OUTSIDE CAFÉ ROUGE

I left the Christmas Do early. Well, just around the time when all the party-minded people were slipping out to the pub round the corner for further merriment.

“You’re not feeling it?” asked Erica. I reiterated that it wasn’t my scene, and folded up my paper hat onto the table. She was off home too, so that was okay.

The truth is that for some reason, for the whole day, I’ve actually been feeling really close to tears - not sad, not necessarily, but just right on the edge of it, as though it’s out there in the atmosphere and my tuning has been picking it up. My eyes were stinging on the coach, and despite trying to get Jonathan involved in the ‘wacky Christmas fun’ I was still feeling very sensitive at the do. The pub was the last place I wanted to be.

So, I hit the twilight streets, under the sparkling lights and the warm glow. The town centre was alive with people - shopping bags, rucksacks, pushchairs, suitcases, carry-cases, handbags, man-bags, mobility scooters, high heels, work boots, high boots, trainers, smart shoes, scuffed shoes, flat caps, posh hair, tousled hair, sleek hair, no hair, everywhere - a crowd of strangers.

The other truth was that I had a few hours to kill before meeting my friend Paul for dinner at Café Rouge. And so I found myself milling for a while.

“It’d be really nice to see someone I know,” I said to myself, “maybe someone I haven’t hung out with in a while.”

I can’t say it was a prayer, not in the conventional sense - but it was a desire at least. I’ve often wondered whether God hears those things just as loudly, and therefore whether it makes any difference. I could easily have said ‘amen’ either way but I’m not sure what that truly means from His perspective.

I still had no idea what He was about to do.

So there I was, anyway - just sort of hoping for a convenient friend to run into, to chat to for a bit, and I was still somehow inexplicably emotional in the middle of a shiny town with an hour or so to go.

“On way, but bus running late,” texted Paul, a little later. He asked me if I could head over to Café Rouge and reserve a table for two, just in case.

So I did.

It was shut. Well, not quite. The proprietor poked his head round the door and told me they’d run out of gas. I doubted it, as there seemed to be a party of twelve inside tucking into some lovely French cuisine. I was in the middle of texting Paul back to tell him the unfortunate news when I heard a voice:

“Is that Sherlock?”

“What?”

I span round, and there, right in front of me like the Ghost of Christmas Present, was my very real, very present friend, Gerard, whom I’ve not seen since he moved to Brisbane six years ago! We’d lost contact when I gave up checking flippybook every day. And there he was. Literally a friend I haven’t seen in ages.

He stood there grinning, an apparition on a mission. Had I imagined it? Was this another of those weird dreams I’ve been having? I didn’t say anything for a while. I just stood there, computing.

Then, I pinched his overcoat, and I said “Wow,” and, “Are you definitely real?” which made him laugh out loud, and made the Café Rouge man do a tssk as he retracted his head back into his closed-for-the-evening-and-definitely-not-a-private-party-restaurant.

Gerard smiled. Then the rest of his family, his wife and their impossibly eight-year old son appeared (last seen aged two) and I just hugged them all like family. 

They were here for one day for Christmas before going to Liverpool where the rest of their folks live. One day. One moment, one afternoon in a town centre they had no real need to be in, all the way from Brisbane, standing outside a very shut Café Rouge! Unbelievable!

So that’s how God answered that half-baked prayer of mine from the other side of the world. We all went to Starbucks and had a catch-up over teas and a coffee, until it was time for me to meet Paul for dinner. I was so grateful for that hour! Who’d have thought it?

He calls me Sherlock by the way, because years ago I was very fond of repeating the same lame Holmes and Watson joke to him. It was the kind of thing he found funny at the time - that’s how he rolls. It amused me today of course how the act of teleporting him halfway round the world because I was feeling weepy in my home town-centre after a Christmas Do, suddenly seemed like the opposite of any definition of elementary I’m aware of. I am thankful to God though. There’s an audacity to a miracle sometimes, a laugh-out-loud, outrageous, over-the-top bit of incredible engineering. I can only be thankful. Ridiculously thankful.

“Amazing eh?”

“You can say that again, Watson,” I mused.