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  • Mothers Day

    Want to know why I dislike Mothers Day? We were in a cafe, crowded against the wall by a spreading table of one family, all hunched over in their chairs: grandfather, husband, brother, wife, and two small blonde girl children. Mother sat between her two children. Their demand on her attention was constant. “Oh, that’s lovely, now why don’t you draw me a great big house where all those people can live?” The men talked amongst themselves, playing a game of cards.

    Mother was not engaged with the card game, she was busy mothering.

    Lunch arrived. A plate was set down before each adult: big breakfast, steak and chips, eggs benedict, big breakfast. The mother divided her breakfast in three. Clean white plates were set either side of her for the girls and she had to ask the smaller daughter to keep her fingers out of the eggs as she parsed and divided a great mound of bacon. Her enormously fat husband and groovy dad and quiet, spare-spoken brother tucked in. Just as the mother had finished dividing her breakfast the littler girl wanted the toilet. All three females got up and headed out back.

    We had finished our coffees. We got up to go. At the doorway I doubled back. Three men, oblivious, satisfied, stuffing their faces. “Guys,” I said, spreading my hands, striving for humour. “How come Mum is doing all the parenting – even on Mothers Day?”

    They crouched into chuckles. A knowing guffaw from the husband, who looked up and said, “Aw, but…. she had two hours lying in bed this morning, the kids brought her a cuppa tea.” I lit my fury with the fat of his land. He just looked so pleased with himself, so well-fed. His wife had stayed slender and groomed herself, even as she produced offspring for his lineage. “Oho!” I said. “Two whole hours! Out of 365 days! You’re right, you’re not sexist at all. But hey, better watch out she doesn’t get used to that, right.”

    He smirked. He knows the world tilts his way. I put my hand on his plump shoulder. “Take care of your lovely lady, dude.” To no avail, no doubt. I wish I had spoken to the mother instead. I wish I didn’t live in a consuming culture where we can just buy things to make up for all we don’t do, make room for, allow, feed, feel. Mothers Day – like Earth Day – if you’re serious, why not make it every day.

  • housewarbling

    I cannot describe what a privilege it is to have a home of my own after two years of house-guesting, couch-surfing, and six-week sublets. A friend who is also deeply introverted said, You must feel like a tortoise with no shell. I do! I did. But we’ve found a tiny high house with a tree-shadowed back deck, crowded between the new high-rises that despoil old Brisbane and at the same time bring her to life. Hemmed in by light industry, free from lawn mowers as nobody has the space, roaring with traffic all night and all day, wonderful. Within four days of first seeing the place we’d moved in.

    Winter in Brisbane is beautiful. It’s not cold, but it’s cold. In a month’s time my beloved goes back to Berlin and my throat shrivels at the thought. But for now, a branch to rest on. Our first place together. An afternoon in the sun. A soft prong of furry grey ears that rises from the doona as I go in to collect my jacket off the hook.

    At first it was like camping: a spacious, luxurious, first-world camping, serene in serendipity. We had cold showers and tea-light candles, newspaper for toilet roll. The flickering space so golden at night embraced us from the start. We moved our stuff in. I could feel, or felt I could feel, the kindliness of whoever lived here before, three exotic names in the letterbox, and the shallow tree resting out back with its branches never inactive, the artist who lives next door and who when we were chasing our cat spread his hands saying, “My yard is your yard,” the piercing weird tropical birds at night which that first night were louder than traffic, let me feel at last I was at home at last. Oh, at last, at last.

    In the mornings I take a pair of double-handled mugs and scuttle down to the hole-in-the-wall cafe which spills with office workers. I take away two coffees and carry them uphill home. The neighbour who spends his days smoking behind a frangipani tree waves and I call back. From inside the house I can hear the morning mewling of my cat, who is back after two years lodging on the soft laps of my parents, who thus enabled me to travel and delay coming home. That’s if this is home: funny Brisbane, which doubles in size every time you turn your back, where we moved from Jakarta when I was twelve and which I left so many times, forever leaving, last heading south in 2003.

    After four days’ flicker the power came on and I carried the stinking kerosene lamp outdoors. We had hunted down the kerosene in the local midnight convenience, in its ribbed bottle that in ribbing says poison; on the lowest shelf, but with child-proof cap. It stood next to a bottle of clear methylated spirits. The corner shop when I lived in West End used to sell meths cold, from the fridge. I remembered that, and the painter friends in a rickety place in Paddington who agonised over the old man who liked to take refuge under their high house on a steep slope to drink his meths and milk. This was years ago. He was rotting himself. They were relieved he didn’t smoke. These houses are like matchboxes on stilts and it’s a revelation to a Berliner how it can be colder inside the house than it is outside in the mid-morning winter sun. The whole place would go up in a giant torch, the house itself is tinder.

    I set fire to my house once, late one night. I set a pan of oil on to heat and then sat down to write. Maybe that’s a story for another occasion. The firemen came clanging down our narrow street and couldn’t get through, they had to leave the vehicle and leap out, they rushed in and stomped through, after I’d put the fire out, in their giant boots and yellow rubber overalls. The guy in charge swept a glance up and down my walls, which were floor-to-ceiling books, and said, “This House…. is a Fire Trap. You have got to get rid of some paper.” I was glad, then, to be rid of the flammable kero, its brilliant, electric, improbable blue. Carrying it to the checkout I realised something, and said to the plump fellow staffing the till, “Hey! They probably added this colour because it looks toxic – to show that it’s poison. There’s nothing like it in nature. But, now… we actually have energy drinks that are exactly this colour!”

    “Yeah,” he said, incurious, bagging my groceries though I’d said, “No bag,” standing unmoved as I fetched them back out again and piled them under my arms. Sometimes it seems the whole world is an artificial blue whose dire warning passes unheeded. Sirens are not lovely temptresses on wet rocks, combing and combing themselves, calling us off-course to pleasure, but flashing kerosene-coloured lights that revolve with a wet sound that’s unbearable and which we tune out and ignore. I wonder how deep have we poisoned our minds. Are we lit inside like the material world, carpeted in concrete and no longer allowed to grow dark (its dearest crop). The hoop of day revolves around and round earth’s hub and the thousand flights track the near cloud like lit flies, the native, believable blue and green of the world’s watery and earthly chores lying at ease, overridden, injected a billion times with a million kinds of toxic compounds of our own fevered invention: carrying home plastic instead of water, dining off plastic instead of wood; is this why a home of one’s own, until the water rises, is the kind of refuge that it is… nowadays.

  • Capetown, South Africa

    Getting a phone line connected. Guy: “So you’re all good to go!”

    Me: “Can I ask you a personal question? You have such a beautiful accent. What is your accent?”

    Guy (laughs): “I’m in Capetown, South Africa. It’s very far away.”

    Me: “Oh, well hi!” (Pause). “I am waving, but you can’t see me because the curve of the earth is in the way.”

    Guy: “Maybe if I look out of the window…”

    Me: “There’s too many tall buildings in between.”

  • dancing, just dancing

    Dancing in the dark. It’s so beautiful. I heard about it back in Melbourne, where it was born (and so was I), and just kept not going because I felt too shy to go on my own. In Berlin I signed up for the No Lights No Lycra facebook page and waited for them to organise an event but they never did. Finally last Tuesday the old Ukrainian Community Hall in South Brisbane with its solemn Cyrillic listings in gold of every president since 1949 and its overpowering fake floral stench from the immaculate brown-tiled bathrooms downstairs came through for me and truly delivered. A girl in a slouchy beanie stood bopping on the pavement, holding an envelope. “You here for No Lights?” She slipped my five dollars inside her envelope and pushed the door wide. “C’mon in, we’ve just started.”

    Inside the dim foyer were big double doors. I went through. The darkness bloomed all around me like mould, soft and plentiful. Oh, the delicious sound, oh, the song I had not heard in so many years and which swept me away like laughing salt water. The song took me by the throat because I used to love it, in the day, the day when days were nights and I was only waiting for the soft darkness to fall. I remember driving to a club I loved and smiling at the doorman whom I knew from a Government lecture at Uni and who never charged me, and just falling onto the dancefloor and dancing until I had to go to the bathroom, until I needed a drink, until they closed. The dancefloor was tiled in black and white and I was very often the only one on it. I didn’t care. Alcohol helped me to get there. A man said to me once in a park, I know you! You were dancing at the club and you smiled at me. But I hadn’t even seen him, I was smiling at god. I was god. The music was everything.

    In the darkness the first song made me dance and very quickly the dancing made me cry. I remembered all the times I had wanted to dance and couldn’t. I realized: nobody can see me! I’m invisible. I’m hardly here. I felt the hot freedom pouring like molten sand through me and through me, like glass, a kind of tide of revelation, only me in this full space, me and the lyrics, me and the bass. And as I realized the extent to which I always feel observed, counted, and noticed, and to which I hinge and hem myself, and won’t let myself go, it all got too much and I started to cry. The crying lasted only a moment, a long moment, then the next song took me in its arms and I got this big broad grin across my face, a grin that almost hurt, that lasted several songs before it disappeared without my noticing it.

    By the time that boring song came up I didn’t care, I was dancing. My feet came up towards my chin, I flung my shoulders like a bird. I shuffled forward between the blurs. Ever so slowly as my eyes arrived I could make out through the teeming darkness people in a trance of dance, their arms flung up, their heads hanging low. People hopping, jumping, one woman just strutting in a long walk back and forth from one pillar to the next, making a shadowy sashay. Just for herself. She didn’t need to be anything, do anything. Everybody looked absorbed in their own element. I was dancing. We could not make each other out except to keep from colliding. Somebody laughed. Somebody set up a clap and its contagion caught across the wide old hall.

    I noticed the second Tuesday something that felt really familiar in me but which I had never consciously seen before: that a lot of the time my dancing involves throwing myself slightly off-balance, so the dancing is more like a falling, a forever falling. Just in time I catch myself, I stave off the floor, I rescue me.

    Spun on the spot like a floss I faced the back. The thread of light under the double doors and upright in between them reflected dully on the dim floorboards, resembling an upside-down cross. At the end of every song we grew still and soon another song started. Some were from the 70s, 80s, some were woven by machine. I went out to get cool air under my shirt and let the sweat roll between my breasts and pool in the tiny belly button cave and run down my arms; the night breeze struck me like a soft tree, ineffably; across the road in the old church hall a dozen drummers had set up a racket, independently, a rhythm, they sounded like they were conducting ceremony rather than just rehearsing. I walked round the hall and peered in on them before plunging back into the throbbing, dancing dark. “Last song!” she cried and everybody whooped. At the end of the hour a small light went on up the front and people gathered along the side bench for their bags. As we left two by two or singly or in threes the girl with the beanie was there, gallantly holding back the door, greeting everybody the same: “Nice work, ladies.” Only then as the street trees dipped over the road tropically did I parse the vision I had seen but not really noticed, when the lights came on: these people are all women – it is us who dance, it’s we who want an hour off from being seen, we are here to hold our freedom in our mouths like berries too many to swallow, the jaw dislodges and the voice unhinges and juice rolls fatly and purply downhill, over the hills and valleys of me. Of you, who is me.

    I opened all the windows and drove silent home. Thinking about a man who courted me by visiting with drugs. Who used to ply me with pot and I always accepted it and we would talk about music for hours, hours and hours and hours, maybe playing one song over a third, a fourth, a sixth and seventh time to see through the weave. He said to me, When you perform, remember: it’s all in the approach. It’s in the way you walk over to the guitar. I nodded, I had no idea what he might mean. And I got up and danced, irresistibly, through my own house like a thicket of books and ideas dense and shifting like sleeping cattle swaying upright, he loved to watch and I didn’t care, I let him, I’d forgotten him, and once I danced up in a sprung crouch onto the kitchen sink, under the taps, flicking the wall with my flat hands, I played the house like my instrument, I ran out on the verandah and threw my head back my mouth open where the rain poured down from the broken gutter and that night when I came in again and the song had ended my suitor was lying back in his chair, looking very grave, his long fingers a tent, and he said, “Yeah, I know you got the voice, like I said; I realize that you’re this big poet and all. But in my view: you are more yourself in the dance than in any other form.”

  • the sweetest noose

    Ok, so: imagine you have a lover whose second language is English and who one day refers to you unexpectedly as his spoose. Your spoose is another word for your beloved or your partner and rhymes (conveniently) with caboose. I can tell you that any little irritations you may hold against this person are going to dissolve instantly. You won’t even mind that the last thriller they wanted you to read was so dark and so wiolent.

  • Swiss medicine

    A lucky, lucky bike accident. I was following the river on a very narrow path, about a foot wide, and it was bumpy. Tree roots, little soft holes where the soil has rotted away with rain… You know how you think, Gee I should maybe walk this bit? Or, “I hope I don’t drop this,” etc. And then: >whoooo…< I found myself peeling sharply outwards, dipping, losing balance, falling over the bank.

    You have those two seconds which feel like ten where you get to think, Which way should I fall. I fell towards the bank, tried to fall upright and loose. As this was happening I swore, in German. Why not English. Then I was wedged, still on my bike, between the river and a handy leaning tree.

    I had hardly time to wonder why “Scheisse!” and not “Crap!” when a party of four Swiss people on hardy mountain bikes came through the mist of trees. They were lycra angels in the afternoon sunlight. I handed them my bike and then two arms came down and two women – the men were busy marvelling that I had landed so fortuitously – hauled me up on the bank. A drop of about five feet. They lectured me but only very briefly and kindly. Those are really the wrong tyres! Are you sure you’re ok? It felt cosy to be roused on by a party of rescuing strangers.

    On the way home I passed various other people using all different kinds of devices. A girl on a skateboard. A woman jogging, in earbuds. A couple skating gravely on the asphalt in those stocks you use to push yourself, for all the world as though they were skiing. I passed a truckload of army recruits who waved and smiled and when I waved back burst into ribald laughter. But my favourite was the guy gliding between two fields of cropped green stalks who appeared to be travelling on a moving walkway, who was, of course, on rollerblades.

  • tattoo virgin

    Wandered into a cavernous caff in West End and the girl there was showing me her tattoos. I am squeamish and have never pierced my ears. Tattoos are beyond me, I wouldn’t, I couldn’t. We stood poring over her long brown arms, turning and tracing the story which evolved from something simple into something faceted. “It’s nice talking with like-minded people,” she said.

    I thought about this word like-minded and what it means. The people I hear using it seem to be people I feel comfortable with. I wondered is it just what I’m hearing, or is it that people who use this word tend to be people I get along with and like. Is it a less judgmental and more fluid term than for example “they have values I respect.” Is it less confining and more welcoming and free from expectation than the older “we have a lot in common.”

    This girl bristled with insignias I don’t desire or share. There was an age gap. We were strangers. I was her customer. What was it that lept the gap in such a brief conversation, that left us feeling comfortable, feeling even a mild affection? How did we divine our like-mindedness? Well, through expression and language and tone and eyes, the languages of the soul and body. Does like-minded maybe mean not so much “our minds are alike” as “we both tend to like people’s minds”?

    I think about the conversations I have with the people I would call “like-minded.” Every week, some spark, and some do not. There is something exploratory. An acceptance of difference. A failure to require the stranger to conform to a recipe either of us have arrived with, or that has been ready-handed to us.

    In the miracle bowl of my brain and the miracle foreign world of hers, something gleamed. There was an element like sunshine or moonlight or rain that we could enjoy in one another that was universal and therefore shared. The sparkling sea of rain that sloshes round a souvenir: an experience there are more than fifty words for: two separate worlds stood side by side for a fleeting instant, worlds transparent yet ineffable, in a shared kind of frame, like snowdomes for entirely different monuments.

  • like there’s no tomorrow

    I’d like to say I’ve been baking but the truth is, only about half the mixture ever hits the heat. Last night I made a self-saucing lemon delicious with around one third too much butter and sugar, so that I could eat the butter sugar and lemon mix off the back of a wooden spoon. The night before it was apple tea-cake, creamy and satiny in the bowl. I started with a bullied gingerbread recipe, almost every spice within reach crammed into it, including black peppercorns and cardamom pods which I ground down in a pestle, just so that I could lick the mixture off the back off a… well, you get the picture. I mix, I grind, I beat, I slurp. Then I pour the remainder into a tin, put it in the oven and walk away. The rest of the household have to monitor, test with a straw, slide it out and serve it, and then the next morning I find crumb-clung baking tins stacked in the sink half-filled with water. Either I will turn into a human sofa and have to turn sideways to enter a doorway, be unable to leave the house and eventually fill it with my lardlike balloons of flesh, or I will die young of a preventable illness, or I’m soon going to have eaten so much cake mix I will never bake again. Damn you, red clothbound bachelor cookbook with your enticingly pineapple-ring-lined black and white recipe illustrations! Damn you, free range eggs!

  • the underground birdcage

    Brisbane’s underground opened up unexpectedly and swallowed us whole. Like two fishes we went down, happy to be coveted. Brisbane sprawls on the surface of several hills, sunny and pleased with itself, the city centre sprouting like rockets deteriorates into sleeping suburbs at its very walls, a castle hemmed in by shanties: who knew there was anything underground, mysterious, culturally exploratory at all?

    It’s above ground, it turns out, like a 70s pool. Perched above a suburban railway station in a decayed birdcage shelter like a lean-to, stripped inside, its tin roof bared and its internal walls mostly gone. This might have once have been the house of the shopkeeper who founded the burger bar downstairs, barred and bolted at street level: as we ducked under the sagging verandah to come up we read: Award-Winning Coffee! PLUS: Bacon & Egg Rolls.

    The milk bar was closed, it being late on Good Friday, everything was closed in fact, everyone gone. Miles of car dealerships gleamed up and down the highway. The railway station was empty and cool-lit. Huge billboards loomed. We went up a rickety flight of stairs and into the unlit living room of a couple who host these gigs intermittently, whose devotion to experimental music lies thick like dust over every surface in sight. They had stacks of tapes on a milk-crate table, I’d not heard of even one of the bands. We sat down on a velvety car seat and a milk crate filled with comics. Outside, the verandah was hedged with netting and the lights from the dealership opposite swam. People smoked various plants. Eventually two bands played. One was the Loop Orchestra, which morphed out of Severed Heads, and whose members have been assiduously pursuing the random mismatching of tape loops since 1979. They took a long time to set up. Their equipment was heavy. Their sound was intoxicating and strange. Compelling re-occuring beats splurted from old splices in the tape. One man wore dozens of loops round his wrist like loose dark bracelets, slipping them off when he wanted to change and refit. A young audience member scrolled his phone throughout the set. Another, in his fifties, sat on the floor like a child being told the best stories and when his attention wandered he picked up an old flyer off the floor and held it up close to his eyes to read.

    A girl with plaits attached to her hat turned her head next to me and gazed glassily past. Her smile was vague and convulsive. The man in the Bauhaus t-shirt who kept bending over some detailed arrangement behind the stacks of jars in the cluttered kitchen corner turned out to be the drummer for the second band. He told me their name but I forgot it. It was clever. His drums were built out of scrap. I was perfectly comfortable in my warm car seat, I took many dark photos, my mind just sank away. Everything was dark and people’s shadows cut the reading light delineating the stage. With care it was possible to pick a way along the verandah which felt like at every moment it would dissolve into the highway and disappear in a smear of rapidly swept past headlight. The light from the head, and the light from the heart. The moon climbed impaired and creamy through the dark netting and lighted the shining untouched vehicles displayed forever, from last century, from a comatose time when people thought it was ok to mine whole mountains hollow and smelt their insides into trash. So many different kinds of sleep. Our audience stirred when one set closed and another opened and applause was low to the ground, enthusiastic. Up the back it was possible to buy t-shirts, so I did: five dollars, screen-printed, awkward cut-out letters claiming boldly and purply Real Bad Music. A rack of tapes and records and cds ranged from five dollars to twenty; four twenty-dollar notes unfurled in the tall jar into which I dropped my coins. People came up the back stairs at intervals and slipped in between the shadows watching and swaying. House plants trailed from tins hung from the tongue and groove walls and from the tiny thicket outside, garden plants reached in. The imperfect floor had a board missing here and there and had been repaired with layers of steel shop signs and advertising placards. My favourite said, in white on grey, “…your business the exposure it deserves.”

     

  • the other C word

    My dad has cancer. Our relationship has been so peculiar and, at times, so intolerably painful that my reaction to this news since we heard it a week ago has been mere confusion. He was told on Saturday that he had a “small, operable” prostate cancer. Today he had another barrage of tests and the surgeon called it “aggressive.” Another doctor has suggested it may have spread to the bone at the base of his spine. I feel strangely ashamed to be thinking of my own experience in this context. It feels like I can’t help it. My father’s own father died of suicide when Dad was only twelve. Dad never learned how to dad. A decade ago my brother, who mines coal, in a moment of unexpected empathy suddenly said, I think Mum and Dad didn’t know how to love you; I think you’ve never experienced unconditional love. I was so relieved by this clear explanation of just about everything I burst into giggles. It was here at their house that this conversation took place. I remember running up the stairs to check out this new theory, calling, Dad, Dad! What? he said, from his chair on the verandah overlooking the river trees. Dad I said, would you say your love for me was unconditional? Oh, yes, pet, said my father. Largely.