Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: you are traffic

  • the pickling palace

    The people across the road are drunk and two of them are planning to have sex together tonight for the first time. That’s at this stage, it’s not even dark yet, we’ve still got the Fight that Blows Up Out of Nowhere and Falling Asleep in the Pizza up our sleeves. Their voices carry and then the Friday afternoon traffic will surge up the hill again to carry them away. He says something and she says, “You are fucking kidding me.” “No,” he says, something something. “You’re just making that up!” Her incredulity is a dare. Climb this tree for me and bring that fruit. He says, “No, I’m deadset serious. Anything you like.” One of the other blokes says something and then the girl begins to sing, or chant, like she was at a football game: “Je-sus, Je-sus, Je-sus, Je-sus.” The positive guy sings something over the top of her, harmonizing. He’s making it up. He’s fucking-kidding her. Their verandah falls apart in a seething heap of laughs just as a truck roars down the road. When the noise clears he is saying, aggrieved, “…been doing it all my life.” I know that feeling, I have too. I have just got home from a delicate day of negotiations in my unconscious and as we swept over the bridge with its hanging-lantern streetlights and banners I felt a song unbrew in me. I sang it out the window in handfuls of confetti and as we pulled away from under the biggest fig tree, that the road goes around (the greatest kind of road), I said, to my long-legged companion who was driving, “Did you see that girl on the corner, the beautiful girl, with the guy who’s just so in love with her?” “Yes,” he said, his voice warm as if fond of them. “How she was just standing there in her little purple dress,” I said, “holding the orange flowers he brought her. He’s looking at her so carefully, he’s in love with her every little gesture. She’s not even noticing, telling him something, he’s in love with the way that she says it.” “So is she in love?” he wanted to know. I said, “Could be. But she’s not thinking about it, she is remembering something that happened and telling him. So it was hard to tell.”

    We drove round a sweeping corner prickly with pedestrians. We had watched a giant ibis as it took off from a street sign and flew the length of Charlotte Street, its white wings insignia. The prosperous tropical colonialism and sandstone and big bunches of trees made me feel at home. I wound my seat back and propped my foot out the side window. I said, sentimentally, “Both of them standing there with their bicycles.”

  • bicycling on

    Finally my bike! There have been various substitute treadlies in between but my own blue bike, bought in Alice Springs a decade back, is now out of storage and dusted and greased and today for the first time we hit the black road. Wahoo! The freedom and terror. Raced down the tumult of traffic to a sleepy golden markets, where under the trees people had laid out vegetables, sprouting herbs, tempting red circles of handmade saucisson. After a coffee and waxy croissant we sauntered out as the stallholders packed up. One was a big bloke with black beard and a huge smile who stopped packing, and straightened, when I said, “Can I take a photo of your red stuff and the red stuff behind? Would that bother you?”

    He grinned. He looked at the bunch of marigolds and bouquet of red rubber gloves and turned to see that behind him, now that the intervening stalls had folded away, the scarlet florals of a fashion stall made another layer of colour. “The red stuff, and the red stuff behind,” he said. “Spoken like a true photographer.”

    I was rummaging in my bag. “Yeah the professional terminology, eh?” I made a dozen photographs with people swiping by obligingly as my coloured-cotton, human scenery. Showed him the last and most successful shot. We wished each other a good week with enormous cordiality and I had the feeling we both would have liked to have given up a hug. On the narrow, shaded road outside the markets I wobbled and nearly fell as a car overtook me within an arm’s length. He accelerated to pass me, even though the standing traffic was banked at the traffic lights metres ahead. When he stopped I swooped round onto his driver’s side and stopped, and spoke to the guy through his unwound window. “Excuse me, Sir. There’s a new law, you have to stay a metre and a half away from the nearest bike, because it’s much safer. Thanks!” And I patted his windowsill familiarly, patronisingly, and pedalled off. It feels good to be back on the bike. But it wouldn’t feel good to be forever extinguished and flattened like a pizza on asphalt because some guy with “fat eggs” as they call it in German wanted to prove he could escape my hand-built speed.

  • 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?

  • ute tray of goodness

    In the back of my ute is so much soil and sundry scraps of leaves and dirt that I just found, in the seams of the rusted steel, a tiny plant growing. I plan to leave it and see what becomes of it. Maybe I can drag a fruiting tree behind me round the town. Put in a cane chair and folding picnic table. Add a coloured cloth & give readings. Uh huh.

  • snap

    Tonight I saw a man pull over in his shiny red car – more small round bubble than lippy convertible – leave the car running in the empty lane of traffic, as Berliners sometimes do, climb out and stroll over to a tree I was approaching on my walk – a sidewalk tree outside a darkened school, turtlenecked in asphalt – pull down his tracksuit pants, piss, pull his pants up with a satisfied >snap<, climb into the vehicle and drive away.