Wild Sovereign Development Site

Blog

  • the wind was rising

    “The wind was rising, so I went to the wood. It lies south of the city, a mile from my home: a narrow, nameless fragment of beechwood, topping a shallow hill. I walked there, following streets to the city’s fringe, and then field-edge paths through hedgerows of hawthorn and hazel.

    “Rooks haggled in the air above the trees. The sky was a bright cold blue, fading to milk at its edges. From a quarter of a mile away, I could hear the noise of the wood in the wind: a soft marine roar. It was the immense compound noise of friction – of leaf fretting on leaf, and branch rubbing on branch.

    “[…] Anyone who lives in a city will know the feeling of having been there too long. The gorge-vision that streets imprint on us, the sense of blockage, the longing for surfaces other than glass, brick, concrete and tarmac. […] I felt a sharp need to leave Cambridge, to reach somewhere remote, where starlight fell clearly, where the wind could blow upon me from its thirty-six directions, and where the evidence of human presence was minimal or absent. Far north or far west; for to my mind this was where wildness survived, if it survived anywhere at all.

    “[In 1990] the American author William Least-Heat Moon described Britain as ‘a tidy garden of a toy realm where there’s almost no real wilderness left and absolutely no memory of it. Where the woods are denatured plantings. The English, the Europeans, are too far from the wild. That’s the difference between them and us.’”

    ~ Robert Macfarlane, opening The Wild Places

  • rainy childs

    Berlin children are adorable when it rains. I came upon a flock of them, holding hands in pairs and stopped dead at a cobbled intersection wearing bright and varied rainslicks and little hoods. In the winter one sees them bundled in snowsuits, a hundred cossetted little snowmen. Their mamas and papas dress them in primary colours, bold patterns, polka dots. I drew myself and my wet bicycle relictantly away from the tiny plastic-coated crowd and found on the next street a tiny boy doused in yellow mackintosh and giant green boots, wheeling very carefully his wooden walk-bike through every single puddle.

  • New York meets Berlin

    It’s 3am now in New York but when we landed in Berlin, it was 7 o’clock on a sunny Sunday morning. It is colder. I am tired. My first time arriving in Berlin from the States and the subway, the U Bahn, seems immediately different. People are different and I can’t put my finger on it. “Thinner,” he says, and I gasp. He is right. They do not seem to be eating themselves to death. They are playful with one another, with strangers, in a way that seems to me to take a different kind of things seriously. They chatter and laugh, fall asleep, excuse themselves to one another as they pass. There is a different kind of facial expression, something hard to quantify. There are many many fewer really giant large people. They seem, I don’t know if it’s more alive or simply more awake. I do not cherish myself making these observations but in between the long spells of sleeping sickness on the swaying bus and the whispering silky smooth train I keep noticing. The train platform is not a kind of caged forest. It feels spacious and light. I didn’t expect to feel this way. There is a lot less staring into phones. People look to me fresh somehow. They seem grimmer and less disheartened.

  • what ate New York

    The film poster that has Godzilla tearing up great chunks of the city and eating alive New York City should have been a giant Pacman, I think. For technology has eaten New York. And not only New York: Copenhagen, Madrid, Berlin: these are cities where I have witnessed this carnage, sinister and almost silent. We noticed it on the plane, a ride through the sky which has transformed from what was a quiet space, a time of dreaming and half-sleep, into a wilderness of seatback screens. Everything flickers. People feed themselves perpetual stimulation by the handful, like a supersized bucket of chips. As soon as we land out come the phones. Soon the aisles are crammed with people stooping under the bulkhead and standing over each other, so intense is their desire to be free of the traveling life and meet with the destination city, yet all have pulled out small devices and are keenly, yet dutifully scrolling. Oh, the dullness, pervasive and wee. Why travel five thousand miles through the ferocious universe only to read up on what’s happening at home? Instantly to rejoin the same long conversations we were wrapped in on our own soft couch.

    We drag our cases to the A Train. My heart is pounding. This line is the subject of so much damn jazz. But when we get inside and the familiar orange seats are filled with black folks, every one of them inimicable, cool, and beautiful, the place proves to have changed somewhat since 2011. The suddenness of these changes and that nobody notices sometimes makes me despair and grieve. I miss my community, who have turned away from each other. Now even in the most exciting city anywhere, every third person is staring down into their lap, hung over the miniature news from elsewhere.

    Used to be I was the annoying or crazy one, preoccupied and dreaming in a hyperalerted world, clogging up the pavement as I stopped short to stare upwards, to notice detail or jot things down, writing as I walked, holding my breath, my train of thought, my pen. Now I’m the passenger in everybody else’s aquarium world. In the street, people scroll as they stroll. City that never sleeps seems halfawake. And it’s all so iconic. The subway car that looks like every movie scene, the puddles and paddocks of outermost Thingie Island where the airport lies marshily. The Rockaways, Blvd and Ave. “We are passing under the East River,” I report. “We are passing under the World Trade Center. A lot of people died here,” reading the map, my eyes filling with sentimental tears. “True,” says my companion, “and then their friends went out and slaughtered many, many, many times more around the world.” After an hour of train travel, after nine hours of airplane travel, after an hour of bus travel in Berlin we come up out of the subway station at last, at 42nd Street, and the noise – the smell of French fries and traffic and metallic dust – the people and the way they pass, the hoardings, the sidewalks, the way they hold themselves – both of us standing their marooned by suitcases, we each burst into tears separately and hug across our baggage.

    The lights, cameras, action are all around. We drift through the traffic of souls, uncounting. This explicit town, alive in all our dreams, overwhelms with its gross drama and chaotic splendour and decay, while at the same time it speaks to everyone individually. We find the New York Times, Dean and Delucas, the cafe. We find my friend, her black hair everywhere and her familiarity so moving. Even she, an artist, a true lifelong artist, ravels her phone at every opportunity. We buy burgers and a jar of beer, at the counter I worry we are taking too long to order and look up. There she is, hunched over her phone, as thought it were a knot in her hair she is unable to stop from worrying and untangling. Oh New York! Oh humanity! Come back to me! I miss the dreaming, the uncertainty, the hesitation and lostness. This striving, blaring, rushing, overstimulated community premium among the anthills we have built over the world is a place I experience through the dreaming comb, the honeycomb, of sweet nature, and the wild. Within eight stops of the Howard Beach station where the airport train meets the A train I have given up my seat to a pregnant lady and he’s given up his to an elder woman who rewards him with a sweet seamed smile, we’ve admired the pretty girl with green-tinged hair who has filed her front teeth into sharp vampiric points, I’ve passed on the name of an excellent book to a women who accepted my scribbled note and stashed it in her pocket, have told four people how beautiful they are, the tiny lady whose friend took his seat has paused at her stop, the stop before ours, to say, You have a nice day, now, and the beautiful man whose face was so somber and cold has smiled, shyly and ironically, when I said as he got off, You are a really beautiful man and I hope you have a really beautiful life. He said, drawlingly, Thank you. I love him.

  • a beaker of fruit in the sun

    Some of the friends I made in New York four years ago are so precious to me that I have been saying their names aloud as I walk about my apartment and then smiling and convulsing with love. Flying into New York on the Fourth of July. First time I got there it was Superbowl Sunday: America, I love your peculiar public holidays. It was February and snowing and a lot has happened since then. I am eating up all the fresh fruit in my house and drowning my potplants. The poor sad fig tree by the window drops another sighing leaf. “This. Is not. The tropics.” This time round I want to do all the iconic things I skipped on my first visits, because I was too immersed in the sultry life of the place, the people who surprise you with insightful questions in the street, the man who gazed and gazed at my breasts as we drew closer and gasped, “Oh! I love your… eyes!” dragging his own eyes up to meet mine as he spoke. The longing in his voice, plangent and transparent. The love of life. The piles of people, literally stacked for miles all around, as though the whole population of Australia had been swept up into one giant terrarium. And the way you can feel them in your sleep, breathing and striving and struggling so hard. I want to ice skate in Central Park although the snow has melted now. I want to run into the beautiful man who was reading Rumi on the train. I want to show my Berlin companion the things I found there last time, the Flatiron Building where I laid my hand flat for goodbye and started choking as though I was leaving a lover. I want to point to Trump Towers as we glide past it in a vehicle of some kind and pass on my favourite local pun: “New Yorkers call this edifice complex.”

  • everywanna’s an artist

    Giggling to myself at what seems a very typical Berlin expatriate conversation I just passed. American accent. Eight uses of “I/my” within two sentences. One “I need to find,” one “animation,” one “my Dad.” Everywanna’s an artist. Hey I just made that up.

    This week life has handed me lemons & I’ve made lemonade. Actually life didn’t hand me the lemons, I had to go out and buy them but on the Turkish markets they were very inexpensive. We’re having an unaccustomed heatwave in Berlin & das Limo tut gut. The tart citrus and slight sweetness seem to me so unsubtly symbolic, so refreshing, so true.

  • the true markets

    On Sunday in the midst of strife I had a most wonderful day. Met an acquaintance who wanted something from me, and we walked into a foreign land so familiar that I fell into my childhood, and the sweet world intricate and divine which sustained my deepest breaths when I was seven, nine, twelve, eleven rose up in me and about me again and the trees were all there, we knew each other, the soft wind… I cannot describe and no one can transport that essence, the spirit of the place wrapping its tendrils like

    a delicate sweet love

    like a plant which is birdsong, a vine divine

    or like the bride of the forest who shyly beckons shadows, and sings underwater, and has rooms for all our grief.

    You walk in through the trees and there are people everywhere, eating and chatting. I took two hundred photographs. I remembered wandering on my own in the pasar, on the markets, in Jakarta

    alone but never alone, and the trustfulness held in the colourful world back then. Adults were sexy and cool. They didn’t impose. Nobody touched me. Only the lady, the old ibu, wrapped in her thin scarf who took hold of my head in Blok M and cried all over my face, down my neck, her reddened betel-nut tooth stumps, and her grace and words: this child, this girl, she has depth, she is in the world, she is a soul I can see, she is one of the ones.

    I can’t remember her words. But I will never forget the shy proudful sensation of her touch on me and her recognition, down from the mountains, the cave with a wall solid behind it which creates a resonance.

    On the bright Thai food markets which began, my Peruvian friend told me, from the longing people had to scent and taste their lovely homeland

    where food is beautiful, and fresh like birds, cooking a kind of singing

    not all pickled, roasted, brewed, we found Asia in Berlin. The laying out of rugs and seagrass mats. The bright umbrellas and bold plastic implements, lime green, orange, blue. All the families squatted comfortably at their esky tables and their cardboard carton frying-boxes, each carton spattered inside with dark from the oil splitting off in the toiling wok –

    There were stalls everywhere, low at ground level, people squatting on their mats pounding and chopping and skilfully frying things. Freshness drew me and my acquaintance, who had said “I will be there for you in this hard time” but in five hours asked me not one question about all of my news and myself, down one grassy alley after another, under the trees, and out in the big clear grassy field. I overheard a Berlin punk on his phone saying, “We are here in the Hauptfressgasse,” the principal pig-out aisle, “come find us,” and the sky

    with its inimitable piles like God’s geography, pleasurable, transient. The sky was a beast you could watch for hours straining its leash. And then the train home so swaying and fast between the treetops and the speed was exciting, the lurching and long corners, the sense of riding rapidly above the grimy familiar streets and swinging, like an ape so joyous in his homeland, vine to vine, hand to hand, song to song – that was all I was conscious of. It was such a relief.

    I wouldn’t say I was drunk. But I was so very, so very, just so relaxed. A lady under a purple umbrella with a carton-top of bottles, the world’s smallest, freshest bar, mixed up an unholy powerful brew. In Thai German Spanish she said, “You want capina? You want mosquito.” I chose mosquito. Then she sliced the lime with two sharp chops, into the palm of her hand, with a cleaver and crushed it in the cane sugar with her big pestle. Mint leaves then she filled the whole beaker to the rim with gold Havana rum. “Drei Euro.”

    Clear tubs with jelly shapes swimming bright and glutinous in the milk, milk of the coconut, mother that travels long seas. The plangent scrabble and wail of unselfconscious Asian voices, familiar in my oldest memories and so sweet and salty and spiced and honest to my ear. Berliners roar, a guttural beery spume: in blaring Jakarta the screeching, the Bulgarian mountaintop want of modulation, the intensely modelled fineness and discretion – that is culture, or one early formation of cultural expectation, to me.

    People sitting crouched around a frayed mat under the trees were throwing yellowed dice high again and again, some unfamiliar game printed on the cloth they had spread between the five of them. Little children kicked their legs. I ate and ate. Every mouthful seemed precious. The fresh feisty fruitfulness, realness, diverse sprung view. There were plates of fried insects, sweets wrapped in banana leaves, hot spicy soups. Bright pink milky drinks and bottles garlanded in flowers. I had satays, dumplings, green papaya salad threshed in a trophy-sized mortar which filled my mouth and throat with remembered fire. The high thick combing trees foamed around the park, a large, open park, almost concealing the buildings. We could have been anywhere, we could have been in the Seventies when adulthood was a charm I held inside me. Could have been in the tropics. Could have been out to sea somewhere in the congruent, lasting, more intricate world, that was built by many hands and had trees and is gone.

  • feierabend

    I love how in Germany restaurants closed on Mondays will say, Montag ist Ruhetag. Monday is our day of peace. And every single day, week in, week out, when you are finished your work and knocking off for the day, home time is Feierabend: celebration-evening. People will say to one another consolingly at the checkout: Not to worry, it’s nearly Feierabend.

    The peace at one end of the day, festivities at the other: it seems to me somehow an ideal sweetness for the life.

  • falling, and small, and very far away

    I had an email from my partner’s new lover. It was my fault, I wrote to her first. This exchange happened last Saturday night, about three or four hours after he first told me. I’m falling in love with another woman. I could do nothing but feel it, I braced myself and grieved. Threw him out of my house. Held myself and ached. There seemed nothing to discuss – if he’s in love, then it’s over. On Sunday a stream of forlorn calls came in. Four, five, six calls in a row, none of which I picked up. Emails, one after the other: Please no. Don’t just cut me out of your life like this. Is it really all worth so little to you?

    That one, I answered. “Actually I think that’s my line.” I had found a resurrection in a certain short-term supply of wry dry humour, an emergency stash I’d kept under my seat but had never thought to have to use in this context. Fit your own mask first before assisting others. The fifth call I picked up because its disguised number seemed to me to herald a call back from my close friend in Denmark, who earlier that morning had been listening patiently. But instead it was… I don’t know what to call him. To say my partner seems now ridiculous and cruel. It was the guy I used to know. His voice sounded falling and small and very far away, as though he had tumbled down a well in some distant galaxy and didn’t have anybody to haul him out. “Hullo,” he said, two hollow syllables, like Eeyore. “Oh,” I said. “I don’t want to talk to you. Sorry.” I hung up.

    Meanwhile I had worked out at last who this person was and I decided to write to her. It wasn’t because I needed to stir the hornets. It was for comfort, to make it real, for my bewilderment. I had this slippery tipping feeling like in the snow, when you’re climbing a hill. There’s the pain, and there are moments of a surf-like salty emphasis where you can’t be sure which way is up. My instinct is to open out the emotion, but lance the drama. I wrote to her as quietly as I could. “Hi, Name of Woman. I’m Cathoel, the guy I used to know’s partner.”

 I said, he’s just told me the two of you are in love and you want to be together. I am reeling. I’m struggling to understand, I can’t grasp it. It would be a great kindness if you would be willing to meet me, some day, maybe… just have a coffee, or something.

    Within ten minutes she had written back. Yes, very gladly, she’d love to meet. There was so much to say, how about tomorrow night. Or the night after that.

    A little, warning ping went off deep in my reptile brain but I stumbled on. “Ok, I think so, thanks. That’s kind of soon… do you mind if I let you know later, let the dust settle, see how I am feeling.” Her profile photo was glamorous but abstract and she wanted to meet at the park. Maybe we could both carry a red carnation, I said, so we can recognise each other. Because that, at least, would be amusing.

    Next morning another email from Name of Woman. Long, impassioned, faintly accusing. She didn’t think she could now meet me, after all. She had seen the story I wrote about my experience, about his news, about how we were broken, about how I was hurt. Did I really feel entitled to violate his privacy? Sure, she could understand I felt terribly wounded and wanted to lash out in turn. But, Cathoel, she wrote: people get hurt.

    All curiosity, all desire to meet her, dissolved. I could feel it fizzing out of me leaving the dry sand behind. As I started to type I was asking myself one of those good-instinct questions: why am I bothering to answer. Hi, Name of Woman. Fair enough, no problem. I can understand your feeling. I said I had written out of my own turmoil and shock and that writing helps me to try and understand the world. I felt I had done it respectfully, anonymously, and certainly hadn’t done it to wound or punish anyone, “because that would be mean.” And by mean, I mean: lame.

 Her answer told me everything you could ever need to know about Name of Woman. “But, Cathoel, you’re forgetting. There is somebody you are hurting by publishing this story. You hurt me.”

    I could feel myself physically rear back from the screen like it had farted, my chin tipping to the left, my brow crunching. Out loud I said, “How self-absorbed are you?” This of course was a foolish question and illustrates how stupid a smart person can be. I could instead have recounted. Let’s see. What do we know about this person, so far? She is married and she’s a mum. She’s gone out of her way to fan a heavy flirtation with a man who is already spoken for. The rest of the story I should have been able to tell, myself.

    “And what about the people who read your writing?” she went on, gently as though admonishing me. Pointing out to me a moral lack I’d not myself had the sensitivity to see. “They are hurt. Because it’s such a painful tale.” I was feeling the pain by now, alright, but possibly not in the way Name of Woman meant. This was first thing in the morning, my first day of singledom, I was sleepy as well as rather clouded by heartache and had turned to my emails while barely awake. Hoping for some sort of shaft of light, Hollywood, Biblical: it had all been a dream, it never happened at all, he’s made a horrible mistake, he’s not going to see her again, he loves me. They had only met twice, both times in public. They hadn’t even kissed. How can that be ‘in love’? Somehow aside from the agony this whole thing felt mortifyingly lurid, improbable, a shlock production.

    And yet here I was clutching my pillow like it was a person, drowning in my own saliva, grappling to gasp. The absurdity as well as the viciousness of the breach cut through my body again and again. I had an ache in my throat that would be there for four days. This person lacked the humanity to understand the situation she had helped him to create. Let them love each other, they deserve each other, let her leave her marriage.

    I didn’t answer the email, decided not to answer again. But she didn’t like that. Within ten minutes the first reminder showed up. “Where are you now?” Sure, I thought, unbelievingly: why don’t you come over? Maybe you can give me a smiley face and a hug. While I was making tea a third message arrived. “Where are you? Can I see you?”

    You can’t see me after all, but you must see me: I was beginning to lose track. The sudden spate of demands, the multiple unrequited emails, the purple emotionality: it felt so false, a mimicry of how you might speak to a hard-hearted lover who says abruptly, It’s over, and will not meet to discuss it. Recanting the whole story into my friend’s ear over Skype that evening I said, “If I said to you, ‘Where are you? Can I see you?’ – wouldn’t that come off as kind of… flaky? Desperate?” From Brisbane she said, “I am shivering. What on earth has he done, getting himself entangled with this person?”

    Half an hour later I got an email from the guy I used to know. She had recruited him. “Name of Woman thinks the three of us should meet. What do you say? She is worried about you.”

 In German this phrase is, “she is making herself sorrows about you.” Easy solution, I thought, my lip curling. If you’re concerned about me, how about don’t mess with my boyfriend behind my back? I closed the computer and walked away. The urgency, the manipulative pressure, the attempts to control other people’s behaviour – the unctuous false sympathy. It was boring as well as outrageous. If you’ve read this far, though, I have to warn you: if all of this seems unbelievable now, it soon got far worse.

    As a child I spent hours alone with a great joy, rummaging in the world, musing, dreaming, lighting on strong understandings that then lit me like honey. At ten I found the dusty old books up the back of the library and learned about witchcraft, my best friend and I practiced spells by tying knots in ropes and brewing up fearsome potions from the garden, at eleven I invented a religion one weekend at the beach and converted all our friends. All my life I’ve been translating for myself joyously, soberly, freely the musings that I hear in the trees, in running water, and with my face close to the ground. Petals at the gatepost, curtains at the doorway, the sober whispers of ceremony: as a teenager I felt that god must be like being in water, I would sink into the pool in our backyard and think about that, underwater, rain coppering the green water-surface sky. This day was a Sunday and Solstice, turn of the year. I am in Europe, the thieving place, that other dark continent. I search for the sense of a continuous culture, a blood known by me, in my bones, in my waters, the elusive thin feeling of a processional ancestry, going back generations, faint but audible, disappearing into the hills of the thunderous and fire-lit past.

    I couldn’t bear to stay home by myself in the wreckage and just feel the loss of all that was now gone. During the day as the lost, lovelorn emails arrived from my – from the guy I used to know, don’t cut me out, I don’t want to lose you, was that all it was worth, a sense of self revived in me, probably through rage, and at seven I crept under the shower at last and tied up my hair in a spike and got dressed. It was still light outside as I left the house: the longest day of the year. My girlfriend and I had a huge German beer in the bold blue daylight of 8pm. The film her musician mate had crowdfunded was debuting for the second time in a narrow Kino at the back of the bar, all red velvet curtains and comfy 50s cinema seating, like a womb. A New Zealand woman sang plangent old songs, in Eastern European languages and tone, of unbearable, heartbreaking beauty and transliterated for us the lyrics: Now we go down into the dark.

    We are happy, because we have light and the warmth.

    But also we are sad: because we know the long darkness is coming, the days are growing shorter, we are going to have to work hard to harvest enough to get us through the miserable winter. She toasted the shy film maker, gloriously. In the audience we sang out and stamped our feet. The film was complex and evocative and followed a journey, into the kitchens and courtyards of some of eastern Europe’s female elders and their healing gifts, their frayed folk magic. Music, it was music all around. The crone in her stony kitchen in Greece stroked the head of the sweet film maker and crooned, What a good boy he is, he is a good boy. Afterwards she danced in her kitchen, threading an offering of some sacred substance she’d unwrapped from brown paper, singing roguishly, for him, forty years younger: My love loves another, o, my love does not love me.

    Watching, I felt revive in me certain dark and numinous elements of my own self and our place in this webbed world. I got on the train home lit with my own love of the place, the dark, the swollen great everything. Then Monday morning, an email from the guy I used to know. “The only woman I want to talk with every day,” he wrote, “is you.” He reiterated that he didn’t want to be with her, he didn’t love her. Can we meet? I felt hesitant. I was angry. I felt mistrustful.

    In Germany, official procedure is torturous. On a forest walk you will pass signs which in English would say, perhaps, Keep Off the Grass. In German they are like long, open letters which begin, “Dear Forest Wanderers and Forest Wanderesses. Please be advised…” When he and I were still us we had made a clotted string of appointments to do with my visa application, which entailed filling a three and a half page list of requirements, reports, business plans, health insurance, pension insurance for old age, income projections. I was to register my address, now I finally had my own place, with the Citizensresidentialaddressdetailsregisteroffice.

    So on the Tuesday I said, why don’t you come out and have a coffee with me before my appointment. You can help me read the forms. He said, “Let’s melt this block of ice.” We spoke, by email, for the first time about his sense of frustration and how he always felt it wasn’t ok to talk with me about it, somehow. And he shared with me the screenshots of their two-week chain of emails. I thought, maybe we need to sit down and I will just really listen. I skimmed the emails and felt wryly disappointed, or do I mean relieved, at her badgering pace, cheesy emoticons, unrequited hugs, carefully littered suggestions. The next day I read them again, properly. She suggested they meet up and he was very keen. Clearly they had made a strong impression on each other. She wrote again, to pin him down to a time. He and I were still a couple then, and I knew nothing of this. Five times she said in her subsequent messages, we can just let it be spontaneous, I’m so spontaneous. I read this as a flag intended to advertise her sense of herself as sexually available and adventurous, like certain kinds of tattoo you see now on very young insecure women.

    In between the proclamations of spontaneity were repeated attempts to lock him down to a solid plan: how about we walk our dogs one day? How about tomorrow at one? How about a bike ride? Or how about we meet down by the river and talk?

    When I got to the cafe, locking my bike to his – actually, they’re both his bikes – he was inside, long-faced and remorseful. I thought, I have so loved you. Now I’ll never trust you again. I was sad at the ruin of something so fine and fruitful. In the early days we had fiery arguments as we began to shake down, to build a life we could share. We’d get furious, shout at each other, and then meet the next day, in a park, under trees, “come for a walk” he usually said, and the moment I spotted him in whatever crowded public place I always felt the smile breaking over my face however unwillingly, however angry I might have been, however angry I still was. Seeing him walking towards me with his hysterical dog (“he’s been sitting by the door all day”) I would see that same smile on him, spreading his cheeks back, an involuntary smile, a smile we shared. Goddamnit. Such a waste. But, maybe –

    We ordered tea and he said, You can ask me anything you want, and I will answer. I said, almost at random, Are you still seeing her? 

He said, I have seen her one more time. I said, How was that. And he said: “Intimate.”

    

Forgive me. These words seem to me today almost sensual. I didn’t hear them, they’d have done no good, I long for someone – some guy – some man – to sidle up from somewhere and whisper them into my ear, those hot words: I want you, I miss you, I love you. And if this guy ever did it I would have to turn my head. They met on the Saturday night. That is, the moment he had freed himself and got shot of our sense of commitment. He was angry about the story. He was sad. But she wanted to go dancing. He “got dragged out into the night.” They fucked. But afterward he felt sad. “I was lying there wishing it was you beside me.” I turned away my head, burning with nausea. “I got asked what I was thinking and I had to lie,” he said, sadly, almost wistfully. Oh, the vile.

    When liars lie, they always say the same thing about it. “I didn’t want to hurt you.” What this means, of course, is, “I didn’t want to hurt myself.” I started choking. Trying to speak. Asplutter. I couldn’t look at him, I couldn’t look away. “So – then… so, but why did you spend all of Sunday calling me? You called, like, eight times! Again and again! Sounding so sorry for yourself! Saying you – ” I sat up, staring. “And when she was claiming, so patronisingly, so falsely, to be worried about me – you mean she still had your juices inside her? What kind of people are you, anyway? It’s so fucking disgusting!” The fear and the rage made me savage. I was savage in an undertone because, hipsters, cafe. 

Like children who think they deserve abuse because it’s less destroying than seeing that mummy and daddy are cruel, I could feel myself slipping into the cardinal error women make in these cases: we blame the woman, to avoid the pain of blaming the beloved.

    He tried to tell me it was I who broke it, or who made it all irreparable – because I wrote about it. He said he wanted to block her but was afraid of hurting her “more than she’s been hurt already.” He began to cry. Told me this hideous story of abuse, a sour history, from before her birth. I put up my hand to say No more. I got up and we both left the cafe. Outside in silence we unlocked our bikes. Unable to take it in, grasping for solids, I said, “What does your other friend Designer Guy say about all this?” The guy I used to know bowed his head. “He says I should be honest with everybody involved.” “What do you mean, honest with whom, what, you mean honest with me? Or – you mean… do you mean, be honest with her?” He said: also, her ex-lover. Her ex-lover? You mean apart from her husband? Yes, he said. Mutual Friend. Mutual Friend who introduced us had an affair with her a year ago.

    We were cycling away from the cafe when I learned this, on a shuddering, cobblestoned street. The whole moral bankruptcy of the situation made me begin to howl out loud. I felt my gorge rising and had to howl and howl. “Ahhhh!” I said, “Ahhhh! I’m going to vomit! I feel sick!” The violent nausea so painful, unexpected. It felt like the sounds would maybe purge me, save me. “So – what, he just… handed her on to you, like she was a bowl of fruit? What the literal, actual, living fuck?” The stormy conversations we had had all day Monday by email seemed nostalgically innocent by contrast, silent movies instead of porn, almost sepia. He’d said what can I do to show you I was wrong. I’d said if he was serious, he could send me their emails. I wanted him to show himself which privacy he was loyal to. He had discussed with this woman, this stranger, our relationship. Now he said that in order to betray their conversations to a third person – me – he would have to abandon one of his chief principles: Privacy. He said he needs his freedom. Isn’t it interesting, I wrote back, how the principles that mean most to you are the most self-serving kind: your freedom, your privacy. Isn’t it telling, I told him, how the principles you’ve been willing to abandon so easily are the socialised ones: loyalty, trust and honour. Our privacy, our love, and the agreement we made in our sweet hearts when we decided to be monogamous, to become a couple, to be close in the night and to whisper to each other all the things that are so hard to say to strangers in the bewilderness of estrangement that is sometimes the world.

  • 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.