Wild Sovereign Development Site

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  • bullying

    On the bridge I pass two young women pushing prams walking with a guy chugging beer. They have their responsibilities, he has his beer. He is much larger than his baby mama, and in order that he can burp, twice, deliberately, right in her face, he has to crouch. Her head is down, she keeps pushing, and that is what makes me want to learn how to say in German: “You are in an abusive relationship.”

  • Dad and Ian

    Dad’s number is 0412 195 957. Mum’s number, obtained in a different year and from a different phone company, is separated from his by only two digits. For years their numbers were almost the same and then Mum put Dad’s mobile through the wash and now Dad has cancer in his blood. The doctor’s stopped the chemotherapy because it wasn’t working, but not before it turned their home life medieval. He had radiation, hormone treatment, then the magic pill. He will be dead before I ever get home.

    Dad has a close friend from childhood called Ian, not the Ian in this picture. They were lifesavers together on the Gold Coast. Tonight I heard that Ian has inoperable cancer in his lungs. My brother sent me a photo of Ian coming out of the water at Little Burleigh looking hale and strong: he sent a photo of the four dozen young men lined up in their wrestle suits. This is how men were built in those days, I thought: before McDonalds. As I lay down and closed my eyes a strange calming image flooded me. I was thinking about the two friends who now have known each other longer than they’ve either of them known anybody else, just about; so many people have died. Their generation is at the wall. Their bodies are crumbling. I knew Ian was in town for a while to spend time with his children, our playmates on the long summer holidays at the beach, and I thought: what if someone could bring the two of them together, if they both wanted; and then discreetly disappear; so they could have a beer or a cup of tea with no one fussing around them and being social; and face the horizon as it approaches. Dad told me once years ago how when they were lifesavers they were both out on their boards beyond the breakers, where the water is green and tilts; a huge shark went cruising past his feet. He said he wasn’t scared. It was just a part of being in the water.

    I always thought once you step into the ocean, you are in their territory. They know the places we cannot map and can eat the things we are. They have no mercy, so far as we can understand it. They maybe don’t even have fear. But once you leave the sloping beach and paddle out past the breakers you are out of the reach of land and you have stepped into the wild.

    .

    My father was born during World War Two. It’s hard to imagine he minds being deprived of his mobile phone, the constant connectivity that keeps us bobbing on the surface of our minds like so much trash.

    For the first time now the living outnumber the dead, things will only get worse; it is a strange and insecure world we have made, top heavy and crumbling fast, like a breaker. We are a web on the surface of a world we have ruined and let ebb, and filled its clear salt waters with our junk and emptied them of all life using nets the size of dead cities. We are a glinting and reflecting shifting roof of plastic bottles for the endless ocean which needs no roof.

    When I went to buy a futon in 1996, my father had the only mobile phone I’d ever seen. He lent it to me, so that he could call me later to come and pick up his car. I shoved the phone in my bag and forgot it was there.

    The futon I chose was so comfortable after I lay down on it I fell into a sound sleep. A strange blaring noise woke me, repeated and insistent like a tiny tugboat. People around the shop were stirring and saying to one another, I think your mobile phone is ringing. That’s what we called them in those days, two words. I said when asked, loftily, Oh no – I don’t have a mobile phone. Then, mortified, recollected that I had, and this was my father, ringing me on it. His phone and his car were in my custody.

    I bought this week a German sim card, after a year and three months here without one. I am wary of giving anyone the number. I think of the life I had, once I had slipped its leash, as like telling the household I’m just going out for a walk. Unless you take your phone along – no one can know where you are. No one can call to say Stop for milk or You are late, and so you can browse and forage and glean and sift through your thoughts like hot sand that sparkles neverendingly and forever through your fingers which are dry and brown. It makes me sad that my father doesn’t have a phone now and that it seems hardly worth replacing it. It makes me proud for him, and happy, to think of him slipping the leash, gazing at the sky, listening to the birds.

    On his verandah with his afternoons all to himself he can see the horizon from his long cane chair which curves like a Malibu board. But the chair is so low and Dad struggles to get out of it. He cannot make it to the landline in time if I call him from my strange time zone in another season; efforts to reach him seem futile. From his supine position the verandah rail is his horizon. It has snuck closer in his sleep.

    On the far side of the world where the water is cold I stare and stare towards the south but it’s slipped round the curve. I hear nothing, and I see nothing, and I get these occasional emails. My father who then was the love of my life with his fearless innovations and his steady carpenter’s hand has stepped off the coastal shelf now, he is out for a walk and he may be some time, he is going where we none of us can follow and I don’t believe he will ever meet us there; he’ll be gone; he has stepped into the wild.

  • walk on ice

    Last week I stood on water for the first time in my life. So eerie. My friend rang, saying, there are people on the river! and I ran down to look. There they were, casual as anything, crossing the water from side to side. Today it is raining in a dreary way as though the clouds were melting and it occurred to me, so warm was it when I left the house, that it cannot be winter for ever. It seems like it’s going to be: but it won’t.

  • calvados, ahoy

    Miserable with flu I staggered down to the markets in search of star anise, lemons, and fresh coriander. There was a golden-lit stall with a radio blaring which sells raclette, a stinky, melty, fondue-like cheese, and “hot apple punch.” Hot apple punch! Irresistible. I came round the front of the stall and presented myself; moments later the bloke, who had been sneaking a quick durry out the back, lifted the flap of his tent and introduced himself with the flourish of a magician: “You see? I am already there.”

    I’d like an apple punch, I said, and he said, lifting a golden bottle and tilting it towards me, would you like a shot of calvados in it? Good on a chilly night. In German they say, ein Schluck: a swallow. Oh yes, I said, absolutely: I am wanting it against the flu and I think with the calvados it will be just… “Hervorragend,” he finished for me. Capital, tremendous, outstanding.

    Carrying my steaming cup I went around the vegetable stalls, gathering a bunch of coriander, a quiver of cinnamon quills. At the cheese stall where she cuts slabs of butter fresh from a giant block I bought eggs for the weekend, waiting til she had served the family of Syrian refugees whose host, a Berlin woman in her fifties, hastily appeared to translate for them. “These are really good eggs,” she said, using gesture: “they’re organic.” The Syrian man wanted the eggs but he and his three children screwed up their faces at the pervasive stench of over-mature German cheeses, something they have perhaps never encountered before. The stallholder met my eye and very gently we started laughing. “Stinks, hey?” she said cheerfully to the youngest child, holding out the swinging plastic bag of eggs invitingly. When I got home I put my stock pot on the stove and have added to it the following ingredients, a witches’ brew for colds and flu that I have sworn on for twenty years: it deals with aching bones, the twitching burning skin, the sore throat and feeling of lassitude: heat in a pot full of water for an hour or two, slowly, then serve each cupful with honey and the juice of half a lemon. You’re welcome.

    Witches Brew

    6 cloves garlic, split in half
    5-6 chilies
    half-thumb chunk of ginger, sliced
    6 anise stars
    5-6 quills cinnamon
    rind of a lemon or a lime
    bunch of fresh coriander

    Simmer one hour in 8-10 cups of water. Let stand one hour. Serve each cupful with honey and juice of half a lemon.

  • angel Bowie

    Two hipsters compete in a Berlin bookshop, the day of David Bowie’s death

    Hipster One: I know, I mean I was like twelve when I heard ‘Changes’ for the first time.

    Hipster Two: I know, it’s like, I just… it’s like I had a personal connection. You know? Like I…

    Hipster One, abruptly: Yeah, everybody seems to be saying that.

    Hipster Two, hastily: I mean, not that I felt it, I mean like, this morning I was kind of like, Wow… But ~

    Hipster One: But now ~

    Hipster Two: I mean it hasn’t ruined my day or anything.

    I am standing in the window alcove with a volume I saw from the street and have lifted out of the display. This conversation, with its switches from having to care most to having to care least, seems to me exhausting. I think about the beautiful and dignified Iman, Bowie’s wife, whose day the news presumably has ruined. Hipster One, who owns the bookshop, calls across the room.

    Hipster One: Kann ich helfen?

    Me: O nein – danke, ich kann es selber lesen.

    Thank you, no… I can read it for myself. I smile at her lest she think I am being less playful than rude. I am reading a journal called Elsewhere, about place. It is a first volume, compiled by a bunch of homesick expatriates and published locally in English. To get here I walked past a stream of graffiti saying if you want to talk English, go to New York – Berlin hates you. Variations included Not for yuppies and the more melancholy anti-gentrification slogan Wir bleiben alle, written on a building which is about to be mass-evicted and made over for higher-paying expatriates. It occurs to me that Bowie himself was one of the pioneers of this gentrification.

    My companion, who made the signage for this shop, comes in and the shop owner realises belatedly why I look half-familiar. She switches from the formal Sie to the friendly du and cozies up, saying: Habt ihr einen guten Rutsch gehabt?

    And did you both have a good slip? a good slide? This is how Germans picture their entry into the New Year. After Christmas they start wishing each other einen guten Rutsch, as though all the nation held its breath ready to lurch down wildly careening into the new frontier, meatier, balder, bolder, breathlessly. We’ve arrived!

    I buy the journal. We walk on. My companion guides me round a brownish squelch coiled on the stones. I look closer. “That – is just a big fat brown hair scrunchie.” He laughs. “And yet…”

    I am pushing my bicycle, I don’t want to risk a bad slip, a bad slide. I tell him about the dog mess I found on my first visit to New York, wrapped in a flattened red singlet bag and shaped exactly like the drawing of a heart. I wrote about it online: I dog poo New York. On the river a circle of ice has formed round the perfect hole where someone threw a chair, a microwave, a bicycle, and the hole has frozen over. Bottles stand drunkenly frozen in place where they bobbed, and a few Christmas trees. Where the water has dissolved into liquid are a dozen ducks cosily chatting on the curving edge of remaining ice, which resembles a beach. It is so cold the tops of the buildings disappear but my breath makes shapes on the air. We are all smokers today. Or maybe, dragons. Breathing ice.

  • zwiebelchen?

    On the markets I passed a tourist with an American accent who was saying to his companion, “Jeez. So much amazing stuff to eat and drink!” Inexplicably he managed this in a tone of complaint. Jet lag? For how, I wondered, can you possibly turn that into a sense of personal injury. Woe is you. I bought a jar of honey; local honey is relatively flavourless because the Linden trees in Berlin have a very mild scent. I bought sweet potato at the potato stall where you can spend half an hour reading her scribbled handmade signs. She extols the nutritional benefits of orange vs purple sweet potatoes and sells fourteen kinds of spud. When I buy a bag of root vegetables she always pops a tiny round golden onion in the top, saying sweetly, “Zwiebelchen?” which means more or less ‘And may I offer you a tiny baby onion… an onionette?’ She’s so cute with it. What’s particularly cute is that she has clearly trained her husband to do this and he clearly doesn’t get it: when I buy from him he’s all blokey and dismal, ticking off the requirements almost visibly in his head: paper bag, turn down the top like a lunch pail, “Oh yes, the onion! Sorry – here, have an onion.” Muttering to himself that he almost forgot to throw that in. My eyes meet hers over the back of his head and we share a moment of feminine protectiveness and love.

    The potato lady is an old punk and always has some raddled spud which has started to send out its purplish tendrils, turned upside down for hair and with eye holes nicked in its face with a toothpick. Generally these guys will be carrying a flag or dressed in a scrap of fabric, propped up in front of middlemost bucket. I skirted the Turkish stall holders who sing their wares and scold their customers and fronted up at the endmost cheese stall, where some of the cheeses are eight years old. She also has butter, far younger, in fact churned yesterday. The woman in front of me was buying a slab of butter and as I sometimes do I composed the German sentence in my head while I was waiting. “Auch so ein Stück Butter, bitte.” Ie ‘I’ll have another such slice of butter, please.’ One of my greatest difficulties on the market is I don’t know the words for piece, slice, bunch, punnet – the collective nouns. When I came home with my basket over my arm, my friend was stretching up over her bicycle’s rump to pull my doorbell again. I told her of my triumph and we hugged each other gleefully. We are veterans of Germany’s indefatigably formal and prolonged migration processes, where ordinary German seems to acquire a top hat and a moustache. You see, I told her as we mounted the stairs to eat the Dutch pepper cake I baked this morning: I performed three distinct linguistic somersaults in a row, to get out that sentence intact. First there’s the two different Ks: auch, and Stück. The two different Us, ü and u. Then the two different but similar words, Butter which ends in a dry R, and bitte which ends in the kind of disdainful e we rarely use in Australian English. Out it came flawless. I somersaulted home.

  • pure new cold all over

    It’s snowing! It’s snowing! It’s snowing! I came into a cafe going, It’s snowing, and she said, I know, and I said, But – it’s snowing! and then hours later walked out into the dark and under the golden lights every car wore a fresh crisp white bonnet, my old tears burst its banks, oh – snow.

    In my cafe two fellows in black beards were drawing at a big round table and as the cafe closed two girls in long tresses came up to say, So? Are you drawing? They looked up, patiently. The girls were pretty and the boys kind. “So do you do this professionally? Or…”

    Ah, yes. That tasteful first question, also asked of every dentist and every builder’s labourer – so how much do you get paid for that? The taller girl plumped her bag down on top of the nearer guy’s paints. She got out her phone. “May I?” Yes, he said, standing back so that she could take a picture of his work. Her friend said, Doesn’t it bother you, working in a cafe? Behind her packing up my laptop and my notebooks I answered for him, only quietly – the only thing that bothers me about working in a cafe is that people come up and interrupt, this has happened to me many times, someone actually waving their hand under my nose to get my attention so that they can say, Doesn’t it bother you working in a place like this, how can you concentrate?

    Coming out into the fresh snow, unexpected and perfectly flawless just yet, I saw a man – let’s say a man – had drawn a huge erect penis on the rump of one of those anointed cars, cos some people don’t understand perfection. I could hear children cluttered round the corner shrieking in their snowsuits, that time of year! is here! so I put down the palm of my hand on someone’s bonnet to make a snow angel of five long fingers, marking: I too see this snowing time of year. This indoor landscape. Domain of families and gold. I too am here.

  • the indivisible splendour

    Thinking of love today and how it has such deep transformative power in our lives. I so long longed for people who would understand me and be willing to be understood. Those friends and those loving acquaintances are everything to me, the topsoil on the earth’s surface or maybe the oceans which caress its journey, ‘the dance in its lonely walk.’

    This body is pining in me for its home
    that seats its hollow floor with ships, swinging and sighing,
    surging and sighing
    like birds with weighted wings
    that seeds its lonely untended beds
    with salt, to raise the precious produce of the sea
    I look back, and long to dissolve myself
    back home into the indivisible splendour of the water
    that sheathes the burning earth
    the dance in its lonely walk

    ~ from Adrift, published in Going for the Eggs in the Middle of the Night 1999

  • the man she likes

    I saw a girl on the Underground travelling with the man she’s in love with and the girl he likes. They were Italian. Crisp faces. Hers, naturally, a little long and sad; the other girl’s, naturally, coquettish and confident. He had a lovely outlook, solid stance, good beard, and kind expression; compared to them he was tall, he stood unselfconsciously, his feet well planted. Oh, how she loved him and craved for his attention, his acknowledgement. The other girl was wearing a cute mini. On the platform the girl who loved him poked him as if playfully, but he barely saw her; the other girl made a lot of play with the straps of her little backpack. My girl couldn’t help herself, she went close to him and buried her face in his chest, pretending she was joking, but really soaking up some of his smell and his heartbeat, his masculine solidity, his illicit love that would never be her own. Your heart would have ached to see her. She followed him onto the train like a little sister, dragging her feet. The two girls were, purportedly, friends and she had to pretend to be interested in what the winning girl was saying, which seemed endless; the loser girl was lacklustre, she’d lost confidence, she could see the headlights of disaster barreling right down the tunnel towards her. They leaned on opposite sides of the carriage, the man, the two girls, and you could see he had forgotten they were travelling in a trio. She peeled his heart open with her yearning eyes. She longed for him and gazed and gazed. And longing does no good at all. I could have told her that, if she’d asked me; I thought of saying so. But she wouldn’t have believed it, we never do, just as he couldn’t see the love standing in front of him, yearning for every morsel of his blessed being.

  • New Zonked

    In New York we had dinner with two New Yorker friends, one from Chicago, who are both broadcast journalists, and a Southern boy one of our friends had picked up in the street and they had bonded. Southern boy had on a Hallowe’en pumpkin shirt over an American flag t shirt. My German companion made me laugh by innocently mispronouncing his views (sane) on American gun laws (insane): you walk into a school and it’s like that film, he said: The Texas Chainsaw Moussaka.

    Many Americans have a naivete that makes me feel protective of them, and not just about guns. More than once I have been complimented on speaking such excellent English, for an Australian. It doesn’t always seem to be because the speaker has confused us with Austria. I guess the sensation of believing one’s nation the centre, and pinnacle, of the civilised world – the use, even, of phrases like ‘the civilised world’ – might engender a certain self-satisfaction. On my very first visit, a few years back now, to New York I would marvel to anyone who’d listen how much better of a time I was having than I’d expected. “That’s because New York is the centre of the universe,” explained four or five unrelated New Yorkers, innocently.

    At JFK we had queued with our passports and I overheard the officer herding the line answer an anxious tourist’s question with, “I’m just doing my job here. Anything else you’re asking – is irrelevant.” “They’re handling people like goods,” said my companion, shuffling forward. Three days later up in the Bronx we went walking through one of the giant parks that make that part of town so beautiful. As we were coming down the hill a crocodile of children was climbing up. A little girl in front was walking rapidly backwards, her head tilted round to guide herself. “You can do it,” the teacher encouraged. “I believe in you, Destiny!”

    I said, to make her laugh, “We believe in you too, Destiny!” A second group of students followed them. One little girl was walking with her teacher, saying, “I’m serious!” “You can’t call a taxi,” the woman told her, “in a park.” It occurred to me I’d never said I believe in Destiny, before. I’m just… not American. Yet the sense of kinship with random passersby as we wandered up Central Park right from the bottom to the top, as we ventured into Harlem, as I got tangled in conversation with fascinating people on the D train, forever a stranger, was so spicy to me and so sweet. I loved the guy on the subway whose Superman socks were pulled high to the knee and inside out. I loved the wide-eyed baby whose daddy was so stoned he gave off a pungent weed reek. I loved the crazy Christian lady who tried to pick up my companion and when she’d asked, are you alone, looked at me and said, “And is that your… sister?” I loved the man who glanced into my camera’s screen when I stopped short at the top of the stairs into the subway station at Canal Street and said, “Nice photo.” It felt as it always to me feels in New York city, one of earth’s prototypical cities, as if we all are engaged on some giant endeavour, and none of us will ever see the outcome – in completion – we are fragments in a kaleidoscope like moths, we are our own art, we are brushing up against each other every day all day long as we go, handling the good like it was people.