Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: homecoming

  • my god, I’m so drunk

    My god, I’m so drunk. What happened is: it’s all Diamond Dave’s fault. What I mean to say is: we went out to see him play. We were walking and on the way several bauhinia trees stretched themselves across the cyclone-wire fence of a local public playground, I pulled them down towards the ground and took half a dozen flowers, thinking: I have never seen Dave play, I can throw these to him on the stage. In the pub.

    The pub it turns out is, like, the happiest bar I have been in for several years. There were six people in there when we came in, plus a barmaid whose long slender legs had tattooed across the hem of her leather skirt, “forever young.” “If only she knew,” I said to my Berlin companion, whose height people in public places remark on. But fuck them. Dave’s number one fan came reeling up to us and gasped and let his hand fall open like a slow present. “You!” he said, “are like the new Jerry Hall. Oh. My. God.” I was laughing. “When I die and I finally get reincarnated… I wanna come back AS YOU.”

    My darling bought us a beer. It was a German beer whose name the scribbled bar girl could not recognise when he pronounced it the German way. “Oh,” she said, “Doppeldingsbum.” Our friend Diamond Dave, or so he claims (“Is that really my name?”) was playing covers as though his life hung from them. I felt ashamed, abashed, totally awakened at the sound, I had never heard him play in all those years we had been friends and yelled into my companion’s sweet ear, “He’s just a natural born rock star!” He was. He is. The bar filled with revellers. Some of them were 21 and some were 62. The bald guy making eyes from across the bar began to dance as Dave poured himself into “Love is the Drug,” an exquisite cover, absolutely defined again by his rolling bass.

    Probably my favourite song for the night was the Sunnyboys, “Alone With You.” Lord, was I dancing. That just never gets old. And then Dave struck up something of Elvis’s, can’t remember what it was, oh! “Hound Dog”! and the bald guy across the bar left off leaning and started slowly grooving. Like he was wearing a hole through the floor. I strode round to join up with him, sashaying good, and we both sang it out as people do who love music and are perhaps drinking, who knows, it’s the Valley. A whole pile of people poured in. There were two gigs upstairs and one in the back room. “It’s a labyrinth,” said my friend when he came offstage. I left my beer standing there and the man I’d been dancing with bowed with his hands, like Thai masseurs do, “Thank you, lady,” he said, “thank you, love.” Later on he turned up at my elbow saying, “Can you introduce me,” and then grinned into both our faces, saying, “You are suited, you look right together.” He told my boyfriend, “She’s a great girl. I mean! She’s super great!” But I let my beer stand and went out to explore the back. It was noisier. Death punk vibe. There was the girl with cherry bomb hair and long black leather jacket. There was – hey! Dusty Anastasiou waved cheerily, next on the bill, I promised I would go see them play but then my boyfriend threw an accidental beer over me, I forgot. Anyway we slunk home cold and reeking of alcohol. “I can’t believe you threw that over me, I am so cold, I’m so wet.” But we had climbed up the stairs and found the skinhead gig right up under the roof, the boys clustered at one end the girls coiled at the other, we looked out the clotted windows on the Valley, Friday night concupiscence, all the sleek taxi cabs stopping and starting at the curb, the people stumbling in and out of places, the girl who looked like Ashley Judd and the post-traumatic-stress-disordered Scottish Falklands veteran who told us all his archaic and sad, tired, unpleasant history and by his side the little punk boy whose girlfriend, fiery-dyed and fearlessly tattooed up like a Maori warrior queen, sang along every word with some Nirvana song I’d never heard of, such is music, the shared ecstasy and the narrow individual dream that takes up all the moors and can encompass every wonder, every effort, every thing. I came home stripping off my beer clothes and barely knowing anything, deep in the serenity, close friend to a rock star and light as lager foam in my soul, on my feet, all down the front of me, wherever you’d want to be: the music has always been there first and is what guides us, canary singing in the coal mine, “You’ll be safe here, you’ll be sweet.” Good night, canary dear. I love you.

  • fear of bunyips

    It’s getting dark. The gentle end of a slow and satisfying farm day. My farm is a tiny lakeside property which belongs to an absent friend. I am alone today. Last night we walked round the lake, or dam, and I told my German visitor all about bunyips. Today he rang from a nearby mountaintop to remind me: “You know, those scary… the obokodies.” “Bunyips?” I said. “Bunyips, yes,” he agreed.

    I let the chooks out to huddle in terror under a clump of some flowering ginger that sings. Its scent sings. They are frightened by the death of their fourth friend, two days ago, who was torn into heedless headlossedness by a hawk. I guarded them all day. Chased them out into the sunshine and leaned over the sagging cyclone wire to pick them up, plumply one by one, and carry them safely home. I bent my back under bushes and collected basketsful of dry kindling. I washed all the rugs and hung them out for sun’s succour. I took the landfill and all our recycling down to the council bins, near the road. In between I was supping and sipping on things that the humming ether brought me, random stories, articles and talks that lit my tiny local and deeply domesticated sky like tinsel snow shaken through a palm-sized dome. I set the axe against the tank and broke some branches over my knee. At the foot of the scored stump on which hardwood is splitted I found the dusty remains of the peeled head, eyeless and gone, of the poor chicken who wasn’t the fittest, on Wednesday, and didn’t survive. This is where my inner-city Berlin visitor had executed her a second time, after she died, so he could pluck her in hot water and rub her all over with red cooking herbs. The whole tiny house smelled of good food last night and I ate my baked potatoes and looked on, unable to stomach it, lacking the courage, picking the eyes out of a salad.

  • this cat the sun

    I think this cat’s favourite person is the sun. She believes everything he tells her and is willing to let him whisper into her belly and long ears for hours. I don’t think she realises he is distant, to her he is close. And I don’t believe she cares that he sprawls his favours indiscriminately. He is her sun and that’s all that matters here.

  • book-learning

    book-learning

    I just feel so ruddy fortunate to have a decent academic education. It obliges me to be of service in the world, even as I benefit from the knowledge of people whose education differs from mine. I went off to Berlin for two years, leaving my old farm ute parked in the street. When I got back it was high summer in Queensland and we drove down to the local watering hole to cool our feet. On the way back down the main road my driver’s side mirror simply flew off, and smashed at the roadside, the solid steel stalk that upheld it having rusted through to nix. And then the gears started complaining. It took us several goes to get up a medium-gradient hill – we creaked up slowly until a handy side street appeared, backed into that to get another run-up and take another bite at it. Traffic accumulated at my tail like well-wishers to a visiting dignitary, only lack in all dignity and free from well-wishing. Finally I took the thing groaning and spluttering dust into a local mechanic, a Laotian named Vince who took one look at the aged machine and said, I can’t handle this one. We will need to call in Sid.

    Sid. What a guy. He is eighty, round and floury in his cement-dusted blue overalls, the fabric worn so thin it looks all snuggly and soft as down. He resembled in his courtesy that actor on Are You Being Served? who held his fingers to his lip when considering colour and girth – John Inman. He took my car to pieces very patiently and when, days later, they finally called me in he had assembled a teaching platform of worn-out sprockets and rusted-through parts in order to show me for sure and definite that (a) they weren’t cheating me and (b) I needed to change my ways. He left behind (without reluctance, I think) the fussy paint job his wife had set him out at Redland Bay and toiled all the way into the city by bus, an hour and a half’s early morning journey, so that he could take me on a long explanatory test drive and coach me – with a tact and delicacy I didn’t deserve – in the right way to care for my new shiny gearbox, the best way to use my foot on the clutch, basic things.

    Today I realised that arghkh, the rego runs out at the end of June. And that the end of June is on Monday. And it’s still registered in Victoria, meaning it will have to go over the pits and be checked out. I rang Vince. “Sure,” he said, sounding so beautifully unalarmed, the television sqwarking in the background. Last time I was in there he showed me the framed photograph of his father, who always told him he could have his own business. An hour later Sid rang me back. “We can do it, luv,” he told me, “but you might have to get in here pretty early. Vince is gunna ring his mate for you, that does the roadworthies.” He asked had we been enjoying the vehicle, had we been out of town, off the road. I asked had he finished his work in the kitchen. He told me what was on his mind: seven months ago he got $40,000 worth of hail damage to his motor home. “And the insurance people are kicking up a fuss.” I said, “They’re not bad, are they. Do anything not to pay out!” He said, “I had to get the ombudsman onto them. Now I’ve just gotta write them a letter, only I’m not much of a one for letter-writing, I’m just no good at English, I’m struggling with it a bit.”

    I said, Sid, would you like me to look it over for you? Because I am good at English, and letter-writing. Send it on to me if you like, I’d be happy to. His gratitude was so overpowering I felt shamed. I cannot understand engines, motors, mechanics. I look at those devices and my brain glazes over like a river in winter. I can feel the synapses cracking, it hurts, it makes me feel stupid inside. Sid parsed my rotten old engine like a chef diagnosing the herbs in a beautiful soup. But he’s no good at letters. And I rely on engines all day, in my computer, my car, on the bus, in the train. And he rides English as his only tongue, feeling no mastery of it and no ownership. How can we respect each others’ gifts better and expertise?

  • brisbanally retentive at last

    Brisbane. Took me ten years to settle here, having uprooted from sultry Jakarta and a school which had barely two students of each nation in one class. This was the first time we’d lived in the suburbs, since I was a tiny baby by the sea, a child learning to walk in the desert. I used to lie on my bed listening to lawn mowers almost frantic with the choking feeling that lives go nowhere and end in dust. Lawn clippings and agapanthus and dust. But then there was sultry West End, the village which now has devolved to a suburb at last. And then I moved away and now I am back. It has taken me months to move out of the suburbs and into a place of my own. And six months and tonight I feel the trickle of sweet familiarity at last, a trust in the landscape, a kind of security that releases a kind of intrigue it is hard to feel when you are always new, like how it’s hard to be deeply creative and free and wild with no safe home place and without a routine. I felt I belonged at last. God damn it, Brisbane.

  • superpow

    I think maybe my superpower is interfering in other people’s lives. I pick up their rubbish. I make faces to cheer up their miserable kids. Not only do I do it but I feel like it’s my perfect right, kazam, kerpow. We went out for dumplings. The table next door were depressing. He sat sprawled in his own homeroom slump, scrolling endlessly through the blackened thicket of his fascinating phone, actually holding the device up to his face while she ate stoically from a bowl of poached pork gyoza so that the back of the phone covered half his face, a carneval mask. The girl pulled out her wallet at the end of the evening. I said, Excuse me. Politely she leaned over. The boy was in earshot. I said, You’re really beautiful. And you seem interesting. Her eyes came to life. Thank you! she said, warmly. I said, I think you deserve a better relationship than one where the guy drizzles through his phone all night while you are out with him. And I wanted to tell you that. Ok, she said, um, fair enough. Thank you. We walked home slowly in the light dark rain and passed two signs that reminded us of underpants. One was an A-frame set out sturdily in front of a kebab house, and the other hung from the awning of an old shop now a restaurant. I said, pointing, does that photograph remind you of underpants? The photograph was of a segment of Grecian columns. Yes! he said. With the… and the way it sort of… Exactly, I said, lengthening my stride. Underpants.

  • this most severe moon & I

    A house nearby is small, wooden, and humble, a tiny workers’ cottage in the classic Queensland style. Only it’s been done up like an Ascot knot with a formal grey-and-dark-grey paint job, art-gallery landscaping (blades), and an unpleasant extension bigger and taller than the house that clamps onto its back side like some shuttered and illegal petrol station. It looks like a small, private jail for teenagers. It occurs to me that is perhaps what it is: the parents maybe have built this for their kids who were too big to leave sprawling round the living room and too small in the eyes of the world to take their chances under a beckoning dancing and quite shameless moon. As with beads, as with knucklebones, as with tealeaves: who can tell.

  • the good ship junk

    At my last place I cut down one of those plastic “NO JUNK MAIL PLEASE, thank you!” stickers and clapped it on my letterbox so that it said: NO JUNK. This didn’t stop some people who felt that their pizza-shaped pizza menu, Thai takeaway special delivery offer or local dentist’s surgery was immune. So at the new place I kept the “you!” Now it says: You! NO JUNK. *dusts hands*

  • The Saturday Paper

    Bought The Saturday Paper, the one not owned by a misanthrope sadist. Carried it into my favourite weekend cafe and sat down. They were playing the Rolling Stones: bloke music. The first sentence that caught my eye was: “Trying to explain why fiction matters, novelist Ian McEwan put it simply. ‘Cruelty,’ he said, ‘is a failure of imagination.’”

    Common-sense headlines followed: “The real budget emergencies: households around the nation face genuine hardship, with terrible consequences.” “European austerity breeds far-Right support.”

    The article titled Failure of Imagination was by Sean Kelly. He explored the reaction to Hockey’s budget and said, what he is hearing is not only individuals lamenting their own losses in this new deal, but a nation of people who worry about the impact on their fellow citizens, “imagining,” for example, “the everyday obstacle course imposed by disability.” He said, “There is harder work ahead, work many of us have still largely failed to do because what we are being asked to imagine is too far removed from our own experiences.”

    A whole album of Mick Jagger’s plaintive lope later, paying for breakfast I joyfully brandished the new enterprise to the cafe owner, standing at his till. “Finally you can buy this locally!” I said. “What is it?” he said. He had not heard it’s happened. I showed him. Staff clustered round. “Can I take a photo of that?” “Can I too?” Careful pictures of the back-page subscription form disappeared into several phone cameras. They jostled behind him to leaf over pages, pointing, reading. The guy in the cap covered in little Lionel Ritchies levelled his finger at me, the bearer of better bad tidings. “This is genius!” he said. The owner said, it hurts to buy five copies of The Courier-Mail and five copies of The Australian every Saturday. I said, you will love this. It’s full of interesting points of view. Over his shoulder the tall barista said, “There’s no Sports!” The cafe owner flicked the paper open at the back. “Yes there is,” I told him. “You just didn’t recognise it because it has a photo of a woman athlete.”

    Reading the paper had left me filled with an unholy rage, but without the sick feeling I get from Murdoch’s certainties, a deep fury empowered rather than overwhelmed. “This isn’t us,” I felt, “this isn’t right.” The cafe owner and I talked it over in a few despairing sentences. “Every morning this week it’s been all about the State of Origin,” he said. “Yeah,” I said, “cos nothing else is happening in the world. Nobody’s struggling, nobody’s suffering…” “People read it,” he said, “people buy it, but I can’t believe they like it.”

    I said, “I just read this from end to end. Not one photo of an Indigenous person saying how their low income and premature death rate are really their own fault. They should work harder.” We both had tears in our eyes. “It’s really good to see you,” he said, “really good.” “Thanks for your halloumi,” I said. “Thanks for your hospitality.” Afterwards I cried all the way home. My Berlin companion, who his first weeks in Brisbane had worried he would not be able to live in a country where every morning this kind of crackling cruelty unfolded over the breakfast table and whispered from every headline its slimy innuendo, asked, What is it. I said, bursting, People don’t want this! This is not us! I can’t believe in their real hearts Australians are so racist and greedy and selfish and cruel. “Our country has fallen into the hands of thieves.” I remembered pelting across Berlin on my bicycle to vote at the Australian embassy, the sense of resolution and purpose in the room, mostly young people, filling the forms in, voting. I remembered keeping an appointment the next week with a shiatsu masseuse I had fallen in like with, who said when I showed up, “You look pale. What’s the matter, are you ok?” And I said, “Something terrible has happened in my c~, in my country,” my voice broke and I sat on her futon and sobbed. Who could have guessed then how terrible it was. The vengeance on anyone vulnerable and poor. The vindication of everyone landed and privileged. The silencing of anyone who is not white, in a country built on burnt rich black and red soil. My belief in life is that people are kind, it is only our damage and pain that makes us take out more damage and pain on each other. Tony Abbott’s government feeds to that a small, poison doubt, telling and insidious: Maybe not all people are only cruel because hurting. Maybe there are some, walking amongst us but psychopaths, who seem functional and believe in themselves but who gain satisfaction from inflicting suffering. Satisfaction, pleasure, and release.

  • light and shade

    light and shade

    Today was a sad and complicated day and I couldn’t get myself off the couch. Life seemed at once too little and too much and I lay coiled under a faded rug that I love, cat curled on top of me, reading one trashy novel after another. Just now with the afternoon sun streaming in I went out to admire the work my incorrigible companion has been making: he is determined to transform the weedy, shaded wasteland out back into a luscious lawn, “so,” he said, “in the summer you can lie down on the grass and read your book.” He went to the hardware store and bought boxes of light-and-shade lawn seed and some kind of strewable powdered fertiliser. He yanked out all the flowering weeds and raked up dried twigs thrown down from the large camphor laurel that spreads its branches over our tiny yard, into a furry, untidy pile in one corner. He made a proper compost pile. The old man who lives next door and spends his days sitting either end of a splendid gold-figured couch in a little garden shed with his best friend struggled over on his stick to see what went on. He is Italian and speaks so little English and in so husky and broken a tone it was almost impossible for us to understand each other. He said, “No rain.” The grass would not grow. “I know,” I said, rolling my eyes and pointing – “Optimist.” “No sun,” he said, indicating the tree with its complication of fine branches. “Yes,” I said. “Maybe we are lucky,” said the man scattering fertiliser. Our neighbour gazed across the yard. He pointed to the huge shaggy mango tree two doors down. “I plant that.” He was immaculately dressed, a feat which in an older person living alone fills my throat with painful tears. He told us his grandchildren used to play in this yard and that is why he’s put the plastic netting up, to protect the lady (Mrs Something, I couldn’t decipher her name) who sold this house to our landlord from having to rescue their balls all day long. He told me his wife died, five years ago, and when I said, “I’m so sorry,” his face was consumed with sadness fresh and undigested. Mrs Something has died too. Now he rents out the top floor of his house to the man who two days ago knocked on our door with five rooting sprigs of Roman basil tenderly wrapped in dampened “Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!” paper towel and then kept moist with a layer of cling wrap. He had attached with string a little label written in cursive, “Roman Basil. Very good for eating.” This tenant has filled the Italian man’s concreted yard with pots of herbs and vegetables and sometimes glances out his top window to wave to us on our shaded verandah. It’s a long time since I’ve had such wonderful neighbours. The Italian man rested on his stick, watching. He explained, or I think he did, that he is waiting for his sister who calls every morning from Venice. Talking about the death of his wife and the death of Mrs Something from this house he patted his chest with a knotted hand. “I too, soon.” “Me too,” I said, “eventually. Happen to us all.” “No,” he said, shaking his head, smiling: “92! 92!” It astonishes me how some people can be so self-centred and cruel and others light their eyes on the world like birds resting on a beautiful branch: the fire in their belly is a generous flame, lighting everything around it with compassion and love; were it not for those people I would not know how to make a home of this strange and wonderful, terrible world.