Lady Barista and I made each other laugh today, or maybe I just made myself laugh, which is lamer but still enjoyable. I turned up with my curly-handed mug and passed it across. “Just the uzh?” she said, which is her uzhual question. I was reading the band posters behind her. “Oh! I’m performing in that!” “What?” she said. “Queensland Poetry Festival. We have this fantasy that my poetry book & my CD will be out by that time but I think…. it’s not going to be both.” She picked up my loyalty card and said, “Hey! You’ve got a free one here.” Instead of throwing the full card away she passed it back. “You should keep that.” It had a bright yellow postage sticker on it, for tracking an overnight bag. “Ok,” I said, “but I think you better stamp it anyway. Just in case I try to come back and claim that free coffee again.” She said, dryly, “I think I might recognise you.” I said, “Wearing a fake moustache.” We started to laugh. “Dark glasses,” she said. She said, “I think the cup might give it away.” I was lying on the counter, laughing. “So if someone turns up,” I gasped, “in a plastic moustache – and a big hat – and dark glasses… and a shonky foreign accent – ‘Chello. Do you haff ze decaf?’ – I have to confess that might be me.”
Tag: suburban
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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.
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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.”
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a bitten grin
Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen. I just love it here. Invited by some new friends, in fact someone I’d met once, to spend ten days roosting in the writing cabin in their garden. We got talking at the airport last time I was here. We liked each other so much. I was shy about coming to stay, off one meeting so many months ago. The plane got in late and we drove through the long unfamiliar softlit suburbs, speaking in English and my three words of Danish, lapsing into silence with a sense of relief. “This is my desk,” she said, “I’ve cleared it off, feel free.” Her husband is a drummer, with quiet, gentle eyes. At the top of a steep pine ladder in the little attic room I fell into a deep, long sleep. An advertising sign at the Schoenefeld airport said, To travel is everyone’s right, but to me, travel is exhausting, it’s a piercing privilege. It takes me days for my soul to arrive. Over breakfast our host sliced an onion into large rings, a raw onion, built a layer ~ a layer of raw onion ~ onto his dark bread and pickled fish and curried egg. He saw my expression. “Even by Danish standards,” he confessed, “this breakfast is rather…” “Rather punk?” Today we took the train and explored the old city, with all day that happy, blessed feeling this place always gives me. I just love being here so much, I love it, and always have a sense of wellbeing. It makes me feel I must indeed be Danish, in part. Our surname, which we pronounce jerz, comes from Lübeck but sounds to me more Danish than German, even if ineptly or creatively Anglicized. So floating on sunshine like two leaves on water we wandered about all the livelong day long today. The old town is a maze of quiet stories. People sat in cafes by the narrow canals and disported themselves on cobbled squares. Summer is short and wears a scarf. The temperature gauge on the side of a building goes up to 27, then stops. We came out under the church tower past the high prancing fountain. Under the low arched bridge a shadow moved. Slowly the nose of a broad canal boat came into view, low on the water and brimming with motionless tourist folk. They looked half asleep. The boat was about three feet narrower than the stone arch, being steered by a young skipper with immense concentration. Behind him people lounged, a few couples chatted, one lady stood up as she came free of the low bridge and began filming a long round sweep on her phone. We watched, awestruck. He had to nose the boat almost into the stones of the opposite wall before he cleared space behind him to start to turn. With inches to spare he cleared the curve. A beautiful piece of piloting, wonderful to watch. I could feel the warm railing against my ribs. When the boat finally started to turn cleanly past the narrow bend in this ancient, odd passage of water I began to clap. “Woohoo!” I said. People on the boat looked up, woke up, and amazingly a burst of twenty or thirty up front also bloomed into smatterling applause. The sense of joy spreading was almost palpable, you know that feeling. The skipper bit his grin. Two men also leaning over the railing gave me sideways, wry, prideful smiles. For a moment we were all alight with each other. In aircraft a difficult landing in rough conditions will be greeted by decorous applause from the cabin, like an audience in a concert hall encoring a solo. It feels like the habit of an earlier age. “That felt good,” I said to my darling friend. We walked away under the walls of the museum. “Maybe,” I said, hopefully, “next time those people see something wonderful they might think, how lovely this is.” How sweet that I am here to see it. How skilfully that person plays. How dear and rich. My friend gave me a tolerant, affectionate glance that flooded warm water through my heart. I feel lucky.
