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  • follow milk

    I learned a poetic new German word just now at the little health food shop. The man behind me had put just one item on the counter, a carton of Folgemilch. I asked him, “What is… follow milk?”

    “Well,” he began, and something about his tired, slightly harassed, but ever willing to be helpful expression and messy hair struck me with insight.

    “Is it… what you eat when you are done with drinking only milk?”

    I didn’t know how to say ‘breast milk’ let alone ‘solid food’ so I just said, only milk.

    “Exactly!” he said, and then used that pricelessly dear word Germans have for breastfeeding infants. “It’s for sucklings.”

    We both shifted our stuff along the counter as the person in front moved on.

    “So can you use it for other things, in general, like… I’m just having a beer as a followlunch?” I asked, hopefully.

    His brow clotted. “No. No, that is not right.”

    Learning German. It’s one-third flights of folk poetry, two-thirds ‘that is not right’ and ‘we simply don’t do it that way.’

  • a homemade flower festival

    A woman in my neighbourhood has put up little signs all round the flower gardens in our local park. Her signs are handwritten, but laminated.

    “INVITATION TO THE FLOWER FESTIVAL, JUNE 16. Yeah maybe ‘festival’ is somewhat high flown. But I will bake a cake and hand a slice of it to everyone who feels themselves somehow connected to these plants and who wants to come by. There have been so many lovely engagements and so much enabling mutual assistance taking place locally, I would really love to offer my friends an impression of it all. And in case we haven’t yet met, then this will provide us an opportunity.”

    She writes a smily face, in her own handwriting.

    “It would be practical, if youse (the informal German you) would bring something to sit on and some stuff that goes with cake eating and coffee drinking. I’ll be glad if you come along!”

    Flowerbeds in Berlin are always overgrown, because the city is broke and there’s no money to pay people in fluorescent vests to destroy our every Sunday with leafblowers. Nearby, even more overgrown and underkempt, a tiny meadow has evolved where consistent and assiduous neglect year after year has allowed all the native flowers and butterflies to come back.

    On the main road, when I reach it, a man with a ZZ Top beard has settled himself and his paunch next to my favourite seat outside the writing cafe. He turns the pages of his newspaper with noisy harrumphs. We exchange a few words. “I’m going inside to order,” I tell him, as Berliners do, “are you here a few more minutes?”

    The informal ‘you.’

    “Then would you mind keeping an eye on my stuff?”

    “Either that,” he says, “or I’ll be gone, with your little red rucksack,” and he laughs, and I laugh, as I’m heading inside where it is shady and the bartender on his stool is reading Camus, in French.

  • skeeter mattress

    I just sold my air mattress, late on a Saturday night, to a small, muscular, warm dude whose name is Ramon. He rang me an hour ago from my online classifieds ad and asked, how much longer are you up? He described what he wants to do with it – lie under the stars among the mosquitoes (“And the moon,” I reminded, insufferably helpful), at his garden house in its green garden.

    I told him why I can’t stand the sight of the thing and must sell. I bought it brand new for a terrible houseguest who tarnished my last birthday, 2017. She was mean and I had not guessed it. Now I want rid. “Ahh,” he said, breathing out very understandingly.

    So when he rang to say, “Ich bin da,” I am there, I snatched up the mattress deflated in its box with the sales docket sticky-taped to the side and said to my current, far nicer houseguest, “Omigod. Now I hafta run downstairs in bare foots and my father’s pyjamas, to meet this guy, unless I change.” He was flicking Tinder prospects on his phone and I had been dancing round the living room like a wild thing that is not a thing. Who is not a thing. We had got into a game of what songs do you truly really love only you wish you didn’t, they are embarrassing? I playde him Sex on Fire by Kings of Leon, whoever they are, dancing a hole in the floor and The Living Years by Mike and the Mechanics. “If anyone can, you can,” said my houseguest and friend, and when I came back upstairs at a run laughing with joy he introduced me to Feu! Chatterton, just as earlier we had been listening at his behest to the very weird and cluey New Zealander Aldous Harding.

    My mattress bequeathee held out a handful of coins and notes. I brought you your original price, trotzdem, despite everything, he said, and: Oh! you are in your pyjamas, you must be having a good Saturday night. Fireworks exploded above our heads and he said, shrugging, Maifest: the festival of May. The black Europe night was alight with sound. I described to him what kind of an evening my houseguest friend and I are having. Then we hugged.

  • a birthday story

    It is my birthday and I had kind of a depressing morning because (various reasons). But I reckoned I could make a go of the afternoon, and I was right. Riding out into the day aboard my trusty, failsafe, foolproof bicycle I zoomed around town for an hour or two looking for the restaurant, cosy but decent, in which my friend arriving from Copenhagen this evening will treat me to dinner. He says I’ve got to choose. So I chose, and had lunch outdoors in the shade and a large German beer. Needing shade is such a luxury in grey chilly Berlin.

    The bowl of noodles was delicious and the beer made me feel better. I sauntered home on my wheels, spinning down the quiet side of an overgrown local park and only gradually noticing that the man crouched forward on his bench was speaking to me. You are traveling much too fast, he was saying, and then his forbidding German conformity dissolved into a slow salty smile when I smiled at him, raising my eyebrows without meaning to, a smile that turned flirty when he flirted back.

    “Sicher?” I said, slow and low – are you sure? “Absolut sicher,” he said, and his tone had evolved from censorious to self-mockery and enjoyment.

    The African men at the bottom of the park looked me over and I looked at them. I miss Africa. Noodling along the pavement on my way home, which you shouldn’t, but people do, I was warmed when three men in identical backpacks like Mormons stepped aside to let my bicycle pass. “Das ist lieb,” I told them, that is lovely. The tallest one said, gravely, “I come from Stuttgart.”

    “Oh,” I said over my shoulder as I zoomed past, “that is also lovely.”

    The little German birds are high in their voices like tree bells. When I was in Ghana all those months I kept thinking: the birds fly away to Africa for the winter. So here they are! I kept expecting I might meet one and we would recognise each other. Hey, I know you. I’ve seen you in Berlin.

  • Springlike

    Whole streets in Berlin have grown into green tunnels while I was away in Africa. Trees so heavy with bloom they are almost touching sag together across the road. From above, they must resemble giant posies.

    To resolve my sense of cultural and geographic dislocation I decided to focus on the sky and the trees, not looking so much at the buildings and the people. But Berliners are irresistible. I passed a park as it started to sprinkle with rain very briefly, and a whole mousecapade of people rushed out carrying round grills on three little legs in their arms, in a panic. One of them was carrying a fire of coals still burning. I saw a cool couple holding hands, two metres apart on their bicycles, slender in matching jeans. I all of a sudden remembered the balding man in his topless silver sports car who drove very slowly down a cafe street, stopping outside every venue to sing along, imploring with his hands and magnificently confident and loud, to “That’s Amore,” which was blasting from his excellent speakers.

    A man pedalling his two small children home in the cart mounted on the front of his bicycle passed me on my bike, and the two blond little heads lolling out either side of the Kinderwagen reminded me of two tiny flopping soles you see when an African woman passes with her baby tied to her back. He got to the pavement and met a step up that might have jarred them awake, so he stopped and climbed down, came round the front and lifted the whole apparatus tenderly onto the footpath.

    I rode past a Trödel shop of collectibles and junk and saw two women bent to a basket of broken, glinting strings of beads, lifting them out and delving with identical enthusiasm. One was the shopkeeper. She’s still loving it.

    I saw three African and four Turkish men sitting at their ease on milk crates out the front of a coffee shop and had to stop myself from climbing down from my bike to say hello.

    And I passed the Denkmal, which means, I guess, ‘think, why don’t you,’ a very simple plain memorial listing Germany’s crimes during the war, in rafts of black the names of all the awful prison camps, titled, “Places of Terror which we must never be allowed to forget.” It was standing on a busy shopping street because it was from normal streets that people were taken, from their own homes. A seedy-looking man with tattered blond dreads was sitting on the bench in front drinking his afternoon beer and gazing up thoughtfully. In the time it took me to get out my camera, two other men had stopped on their own bicycles, wearing suits, and stood there, reading the names and pointing them out to each other. Someone had left a huge, costly wreath with long red broad streamers printed with something I couldn’t read and the taller man got off his bicycle and wheeled it round to lean down and untangle the ribbons, dragging them so they lay more legibly on the ground.

    I saw a survivor of those pogroms, a Romany man, crouched in the shade of a roadside tree with a flower garden built around it, and he was holding up a bunch of creamy snowdrops bundled with broad blades of green for one euro. I bought some flowers and asked if he would like to have a photograph of himself. So he allowed me to take his picture and gave me his phone number so that I could send it, later. His name was Yonut.

  • morning inglorious

    Standing on the street in my Dad’s old pyjamas taping a sign “GORSS” next to the labelled doorbell. The man who works next door is waiting with his hands in his pockets, wearing a paint stained smock. He is very good looking. We are laughing. “Always misspelt,” I explain, in German, jabbing at the tape with my finger. I am barely awake and people are walking past with their kids in little kid wagons, pushing their bicycles, walking their dogs. I’ve been away from Berlin a long time and clearly am eager to make a good impression.

  • core grimey

    Today I am going down to my favourite Berlin cafe to write. Last time I was there was four months back and I did not plan to be away so long. It was winter then and a homeless man came along the rows of customers to beg. He stood for some time reading over my shoulder, and when I looked round, he was nodding and smiling with glorious approval. He put his hand around me to scroll down so that he could keep reading. He put his index finger, seamed with grime in its peeling fingerless glove, up to my glowing little screen and almost touched it. He kept pushing his finger under the lines he liked, making little grunts to let me know he thought my writing was grand. I was so chuffed by him. The screaming espresso machine and the scraping of the stools and people chatting in German as they unwrap their croissants and unfold the thoughtful, liberal, kindly and independent German newspapers stacked in the corner are all sounds I have missed.

  • jarred honey

    A friend of mine took her own life, from herself and from the rest of us, a little while back, perhaps eighteen months. After a long time another of her friends whom I didn’t know wrote to me in Berlin saying she had left behind a painting for me. We met when he was in town and he handed me a plastic bag with her rolled picture. Today in Ghana I got an email from another of her friends. She was a wonderful person and most beloved. This friend says she left a letter behind for me. Would I like it posted. I am so sorry my darling friend cannot know what she meant to us and did not survive long enough to have meant everything she was and had, to herself.

    We met dancing. And at a certain point in the dance we sat down in pairs and she and I told each other the innermost stories of our lives and we both cried. That communion, when two foreign souls can grasp each other. When the self of this new person feels like paper or crumpled cloth or scatterings of cut grass on fine sand. I live for those times. She died, perhaps, for want of them. I will never forgive myself for having been too sad to reach back to her when she called out to me. I’ll never forget.

  • kink shaming

    On the one hand, consensual sex is nobody else’s business. On the other, I feel sad for this person (surely a woman). I feel suspicious of her dominant/exploiting partner (surely a man). Sexual play is one thing. But if she is dependent on it, I start to feel like there are healthier ways for people to admit they need comfort and cosseting.

    As a friend who is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and is working with her own inner child has said, she cannot imagine a more damaging thing to do to your wounded inner self.

    I want to say a little more about this. Like many oldest sisters I grew up caring for my little brothers and, in some ways, taking responsibility to parent the woundedness exhibited by both parents. I didn’t have a lot of opportunity to be little. I have a hunger for it. I’ve been 6’2″ since the age of 12 (and shy), and people attribute to me a lot of authority. It’s been so interesting to learn to own all of that and be unashamed and to teach myself, rather laboriously, to be able to say to my partner, I need to be comforted and babied, I need to be little, do you have the energy for that?

    It took me so much courage in adulthood to learn to finally be little. Asking for such indulgence and comfort and parenting straight out feels, to me, so much more enabling than other options I see people using. No blame to them, everyone is doing what they can. And again I emphasise that I am not speaking of individual people’s enabled choices for sexual play. But I’ve had damaged friends and exes who indulge themselves in tantrums, breakdowns, manipulations etc that demand cosseting and patient parental style understanding – which as a partner I will gladly give, only it feels so much more respectful to be asked for it clearly and outright. To be able to do this takes real work. I actually enjoy the sense of agency and grounded balance I have when aware and present for my own vulnerability and not trying to do something which would be so alien to my nature – dress up and protect that aching frailty by pretending it is sexy, hot, kinky, or hip.

     

  • that I fight

    The battle to take seriously my own life and prospects, and to treat myself well, is the great absorbing struggle of my life. After fifty or a hundred rapes, before which I had never kissed and been kissed; after being savagely beaten and thrashed by my parents one of whom is now dead for daring to leave that first relationship, a year later – this struggle absorbs more of my energy than I can tell. In Ghana I am free and scintillate, I roam the countryside of this strange and wildly interesting city. People greet me and I call back. I am smiling from my soul. But even here my lover and I must attend constantly the vigil of ensuring that I never provide myself to him as a service.

    Occasionally I do and he catches me out.

    Are you sure, he asks, and I lie, Yes. Am I hurting you, as we press ourselves into each other like metal into sand and heat into metal. No, I lie, and he stops still to look at me narrowly. This narrow suspicious glance in my case is a necessary feeler of love.

    When Judge Rosemarie Aquilina dropped aside the pleading, exonorous letter serial rapist Larry Nassar had written to the Court, when she told him his self-pity was nothing compared with the pleasure he took in these immature women’s forming bodies, let alone the pain and anguish he has caused them which inhibits still their talent-stained lives – I could relate. I waited months, until yesterday, to expose myself to parts of the footage and reportage, waiting til I could bear it. I watched the testimony of a young Olympian who told him from the stand, “I will not take my life. I am taking it back.” And on the couch in our rental in Accra I crumpled forward and clutched my hand around my so long sore heart and cried out and cried.

    These decades later, I still have no income. Having topped every class I took from the age of four to eighteen, when in the final semester of university and throes of this awful year of cumulative hell I dropped from my flock and barely passed, I have no career. The money I’ve lived on comes from waitressing, fifteen years of waitressing, which I was good at; and from sporadic coaching in which fellow writers tell me I have inspired them, and pay me for an hour; and from a stunning single purchase of property which I renovated and lived in, dividing the bank interest with a series of housemates I invariably chose for their resemblance to the abusive family who loved me as best as they could.

    The waitressing was mostly in a fine Paddington BYO which required me to carry seven full plates of food at once, and taught me to open a bottle of Moet after I dropped the first one, and to carry out twenty-one champagne flutes between my fingers and lay them out on the table one by one, shining and polished. It exposed me to the old man who pressed his face up against my breasts when I stretched across the table to set down his friend’s plate. It put me in the path of the stranger who stuck a fork in my arse as I bent over the table as though I had been a bird in an oven. Was I done?

    In Berlin, as a friend has only recently pointed out to me, I struggle some days to get myself off the couch. Leaving my apartment is a daily heroism. I am shy and exceedingly sensitive to start with. The performance instinct which is a lion dancing in me and roaring has been silenced externally for several years. Instead I practice dealing with bus drivers. If some random barkeep is rude to me I feel the talons of self-silence cage round me and I become a mouse, limp in the sailing claws of this bigger predator, playing dead lest he kill me, trapped in the freeze.

    The amount of energy this perpetually renewed struggle costs me is mortifying to tell. The spectre in myself of being someone who is de facto preoccupied with her own past, or at least, stained by it, humiliates me when I long with all my heart only to face the day, this day – the only day, and build all its fruits.

    My brother, who though he has three children mines coal, has told me when I tried to discuss this perennial battle, “There’s something wrong with your personality, that’s why you can’t sustain a decent relationship and you have no friends, that’s why you don’t have a job.” An aunt who discovered – or invented – God told me, when I timidly brought up the topic of her sister’s, my mother’s, rage, “It’s you. I sometimes think you are possessed by the devil.” I was so irritating as a child, that same brother assured me, that our parents had no choice to get violent with me.

    My mother, who once called me ‘a failure as a human being’, also supports my daily life. Fear of publicly shaming her – a shame that seems unearnt – and of hurting my family has long kept me silent. Having run out of my own miracle earnings, much of which I spent on unnecessary medical procedures whose invasive humiliations I was convinced were crucial for my health, I am living outright upon her, in her seventies – how dare I? –  while I labour to complete some saleable work, or to get some business started. Some days, the labour focuses still on finding the wellbeing to bother to feed myself. You see I have not always eaten every day. I find trouble keeping my little home clean and combing my own hair. Every now and then I have to take the nail scissors to it and cut out all the little knots.

    Meanwhile I write and make photographs every day, I draw and make assemblage and small films. I give all my work away for free and the album I made, lassoing twenty-eight musicians in New York and Melbourne, is still unreleased except online. I play my album to the jazz impresario who in the 50s brought Shirley Bassey to Melbourne, and my heart clutches when he says, “In my opinion, you will be one of the greatest artists this country has produced.” I finger the dusty piano I have lugged from Brisbane to Adelaide, and from Adelaide to Melbourne, and Melbourne back to Brisbane and now across the seas to Berlin. I cannot bring myself to touch it, I never sing, I have forgotten how to play my own songs on my own guitar. When I think about money, I panic and flail. It is almost not possible for me to believe my work has value, and that anyone would ever pay for it.