt of product through her unruly pixie cut, and out onto the pavement with its mingled scents of sea air and dog, coffee grinds and stale piss. Shifts were predictable in their frequency but never in their timing, so she’d sit and wait, or stroll and wait, for the familiar buzz in hip pocket, heralding the call to duty at her local secondhand music store.
One day, she set off for work in a particularly chirpy mood. This particular afternoon was not unlike any other, mild for autumn, busy but not manic, the late sun arching over the pavements to cast long shadows of tourists, prams, cyclists, trams. It was unremarkable aside from the fact she was running late, and decided to drive the nine hundred metres to Station Records, rather than her routine amble. That is, until she saw the back window of her ’78 Kingswood smashed inwards, no vinyl records where they should have been resting on vinyl upholstery, cracks across the glass like a spider who had spun his web on Carlisle st-grade-smack.
Because of that, she lost her trademark cool. Replacement glass meant at least another couple of weeks’ wages before she could get it fixed, so she could get it sold, so she could finally hand in her notice. She was only days off booking flights for the trip she’d been plotting for 3 years, stashing notes away in an instant coffee tin on a shelf above her fridge. Dreams of Tokyo, city of lights, mecca of records, so close now she could smell it. Only another couple of days of pushing obscure LPs into the hands of bayside suburbanites and she could book the flights. Until now. She kicked the tyres so hard she stubbed three toes.
And because of that, she was still fuming and wallowing with such intensity that when a man walked into the store, casual as fuck, and placed four records on the counter, asking for a sale price, that it took her a few moments to realize they were the very same four plucked so brazenly from her car only hours earlier. Normally, in this instance, she’d give a brother the benefit of the doubt – coincidences do happen, after all, look at Hall and Oates. But the odds of these four disks, in this combination, from a first edition Paul McCartney post-John, to a B-side Bowie… well, that shit just don’t happen. They stared at each other for what felt like a good forty seconds, but was probably ten.
Until finally she broke the silence. “Are you fucking serious, man? Are you actually, like, seriously attempting make a buck off these? These are My. Goddamn. Records. From my car. My car, that you broke into this morning. And now you’re trying to sell them back to me? Ringing any bells? Any TUBULAR BELLS?” She waved the iconic record in front of his face.
I won’t go into too much detail about the scene that unfolded in the following minutes. There may have been shouting. There may have been heated discussions about the various comparative virtues of extensive layered instrumental odysseys versus the merits of progressive yet accessible pop-music. There may or may not have been exchanges of wide-eyed outrage, followed closely by periods of intense kissing. Either way, my darling children, it’s well past your bedtime, so all I’ll say for now is this – that is the true and mostly unadulterated version of how I met your mother. And we all lived happily ever after. The end. Now go to sleep!