David Montgomery's mum.

He was a year or two ahead and every day I'd walk past his house on the corner to and from school. Sometimes we'd cross Lane Cove Road together without exchanging a word, even though we knew we'd get into trouble for not crossing at the lights up by Cox's Road if ever we were found out.
He lived with his mum who worked with my mum at the nuthouse, as it was known to everyone, and his house had a fibro garage. One Saturday I rode past his place and saw him, through the open tilted, rotting garage doors, holding two slot car set controllers, working out how to use both at the same time.
"Hey!"
"Hey."
He looked out towards the back door of his house. What he was gauging I don't know but it appeared the right thing to do.
"Want to have a go?"
In answer to the invitation,I immediately forgot the Mustang I'd received for Christmas and let it fall to the dirt driveway, hiding my excitement as I shambled towards the dank garage. Such a momentous occasion was this lure that I didn't even mind when I realised it wasn't a Scalextric set but rather a modest figure eight circuit made up of grey plastic track with corner rails that refused to stay in place and what looked like rather fragile rheostatic plastic grips. The cars, one a Dodge Phoenix in American police livery and the other an ugly blue Chevrolet Corvair, lazily went round and round never picking up any great speed no matter how hard we squeezed the triggers with their odd, hollow grating sound.
We must have watched the cars perform desultory loops for the best part of half an hour without exchanging a word. We seemed, like kids through all lands and all time, to have gone quiet for the strange absence of reason that only we could fathom. It wasn't discomfort or shyness. Nor was it intense and singular focus. It was simply the thing to do.
"Daaaavid."
Mrs Montgomery had a young voice, belying her hard face etched with lines born of too many disappointments, too few triumphs and comforts. I later sensed that she must have spent a very long time paying off the slot car set on lay-by. My own mother, I'd learned, started lay-buying Christmas presents for us as early as February.
"You'd better go."
As with the pushbike, we both casually dropped the slot car controllers and ran our separate ways. He was nice kid. Taller than me by an inch and a countenance that had a perpetual sad, gentle grin.
I never got to know him outside that moment.
We never visited each other's house nor rode pushbikes together. We would, at most, nod in passing in the quadrangles and the Cocky Laura fields.
Some months later when I was visiting my mother, she mentioned that Mrs Montgomery had been watching us race the cars and there that side of the story ends.
***
Perhaps a year or two after all of this, my mother was holding a Tupperware party in her tiny flat. Whinging wogs and poms any other day, at Tupperware parties they were all just wonderful friends - or so it seemed to me - who talked too loud and drank too much beer or cheap white wine or Vok Advocaat, with not a single adult male in sight. Arguing and laughing, smoking and smiling, putting on scratched Burl Ives and Bing Crosby albums, pointing at nothing and collapsing halfway through unfinishable adult anecdotes.
"Did you hear about Emma?" This from Mum's friend from Yugoslavia. I remember this small thing because I liked the word. I liked the way it sounded when I'd repeat it to myself in the bathroom as the water went cold around me.
The laughter and chatter subsided.
"She was found dead in Walton's over in West Ryde!"
"No way! No bloody way!"
"She ..."
Unfortunately furtive adult glances in my direction brought on a wave of soft voices and conspiratorially close faces, as the women dragged their assorted array of chairs into a huddle while I continued playing with tiny army men.
The last thing I remember hearing was, "...in the women's toilets!"
***
I never did learn why or how Mrs Montgomery died in the women's toilets at Walton's. I broached it once with my mother some time later who forced me to settle for a laconic, "Never mind," and I never did walk that part of Eastview Avenue again thinking I might run into David. Yet throughout the times - through the maudlin teenage years, de rigueur then as now, and throughout the adult years, lost in the heady haze of profligacy, confused certitude and sobriety, my mind still occasionally turns to the strange and unknowable death of Mrs Montgomery.

Your life and your life and my life.