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  • backbone

    Over breakfast my partner announced he is falling in love with another woman. I said, “What?” The omelettes had turned out so well. It was a cool, greyish day. I had asked why he kept heaving huge sighs. For a long time I could say just nothing. Then I asked a question, how can this be the first I am hearing of this. Because it is very new, he said. Also she’s married and has kids so it’s complicated.

    I think I said, Oh, how dramatic. I felt filled with pain and contempt, and the pain of contempt. I got up and took my breakfast into the other room, shutting the two doors between us. I couldn’t eat. Naturally after a while I went back and had to ask some more questions. He met her two weeks ago, at a friend’s. A friend’s of mine, as well. They talked for ages. The two of them really understood each other. They’ve been ‘texting’ a lot. I was outraged. How could you get to the point of asking a woman for her phone number – without saying anything to me? Oh no, he said, as though that made a difference: we talk online. I said, Why didn’t you just come home and say to me, after that first night, I met a woman last night and we had this amazing conversation, I feel very attracted to her. Everything might have had the chance to turn out different. It might have been the beginning of a new closeness for us. Or is it just that for some reason you wanted out – you don’t wanna live in Australia, you wanna stay in Berlin – and you lack sufficient emotional self-awareness to break up our relationship without using this lever.

    His emotional honesty and his courage were the qualities I most cherished in this man. Now those were gone, I felt nothing but a bitter disdain. The dry, unflinching, writerly part of my brain was saying, What a convenient trap. I cannot say or do anything. If I howl and cry I will be making myself more unappealing while this stranger, this mother and wife, remains mysterious and alluring because blah honeymoon. If I say, I’m so angry I feel like I could crack a dinner plate over your head, then I’m a monster and he can take refuge with her and be relieved to get away and thus basically whatever I do, I am making myself easier to leave, easier to get over. The cold tight tiny childhood feeling in the pits of me which whispers: didn’t we always know this, you are unlovable. How old is she? Young. What do you talk about in your endless emails, do you talk about how the two of you are falling in love and how you want to be together? “No, not really, we can talk about everything! Everything!” Oh, how divine. I could feel the grief and fury in me congealing over with a self-preservative lard of dry humour. Underneath this cold gel, the endless pain lurked dark and wild. I thought, well if he is prepared to jettison a three-year love affair, and to leave me in the middle of Europe alone; and if she is prepared to leave her husband and two (or three?) presumably quite young children – they must be made for one another. I just couldn’t get over my feeling of disgust. I said, I’ve never respected you less.

    The whole conversation took less than half an hour. He burst out at one stage, But I love you, Cathoel, I really do! Yes, I said, sourly… I can see that. He said, I honour and respect you so much. That cannot be true. For then how could you treat me so poorly? How can you have been so close with me the last two weeks while this was going on, and never even mentioned it? I said, Can I see your emails? “No,” he said, almost primly. “Those are ours, that is our private communication, and I protect that.”

    That hurt more, in the instant, than the rest of everything all put together. My wounded child soul was roaring, Wait! What? Help! No! Help! Isn’t it… our privacy that you should be protecting? We are so interwoven into one another’s lives. I thought we were. I threw him out. I went out, too, after he’d gone and walked in sunglasses through the dim afternoon along the green-shaded river. Berlin, so much pain. I passed the spot where in August of 2012 I had sat down on a park bench and cried, overcome by the dismaying enormity of what I had done: locked my house door in Melbourne behind me, and come to Berlin for a week, on a whim, on an instinct, and stayed on and stayed. Homesickness choked me and I did not love the swans. The man, who until this morning seemed so darling, so honest, so filled with love, went off into the greenery and scuffled. People were walking past smoking joints and wheeling their bicycles, I was busy crying as quietly as I could. Moments later he reappeared, holding out a sweet handful of fresh soft summer leaves, heart-shaped they were, I did not know the tree. He said, “Brush your nose,” which was the way he’d learned to say “blow.” In spite of everything I’m sure I must have giggled. He had graded the leaves, choosing only the softest, from smallest at the top of the pile to palm-sized below, so that I could ‘have a good blow’ as Gran used to say and reassemble myself. I thought, all my life I have never been loved like this. And I was right. And also, I was wrong. It is painful to love a weak person, it hurts. And it seems there are only two choices here, as to what might happen. 1: in a few weeks he comes over crying and saying, I’m so sorry I hurt you, I will never hurt you again. Gee… that’s attractive. Or 2. He really is falling in love – ugh, that phrase, in this context, it just fills me with contempt – and this is the end of the nicest, kindest, wisest love affair I have ever been a part of. Thus it is not only over but was partly imaginary. Aye… there’s the raw.

  • spine

    My dad has cancer. They thought he had got rid of it but now, it’s back. It’s in his spine.

    My mother habitually announces things with enormous flourish. A printer jam, a forgotten shopping list: “We’ve got a major disaster on our hands.” This time she wrote an understated letter. “Not good news, my darling.”

  • the father & son skateboards

    Bearded guy walking past rather fast along the cobbles holding his cell phone up to type rapidly, with a sprig of green clutched in his other hand, at chest height. As he walks he types and as he types he keeps glancing over at the little torn-off sprout – it’s clear this green is what is informing his flow of ideas this fine morning. I guess he is describing it but can’t shake the sweet thought that it is somehow dictating to him: a poem, a song.

    This street is crowded with ice cream shops which make their own blends onsite. “The surest sign of gentrification,” said boyf as we were queuing in the sunshine to choose between matcha (green tea ice cream) and white chocolate with parmesan. When I first moved in, was it only last week? a man walked past with his skateboarding little son. The father had a skateboard of his own clutched under his free arm and was holding the little boy’s hand. As I watched, the man dropped his boy’s hand, dropped his own much smaller board to the ground, and hopped on. From behind, they were unmistakeably linked: little boy in colourful t-shirt covered with tiny dinosaurs, and drab pants; daddy wearing his own groovy colourful t-shirt (covered in Donald Ducks) and khakis. They set off together, paddling solemnly, right down the middle of the pavement, wearing their genes.

  • good wipe ratio

    Feeling a bit unsettled and displaced today in unfamiliar Berlin humidity and the eventual but sudden storm, I got into a conversation with my love about Australia which seems so far away and I feel so denuded of it. I got out photos of my little cat and began to paw over them. Outside his big windows the thunder was rolling long, loud, and distant. I said how it’s so hard to imagine being back in Brisbane or Melbourne right now. He said how he sometimes wonders could he ever settle in Australia at all. “It’s the wipe. Especially the wipe of your government.” After a few seconds’ freefall I worked out this meant the vibe. It’s your vibe, Australia.

  • the night so vast

    Walking at night through the little woods that runs along the shore. I can hear a muted guitar playing from across the water. The dirty water in the dark looks black and clean as ink. Spring is thickening and the trees reach in from either side, closing the path. You have to be swallowed in it. The low thrum of summer night conversation peppers along the canal. The smell of pot. The smell of cigarettes. The clinking of old bottles as a man wheeling his laden bicycle stops under a streetlamp to readjust them all so tenderly in their bags, with furrowing care as though he were collecting them to keep. When I turned down last night an invitation to the birthday party of a man who lives in a van in a village of vans in a thicket where the cherry trees were all pink in April his brother, who’d invited me, said, You should come, we will have a fire in a barrel. Like New York. His brother, he said, had a telescope and this was a telescope party. “Saturn,” he said, the German way, “and her rings and… Jupiter.” I turned for home under the linden trees and he told me how every village had its linden once: with a bench running round it, the Dorflinden. I’m alone now, in the manner of people who don’t go to parties, and my eyes are swollen from crying, and sore. The headache lifts and disintegrates from my shoulders as I walk on, caring for little and everything, reaching the peace inside like dark water. Right at the far end the moon hovers low over the broadening trees and the water, a doorway to infinite peace, an intermittently rattling blind, a prize.

  • forever leaving home

    So on December 4th I stripped myself out of the hammock tied under a tree that is no longer there, and put on a Santa suit and biker boots, and we went out to the airport in Brisbane and got on a plane. We left summer and got here to Berlin in winter, it never grew light and it never grew dark. Having parked my tiny cat with my parents we went into West Germany by train to pick up his dog from his. Dog was hysterical. Family were loud. A New Year ensued and we came back to Berlin to begin 2015, moving both into his one-room studio apartment, with the dog, until a bare four weeks later a sensational four a.m. barney – involving all three of us – saw me move into an elderly pension over in another, more genteel part of town, and stay away.

    I lived in that desiccated hotel for three months. After a month they gave me a kettle and a mug so that I could make cups of tea in my room. The room I’d started out in is their biggest and grandest and has a great desk, so it’s popular – we made a cosy arrangement where I could stay at a reduced rate but had to move rooms every time they had a new booking. I could hear the conversations at the front desk and the sense of stringently absent privacy was wearing, after a while.

    Meanwhile outside my window on the golden street with its slicked-umbrella trees the winter melted into Spring. I went to Spain and came back to find all the street had bloomed, you could walk very slowly from one end to the other between one glossy scintillating treespan and the next; under one, one day, a man huddled by his shopping cart of rescued bottles was sleeping, on another bench a young man rocked his bored child back and forth, staring intently past the trees and the spattered sunlight into the embrace of his gleaming dark phone. I felt I was always alone there. I sank into myself, in the old town, in Europe, and Germany.

    We went again to Spain, this time I took my beloved, with whom things were better the moment we stopped trying so hard to share the one long desk, the one room, the one window. Madrid became my favourite place, I felt childhood reawaken in me like a scent, like palm trees and cinnamon, and when it came time to leave I was sad and did not want to face Berlin at all. It feels like we’ve been away for months. It is three weeks I think. We went back down to the small town to fetch the hysteric dog and then at last yesterday, late in the evening, I met the woman who had advertised a large white apartment for sublet and I gave her some money and she gave me some keys, and I loaded all my suitcases thankfully, exhaustedly into the back of a cab and woke up here this morning, all alone, alone in Germany, not far from my sweetheart and his morning walk and for the first time in six months – to the day – I have my own place, my own home, a place I can write in and read when I want and where no one engages with me and I need not move, if I can gather the money to stay on and if the German government are willing to have me, for as long as I need to… I counted up all the times I’d moved down the hall from one hotel room to another and the travelling we had both done since we left our little cottage in the middle of screeching Brisbane, where I barely left home at all, and after I got to thirty removals I gave up the count, and I hope to resume it again only after some long, restful interval has passed, and my soul has repaired itself from all the tumult, and I have been blessed with many months of languor and dishevelled, resting solitude, and never packed my case or had to remember my notebook and toothbrush, Australia seems another lifetime and I cannot reach the beaches, the desert, the dense greenery, I am here in this stony iron country with its brass plaques outside the doorways where people were stolen from their everyday lives and its much browner birds and whiter sky, its tyranny.

  • through Glass, darkly

    Philip Glass: a man who halfway through his own memoir, written by himself about his own life, can start a paragraph with: “But look at it from my point of view…” The innocent jostle of his ego crowds every page. He takes up plumbing as a day job in order to support his children, whose appearance in his life occupies one small paragraph out of 396 pages. He and his friend simply walk into the local plumbing emporium whenever they hit a snag and ask “for supplies and advice.” He recounts the time and energy spent by these professionals in training him and his friend and then says, “We taught ourselves basic bathroom plumbing this way.” Having reframed their teaching as his own auto-didact determination he then further undermines it with, “We weren’t that good at first, but it wasn’t that complicated, either.”

    Eventually Glass gets work under a proper licensed plumber, an older man who presumably has taken the time and trouble to earn his own certification. Everything works out smoothly for about three years, until one day an artist friend of Glass’s offers him more interesting work at the same price. He immediately dumps the plumber who has spent three years training him: “That was fine with me and I began practically the next day.” Audiences in Europe who didn’t like his music are described as “a bunch of yokels there who didn’t know anything about world music or even new music” – “They didn’t know anything.” How I wish there were a stronger alignment between good work and great character.

  • this land is our land

    Was quite excited to work out last night by decoding the allergies notice in a Korean BBQ restaurant (‘alergia’) which began ‘en caso de…’ – ‘in case of…’ – that ‘casa’, house, must mean your case. It’s your shell. And mi casa es su casa. My case is your case, we all breathe the same air, death and the roiling adventure of this life will inflict us all.

    On the way home we passed again the man whose giant telescope, set up in the square outside the Teatro Real, has shown me on previous visits Jupiter, and her moons, and – unbelievably – Saturn, looking like a chalk sketch much stouter and smaller than I had always pictured Saturn. He busks with it. Drags it down there, I can only suppose, on the back of a small truck and sets it up pointed at whichever body in the heavens is tonight most significant, then he stands artlessly waiting, perhaps not polishing the lens but minutely adjusting the sights after each visit, inviting all and sundry to take a look through his machinery at the distant miracles now shedding some light on us – too little light, and too late. We didn’t stop to look through the lens again but my companion pointed out the joy on the man’s face, the way when someone steps up onto his wooden footstool to apply their eye to the eyepiece stooping to reach it he himself bends in, unconsciously it seems, and eagerly, as though he is sharing their experience and imagining their wonder. The first time I saw Jupiter in a long line of moons I was almost crying. Now every time the man and I wave to one another, satisfaction on our faces, a strange friendship. Mi luna es su luna, inevitably.

  • sugar no sugar

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

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

  • jazz bar, balconies, bikers, busker, moth, Madrid

    The moth which landed in the glossy black curls of a woman sitting on the Metro so lightly and delicately without her noticing, and which spread its dun linen wings like opera skirts to reveal the sheer, white gauze underneath. The two boys who jumped on and played joyously, their guitars facing belly to belly. The long, arching trees filling curving streets with greenery and palpably articulating the breeze into soft whistles and dim spirit presences, into a welcoming and retired song, almost a language. The man and woman whose voices caught my attention from above and whose conversation diagonally across from his first floor balcony to hers on the third seemed frank and gossipy, reflective, unhurried. The jazz bar with windows open right onto the street and spilling glorious plants, which served gin and tonic in round-bellied goblets with surprisingly sweet, chewy, nutlike juniper berries bobbing against the cubes. The lovely dog opposite, above the antiquarian bookshop, who stands on the balcony and gazes up and down the street with such a mournfully intent expression; the man playing a baby grand under a white cloth in his open window and gesturing to his colleague, playing violin, and the crowd of silent witnesses standing with their phones and faces raised on the curving road underneath. The security guard reading a volume of poetry on the underground, so intent he almost missed his stop. The three tiny ladies chatting loudly and volubly on the train who parted with light, smacking kisses at Nuevos Ministerios. The BMX bikers who practice outside the opera house every day, every day, waiting their turn and daring each concrete bench and set of steps to rout them like ballet dancers swimming far out to sea. The low doorways and Metro tunnels against which my sweetheart has to watch his head. The expressiveness of public life with a girl flying into a passion of sobs at the post office counter, a woman crying openly as she was talking on her phone walking through a crowded restaurant district at lunch time. The yoghurts brewed in little glass pots desde 1992 which we top with strawberries, blueberries, bananas; the milk section of the supermarket which is on shelves unrefrigerated because everybody likes powerfully adulterated longlife milk yet luscious, unpasteurised, handmade yoghurt. The quiet, hot siesta hours when shops are barred and windows shuttered and the Metro crammed to the gills. The people who gaze up so curiously, so unjudgingly, at me and my two metre tall lover as we bow our heads to enter the train. The busker in orange top hat who tied his dog to the railings and turned aside into a shop window to tune his guitar. The little backstreet shops which build guitars and the man with his cardboard box desk on the shopping street who carves crosses out of two sticks and binds them together to sell, one after another, he was here at Easter and he is still here now, filling the paving creases with whittled shavings as though there can never be enough crosses in the world and he must fill the lack.