La Mina

Her fleeing spirit catches
on rocks on the empty shore;
on seaweed strung
around ankles coarse
with stubble, fishing lures
rusted and washed up are
reborn - a tent pitched, tides surfed,
ties torn.

And sunning on a rock outcrop
with birds dead and alive
she feels like the last woman,
last mermaid beyond sexual reproach,
without shame or pride or pair
of self-reproving eyes or smell, or taste,
or noise.

She fashions a fence of stones,
sits inside,
untouchably watching
mussel nets rake the surface,
dark black buoys and orange buoys
and duck-diving birds scatter in the vapours;
limp nets pulled in, dripping, piled
at the stern of little wooden boats.
She imagines the noise of them piling.

Desperate to piss,
she clenches her buttocks, ties
and reties her hair to distraction,
walks laps of the twilit beach;
plunges chest-deep
into water grey with silt
but cannot go, cannot abnegate
the perfect finishings of her family,
cannot stop thinking of her dad.

Build a stone wall then,
a box, an outhouse, a hollow
cairn homage to the human anatomy,
build pretty diversions with shattered brown glass-

red-eyed Inca birds place her,
without them she is nowhere;
she wishes they would fly back to Ballestas.

Wooden, half covered with flaking green house paint, the tour boat has a few boards nailed to the roof as makeshift seats. Below is blackish water thickly laden with reeds, yet to be lit up by the rising sun. Cold wind whips off its surface and chills us to the bone.

Far enough out so that Copacabana appears in full on one side, the distant Island of the Sun on the other, I feel my excitement begin inexplicably to melt away, as though I were suddenly reminded of having seen all of this before. I fall silent and she is silent and conversations in Norwegian and Swiss German become all I can tolerate, simply because the words are not words to be, only sounds interspersed with the occasional and jarring familiarity of a´Ja´. My head is empty, save for a vague flicker of images and thoughts, those inextinguishable, pulsing reminders of being alive. And then she she turns her back to rest on my left shoulder. I am startled but soon go back to nothing.

Those gulls, those black-billed ducks; can they diffrentiate between lake and sea? Out here I guess no-one can, for it is endless azure water on either side of this, Isla Del Sol´s highest peak, overhung by clouds low enough to blow away with a birthday puff, distant currents like silver oil slicks, cows eating withered waterless bushes on precipitous slopes, lambs with red ribbons quietly listening to their elders bleat. Nomadic sheppards padlock huts, perched like lookouts over the water, while sowing crops on flatter land; as I walk along, alone, sometimes silent, sometimes singing, the full force of my imagination rushes back, my thoughts in all their shambolic entropy, and I tug padlocks on those clay idyls and from open, deserted guesthouses steal bafs of coca tea. Stopping only to piss or reapply sunscreen - the day is cloudless and at maximum heat, not to mention my relative proximity to the sun - I have torn away from the other tourists and from her.

This path undulating through the island belongs to me, rouses me from my morning torpor and trips me up on glittering ore-stone and burns me with its charity. Birthplace of the Incas! But what does the word Inca mean to me? Referent to a great civilsation, or the name of a type of soft drink? Part of the puns above butcher´s shops, bus terminals, restaurants, or indexical launching pad into history?

...

The road to Coroico twirls like a pinwheel, paved and then unpaved, rounding mountains or tunnelling through them, opaque in the film of morning cloud still lingering amongst the Yungas. Like its sacred Peruvian counterpart, this subtropical valley abounds in verdant greenery, the air heavy, the scale one of hair-raising enormity. And like enormous colanders, scores of thin waterfalls spurt from these mountains, carving out sharp gullies to render their sides wonderful puzzles of geometry, white miracles running a thousand meters down before drying up not three from the dead riverbed far, far below. Giant banana leaves canopy the road and the skies are policed by gliding birds.

We share a collectivo with twi Boliviano families; the only other vehicles encountered are trucks, tour buses, anti-narcotics four by fours - this area was understandably a haven for cocaine production - and the odd banged up taxi with its bonnet up on the roadside. Chulumani and Chuspipata come and go. Stopping to refuel, I am about to enter the baño when an hombre, wearing black gumboots and gold aviators, signals ominously with his index finger: 1 Boliviano. I hold it in.

Soon both families are gone. The first to leace consists of a mother, father, two young children and grandparents. They are dressed in the latest western fashions and alight at a five star resort. The other family is a mother with one boy and one girl, possibly twins, enigmatically carrying plastic bags full of flowers. They disembark at a windowless roadside shack. And though I didn´t notice, she tells me later than, sitting side-byside. the first family had looked upon the second with utter disdain, as though they were of a lower order entirely. Not in a touristic sense either, which is closer to the way one looks at a different, but by no means inferior, race of people; no, like overlords upon the mastered. It saddened me to hear this- my conception of Bolivia as a bitterly poor country but one poor in solidarity - poverty after all being the world´s great unifier - was irretrievably changed. With what frequency must that first family have cast those subjugating eyes! Knowing nothing of their situations I nevertheless worried for both sets of children but for the wealthier two in particular; everything this country did not need - nor does any country - was already impregnated in their helpless little minds. The archway bidding us Bienvenidos to Coroico also displays the slogan, ´Welcome to Paradaise´. I laugh at the unusual spelling, though I will never know if it is intentional or just a pitiable gaff.

One in the afternoon now; we find ourselves walking uphill again, steeper this time and in extreme humidity, towards a campsite we can seem to find no trace of. Up and up over the tiny town we rise; the terrain is lush and the vistas of the Yungas breathtaking. Banana trees, full of green bunches with their wand-like flowers dangling underneath, mingle with bushes of red hibiscus, ferns beset by some kind of fungal infection, trees with tiny jungle oranges that are the sweetest I´ve ever eaten. It smells of rain, soil. Butterflies of myriad colour and size dart past our cheeks, jumping spiders startle her; hummingbirds; yellowtails; grasshoppers small and bright red; inimitable sound of a certain bird, I do not know which one, who, perhaps streeting towards its prey, will hold its wings close to its body and launch at phenomenal speed down into the valley, trailing behind it a noise that summons, in my mind at least, that menacing whoosh on cartoons when the fuse on a stick of dynamite is lit.

Another hotel but at last a sign, an arrow; we are headed in the right direction. Excitedly we round a bend, haul our heavy packs over the next rise. There is a small military compound but no campsite. I look back at her; cheeks purplish red, fringe, stringy with sweat, stuck to her forehead. Put your things down, I tell her, while I go ahead and make sure it´s there. She nods and I give her a kiss and water. Thirty seconds after setting off I stop; it is there.

Once the tent is up I pass a quiet hour absorbing what is truly an ample reward. Officially an ecolodge, the grounds command unparallelled view, set on the hillside in segments connected by wooden stairs strwen with tiny purple flower. The relative altitude obscures the rest of the town as if it were not there at all. And opposite us the Yungas plunge down into a gorge and rise again sharply in green mountains, staggeringly high, leaking more miraculous water.

There are two swimming pools, hammocks slung from bamboo, a mediation room - glass panelled - where the view alone is enough to put one in a trance. The stone hot tub, however, is empty and fire wood costs extra. We pay $5 per night to camp. For four days her tent is our home. Cramped, without mat or sleeping bag save for a colourful Boliviano blanket bought in La Paz, the tent, pitched in the shade of a huge banana tree, affords me little rest but I hardly care. Roosters crow at around 4; stirring then, I rise soon after. And in the early hours all is shrouded by thick cloud. Even the sky looks hopelessly overcast. What a transformation to be awake for then; slowly the sun imposes itself on the shadows, slowly there appear things - objects, plants, insects, birds - invisble before. And by midday, after I have sat in the Sala Mayu for an hour, never able to vanquish a last thought from my mindm usually the most untapped and trivial (this morning it was the lyrics to Britney Spears´ ´Sometimes´) swam, showered, eaten breakfast and chosen a good vantage point, at last the valley and sky become clear, cloudless, bright as stars, and all the inhabitants of the jungle are again in full song.

One afternoon, thunder claps from far off down the gorge. We have just washed our clothes in the stone sink at camp and have them all spread out to dry- on seats, logs, the rafters of a small communal hut with thatched roof and walls made from mud and beer bottles. In the middle off the bottle-butts there stands, on the back wall, the figure of a Frangelico monk, which I find an inexpensive and cool display of piety.

Before long half the sky has turned black. Asleep in hammocks, we are finally raised to our feet when one bout of thunder sounds as if the sky is breaking in two. She rails against me for saying the clouds were going the other way until I point out that they are, in fact, going both ways, bad coming toward us and benign floating out to other lands. She rails against me for making that mistake. We rush to put everything in the tent. It rains hard all afternoon and all night. Under the hut´s thatched roof we play cards, drink whisky, eat fried bananas and take in the spectacular deluge. Later, when the tent has cooled down, we make love. And in that sobering after-effect of sex I realise we would stay here for months if we could. This is a dangerous thought; only weeks left and still so much unseen. Next morning she asks me will we stay another night, but scrap our plans for Cochabamba and head directly to Sucre instead. I agree to everything.

We came from the sacred mountain,
squat on rocks and staring at clouds
boundless, and the Old Mountain hosting
a thousand specks with fifty dollar tickets
gushing at roofless temples
and waterless fountains-

We came from Canada
for novelty passport stamps,
for Inca-trail t-shirts-
climbed for the thoughtless
vertigo of fatigue- and maybe,
in those giddy seconds,
for an unpeopled moment when only
green and white and quietude abounded.


...


Tax on our boarding passes paid; all Puno buses preparing to leave. Through the departure door and gate we pass and settle outside amongst other backpackers, leaning our bags against a concrete pillar. Stray dogs are sleeping on the tarmac warmed by recent engines. When the space is filled they move to an absent one, slinking, with the precision and nonchalance of lifetimes on the streets, impervious to the shouts or rocks hurled by locals, nonchalant between man and machine and other tired dogs. The night is cloudless and cool. I wear a cardigan I bought at an inflated price from one of the selfsame Cusco artesanos, holding her from behind because she refuses to haggle out of anxiety and so remains in none but my long-sleeve thermal and an old leather jacket. Nearby a couple from Spain talk to a couple from Russia in English while a Japanese girl listens tacitly from the shadows.

Luxurious coaches come and go in legions. But ours does not come. Perturbed, we look at the boarding passes given us in haste by a woman who at the time of issue was on the phone and trying to Pacify a furious Peruano man of perhaps eighty years. Not only do they indicate a change in bus company, but also that we have both paid 15 soles less for the seats. Moreover, stapled to the back is another boarding pass, for Copacabana, Bolivia, that we did not purchase. And when at last a big, battered bus bearing the name on our tickets, Libertad, pulls into a different gate than we had been advised, with a cardboard Puno on its massive dash, we have no choice but to get on.

The air vents do not work and the windows have been locked shut- normally trifling problems, except for the small puddle of motor oil by my feet. Impossible to complain now though; locals have made their dash to the dilapidated second storey and shoved their huge colourful bags of goods into the cargo hold. I say a quiet curse to the bus company and feel stupid for having been duped. In context, however, things are not so bad. Splendour or squalour we are on our way. My immense fatigue should permit me some sleep, no matter how high I become in the process. And all the Peruanos, so quick to start snoring around us, are comfort enough that this ramshackle coach will go where we need it to go and that we will see our bags on the other side.

...


But some places, as a consequence of our own state of mind upon entering them, unwittingly, innocently acquire what we like to term bad energy, a bad vibe. This trait is almost always terminal; it cannot be reversed and will ultimately effect a judgment of an entire city or even country based on nothing but our caprices. And, excepting those few to whom a genuine misfortune occurs somewhere that forever associates the name of that place with a set of memories they would rather forget, it is usually the case that when somebody says I dont like that neighbourhood, they will point to dubious, ineffable flaws; strange people, weird energy, bad vibe.

Strange people? Obviously an assertion belonging to the sphere of pure subjectivism. Let that same person make a second judgment after receiving one small act of good faith or kindness in the area where such strange people live: watch how his opinion shifts. The opposite is, of course, true as well. But caprice and misunderstanding - combined with our so often being too quick to judge - can virtually turn paradise into hell.

Other factors, most of them subjective as well, also come into play. Do we find the place physically appealing, beautiful to the eye? Do we like the style of its architecture, the layout of its streets? Are there too many or too few green wedges? What does it smell like? What, broadly, is the ethos on display, and does it comport with our own?

Puno is on the receiving end of some bad press and a hostel too far from the bus station and a fight her and I have in the central market and its unscupulous treatment of the Lake Titicaca foreshore. In spite of its upsides - for there are surely some - it is forever cast in our minds as a place with no touristic appeal, a place as daark as the clouds gathering in the hills behind it on our first afternoon, which, although they soon lighten, turn to that wet season blanket of white that swathes the sky and consigns a whole population to the indoors. Empty streets turned to red mud slicks. Lake stripped of all its beauty. And cow skulls in pothole puddles by the roadside. We leave for Bolivia the next morning.

Then the oil silos, a graveyard, a carnival; this carnival of humanity sandwiched between the hills and the turbid sea. As terrifying as they are thought-provoking, almost visual philosophy in terms of their total human realism, the slums continue unchecked, uncared for. We roll on. Pens of withered cattle and more mines, refineries, quarries commingle with the brick hovels. Political graffitti extolling this or that candidate, or liberty, or hope, is scrawled over any available wall space.

On the ocean side of the highway another jumble of dwellings appears, literally meters from the upscale seaside suburb preceding it. Armed guards man the prison-like entrance gates and the waves of the Pacific thunder to shore in the background. Except at their apexes, the hills look to have been excavated to desolation; ground here is blanched and barren.

Basketball courts appear in the dust. These interminable slums, many buildings of which have crucifix-shaped doorways, are shadowed by a new mountain, bleak and enornmous, with the words Peru Moderno etched onto its side. Like a good Westerner the scale of poverty makes me cry and I avoid looking out the window of our luxury coach for fear that she will see me and ask what is wrong.

Now green-painted garden sheds scatter the immense plains. The bus makes a pitstop in Picusana to refuel. In the sheds live families who fly the Peruvian flag, similar to its Canadian counterpart sans maple leaf, on their warped tin rooves. Still, there is hardly anyone around; likely at work in one of the industrial zones or in Lima. Bulldozers and oil tankers seem more common than cars here. Locals barter at a market near a small olive grove, with the biggest refinery yet consuming the background, probably the foreground too with its fumes. A football stadium, houses, hills, ocean.

We are not forty minutes out of Lima and its must be said that the money has dried up, unbelievably under the noses of those fabulously profitable industries destroying the very landscape these people live in. Unsurpassed poverty flung in faces by ore dust and up noses by oil fumes. But then the money dried up - for most - a pace or two each way from Miraflores, that bubble, that fiction. Money is the true otherworld; we are aliens and I have never been more aware of it.

In parts the view of the sea is spectacular. Cacti grow from the sand and sparkling inlets do not subside until the highway´s edge. Palm trees and crop fields provide scarce oases of green on massive moonscapes. And then there is a resort golf course whose lush fairways are being flooded by a modern sprinkler system. Across the road are perhaps ten thousand people without sewage or running water.

The small city of Ica passes by. Its municipal office, with all-glass facade and daring architecture, is bewilderingly conspicuous in this huge electrified hovel. There are hotels but no reason to stay. The shimmering mirage of that building haunts me long after the highway abounds again in emptiness. For hours now we have stuck to the coact and I pine for higher unpolluted ground.

As the sleeping tablet wears off I look bleary-eyed up the bus and realise what a steep ascent we are making. The sun is rising over the Andes. Light inches down the peaks; everything else still in shadow. Smoke stacks in a valley mingle with the clouds, morning hues of soft pink and yellow, upon which we nearly perch. And it is true that there are smatterings of houses but shadowed houses, asleep and wholly insignificant in this place where nature is everything. Reaching for my Ipod I see my hands tremble.

Now half the mountains are sunlit. Snaking higher and higher, giant embroidery reveals itself below, the first snow-capped peaks supervening over landscapes of immeasurable beauty above. One peak, the largest, is like a spur jutting from nowhere and I ride its white immensity with awe.

Lines of ploughman scythe the earth - I guess for corn, or quinoa, or potatoes - on this stretch of flatland we now cross. The villages here are beautiful. Green pastures, more animals, more space that is not sand dune drilled and dug to oblivion. Some of the paddocks have soccer goals set up on unsown land. I even see a tennis court. And churches are being built and pictures of electoral candidates are posted everywhere and the movie White Chicks, overdubbed in Spanish, plays on the series of screens hanging from the coach roof. In glaring sunlight, the sort I have experienced only in the Rocky Mountains and out the windows of planes when above the clouds, every blade of grass, every roof-tile sprouting weeds in its mortar, every steeple and mountain top speaks to me as if I were in the middle of an echo chamber the size of the world. Much here is to be rejoiced and I rejoice it, glad that she is still asleep beside me. A stream, women walking along its banks in colourful clothing with firewood on their backs, does not follow us around the next bend. Presently Cusco appears.

A city entrenched in mountains, 3400 meters high, guarded by Inca ruins and the huge Cristo Blanco overlooking the Plaza De Armas, arms outstretched, illuminated to a glow at night. Here the sun shines so pitilessly that 20 degrees feels like 40. The Spanish influence can be felt everywhere, from narrow cobblestone alleyways to beautiful cathedrals and, of course, the language.  Locals are prosperous in comparison to Lima, and friendlier. Artisano selling ponchos and felt hats vye with adventure tourism outlets and other hagglers of innumerable persuasions, shoe shiners masseuses tattooists money exchangers, for the attention of wealthy Westerners. The police presence is visible and big. Mangy dogs sleep under street carts selling popcorn, pineapple, skewered meat, trinkets. And everywhere, everywhere, like the city motto or a religious mantra, there appears those two words much bigger than themselves: Machu Picchu.

Altitude sickness is common here and we are advised to take things slowly, drink plenty of Coca tea, limit the amount of food we eat for a couple of days. Ignorantly I do not heed the warnings and develop the worst migraine of my life, as though my eyes were about to burst. She, on the other hand, is fine; I struggle to keep pace as we explore the downtown. Of course there is a McDonalds in the Plaza De Armas. I go in to shit and hear disgruntled Americans railing against a lack of sweet and sour sauce.

In the Koricancha temple, once the largest in the New World, we follow one of the Dominican Friars still in residence down a fenced off walkway, into a forbidden room. The door he enters next is locked, but another path leads to an exhibition room without exhibits. So we go in and discover a small chamber, roped off, housing pieces of contemporary art; mannequins with necks a meter long, with two heads, Jesus lying on a pyre made of leaves, Jesus headless, Jesus two-headed. I shiver at the thought of what effect it al might have on that old friar. Then we hear footsteps and tiptoe downstairs.

Next day we follow the tourist circuit to Sacsayhuaman ruins. Barely an hour from the Plaza De Armas, the steep stairs and rarefied air make me feel three times my age, heart leaping from my chest and a throb behind my eyes. I am seeing stars and giddy. Perhaps my iron is low, she suggests. Will I take one of her pills? Though it makes sense I give it no credence - she brushes it off but I am furious with myself for being so cold.

Dripping with sweat, we give the park officer our tickets and step into a place of incredible silence, and incredible beauty. We walk down dirt paths canopied by trees with spiky red flowers. I notice her hands shaking. I touch the back of her neck; cold. Are you alright are you alright? Too stubborn to say no, she pushes ahead. Moments later the path ends and a wooden fence, fixed together by strips of alpaca leather, arcs around a sort of viewing platform with a tall crucifix standing in the middle. Resplendant in the sun, Cusco appears before me in full for the first time. I can literally see every building to the mountains on the other side, onto which Viva El Peru has been impressed inside the most gigantic coat of arms in the world. Floral wreaths rest against the base of the cross, and to my left the Cristo Blanco is set upon by hoards of tourists.

Further into the grounds, what marvellous stonework we have been traversing and rubbing with our hands falls way, plunging into a moat-like central valley where llamas graze and another, grander outpost of this ancient fortress rises up again higher, steeper, more picturesque. Before we head down, however, she asks to take a rest. She is shaking and her stomach has cramped and she needs to sit down. So we sit in a perfectly square corner of stone, drinking water, eating a few mouthfuls of a Quinoa bar, feeling the tempo of our insides start to level out. Then silence, until as I expected she concedes that she cannot make it up the next rise. And I hold her and tell her not to worry, to find a peaceful place on the flatland and lie down, that I am not faring much better and will only be a few minutes. And I force her to finish the water.

I start to climb. Quickly the throbbing reasserts itself and my vision is stippled, as if I were looking at millions of tiny blades of grass trembling on a breeze. But it is windless and cloudy and whatever grass I see stands still. From the top I am granted more panoramic views but can hardly appreciate them, so loud and resounding are those thuds! So loud, I understand as I catch my breath, that they are in fact independent of me. Yes, the thuds are definitely external, and booming. Over the next ridge I see at least fifty people dressed in white robes; most of them look Peruvian but at this distance it is hard to tell. They are moving eastward in single file, dancing eastward almost as a bizarre conga-line. The thuds grow louder as the line fans out and ascends a slope, eventually settling as a horizontal barrier facing the lower ground. I move curiously to a better vantage point and discover a circular field of grass below, surrounded by staggered walls of stone, perhaps a ceremonial site in Inca times, where throngs of people, obviously white-skinned, use sticks to beat the biggest drum I have ever seen.

They chant according to the directive of a woman who has red hair and is dressed in outrageous leopard-print robes. Her face is covered in freckles and glitter. A camera has been set up on a tripod but is manned by another white girl in typical hippie clothes who cannot go five minutes without launching into dance, like a grass blade on a breeze. The sound, intensified by that amphitheater, reminds me of drumming I have heard at gatherings back home, as do the clothes the Gringos wear. But in setting and in sheer unexpectedness - I will never know how they gained permission to stage such a ritual here - it is without precedent. Slowly moving closer, falling further and further into the trance that seizes me whenever I hear percussion at such thunderous volume, closer until it is I who have a stick in hand and who beats the drum and clashes sticks with others and closes his eyes in submission to the noise, I can only guess - from beliefs I already hold - that there is a small population of disaffected Westerners here, as in Nepal or other places famed for their cradling of spirituality, who have taken too many drugs to forget the ills of their own world, perhaps of their own sad former lives, and ended up staying on, ironically - some would say pathetically, but not me - becoming more concerned with the metaphysical aspects of the place than any locals, who simply happen to lead their ordinary lives in extraordinary surroundings.

And I beat along with them because I both empathise with and pity them in equal measures. That it should take such an upheaval of self, of identity, just to feel a sense of belonging! But my empathy tells me the creation of a new self or the abstraction of the old is the only way to achieve what we have self-flaggelatingly called contentment, which even then is always a knife edge away from being shown up as absurd, phony, fraudulent.Red headed lady in leopard robes, man with long greying hair dictating the flare-ups and come-downs of the drums, I commend you for trying. No-one could accuse you of being half-hearted, beating a car-sized drum so far away from home.

Montreal

On Wednesday night we eat out. One of her friends, a student at Concordia university, has organised an environmental rights gathering at a place called Burritotown or Burritoville somewhere in the gay district. The guest speaker lectures at the university. He is Anglophone, and I am glad about it. Nights earlier she hosted a dinner at the apartment where only French was spoken. Sitting at the table, pining for new places to direct my tired stare, I tried to bear in mind the fact that this was Quebec, that these were Quebecois who had come home after a day of bilingualism and only wanted to drink some wine and speak in their mother tongue. On another level though I was disheartened to hear my ten weeks of French class completely undone. And on another still I found it hard to swallow that her friends, who had presumably heard at least something about me, could not condescend to use their fluent English in order to ask a single question of me.

While they got drunk and listened to Celine Dion – just as popular as one might expect – I got drunker and sank further into my seat. Smiled cheerfully whenever she looked my way. It was all I could do to remain at the table, but as a spectre, a present absentee. And then she was up and dancing crazy.

After everyone had left I washed up, genuinely happy to see her in such high spirits but unable to shake my own self-indulgent broodings. In bed the alcohol stirred my mind to odd places. I felt tense in the chest and loath to touch her. If one evening with her friends had left me feeling so inadequate, so jealous, where then did that leave us? Normal relationships didn’t tolerate failings so basic; why should ours be any different? With a fast heavy heart I fell asleep, head to the wall and a strip of cold sheets between us.

How early she awoke I didn’t know but early enough to put me on edge. The same odious thoughts swirled back into awareness, but another concern now dominated the rest; was she thinking the same thing? So I lurched to foot of the bed and found my laptop and manuscript and French dictionary and pen. Music playing in the living room. I was almost sick from the anxiety. I was close to being sick and to telling her I had to get away, just as I would with some other girl back home. But with effort I wrestled that urge down and supplanted it with the urge to dress and go to her.

The speaker cannot stop touching his long curly hair, barely long enough to drink the four beers allotted him for his speech. He has no cue cards, a British accent and a messily brilliant brain. I worry that his manic English, laden with political terminology, will be too much for her to understand- matter of fact I know it will. But he keeps her attention for the whole hour. Better than he does mine anyway, since I am always looking at her. During question time he answers with facts and figures but no answers. Can’t this distinguished lecturer and journalist who has spoken to Donna Karan about bamboo clothing and met Brundtland herself, who has supposedly refused to sign Nato’s contract for media personnel working in Libya and offered Steven Harper advice on the melting glaciers up north, can’t he face this reverent pack of politics students and offer anything more than, “I am part of the generation that made this planet go tits-up, now it’s your job to get it right”? The answer is yes and no. True he offers more than that; he is a legitimately excellent scholar. But when I ask him how we can encourage people to vote more altruistically – since so many countries are seeing a return to conservative governments on the back of anti-immigration platforms – he reels off a hundred things I didn’t know about the Australian situation but not a single word about my original question, just a glib smile. I guess it strikes me as defeatist. He is interesting without drumming up an ounce of optimism, he gives us the your job spiel and even says tits up like a good left winger but baulks when it is his opinion we need. Okay though. And she liked him. We leave with full bellies in the dark. We walk the dark streets like a fearless old couple undaunted by anything except the ferocity of the other’s opinion, which excites as well, and our bellies are full like the moon. “Are you afraid of werewolves?” Suddenly she is a terrified little girl. Entering the park, I breathe loudly and loom behind her. She almost starts to cry. It is adorable and there flashes in my mind a vision of wild horses at gallop. Then the lake, the lake turning to ice, her skating on the ice as a child and her dad tripping over her – I realise our hands are clasped and she was telling me stories about her childhood while only my subconscious listened. Now all of me is back and her cheek has begun to bleed onto the ice. 

Montreal

Let’s go walking, she says – oui on y va, on y va. Her strides are short because her legs are short. Bursts of lively conversation rise like bubbles into great expanses where nothing is said and all I can hear is the clip-clop of her boot heels on the pavement. We walk on. Much as I would like to say they, the silences, contain no awkwardness, are as natural to me as walking silently along with no-one, my gut feeling does not always support that claim. We round a bend and turn right onto Saint-Laurent. No physical intimacy can ever fully compensate for a language barrier- if it could the very purpose of verbal language would be undermined. And ours, though slight for me, is a gulf for her; how many times she must switch back to English and struggle to conceal the sigh! Those great expanses are therefore not born of some serene mutual silence but a basic void in understanding. The funky grocery store. Before stepping inside you are already drunk on the smell, seeping out onto the thoroughfare with an admixture of the horrid and the wonderful. She asks me about a trolley – I smile but give no answer.

There are a lot of beggars in Montreal. I have similar memories of Vancouver though it is a more temperate climate there and the homeless journey to its alleyways and underpasses to escape the frigid winters to be found in other parts of Canada. Here people show them little charity, even the man in rags who plays his recorder with such elegance. In her neighbourhood the street crowds are small, even on weekends, almost dismayingly small when compared to a similar area of inner Melbourne. There are also more trees. Hospitals look like castles, sports stores like boulangeries. In concert it all creates an atmosphere that is refined but also more organically human than can be found in most of the large cities I have visited, certainly all in North America.

Downtown, Old Montreal is greyer, more leaden. The buildings are bigger – though by no stretch as big as Melbourne’s – and people seem to shrink in their shadows. A block from the water’s edge, the legal and financial precinct feels at odds with the small-town atmosphere cultivated in her neighbourhood, but then I guess this bespeaks of good urban planning; the same comment could be made about dense industrial zones or power plants. There are more tourists and subsequently more kitschy souvenir shops. The clothes stores have less in them for a higher price. And with its stately mayoral chambers the town hall looms out over the street with a sort of Bram Stoker tremendousness.

On our way back from the river – an ugly section expanded for shipping, beside which runs a massive freight train line – we pass the Hotel St. James. It is Montreal’s most expensive and probably the one clad in the most ivy. “When I’m a famous writer,” she says, only half-joking, “I’ll have a tiny room there near the top with a maid and my own concierge, just like Francois Sagan”. She doesn’t understand when I tell her she is maddeningly capable and it is likely, though I can’t say for sure, that I have used these unusual words just to confuse her. The museum is only free after six, meaning we still have twenty minutes to kill. So with bags of groceries bought in the unimpressive Chinatown we sit on the white pebble steps facing the street, take in the enormity of space required for this museum and concert hall and ballet theatre while eating green tea flavoured balls of gelatinous goo, and she smiles wider with one of them between her teeth than I’ve ever seen her smile; postulating about our names and personalities had we been born the other gender – she’d have been gay, which I label a cop-out – I realise that not only would I rather go home and spend time with her than enter this Napoleon exhibition, but also that’s it’s been remiss of me not to have asked more questions about who she is, who she was, who she does or does not want to turn out like, instead of just looking at her face and wordlessly making to kiss it and breathe deeply on it. By now it is after six-thirty. Without my prompting she asks if I really want to go inside.

We walk home. Another hour and a half, mochi balls, snow peas and a few jars of Asian seasoning to show for our toils. I kiss her in the stairwell but she has turned inward and obliges evasively before hurrying up to the bedroom. Since arriving I have felt a strong desire to cook for her and do so again. Watching her as she eats, while creepy, gives me great pleasure. And for dessert we quarter an apple but leave the kiwi fruits as they are still hard as marbles. 

Montreal

Windsor, Ontario, the birthplace of my mother, lies some six hundred miles southwest of here. It is a small hard-time city with few attractions other than being the Canadian little brother of Detroit, which is just across the river. Originally I had planned to go there alone while she visited an uncle in Gatineau, the last bastion of French Canada before the bridge to Ottawa. But after ten days down here I find myself increasingly reluctant to part with her company. So I pitch my new idea. She talks me down. We compromise – I’ll join her in Gatineau and go onto Windsor after two days, she will go back East.

Meantime Montreal is gripped by an unseasonal string of warm days- twenty degrees but hotter than that in spirit; I walk the streets as if it were summer. Its famous irreverence is on parade everywhere you look. Jugglers, flutists, comedians, transsexuals; the city flexes happily in the afternoon warmth. By night enormous spotlights crisscross the sky with erratic movements, more than twenty at my count, part of an art installation near the contemporary museum with which people can interact and create by jerking long levers this way and that. But I have worked hard to be here and contentedly pass those levers by, uncaring and content with her beside me. Like yupis we work on our laptops in silence or like poets our notebooks on her balcony or a Guatemalan hammock spread flat in the park.

When home, rarely do we engage with her flatmates. One is Anglophone, a 3D animator who sleeps by day and works by night. He is a nice enough guy but is more likely to emerge from his room in the daylight hours for food or something completely left field – the other day it was every last fork in the kitchen to play the role of fish in a project – than communicate with others. And while his dedicated introversion impresses me it is another thing entirely to be too insular to observe basic household courtesies; she regrets choosing him when the last girl left. The other two, both women from France, are lovely people but neither here nor there for me. One is much older and pregnant, the other from a tiny village near the German border who does not speak English and is shy as can be. 

Montreal

More maple leaves will fall as the first frost closes in; at present many of the trees lining Montreal’s one-way rues and avenues are half green, half red. The sun is out but high and cold. Looking upwards I see ducks flocking to the enormous park near her apartment – there the lake’s foamy spillway is clogged with leaves and goldfish swim in the shallows. By the time the shedding is complete, when they cake the footpaths like a daub of paint, the leaves themselves will be caked in snow.

Charming blocks of apartments all have staircases on the outside so every front door can be reached independently, undisturbed. It gets me thinking about why Australian apartment blocks rarely afford their residents this luxury. Too big I guess; these are three or four levels at most, the kind you might swan past in a more elegant area of Paris. Old women sit in rocking chairs on numerous balconies, obese, silent, staring. And from afar their chairs rock with a barely detectable rhythm, so slightly that you must stare back in order to see them move.

We enter the park at a pedestrian crossing. Fortunate that we do, since I am yet to grasp the idea of reversed driving directions and goad beeping motorists by looking right first, always right. There is a soccer pitch, a baseball diamond, a petanque square full of white-haired men. Bands of musicians play, eyes fixed on their counterparts for signs of a change in the jam. An adult learning centre made of old grey stone; cryptically the coat of arms above its entrance depicts a woman hitting a tennis backhand. I ask after its meaning but she can’t tell me. “Once there was a dead body in the lake though,” she says, as if pressed into supplying me with a substitute piece of trivia. Smatterings of people in meditation pose on rocks by the water and shaded grassy hillsides. I gush at all the squirrels and she shakes her head but listens as I explain their significance; the park in Windsor when I was ten years old, illumined by fireflies, my father shrinking to a ball on the tanbark, crying for reasons I could not understand then, grandpa. Grandpa who I’ll visit in ten days, by total coincidence the day of his eighty-eighth birthday.

Commotion up ahead; a man is screaming. People look around with concern but discover only the barks of a huge black fitness trainer, practically towing his pupil along in a slipstream of berating motivational jibes. Most of the women I see are beautiful. 

From the Balcony

Only the exhaustive is truly interesting- who wrote that? And the other border of this divide I straddle – thirty seconds? But I want it now! Attaching my daypack to its big brother in a hot sweat, the sweat of passport control, the sweat of customs, and the pointless race to the baggage carousel, I know that she is just beyond the ‘Sortie’ sign. And I have exhausted myself in anticipation but would almost prefer it if she were already here and there was no ‘big meeting’ at all. Withdrawing from sight, meting out comparisons between incomparables – why am I the last to leave the terminal? Are you going to tell me; tell me about those first moments! Hers is the first face I notice. All the other faces are imprecise as background characters in a movie. The doors open and she sights me and stands. The weight of the backpack topples me into her; we embrace, stare at one another with unidentifiable emotions, walk.

At the back of the shuttle bus I do not touch her, I can hardly look at her- when I do I always seem to lapse into a rude stare that confuses some young Quebecois backpackers on their way home. What is this beautiful French Canadian whose fringe is straight and nearly covers her eyes doing conversing entirely in English with him, wild haired and bespectacled, too awkward to sit flush on his seat? Perfunctory questions about the flight and the weather and a small road accident flash dimly through our stalemate, charged with joy but overlaid by a feeling I can’t pin down. After every answer we share a glance, smile innocently and shake our heads, as if in disbelief, then look away again. It is a common condition among people to have their mind’s eye fixed on something but their gaze trained on something else; never have I felt that more acutely than in these dark caricatures of neighbourhoods seen but unseen, this city I have never visited and should be clamouring to study but am closed off from by a solid wall of other thoughts.

We come at last to a stairwell. Too narrow for two, I go in first but must let her push uncomfortably past my massive backpack in order to unlock the door. My legs are weightless at this point and I suffer from short interludes of terror. And the floorboards creak more than any I’ve heard and they seem to heave beneath us, and that nostalgic perfume trickles back to me in the air her body cuts through. The bedroom I know so intimately from Skype is now here, a cartoon illustration come to life. I cast my stuff down exhaustedly and shower. The shower is difficult to work and I burn and I freeze. When I creak back to her the door is ajar, held so by a stone pig smirking at me. It smells of incense. Will I put things away before bed, she asks – empty hangers dangle in waiting on my side of the close. My side? Unbelief never took so trivial a form. Police sirens sound strangely over my no and fully clothed I lower myself onto her frameless mattress, taking care not to step on her legs. Still I struggle to look at her.

The walls are poorly painted in off-pink, white base layer showing underneath. They are adorned with posters and photographs and incomprehensible French scrawled in black marker. A picture of her, then 16, with her girlfriend of the time takes my attention; her hair is short and her eye makeup dark green. I ask her about it and before long we are looking through her few remaining baby photographs, in front of televisions with Play School-style women holding colourful placards aloft – CINQ, SIX, SEPT – by lakes with her father and on couches between cousins both kissing her forehead, face practically unchanged, eyes no more or less spectacular; in her teenage brother’s arms, with her mother whose hair colour changes in every shot, a tiny carefree mind destined to live out hardships both undeserved and self-engineered, anchors on her dress and glittery cheeks, and by the time the first picture comes around again her chin is on my shoulder, her arms threaded under mine to reach the top of my back. And I am holding a body which is bigger than I remember it as if I were holding a family member I had taken for dead. Below the last line of Romain Gary’s suicide note suspended in huge letters from the ceiling like the Happy Birthday at a child’s party I recognise and drink her. My heartbeat returns to normal; the ineffable feeling was love. Sunlit Australian beaches encroach briefly on my dreams. Then hours and hours of nothing. When I wake, half the day is gone.

Before Her

Like the reptilian eyes of a cat in sunshine a morning sky more white than blue finds itself divided by an enormous vertical slit of purple cloud, still as a stone but roaring. Yawning; the sky is old and tired. But when I first approached the airport it was the dilated pupil of a cat prowling for possums in the night. And my parents, though they had listened eagerly over breakfast as I answered their questions about money and insurance and severed heads in Acapulco, could not look me in the face, as if only it were leaving and my body remaining behind.

Oil spills on the tarmac, planes taxiing backwards, fingernail-deep foundation on the cheeks of flight attendants whose pants zipped up on the side instead of the front. Grudgingly I cried but felt my tears were an elegy to nothing. So removed was my mind from this Melbourne, the Melbourne of the airport with its barren paddocks and industrial estates, and industrial lakes of refuse, so typical of those skirting airports the world over – so much further removed from the city. Then in the air all the dams on the eastern plains were spangled silver and that great slit of cloud revealed itself to me, and inspirited by that strange contagion I yawned back at it and took out my notebook.

Perhaps out of frustration at my score of failed attempts, the big man sitting next to me fastens the pendant clasp around my neck. His hands are the biggest I’ve seen and worked coarse; I find a paternal strength in their touch and consequently feel smaller than I am, and my voice lighter, my independence more arguable. Now that we have ascended beyond the highest vapours the sky is young again: the sun monsters me at my window. Next to the emergence exit I am afforded more legroom but also a confining sense of vertigo – the ease with which I could grab and yank that handle! My first awarded story centred on a scenario like this. I shudder to think how it ended and why I chose to end it so.

Wednesday will be longer than Wednesday, for I am scheduled to cross time zones and lay over at three airports in the USA before arriving in Montreal. Disconcertingly, the girl who checked in backpack seemed somewhat vexed as to how it should reach Canada. She instructed me to ignore Sydney and Atlanta but to be sure to recheck the backpack in Los Angeles and with 5AM nonchalance I nodded but was more taken with the idea of holding her in my arms a while, like two disaffected loners trying intimacy out – like me and Audrey – Audrey the person she bore a slight resemblance to and who would probably be reading Stendahl when, at midnight, well into Thursday Melbourne time, I finally reached Pierre Trudeau.

In the back of my seat and everyone else’s there is a credit card slot and I don’t like that so much. It calls forth memories of coin-operated appliances in cheap motels. Bathrooms in pompous Europe. Rolling along a sequence of parallel thoughts, not pissing in Melbourne because the urinal was crowded strikes me now as a sad, quintessentially western state of being; even though I can argue to pencil shavings the ills of that condition or direct one to arguments made by men far superior to me, that condition is me and I it, inexorably. Usually I can exhort the piss out by thinking to myself, you are enviable, you are talented, you have been places many people haven’t, made money off your pen and your looks and there is no fucking reason why the company of other men – not even the company, just the presence – should make you nervous. But my giddy stomach, and my humiliation at having to engage in such conceited inner dialogues just to take a piss get the better of me.

Transferring from Sydney’s domestic to international terminals I sit on a bus beside twin girls more lovely than any others because they are here with me now. Barely ten years old, they repay my adoring smiles with blush and laughter. I stare straight ahead for propriety – their mother might (will) misinterpret my affection as lust – and consider them good luck omens. My heart flushes; I check myself before tears start falling – how tenuously these emotions, all of them, are perched! Later, while attempting to find departure gate 3 – the one I should have been looking for was 53 – the girls flash back into my mind. Only this time it is sadness they bring. How facile and shallow it was to feel uplifted about human beings in general because those two children were so physically beautiful; would I have reacted the same had they possessed faces less angelic? But wait: would the hairs on my arms stand more readily erect above gooseflesh if I were looking at Mount Hotham, or Everest? Absurd analogies poison my spirit.

And whatever it augurs, they also sit front of me on this shabby jumbo bound for Los Angeles.

Sydney airport was bitterly cold and its floor so crowded with duty free products that I could not take a step without grazing some designer handbag or comically oversized block of chocolate. Light and lovely like the movements of a beautiful girl, light and lovely like the movements of a beautiful girl. The solid mantle of white below us has given over to snowy spots in the sky and specks of foam scudding across the sea, down there on earth’s eternal blue. Fingerprints smudge my little portal window, which is directly aligned with the tip of the right wing. Not even the glassy lakes of Banff or Colorado can offer two skies like altitude can. Apparat is a tremendous artisan of electronic music but cannot write lyrics – why does a German try to write lyrics in English? Market appeal? Write fantastic lyrics in your own tongue and sing no more songs about sunlight washing things away. I’m disappointed by Apparat but consider that perhaps his lyrics have been translated from the German the way, for example because his book of essays happen to be on my lap, Hesse’s writings were. In that case, I’m even more disappointed by him. The flight attendant gives an inconsolable man watching Beauty and the Beast a tray with fruit salad – mostly cantaloupe – tasteless pasta, crackers, lettuce, tomato, horseradish. Water.

It’s alright. Physically I overtop the world and metaphorically I look back at six months of indecision, anxiety, unsuitable affairs with girls I care nothing for, joy at sad times and sadness all besides, the rapid disintegration of my little brother, passing up university for the second year running, palming the trust of best friends into dirty gutters, mimetic shapes forming in my head as physical embodiments of the alphabet while on magic mushrooms in rooms where everybody else is sober, and Audrey – always, inescapably, Audrey est ici.

Forty minutes from the City of Angels, the sky still pitch black, cabin lights somnolently dimmed. Even the jet engines seem to have quieted. Since these sleeping tablets wore off I have begun to obsess over the whereabouts of my backpack – was it sent to Atlanta first, then LA, then Montreal? Because if it was I have a problem. I’m pretty fucking certain she did. Then breakfast rolls in – an upside to vegetarianism on a plane, the only upside, is that yours always comes first. But worries encroach again before I can fork the first mouthful of spinach; my times seem out, too miserly, wrong. It’ll be seven in the morning when I enter the terminal and according to my itinerary I arrive in Montreal at midnight tonight. There is either a monstrous unspecified layover or this itinerary is a bunch of shit. I feel a great deal more privy to small annoyances than I did on my way to Europe, almost twelve months ago to the day, and the fact that I condescend to thinking of such trifles when the only person I have every wanted to devote myself to will be awake soon and organising her bus to Pierre Trudeau serves only to annoy me further. White waterlily skin, hair like the dilated heavens closed off to me now by a plastic shutter. Nine months now I have imagined our re-acquaintance. Every possible scenario, every angle of the mind’s great camera I have countenanced and exhausted, never, for all my efforts, managing to get past the first hug. Good, good – she is inside me again.

No monstrous layover, no bullshit itinerary – just people altering the time in accordance with their share of our great star. In LA I sight my backpack with manifest relief. I pass through customs without shoes or a belt or a kind word from the huge officers.

“We do not discriminate against belts,” one of them, a young black man, bellows to the tired masses, “black belts white belts skinny belts chubby belts, get ‘em all off”. 

The backpack is rechecked without incident and I will not see it again until Montreal.

Many familiar faces surround me as, Atlanta-bound, we take off in a shroud of oppressive rain and un-Californian cold. Next to me is a heavy man of thirty who buys up large when the lunch trolley comes; peanuts are complimentary but everything else costs. I ask him, where are you going? Home? “Yeah,” he says, “where are you going?” So I tell him and he merely acknowledges my reply without harping on the romanticism of the situation, as people have been prone to. I love him. Since he will be the last to pass judgment it has left me on the ground, for if this fantastical holiday love is doomed to fail it will be brought down by that impossible idea of love conjured in the mind during its darling’s long absence, reinforced by the gushes of friends and family, the often wistful gushes of people who may once have found themselves in a similar predicament but erred, to their eternal regret, on the side of caution.

I buy an avocado sandwich in Atlanta and buy some Wi-fi too. And I eat the sandwich while writing Audrey an email. The sandwich came with potato chips and half a massive gherkin which I eat in little increments with mouthfuls of bread and avocado and rubbery cheese. Then I post some lyrics from Beauty and the Beast, about Gaston, on Facebook and Audrey is online so we speak for what is categorically the final time before me meet. I’m deliriously tired but quite excited, or the thought of excitement exists but has no able body through which to channel itself. I am not nervous. We chat for a few minutes. Her written persona, that irrepressible cascade of slightly Awry English written with the sagacity of a native poet, that voice of a thousand emails to whom I have confided the celebration and mourning of my life as I never could through speech – she leaves me. She is gone to me. And even though I exchange her for the reality beneath, there echoes in my heart another mourning that I can confide to no-one – words often fail me, but with much more aplomb when they come from my mouth and not directly from my mind. To whose silent sessions will my own be carried? That heavy man sang in a capella at the Brisbane convention centre three days ago.

I love the mango sky. I love the ridiculous pink ties worn by Delta pilots. Red exit signs and Georgian women wearing stilettos on long-haul flights. I love the blacks and hispanics who cook people’s fast food and clean their floors, ragged mops roiling the brown water in their rusty pails detergent. The Devil’s Walk is better than I gave it credit for. Ohio State, Arizone, UCLA Business – I love them. More than anything I love layovers because they represent the closest possible phenomenon to the suspension of time. What state was Walt Whitman from? Who knows but I think of him, his words like mental furniture for so many Americans. Audacity! Federation! Singing! Contradict! The leaves of grass I love but still can’t picture – are they leaves or is it grass?

Smelling almost offensively now, I watch a baseball game with great confusion and wonder if the rules are the same as rounders. Twenty minutes until Montreal. The girl whose nose is pressed into a book as she walks through a standoffish crowd of sleepwalkers is going to kiss me and take me to her apartment. For the first time since that sad Berlin morning I imagine I will sleep in peace. 

Spring

How the apricot saplings have grown, impervious

to those brutalising cockatoos and crows -
penned in like an infant behind two-foot bars
green wire mesh armour warding
off field mice and a Labrador smarting
from its first March Fly bite – how the hard
little nectarines ripen and spill stones
how the butternuts grow in unbecoming briars,
their seeds flung down by cockatoos and crows,
how the loquat saplings age unwatered and alone. 

From the busy dance floor plumbing

timeworn guitar riffs and synthetic kick drum
for directives, a chorus of high female voices
higher in the speakers’ roar

Like screams in a roaring windstorm stop
opposite the couch I lie on, wave their ringed hands
for no regard, play-fuck me like a stuffed bear
swathe me in their long perfumed jackets.

Every morning she would remove her black nightgown to bathe and weep at the moonlike whiteness of her body. After towelling off it flushed pink in the foggy mirror and that brought her also to tears. An old boyfriend once told her that wearing black all the time was a form of overcompensation which would make her complex worse. How does a black man feel, he used to say, when he gets naked after wearing a white all day? Like a toothy nothing. A shadow. His nickname for her was pearl and although he had been good for her at first was not part of her life anymore.

Daddy pushes her higher and higher and as she soars back and forth she has to quell the urge to leap off towards mummy who is standing on the tanbark with a camcorder. Hold on tight, daddy warns, or you’ll have a great fall. Like Humpty Dumpty? That’s right, all cracked and all that. And runny? And runny. But it would be nice to go gooey in mummy’s arms. Nothing would be nicer than that. Other kids’ daddies are pushing them even higher, except now she stops pointing her legs out at each push. And a mummy pushes but not as high and wonky. Tucks them in tight because she is a smart girl and knows that by tucking them in she will get lower and lower until it is only a safe little jump onto the tanbark, not a great fall, and then she can run right over to mummy. She is the fastest in her grade- faster than any of the boys. The sun is behind a big woolly sheep but not completely behind it. Purple spots still flash if she looks at it too long, and reddish ones too. Maybe mummy will play the guessing game with her; when she runs over there is no need to ask because mummy says let’s play the guessing game now Suzy-love.

One morning in a summer cold snap she was cutting her fringe over torn magazines in the kitchen when the phone rang. It startled her and she and cut it crooked. Twice a week she showered at night and trimmed her black fringe sheer across the forehead the next morning, just above her eyebrows raised as far as they could go. If too much skin showed through it affected her less at the level of appearance than of morality, just as an open-toed pair of shoes could reduce her, in her mind, to a person not worthy of anything but derision. She screamed and answered the phone in a voice quavering with fury. She grabbed at her fringe like mad. The voice on the other end belonged to the lawyer in charge of her grandmother’s estate, her estranged father's mother who had died four days earlier. Beverley has bequeathed her farm to you and would you come to the chambers in Queen Street to sign the papers. She had recently taken a job two blocks from the chambers at a call centre asking people if they were satisfied with their current energy provider, but broke for lunch at one and could sign the papers provided it was quick, and provided it wasn’t some sort of sham. Because what was a woman she hadn’t seen in ten years who had six adult children doing giving her a farm she never liked; anyway she would break for lunch at one and go. Did that fucker have any clue what he’d made her do. From a redwood bowl on the kitchen counter she took her mobile phone, tinkling the car and house keys, touching a few silver coins. She smelled her hands as if by reflex and they were the way blood tasted. It was just after nine. Her shift started at ten; if she skipped breakfast and wore the outfit she liked best and saved for the indecisive days there was at least half an hour left to devote to her fringe. Messages from men had been left on her phone in the night, messages to which she would flippantly fail to reply but obsess over in her imagination to the point of sickness.

Opening the blinds on the only window in her apartment, she saw an overcast morning and a woman exactly opposite from her, on the same floor of the neighbouring apartment block, sitting at a flimsy-looking table setting on her balcony spreading wax on her legs. They caught eyes and held the gaze an unusual length of time. Then the other woman went back to her legs. Just as a sheet was being torn off she lowered the blinds to half-closed, so the train lines were out of sight. While drawing the shutter chord she saw right through her pallid hands, like the extremities of a dying woman, laden with thick blue veins bulging from the skin. The nail polish was black but cracked; pink specks had begun to show.

She had not only to lock the toilet door but the door of the bathroom housing it and the door to her apartment. And as many times as the filling cistern would allow she flushed, muffling the noise of her own body. She never looked at her thighs and kept the light dim and had the clock radio in her bedroom up loud. One hand on the flush, ready to hit it as soon as the hiss of water quieted, she picked up an ornamental china dolphin from among the rolls of paper stacked on a small chrome shelf.  The base pathetic aloneness of that stinking box. The dolphin was lacquered smooth and turned over easily in her fingers. She flushed. The dolphin turned over and over in her fingers with only the slightest coaxing, as if it were the real thing barrel rolling at play. Her cold knee jerked and her heart hurt- she flushed. 

If I tickle you here and it tickles over here, what is that called. Sydneystheesha.

What can you hear. Kids and mummies and daddies, and cars. What else. Trucks, and birds, and the fountain and people throwing coins into the fountain, and whirring somewhere. What is the whirring, listen carefully. Cut it out Linda, says daddy.  Come to think of it I’ve actually had it and I mean that this time. Don’t listen to him Suzy-love, just listen to the whirring – do you still hear it. Did you even really here it before daddy was so mean or were you just trying to impress mummy. She touches the tip of her nose. You’re going to mess her up with this hyper-conscience bullshit and I won’t let you, how about that, so stop or I’ll and he moved his mouth but nothing came out. His eyes were open like when he played peekaboos. Hyperconsciousness, and she wants to play, don’t you Suzy-love. The whirring is from the big box on that roof mummy. Very good. Then mummy began to cry and while she wiped her eyes with a tissue said she’s right, she’s right about everything, I know she is. And she looked at daddy. What is all of this though, she said crying with her arms out wide. What do you want me to say Linda. You’ve had too many great falls into oblivion and it’s your baby who has to suffer. And daddy took her but mummy held her arms, and it hurt being pulled in both directions. Mummy let go and daddy put her on his shoulders. He sighed, started to walk away, sighed again and turned back to mummy. She liked it up on his shoulders because she could play with his hair, which was long and curly like a girl. They were all sitting on a bench now and she was swinging her legs out and in the way she stopped doing when she was really high to come back down. In the middle of mummy and daddy. Mummy and daddy were still. The box on the roof was whirring and dripping some water too and a man was selling ice creams inside the tiny house with the box on top, in the middle of the park where the bench was. She could hear a drip drip drip now and told mummy so; mummy said you’re a very good girl. Her daddy said would you like an ice cream Suzy and she said she would, and could she eat it over near the slide because mummy and daddy have to have a grown-up talk, because mummy is off the planet and mummy said shoosh shoosh. The ice cream was rainbow swirl. The ice cream man had white hair coming out of his white apron with green stripes.

Still smarting from the phone call she began to cut, in the bathroom now; the paucity of hairs falling away each snip bordered on the absurd, like wood-shaves from a precious carving. What was an extra half centimetre if it meant it would be straight. The phone was switched off at the outlet. Her lashes kissed the mirror and every blood vessel in her eyes was there, arresting, too many, her breath a visible murk rubbed off and put on and rubbed. Evenness draws less attention but not fake evenness, anything better than accidental crookedness. What was an extra half centimetre. The perfume on her neck seemed to refract off the glass into her nostrils and when ten minutes had passed and her neck was clammy with concentration it was a nauseating bouquet. Her head ached from the perfume and from keeping her eyebrows raised up. No sooner had she contracted those muscles to their maximum than another tiny contraction was forced out, the way as a girl she would breathe in as much as she could for diving contests in nanna’s pool but manage some extra gulps right before going down.

Once she had done nearly two laps and heard nanna spluttering on the surface after less than half that. To the end and a final big kick off in the other direction and still nanna spluttered. The farmhouse had very high gables made of orangey wood with circle windows in them, white-rimmed, and drapes like wedding dress veils. There were a lot of cobwebs on the gables and on the big red trusses because nanna couldn’t get up to them with her broom. On rainy days she would look out the windows downstairs with those drapes pressed right up to her eyes; all was blurry, the raindrops gone, except for their pitter-patters on the iron roof. Mould between the shower tiles and in the back corners of the floor, and in the bath drain. Hairs piling silently on the floor like ash. Black nightgown undone, black lingerie becoming itchy. Work starting but this nowhere near finished. And gum leaves clogging nanna’s pool filter, gum nuts bird-pecked onto her tiny head from high high above. Still no sign of daddy, didn’t he say this weekend. So close the blood vessels were worms and the irises veined, more yellow than blue, she realised what it all meant, at which she stepped back and looked at herself, too exhausted to cry, then at the scissors, thinking it probable that today there would be no work or lawyers’ chambers. That she would turn down the farm was a certainty.

In the time it took for the headlights to die away completely in the night, nanna had got out and was halfway up their front path. Even then they seemed still to be giving off the faintest of faint glows. What was keeping them aglow. Their letterbox, which had stood askew for months, obstructed the front gate like a stalker. The roses had not yet come into bloom but still looked pretty as bulbs. Uncollected junk mail fallen from the crooked box and made sodden by the rain left a spongy trail of neglect all the way up the path. Peeking from upstairs, she divided her attention between nanna and the headlights, until the porch trellises blocked nanna from view; presently the porch lit up bright and the glow of the headlights died.

Always the precursor to that weak knock, the creak of the middle stair going down, that weak hug, the kisses. Not a perfume smell but special soap, the kind she kept in the vanity bound with string in threes, purple, red, white, would come at her in gusts as the embrace continued, fill her nose and her head with memories of similar encounters, stay on her skin until she showered. It was a sort of scarily beautiful smell that she imagined beautiful witches might give off. Then questions about how school was going and were there any boys she fancied at school. At the same time daddy would be in the kitchen making dinner and mummy would be fixing her a suitcase. None of her good dresses ever went in. I don’t want you to get mud stains on your fineries, no mud stains on your fineries, mummy always told her, or sometimes no mud stains, not on her fineries, mummy would mumble to herself as she packed.

Nanna had wide shoulders for a lady and smelt like freshly mown grass. Her eyes were spectacularly green, like baby grass, she never wore makeup like mummy, her boots sounded like a hammer if they hit on stuff by accident. There were fine lines in her leathery skin like the lines on a leaf from up close. With skin so brown she always looked the way people did when they got back from the beach, but she said it was from working out in the sun all day and you could even get burnt on a snowy mountain. She always wore the same blue jeans and one of three shirts, with the same heavy brown coat if it was cold. After dinner nanna would always give her a plastic bag with a chocolate bar and little packet of cashews and a two-dollar coin inside. But she never ate the cashews because they were soft and not salty at all. Then nanna would go with mummy and daddy to the rumpus room. Upstairs Suzy-love, go and play with your fairy dolls. Every so often someone’s voice got loud enough to hear, usually mummy’s voice, before things were quiet again, quiet even in the middle of a sentence.

And just once she had crept to the stair above the creaky middle one to listen except that in the excitement of being a spy she didn’t make out many words, mostly just the racing heartbeat inside her head. How long this time, how long this time, she did hear. When she slept it was on her stomach and she liked to be facing the wall. If she was facing a wall it made her feel safe and sleepy. If she wasn’t facing a wall she heard her heartbeat so loud, like drums or soldiers marching. At nanna’s her bed was in the middle of the room and against the walls were chests, wardrobes, a sewing desk with an old-looking lamp. Heavy things you couldn’t move. Out to Warrandyte with you precious girl, mummy and daddy would come into her room and say, out to the cows and the chickens. Nanna will take you to school and daddy will come and get you in just a little while. The little while was usually one week but often two and once it was nearly five weeks. Daddy always told her to enjoy herself but also, if mummy wasn’t nearby, that he was sorry; she didn’t understand. How would you like to feed the chickens, nanna always said. They miss you.  She said she would like that but had to try hard not to cry. Then the porch went black and the headlights came alive again. There were no lampposts on the road to nanna’s; it was always so black.

Where did daddy sleep when he was little. Did he sleep in this room. Well you see, I only moved in here once your daddy and uncles and aunt were all grown up and your grandpa gone to heaven, but at our old home he slept in a little redwood bed that we made together, and his mattress was filled with feathers, and on his walls there lots of pictures of the planets and stars – did you know your daddy always wanted to be an astronaut. Being the youngest he spent plenty of time in my bed though, which was the room next-door. But he never lived in this house, not here - you're the only child who has. Did you see what was in the second suitcase. No I didn't open it yet. Well okay, wait until tomorrow. We learn about space at school. I like Neptune the best nanna, do you know, because it’s blue. And Pluto. Is it just. Your daddy always liked the moon, and Saturn for its rings.  

  

Nanna had wide shoulders for a lady and smelt like freshly mown grass. Her eyes were spectacularly green, baby grass colour, she never wore makeup the way mummy did, her boots sounded like a hammer if they hit on stuff by accident. There were fine lines in her leathery skin like the lines on a leaf from up close. With skin so brown she always looked how people did when they got back from the beach, but she said it was from working out in the sun all day and you could even get burnt on a snowy mountain. After dinner nanna would always give her a plastic bag with a chocolate bar and little packet of cashews and a two-dollar coin inside. The cashews were soft and weren’t salty. Then nanna would go with mummy and daddy to the rumpus room. Upstairs Suzy-love, go and play with your fairy dolls. Every so often someone’s voice got loud enough to hear, usually mummy’s voice, before things were quiet again, quiet even in the middle of a sentence.

And just once she had crept to the stair above the creaky middle one to listen except that in the excitement of being a spy she didn’t make out many words, mostly just the racing heartbeat inside her head. How long this time, how long this time, she did hear. When she slept it was on her stomach and she liked to be facing the wall. If she was facing a wall it made her feel safe and sleepy. If she wasn’t facing a wall she heard her heartbeat so loud, like drums or soldiers marching. At nanna’s her bed was in the middle of the room and against the walls were chests, wardrobes, a sewing desk with an old-looking lamp. Heavy things you couldn’t move. Out to Warrandyte with you precious girl, mummy and daddy would come into her room and say, out to the cows and the chickens. Nanna will take you to school and daddy will come and get you in just a little while. The little while was usually one week but often two and once it was nearly five weeks. How would you like to feed the chickens, nanna always said. They miss you.     She said she would like that but had to try hard not to cry. Then the porch went black and the headlights came alive again. There were no lampposts on the road to nanna’s; it was always so black.