Gumbo wanted to come around on Sunday. He rang in the morning, and Pearly said he’d be free from about two-thirty for a couple of hours. He usually set a specific timeframe for Gumbo, otherwise he’d stay all day. Gumbo was Pearly’s loyal and long-term supporter, content with the reflected status of the friendship and with no pretension to achievement himself. He seemed always to have been there: a mascot for Pearly and his mates when they were all young. Gumbo was slight physically and with a malformed roof to his mouth so that his speech sounded as if his head were in a bucket. All he asked was to be able to tag along, provide the laugh track for the jokes of others, and the spontaneous yet sincere admiration of their achievements — especially Pearly’s.

He was the caretaker at the primary school he’d once attended, and the most enthusiastic member of the town’s model aeroplane club. As Pearly’s life had become busier and more successful there was less room for Gumbo within it, but Gumbo hung onto the connection in any measure that was permitted, and for old time’s sake and genuine affection Pearly kept in touch. No one could remember how Gumbo got the name. Pearly knew that Gumbo was a Creole dish, but there seemed no connection between that and his friend. Maybe it had been corrupted from mumbo jumbo as a reference to Gumbo’s speech, but it had happened long ago and nobody cared anyway. Gumbo he was, and he accepted the title as if royally bestowed.

He was excited about the reunion and wanted to enthuse to Pearly about it. How many of the old cobbers, the old gang, would turn up to relive the glory days? That’s what Gumbo called them — the glory days, and Pearly felt sorry for him, as he did for anyone who thought their school years the best time of their life. Gumbo remembered the games, the drinking and feasting, the larrikin nights in their fathers’ cars, the close male fraternity before guys found greater and more mature pleasure with steady girlfriends.

From the living-room window, Pearly watched Gumbo arrive in his aging ute, which had two discoloured heat-pumps on sacks in the back. Gumbo smiled up at the window as he got out of the cab; a smile that would hardly leave his face during the duration of his stay. Gumbo adored Helen and often said that had Pearly not married her, he would’ve done so himself. Helen always played along with a flattering response. He’d been married briefly, years before, to a woman who left him for a helicopter pilot from Queenstown. I didn’t have a whirly-bird, Gumbo would explain. Helen said it was a pity he had no children, for he would’ve been a great dad.