The Meeting That Didn’t Happen

By Janita & Frank aka The Duo, (or Fruitloop and The Mayor.)

Fabrice was supposed to join us. He didn’t. So, while we waited, we did what any sensible Mayor and Fruitloop would do: carried on without him.

At five o’clock, there were supposed to be three of us.

There were two.

The Mayor arrived first in the usual state of organised disorder. He had been productive. Very productive, apparently. The app had been fixed, the website was being done, PayPal had been set up, and only the calendar remained.

Even his desk looked suspiciously tidy.

Fruitloop noticed immediately.

“I’m surprised to see how tidy your desk looks.”

The explanation was less impressive.

“I’ve just shuffled paper elsewhere.”

And with that, the tone of the meeting was established.

There was just one small problem.

Where was Fabrice?

He was expected. The meeting was waiting for him. And, more importantly, Fabrice was not normally late.

“But he’s never late,” Fruitloop said.

“This is what is so unusual,” said the Mayor.

At first, this was merely an absence.

Then it became a mystery.

And then, naturally, it became entertainment.

While We Waited

There is a strange little space that appears when somebody is late for a meeting.

You cannot quite begin, because they may arrive at any moment. You cannot quite leave, because they may arrive the moment you do. So you wait.

Except the Mayor and Fruitloop are apparently incapable of simply waiting.

There were Pineapple jobs to discuss. October topics. Internal adverts. Website checks. Social media. A birthday card. A debate over whether somebody was “my Sarah, your Sarah or our Sarah.”

There was also the increasingly important question of whether the next Pineapple would be alarmingly thin.

“We’re going to have a very thin Pineapple this week if everybody bombs out on us,” the Mayor announced.

Fruitloop began counting possible articles.

Swimming Club. Sylvie. Lunch. Bruce.

“That’s six articles.”

Crisis averted. Possibly.

Then the conversation moved, as conversations do, to the weather.

South Africa had sunshine and 23 degrees. France was heading into autumn, although the Mayor appeared to have invented his own seasonal calendar in which civilisation depends largely on whether it is still light at six o’clock in the evening.

Then came dinner.

“What’s for dinner?” asked the Mayor, fully aware that Fruitloop loves this question.

Boerewors rolls.

A South African sausage in a roll, accompanied by a brief explanation, because apparently even dinner requires international interpretation.

Then Fruitloop told the Mayor about her parents heading back towards Kruger, not for a holiday but to help host a conservation camp. The trip had come together unexpectedly, and her father was fitting it around work before retiring next year.

Still no Fabrice.

By now, waiting for him was becoming considerably more interesting than the meeting we had planned.

We Got Stood Up

Eventually, the Mayor suggested that Fruitloop could go home and announce that nobody wanted to talk to her.

Fruitloop improved the story immediately.

“I got stood up.”

“Ooh, that’s vicious.”

“I know! Savage!”

Then she reconsidered.

“But in this case, it’s not me. It’s we. We got stood up together.”

That changed everything.

Being stood up alone is unfortunate.

Being stood up together is a team-building exercise.

The only remaining question was: where exactly was Fabrice?

Fruitloop proposed that he might be on a hill somewhere.

Or in a tree.

Perhaps he had simply forgotten the time.

The Mayor had his own theories.

Soon Fabrice was no longer an absent member. He was a character in a rapidly developing mystery.

Maybe he was harvesting.

Maybe he was hiking somewhere in the woods.

Maybe there were mirabelles involved.

Perhaps pigeons.

Possibly mushrooms.

At one point Fruitloop suggested that Fabrice had gone hiking, discovered mushrooms and made mushroom stew.

Then the theory escalated.

“He travelled to another universe.”

“That has legs,” said the Mayor.

Of course it did.

By now, reality was becoming the least interesting possibility.

The Secret Mushroom Problem

The mushroom theory sent the Mayor down another road entirely.

He remembered a woman from his village who had been an excellent mushroom forager. She always returned with beautiful finds, but she never revealed where she found them.

Apparently, this is serious business.

“You do not share the prize mushroom sites.”

The locations of good mushrooms, we learned, belong somewhere between family secrets and national security information.

The Mayor remembered the joke perfectly:

“I’ll share it with you, but then I have to shoot you.”

Which seemed a little extreme for mushrooms, but perhaps explains why the good ones remain so difficult to find.

From there came mirabelles, plums, grapes, corn, the lack of rain in France and the unusual warmth.

Still no Fabrice.

Meanwhile, Fruitloop had other problems.

There was a cricket match waiting at home.

Not serious cricket, fortunately.

“We’re not keeping score. We just play for fun.”

This came shortly after the revelation that Fruitloop and John had recently played soccer and both managed to hurt themselves because they had been “a little bit too enthusiastic.”

The Mayor suggested croquet as a more genteel alternative.

Fruitloop immediately identified the flaw in his safety plan.

“The possibility of hurting ourselves is not there.”

Then she reconsidered.

It depended, after all, on how hard one swung the little hammer.

Fair point.

And just when we had almost accepted that Fabrice might genuinely have disappeared into another universe, something happened.

He called.

Mystery Solved

The Mayor answered.

There was a conversation in dialect, only parts of which Fruitloop could follow.

Then came the verdict.

Fabrice had forgotten.

He was snowed under.

That was it.

No mysterious mushrooms.

No secret hill.

No tree.

No parallel universe.

Just ordinary life doing what ordinary life does best: becoming busy enough for a meeting to disappear from somebody’s head.

“That answers our ‘guess where Fabrice is’ question,” Fruitloop said.

“Exactly,” said the Mayor.

The meeting would happen another time.

Problem solved.

Except by then, the meeting that had not happened had produced something else entirely.

What Happens Behind the Scenes While We Wait?

Near the end, Fruitloop realised what they had accidentally created.

“There’s a lot of stories in our transcript.”

The Mayor agreed.

They had started with a missing Fabrice and somehow travelled through Pineapple production, tidy desks, Kruger, South African weather, French seasons, boerewors, mushrooms, mirabelles, cricket, croquet and the dangerous business of leaving Fruitloop’s family waiting in a car.

Then Fruitloop found the title hiding inside the conversation:

“What happens behind the scenes while we wait?”

Exactly.

Because perhaps that is what waiting really is.

We tend to think of it as empty time: the minutes before somebody arrives, before something begins, before the proper thing happens.

But this time, the proper thing never happened.

Instead, two people sat on opposite sides of the world and filled the gap.

They asked questions. They wandered into stories. They teased each other. They worried briefly about somebody who was uncharacteristically late, then invented increasingly ridiculous explanations for his disappearance. They talked about ordinary things because ordinary things are often where the best conversations are hiding.

And somewhere in the middle of it, Fruitloop had the obvious idea:

“Maybe we should use the transcript and create an article.”

The Mayor liked that.

By the end, they were already laughing about the story they would tell:

“We were stood up, and then we played a guessing game.”

Which is more or less what happened.

Fabrice missed the meeting.

The Mayor and Fruitloop found the story.