Each month at North Arm Cove Writers’ we’re given a
homework exercise for the next meeting. Here we were given a handful of opening
sentences and asked to use each of them as a starting point.
I
am an invisible man. Ralph Ellison, ‘The Invisible Man’
‘I am [indeed] an invisible man!’ I
thought, and thought to demonstrate this irrefutably. Daily, for example,
Nurses will hand-over in the staff-room while I sit dumbly munching on a flavoured
pie. Or one of the junior AINs might bring in her infant and a handful of
colleagues will gather round, clucking and giggling as they bounce the child
around on their hips, some looking positively radiant. To this I have nothing
to add, so I simply quietly exit the scene.
Yet the truth is anything but. I often
remember the chat I had one day with that lovely American lass as we travelled
to Sydney. Or the sweet gal from the UK I met at the backpackers’ who still
occasionally writes. Then there’ll be the prompt responses from old friends and the warm welcome I regularly receive here, there and about.
So
am I invisible? Not really— just when it pays to be.
