So cold and empty at the heart today. I feel all the little threads connecting me to everyday life in the usual world – the usual world of Brisbane, that I grew so painfully and slowly reattached to after some 13 years away – have been cut, or burnt off and I am gliding in tiny jerks across an endless sky of winter, white sky, moored in this tiny white room, which sits five floors up and blank-eyed with windows, looking out on all the whiteness as though they were just another wall. I went for an early morning walk with a man and his dog, I chatted for over an hour with a friend who makes music in New York, the day started out clean and entire and I had been thinking how the jetlag was passing off and the climate shock was gone. But today was overcastled, grimy, grey, people walking stoopingly. My old winter boots that I’d left behind so gladly in Berlin when we flew south had little leaks in their soles which I had forgotten, the streets seemed to me endlessly stony and the only green things have cast off their veil of leaves and stand trembling naked, black and greasy with rain. By the side of the canal we found a giant apple tree leafless and bare studded with large red apples gleaming slightly, like lamps. A couple of apples had fallen from its black branches but they had not fallen very far. Apples don’t. The flights of stairs home seemed endless and I peeled off my shoddy boots and climbed back onto the island of bed, white bed in a white room adrift in a white sky, and lay disconsolately fingering my hair, feeling its wiry wintry dryness, fingertips stumbling over the wretched knots like berries in the snow.
Author: moseara
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grafitti cake & cold wind
Walking past yet another housing estate whose walls are festooned to arm’s length with torn posters, glued art, endless tags. A small, modest sign up top reads: Nothing is to be stuck on here. “Nothing is to be stuck on here! Yeah… so I see.” “Yes… it’s hopeless.” “No, no. I think it’s absolutely hopeful. Beautifully so.” We walk past another building which reads, in part, Love is not a private possession. We wait for the dog, who is snuffling round a tree trunk with great assiduity. How does he know how to measure out his urine so as to have a little to offer every staging post and chat point, but without finding himself trapped back in the apartment all night with a half-full bladder. “I guess every young man has to have his tag. And then he has to stop on every corner to pee a little bit and mark it out.” “Just imagine if every young man had his favourite plant. And everywhere he went, he just had to plant out some of those plants, to make his mark on the place.” “Place sure would be green.”
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the lonely honest man
A man on the street broke my heart open and I can’t stop thinking about him. We had turned a corner heading for my friend’s atelier to surprise-visit her, when out from behind a parked car bounced this large, bounding, fierce-looking black dog. We both stood in front of our much smaller dog and got fierce in turn. The dog’s keeper ran down the street shouting something it took me a while to understand. He was calling, She won’t hurt you! She won’t hurt you! He drew abreast, out of breath, and began to explain his dog was always over-friendly, people got a fright, she wouldn’t hurt a hedgehog, she’s as gentle as milk. In Germany most milk is super-heat-treated longlife and tastes faintly of benzine so I take this with a bar of soap. But the two doggies were gambolling together merrily and the size of the big black hound was no way her fault.
“She’s 13 years old,” he explained. Garrulous. My partner was looking at the dog closely, then at the man. “Did she… didn’t she used to live on such and such street? Over by the park.” Yes, said the guy, she belonged to someone else then. “Yes… Punker dog.” Well, he said modestly: not exactly a punker dog but he had rescued her from this large co-op over by the markets… “This is Sheila,” he said, nudging her with his calf.
“Hello, Sheila,” we said. The man went on to describe some more about her and her gentle nature, how long he had had her. I was feeling tuckered out and my attention soon waned. As we parted he said, it was nice talking with you, and then called out something else which I answered, to my shame, with a fake laugh and a generalised kind of “yeah, right,” because his German was too quick for me and I couldn’t be bothered to figure out what it was he had said.
As we walked on past the florist with its three kinds of pine branches for sale in steel carts out front and its purple pots of heather, I asked, “What was it he was saying at the end?” My partner repeated it. “So was passiert nur selten in meinem Leben.” Such a thing happens only rarely in my life. That is, people are seldom so friendly to him and take the time to chat. I groaned and looked round. The man was, of course, gone, with his big goofy dog, back into the labyrinth of endless cold stony streets. How honest of him, how honourable. How kind and sweet and how little I’d deserved it. Because while he was remarking, like a good-hearted human, that a conversation – even so brief of a streetside conversation about dogs – was a rarity and how nice of us it was to talk with him, when he himself brought so much attentive curiosity, so much willingness to share his history and to lay people’s fears like rice to rest, I had been growing bored and wondering, how much longer do we have to chat with this fellow and his dog, my back is aching, I just want to go home. Now I wish I had heard him and had answered properly. Had given him a hug. Had said, Yes, it’s true: my friend, we are all lonely at heart.
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you are like a fresh cranberry
God, I am so in love right now. Partly because of food and partly because of language.
We decided I needed to really touch down in Germany, not to be always looking back over my shoulder at sunstruck Queensland. We went for a long walk, through the marshy parks where the back of every sign has stickers and the benches are scribbled over and the leaves already bearing along their spines the shadow of ice that feathered into them in the long night. We went out for breakfast, late enough that it could be called lunch. My partner had tagliatelle but I had a big plate of Deutschness: ragout of wild venison, which I had never tried before, and bread dumplings, which I adore. And dazu einen kleinen Schnapps. To get the heart started.
They pack down good German bread into a kind of loaf and slice it, and sop it in gravy. It’s so good. Venison it turns out tastes not unlike kangaroo. My second schnapps set everything on fire, the flavours, the light, the two men talking in English at another table, the awful U2 covers, the scenery almost sunlit outside. My plate was decorated with a fan of fresh sliced pear and a few bright red berries. I tasted these, liking their tartness. They have a tough, wrinkling red skin. I said, surprised, “I’ve never eaten a fresh cranberry before, in all my life.” My companion stroked the crook of his finger down the side of my face. “You are like a fresh cranberry,” he said.
Then, gazing out the big picture windows as I ran my finger round the edge of my white plate and licked off the last of the sauce, he said, musingly, “You know, I can see really why you have such a big culture shock. People here are kind of sloppy. They look poor. They look a bit desperate. Whereas in Brisbane, really everyone is so very well-broomed.” I smiled at my polished white plate. Then we came home across the tiled streets that have been swept clean of their autumbled leaves and when we reached our minute apartment I said, You build the rest of the bed. I’ll just write.
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when nothing really mattress
Being back has been all too much. My body is toiling through an endless misery of sudden change and dark culture shock. And it feels like during the four days I have been travelling underwater, through endless airports and then a change of climate, into dark short days and misty frozen nights, the Western world has caught fire at both ends – America seems to have exploded in all of its underlying injustices and Australia has now from what I can gather officially turned its back on the Refugee Convention of which we were originally one of the instigators. Berlin is overwhelming and dirty and livid with struggle and grime. The two of us have been sleeping, incessantly, on a narrow mattress which requires everybody to sleep on their sides and all turn at once. At intervals we get up and stumble about in the cold, following the dog whose yipping almost split my ears when we first picked him up. My partner got on eBay and looked up mattresses. He has bought a decent, little-used bed for a price we can afford. The guy is about to go away for the week up to Cologne. Oh god, seven more nights balanced on our sides. “Well,” said the mattress owner, “why don’t I leave the key to my apartment down in the garden house and you can pick it up and come take the mattress away.” “Okay…” “Just take the mattress,” he said cheerfully, “try not to take any of the other stuff.” Some people really rock.
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alles ganz frisch
No Murdoch press and the sun has come out! How much fresher can Germany get. We have eaten a breakfast of thinly sliced things rolled on platters served with other, slightly more thickly sliced dark and chewy breads. My companion sinks into his first cup of filter coffee with condensed milk, “Aaahhh.” The familiar is sweet. He makes me smell its unmistakeable scent but I hand it back, unimpressed: “That is not the coffee to make me forget my vow.”
Instead of The Australian and The Courier-Mail, with their perpetual racist beat-ups and photos of women murdered by their husbands who are described invariably as “decent blokes” who simply “got pushed too far” (by the serially battered victim, presumably), instead of a cover photo of some actor who happens to have dark hair and “swarthy” skin staged in an “ISIS” pose like some deranged hip hop artist, there are four pages of literature and art events with listings – in the plural – each day of readings and book signings. Some are in bookshops I recognise, one is in the genteelly decaying place round the corner where in the week I was first in Berlin alone I took my own book and asked would they sell it. They did. Its sole purchaser was a tall beautiful man whom I approached as he was turning over novels in the English language section, saying, “You should read this one, I wrote it.” “Alright,” he said, and bought it. That man was a bookshop and cafe owner in gorgeous Copenhagen and is now one of my dearest friends. He told me, before I ever thought to visit, his little shop sells “three of my favourite things – coffee, books, and records.”
Much though I applaud the ferocious independence and gall of the newly established Saturday Paper back home, it feels wonderfully civilized to have a wide choice of newspapers all run by different owners and all presenting a variety of views. The Tagesspiegel, “mirror of the day”, has a long, two-page article titled “Wie Besser Helfen.” How you can better help: it details the “lonely elderly neighbour,” the “fallen person selling Motz” (a homelessness fundraiser similar to the Big Issue), the “prostituted girl”, and the “belaestigtes Maedchen” – I don’t know the word and wonder what kind of needing-help girl this could be: my partner, in labouring to describe it to me, reveals that he has heard the recently much-used word “cat-calling” as “scat-calling.” I want to go out into the streets of Berlin and feel the frigid sun on my face and get scat-called by traffic that stops and starts like a jazz composition on the right-hand side of the road. I want never to hear the name Rupert Murdoch or Tony Abbott again. I read the stories of “alcoholic apprentices” and lonely elderly neighbours, followed by short, pragmatic paragraphs contributed by people who know how best to offer help – social workers, for example – and I think how a country’s press can shape its social life. My partner reads out an article on an American novelist we met at the University of Queensland, who dropped his head when I asked a question from the audience and tore in a deep breath when I mentioned how Australia, “to our shame, leads the world in child suicide rates among Indigenous young people.” Last night we passed a synagogue with a police officer standing outside stamping in the cold, he had a little hut with Polizei written on it. Every Jewish gathering place in Germany is thus guarded, my partner says, and has been since 1949, “because we are guilty for a thousand years.” I suggest to him that there have been times when a German police guard would, to a Jew, not be very comforting. Like the escort offered in my homeland to its Indigenous people whenever they are picked up for not paying a fine, or for being drunk: a one-way train that leads to nowhere but the ironic and ferocious hell whose gates are tiled with good and insufferably pious intentions. The Murderochracy.
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crop of the air
I got up in the middle of the night and went over to the window. It wasn’t the middle of the night, it was half-past five in the afternoon, I had slept from nine til five because right now sleep is my job. You can’t tell because it’s dark already, but not quite. It never gets quite dark, there is always as I noticed in England years before this the glow on the horizon of the next town; the lights infect the dark and it feels like it’s mutual, in wintertime it never gets quite fully light, really, either.
Half-awake I scrabbled at the curtains a bit. He said: What are you doing? I fell back. I said: I thought I should get up and close these curtains properly, I thought, in the morning a bright shaft of light is going to come through that gap and wake me up. But I realised I was wrong. Mm, he said, it won’t get light til late, maybe 8 o’clock. And, I said, it’s not going to get bright at all. No, he said ruefully, and we went back down into the chambers of sleep, the lost city of all those who are dead to the world.
A lit sign at Abu Dhabi airport said, Last Chance to Buy. To me this had a kind of ectopian ring, if ectopia can be the reverse of utopian. Beside the sign were many golden products ranked in serried rows. Bottles of perfume, bottles of booze. Last year when I was there they had an aqua-coloured lightbox showing the wistful face of a child gazing out of her window and the text said, At any one moment there are 450,000 people in the air. That image of the city of souls who have left the earth yet plan to return, and the image jetlag plants in me of half the world sleeping in their bed-tombs under the water, as the sun splashes its giant curves up and down the round walls of Earth and drags them on, made me think again about how air travel feels like being away at sea. I guess it doesn’t last as long. But the feeling of being returned safely to dry ground is just as dull and amazing, just as blessed. The dangers are the same: you could fall overboard and be eaten, you are out of your element, you could drown. I suppose you really wouldn’t get eaten in midair but you could drown in the air, gasping for ground like a fish drawn against its fire of will onto the deck, you would fall and keep falling and take many miles to die.
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Abu Dubai
Abu Dhabi airport. The altered reality of long haul travel is hard to convey. It does feel like we are hauling something, up from under the water. My hearing is dimmed and my sense of humour sharpened. When the lights came on for our last landing my companion pulled a blanket over his head in despair and I laughed at him until my eyes ran and stomach ached. It is always such a joy to survive air travel. The man sitting behind me from Singapore was floridly farty, a round Irishman whose gases escaped him in his sleep. I felt how I was unable to sleep and yet unwilling to waken, trying to stay upright to take little sips of air as close to the ceiling jets as possible, a turtle with its neck stretched out from underwater taking little sips of consciousness. Back at home the hammock which I made myself lie in every afternoon just to soak up the last of the heat and the sun is folded and packed away. On the morning of our departure, some six or seven weeks ago now it feels like, I made everything ready and went down to lie in it, cuddling my pillow, closing my eyes. Every stir of the local breeze was warm and feathery distinct on my skin. The leaves shifted. The light changed. The traffic pounded behind. The tree I was fastened to may not be there when we get back, someone has bethought themselves to maybe chop it down. I thanked it for all its leaves and its mangoes and shade. For giving a home to the butcher birds and possums. The tree spoke amongst itselves, as a friend of mine once said when I had coffee with him and he left me alone to go order: you just talk amongst yourselves. I thought that was hilarious. When our friend arrived at 9am I had almost fallen asleep, and her voice and my partner’s voice seemed to approach from a long way off, as voices right behind you will seem to do in a pressurised roaring cabin. We went upstairs and collected all our luggage together. I got into my travel clothes: scarlet and white onesie from Denmark, for ease of lolling, and giant black zippered biker boots, trying to shave five kilos off my bulging luggage. I’m always carrying too much weight in aircraft because books and journals are heavy. Oh my god, I said: I look like Santa Claus off duty. My partner said, you look like a rock star. At the airport I caught a glimpse of myself in the long glass doors and said, Hey! I look like a rock star! Then a jolly fellow in his sixties came up laughing to ask, Are you here to bring me all my Christmas presents? Oh, ho ho ho. On the plane we folded and refolded our four metres of limbs ingeniously and repeatedly, trying to get comfortable. At each airport we stumble out and cover the concourses. If I described how loud the announcements are here in this giant waiting room filled with black leatherette seats, no one would believe me. They fill the room like black sun. Everything trembles, or maybe that’s just me. My Santa suit zips right up to the crest of the head, so if I cannot stand the strain of being in public for so long continuously I can just close it up and disappear. But when finally a horizontal surface presented itself just now, I just lay down and pulled my hair over my face for a scarf, and slept almost at once.
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state of sunshone
Queensland. The Sunshine State. Skin Cancer Capital of the World. Spending as much time in the hammock under the trees as I can possibly afford, trying to absorb enough warmth and light and birdsong to slingshot me over the sudden cliff face of winter. A friend writes from Berlin: it is near zero. And I read this in all kinds of symbolist ways. Meanwhile another friend over there has made a grim art project: photos of Berlin skies and of London, side by side: who has the most sunlight? In Berlin they measure the hours of sunshine, in winter, and announce it as part of the weather report: when I was living there, in January there were 22 hours of sunshine for the month. That’s right, the month. We didn’t crawl into Spring until early May, at which time I spoke to my Mum on the phone. “It’s 20 degrees!” I told her, excitedly. I had had to go buy new, lighter socks and scour the second hand shops for a t-shirt. “Oh, I know,” said Mum, “it’s only been 21 here. We’ve had the heater on.”
How I pored over the Queensland complaints sprouting all over Facebook. “Ooh it’s chilly!” “Had to wear my cardigan on the bus to work this morning.” How I longed to move back and become one of those Queenslanders who complains when they have to put socks on. How I quail before the bellowing fire in my lungs that comes of walking on the stone streets of an iron nation steeping in ice for three-quarters of the year.
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the lascivicious wink
So it’s late afternoon and the storm has passed, the light has begun to pearl. I’ve ducked into the local store to buy tomatoes and am issuing barefoot out of their sliding doors and down their concrete steps under the low, spreading tree. There is a man standing across the road behind me but I don’t see him because my face is lifted to the changing sky, feeling the colours dissolve down like layers of espresso and frothed milk blending slidingly together down the inside of a glass. It’s been such a hard week, it’s such a beautiful day. At first the crowing, acquisitive wolf whistle that issues from the man standing behind me (or lounging) does not attract my attention because it’s not about me, it’s about something else, my mind is flowing like a river of milk clunking with thoughts and I am active, relaxed, upright, happy, and at peace.
The whistle comes again, this time with an insistent edge. I feel myself stiffen. My walk loses its swing, a little. I am self-conscious. The street apart from me and, I now realize, him, is empty and there is no traffic. I can hear the traffic sliding round the other side of the hill but too noisy and too far away to hear a person who needed help, if anyone did need help. His second whistle getting no appreciable response he calls out, “Oi!” because it’s not acceptable to him that I might direct my own attention and be mistress of my own thoughts, that my world is mine and not his to command, that I am not interested in seeing his face or his leer or his gesture that I could otherwise add to my repertoire – my quiver – of lascivious and demeaning gestures. His inability to accept, after two failed attempts, that a passing stranger has no interest in his sexual assessment of her all of a sudden gels in my mind and I realize what the worst thing is. It’s not the veiled possibility of attack, though sometimes a woman finds that is worse than anything the rest of us imagine. It’s not the shattering of the bold, beautiful, skyblown and well-earned day and these few moments in between working at my desk and cooking dinner when I can think about whatever I please.
It’s that moments ago I had escaped the ever-mirrored hall of minor torment that is girls’ guide to the universe. I’d slipped the leash. From birth I’ve been, like almost every girl, taught that my expression and the way I stand and how I sit – with knees together! at all times! yet mocked for pigeon toes – are subject to the constant and perpetual raillery of everyone outside me: they have authority over my appearance, it is not mine, it’s theirs, for them, to please. And somehow slipping out of the house preoccupied with my thoughts and not stopping to change my worn old tank top and stretched-out skirt, somehow browsing over the bags of round tomatoes and lifting them to catch the scent and emerging into the late afternoon with that soft red weight hanging in my hand I had momentarily forgotten, I had reached the open sea, I was making for the islands and I’d lost my sense of the lifelong liability of my gender.
They say some cultures – not ours, oh, of course not – have household-sized kings, many little Mussolinis. Drug kingpins and pimps are local emperors. Each man is entitled, if this be what he chose, to run the harem of his immediate neighbourhood. This man, to use the term (yet again) very loosely, is afraid of my independence and feels he has to broach it. What spurs him is not my luscious, unconscious walk nor my legs nor the way some sun or streetlight caught my hair nor how my skirt swings. It is that I sashayed past in my womanhood and failed to notice him, to put down my tomatoes and acknowledge his mandom. The little kingdom of him.
Once I’d not heard him, or ignored him, I had to be brought to heel. He needed to emphasise and impose his own right to impose a faint sexual threat, by which a man says to a stranger: You, girl. It’s you I choose. I’d like to do this and this to you and it’s immaterial to me how you consent to the idea of it, how you consent to it. As the distance between us sags and increases what’s bothering me is the thought policing. His outrage that I didn’t respond. His insistence on his right to control. He wanted to intrude himself onto my thoughts: a physically masculine impulse. And what injures me, only slightly and for the thousandth time, is the occupation of this sweet space I’m living in, which is full to the brim already with adventure, not all of it easy and fresh and rewarding, not all of it kind. It’s this intrusion by the flimsy failing fascism of some random stranger who strokes me with his stalk eyes as I go: but who will never, however powerful the zoom on his X-ray specs, ever really see me.
I turn the corner and arrogance, or rather privacy, reasserts itself and I start to notice the cupped corns held out by a neighbour’s mown bushes. I notice the soft crisping carpet of green leaves and blossom that has been cast down by the storm. I think: nor will he ever, surely, truly see himself. Nor see the sky for what it is. Nor feel the breeze landing cleanly on the naked parts of his skin. Nor feel the pale green of these undersides. The rustle of fresh joy in the trees and underfoot that announced the storm has now passed and all of us here have, as they say in German, overlived it.