Sat for half an hour watching this bouncer refusing entry to a drunken girl who had evidently no ID. She tried to show him all her tattoos, including one on the base of her ankle, talking earnestly, presumably explaining how could I possibly have so many tatts, and not new tatts, if I was underage? She pulled out a limp, folded ten-dollar note and tried to hand it to him. She leaned on him and cried. The bouncer was an Islander man with beautiful soul in his face. He held her upright and pretended not to see the ten-dollar note she waved at him. Every time she showed him a tattoo or pulled out her purse to try him with her ATM card he attended, patiently, to what she was saying, refusing to let her drag him into an embrace, smiled, seeming amused but not at her expense. A student of humanity. How I loved him. It was a solid half-hour before she gave up and wove off down the street on her patent white heels, and by that time the flaccid ten-dollar note had made several more appearances. Inside the club two rival brides were dancing with their bridal parties, not actual brides but brides-to-be, each wearing a white veil over a stripper dress and one of them dancing with an inflatable, naked, anatomically correct groom who gradually deflated as the night wore on. When we left I saw one of her bridesmaids clutching him, just half a man now, sitting dispiritedly in a corner nursing her umpteenth umbrella drink. I stopped on the way out to thank the bouncer. “Man, you and your colleague, you are really generous, kind, patient people. I saw how you dealt with that little girl who wanted to come in and was crying. You were really good to her. I was watching you.” His eyes were bright and he smiled hugely. He said, “You know, I was just talking today to Lifeline and I realised, my sister died four months ago today.” “Oh!” I said, touching his arm, “I’m so sorry.” “It’s ok,” he said, “she’s in a better place now, she was a heroin addict.” “Oh, god,” I said. “That’s really sad.” He kept smiling, his eyes liquid. He gestured up and down the street. “You love the people, you love the life…”
Tag: BrisVegas
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Wednesday afternoon in the Valley
Two girls in high heels and tiny skirts chatting outside Eye Candy peep show. A dishevelled guy lying supine in the bus stop bench with his arm slung negligently over the side, as comfortable as if he were in his bath. Guy with a ginger beard that starts outside his face, threading it thoughtfully between his fingers in two skeins while his earnest friend tells him something seriously, endlessly.
Driver of a dull gold off-roader, stopped across a pedestrian crossing and mouthing “Ah, come ON!” to people who cross, with the lights, in front of him. The sharp calls of tropical birds, the sun pouring over everything. The old fig tree whose high-walled, circuitous roots resemble the coils of some fire-breathing cave creature. Little boy with his father’s smartphone taking a photo of the orange Lamborghini in the display room window. The old man who closes his door on a dim apartment where the fridge is right in the front entrance. Girl in racing togs, wrapped in a damp maroon towel, who is walking home from the Valley Pool, her feet bare and her hair wet, the muscles of her back gleaming.
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brandy barter
I must have lived in Berlin too long because it’s screeching hot on a Sunday afternoon, I am exhausted, and somehow the idea has crept into my head that I would like to drink a martini. It won’t dislodge. Opening my parents’ liquor cabinet is a dispiriting experience. It is a small, oval, glass-panelled thing on turned legs and inside, it resembles a brown mouth half-filled with decayed molars. An uneven semi-circle of discoloured flasks: these are the bottles of something your old workmates gave you for Christmas and that no one enjoys enough to actually drink. Plus a bottle of cheap brandy from which I made the pudding butter five days ago. Outside, Brisbane sprawls on all sides, as far as the sea and the hills, suburban and stupefied by shimmering heat. I cannot accept that there isn’t some strange punk bar or pirate bar within a block’s walk, opening late and staying open even later, candles on the tables, dogs under them, where a charmingly incompetent twenty-five-year-old bartender will make me a martini that begins with him holding up a Cinzano bottle that is actually labelled ‘Martini’ and showing me, “It’s empty.” After that I will explain that you don’t need a bottle marked ‘Martini,’ you need gin. I wish I could buy a vile martini for three euros, or a sublime martini for four, and have the bartender bring his black leather wallet to my table afterwards and have to remember that when you pay, it is customary to tip, but advisable not to say “Danke” when you hand over a twenty-euro note: this means, in the German sense, “Nein, danke,” which means “keep the change,” and it took me almost all of an eighteen-month stint there to learn this.
On Christmas Day I met for the first time in three years my uncle, with whom I had been having a feud. He lives across the road and is stubborn, a unhelpful family trait shared by us all. Our feud arose because three years ago I was staying with my folks a few months before moving to Melbourne. During that time I had set up a writing room in their dining room and pinned out the manuscript for my poetry book along the tongue and groove walls. It was a quiet, dim, and sacred space. The first song in my album was recorded there, on a single microphone propped by the couch. But for now it was just me in there every day, working, working. The walls were lined with shelves and high up above the rows of books lay three ugly old clocks, stained wood, with various pieces missing. I made a joke, apparently: we should sell these on Ebay. My uncle, who spent his childhood immersed in the story of these clocks, one of which had belonged to a great-uncle who died in the Great War, took me seriously. It had not occurred to me that such hideous objects might be of value to anyone. I was at my desk one afternoon when the door opened without a knock and my uncle strode in. He is a train driver. He was wearing hubcap shorts and a huge pair of dusty boots. Without a word he climbed onto my desk and started reaching down the clocks. I was milling at his feet, wringing my hands, saying Please get off my desk! Don’t stand on my stuff! That’s my work! If you want the clocks I will get them for you! My uncle took all three clocks in his arms and climbed down, grunting. He set off down the hall with the clocks anchored under his chin and me beside him being flicked aside like a fly. He confiscated the clocks and later told Mum it was in order to protect family heirlooms from being sold online. The idea that I could live in my parents’ house whilst secretly selling family treasures online was disgusting to me. I marched over to his house to demand he apologize. I could not accept that anyone could know me all my life and believe me capable of such selfishness. We had been mates since I was three or four – how could he not know that hey, she’s a royal pain but at least she is painfully, irritatingly honest? The feud simmered slowly for all the years I was away. No one had been sure whether to invite this lonely uncle to Christmas lunch or whether to leave well enough alone. Christmas morning everybody cooked. My sister-out-law made a magnificent salmon and wrapped it in foil, my brother cut up foothills of potatoes, we worked out that we had almost one whole joint of meat or fish for every adult at the table. I made a pavlova and a Christmas pudding and followed the most labour-intensive recipe for custard I had ever seen. It required the milk to be slowly heated to a simmer and then allowed to cool. Halfway through it said, “Now transfer custard to a clean saucepan.” I made the brandy butter. Then I went to the phone. I rang my uncle. “It’s Cathoel. Are you coming over soon? Because I have a problem and I need your help.
“My problem is that I made the brandy butter and it’s got so much brandy in it that it literally won’t absorb any more. There’s actually a puddle of brandy sitting in the top of the butter. Everyone’s telling me I’ve wrecked it and I need you because you are the only person in the world who can come over and tell me ‘this needs more brandy.’” My uncle said, “You need back-up.” “Exactly,” I said. “I’ll need to make myself beautiful,” he said. “I’ll need to have a bath.” I said, “Don’t get too beautiful. The rest of us have settled for only moderately attractive, so don’t be too long.” When he came in the door half an hour later he handed me a drinking straw. “Is this for slurping up the excess brandy off the top?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. Then he took a spoonful of my brandy butter and said, wonderfully, “It’s perfect.”
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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.