Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: homecoming

  • 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.

  • birthday

    It’s going to be my birthday on Saturday, along with perhaps 19 million other people. Good Lord, though – how did this happen so fast? Heard a guy saying the other day, and I think he is right: days are long & years are fast.

  • til the day I die

    This morning carrying coffee I walked past the hostel where an old Aboriginal man, gold-chocolate skinned and with a round white beard, sometimes sits in a folding chair under the trees waking up slowly. He and I like each other and we often say g’day. “Might get some rain,” he said, and I said, “Feels like it, doesn’t it?” Above our heads the murky trees were cacophonous with bird squabble. These are the rainbow lorikeets who yesterday dumped a couple twigs on my head when I passed them by underneath. “Those birds’ve got something to say about it, too,” I said. Later in the day I was crying in the car, having had some unexpected news. It’s ok. The radio was spurling some country song I had never heard before, the lyrics masculine and earnest. That’s because I listen to Murri Country, 4AAA. Every time they replay their station tag, “Murri Country,” meaning, Aboriginal, Indigenous Country, I think: yeah, a good thing, too. I think of it like a drip drip on the stone that slowly might wear a hole. So the blood can come out, the more justice and kindness. The singer said something that made me laugh, a kind of watery giggle. “I’m not going to stop loving you,” he sang, “until the day I die.” Immediately I saw him in his death bed, primly folded in the neatly pressed hospital sheets, flapping his hand to get rid of the wife who has not realised this means, “but, girl – on that day you are on your own.” “You,” he says calmly, “get lost.” She says, “But we had a contract! You promised! You were gunna love me until the day…” He says, his voice gravelier now but the same voice still, “Yeah, love – actually you misread that.”

  • housewarbling

    I cannot describe what a privilege it is to have a home of my own after two years of house-guesting, couch-surfing, and six-week sublets. A friend who is also deeply introverted said, You must feel like a tortoise with no shell. I do! I did. But we’ve found a tiny high house with a tree-shadowed back deck, crowded between the new high-rises that despoil old Brisbane and at the same time bring her to life. Hemmed in by light industry, free from lawn mowers as nobody has the space, roaring with traffic all night and all day, wonderful. Within four days of first seeing the place we’d moved in.

    Winter in Brisbane is beautiful. It’s not cold, but it’s cold. In a month’s time my beloved goes back to Berlin and my throat shrivels at the thought. But for now, a branch to rest on. Our first place together. An afternoon in the sun. A soft prong of furry grey ears that rises from the doona as I go in to collect my jacket off the hook.

    At first it was like camping: a spacious, luxurious, first-world camping, serene in serendipity. We had cold showers and tea-light candles, newspaper for toilet roll. The flickering space so golden at night embraced us from the start. We moved our stuff in. I could feel, or felt I could feel, the kindliness of whoever lived here before, three exotic names in the letterbox, and the shallow tree resting out back with its branches never inactive, the artist who lives next door and who when we were chasing our cat spread his hands saying, “My yard is your yard,” the piercing weird tropical birds at night which that first night were louder than traffic, let me feel at last I was at home at last. Oh, at last, at last.

    In the mornings I take a pair of double-handled mugs and scuttle down to the hole-in-the-wall cafe which spills with office workers. I take away two coffees and carry them uphill home. The neighbour who spends his days smoking behind a frangipani tree waves and I call back. From inside the house I can hear the morning mewling of my cat, who is back after two years lodging on the soft laps of my parents, who thus enabled me to travel and delay coming home. That’s if this is home: funny Brisbane, which doubles in size every time you turn your back, where we moved from Jakarta when I was twelve and which I left so many times, forever leaving, last heading south in 2003.

    After four days’ flicker the power came on and I carried the stinking kerosene lamp outdoors. We had hunted down the kerosene in the local midnight convenience, in its ribbed bottle that in ribbing says poison; on the lowest shelf, but with child-proof cap. It stood next to a bottle of clear methylated spirits. The corner shop when I lived in West End used to sell meths cold, from the fridge. I remembered that, and the painter friends in a rickety place in Paddington who agonised over the old man who liked to take refuge under their high house on a steep slope to drink his meths and milk. This was years ago. He was rotting himself. They were relieved he didn’t smoke. These houses are like matchboxes on stilts and it’s a revelation to a Berliner how it can be colder inside the house than it is outside in the mid-morning winter sun. The whole place would go up in a giant torch, the house itself is tinder.

    I set fire to my house once, late one night. I set a pan of oil on to heat and then sat down to write. Maybe that’s a story for another occasion. The firemen came clanging down our narrow street and couldn’t get through, they had to leave the vehicle and leap out, they rushed in and stomped through, after I’d put the fire out, in their giant boots and yellow rubber overalls. The guy in charge swept a glance up and down my walls, which were floor-to-ceiling books, and said, “This House…. is a Fire Trap. You have got to get rid of some paper.” I was glad, then, to be rid of the flammable kero, its brilliant, electric, improbable blue. Carrying it to the checkout I realised something, and said to the plump fellow staffing the till, “Hey! They probably added this colour because it looks toxic – to show that it’s poison. There’s nothing like it in nature. But, now… we actually have energy drinks that are exactly this colour!”

    “Yeah,” he said, incurious, bagging my groceries though I’d said, “No bag,” standing unmoved as I fetched them back out again and piled them under my arms. Sometimes it seems the whole world is an artificial blue whose dire warning passes unheeded. Sirens are not lovely temptresses on wet rocks, combing and combing themselves, calling us off-course to pleasure, but flashing kerosene-coloured lights that revolve with a wet sound that’s unbearable and which we tune out and ignore. I wonder how deep have we poisoned our minds. Are we lit inside like the material world, carpeted in concrete and no longer allowed to grow dark (its dearest crop). The hoop of day revolves around and round earth’s hub and the thousand flights track the near cloud like lit flies, the native, believable blue and green of the world’s watery and earthly chores lying at ease, overridden, injected a billion times with a million kinds of toxic compounds of our own fevered invention: carrying home plastic instead of water, dining off plastic instead of wood; is this why a home of one’s own, until the water rises, is the kind of refuge that it is… nowadays.

  • like there’s no tomorrow

    I’d like to say I’ve been baking but the truth is, only about half the mixture ever hits the heat. Last night I made a self-saucing lemon delicious with around one third too much butter and sugar, so that I could eat the butter sugar and lemon mix off the back of a wooden spoon. The night before it was apple tea-cake, creamy and satiny in the bowl. I started with a bullied gingerbread recipe, almost every spice within reach crammed into it, including black peppercorns and cardamom pods which I ground down in a pestle, just so that I could lick the mixture off the back off a… well, you get the picture. I mix, I grind, I beat, I slurp. Then I pour the remainder into a tin, put it in the oven and walk away. The rest of the household have to monitor, test with a straw, slide it out and serve it, and then the next morning I find crumb-clung baking tins stacked in the sink half-filled with water. Either I will turn into a human sofa and have to turn sideways to enter a doorway, be unable to leave the house and eventually fill it with my lardlike balloons of flesh, or I will die young of a preventable illness, or I’m soon going to have eaten so much cake mix I will never bake again. Damn you, red clothbound bachelor cookbook with your enticingly pineapple-ring-lined black and white recipe illustrations! Damn you, free range eggs!

  • the underground birdcage

    Brisbane’s underground opened up unexpectedly and swallowed us whole. Like two fishes we went down, happy to be coveted. Brisbane sprawls on the surface of several hills, sunny and pleased with itself, the city centre sprouting like rockets deteriorates into sleeping suburbs at its very walls, a castle hemmed in by shanties: who knew there was anything underground, mysterious, culturally exploratory at all?

    It’s above ground, it turns out, like a 70s pool. Perched above a suburban railway station in a decayed birdcage shelter like a lean-to, stripped inside, its tin roof bared and its internal walls mostly gone. This might have once have been the house of the shopkeeper who founded the burger bar downstairs, barred and bolted at street level: as we ducked under the sagging verandah to come up we read: Award-Winning Coffee! PLUS: Bacon & Egg Rolls.

    The milk bar was closed, it being late on Good Friday, everything was closed in fact, everyone gone. Miles of car dealerships gleamed up and down the highway. The railway station was empty and cool-lit. Huge billboards loomed. We went up a rickety flight of stairs and into the unlit living room of a couple who host these gigs intermittently, whose devotion to experimental music lies thick like dust over every surface in sight. They had stacks of tapes on a milk-crate table, I’d not heard of even one of the bands. We sat down on a velvety car seat and a milk crate filled with comics. Outside, the verandah was hedged with netting and the lights from the dealership opposite swam. People smoked various plants. Eventually two bands played. One was the Loop Orchestra, which morphed out of Severed Heads, and whose members have been assiduously pursuing the random mismatching of tape loops since 1979. They took a long time to set up. Their equipment was heavy. Their sound was intoxicating and strange. Compelling re-occuring beats splurted from old splices in the tape. One man wore dozens of loops round his wrist like loose dark bracelets, slipping them off when he wanted to change and refit. A young audience member scrolled his phone throughout the set. Another, in his fifties, sat on the floor like a child being told the best stories and when his attention wandered he picked up an old flyer off the floor and held it up close to his eyes to read.

    A girl with plaits attached to her hat turned her head next to me and gazed glassily past. Her smile was vague and convulsive. The man in the Bauhaus t-shirt who kept bending over some detailed arrangement behind the stacks of jars in the cluttered kitchen corner turned out to be the drummer for the second band. He told me their name but I forgot it. It was clever. His drums were built out of scrap. I was perfectly comfortable in my warm car seat, I took many dark photos, my mind just sank away. Everything was dark and people’s shadows cut the reading light delineating the stage. With care it was possible to pick a way along the verandah which felt like at every moment it would dissolve into the highway and disappear in a smear of rapidly swept past headlight. The light from the head, and the light from the heart. The moon climbed impaired and creamy through the dark netting and lighted the shining untouched vehicles displayed forever, from last century, from a comatose time when people thought it was ok to mine whole mountains hollow and smelt their insides into trash. So many different kinds of sleep. Our audience stirred when one set closed and another opened and applause was low to the ground, enthusiastic. Up the back it was possible to buy t-shirts, so I did: five dollars, screen-printed, awkward cut-out letters claiming boldly and purply Real Bad Music. A rack of tapes and records and cds ranged from five dollars to twenty; four twenty-dollar notes unfurled in the tall jar into which I dropped my coins. People came up the back stairs at intervals and slipped in between the shadows watching and swaying. House plants trailed from tins hung from the tongue and groove walls and from the tiny thicket outside, garden plants reached in. The imperfect floor had a board missing here and there and had been repaired with layers of steel shop signs and advertising placards. My favourite said, in white on grey, “…your business the exposure it deserves.”

     

  • the other C word

    My dad has cancer. Our relationship has been so peculiar and, at times, so intolerably painful that my reaction to this news since we heard it a week ago has been mere confusion. He was told on Saturday that he had a “small, operable” prostate cancer. Today he had another barrage of tests and the surgeon called it “aggressive.” Another doctor has suggested it may have spread to the bone at the base of his spine. I feel strangely ashamed to be thinking of my own experience in this context. It feels like I can’t help it. My father’s own father died of suicide when Dad was only twelve. Dad never learned how to dad. A decade ago my brother, who mines coal, in a moment of unexpected empathy suddenly said, I think Mum and Dad didn’t know how to love you; I think you’ve never experienced unconditional love. I was so relieved by this clear explanation of just about everything I burst into giggles. It was here at their house that this conversation took place. I remember running up the stairs to check out this new theory, calling, Dad, Dad! What? he said, from his chair on the verandah overlooking the river trees. Dad I said, would you say your love for me was unconditional? Oh, yes, pet, said my father. Largely.

  • no use to a lizard

    A small scream from the other room. “What? What?” “Can you come here?” On the rug is lying toes-up a small, lucid-bellied, iridescent, recently murdered gecko. Its tail has been severed to a bloody stump: it didn’t just drop, it was ripped off. By its extreme corners I pick up the rug and gingerly carry it to the ferns. “Tisch! Tisch! Where are you, you little cat-monster?” A cat-bell is no use to a lizard. We both stand over it mournfully, uselessly. “Poor little dragon,” he says.

  • tilt a world

    Finally, bodysurfing. It must be a decade since I have surfed, maybe since before moving to South Australia where terror of sharks somewhat put me off. That feeling, you know that feeling? Carried by water, gasping for green. You invite the water to take you. The water picks you up and takes you. Rushing with the thousand million bubbles carrying me along. Making myself lean and long like an arrow, like a board. Glances from the other surfers, that joy at the wet dark head surfacing from the spent wave, way up close to the shore. I can see why dolphins do it, I can see why people learn to ride boards. It’s been so long since I surfed I forgot to take a breath before the first wave and had to pull out of it in order to gasp for air. There is that ineffable serenity when the whole world is tilting and green.

  • easy cure

    Found this dim-lit, twinkling little bar in an unexpected quarter of town. All seats were empty and the bar owner and his staff were sat around a corral of lounges playing The Cure and playing guitar. I mean The Cure, as in 1979: doomph/slup/doomph/slup/“Accuracy…” We sat down and the barman quickly flipped for the Rolling Stones. Ugh, I said to my companion as we let our eyes run over the heads and shoulders of the weird beers they had on display, these guys are like one-twelfth the band The Cure were. Sir Jagger left his garden party prematurely to drizzle out “Ruby Tuesday” and it felt like flat champagne, the musical excitement level had just dropped to a sad low tide. I remembered how actually the supposedly sweet, supposedly fulsome folk singer Melanie had turned this drear song inside out, stringently, dragging out of its melancholic chorus the brisk, tripping threat “stillummonnamissyou…” Guy who owned the bar came over to talk beers. He was finally able to explain why a German person would never have heard of a “lager.” (“How come now I’m in Australia I never see anyone drinking Fosters?” “ugh. Those are our… Export Beers.”) Lager is like a Pilsner only, he told us, “more lager.” They wanted to know would we like to join them. Meanwhile two ladies had burst in asking “do you do coffees?” then ordered tea. I described to him the album I had made with “a kind of collective” of musos recruited in clubs, on the streets, how part of it was kind of jazz and part of it “a kind of folk.” He took from me a card saying, “How did you know I would be into that stuff?” I lifted my hand to flop round the bare ceiling, the little white-clad tables, the squashy couches, the bare backed beers, the I dunno… “The Cure, baby.”