Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: depression

  • pity flamingo

    Every week I cross town on the train and we pass a tower block of identical grey-frame units which have grey balconies. One balcony, at eye level with the train, has a bright pink inflatable flamingo hanging like a lurid fern, I guess somebody went to Florida or Havana and brought it back with them to bring back the tropics. It doesn’t look tropical. It looks more defeated. The air has shrivelled out of it, or perhaps shrunk in the bitter chill of Berlin’s below-zero winter. The bird sags, motionless, its head drooping over its breast and hanging down to the shrivelling feet.

    Poor tropical bird, alone trapped in glassy Berlin and its colourless end of year season, after all the other bright birds have vanished down to the southern shores to caw and preen.

    Snow lies on the ground in greying patches. Hardened scars of black ice have been strewn with sharp pocks of gravel from the big grey plastic bins. This fake bird is the only pink thing. Apparently flamingoes, naturally flamboyant or perhaps insecure on their wavering stalk legs, will not make babies unless a crowd of other bright pink flamingoes stands round them watching.

    Zoos have had to set up elaborate peacock tails of mirror to encourage them to breed. Gazing out at this sad blow-up bird sometimes I think about staging an intervention. What if every passenger put on a pair of Edna Everage sunglasses. What if we all stared out the windows and flapped our arms. Maybe the dying flamingo would stir on its still leaf of string. Maybe the neck would waggle and stretch, and the tiny head come up again to display proudly its improbable and superciliously curled coconut ice pink swan lip.

    But Berlin’s trains are courteous and pragmatic. People stand back tiredly to let each other on. This week I’ve passed a junkie shooting up right into the arm, against a pillar at my nearest U-Bahn station; five people in a row who were all reading books but seemed unaware of each other; and a sturdy Polish tourist who rolled, under my nose, a plump head of ganja into his palm so that when we all got off the train, he could light it.

  • house of gingerbread

    So it’s Friday night, I am in my pajamas and baking sticky gingerbread for dinner. About to devour some more of Shirley Hazzard’s insightful Greene on Capri, about her friendship with Graham Greene. She calls his writing landscape, in which women are conveniently passive, ‘Greeneland’. The descriptions in passing of her ease with her husband, the writer Francis Steegmuller, are so beguiling. They sit and talk a lot, often about what they are reading. Greene soars in like a small eagle who casts a large shadow.

    The world is run by noisy extraverts and tonight three of them had a bang-up row in the Hinterhaus, the building at the back of this courtyard. Glass was thrown. Police came pouring in with walkie-talkies at the ready. Now all is restored and the night has taken possession of the leaves and every sill. Far up in the corner of the highest apartment two facing windows are joined by a little covered bridge, for their cat. I had coffee today with the woman whose apartment I am leasing, who has moved to Vienna to make a film, and she said her cats (who travel everywhere with her – to Berlin and back by train; she takes them on set; she takes them to the beach) have a little case which they climb into so she can carry them down to the garden in the back courtyard every day, to play and explore and pounce and poo. She knows they are ready to go out when she comes into the hall to find them sitting quietly in their windowed carry case – “it’s like their bus.”

    It is beautiful to have a home and to stay home in it. It is a lamplit evening. I have the double doors open onto my tiny balcony – Berliners call this “Balconia.” The land of summer, of lurid sun umbrellas and bright geraniums in pots.

    Recently I passed a guy tenderly polishing his very fancy bicycle, outside the discount markets where junkies drift like zombies underwater. Gee, I thought: that’s a fancy bike he’s got. On my way back the same guy was pushed up against a police van. The beautiful bicycle was nowhere in sight but the back of the van was wide open.

    The dwindling end of the long twilit nights which seem to trail into evening like cloud drifting for the horizon – the endless days, blue and filled with pleasures – I have loved these nights. I have loved all these days. Now when the sun clouds over and the sky bleeds grey I start to panic, just a little, just skimming over it, dipping into it with one wing: is this it, then? is this the last of it? No more blue til May – or June? I know what we are in for. No more birdsong. The leaves fall to the ground. The grounds turns to iron. The limited colours, low white skies.

    The outdoor cinemas are closing. I saw candles in the windows of a backstreet cafe today. I wore a scarf in the afternoon sun. These little deathknells make me sentimental and bleary, like a Dickens character. Little Deathknell, and the Year That Took Three Months to Die. I’m standing with one leg on the ground and one in the rippling cool water. My bookshelf glows in the lamplight and I feel unafraid of the cold.

  • her blonde fall

    Today I pulled my ugg boots out of the back of the closet and yanked them on to walk down to the nearest coffee shop. Under the lowered sky the world feels more like a cave than a palace of splendours. It is cold and what withers my heart is that it will now stay cold here for months. Flowers are still standing on people’s balconies but the sky behind the buildings has soured. My little blue mug marches with me every morning past the Turkish men playing backgammon and the local alcoholics gathering outside the convenience store to drink beer. The prospect of seeing no blue sky nor hearing birdsong til May or even June is so terribly daunting to a tropical heart. It is cold and dim and it’s going to get colder and darker; the ground will freeze solid; the rivers will freeze over; it is going to be cold and dark, always cold, colder and darker and dimmer til Spring.

    The little cafe is brimming with people and music. I used to come in and write here, every day, back in 2012; that was six or seven sublets ago. I am aware as I move out of the way a third time, waiting for the Australian barista to pour, that my order, in Melbourne barista-speak, is a suburban why bother. A cafe owner in Northcote once translated the name to my face, jauntily, making rapid notes, then looked up and saw my eyes had filled with tears of mortification and exclusion. Poor guy. He spent the rest of the morning hustling my friend and me to ever choicer patches of dappled sun and offering us sample cakes and sandwiches. It’s just convenient, he lied, in a fluster. Extra hot is suburban. Decaf is why bother. In a culture which preens itself on hardiness and how many coffees everybody ‘needs’ to get through their demanding day, to drink caffeine free with a scalded milk froth is like walking unemployed into a cocktail party of the leisured, mannered, drunken wealthy and asking for a glass of milk.

    I’ve done that too.

    As the sky closes over our heads we turn within, I guess, a more meditative season. My heart aches after the email from my father today about the cosy family holiday they had, a farmstay with all the little children: like the childhoods we had, on our grandparents’ farm, a place now sold and probably built out. I’m in exile and I can’t go back. But as the natural landscape pleaches us in with its monotones of winter sleep, maybe that of the humans around me will brighten and deepen and welcome me in. The golden daytime candles are sat out on cafe tables already. The smooth endless music rolls forth. There’s the wintry rattle of cars over stones. The changing colours on the market, from bright summer fruits to rich, bruising plums and sprays of spinach, and beets. Two or three weeks ago we cycled miles out of town to a garden party, livid with lanterns. We swam in two lakes and ate breads and preserves our hosts had made, and felt sleepy at table. A large dog thumped her tail under the bench seat. At 2 o’clock in the morning on the quiet train home I lay huddled against the glass divider, replete. A woman got on and plumped herself against the opposite side of the glass. She dropped her head back and sighed. She had a glorious fall of long blonde hair, different colours of blonde, salon tipped, which flattened out against the glass as she took out her phone, compressing like a river of gemstones into one two-dimensional clotted sky after another as she turned her head. I lay sleepy with my face pressed into her hair, but for the glass, and I now recall it: and winter stings me, but there’s always the heaven of us.