Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: bicycle

a bush tissue

Almost a year ago I left Brisbane, on three days’ notice, to come to Berlin. I had looked up the weather map and packed a small suitcase and figured I would stay about a week. A very dear friend was in town and we wanted to meet up before he set off on his bicycling tour across Europe.

That came and went and the strange, metallic, leafy feeling of being back in Europe set upon me like moss. I decided to stay on and see what became of me. I met a gorgeous guy with a beautiful heart. Some weeks later the intrepidity or foolishness of what I had done came over me one afternoon in a storm of tears, and I just started crying and couldn’t stop.

We were sitting on a bench not far from here, under the trees, overlooking the murky canal. Swans then and now. My companion was alarmed by all this emotion but he was super-generous and sweet. It waxed into a burbling froth of mucus and salt water and he offered wouldn’t I like to blow my nose between his pinched fingers. Well, no: certainly not. I covered my face with one hand and kept crying, as quietly as I could. Sometimes it takes a man some time to notice that I laugh as easily as I cry and I guess this was one of the things on my mind as I sat there and people walked past smoking pot. Several benches down an Italian guy was playing guitar and crooning, three girls with long hair sat around him like groupies from the Sixties. One was perched on the back of the bench like a sweet bird. I looked up and there was my friend with a little wad of leaves in his hand. He had picked for me the softest, greenest, most tissue-like leaves, heart-shaped from a tree I don’t know, and had stacked them from biggest to smallest so I could mop myself up in stages. I remember the softness of the leaves on my skin and I wish now that I could remember the song that Italian bench star was playing.

May 28, 2013
in the dark

Things you can do in silence, in the dark. Cycling alone under trees, flicker, flicker. Watching petals fall in flakes of tiny silver alight on the black liquid wind. Swinging on a swing someone’s fixed to a low bough overhanging the water, the wind rushing gently and softly as cat’s paws past your ears.

May 26, 2013
jousting

Guy sauntering through the pretty part of town with a flashing, winking keychain, silver and the size of a beer coaster, jouncing at his groin. Its flashing and winking caught my eye, and then he caught my eye, with a smug, knowing look which spurred the mean hope that he may never get close to any woman again.

Girl wheeling her bike alongside the lake, its rear wheel throwing up pinkish white blossom in tissuey arcs. I walked behind her like a bridesmaid, the bottoms of the green Spring trees stroking soft as mothers across the crown of my head.

May 26, 2013
lucky, lucky 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!" before 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 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 sluicing gravely along on the asphalt with those stocks you use to push yourself on snow, 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.

May 7, 2013
a-biscuit, a-basket

O, the sweetest! Boy pedalling through the old part of town with his girlfriend in a wheeled box fixed to the front of the bike. It’s intended for children. He is wearing jeans and a stripey shirt and a little pork pie hat. Her blonde hair spills over the back of the box, she is tucked up in a blanket and eating a biscuit. At the traffic lights he slides forward off his seat and onto the ground, bends to give her a kiss in the small of her neck.

April 29, 2013
jazz, godliness…

I’ve cycled past this jazz club in town maybe half a dozen times & never had the nerve to go in. Today in the afternoon sunlight both the doors were standing open and, oddly, two tables with bottles of soft drink stood at the entrance guarded by ribbed plastic cups. A handsome-looking man was pouring. I got off my bike. “Is this – open? I mean,” looking at the people in coats milling around inside, “are you… rehearsing?”

He flashed me with his blinding Amway grin. “It’s a church. You’re very welcome.” I stepped back. Looked up at the sign. “It’s not a… jazz club?” “It is a jazz club, just not today. But we have lots of music!!”

Who could put their faith in a church that’s willing to use disopsable cups? Looking back, I could have given him many better responses, the least of which might have been, “My only religion is jazz” (a lie). Instead I had that protective feeling one has around people who seem to look out wistfully from inside their own club and wonder why more don’t join. “Jazz,” I said, “godliness…. they’re related.” And we waved each other off, a pair of heathens, neither one willing to convert.

March 31, 2013
through snow

a bell dings behind me, I step aside and watch the beautiful line of a bicycle’s tyres, drawing like dark pencil on white paper through the snow

March 10, 2013
his three favourite things

Hired a bike and visited my only friend in Denmark, who runs a beautiful second-hand store that sells his three favourite things: books, and records, and coffee. He has two splendid crimson armchairs and windows onto a cobbled street. How we met was, I was in Berlin over the summer and dropped in on the bookstore that had agreed to trial one of my books in their English-language section. The pile was sitting untouched but I saw this tall man hovering and said to him, unexpectedly, “You should buy this one! I wrote it.” So he did and we have been friends ever since. God love good bookshops, the friendship agency of the civilized world. Today he had on Nick Cave’s new album and was listening to it “over and over.” I said, “He’s Australian! Like, the coolest Australian since… 1975.” In the riverside cafe where I ate dinner afterwards they were playing Olivia Newton-John, who has no use for cool and was singing “Hopelessly Devoted to You” as though her heart would crumble. What a song. I and the elderly waiter were both singing it. Two tough-minded Danish women in their fifties walked in to order beers, wearing what seemed to me very insufficient clothing. Outside, the water darkly rippled and a skin of ice extended itself infinitesimally.

March 1, 2013
tall & straight-sided

Tonight I saved somebody’s life. I cycled past a table on the mall where Scientologists were practising Scientology, just right out in the open as though it were nothing, were not based on shame & rooted in a foul, deliberate dismaying of the self. A beautiful, sumptuous, exquisite black woman sat paying attention and nodding as she was told wonders (presumably) that could be hers ~ the stance of her head & the slightly tall straight-sided hat she wore reminded me, at least, that she is an African queen. I cycled past. My heart roared in me. I swerved and slowed and circled round. When I went back to her she was still listening to this lanky dude in a red Scientology t-shirt. It seems to me funny that only McDonalds ~ almost endearingly ~ are not aware that the prefix ‘Mc’ does not denote corroboration (McFeast, McProfit, McCafe). He wore his Scientology t-shirt & she wore her splendid self & listened. I stopped beside them and waited for the courage. I’d a fear he might reach out some big butterfly net and trap me in glass forever. I leaned over to her over the neck of my bicycle. “This is a cult. And you are beautiful. And there is nothing the matter with you.” I know they start with personalty ‘testing’: presumably, everyone fails the test. The beautiful woman laughed; I spoke in English: she answered in German, “danke schoen”. Hearing me, I hoped; herself, I truly hope.

January 20, 2013