Under the big clock

are we still selling the bread machine?

There are two things you do under the clock at Melbourne Central, which are to watch the clock or to meet someone under the clock. Watching the clock is something you did as a child and that feels both from a very specific time - your time as a child, watching the clock and listening to the song - and completely ageless, something that could have been dreamt up any time between yesterday and the day someone first put a tiny ballerina in a wind-up box. You do it now because it is still there, and so you know it is one of the things you do there.

Meeting under the clock is like the answer to that logic puzzle. A coordination problem: it’s where you’re meeting when you don’t know where you’re meeting. As a result it comes to mind readily, so may as well also be where you’re meeting when you do know where you’re meeting. It rolls off the tongue and somehow sounds right, simple but serious, under the big clock.

The two things are not connected, but of course if you are meeting under the clock and you respect the tradition of doing things on the hour, you will be there, for the watching, even if you don’t want to be. Your meeting place is swamped by children and bemused tourists and nostalgia hunters. You face a choice between being carried away in the moment, and turning to watch the clock yourself, or adopting an expression of disinterest real or feigned and looking elsewhere, out at the chocolate shop, up the escalator to the expensive boots.

The last time I met someone under the clock they were late, a little, and so I watched the clock, but not with my full attention, scanning occasionally. Doing this I saw a young man walk in from the street at two minutes to five, lean against a rail in a prime position, stay there until three minutes past five, and leave again. Which is to say that he behaved exactly as if he was there to watch the clock, even though as a matter of fact he did not look at it for even a second. Still it is reassuring to see the form respected.

-

In the terminal waiting for baggage: Well, that’s good to have worked out, finally. Does that mean we don’t need to sell the bread machine? Or are we still selling the bread machine?

— Wait — (surely too late in the conversation to have this question) — what does over the counter mean?

With the baggage, in the train station, clueless and trying to project calm. It is close to rush hour, and while you poke haplessly at your phone to work out which way you can turn, the space fills with the confident and impatient, the commuters whose familiarity has long since rotted into contempt. Through them, though, a woman winds unfussed against the direction of the flow, carrying a saucepan full of peeled, boiled eggs.