I’ve a German-speaking friend who since quitting tobacco suffers terribly from grievings. ‘Grievings’ are what happens when you depend on a drug and then give it up: heroin grievings, nicotine grievings. I quit coffee in January, and today in the Lebanese shop where the machine sent out aromatic blasts and the steam collected on the rainy window like tears, I experienced coffee grievings. Coffee, you sweet sorrow, you sultry wench.
Two li’l punks on the footbridge to the Warschauerstrasse station, lounging with legs crossed and outstretched, dog lying between them, begging bowl out and a large sign propped on her legs which says in English: FOR BEER AND WEED. He obviously adores her. They have matching frothy haircuts, blonded and shaved up the sides.
I somehow forgot Berlin’s imaginative beggars. This guy held open the door to the autotellers in the foyer of the bank, with a grand flourish, saying, “Welcome!” He was as confident as though he owned it. And he did! He was wearing a greasy navy-blue pinstripe suit like a boxer and had his hair slicked back. On the way out I gave him some coins and he snipped them up in the hand that was free from cigarette-rolling, clasped them to his breast, “Danke!”, kept rolling, grinning at me salty and devilish as Tom Waits. The joy of life is a great thing to share, if you’re a beggar or busker, if somehow you can manage it. Irresistible!
In 1999 I published my first book. A week later the girlfriend who used to live across the road returned to Brisbane from the desert and said, do you wanna make a road trip? We set off on retread tyres and with (it turned out) not enough tools to help out when things went wrong. Just outside Toowoomba (an hour west) I phoned my Mum. “Mum the van’s overheated! We forgot to check the water.” Anyway we made our way west, west, west. Spent the night in a grand hotel in Longreach with verandahs broad enough to foxtrot on. In the morning I stashed my packet of tobacco in a potplant and that is how I finally quit smoking.
We spent the third night in Alice Springs. By this time we had bonded and had told each other our life stories. I read her passages from my diary. She told me stories of her abused mother’s fight to shift her relationship with the now aging grandfather, using delayed cups of lukewarm tea, passive-aggression, and humour. Only 700km to Uluru (‘Ayers Rock’): we were on the home stretch! It felt like our own driveway. Then we blew a tyre. Like superheroes we got down and changed it, yay for us. Then we blew another. Two people who were travelling round Australia in a mobile home stopped to help us. The man was seamed and nuggety, he said, Don’t you girls dare go a whisker over 30 kays, now: you’ll blow the tread, and then you’re really rooted. So we crawled home to the tiny community of Mutitjulu where she worked – the short drive took us more than seven hours. We daren’t stop. When one of us needed to pee the other took the wheel and we hung our bottoms out the window. She was still smoking but somehow, I had lost the knack. I had last left Uluru when I turned 21 and quit my tour guide job. I spent ten days in a dream of homecoming, rolling myself naked in the red dust of an evening, walking out the door or her little house, magnetically drawn, almost every time I glanced up and saw Uluru. Crouching there like something, someone, it’s unsacred to speak of. I found the tiny second hand shop in the resort, run by a ranger’s wife, and consisting of things the high-turnover staff had left behind. I bought old-man’s underpants and a singlet and dyed them to form a swimsuit. After that I swam laps every day in the Sheraton pool. A rich lady befriended me at the bar and confided if you showed up at the front desk with enough confidence, you could ask them for the keys for a ‘poolside room’ (that is, on the asssumption that your own room was too far away upstairs) and so that is what I did. I lazed in the big white beds and had baths. I wrapped myself in dense velvety white bathrobes every day. I met interesting people from faraway places. And I kept going back to the sacred place, every day, every day. One night I cycled round the base as it grew dark and had to follow a very merry carload of local men home: I could not find which sandhill concealed the community. Never been so glad to hear a booming generator.
I took copies of my book into the newsagent and they said, yes, they would buy some and sell them. I went out dancing on the same dancefloor I’d loved when I was 20, and danced til I could barely remember my own name. When I was ready to come home, there was a problem: at that stage I had never owned a car, and saw no reason to carry my driver’s license in my purse. So as well as no shoes I had no photo ID. There was a tiny library for staff and the librarian was a Justice of the Peace. I explained to her my dilemma. I showed her the book, whose title is Going for the Eggs in the Middle of the Night. I showed her how the poem titles were printed in my own handwriting. And how it has photos in it of our family when we were kids, photos of me and taken by me as a child. “Ok,” she said, “it’s you.” And after she’d signed an affadavit I was entitled to buy a plane ticket and fly across the detailed and sumptuous red plains, to Brisneyland.
Scampering down the steep stone steps to gain the river path I met our neighbour, skulking behind the boat shed. He was smoking pot. I told him so. “You’re smoking pot!” ‘Ach,’ he said, ‘it’s just so…’ ~ waving his hand to encompass the day, the deepening afternoon, the greenery. “I agree,” I said, and we talked for a while about stinging nettles, and daisies. After that I walked for maybe an hour and didn’t meet anyone else nor their dog. Except for five shadows lurking on the other side of the river, sifting back and forth mysteriously in front of a huge raging fire they had built. The flames were leaping high and the mound of wood they’d set fire to was tall and triangular. This was under the long high roof of a storage shed thatched with bark tiles. Not thatched, exactly. I thought about the impenetrable Swissness of things, imagined the secretive signals by which they would have arranged they would meet up. A train went past a long distance away and at the same moment up on the hillside someone unseen let out a huge, scarifying shriek: the kind you let rip when the forest is all around mystifying you with its trees, and the sun won’t last much longer, it is time to be heading home to the domesticated landscape but for these few moments you are you, you are ancient, you are wild, you are free.
