Title: Sport 27

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, October 2001

Part of: Sport

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(Biographical Sketch 1—Harold Wallman

After barely managing to graduate from the University of Canterbury with a BSc in Philosophy, Wall had packed his bags and set off to join the New Zealand Army.

‘Socrates was a soldier,’ he had said when I questioned his career choice, ‘so was Déscartes. Ideal life for a philosopher in the army. Training to kill and to be killed can only enhance one's appreciation of the insubstantiveness of physicality and the preciousness of sentience and reason.’

His army career, however, was short-lived, and, when I returned page 7 to Christchurch after failing to make a future with Anya in Santa Fe, I found him working in the tele-marketing trade; trying, over the phone, to sell swifter, stronger vacuum cleaners to people who were trying to have dinner. He now laboured in a computer games store under the auspices of a manager six years his junior. I have no idea how he landed the job, considering how he had always disdainfully dismissed personal computers as ‘glorified typewriters’ and was still uncertain of the difference between Playstation and Nintendo.)

At home, I turn on Jason's PC and check his email.

Please don't come, Joni writes, not now, not yet. There are things about me you do not know, things I cannot yet reveal. I do Love you Jason, but I am not yet ready to…

The phone rings and I abandon Jason's correspondence to answer it.

‘Philip? Have you read it? What do you think?’

‘Hello, Morris…’ I say.

‘Have you read it?’ Morris has the rapid-fire, re-caffeinated voice of someone who works in an office which adjoins other offices. He sounds like a man who has become used to deadlines.

‘I haven't read it,’ I say, ‘I'm still working my way through the last lot of stuff you sent me…’

‘Where are you up to?’

‘Three eighty-five. Look, can't this wait? I just got in, I was going to bed…’