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  • disjointed

    Yesterday I dislocated my finger. I tripped on a folded horse blanket and fell against the car and when I stood up my ring finger literally stuck out behind the pinky at a 45 degree angle. So scary and, during the hour and forty five minutes waiting for the ambulance, nauseatingly painful. The pain however only came in waves, in swells of sweating faintness. “She is grey,” I heard someone telling the ambulance despatch. But I could think and breathe and I just tried to stay calm and tried to keep my muscles and breathing relaxed. I was with a bunch of blokes in a huge storage hangar who would not let me drive myself to hospital but kept standing about telling me horror stories about their mates whose joints had never recovered. They had no help on offer and were useless in the way people often are when there’s any kind of emergency. “Could you please bring me a chair?” I said, when the first wave of faintness began, “I think I might pass out.” It was restorative to have to project manage, because it gave me something to think about and that really helped. The ambo turned up and sat me on the front seat of his car while he completed his paperless paperwork. He drove laconically with no hands on the wheel as he gestured and told me about his afternoon. I had worked out that my distorted hand looked totally gangsta and was holding it up, the fingers curling under and this new finger shooting out at an impossible angle, crowing, “Check it out! This is going to be my new gang sign.”

    “You party trick,” he said, and my heart sank. “Well,” I said, “I hope not. I sincerely hope this will not be a lasting um, disfigurement.” In the emergency ward I was seen within minutes and a doctor injected the knuckle with four seeds of local anaesthetic to make the relocation bearable. Then the specialist on call came in his white coat to yank my finger back into its berth, a most horrid sensation. Now the long road of rehab begins so I can, I hope, play guitar again.

    My mother who has a freshly broken hip had to drive out to rescue me from the hospital. When we got home at last, both pale and tired, the Greek woman who is living here to care for Dad baled me up in the kitchen to say, “Your cat – she knew, this morning, that you were about to have an accident, this is why she was mad at you! she didn’t want you to do it.” She said, “All day you work, all night you work. You are too tired. That is why, accident.” Her fury of caring broke my dry heart and I sat down and cried. “Why you cry?” Oh, I said, I’m just feeling sorry for myself. And the darling carer, who I think did not know the phrase ‘sorry for’, roused again. “Why? you are an excellent person. Why you should be sorry?”

  • a happy visitor

    My parents have a spare room which they have been eager to put to use as Dad’s medical expenses mount, so I offered to manage it for them as an Airbnb listing. Airbnb has been so problematic in rapidly gentrifying areas of Berlin that it’s actually been outlawed: developers were buying up whole buildings and certain streets became so filled with short term pleasure seeking tourists it was impossible for residents to find homes. However in a context like Brisbane, filled with overlarge houses where older people like my parents want to continue to live independently, it seems to me one of the best uses of the internet. Meanwhile Berliners have been making new arrivals from Syria welcome using an innovative ‘Airbnb for refugees’ set up by two local men. You can register your spare room and the government, who are not much addicted to locking up children and families offshore in tropical death camps, cover the rent so that a new family can settle in.

    This is the review left this morning by our most recent visitor, who arrived jetlagged and disoriented off an 18 hour flight from Shanghai. She is here to study for two years. I feel good to know we have welcomed someone on first arriving in a brand new country and brand new climate, and I love knowing that people can experience each other, as strangers, through this medium and can build trust. We stayed with an Egyptian family in the Bronx last October and their hospitable kindness was transformative of our visit. In this case the tiny errors in my guest’s English just make me love her the more.

    “This was the first week I came to Brisbane. I really love the house Cathoel offered. She is really a patient and warmhearted people and can offer everything I need when I live here. The room is tidy cosy and quiet which offers me a perfect circumstance to have a good rest and the Chinese decorative style impressed me a lot. The transport is convenient and easy to buy commodities nearby. All in all, it is really a wisdom choice for me to choose Cathoel’s house. Living here for a week was enjoyable experience for me.”

  • four years ago today

    Walked into a Turkish convenience store late on Friday night, they sold water pipes as well as a dazzling array of alcohols and sundry sweet snackettes… behind the counter stood a very untall & wizened woman wearing a scarf, her hands on the counter at chest height in front of her, and beside her a large, slightly slavering dog, standing on his back legs with his forepaws folded on the counter. I said to him, “Excuse me. Do you sell yoghurt?” She said to me, “Sie haben eine so schöne Stimme, eine richtig wunderschöne Stimme. Bitte singen Sie weiter.” But I was too self-conscious to keep singing under this barrage of compliments. We talked about the dog and his jolly helpfulness & how tidily & sweetly she kept her shop and then as I was leaving, she called after me, “Keep singing! Always keep singing!”

    ~ beginning of my second month in Berlin, second date. We held hands and took it in turns to walk blindfolded round the city. Later that week I wrote:

    Tomorrow I am moving ~ boldly! ~ into a sublet apartment of my very own, here in Berlin! I was only here for a week but I have staid & staid ~ and so it is the last day in the sweet sunny breakfast room with its big basket of soft-boiled eggs, tucked in a cloth ~ the man who serves coffee came in to clear and I went over to him and touched him on the arm. “I’m moving out tomorrow, and I just wanted to say, thank you for the ~” ~ floundering in my early-morning German like a shallow foaming surf ~ “the service?” he suggested ~ “the um,” I said ~ “the table service?” he wanted to know. “The love,” I said, finally. And then ran away back to my table. Every morning he brings me a pot of hot water & some honey, my life in Berlin has been far cosier since I discovered that chai tea is called “yogi tea” and that you can buy it in bags at a Bio Store.

  • dead man sleepwalking

    In this house of illness and pain I get lonely. Everyone is in bed by eight o’clock and the long night stretches ahead. Tonight I can hear the rain plinking on the skylight which reminds me of the sound of rain on a tin roof, the sound of my childhood. I am tired. My father can only take soft, resistless things. His swallowing or as the Greek carer calls it “his slow” is very deteriorated. Every day there are two sets of meals to make. I’ve been searching out the kinds of foods he can slow and which my mother and I can also eat with him, not so much to save the work as to include him and to try and beckon him somewhat out of the twilight in which he is living.

    When you’re in hospital, or in my father’s case living in a hospital bed in his own bedroom and then in a padded hospital lounge chair all day, meals are the highlight of the day. The clinking of the trays along the corridor, the slowly approaching voices. If you can’t look forward to that, what is there to look forward to? pain and dosings, people who pull you about and speak in a singsong tone, and death.

    There is a lot of work to do, and a lot of cleaning up afterwards. It’s like having children but sadly, I have been spared that joy. I have become preoccupied with brewing everything from scratch and am making rich bone broths on beef neck and chicken frames, slow-cooked casseroles in which the meat dissolves into tenderness, a rich bolognese which simmered on the stovetop for three hours until it was silken and plump. I offer little trays: clumps of his favourite soft cheeses and soft smoked oysters, and Dad might manage a teaspoonful before he turns his face away. The next day he will have more energy, he seems brighter, so the effort feels worth it.

    The carer has told me, “I cannot help my mother, I cannot help my father – but I can do this.” She looks after my father as though she loves him, standing ready with the clotted tissues for the food that he has held in his mouth for a quarter of an hour, refusing to swallow. She says, “You want to slow? Try to slow it. You can’t slow? Ok, then split it. Split!” And my father spits and she wipes his mouth for the four hundredth time.

    I had to do this today and I did it as well as I could. My brother had entered the bedroom and stood covering his eyes while I held out the tissue to Dad and then, behind Dad’s back so as not to hurt him, indulged the paroxysm which instinctively clutched my whole body. It’s not his fault and I’m not at all disgusted with him, I love him. It’s just a bodily reflex. The sensation of hot liquid coming out of my father’s mouth is too much for me. My mother lying up against her pillows announced, again, “Oh! you would have made a terrible nurse.” I have no doubt this is true. She gestured towards my brother, standing just inside the doorway so as not to infect Dad with his cold. She asked the invisible audience who accompanied our childhoods, “How did I end up producing two such lily-livered cowards?”

    My brother’s late appearance, two weeks into my short visit, is on account of the feud he and his wife have had with me, kept up for more than six years now; I threw a plate and they cannot forgive me. This was in May 2010. We had a family dinner at which my brother was tired and so stressed that he roared at his kid. The boy was two and I have seen him four times since. My brother is huge and his roar made us all jump. I said, “You know – I’m not sure you need to use quite that much volume.”

    There is dispute over what happened next. Brother says he said, We’re not interested in your parenting advice. My memory of it is: You don’t have kids so we’re not interested in your opinion. The cruelty of this when he knew, they all knew, they’ve all known, how desperately, dearly, deeply, strongly I yearned and tried to have children of my own, cut me like a clamshell across the throat. I can feel its ache now, as I write about it.

    The feeling of having been excluded, after a lifetime of being told by this family and this same brother I was over-emotional and over-sensitive, that I had “such an imagination” and thus had constructed most of the abusive events which dotted our historical landscape like felled trees, of being told that my opinion didn’t matter and my experiences had never existed, created a pain that felt intolerable in my body. I grabbed my plate of Thai takeaway and hurled it to the floor. As it left my hands all of the anger left my body and I thought with great distinctness, “Oh, you idiot. You are never going to hear the end of this.” And as so rarely, I was right.

    Plategate, a friend called it over dinner this week. She was joking that if I ever see my estranged sister-in-law again I should monitor our conversation for imagined slights. I should say, in a dark, gormless brute’s voice, “Oi, wotchit. Don’t you be sayin’ that, or I’ll killya. I’ll killya with this… plate!” She mimed drawing a tiny side plate out of her breast pocket and we folded up with laughter. Plategate changed our whole terrain and I have not been forgiven by my brother and his wife. She still keeps herself and her children apart from me on the grounds that I am dangerous, terrifying, violent. This accusation wounds me because it sits next to the hidden violence of my mother, who suffers some kind of condition that leads her to build towering rages which moments later in the wreckage she is unable to remember. All my life I have had a bone-loosening fear of that terrorising rage. The destructive, the lasting bolts she hurls. The silence afterwards, broken by my father saying, “Well, I was sitting right here, and I didn’t hear her say anything like that.” There have been times when I found no one looking back out of her eyes, they were avid like a bird’s, there was no one to reason or plead with. Very few people outside the family have witnessed this phenomenon and it was a great relief to me each time when someone did.

    My brother meanwhile has an explanation that ties everything in a bundle. There must be something wrong with me. In our twenties he told me there was something “wrong with your basic personality” and that was why I kept choosing unkind men. “You cling to these imaginary or exaggerated events because they give you an explanation for why your life hasn’t been all it could have been.” He has told me that as a child I was so irritating that our mother had no choice but to get angry with me. And once, perhaps a decade back, in a gentler mood he said, “I think you’ve just never experienced unconditional love. I think Mum and Dad didn’t know how to love you.” This struck me as a shaft of light between the trees and I bounded upstairs to ask Dad. This was after Dad’s stroke but before the cancer and he was lying in his daytime cane lounge chair, gazing out into the trees. “Dad,” I said, “Dad!”

    My father turned his head slowly. “What?”

    I was so excited I was hopping from foot to foot. “Dad, would you say your love for me was… unconditional?”

    “Oh, yes, pet,” he said. “Largely.” He looked startled when I started to laugh merrily.

    To be difficult to love is the fate of some of us. Of most of us, maybe, when we really get close to one another. Mopping up after another meagre meal which my father has picked at and spat out, passing the carer on the stairs as she carries him his fourth glass of cold milk for the night to make up for all the meals he wasn’t able to manage, I think about this. To love one another in all our difficultness is perhaps the most exacting grace of all: it is the fur in our mange, it’s the comfort in our cave; that’s just nature of love, it’s the manner of the beast.

  • good reef

    I spend a lot of time in this household running downstairs to close the door and just breathe. I duck out to coffee houses and get sane again. I spend time among the trees, or failing that, among the pot plants. This morning a friend of my father’s, a gracious fellow whom Dad first met when they were seated side by side in the first year of Norman Park State School, came to visit and I made him some coffee and offered a slice of the cake another of their friends had brought. I was thinking how lovely it is that my folks’ friends come to visit even though Dad falls asleep on them, how they have friendships stretching back decades from living thirty years in the same place. My father went to school and grew up here, and has friendships going back to childhood. I was thinking how this will not be the case when I am 77. We had a fascinating chat about Sir John Monash, whose biography this man has been reading, and about the anti-Semitism in Melbourne that kept Monash out of the Melbourne Club. Dad’s friend volunteered the view that Murdoch, an enemy of Monash, even back in those days acted like he ran the world. I said how this was in evidence every time we have an election. I was thinking of the photos of Tony Abbott clasping a puppy, etc, paired with a front page picture of his rival Kevin Rudd with mouth half open which was titled, “Does This Man Ever Shut Up?”

    This led very quickly to a lecture from my father’s friend about the errors of environmentalism, which he perceives as a kind of conspiracy theory. He has holidayed recently on Heron Island and says grandly, “Heron Island is just as good as it was in the 1960s.” Oh good, I said: so all those acres of coral bleaching must just be a bit of a furphy. Well, he said: 7000 years ago the whole Barrier Reef was above water. Now it’s not so bad as that, is it? “Oh no,” I agreed, picking up my cup of tea, my notebooks and my cat and standing up to go. I kissed him on the cheek. “All just a big natural cycle.”

    These natural cycles are all but overwhelming me at the moment. The slow sleepy death of my father, whose eyes are rarely open and who will take no nourishment but ice cream and milk. The frantic collisions of my mother with a series of administrative chores which she sets herself, needing to gain back some form of control over her life, and which subsume her grief and dread, I think, driving her into a frenzy of impatience and a series of spills of papers and pens onto the floor as she is kept waiting on the phone line by the bank, the electricity company, the phone people themselves. Our larger darker howling emotions. It’s hard to live in them. It’s harder to live alongside them… I feel.

  • of our elders

    I’m at my parents’ place spending some time with my dying father. He is frail as a leaf. This morning two Blue Care nurses turned up, funded by Australians’ taxes, and hauled him up the bed so hard they bashed his head against the headboard. When he is sleeping, which is much of the time, they sit with their hands folded. But today they tipped over from the useless to the dangerous.

    Two days back on July 11th we passed what would have been the 100th birthday of former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, who died in 2014. As Tanya Plibersek put it, he was a warrior for fairness. I was saddened to learn when he died that this elder statesman had spent the last months of his life living alone in a tiny room in an aged care facility, separated from his wife of nearly seventy years, Margaret. That even such respected and influential people are not allowed to live together once they are old and infirm shows us how urgently we need more compassion and common sense in this field of endeavour. Why is aged care so brutal and so lonely when it ought to be tender, humorous, concerted, and peopled with small children and teenagers, kittens and dogs? Elders, children, Indigenous communities, people with disabilities, and asylum seekers all have deep sources of insight the middle ground of our society has lost. You would think we would cherish them kindly out of sheer self interest, if we genuinely can’t muster the compassion to care about their wellbeing.

  • the family stones

    Caring for Dad is painful. I love him, naturally, and now he’s very frail and unwell; so it’s wrung from me like dark water out of soaked wood. But Dad tormented me with minor sexual attentions during my pubescence and twenties, and into my adulthood; he would never listen when I said No and always overrode my assertions of sovereignty: so it’s hard for me to get close to him, it’s hard for me to touch him.

    A tilting hospital bed has been hired for the house and made up with my mother’s pretty pink floral sheets. Dad lies curled like a prawn in the arms of this vast apparatus, holding on gamely to the triangle-shaped handle that dangles from the back of the bed. He is half-starved and so thin that his bones stand out. His strong hands have withered into spotted claws. I stand by the bed and stroke his face gingerly. A tube comes from under the quilt and I am so unkeen to know its details.

    A Greek woman has taken up residence with her husband, as Dad’s carer, and she hauls him higher in his bed so that he can be winched upright to face a mouthful of ice cream or a big fat glass of milk which is what seems to be keeping him alive. “Don’t worry,” the carer said yesterday, meeting me at the front door with groceries and holding out her arms, “I come from the village of Hercules.” I hear her coaxing him to swallow. Swallowing is painful and slow. Dad’s swallow reflex is now so weak that he can’t take anything solid, for fear of choking. If he inhaled a crumb it could lead to infection and another bout of pneumonia. Privately Mum said to me a few days back she rather wishes one of these would “carry him off” – “It’s no life.” Then she started to cry and I persuaded her instead of rushing away on her walker to come sit down beside me on the couch and we can talk about it. How she feels and what might happen. Carefully I introduce the idea of what her life might be once she is alone in this house, what she’ll do. Coughed out at the far end of a fifty-year relationship. Death is harsh.

    When I came home from the polling booths Saturday Mum and the carer were seated either side of Dad on the verandah couch, coaxing him to take another mouthful of the egg flip he has for his breakfast. They have to urge him to each mouthful and then, for long moments, sit concentrating with him til he swallows.

    My mother is tired out and molested by sadness, she has cared for him since he had the stroke and now, since he’s had cancer. “It’s not fair,” she says, and this is the thought that undoes her. At some point in the day every day she cries and I try to just listen, I try to offer what small comfort there is. I keep wondering who will listen to her and comfort her once I am gone. Their close friend, losing her marbles, shows up at the house every morning asking for errands so she can help out; she is not someone it’s easy to talk to, she never has been. My mother despatches her to the shopping centre to bring back the wrong kinds of milk or to lose her car. The Blue Care nurse shows up and says piously, “I’m not allowed to lift.” The whole household’s exhausting. My family have never said clearly how they feel and it is difficult for my mother to say, I want this, I need that. She prefers to hint. “We do need some shopping,” she’ll say, and then wait for me to ask, “Shall I go?” Dad used to say, Gee, some cheese and biscuits would be nice. Gosh, I wouldn’t mind a gin & tonic. And then someone would get up and go to the fridge.

    Now he can no longer have crackers or toast or steak or any of the immensely solid English comfort foods that are his core diet. He seems to have lost interest in eating, which when I contemplate the plastic vials of meal replacements and protein shakes in the fridge seems unsurprising. But the kindly carer gets called upstairs four times a night to haul him upright for big glasses of milk. Clearly he’s hungry.

    In the supermarket last week in my jet-lagged haze I tried to guess what might be the various clues which would trigger Dad into his appetite. In the deli aisle I worked out that if I bought him beef sausages he would be able to eat the inner mince, suitably mashed. First I served the sausage whole. He sat up a bit and said brightly, “Ooh!” Then I spooned the meat out of its casing and mashed it up small on the back of a fork. He ate two tablespoons of sausage meat, a triumph. Mum said, inspired, “Hey maybe he could have pâté!” So I brought back some pâté, soft smoked salmon in tenderly thin flakes, a crumbling vintage cheddar and a creamy blue cheese, prawns with their mulchy orange and white striped meat, and the makings of an egg custard. The next night, presented with a parfait glass of prawns, cluttered with a peculiar curry sauce for which Mum had given instructions, Dad turned his whole body to grab after the tray. He had to be restrained until he could be sat up safely to eat a bit. Then it all came up again and I ran away and my mother had to deal with it. By stimulating his appetite I had only put him through more misery.

    At the counter of our local all-night store I showed up toting two giant flasks of milk with one hand and balancing a stack of four boxes of tissues on the other. The Korean guy who runs the store said, “Are youse having a party?”

    “Yeah – a phlegm party. You wanna come?”

    “Oogh,” he said.

    “I mean, jeez,” I teased. “What the hell kind of parties have you been going to?”

    “Ahhh,” he said helplessly, having run out of banter. With some difficulty I prevented him from stuffing everything into bags, and took it home to the top of the hill. I try not to run away but to sit next to Dad while he produces his vibrant spume of coughs, yielding blizzards of soaked tissues discarded in florets over the side of the bed. I am painfully squeamish with splinters and injuries and when he coughs, I cough too. It feels like my body is trying to vomit, I cover my ears and retch when I hear his chest rattling and carving. “Just think, darling,” my mother used to say, “only five Tertiary Entrance points saved us all from you becoming the world’s worst doctor.”

    I certainly am a terrible nurse and would have made a woeful surgeon. However we laypersons can love, and we can serve. This morning Dad began to cry and his whole face crumpled. The carer was away in the kitchen. I asked him, but he could not explain what it was that was so sad. “Is it because you feel so miserable and sick?”

    He nodded hopelessly.

    “Ah, Dad.” I had been stroking his face and his bony shoulder. I feel inhibited by the memory of the times he would grab hold of a handful as I walked past, graspingly unable to grasp how a routine which was mere sport to him could be so distressing to me. Dad would often pinch or fondle my bottom or comment on my budding breasts and he always acted so surprised when I howled with outrage and pain. “Dad! Stop it!”

    “Oh, but darling,” in an injured, high-pitched, goofy voice, “it’s only a bit of fun.”

    Now he is reduced to this skeletal frame who produces industrial quantities of mucus. His tongue, which laved the palm of my hand eight years ago after his stroke when he lay stricken as a baby bird naked in the lifting hoist and all of the nurses were out of the room, is thick and useless in his mouth. His eyes, which bored into mine that afternoon as I recoiled and cried out and he held onto my hand with surprising strength, still have that mischievous expression that is, in his character, life itself. I remembered him gazing at me over our linked hands, letting me know he was being naughty. I remember the repulsion and chagrin that gripped me and how I felt the need to blame myself because, overcome by remorse and compassion at his collapsed post-stroke state, I had pressed his head against my shoulder to embrace him, though carefully keeping it well clear of the breasts. Now on a sudden instinct I curl forward and lie my head on the side of his chest. It is the closest we have been since they beat me in my bed, after I escaped the year of rapes, when I was eighteen. One held me down and the other yanked an arm right back to whale into me. Their mouths were filled with filthy words, slut, tart, the boys at Uni will be round you like flies round a honey pot once they find out you’re on the Pill. Next day the girl who lived next door crept round as soon as my mother had driven down to the shops. “Are you ok? I wanted to call the police. I thought they were going to kill you.” He could not hit me now. He could barely even kiss. I closed my eyes and let the feeling of his liquid loud breathing fill me. And a kind of rickety peace that has hovered round me nearby and more distant, never staying, never settling, came and perched in my heart like a dirty bird, for a few long minutes.

  • a night and a day

    I spent 36 hours in Bangkok and it seemed to me just like the Jakarta of my childhood, that dense crowded lost world. Our flight was three hours late and I had missed the shared minibus from the airport. A series of people gave me courteously conflicting advice. You must go to Gate 3. Go to 5. Go to Gate 10 and ask there. I asked the ladies at the Tourist Welcome counter, one of whom was fanning herself while she scrolled her cellphone. The other lady looked up from her block of pink and yellow carbon receipts which she was carefully stamping with the up to date telephone number, using a ruler and a rubber stamp. Their desk seemed to be crowded with technologies which I passionately collected as a child and which I miss. Ink pads, erasers, her fan which folded into a long stripe of feathers.

    Somebody called somebody, who called somebody, who would find the driver and call us back. A man approached the desk at length and said, very kindly, our transfer driver is not here: let me find you a taxi. He gave careful instructions to the taxi driver and to me. “You must pay the toll booth.” Okay, I said. The driver slipped under his seatbelt, which lay against the seat already done up. We passed a truck decorated with gleaming silver ornaments like folded snowflakes cut out of tin, every panel of its side bars was painted joyously by hand. As I reached for my camera the skies opened, and down came that thundering tropical rain.

    I had forgotten. Those high-pitched tiled rooves, the canals lined with palms. I’d forgotten the rain, how everything is saturated within a few seconds. Those open-back, cage-backed little trucks with two long plank benches like for carrying troops. I saw giant billboards empty, made from countless sheets of rusted tin each nailed on individually. I saw lily pads in ponds, little green ditches like streams; the business-like gates unclimbable at every official building. We passed six tiny thatched huts under a corrugated iron roof. We drove in unmeant formation with fellow taxis, some of them bright yellow and lime green, some a deep hot nail varnish pink. Green vines ran up the poles and along the wires. A multi-storey car park was festooned with vines at every floor. Hard up against its sheer grey concrete wall was a row of bamboo houses. Huge swags of wires, as thick as a person’s torso. Little gods with golden wings flying on signs atop very plain buildings.

    At the airport, queuing for passport control, I had avidly read the signs. Buddha is Not for Decoration: Respect Makes Sense! A lady with pearlescent complexion of which she was clearly proud turned her swanlike neck to camera, sharing the secret of her make-up brand: Snail White, the Best White. But I had a secret in turn, which was: the world’s most flawless white is found in the frangipani flower, peerless until it is dropped or touched, when it withers to brown instantly.

    After a while the swarm of rising buildings that is Bangkok drowned in rain. The high rise became invisible. Clustered at ground level, mango trees, bananas. The rain dropped in visible layers of grey bead curtains, like washing hung on the line. We passed a building with 16 air conditioning units piled above its front entrance, like shields, and passed under an overpass where dozens of mopeds sheltered to wait out the storm. I saw trees growing out of buildings everywhere they had worked a crevice. Everything was only an island among trees, like German towns seen from the air.

    “How do I say, ‘thank you’, in Thai?” I asked my driver. “Ko-pung-ka,” he said carefully, and when I repeated it, and then said “Thank you – kopungka” he laughed with delight. “Oh ho ho!”

    He told me, “You kopungka – I kopungkat.” We were laughing with joy. Yet a day later on my minibus ride to the airport I discovered the toll cost is actually 50 Baht, not the 100 he had solemnly charged me at each stop. I’d forgotten that people can rip you off so lovingly. I’d forgotten those long-ago familiar silver signs, each letter clad in silver facing only half of them have peeled away and are now just stained wood. The last thing I saw before we left the freeway was a tiny handmade treehouse open hut, on stilts, directly under a giant blank billboard among treetops as though the city had simply sprung up around it, or like a jungle vine it had simply reseeded. Windows and whole balconies were enclosed in cages. Avocado green concrete building and green sky. Clouds that boiled like surf.

    Venice of the East, they call it. I left my room and went down the fire escape and was immediately in the smell of Asia, a smell of tempest and rotting trash and food. Coming out the back entrance of my bland hotel I walked up to the low hedge shielding the impossibly blue pool from the brown river, which slopped and choked with astonishing things: the whole head of a palm tree. Semi-circles of funeral flowers, large slabs of wood. Turning in at a perilously narrow concrete path that ran alongside the giant machinery of a weir, I was instantly out of the Westernised globe and back in what seems to me the real world: the places where people live, and work.

    Feeling my way and always ready to dip my head, I prowled villages of tiny laneways lined with stacks of buckets and bins. Sprawling heaps of cut bamboo lay wedged alongside roadways and splayed between buildings. Awnings and stalls. More sheets of rain. Milky brown puddles and ingenious paving. A brooding pasture of banana groves fenced in between a fern-lapped village path and a multi-storey car park crowned with dishes. Cats prowling everywhere or sleeping on piles of newspaper and sacking, their tails broken in a way I suppose people find beautiful. Wonderful birds trapped in tiny cages. I took a boat to Wat Pho and walked around it for half an hour before I ventured in. I stepped into an old pasar, which I suppose is the Indonesianised version of what we call a bazaar, and wanted never to leave. Green things stood drowning, festooned with green things. The ferry ran on stinking oil and was laced only very briefly against pier after pier by the insouciant boatman who whistled an elaborate series of instructions to the skipper, unseen overhead. I found complex tangles of tree roots which had become shrines, and a pomegranate collared with blue ribbon that hung in long elegant whorls, to bring fruitfulness. I peered over the concrete fences that were topped with broken glass the way ours at home used to be. A man I had spoken to in the alleyway came walking out over his flat roof. He saw me gazing spellbound into the village of his garden. “Would you like to come in and see?” I said, “Can you tell me – how do I say hello, in Thai, please.” For with thank you and hello, one can pass a glorious thirty-six hours, one can feast on a street stall and watch an old lady with a seamed smile threading rubber bands into a beautiful garland. I drank in everything. My feet were wet and my calves splashed with mud. I took seven hundred photographs on the Sunday and seven hundred more on the Monday, I bought very little and ate a lot. Everything seemed to me natural and true and real. Into the past, into enchantment, into childhood, into piety and reverence and irreverence and glee: the land where shopkeepers sleep behind their counters and people dangle their personal toiletries from a hook on a wall, from the bough of a tree. From the age of twelve torn away from these rich roots I had always, always longed to go back and now I had come home.

  • to meet my father

    I’m going into the difficult embrace of family life to say goodbye to my father. Our family relationships have been fraught with miscommunications, outbreaks of insanity, and violence. Now it’s all coming to an end and we will have to, I hope, focus on our common humanity.

    My mother says, you’ll find him much changed.

    I’ve barely spoken to Dad since his cancer swelled and got into his bones. It has taken him over only slowly. The oncologist gives him so and so many months still to live. Meanwhile the effects of the stroke a decade ago slow his walking and, sometimes, his concentration and that makes it harder for his body to cope with the disease. What will kill him, it seems, is one in the string of pneumonias and influenzas that have infested him since he’s been in and out of hospital. An iatrogenic death: caused by the healer.

    Dad is so generous and has faithfully tried to be a good father to us. In recent years he has taught himself, probably at my brother’s prompting, to say, awkwardly, “I’m very proud of you.” On the rare occasions when I speak to him over the phone he says, every time, “I love you, pet.” He never used to say this. If I said, “I love you,” he would say, “I love me, too.”

    I find these feats of compassion to be particularly moving as his own father leapt from a bridge when Dad was only twelve. His brother was ten and their baby brother three weeks old. Sometimes people’s opportunities to learn parenting skills are so cruelly limited.

    On Saturday I will fly out to Frankfurt, and then to Bangkok. This was an innovation we cooked up because I need to turn up healthy and strong and not be one more member of an unwell household ailing and needing care. When I first flew to Berlin the thirty hours’ travel left me trembling and unable to rest, I was swimming uphill, underwater, and though I was sick with hunger trying to eat made me vomit.

    The thought of leaving Berlin as the hot weather finally unfolds, and of flying in to Brisbane where winter arrives in inverted commas, fatigues me more than I can say. I have just gotten settled and it’s taken me 18 months. I’m so slow to adapt. Parts of me stay behind, or perhaps travel by the old seaways. I have looked up the forecast for Brisbane and it’s planning to be blue, beautiful one day, perfect the next. Mum says, “There’s a cold front coming, in Tenterfield they’re predicting snow.” The weather channels show rows of cheerful whole suns, and temperatures similar to Berlin in the Spring. So I guess I’ll be wearing the same clobber I’ve been wearing these last sweeter months.

    In Berlin now Spanish tourists are beginning to cycle past in the street bare-chested. Girls come out in their fluttering dresses, like pennants; there’s a fashion for unpleasant prints. All the tattoos are on display and we’ve seen the first way too stoned person of the season, sitting on a bench under an invisible sack of cement, their eyes so round and so sore it looked as though someone had drawn in cartoon rings.

    My father’s muscle tone is so deteriorated he finds it difficult to swallow. He has to eat sitting forward, with supervision and great care. So I have chosen out for him all the disgusting comestibles he loves, in the softest forms possible: raw meats, and potted intimate organs, all the indelible edibles with which shelves in a German deli seem to me literally to groan. I’m going to make him builders’ marmalade for breakfast, which is Metz – raw pig mince – mashed with raw onion and served on bread. I’m going to tempt him with Sülze, a kind of jelly quivering with the flesh of a pig’s head and sundry choppings of gherkin and carrot.

    As well as the pulverised raw meats in glass I have a light jumper, four fresh new blank notebooks and a jar of ink, six books to read, and my sunglasses for crying in public places. I have all my old familiar fears and they’re heavier than anything. I have visions of our plane catching fire in the engine and plummeting out of the sky, extinguishing in the giant ocean, coming to rest in the plastic-loamed sand. I pray that an accident won’t happen. I pray Dad will be there when I get to the house, for there is no one now well enough to come pick me up, and I’m planning to call him and tell him so. It’s hard to say goodbye but it would feel even worse never to say it at all. To say: fare thee well and thank you. I will honour your name. I will never waste the kindness you showed. I have loved all the love.

  • or anything but

    Two Americans in a coffee shop staffed by Australians. This is Berlin where not everybody bothers to learn German. They come in and order and make themselves comfortable. One starts talking about Sylvia Plath.

    He is reading a book about her life only it’s not very good. “I mean, with Hughes,” he says, sounding oddly over-familiar. They talk about football, which is what everyone is hearing about this week whether they like it or not. Their voices, like the giant screens set up in front of every late night convenience store and in every bar, are loud and blaring. They’ve been raised to expect prizes for participating and the world is their awe, yeah.

    “I’m not patriotic or anything,” the girl says. In my mind I hear: “I’m not racist, or anything, but,” which invariably heralds the most racist remarks. This is my favourite of the yeahbuts, which I pronounce to rhyme with rarebit. Equal favourite is the woeful, “I mean I’m not a feminist or anything, but – ” which, oddly enough, is necessary to preface anti-sexist ideas.

    “I know,” the guy says, quickly. “I’m not patriotic, either.”

    “…But when it comes to football,” he says, ” – I’m strangely patriotic!”

    They laugh, looking away from each other. She confides, “Me too. I just want the little guys to win. I mean, not – win,” she says.

    “No,” he says, “you want them to win.” There is a moment of silence as this sinks in.

    I am writing in a cafe where punks come in to beg from hipsters. Punk is the indigenous nation of Berlin, they built the poor but sexy reputation that has lured all these web designers and makers of cupcakes, now they are thrown out on their own lands and rely on bottle collecting, ingenious begging, ever more resourceful squats. This week I was cycling down a sunny street when a woman accosted me in French. Did I know where there was a squat nearby which she could visit? “You realise these are people’s homes,” I said. “You can’t just go in and… take photographs.” I directed to her to a large, enterprising commune which hosts open air cinema evenings in the warmer months. Her lip curled. “That place… is filled with tourists.”

    This cafe is on a street rapidly filling up with ice cream shops and children’s shoe stores: the twin signs, to my mind, of gentrification. I am part of the problem. But these strange twenty-five-year olds leave me feeling more foreign than any German ever did. They are talking now about their projects, and about some elder expert. “I’m thinking of getting him as my mentor for the project,” she says, as though the famous professor were a new brand of wallpaper. “I think maybe it would be good for me.” As though everything were a new brand of wallpaper. As though wallpaper were a background on one’s sharp black cell phone and would never need to be hung with paper and with sweat and paste, at all.