Wild Sovereign Development Site

Category: kindness of strangers

  • of wheels & wings

    Today a day of wheels and wings. On the high street I set myself an errand, which failed, as the Turkish woman who repairs garments has locked her shop and flown south for the summer, into a tide of incoming birds. Her storefront was locked like a little dark cage. On the street out front two big bikes sputtered and racked, their owners shouting conversation back and forth as they waited for the light to change.

    Who among us is not waiting on a change in the light? A small boy, not too small, maybe eight or nine, was making his way down the pavement. He stopped and gazed at these beasts, two big throbbing machines, the riders almost supine in that cock-cocking slouch. Spine relaxed to a slump, pelvis tilt: this was manhood. These were Harleys, or whatever other bike there is that renders that cocooned helplessness. Hands up curved like a child riding papa’s back and peering over. The boy made a thumbs-up and grinned. They didn’t see him. I was walking behind and swept up my own arm to jab downwards. Look, I showed them, swooping the air above his head like a homie. This boy here, needing your manhood. The nearer one saw him and smiled, cracking a face almost paisleyed in swirling tattoos. The boy called out something. Made a fresh thumbs-up and offered it. “Was?” the biker yelled: whut? I left them talking – masculine, back and forth across a several arms-length’s distance, in roars, through the machinery of their own engine noise – I was grinning. They seemed to me all somehow boyish, and sweet.

    Very late alone I had lunch under the trees. The water beckoned with deceitful gleams, fish-whiffy at close-up. Every passing car was loud on the cobbles, which make tyres sound flabby as though hopelessly flat. On the pavement a woman passed wheeling a bicycle, sailing under steam, under her own steam. Her long brown hair tangling behind her. A small, queenly child perched on the bicycle seat. The child had clots of molasses-coloured dreads in a long ponytail; she rode her mother’s bicycle as though it were a steed, her beauty an admonition on us all. The sister came pedalling behind, dreaming atop her own bike as her little feet propelled it forward slowly. The slow, stately pace and their undisplaying femininity gave the family a processional quality.

    Overhead, the summer trees flickered. In three months all these trees will be bare, I suppose. Late at night I’ve been out walking and heard the trees start up the breezes as though it were old spirits of the place who pass. The breeze travels high off the ground, in the canopy. The branches rustle and are silent again, shifting the dark. In the old world, I have heard, people knew how to make news travel from tree to tree. We have forgotten our every enchantment. I think we seem to long for that. The flickering fireside of a computer or gather-round television. The mercury of incessant palm-warming phones, that promised to free us and have enslaved. As I was frowning across the road into this thought, a fellow rode past on his ridiculous bicycle, wearing a tiny porkpie hat. His bike had tiny wheels and a tiny frame. Pedalling like a clown, his knees under his chin, he too stared ferociously ahead. But he looked up and caught my eye and slowly, piercingly sweetly smiled, and I smiled back and thought: this changes everything.

    On the tabletop a glossy orange ladybird made its way trundlingly by. Ladybird, here: let me give you a lift, I thought, deceitfully, meaning here ladybird… give me a lift. I put out my finger flat to her, hoping she would launch herself off me and fly away so I could launch on her a wish. She climbed me and kept climbing, clear along my finger and up onto the back of the hand. Scaling the knobbly writer bones on my wrist she came up softly through the hairs on my speckled forearm. Softly, softly, all the way to the shoulder she came. I put up my hand, patting: Where have you gone. She fell out of my hair, locked in the jaws of a ferocious millipede. He was black, glossy, and writhing, he had her pegged by the petticoat of her wings. As I said aloud, Oh, no! and began to try and separate them I was aware of a prejudiced loyalty, stemming not just from the delicate, brief intimacy shared with the beetle but also her cute, round prettiness, from a human-projecting point of view. He was hungry too but I had no thought for him: even the pronouns I assigned seemed to me a kind of self-adoration disguised as compassion. It seemed like he was consuming her in front of my eyes. I put my thumbnail in between them. That’s how he died, because I accidentally separated his head from his body, a much larger brute, crude and intrusive. His body curled and stilled. The bird hobbled away, her skirts awry. The glossy orange wing case folded neatly and defensively whole but one sheer inner wing trailed long and ruffled behind her. I suppose this creature now will starve and will die a painful death, where she might have been eaten at once. I got up and walked home through the jolting stream of pedestrian-sized traffic, the bike trailers towing kids home from kindergarten, children loose and relaxed in their own inner worlds, gazing, musing, one little boy holding a flapping cut-out drawing in front of his face and singing sleepily as in a dream. I craved their size and their sense of safety. I envied their wheels and their wings.

  • colourful, gleaming, a fresh crate of stairwell

    I walked home at last through the markets and by the time I got to the street door of my new home I was struggling with parcels, camera because things kept flinging themselves at me in their peculiar beauty and a heavy bag of books from the discount box outside a wonderful bookshop I’ve wanted to step into for ages, and I had. At the door I met this man who was one of those so beautifully made, sculpted, just beautiful men built like manhood, his arms bare and brown and his black hair well cut but not obsessively groomed and his shoulders taut as he held at chest height a wooden crate of market vegetables, colourful, gleaming. You know how your breath kind of stops. He reached over me as I leaned my bicycle and fumbled the key and just – pushed – the heavy Haustür open for me, slid past, stood at ease with his lovely boot blocking the door from slamming on me. I said thank you and cambumbled myself and bike and packages inside. At the stairwell we bottlenecked and he was behind me as I hoisted up the bike and looped my book bag over one arm and climbed the wide stairs, measuring the treads with his comfortable, go for miles fit and perfect pace. I knew that he had seen my awkwardness and would be used to it and would take it as his tribute. As we both turned at the landing, me and my bicycle with him and his fruit behind me, he said, “Schönes Rad!” Lovely bicycle. Mine is on the first floor and by the time I’d worked out what he’d said (“He spoke to me!”) we were at my door. The suggestiveness of doorways flickered through my mind as rapidly as a fish and I fumbled my key and said, “Ja. Stimmt.” Yes: true. And he smiled and I smiled and he went on up the stairs and knocked at my upstairs neighbours and beauty is an accursed gift, I remember the luminous days of my own moon when people would stop me or cross the street to tell me what they had noticed about my body, my face. Your hair, your feet, the way your hand pushes back the door: inside this world of collapsed longings which fan out into every promenade and every boulevard you enter and entice and somehow enlist people, the whole world, in your sharedness, even when you are not thinking of it and when you are mournful or hurrying or bored: that is the fanfare beauty gives to our everyday, like a flag streaming across the peerless sky that gives weight to its innocent unmeaning blue and makes it for a moment everything and perfect.

  • sugar no sugar

    Pleased as Punch, in that resinous phrase, that in my first days in Spain I worked out how to say, spelling notwithstanding, “Cafe descafinado con leche, por favor – cafe machinata – muy calliente, y con miele.” This is my strenous coffee order, what Melbourne baristas sneeringly call “the why bother” – in order to convey ‘honey’ I first had to mime little fluttering motions with my elbows trapped by my sides, saying repeatedly ‘azucar, non azucar’ (sugar, not sugar)… When I finally spotted a squeezer of honey on the shelf and pointed to it, the assembled staff turned to each other and started mimicking my mime, going, “Ahhhh, *miele*…”

    I love languages but know none apart from German, decayed Bahasa Indonesia, and some shreds of truly pathetic French. But Spanish is glorious. I learned yesterday from some friends who run a bookshop that ‘vacuum cleaner’ is, in English translation, ‘the aspirator’ – that which inhales everything. But let’s not get too carried away – to use that other, far less celebratory phrase: as far as I’m concerned, Nature abhors a vacuum. And I’m with Nature.

  • I’m in trains

    I came clattering down the stairs to find the train already humming, its destination sign was flashing which means departure imminent. I franked the ticket and ran. The train was right down the far end of the platform. As I came pelting towards the front carriage the doors closed and it began to move. I could see the driver sitting gazing at me from his little cubicle. I said, in English, “You’re kidding, right?” and blew him a sarcastic kiss. And guess what he pulled up again, just ahead, and opened the long row of doors for me. Oh! I said in German, “O! Das war lieb!” He couldn’t hear me because the window was closed. I laid my hand on my heart to thank him. As I climbed in the other passengers looked up, startled, and one man said knowingly, “Ah! Extra Service!”

    Another time I watched as a lumbering skinhead with terrifying facial tattoos made his way slowly down the cabin to where an older man sat slumped in his sleep, all alone. Everybody tensed up as the skinhead said to him, “Hey!” I was wondering should I go up and intervene. His next words were, “Hey! Du! Alles ok? Geht’s dir schlecht?” Hey, you. Everything ok? Aren’t you feeling well? He touched the sleeping man on his shoulder and shook him gently. The man muttered, he was alive, everybody’s ok, the sun is shining.

    Two years back when I was living in Friedrichshain I used to ride back and forth on the highline between my house and my beloved’s. The sensation of speeding among the treetops along an invisible rail was one that always cheered me. The red medieval bridge that linked our suburbs was built in Victorian times: the train zips along its brick turrets and either side down below there is the river. I glanced up from my writing to see an older man gazing with an expression of indulgent fondness, as though I were his granddaughter. “Schöne Schrift,” he offered: lovely handwriting. “Danke!” I said, and we both smiled and I went back to my compelling page. At the end of the ride I clipped up my pen, closed the page, gathered my gear and as I got up to leave he was nodding and nodding. “Alles schön aufgeschrieben,” everything written up nicely, he said, with as much satisfaction in his voice as though he had written something of his own.

    Then yesterday I started to want to write something just as I left the house. All down the street I was towing it like a balloon, bobbing under the trees that have appeared rather suddenly, like umbrellas opening, in the short week we were away in the countryside. Someone has been decorating the city with Spring. I jogged down the stairs and sat down, and pulled out my pen. When the train arrived I got on it and kept writing. You know that intent feeling when you daren’t look left or right, you must keep following the scent underwater with your nose until you find its home cave, that treasure. Just as I reached for my mountaintop – balloon, umbrella, cave – a large man standing nearby said, “Guten Morgen meine Damen und Herren, Ihre Fahrkarten, bitte.” Tickets, please. He went first to the woman on my right and I just pressed on, shaping a tide of sand across the page. The outer part of my mind was tensed waiting for the interrupt. That tiny spurt of rage interruption invariably brings to the writing tide. Matchflare underwater. Dimly I felt how he had moved past me – so cultured! – asking the people standing further up the carriage for their tickets. When I was done writing and had capped my pen and zipped my bag I saw him and his colleague gathering themselves at the doors and he didn’t even catch my eye, I had the ticket out to show him because I wanted him to know I wasn’t trying to evade justice and had played fair, they were chatting casually to each other and jumped out at their door and I jumped out at mine and though the staircase was clogged with drug dealers so aggressive they will actually stand in front of you to ask what do you want I felt high and unstoned and free, like the train that curves among the treetops, in this city which respects art and respects thought, in these people.

  • Olé au lait

    When I travel I am never alone because always there is the companionship of my shyness. This sometimes feels like a long shadow I drag over things (‘allo, scuse us, thank you, pardon me’) and sometimes like a large soft yielding mass I work my way through to reach people, to reach the surface: the world, spiky and free. Cities are terrorising for a shy person. At the same time I fall into this kind of trance of exploration and love where I can spend a whole day feeling my way up hills and round corners and scurrying joyously from one shadowed alcove to the next, under trees feeling the spent light curl up inside itself and sleep on its own downy belly, like so many dormice, striking out into the sunlight and forcing myself – by dint of a good hard short talking-to, you can do it c’mon just do it, to stride across the diagonal length of the largest square in Spain for example where hundreds of people in throngs stand about pointing their implements at the view (stonemasonry, cafes rooved with white umbrellas, and the freemasonry of each other). Most mornings it takes some courage to leave the sanctuary of my room. I walk into the breakfast bar. People in Germany and Spain seem to greet each other in such situations, in Australia that would be only me. I gather my comestibles: yoghurt, tea, fruit. I put the room key in my pocket and step out into the day.

    In Madrid the days are blue and whole. The sky runs freely with very often no clouds of vapour dissolved in it. From the vantage point of the ancient city you can see mountains, towns, all of Spain. Coming on this vista unexpectedly down a narrow alleyway between the little high houses I catch my breath and start to cry. It’s wonderful, it’s beautiful, it’s reached through an endless twisting byway: like the past.

    On my second day I fell into a little bar and cafe called the Cafe Olé. As well as cafe au lait they serve spirits, wines, beers, and a raft of different kinds of open-faced sandwiches including one variety loaded with solid chunks of solid Spanish omelette, tortilla. It’s almost Germanic, that one: potatoes on bread. The lady who cooks brings out tray after tray and people wander in out of the sunlight and order, familiarly, stand there and eat. I discovered the sweetest, lightest pastry on earth. I went back another day and had it again: the coffee and the pastry cost two euros. The third time I ate it I discovered it is made from a transverse slice of baguette soaked in egg and milk, what on an English menu we would call French toast: a babyish kind of comfort food with just the right amount of sugar through it. The bread dissolves into light, fruity custard. They serve it with knife and fork. I was so happy there, eating my torrija and soaking up the atmosphere like bread sucks milk, the soft feeling of being included.

    Later in my long visit I found other places where I felt at home. The city itself felt welcoming, ancient, its splendour laid open and well-worn. Finding oneself tripping down a turning side street with some enticing view hovering at its end, finding oneself saying out loud without really intending to, “I just – feel – so happy here!” You know the affinity with places. I noticed the needling cypress trees and their green dark clots; the way they seem to sift the wind and sough it into a cradle song that reminds me of islands, distant and far-offshore islands, and afternoons spent on my own as I wandered the hillsides of my grandfather’s old farm and laid my face reverently, familiarly on the warm stones with their mottled discolouring like an old lace badly stored, greenish purplish blueish white grey colonies. And mosses, the velvet of ancient things and my favourite plant. It all feels so personal. Like the fold-down table off the back of a stranger’s seat on the airplane I seem to have been boarding and reboarding every month or two since I was a baby. That private space unseen in the public glass, the back of the mirror, inside of the knee. The pinkish smell of my own fingertips. The plants that grow in between stones.

    A lady who runs a shop in a large, chill, drafty barn halfway up a steep hill with an unfamiliar flag hung out the front told me, in labouring English far better than my almost-nothing Spanish – español silencio, the Spanish of silence – these things are from Malawi and she visits every year, they are running their own school in this community and the school children and their families make these products – apart from those over there (her white arm waving, a hanger of bead necklaces and assorted things), “Those are from French.” “French?” I said, “so, a colony?” Yes, she said, “things of my French.” Looking closer I could see of course she meant second-hand, these were things friends had donated: a handbag with the tag still on, an ornate belt, a necklace of shells. “This,” she said, “I make myself. In my terraza,” the courtyard of her home. It was a cake of clay soap which she wrapped for me in newspaper, explaining, “Is very good for the soft sky.” For the sky. “My sky,” she showed me, stroking the belly of her forearm invitingly, “very soft, very soft.”

    The smell of Malawi is like the smell of Java where I grew into my childhood and where I have never been back. The Java that I long for doesn’t exist anymore, the outer islands have been logged, the mountains hollowed for high rise and bridges, everything ruined and mined. We won’t talk about that. I went back afterwards to the Cafe Olé and sat there gazing and writing and that is where I gradually came to terms with the place and its strangeness and my strange attraction to it; the sense of knowing and belonging that I also found in old Lissabon, with its needled cypress trees, its castled mountain tops; its alleyways, its tiny, remote, yet intimate vistas. I gave the bar tender my careful request in Spanish, marshalling my few dozen words: “por favor,” “cafe machinata,” “decafinado,” “miel.” To order a pastry I could only say, pan bread and azúcar sugar: sweet bread por favor. All I can do in Spanish is eat. “Where are you from?” he asked. “Australia.” “Ah,” he said. “When somebody come in… who is friendly… open-minded, like you: open heart: they are always Australia. Or… Irish.” I smiled at my hands. He said, shrugging, “To us… you look English.”

    In a flurry of Spanish he turned to the older man sitting at the bar, refilling his glass of some creamy liqueur. “Something, something, Australian,” he said and I tried hard to eavesdrop. The one or two words one gleans in a spume of an almost entirely new foreign tongue feel like shells vouchsafed by the sea: there is so much more, beauty, so colourful and alive, in the rolling deeps under this enveloping foam. The bar guy pointed at me, explaining something. They both nodded, their gazes resting on me as I ate. “Cafe delicioso,” I ventured, and he smiled: all warmth, no malice, free.

    We sat in silence in the quiet cafe, which is dim and all clad in dark wood. Dusty things stand on the higher shelves above the rows of glinting liqueurs. Right up top is a wooden matador, proudly erect in his faded scarlet togs and with one hand rearing up almost to the yellowed ceiling. We sit like birds under the shelter of his masculine wings. The tomatoes on the sandwiches are very red, no white in them, their seeds a dark greenish orange and filling the gleaming segments like jam. I stroke the soft sky on my arms. A beautiful woman comes in, glamour clinging to her like light from the street. She reminds me of Jennifer Lopez, only older. Casting off her garments and bags she sits down on the stool next to mine. After a long long time I put my hand on her forearm like a moth. “Bella,” I tell her, probably in Italian: “muy bella.” I am? she asks, pressing her hand to her breastbone. “Si.” And she says, something something, your eyes: showing me by opening her own very wide and indicating me from one eye across to another. Very… something, much something else. I would love to know what the beautiful Spanish lady said about my eyes. But I can’t understand and say thank you, and we lapse into silence, the two men also, the bullfighter magnificent and motionless above us standing guard over the ages: he is holding up the ceiling, roof, the whole soft sky with only one hand and the cargo carved modestly in front of his matador pantaloons seems to my shy glance so imposing from below it is as though we are all drinking coffee in the shelter of its fruitful shade.

  • desperate for literature

    At ten o’clock at night I went out walking round the curve of the road under bright green trees lit from the lamps, everything beautiful, hot and radiant. A bookshop was open, or so I thought. When I pushed on the door two guys came running out from the rush-bottomed chairs where they’d been chatting. “Oh, sorry,” I said, “you look as if you’ve just closed, actually.” “No, no, come in, come in.” The books were in English down one wall and Spanish on the other, stacked on shelves which started out polished and neat and then wound up built from raw old wood and bricks. A beautiful woman came out from some back room and told me, “The books up the back are just as good as the books up the front here, keep looking.” They sat down and continued their chat. “What was the name of the girl in To Kill a Mockingbird? Cass?” “Was it Cass?”

    I said, “I know people in Hollywood have named babies after her, so if we could just think of the right baby…” “Scout!” said the man with the beard who had Google in his hand. We talked for a moment about the new novel and how there is some concern Harper Lee may have been… persuaded into finally publishing it. “It’s about Scout’s life as an adult,” said the other guy, an American. A small crowd of people came in at the narrow front door. One said, I think, this reminded him of Shakespeare and Co in Paris, and the English man said pointing to his partner, whose name was Charlotte, “That’s where we worked! Up until three days ago!” Two hours earlier he and Charlotte had taken over this tiny store, which is called Desperate Literature, from their American friend, whose name is Cory. “So we’ve met!” said Charlotte, a gorgeous woman who acts as though being beautiful gives her no special status. The little man who had mentioned Shakespeare and Co gave a cry. “We’ve met! So you’ve patted my book!” “I’ve patted your book!” she said. “Wait – what book was it.” Without hesitation he named the book everybody buys when they visit Shakespeare and Co in Paris. “The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas.” “That was you!” she cried. I was out the back laughing. The timing was so wonderful, the sense of willing group improvisation that is true conversation, as at the loveliest dinner parties. Charlotte was jubilant that they’d sold a copy of Wisława Szymborska (to me) on their first night and her partner Terry introduced himself and told me, as he had told the Paris customers, “We are having a big party here on Thursday night, come by.” He looked around the tiny, crowded rooms. “Well – a little party.”

     

  • king of little Thailand

    Unable to stomach any more Spanish food I went out and found a tiny Thai place. It was up a narrow staircase from the paved street where people wander in the evening in great numbers; the combination of Thai intricacy with Spanish kitsch in the decor was eye-watering. The girl tried to seat me at a little table under a limeskin-green wall but I asked her: can’t I please sit and look out? “This table is reserved,” she said, indicating the last little window seat. The owner came out and asked her what was going on. He was a dapper Thai gentleman who reminded me of the portrait of the King above the bar. He came over and swept the chair back invitingly, ushering me in and then jamming the table back further into the alcove, saying ruefully, “For Thai people,” as I worked my legs in under it. “Or,” I said, “Spanish people.” “Yes…” opening a large menu in front of me. I sat eating my dinner all alone and gazing down into the street where people towed their children, and several tall black men down either side of the pedestrian zone were running an illegal market, holding their stalls (spread on canvas) by four guy ropes, one at each corner, and all of them looking around constantly, alert. There seems to also be a trade in contraband recycled cardboard; I saw one man towing a giant carton by a rope like a small boy playing battleships come speeding down the alleyway and hastily harvest the best, cleanest folded boxes from the large pile all the local shops had planted out under the streetlamp; without waste of time he towed his bounty away. Not five minutes later another man pulled up diagonally across the walkway in a dirty white unmarked van and jumping out threw his back door open; looking about him nervously he stashed several large cartons of folded boxes into the back of his truck and then drove away, still looking anxiously all around. The restaurant owner came back to ask would I like a “cocktail” “of the house”, “it is a kind of Baileys,” he said, in English, “so you digest.” Thank you, I said, I would. And when he came back with the bill (I think it’s “la quinta, por favore,”) I used the formulation taught me by eavesdropping on Germans in cafes in Berlin: “Just give me fifteen back, please.” As he turned to go I touched his arm as lightly as I could. He could have made four times the money on my table had he given it to a group. “You are a very cultured person,” I said, “thank you for your hospitality. I appreciate it.” “Oh,” he said, “oh!” and touched his open hand over his heart. I grabbed my bag and ran away shyly and at the top of the staircase he caught my eye as a large group of Germans came in and his hand went again unconsciously over his heart.

  • madre de dios

    Following a little family down the long walkways of Terminal One to reach Terminal Two and the mouth of the subway, I kept seeing how the little girl held tight to her mother’s hand and how the little boy held his father’s. She was scarved and wore a baby close against her chest. On the other side of the glass stood a queue of twenty-five-year-olds waiting to board our flight back to Berlin.

    The Metro ticketing machine offered little flags: press which language you want. I put “Spanish,” because I am stubborn. The trains are suffocatingly heated. People kept climbing on board to beg or to busk. The four men from the Andes with their squat amp and teensy guitars, held high on their chests the way you’d nurse a machine gun or maybe a baby; people looked annoyed at the racket but I gave them some money thinking, these guys are only here at all because Spain built ships, and crossed all the way the world and found their Country, and stole millions and killed millions. Now with their long obsidian hair and their colourful backpacks and their Pan flutes they are back bringing a little music into everyone’s commute: an unfair and gracious exchange.

    A man whose face has been eroded by what looks like an acid attack came holding out his two stumps of hands palm upwards, smiling and wheedling. A man whose right foot is crushed and slanted made his way painfully down the carriage, telling his story and asking… for bread, there was a young man beautifully upright in his wheelchair and begging and a Caribbean man playing joyous reggae and all of this happened in between airport and town.

    I dragged my suitcase and changed trains twice. The driver came out his side door when I climbed out at Manuel Becerra saying, something something something descapacitado… seeing my expression he gestured, unmistakeably, repeating himself very slowly: the disabled staircase (an emphatic sweep of one arm) is reached by dismounting on the other side of this train: and I looked, and sure enough the doors on both sides were open. “Gracias,” I told him, struggling with my suitcase and box of books back across the open carriage in which everybody stared, “Muchas gracias” – how amazing that he should care. In the next train a man gazed and gazed. Another man next to me was reading the National Geographic in Russian. I bought, very carefully, something to eat from the man running his glass-front stall, and he taught me a new word to add to my existing Spanish stock of two (“por” and “favore”). Something something some? “Non hablo espanol,” I hazarded, awkwardly. He said it again with gestures: “caliente?” Blowing on his pursed fingertips to show how it was hot. Oh, did I want it heated? “Por favore.” He went on, helpfully: “friore” (I think) means “cold.” “Muchas gracias.” It just amazes me how people living in an ancient city awash with lenses can be so welcoming and go out of their way to be kind to a person who clearly knows nothing of their country and speaks barely one word: god love them for that. So far Spanish people are wonderful. Though it also made me proud that I found my way using a photo I had taken off google maps in Berlin at 5am from the Metro stop to my hotel without asking help of anyone. It was raining and I arrived wet and splashy. At the corner across from some huge splendid palace a car swept past drenching me and another man in rainwater and we shrugged at each other, smiling, starting to laugh. The “caliente” man gave me a little receipt with my 2€ pastie and I picked up off his counter another receipt, left by another customer, which had been folded into a boat shape, or perhaps a hat; I slipped it into my pocket and will take it home – all the way home to Australia, if necessary.

  • cold but sweet

    Finally experienced the piercing joy of eating ice-cream in the freezing cold, I always used to wonder why people would do that. But tonight I walked into this swanky ice-cream bar where the guy had just taken all the plastic rims off the deep buckets, presumably to wash them, and he was puzzling over putting them back each in its right place. I said, “Do you just take them off sometimes and put them back all different, then, just to confuse people?” And he gave me his slow, shy smile. “…No,” he said, somewhat reluctantly. “No,” I said, fondly, “because that would be silly.” Only I think I said “weird” or “freaky” because I always think “komisch” is going to mean “comical” then I remember it doesn’t. He didn’t take it amiss, thank god. There is not enough room in a passing pleasantry to say, I didn’t mean that as a passive-aggressive attack, it just came out wrong because my German is faulty. He had a service-smile and then a shyer, boyhood smile which he gave out only sparingly, from under the shelf of his brows. That was the one I remembered and will carry, which slightly alters everything. We’re in this world together! Each of us, gazing out, going: Wow, far out. We exchanged a look which acknowledged this. So then he gave me my ice-cream cone wrapped in a serviette and I ate it walking home in the cold, cold wind.

  • by appearance

    A man in front of me got up from his bench and ambled towards the train. He was huge and had that loping, awkward walk of a boy who’s been called too big all of his life. I’d say 6’5″ or 6″. As we both sat down on opposite benches he pulled out a book and started to read. I was reading, too, in fact, hearteningly, several books appeared on that ride but the truth is I spent as much time stealing covert glances as concentrating on Mary Stuart’s court. This man was dressed in giant red sneakers, a sloppy, comfortable tracksuit, baseball cap. He was black. In America I imagine he’d have been in danger of being shot for the crime of Being Tall Whilst Black. The expression of gentleness on his face and the shy way he held his head, his utter concentration on the page, made me love him. The temptation to go up and say, Excuse me, you just have such a beautiful, gentle spirit I just wanted to say hello, was very strong. Only respect for his reading and his solitude prevented me interrupting him as I got off. And I didn’t want to make him speak out about himself in front of all those people when he was staying behind and riding further, and I was leaving: it seems aggressive, it would have made him conspicuous in a lifetime where clearly conspicuousness had been a burden. I would so have loved to know what he was reading.