The Sound of Silence

 To the girl standing right in front of me at the Byron Bay Blues Festival recently:

Because you have only lived in that creamy clear skin for two decades I don’t expect you to know that it was not polite of you and your friend to push your way through the crowd of people who had been standing on their tired mud-caked feet for over an hour in order to be close to the front when Paul Simon sauntered on stage.

Because not one grey strand has yet pushed its way through your long blonde locks I don’t expect you could have noticed that the first middle-aged woman whose ribs copped your elbow had no hair under her rainbow-coloured scarf since the life-giving, hair-killing chemo offered her half a chance to see half of Simon and Garfunkel at least one more time.

Because you and your friend were busy looking at your mobile phones as you shoved through the thinning-haired crowd you would have been oblivious to the yearning look on the face of a middle-aged man you passed whose biceps sported the tattooed names of his two daughters who he thought might look a little bit like you two but he couldn’t know for sure because they hadn’t spoken to him since he left their mother in a small town in Tasmania, accompanied only by a black dog that he hasn’t been able to shake no matter how hard he’s partied in the last decade.

Because you were busy shouting at your friend with the tattoo of butterflies on the back of her neck as you pushed through the crowd I don’t expect you to have realised that another middle-aged woman’s ribs felt your elbow as she was singing along (word-perfectly) to ‘Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes’ while trying to remember the name of the boy who had given her Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland’ album for her 21st birthday and kissed her on the neck and who, by her 22nd birthday, had disappeared under a train.

Because you were sending a text on your mobile phone when Paul Simon sang ‘Homeless’, I don’t expect you to have realised how heavily you landed on the toes of the middle-aged man beside you who might well have been remembering how it felt to be thrown out of his parents’ home at the age of 17 because he was in love with a boy with green-flecked eyes who didn’t believe in a punitive God either.

Because you were standing right in front of me I don’t expect you will have noticed the frown on my face or my fists clenching as I tried in vain to listen to Paul Simon singing ‘The Sound Of Silence’ and to see the funny side of the fact that you were shouting at your friend about the text you had just received on your mobile phone and had no idea what silence might sound like.

Because you were shouting into your mobile phone at the person who’d just sent you the text I don’t expect you will have noticed that I was listening hard and trying to work out whether my lover had chosen one of the ‘Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover’ when he left me just a few years before I turned 50.

Because, just a couple of verses after Paul Simon had started singing ‘You Can Call Me Al’, you turned to me with a big smile and shouted “Has he sung ‘Call Me Al’ yet?” and because I shouted back “He’s singing it now, but if you won’t bloody shut up you won’t hear it”, and because you were so shocked you even forgot to check your mobile phone for a few seconds and because I desperately wanted to either slap you across the face or grab you and hug you tight until you could feel something real, not virtual, from someone right next to you, and because, instead, I poked my tongue out at you as if I was a petulant child rather than a middle-aged woman.

I apologise.

Because you are young I don’t expect you to have realised how foolish and yet how relieved that tongue-poke made me feel.

But I expect you will one day.

This semi-fictional column was first published in The Big Issue in 2013.