A large man loomed ahead, looking rough and hewn straight from the gutter. He wore a red-checkered flannelette shirt over a dirty top, and his pants were loose and untidy. He came dragging his feet along the tarmac spread of path, as though it really wasn’t worth the effort to reach the other end; if indeed for him there was an end or if he was just mindlessly walking somewhere in hope that there was.

The man was overweight, and on his left shoulder he rested a rusted pick where on the head hung a plastic bag full of empty beer cans, rustling like wind in grass as he stumbled forward along the track.

Several times the disorderly figure of a man paused in the middle of the track and raised the can of VB hanging calmly in the strength of his palm, almost as though it were in its rightful place, with purpose. He took a long, gulping swig from the gleaming green can, before staggering forward again through the afternoon’s gold-lit dreariness, vaguely observing his surrounds with tired, lazy eyes. Dragging cumbersome feet against the tarmac beneath.

As our forceful figures met for the briefest of moments as we passed one another, I smiled in his direction. ‘How’re ya mate?’

‘G’day,’ he said with a long, slightly disjointed nod barely raising his helpless eyes to look at me. Like they rolled straight past me, like he didn’t want to see the warmth on my face; as though he really didn’t want to greet my eyes with his own for fear that I might see something he didn’t want me to see.

I gazed at the canal in the swamping bed to my left, caught by the golden light hanging on overgrown reeds and clumps of long grass as the sun waned behind the rooftops of houses and rusting tops of trees. He was just another man on the street looking for a way to bar past his problems, or so I should have thought. My mind wouldn’t forsake the sadness I heard in his voice, the contemplation of his soft eyes; misery being drunk away by a single can of VB.

The drifting afternoon’s light caught the rust and cracked paint of a steel walkway crossing the creek, and I heard a gentle ringing behind me. I turned in my track to see an aged man riding his mountain bike. He had short white hair, a tanned leathery face and strong features. He was hard at his peddling. Determined in his midst.

‘Sorry—I didn’t want to push you off the track.’ He shouted as he peddled closer toward me. ‘Just letting you know I’m coming.’ I barely had time to let out a ‘No worries’ when he asked me how I was.

‘I’m good mate.’ The man raced past, I felt the slip of rushing wind follow him. ‘How are you?’ I shouted as his face turned from my direction and on the track ahead.

‘Always well!’ His reply came over his shoulder as strong and convincing, more than enough to have me muttering the two simple words myself.

I found myself smiling, and came to forget of the sadness of the man who passed me only moments before.

‘Always well.’ I muttered again, this time slightly louder, and wondered what the aged rider had that the one hulking over a beer can didn’t.