Goodbye to Alyson

I first met Alyson Watt almost thirty years ago. She came to a share-house interview, a Scottish backpacker with a heavenly accent and wild red hair. A couple of minutes into the conversation, Andy and I looked at each other; without words, we knew she was the one.

Warm, funny and gorgeous, Alyson took the top room of the big terrace house. She didn't understand that in an Australian summer, you shut the windows and close the curtains to keep the heat out. As a Scot, she thought the right tactic was to open the windows wide, in case of a cooling breeze. We had to explain to her that there's no such thing in Melbourne in December.

Before long Alyson was joined by Jo, and the two of them became 'the Scottish girls', an inseparable pair. When our lease ran out, Liz and Alyson and Jo and I rented another house together, a tiny run-down workers' cottage in North Carlton, just the other side of the cemetery. Jo and Al crammed into the third bedroom; there was just enough room for two mattresses and a rack of op-shop dresses.

That was a year of chocolate puddings and beer, curries and chips, Doc Martens and cotton frocks, bikes in the hallway, silly hats and the Pixies and stupid jokes. I watched the fall of the Berlin Wall in that house. But by then the Scottish girls had moved on, backpacking their way north and eventually home.

A couple of years later, it was my turn to be the backpacker. I landed in their flat in Edinburgh and stayed there on and off for months, through the weird midnight sun of summer, then with Chris in a golden Scottish autumn and finally the bleak perpetual dusk of an Edinburgh winter. It was Alyson who cuddled me on her knee when I was homesick, and Alyson (working as a nanny) who told me I was 'good with kids.' That was Alyson -- generous and kind and always knowing the right thing to say.

Alyson hated flying so she never came out to Australia again. I saw her one more time when I went back to the UK in 1998. I never dreamed that would be the last time. Because Jo comes and goes often between north and south, we always knew what was happening in Alyson's life. Our last exchange on Facebook was only a couple of weeks ago.

Since the dreadful news of her death, so many random things have made me think of Alyson -- taking the tram down Brunswick St, listening to Kirsty McColl or Elvis Costello, hearing a Scottish accent on the radio, a picture from The Year My Voice Broke (Leone Carmen will always remind of Alyson when I knew her best!)

One day soon, Liz and Chris and I will find a pub somewhere and have some drinks for Alyson; it's the only way we've got to say goodbye.