I’m peeling. Last time this happened I was about 14. Went for a long long walk and it was early in the morning and I just forgot about the sun. ‘Hey there, zombie girl,’ says my favourite person. He doesn’t, to his credit, reach out to tug shreds of skin off my nose. The lozenge of bright red skin at the base of my neck resembles the neckline of some elegant 1940s bathing costume. I’m just sure it does.
Blog
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brisbylvania
Brisbane screams and Berlin roars. Can that be what it is. I ask what do you notice and he says, It’s noisy. Brisbane is noisy and Berlin is loud. My anxiety for formulations. Can there be two towns more unlike. We can hear the freight trains on the opposite hill, buildings are no barrier. Everything is liquid, the hills, my heart, the air, my fears. So many new buildings on the way home from the airport. The tender awfulness of long haul travel, the heart that stays a leg behind. The Inuit woman who said to my writer friend at a first nations’ conference in Canada, Stand on the tarmac and holler out your name so that your soul can find you. The sense that my soul cannot find me. The walk in the dark at eight a.m., which is midnight, down along the river between high screaming trees. The frantic squealing purr of fruit bats. They are huge. The slinky broad river in no hurry to get anywhere. The long roads of hideous Eighties buildings, the tradition of tearing things down. And the empty lonely streets. The lava of cars. The shimmering stench of fuel. The yowling thin cat who purrs as soon as I put my hand on her but keeps her neck high and her ears laid back. The overgrown undergrowth. Of nature and of business. The ruthless wretched finds. The mud and mangrove flats, the sense of things nesting and hidden. The screaming air. The shaft of sun through 6a.m.’s window that is too strong and heats me unbearably, heats into me, the stickiness of me from sleep, I have to shelter from myself in the walls.
The flimsiness of buildings, walls are no shelter at all.
“What do you notice?” “It’s so alive.” Not for me. Ghosts of everything, everywhere I look. Ants on the jar of ironbark honey unopened. Everything is teeming with the sense that life is brief, unasked for, lacks deliberation, rots from birth. The blood under the river. The lingering spirits in the trees. The desire to climb and to recline, the rough bark on my dry-skinned face. The passport officer who says, “Thanks, guys.” Peaceable, welcoming, stolen, so laid back. Noisy, rampant, tangling up towards the money. Mining town, rainforest trading camp three days’ journey up the river, flimsy stadium, boat. Leaking boat. Oyster shell. Sharp, sour, over-sweet, festering growth spurt. The few people, who don’t respond when I greet them. Pedestrian place of real estate dreams. This awful, deep, disorienting fatigue. Lost world of flowers, big, as scentless as fabric. Put up adventure and find some shade. Where is art. I mean the sap extruding from the living blood. Not what the anxious local government says is art. The money and the festivals, arranged rather than brewed. The thrumming art of things, the compost heat of ever regeneration, the shelter of the water, the tireless tides. Down among the mudflats. The 1950s. Motor city.
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buying the cow
The guy before me loaded five litre bottles of milk onto the counter at the BioMarkt, the organic store. I said, You know, it might be cheaper to buy a cow. He said, Well, we thought about that, and the two of us smiled at one another. The girl who was serving has prominent front teeth and a mousey, rather shy face. She started laughing and couldn’t stop. She was still laughing about the cow when I packed up my groceries and bad her goodbye and the guy with the milk had let the door swing behind him. I guess because of the link with the dairy products this reminded me of an incident when I was working on the cheese stall on an outdoor market in Britain. I was 23 and my boyfriend had that day turned 32. He was a bit of a drama queen and spent the day sagging and sighing. Two tiny old ladies who used to visit every week to buy “a quarter of a pound of mild white” cheddar asked him kindly, “What’s the matter with you, love?” He looked downcast. “I’m… *thirty-two* today.”
I will never forget their reaction so long as I live. Unless Alzheimers. Well, they laughed. They cackled. They slapped each other. One of them fell against the butcher’s glass opposite and banged herself on the thigh repeatedly, crying tears of laughter. It was the funniest thing they’d heard in months. My boyfriend looked foolish and I began, or so I hope, to look at him differently, more narrowly; in between bouts of mirth the ladies were gasping, “Thirty-two! You’re a child! You just wait! You know nothing!”
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a man who cooks
A man who loves to cook but cannot bake is so good for a girl’s convenience and ego. Years ago I lived with a guy who thought “hundreds of thousands” were called “thousands of millions” and that croissants were a cross bread. He wasn’t wrong but his dyslexia was a continuing delight and I always had pen and paper beside the phone. Once toward Christmas we had a craving for custard and he opened the pantry sadly to show me, “there isn’t any.” When I whipped up a slow custard on the stove top using an actual egg and pan of actual milk he was so wonderfully astonished. It made me feel I had alchemical superpowers: the power to make custard without custard powder. Non custard powder custard power. I rocked!
Tonight I showed another man how you can tell your egg whites are beaten. He was lying on the bed reading and his gasp when I held the bowl upside down over his head was so terribly gratifying. Next week: the creation of a delicious pudding using nothing more than a bowl of scrambled egg mix and loaf of stale dry bread.
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trepanned
A confluence of kindness in the Sunday cafe this morning. People were slouched about, eating their brunch. A series of wan songwriters entertained us from the speakers. When we first walked in a classical guitarist had just done playing, and when he walked around the tables with his cupped hand outstretched, everybody gave. Then a commotion at the doorway. A very very drunk lady sloshed her way in. She shouldered her way between two quite closely placed tables and sat down. Oof. Began talking to the woman on her right, who clearly didn’t know her. It was a long bench seat along the wall so now all three women, ladies who brunch with a lady who lurches tucked between, were sat shoulder to shoulder like pigeons under the framed oil paintings of Karl Marx. The place is called Cafe Marx, been there for years apparently. The drunken one pulled off her filthy beanie, revealing sparse tufts of grease-darkened hair. She was loud. And she looked smelly. The woman she’d spoken to rose to the occasion like the Queen. “I know,” I could hear her saying agreeably, “it’s freezing outside.” The drunk one said something inaudible, affable. “Ja,” said her invaded neighbour, “gemütlich.” Gemütlich is a word like the Danish word hyggelig: cosy, it means; warm, comfortable, comforting. The kind of word you invent when you live in a climate where a person consistently turned away from every door can die just by sleeping in the park overnight. The waiter came over to reason with her. Her voice rose, she waved her beanie at him. At first he said, Can you go, please, and You will have to leave, and Do you want me to call the Police? “I am the Police,” she said grandly, settling her beanie back over her ears. But the women either side of her and their companions were wonderful. Unworried. Well, worried but cool. They started suggesting to her, Perhaps you’d be more comfortable in the corner there, that looks so cosy, wouldn’t you like to have a table to yourself? Why shouldn’t you have your own table? “Yeah,” she said, in tones of worn aggrief, “yeah, why indeed.” And as she staggered to her feet and lurched towards another table (ours) the waiter once again stepped in, more respectfully, more kindly this time. His customers had taught him that – or rather, reminded him, as we do for one another. Gently he took her arm. “Could I ask you to sit outside?” he said, in such courteous tones that she was able to pretend she had been given a choice, to deliberate a moment and then decide, “Also dann.” Ok then. He escorted her to the door, more like a nephew than a bouncer suddenly. The people on the bench seat shifted and laughed quietly, restive with relief. You know how belligerent you get when you feel like your humanness has been ignored. She was aggro. But lost. In the wind outside she sat down with some difficulty. I went over to the counter and spoke to the waiter in a low tone. “Das haben Sie so schoen gemacht,” I said, “so freundlich.” You did that so beautifully: so friendly. “Aw,” he said, looking down. He was putting something on a plate behind the high counter. I said, I would love to buy a coffee for that lady, if… you don’t mind providing one for her. (Thinking of the risk to his china). But by the time he brought the coffee, hot and rich with crema in a takeaway cup, she had gone. The overturned table and smashed ashtray on the ground were all she’d left behind. I walked up and down the square for a while looking for her but she had moved on. And would continue to be moved on, I imagine, all the rest of the winter. And would perhaps be picked up by the Winter Bus that goes around collecting people who have fallen asleep in the snow. And whose fire in the belly, lit and swollen from the magic bottle, might not be enough to keep them alive til morning, in the dark cold lonely treesung night.
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a dog’s park life
Crossing the park I passed the usual gatherings of African men standing about under trees, whiling away the hours until someone comes to buy some drugs off them. Sometimes they sidle up and say, “Alles klar?” and occasionally a whisper of “Grass?” comes up or, once, from a bolder guy, “Cocaine?” I’ve worked out at long last that not all of them are dealers, some are just hanging out because this is where they hang out; because they come from a culture where instead of everybody sitting in their own bedroom facing their own screen, you spend the day with everyone, you hang out. A shower of sparks fell across the park: four guys huddled round a low homemade brazier and fanning its coals with the lid of something. The smell of meat roasting. The sound of whickering trees. The way these recent settlers have brought the ineffable mystery of life back up under Germans’ noses. Two men were sitting on a bench in the shadows and a large, round, comfortably built black woman slowly passed. She was pushing a trolley. One called out to her, “Hey! Mama Africa!” “Yes,” she said, kindly but wearily, pausing, and I thought perhaps she was just someone whom everyone turned to for help, communities yield such persons, I explained to my companion this theory and he said, No, it’s even more beautiful. Mama Africa sells hot food to the dealers on cold nights, she goes around with her trolley and if they are hungry, they flag her down.
A few hours earlier coming through the same park I came across three dog owners standing about warming their hands in their pockets, their four dogs channeling and chasing one another, noses to bottoms, noses to groins. Another dog raced in like a flash of black fur and then two more dogs arrived, a merry flurry, soon there were eight dogs weaving and circling and joining each other nose to tail like elephants or ants and the tallest dog owner, an old punk, said in his dark gravel or asphalt voice It’s a regular dogfest, “Es wird ein richtig Hunde-Party.”
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little staves
I wonder at the charmingly gap-toothed Engrish on the front of the chopsticks packet. Wonder hardens to wryness when I turn the packet over and see the flawless instructions on the back which show diners how they should use them. The front says, Welcome to Chinese Restaurant. Please try your nice Chinese food with chopsticks, the traditional and typical of Chinese glorious history. And culture. PRODUCT OF THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA.
But the back says, Tuck under thumb and hold firmly. Add second chopstick, hold it as you hold a pencil. Hold first chopstick in original position, move the second one up and down. Now you can pick up anything. This is the brand of (oh joy) disposable Stäbchen (“little staves”) that are most commonly given away with even eat-in meals in Asian restaurants in Berlin, they must consume thousands of trees per annum and presumably are also designed to entrance hundreds of thousands of infatuated, patronising Western cultural tourists. Because by making use of people’s urge to condescend and correct, you can pick up anything.
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never the swain
Two swains drifting like white roses on the dark canal. My Berliner swain calls them swains and I never correct him. Similarly I refrained for reasons of selfish enjoyment from pointing out to an earlier, South Australian swain, who though a native speaker was heartily dyslexic (he called our chimney ‘the chumley’), that the swans’ babies are commonly called ‘cygnets’. ‘Look Oel. A mummy and a daddy swan. And all the little swanlings.’
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why am I having to go through this??
The last time I was at the airport I watched a band of six merry hipsters in beards (boys) and ballet flats (girls) and narrow cuffed jeans stop at the boarding gate to take a picture of themselves. One volunteered to be not in the picture and the rest fell instantly into a Tommy Hilfiger pose, falling comfortably against each other, one shoulder sliding up and another down, all of them availed of a facial expression they could hold for many seconds without distress or strain. We went through the glass gate one by one holding our passports and our passes. The sixth and final hipster made an unhappy discovery: unlike his five friends, he had not paid extra for “speedy boarding” and was compelled to turn right where they all turned left and wait in the longer queue with all of us schlubbs. His face fell apart. It was wonderful to watch. He was tall and broad-shouldered and carrying a dense brown beard. His shirt resembled a lumberjack’s jacket. His voice came out whiny and high and aggrieved. He went all the way round behind the counter to reason with the airline crew member, waving his boarding pass: But you don’t understand! We’re all travelling together! Her expression was priceless. She tried a couple of times to explain the airline’s policy, too polite to point out that he and his friends were probably seated together and would all be reunited after fifty metres of tarmac in another four or five minutes. He looked as though he was going to cry. The woman rolled her eyes and let him pass. On the tarmac I saw two people kneeling in front of their carry-on suitcases, called out of the queue, stuffing in the extra handbags they’d thought they alone would be allowed to bring onboard. The tickets had cost around 70 Euros each and the airline’s posters at Schoenefeld Airport said, showing a man in a wheelchair, Travel Is Everyone’s Right. It seems to me equality and access are everyone’s right but jet travel is a fast-ending luxury. When we got on the bus at the other end of our short flight a beautiful milky-skinned red-headed girl was just in front of me. She showed the driver her pass and explained in careful German where it was she wanted to get to. He told her she would have to buy an extra ticket, her Eurail or whatever it was didn’t cover that. “But…” she said. She showed it to him again. With great courtesy he explained that this airport was outside the metropolitan zone, therefore: fresh ticket. She threw her head back and wailed. In English: “Why am I having to go through this?”
At the Turkish place round the corner from my street the guy rolled out a long streak of dough and made me a Turkish pizza from scratch, although rain was falling outside and it was five minutes to closing. I carried it home warming my hand, walking through the soft rain, watching how the illustrated stickers of snowy revellers in the windows of the Apotheke blared colourful contrast to the black sticky wastes of nighttime in December in Berlin. A small woman on the subway train had made a speech about how she is “im Moment Obdachlos”, homeless right now, and because she cannot live on “Luft und Liebe” alone, on air and love, she would be grateful for any small donation anyone could spare. Then she walked the length of the carriage stopping to ask everybody, and thanking with her musical voice anyone who put their hand in their pocket and gave her a small part of the passport to the travel that is everyone’s right.
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the narrow rainbow
So the skies are white, the rooves are grey, the buildings brown and cream… the either dreary or soothing winter pallet of Germany is restful to the imagination. In every cafe, candles flicker. Little pots of gold.