In the mornings Rex sat on the front verandah sipping at cups of tea. He liked it strong, black and sweet which, of all the combinations, is the most difficult to ruin. This, and a tolerance for crinkled clothes, was the secret to his happy mornings.
In the summer months, Rex might be sitting there by seven thirty, or even, during heatwaves, seven, but in the winters he slept in. He had rarely boiled the kettle before nine.
In the mornings, there was quite a lot of foot traffic on his street. Considering. Rex spoke to the people who spoke to him and smiled at the people who didn’t.
When children who did not yet believe their mothers’ stranger danger talks walked past and smiled or said hello, he pretended to pick at his nails or look at the paper or scratch at Rex’s neck.
It was coincidence, him and his dog sharing a name, but the story of that coincidence is for another time.
In the afternoons, usually at four o’clock but sometimes as early as one (depending what was on the news and what Kat had left for lunch) he switched from tea to brandy. Where his tea was sipped from the fine china cups his mother had left his sister but he had taken, the brandy was drunk from a Vegemite glass its smell and the label removed after a soaking in Milton’s.
He liked his brandy on the rocks, which, of all the combinations was the most difficult to ruin, though he was more careful about the number of blocks of ice (five) in his brandy than he was about the spoons of sugar in his tea (anything upwards of one).
By five o’clock Rex was itching for conversation, but by then, people had stopped slowing down as they passed his house and if they noticed him at all, they just lifted their arm in a greeting or left the shadow of a smile at his gate.
It’s how Rex had always been. Never quite in step.
undetermined 