Sometimes we get each other and sometimes, we don’t get. I know this because my favourite cafe today ran out of cups. The man standing behind me in the queue said to his girlfriend, “Dishwasher’s on the blink again,” and she told their little caramel dog, “Awww, dah dishhwashhah!” while the dog looked up adoringly.
I was queuing behind a man in board shorts whom I had greeted, “Are you the close of the queue?” He looked a little startled, then he smiled. “Reckon I am,” he said, and I said, “I’ll take over those duties if you like.” We were laughing now, just a little. “You can put in a shift,” he agreed, and I said, “I mean, I’ll take it on. Someone else is gunna arrive and ask, this the end of the queue, and I’ll tell them, yes it is! It’s only the one time, but it’s arduous.”
We had run out of things to say but now there was a rapport between us so we couldn’t switch straight back to automatons. And because my friendliness is partly anxiety, I noticed he was having to twitch himself out of the reach of the dried curls of jasmine wreathing the verandah post beside him, which kept reaching for him and snatching at his hair. I pulled out of them free and tucked it into the basket of dried branches it had sprung from, saying cheerfully, “That thing just really wants to get to know you!” and he turned as he finally noticed this source of annoyance saying, “Ohh! You’re right, it really really does.” There were still four people between us and the till were we would place orders and we would have had to resort to gazing studiously away from each other, maybe even whistling or humming a little, all that fakery; but he said, in a kind of gasp of social endeavour, “Reckon they could afford to give these plants of bit of water!” I glanced up. The verandah roof is high and four former or alleged potplants dangle, quietly weeping dead brown tendrils into the air. When he reached the till I fell away, and we both turned back between his order and mine to say, “Have a good one,” and now we were done.
I took an Uber home because I have an injury just now from an idiotic but cataclysmic pushbike accident. I had to go through the kind of surgery a surgeon calls, rather comfortably, “minor.” The Uber driver had a grey and black striped handkerchief tucked in at the top of his driver-side window for keeping off the sun. I said, “Is that the flag of your own individual people: the Nation of You.” And he said, “No, no, it’s a handkerchief,” so I said, “Yes, I know, I was just playing.” A silence. We were not of the nation of each other. And I said, “Just I think it would be so awesome if everybody had their own individual flag and maybe a coat of arms! to wave out the window in traffic. Once in a while you’d spot someone with a similar flag to your own and then the two of you would become best friends.”
Did I mention this everyday friendliness which seems to come so naturally is also in part anxiety, in part yearning?
“Oh,” he said. “That’s funny.” And we talked about the big trees along the road, which are highways for Brisbane’s possums. At my gate he pulled over very gently and I stepped very gingerly down and said, thrusting my fist in the air and indicating the flag, “Viva la Revolution!”
My driver said, apologetically, “It’s actually a handkerchief,” and I tried to let him off the hook on which I had not intended to hoist him: “Yes. I was just joking with you. Thank you for this peaceful ride, have a great day!” And as I pushed back the gate which like so much of this city if overhung by trees I was thinking how even the kin-man and I, the one the jasmine at the cafe was fingering, could have estranged ourselves and caused a brief sore rupture if either one of us had only hung round three or four seconds too long once we’d reached the register. We both understood the same rules: the rules of playfulness, only some of which are THERE ARE NO RULES. The coffee was really good. I gave the thirsty peace lily in the bathroom some water.
Tag: Brisbane
-
kept & cupped
-
crutchpapa
Writing this morning in a cafe I glanced up and saw a young woman coming in on crutches, she was slightly built and small and following at a painful distance the bigger, older man who might have been her father or, perhaps, her lover. He forged ahead and sat down, he was already reading the menu while she struggled around the back of the couch and reached the table. He saw me watching and his attitude melted like magic. “Let me help you with those,” he demanded, holding out his hand for the crutches but without getting up.
What a guy.
Did I go over there and tell her she deserves more kindness, and he’s not treating her right? Yes I did. Ordinarily I would have said that to him directly. Today I was feeling somewhat fragile and tired so I waited until he went to the bathroom before I spoke.
When I told a friend about this man’s insensitivity she asked, what did you say? I told her, I asked if I could speak. She assumed I was offering help and said no no I’m fine. I said he should not be barrelling ahead and comfortably seated while she struggles on crutches. I said it hurt to see her gamely staggering round all the obstacles while he just left her and took his ease, he should be by her side and supporting and protecting her. I told her men have a protectiveness they can offer us in this world partly through size and I was sorry he was not doing that. She stared unblinking like she was getting chastised, perhaps just shock, and when I said you deserve more kindness and I don’t think this man is giving you that, she smiled a painful smile and said thank you. -
sharing the Herb
Herbie Hancock came to play Brisbane, it was bona fide. He and the band really loved it each other. When he came onstage, spontaneously people in the audience stood up, one by one, until pretty soon we were all standing. We wanted to acknowledge his effort and grace, the effortless grace and hard work. He mentioned a ‘Wayneism’ by his friend Wayne Shorter, who recently died: “Jazz means, ‘I dare you.’”
He told us, Kamala Harris has to win, and a shout went up. The room felt so joyous. Afterwards there was a long queue for the merch counter, at which we could buy not one of his 53 albums but they had assorted t shirts, and hoodies, and tote bags and a baseball cap. At the end, he wouldn’t leave the stage, the band were all gone and seven hundred people standing applauding. Herbie went all along the front row, shaking hands or a fistbump with one after another, and one guy asked him a question and he dropped down to his knees and started talking, and the two of them were talking and we were all just standing there, happy and rejoicing and wanting to be present. And I had this fantasy that the audience would disperse and go home, and the great hall with its vast pipe organ would be empty, and the two of them sitting there, going Yeah, man. The fusion, the half diminished, the monster drummer. The music. -
worldburn
Today in a cafe two small incidents seemed to me to illustrate the forms of self-involvement that are more common to women, and to men.
A man walked in and ordered a coffee at the counter. He wanted a latte, he wanted it skinny. It was takeaway and he went over to a table in the window and sat down. He was wearing shorts, dusty boots, and no shirt. His belly sagged between his knees. I thought, this is not one of those seaside towns where people wander in and out of the ocean all day and stand in bikinis eating chips. Wherever a woman would not wear swimming gear, a man needs to put on his shirt.
The waitress barged in, late from having missed her bus. She flung down her bag and began telling the staff about her room, which had ‘nearly burned down’ overnight. She described it as the latest in a chain of events which made her wonder had someone put the evil eye on her. What she described was entirely self-generated. She left ‘my candles going’ but ‘only for a minute’, while she was out of the house at the shops. A poster fell down, into a flame.
‘My whole wall got burnt.’ Her housemate put the fire out. If not for that housemate, ‘my whole room would have burned down,’ not to mention the rest of the house. When I looked up, the man with no shirt had taken his coffee and his bare chest and belly out into the cool, breezy day and disappeared. I was reading the foreword to a recipe book, Indian Spice. Its author Pinky Leilani described the importance of recipes in that culture, that they are handed down and closely kept secret. To cook well is a form of power and a source of income in a difficult, impoverished land.
She described how long it took before the family cook, a man in his sixties, had learned to trust her and share with her his recipes. He taught her to cook. Now she has published those secret recipes to the world, they belong to all of us and have lost their power, the power belongs to her. -
gulp it
Last night I went out for jazz and at the bar a man nibbling on the rim of his beer said thoughtfully, You are doing such a great job tonight. I said, Thanks! Then: Great job at what? Airily he said, Oh — just being yourself. When we all left he was standing at the far side of the suddenly bright room, waving goodbye with both hands. The music was like god.
-
mexicocoa
Yesterday I was at my friend’s place after a thunderstorm and she had a little curving highway of ants running up over her wall, so tiny they looked like caterpillar’s eyelashes, and I said look! at these teensy ants so busily there: my friend goes, ugh they are always in my kitchen and I can’t stop them, they’re following some signal or some path and I said, as it popped up in my head like a mushroom, “Antstagram!”
She has a butcher bird who comes visiting to court her and he stands on the windowsill making himself big with fluffing feathers and we always imagine he is preening, see, me, I’m gonna build you a beautiful nest and make you feel at home, my beautiful incoming wife. To comfort her about the ants I told her about the instinct that woke me in the middle of last night and so I turned on my light to read, and found a huge spider size of the palm of my hand trundling slowly up the wall beside me, carrying in her jaws a giant cockroach. The two of them froze and every time I turned back on the light they were still there and in the morning I found just the roach carapace glued onto my wall with spider saliva which marked the spot where this roach died and that spider had enjoyed a most delicious, crunchy very fresh meal.
-
cane toddler
I was lying on my bed reading in the stifling heat today and a cane toad went hopping past my door. I found him in the hallway looking inscrutably lumpy, there followed a prolonged episode in which I tried and failed to persuade him out of the house using squirts of water, squeamish jabs with a flyswat, cunningly angled opened doors, loud noises. Finally I forgot him and feel asleep with all the doors open and I woke up and he was gone. Down into the garden where he can go on destroying native creatures. Also today it was so hot I drove my car (parked under cover) five minutes down the road and already the roof was too heated to touch. You couldn’t have fried an egg because it would have evaporated. As I backed into the shade once more I spied a curling yellow tail hanging out of the rafters, belonging to a possum who evidently sleeps there during the day, and none of my door-slamming perturbed her.
-
disembowelled
For weeks after the diagnosis I was still having episodes of shock as deep as flashbacks, every single day. Every day at some point I went into a dazzled fugue of confusion and horror, while the same words whirled around me like three birds. I have cancer.
Then the welter. Cancer? What? What do you mean, cancer? How could — No. That can’t be.
Meanwhile I had been through a colonoscopy, and then an interior tattooing to guide the surgeon’s hand, I’d met with the surgeon who made breezy mention of maybe ‘whipping out the uterus’ in order to ‘have a look’ — been driven to hospital before dawn and woken up disembowelled. I woke up pegged out like a goatskin with six tubes leading into or out of me, and five holes in my sweet and private belly. I had not let that breezy surgeon get his knife into me, naturally: found a second, younger, doctor who did not say, ‘Don’t worry, I can do these in my sleep.’ I asked myself, which is going to cut me — in my sleep. The older white guy from an establishment family with photos of his kids in ski suits framed behind the desk? Or the young Asian Australian woman who’s had to work twice as hard to establish the same career. I had persevered when the referring doctor’s receptionists tried to shame me out of ‘wasting time’ with a second opinion and when one of them told me, it seems crazy to delay surgery at this point, I told her, round the knot in my throat, what seems crazy to me is: committing to this major surgery without getting a second opinion.This adventure turned out hilarious as well as just devastating. It felt overwhelming, colonizing, and grim. I did not lose myself. I told the gastroenterologist she ought to call herself “a colonoscopologist, cos it just has such great mouthfeel. It’s fun to say.” “It is!” she said, though her smile was wry.
“And when you reach that point, which surely must arrive at some point in every day, where you find yourself climbing out the bathroom window at the back of the building going No more! I cannot stick anything else inside anyone else’s bottom! — why, then — you’re a colonescapologist.” In the hinterground of all these panda escapades the daily panic ran on and on. Ten minutes a day, utter annihilating shock: in which I woke up right back at the start like a terrible dream, unable to receive and to process the news. Meanwhile I had already been given an enema at six one morning, my first, and the nurse explained to me, very kindly as I lay naked on her table, “You must roll on your side and draw your knees up to your chest” and at the prospect of imminent anal penetration and the rapey feeling of being pierced against my will, thus losing this only form of virginity or intactitude or control remaining to me I started to shudder and shake and sob before I knew what I was doing, and I had to take hold of myself, as she was approaching with the implement. I told myself you need to really deeply relax and you only have a few seconds to do that — or this is gonna hurt.
I somehow found the calm inside myself and took hold. I took a deep slow breath in and very slowly let it out and I did not turn away my mind, but paid attention where attention must be paid, breathing out slowly, letting it in. The nurse was gentle. I had told her my history, which came bubbling out in sheer terror as the moment of intrusion approached. Her name was Lisa and the other nurse was Lisa too and my gastroenterologist was called Leisa and they stood around me cheerfully as I began to cry and they all wore the same expression, it was a kind of puzzled helpfulness, and I wondered out loud, what is the collective noun for Lisas? My valour was in tatters but I flew it wide and high.
After the ensuing procedure I woke up in a hospital, sporting my first and only tattoo. I’ve never pierced my ears and feel strongly protective of the body’s entirety. Three years are leaving that chaotic punker city I was finally a Berliner, sleekest of them all, submitting to this marking that was so far inside me no one ever would see it beyond the surgeon who would guide her blade by that mark, and then cut it out. “Make no mistake,” she said. “This is a very major operation. It’s going to take you some three months to recover.”
10 days later, discharged from the hospital and sleeping in a friend’s bed while he slept on his foldout couch I was even still descending into the same panicked fugue at some point every afternoon. What, cancer? Who, me? Whaddaya mean… cancer. I had been into hospital, with the friend who drove all the way across town to pick me up at 5 in the morning, and sat with me until they checked me in, and then the surgeon greeted me at the theatre doors and they asked me would I get up and walk in, and I’d woken up in a beeping bed with five different tubes at various orifices some of them new coming out and going in, unable to move, too afraid to cough, with part of my bowel and one entire artery cut away forever. I finally had the caesarian scar I’d never found through childbirth of the baby who never came covered over close to my pubic bone, my belly was seeded with holes, one two three four five of them, one had a drainage tube spooling out to hang over the bed and the nurses came in to empty it. I learned all of their names, one of them the first night tried to drag me from my bed after I vomited violently right across the bed and I lay shivering with terror and pleading, please, it’s mostly water, I have eaten nothing in five days, can you just… mop me up a little and let me sleep, please don’t make me get up, I’ve just had surgery. This nurse said, “You’re going to have to pull your weight, my girl,” and I phoned my girlfriend and made her stay with me on the line by way of witness so nurse could not tug the painful umbilical line filled with yellowish and reddish fluid which after her too rough ministrations began to hang and the bandage holding it in filled up with blood, like a sac, and the stitch the surgeon had made to keep the drainage tube in place was nearly out. Even at this point, I was still reeling with the unreal, and though this news and its attendant traumas had progressed so very sharply that I had now left hospital and was creeping around my friend’s house learning to manage painkillers, a technology nearly entirely unfamiliar in my life — still at some point in every exhausted afternoon, panic descended with its highly focused sense of confusion and my mind flapped its big wings. Oh my god, I have — what? How can this be? In my own sweet and healthy body.
On the last day in the hospital a kinder nurse arrived and told me, we are going to take that drain out now. She explained it does not end just under the skin, oh, no! of course, it goes clear down across my body to the bowel. I began to shake. And then — somehow, and I’ll never know how, at the end of everything, I found a strength that in my life I had never known. I who am unable to gouge a splinter of glass from my mother’s horned sole said, I will watch. And I decided to film it. And though I had to ask her to stop so I would not black out, after a few moments I could go on again, and let me tell you there is nothing on earth like the sensation of a thick tube being dragged out of one’s own body, it is a foreign object and feels so wrong and at the same time it resembles the feeling of a part of the self being dragged away, inch after inch, vomitous and painful. I watched and I listened and I asked her questions, and then it was gone.
The collective noun for a Lisa is, it turns out, a decency. The decency of Lisas ensured that while I was under, which I had been so frightened for, there were only females in the room. Between the tattooing and the surgery I went back to painting class one last time. I made a self-portrait, in honour of my diagnosis. I told people. I published a story about it. People began to flock around the C-word, relieved and marveling. (There, but for her, go I!) I was carrying it for them and we could feel it. Every time somebody said, You got this, you are strong, what I wished they would say instead was, What do you need? I am thinking of you. Do you have someone to hug? How can I help? -
a man of mouse
In a cafe where I write, the staff are terrifically grumpy. One sometimes meets me with a finger propped under her chin, tipping her head: Is it almond milk? Soy? I say, It’s the honey that’s misleading you, by association, and she’ll say, mansplanatorily, “No, no… I don’t associate you with honey.” Today a large man came sloping in, one of those outsized softies whom I never used to see in Ghana, nor, for that matter, in Berlin: tall and stooping, strong but run to fat, crouching over his table as though he feared being forbidden to sit down. The same waitress came to him, scolding.
“You’re late! You’re usually here way earlier than this, what have you been up to?”
Meekly he explained whatever personal thing had altered his day. Doctor’s appointment, tenancy inspection. Once he had humbled himself to her aggression she softened, and patted him on the shoulder. “Well, you’re here now, no need to make a fuss about it.”
The double-whammy! I sat back, impressed. She went on waitressing, he went on crouching and mooning, I went on writing, and then when he got up to leave and he and I had exchanged a wry smile I put out my hand as he passed by my table. “Can I say something?”
Sure, he said, submissive to the death. In an undertone I told him, “You don’t have to explain yourself to the wait staff, you know.”
He looked startled, then submissive once more. There is manhood there, but it’s lurking underneath. “Oh,” is what he said, “it doesn’t bother me.” And as I watched him shambling out of the cafe into the rapidly clearing afternoon rain I thought: It’s going to bother your next girlfriend, though: I’ll tell you that right now. Having to stand up for you, having to do all that mothering. Having to nudge you towards the manly adulthood without which she is unprotected in your relationship. Unprotected from sassy wait staff who like to subtly keep their customers hopping. Unprotected from other men. -
neither warmth nor depth
I woke up strapped to the bed by six different apparatus. The last thing I remember is the surgeon greeting me at the swing doors, ‘Welcome to Theatre,” and I said, “Oh! How gracious,’ then, “I’m scared.”
Of the leashes pegging me out like a goatskin my favourite is the pair of disco moon boots that wrap, white and puffy, loosely around my calves and plug in to a noisy apparatus to inflate and deflate, compressing the muscles as through walking. Getting out of bed is painful. I’ve several holes in my belly and one of them has a tube of blood coming out of it which is there to drain the wound.
The last time I ate was Wednesday, it’s now Sunday. However we discovered I can still vomit copiously. Had a visit from my mother who sat down beside the bed and said, “Well I’ve been having a very difficult week.” She wanted advice on something uncomfortable in her household arrangements and I gave it. The next day my whole family visited at once, as I thought it would be less stressful to get it over with in the one lump. Mum reached over to hug me and managed to gouge her elbow right into the principle wound on my belly, the first time anyone had touched it. It was so painful I actually screamed. I thought I would black out. When I opened my eyes I found my brother and her two sisters gathered round her patting and soothing, while she cried, because she felt so very terrible about hurting me. When I said, rather bitterly I suppose, ‘Oh, please. Focus on Carol!’ in a bravely wobbling martyred voice Mum said, ‘I’m alright! I’m ok. Focus on Cathoel.’ And my aunt came over on pretext of straightening a blanket to lean in and tell me in a stern undertone, ‘Stop it.’
I’m thinking of climbing out of bed (takes me a while) and going over to the whiteboard on my wall which has daily updated details for the nurses: I’m going to erase ‘liquid diet’ and put in its place ‘strawberries and champagne cocktails.’ I’m in bed 27, the age rock stars overdose, and I am alive and have survived. I’m on ward number 3D and indeed life is all technicolour this week and in three dimensions.