Carl was in the passenger seat. We were riffing about two subjects entrenched deeply within the hearts and psyche of locals: rugby and farming. Only one of us knew how to play the game with any proficiency and only one of us had ever had cause to pull a breech-birth calf from a heifer, so only one of us, the passenger, was really talking.
The driver listened intently, making mental notes that would be, later that night, converted into old-fashioned paper notes. This was not the first time I had been exposed to the phenomenon, but I was still wrestling with the appropriate response. Do I tell him to stop talking and take a rest? Most of the time we did our interviews in places where there was an easy solution.
We just stopped. Kiko had a better sense of time as it related to energy than Carl and I, and would give signals β sometimes subtle, sometimes not β that the session should be drawing to a close. C arl would tell me that the way to imagine brain energy was that we all started the day with a bucket of water. Most people, despite losing a bit to evaporation and a bit more when we hit the odd bump in the road, had plenty left to get us through the 16 hours or so that constitute an average waking day.
When it emptied, Carl would crawl into bed, flop onto the couch or just sit and stare out into nothing. We were, at this point in his story, in Toulon, a place where Carl was, in terms of his ability as a tighthead prop, at the peak of his considerable powers. It was also, as I would learn in confronting detail, where his life started to unravel. This was his life now: a leaking bucket. On good days the water drained slower than others, but there was no puncture repair kit that would fix it.
What he could remember today he might not necessarily be able to tomorrow. He was in a one-man race to make sense of his life. So I let him keep talking, keep fumbling around while attempting to connect his thoughts in a coherent way. Yeah, I felt terrible about it, knowing we were going to have to traverse the same ground the next time we met.
