31/05

On Bryan Gable’s dusty mantelshelf, a photo frame with three hinged compartments stood, fanned open like an altar triptych, blocking all but the Concordia logo on his dog-eared PHD in English Literature from view. One box for each of his baby daughters, all grown up now but immortalised there, fuzzy-headed and crying in the same bassinet Wendy and he had used to rear them all. It was blue and covered in car bumper stickers, literally covered by the time Sarah, the youngest, was born. Those crazy bumper stickers; how many disapproving looks in shopping centres had been cast on their account! As Bryan remembered it, the first one had been put there as a sort of joke to offset the monumental gravity of parenthood – after all, they were only kids themselves then. He supposed the rest had been jokes too. Where was that bassinet now?

The phone rang; he let it go. Sometimes the prospect of answering made Bryan too anxious to move. Only embers remained of the fire he had stoked alone, and sat by alone, most of the previous night. His lips were chapped. His long hair, needing continually to be brushed to either side of his thin, stubbled face, smelt of wood smoke.  Through the archway next to the hearth it was plain to see how empty, almost melancholically empty, the kitchen was; nothing but a few old cans of five bean mix and a box of All-Bran down to its dusty dregs still sat on shelves that had once struggled to cope with such abundance. A kitchen without food was like a bedroom without bedding. But Bryan wasn’t hungry. The malaise in his stomach made the very idea of eating revolting. Matter of fact, he couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten or drank for any other reason than to extend life another day. While the 11 o’clock news bleated in the background, Bryan looked at his girls. His little jewels, all their jumpsuits the exact same soft pink. Plaintively he imagined, and for a time nearly convinced himself, that it was a triplicate of the one picture. How alike they started out, how different they became. He hadn’t looked at those photos – or his degree – in ages.

Lately Bryan had been almost madly preoccupied with how manufactured everything around him was. Particularly since his resignation from the university it seemed that everything, from tiny rivets to colossal skyscrapers shining like supernovas in the sun, stair railings to the stitches on his bed sheets, footpaths and asphalt and disability ramps, burger wrappers and coffee cups and what-all else, whatever you cared to mention from these so-called urban environments, all of it was third or fourth or fifth hand, passed from the farm or the mine through who knew how many processes, across who knew how many oceans, only to be installed after dark and thought of by people the next day as something that had simply sprouted of its own accord from the ground. Walking through the synthetic streets nowadays was like an affront to one’s blood and bones. So conscious had Bryan become of this artificiality that he had purged his house of almost all electrical appliances, all whitegoods besides the refrigerator, all plastic rubbish bins, even clothes and Manchester containing the word polyester on their labels. In short, only materials which still bore some resemblance to the way the Earth had made them were acceptable for Bryan to have around him. 

A Way In (2009)

We understand that people like to live in buildings before they have been erected, in order to set up for something like a Big Bang, one made of all the emotions.
Bang!
Let’s say optimism or pessimism, depending on the nature of the explosion.
Then there are the people who get theirs by peering into the building of another. We might call them voyeurs.
And finally, finally we come to a murky place, where a murky undergrowth of people, for whom peering into buildings is not sufficient, live. Computer gamers allergic to sunlight, fifty year old internet teenagers… liars… the regretful…misfits…; it is some social fabric down there. For their intents and purposes, you see, they have done it. They have found a way in.

This is a story about a way.

One late January in the early afternoon rain, an old black station wagon pulled into the empty driveway at 239 Grant Street, Morton, plumes of smoke blown out the rear exhaust pipe. Stephen Entosic stepped out and squinted his toes over the edge of his thongs. The old neighbourhood, in his clothes and on his skin, felt cold. American Presidents. All the streets in the area had leeched their names; Abraham Street ran parallel to Grant; Rover and Woodrow Courts nestled side by side between them, George Parade connecting the greater Banyule district with bigger roads that led to Realside Tennis Club and into town. Three hundred thousand people slept in Banyule, a municipality heaving, over-lived– classrooms full up, nursing homes so crowded death wasn’t quick enough for the waiting lists, and here, by rights, was a house that deserved an ultimatum: be lived in, or be bulldozed. Wasting space was more than an inconvenience. It was a ‘fuck you’ to everyone who had precious little.

Why, Stephen always wondered, was his street called Grant and not Ulysses? This question threw itself back at him many times in his life; during the dizzy spells he suffered after training because of his low blood pressure, or while the slit wrists of his little sister lay in the bathroom sink, or in bed before sunset with a pen in his hand, it would come and pull at him, pull at him. Ulysses. The point of the reference would be blunted. Not many world leaders had taken their name from Homer. A thick yellow bush that grew around the letterbox was closing fast on the sidewalk, nobody had clipped it down. Front lawn of dead grass, weeds profusely alive, redbrick façade turned grayish, like a steak done blue by the elements. There were always cockroaches in the newspaper unless it had been clipped down.

Black hair in the stain glass panels of the door, refracted back as a kaleidoscope - long and straight, tucked in behind his ears, headbanded. There was a ring of baldness about the spot a Jewish skull cap went, but if you weren’t seven feet talk it was only visible from behind. The hazel of his eyes seemed locked in argument with skin that was pale, as if the sun had never touched it, and a four day growth of rusty hair – scattered black strands just below his eyelids, sunken – took attention from the scar dug into his right temple by the fork on the back of a hammer head. Inside, a collection of cardboard boxes sullied an otherwise vacated living room. Earwigs scurried up the dusty walls. Bedrooms were empty. Inside those walls, unattended but for insects, sour smelling, like an ancient image so decayed that even memories seemed dead and awaiting burial. You took the ashes of memories with you – encased them in concrete, tossed them into the ocean. Walking down the corridor to the bathroom Stephen found himself steeped in all of it, soaked through, an inconvenience – it has to be said – he never predicted. Still a bathroom; sink, shower, bath, toilet, vanity intact.

The old pipes groaned and flexed, and the water seemed, at first, to be the rusted copper itself escaping. Once it cleared Stephen took a few handfuls and doused his arms and face. Then he turned on the shower and then he turned on the bath. His arms were drying but the ritual was compromised, Milana must have taken the mirror with her. Fuck, fuck. A skylight made of spider webs, an arm purging water by magic, and here was Stephen Entosic without a mirror. He left the bathroom alive – sinkholes plugged, liquid and pipes seeping out like something alive, and took the note out of his jeans pocket. Her handwriting was terrible. Years ago, when he first began to decipher it, she would slide little notes under his door in bright crayon, driven across the page like sandpaper, asking that he read her to sleep with one of his stories or poems.

Stephen: I have taken everything of mine already. Everything that might be of value to you I have put in the attic. The other boxes are unknown items, some of which may also be yours. We will discuss the house and the rest of the inheritance next week. You may remember that I will not be at his funeral, nor will I have any part in organizing it. If he is to have one, I feel that it is your duty to take care of it yourself.
M.

A board of Masonite still stood on its side at the fifth stair. Steffi had cried for days when they first put it there, but she had taken to shitting and pissing in the corner by the spare bed around then and no disinfectant could wipe the ‘Steffi’s’ off that carpet. Twisted ankles, an arduous half year spent forgetting patterns, remembering new ones; one, two, three four, step over. Muscle memory. You could’ve walked blindfolded in the dark before that board, and after – even years after – there was this unshakeable feeling that each time you went in things might be different, that you would be hurt unless you kept it together, remained on your guard; after that board, it paid to be afraid of the dark. The attic was black and bedless. Carpet was all pulled up and the floorboards, nails jutting out where the joins had been, smelled like Steffi.
Even in the company of a downcast camping lantern the attic was dark; wood varnished the colour of red wine, walls the same black Masonite as the fifth stair prison bar. Six cardboard boxes stood in pairs at the center of the room like dead trees, and there, over by the little boxy window, was Stephen’s baby mobile. Suddenly he felt an insipid lack of energy or will, and was dizzy with vertigo. Attic; black and bedless. From where he stood it was clear that the balls were still affixed. 


They were still bright, too bright for this place. Perhaps that had been the old man’s error. Perhaps his fatalism should have gone a step further and only affixed worn out old balls that had been played with by champions. Something was moving through the house downstairs. Vertigo eased and he went towards it, picked it up; it felt warm in his hands, or rather his hands were warmed by its touch. A connection still existed -this icon of his earliest years, one that he had desired in secret, hated in the open. House, mobile, the bathroom sink and cockroach bush pulsing with cockroaches, wispy walls resurrected by earwigs and Stephen’s footsteps strafing ashes across the quiet ground beneath him; something still connected the lines that were erasing themselves, thwarted by the arrival of this man who was a boy here once, whose longing to remember was redrafting them again. The water level was rising. Stephen was fairly certain he heard the pipes sighing with relief. Inside one of the boxes he found both of his diaries. While one looked like a regular school organizer, the other was a tremendously thick notepad bound with string, encased with the cover of a Jean Paul Sartre novel, in the French, which he couldn’t read. A moth flew out frenetically when Stephen opened the second diary, wings harassing his cheeks like butterfly kisses. There was a poem, about a ballet dancer, on the open page;

she’s dancing, oh yeah!
As I sleepwalk she’s a jewel
in this black and white nightmare.

He laughed hysterically for five minutes and the house was in rapture, before his tear ducts opened and crying came out of him, and the house was in mourning again. Duck, duck, duck, goose; walking slowly, slowly walking, around the three sets of boxes, he picked up the mobile. His wrists were sore. He had taken a lot of pills today. There was a story here, but first it had to be thought up, redrafted, imagined. Water had reached every crack and crevasse. Earwigs clung to their walls somewhat harder than they had done before Stephen came in. At last he lay on his back and fell asleep, cradling the books and a baby mobile made of tennis balls in his arms. In his dreams it would swallow the whole house, and the house would expand until it was breached like the walls of a hollow dam, and Stephen would survive, even if he drowned up there in the attic, because by the time the water reached him a story would be carved out, and unlike a life which could vanish into the ether a story would always dwell somewhere waiting to be found, then lost, then found again. 

dusk with the sea and the dying

blot of red sun, dusk
and the palm tree tips
golden, and the clouds

that darkened the day give
over to cold
aquiline clarity

sandy tire marks in-
-tersect in the carpark, spin
circles around Lily and me,

Lily with the ailing heart and
sliver of surfboard
tucked under her sunburnt arm

radiant heat - asphalt -
sticks salt to my shins and calves
from the hill-crest an ocean
calm as glass, silent menace

lurking in its vast shadowed parts;
sparkles on languid peaks the last
captive vestiges of our Great Star






collapsed on a bench
I say 'sparkle'
ensconce her in my arms
view heart-stopping
(I cry, Lily laughs)

Picking Season

perched on laughter’s threshold

keeled abdomen a drawn bow-
-string poised, taut, sore;
pulleys of my cocked bow boast
a million pounds of strike force                                              about to ride inward

on a twitching saddle of poison’s mirth;

change: cat’s-back-recoil

                                                hyper-sensory nerves

                                                quell dumb hunger
                                                slake psychedelic thirsts
behind kitsch-curtained weatherboards;
pin-prick tics on bare soles
and under spindly hair

                                                                                         – tactile inaccuracies –
blare of whispers,                                                      whirr of frothing blades
legion of heads protrude
cancerous from grid-like windows, vanish;
                                                 mirthful tennis balls, ballpoint faced, chemical-stayed
Olympic humour of the empty stare;

and as a spade turns over earth
                                   the earth upturns itself
oh atmospheric spade; where

                                           even the air casts a shadow
                                           even the air is a feat of geometry
soil walls churn
tile fissures gape in gapless nooks                           like unseen moons in space;
                       pretty girls’ faces glow orange, grow
                                                                                                                 ghastly excrescences

behind eyelids unable to close
                                                           gruff men die of groundless grief
                                                  among pockets of people no-one knows;

the walls dance
the body’s lips don’t pucker for Sarah
the body traverses its ages         past, present, future       as a pinwheel spins
in a Spring breeze
ring-pulls catapult beer               into the foggy ether;  a Sarah skeleton on my knee            

four sets of teeth on a garden fence, seven enjoined halves of Che Guevara
undrinkable rocks run liker rivers          weird wordless covenants
marijuana butter                                                                   slugs, slug-slicks in Winter
moustaches

                                    what havoc wrought
by transcendent unconsciousness

If Guevara pulls a gun I’m going                 to hail the nearest ambulance                      

Tapestry

feathers in a picture frame
and in her braided hair
wan woven cloudlets
chill of a sidewise glance
shivers in sunlit air

tapestry under her arm
Bohemian briefcase
slowing her uphill stride
the moon’s crater-irises
red veil of heavy traffic
vilified road-ragers
blanketing all sight

sandals like a Roman God
evading pavement cracks
moon-beamed mountain range
Tiger-lily lookalike
with feathered hair on horseback
riding through snow
woven purple night

bus-stop steals her silhouette
mass of selfsame dark
frame at her side refracts a glint
in my eyes new colours spark
no more clouds or mountains
horse lost in the dazzling daub

feathers and irises of her own
remind me what is real
choking on exhaust smoke
eyes ice-cream punnet blue
fingernails like pearls

but give me the tapestry again
there I am more at home
another sidewise glance
from her on the snowy plane
bus gone, and I alone

Anders, Father? Some overwrought conclusions

A cynical reading of parenthood as the easiest and most universally attainable great goal of life would be that the biological imperative to procreate, an instinct as primal as the search for food and water, has been feebly disguised as something sublime in order to take the edge off our systematic shortcomings. Parenthood - or the potentiality of it - mitigates the sorry effects of squandered ambitions and endless regret, offering us this consolation: we needn't try so hard at other - probably fruitless - endeavours because the greatest endeavour of all, the one most indelibly tied to the Good Life, is a mere act of copulation away from being ours. No matter how far our lives diverge from the way we once imagined them heading, we can always have children and therefore have happiness. What religion is for the Nietzschean, therefore, parenthood is for the dogmatically childless.

(reprisal of that unspoken conclusion: Anders doesn't want to be happy).

The obverse argument might go something like this: parenthood is the easiest and most universally attainable great goal of life, but  it is also much more. Most importantly, it is a reminder that the multitude of other goals -  goals which usually, but not always, involve money, fame, prestige, legacy, reverence...in short, material recognition of the contribution we have made in the world - are nothing but trivialities extolled by our sick Age,  worth all but nothing when compared with the genuine Happiness afforded one by raising a family.

Clearly these two positions represent polar extremes, and the majority of opinions will lie somewhere in the middle. But what about mine? Didn't I come under the 'dogmatically childless' category? Avoiding overpopulation, you say. Perpetual bachelor, you say. Immature, depressive, lacking, you say.

Not quite. As it happens, my reasons are far more abject, far more morbid than those common suppositions.
I do not want to be happy: I am happy. Much as the world dismays me, my love for life is nevertheless immutable. However, my relationship with all animate beings around me might be classified as hyper-sensitive:   I am unable to comprehend bad things happening to others in any capacity, and much less the idea of myself as the engineer or perpetrator of those bad things. Thus, while wholly pacifist, I must maintain a degree of social and political disengagement in order to protect my hyper-sensitivities from being over-inflamed. But bad things happen. Like it, lump it, be thoroughly horrified by the thought: bad things happen.

Wait a minute: what does all of this have to do with my stance on children? Clever cookies may have already figured that out. Nothing I have yet said would indicate that I do not like children, or that I consider having them some kind of a weak-minded cop-out. In fact, my sentiments comport much better with the argument couched in the second paragraph. I can imagine no greater joy than conceiving, raising and sending off into the world a human being I am proud of, of whom I can say honestly: there goes a person who knows how to love themselves and others and their environment, whose priorities are not in the order of the present day, but in the order of tomorrow and forever. What is more, I know of at least one woman who has appeared before me in  contemplation and in dream as a perfect mother for my - never to exist - children.

But I am afraid to say that my hyper-sensitivity to life is a formidable barrier to parenthood, perhaps an insurmountable one. How could my conscience carry upon its back an injured child, a dead child, a child who fell prey to one of those legions of bad things in the world that I knew were out there? How impossible life would become! If an assaulted animal causes me to weep tears of unbearable sorrow, how could I even countenance the thought of engendering a child who was bound to suffer, and even more assuredly bound to die? No matter what accompanying happiness, that I had consigned my own flesh and blood to suffer and die? Ultimately, what sort of child deserves such a melodramatic wretch for a father? It simply wouldn't be fair. I  therefore cannot envision having children for the good of the child, not for me.

I said in the first post of this blog that I wasn't especially good with Death. Until our relationship improves, the  possibility of my conceiving new Life seems equally fragile.

Or, if I should seem now and then to trifle along the road- or should sometimes put on a fool's cap with a bell to it, for a moment or two as we pass along, -don't fly off,- but rather courteously give me credit for a little more wisdom than appears upon my outside;- and as we jog on, either laugh with me, or at me, or in short do any thing.- only keep your temper.
-Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

Anders, Father?

Recently, I have been involved in conversations about children. And not Children in some Dickensian abstract either, nor children as puppies are discussed, but actually engendering them. Fathering them, rearing them, imparting experiences and moral firmaments - or laxities - upon their little heads, or, as Homer Simpson would have it, "teach(ing) them to hate the things you hate". Children as an unopposable necessity of life.

 People seem struck by suprise when I expound my own aspirations of parenthood in the absolute negative. As incisively as I can peer into my own future, I see no mini Anders', or at least none biologically begotten by me. Some are disillusioned by it. Without trying too hard I can envision circumstances in which being averse to having children would be met with dismay. After all, if everybody were of this barren opinion...

Others still - and they are the majority - find it laughably immature. When you get older, they say, Father Time intervenes. Your body clock ticks faster. Cue a gaggle of other temporal analogies jocularly bowing to death. Granted,  it is perhaps too petulant a position as to bear any resemblance to how I might feel in five or ten years. Many young people take it as their immediate aim to shirk the sorts of things that could impede their magnficent adventures or lofty career goals. Children, for younger adults, are the ultimate shackler of a good time. I am willing to concede that point, despite the fact that biology is always quick to remind us of how ready we are to, and how easily we could, conceive another human, far easier indeed than one might conceive of a good character in fiction.

But the fact remains that I must take my thoughts as I find them, sensations which are affecting me now and not one day soon. And funnily enough, mining those very thoughts after the aformentioned conversations, I am more surprised than anyone at my current opinion.

The reason for my surprise, which might seem clear-cut to the point of banality, consists of another element besides biological imperative, although the two are inextricably linked. And where one element is concerned purely with hardwiring, with how and for what we are made, you might say, the other element comes in at a much more philosophical level. This second element furnishes the children conversation with the questions, What is the Good Life? What is Happiness? What is it that we do in our lives which makes us Happiest?

Here is a syllogism that, I think, captures the essence of people's dumfoundedness upon hearing that I don't want kids.

1. Having children is the most universally attainable and best accomplishment open to Man
2. Anders doesn't want to have children
3. Anders doesn't want to partake of the most universally attainable and best accomplishment to Man
Unspoken conclusion: Anders doesn't want to be Happy.

People have goals. Most people's highest goals will be left unattained. Any goals which are attained ineluctably lead to the setting of new ones, thus rendering even the most well-credentialled person, to some degree or another, unfulfilled. The feelings of unfulfilment, of underachievement, of lament at misspent time or misused opportunities, are all but iron certainties for the vast, vast percentage of human beings. I exclude from these musings the very young and very old, for they are either unaware of or for all intents and purposes finished with the setting of goals. And by goals I mean great goals as opposed to choosing what to eat for lunch or what game to play after school. I understand that great goal is very misty indeed and its meaning will change from person to person. No matter. Whoever you are, life can be defined as a series of great goals made a hash of, or lost to Father Time, or grabbed like a slippery fish only to glimpse a far bigger one swimming just upstream.

I only bother mentioning all this doom and gloom - none of which you haven't heard before, particularly through a medium of art - as a means of juxtaposing it with another goal, namely bearing children and raising a family. Sorry if it made you sad, but for argument's sake it had to be done. Let's make a brief list of how the goal of parenthood differs from every other great goal I can think of.
-It is inalienably a shared goal (at least at conception).
-It is, with some exceptions of course, a universally attainable goal, and thanks to advancements in fertility science, becomes more of one every year.
-It is a goal that is unsurpassable. No hierarchical 'bigger fish' exists after bearing children, only incidentals such as the size and dynamic of the family
-It is a forever ongoing goal, rather than a neverending sequence of ephemeral ones. The betterment of one's children and of oneself through those children is halted only in extreme circumstances or death. Consider those online computer games that can never be finished but which still command the unwavering attention of millions because 'tasks' are always at hand.
-Lastly (though I'm sure there are many others) it is the only great goal that corresponds precisely to one of the accepted 'biological imperatives' of the human race. Thus parenthood traverses the boundaries between the animal and the sublime. Food, water, shelter: these all become attendant necessities, centered around the family, and are therefore sublimated too as a result. There is a big difference between the relief of winning bread and a roof for oneself and the sense of satifsaction, of accomplishment, of Happiness, that attends to securing provisions for one's family.

I say all this, but also say that I don't want children. For that explanation, I'll get back to you.

Jewel

Suppose there was a jewel
belonging to everyone
that, in fortunate moments,
you had held with both hands
coolly until caught in its allure;

taken covetous stock of its surface
intricacies, imperfections, pressed
down until its edges made blushing
imprints on your fingers; by day
observed its properties of light-refraction,
beheld that swimming pool glimmer,
cognizant by night of
the precise weight of its matter;

jewel unseen but felt and held as a jewel,
suppose you had demystified its triumph
and tragedy, fallen in love
only to duly hand it back again
for the jewel was everyone's but no-ones
to be loved by many, possessed by none.

Better then to partake of partial ecstasy
with its attendant troughs of envy
and confusion and misery,
inevitability of the moment
when that jewel becomes, to our minds,
the property of no other than you or me,

always knowing this to be
sheer impossibility:


the painful glee of eating hot chili,
or being throttled by a lover,
the perverse satisfaction afforded you
by failure.

Dishes cleared in silence, cake wrapped and put in the fridge, coffee cups rinsed for propriety’s sake, Briony heated some leftover mulled wine on the stove and poured it from the saucepan into an old flower vase. She brought it and two champagne flutes to the table, then ladled up. Their glasses raised, Briony asked Daniel to do the toast.
“To…good health”
They clinked. Neither was thirsty.

…

Some time later Briony asked Daniel if he was still okay to drive her to St. Andrews. For, since her flight wasn’t until the evening, she had decided to hold a market stall in the early hours, hoping to raise a few extra dollars with a collection of dresses exhumed from the back of her wardrobe. There was also some jewellery and trinkets, a once-used exercise machine that looked like a giant bow, a box of hand-tied fishing flies her spendthrift brother had given her at Christmas. A bake sale had crossed her mind too, briefly.
“Yeah,” he said, fidgeting. “I meant to speak to you”
“you want me to call Tabitha?”
“I can take you, I can…it’s just”
“What?”
Daniel shifted uneasily in his seat. It seemed to Briony that he was arguing over some quandary in his mind, there was a look of consternation about him, like the one he got when beguiled by a Sudoku puzzle in the Sunday paper.
Finally he lowered his voice and said, “well, I noticed the red dress was in the pile”
“which red dress? There were a few”
“you know the one I mean”
“um…”
“the one from our first date,” he blurted loudly, “and don’t say you don’t remember that”
“I didn’t say anything, I just”
“well don’t, alright”
Her eyes widened incredulously. “Okay…”
Then, under his voice, chin brushing against his neck, Daniel muttered a terse “selfish” before taking out his mobile phone and punching keys.

She froze. “What did you say?”
He’d never insulted her that way.
“Huh?”
“I’m selfish?”
“What’s that?”
“Daniel I heard you- you think I’m selfish for selling that dress?”
“I don’t know,” he mumbled, “maybe”
“I wear clothes every day Dan, you’ve seen me in a million outfits, you’ve”
“okay stop there Bri” he said
“what?”
He kept silent, punching the keys in obvious discomfort.
“What?”
“Oh…okay!” Looking her in the eyes, he said, “okay, are you serious Briony? Are you serious? Christ it isn’t the dress! It’s the memory! And you’re going to sell it off for some…stranger to fucking flounce about in? Just trading out good memories for cash? And you reckon it’s not selfish, are you serious?”

…

It was the first time he’d screamed at her. Suddenly the room felt pressurised, as though quarantined in a vacuum, and somewhere near her appendix an odd sensation: pangs of adrenaline.
“Why didn’t you say something earlier? I’ll take it out okay, I’ll keep it”
“That isn’t the point Bri,” he said calmly, “it’s a bad memory now”
She was moved.
“Oh Dan, but we have so many others”
“they’re all turning bad” he replied
“excuse me?”
“Nothing, just forget I spoke at all.” He seemed to squirm with guilt.
More adrenaline. “They’re all turning bad? That’s the most horrible thing you’ve ever said to me!”
“Yeah, well”
“No way, absolutely not…what is wrong Dan? You’ve been like this for months, so up and down, and”
“What’s wrong what’s wrong,” he interrupted her. “See? That’s fucking it!”
“Where, what? Could you stop swearing please?”
Daniel collected his thoughts. “You have no idea what’s wrong, and that’s it”
Of course, she knew what was wrong- she had known all along. But that paled in comparison to the desire, the aching, sensational desire she felt to hear him, just this once, explain it to her. “Huh? You’re upset because I don’t know why you’re upset? That makes no sense Dan”
“I’m upset,” he screamed hoarsely, “because…”
She took him by the arm. He pushed her away like a doll.
“Because why? Dan it’s torture, just”
“Because you’re leaving without me and haven’t shown the slightest bit of consideration for how I might feel about that, that’s why! Fuck! You just hole yourself up in the kitchen and make your friggen cakes instead of talking to me!”

…

A shiver, the sort caught in a gust of wind or surge of unexpected sunshine, swept across her every inch. The relief was unimaginable. Newfound intimacy, the candour of rage, had introduced itself at long last, and Briony felt more liberated – and angrier – than ever before. Furiously, she raised her voice to a boom and let heedless words swirl from her mouth.
“Well maybe, Dan, maybe if you had’ve stopped being so bloody miserable for a second and been happy for me that I was following my dreams and doing the things I’ve always dreamed about! Instead of drawing all the…effing…attention to yourself! To think there’s something so wrong with waiting! Isn’t that selfish? And cowardly? Who’s the selfish one Dan?”
He pressed his fingers to his chest in defence. “I’m the selfish one? You’re pretty much saying you understood why I was upset, all this time?”
“Well what about you? You just said I was…holing myself up…so you obviously knew I was upset…so yes, you are selfish!”
“Then so are you!”
Daniel slammed his fist, knocking a full flute down. Mulled wine spilled everywhere, expanding over the tablecloth like a red ink blotch. Briony got up to fetch the paper towels.
“No,” said Daniel, “I’ll get it”

Losing Marlin: Part 2

After the cream was whipped and the toffee sauce melted, Briony put each accompaniment into its own saucer and racked them either side of the sliced cake. She tossed the mixing bowls into the sink, beset by nerves. Then the triumphant march into the sitting room.
“Ta-daa!”
Daniel straightened politely at the sight of her. Holding out his arms he said, “here, pass” and set the rack down between their places.
“Babe, before you si’down could you press ‘disc skip’ on the stereo?”
“Okay- but start without me and you’re cactus”
The mechanical sound of the tray rotating came, went, to be replaced by a man singing, in a startlingly high voice, folk songs that might well have been lullabies. This sensitive melancholy stuff was his favourite. And although Briony didn’t care for it, tonight was for Daniel more than for her. As the hour of her departure had closed in he’d grown sadder and sadder. His eyes more sunken and sleep-deprived, his demeanour more and more withdrawn. And Briony knew why: her.

…

She eased the volume to a background pitch and undid her apron, throwing it over the little ebony bookshelf – covered in back issues of Patisserie Monthly, Daniel’s Waiting for Godot perched on top – before slumping exhaustedly into her chair. She puffed out her cheeks and sighed. Daniel in front of her, a sullen look on his face, and what was in the crease of his lips…
“Oh you didn’t”
“Didn’t what?”
“You sneak!” With a napkin she wiped him clean and shoved her findings under his eyes. “You get a cheeky taste did you?”
“Relax, I didn’t touch the cake. Here, look at all the pieces I haven’t touched them- it’s only cream”
“Only cream? What are these dark bits then, liar?”
“I’m telling you it’s cream- even taste”
He attempted to shove the napkin in her mouth, but Briony baulked and gave his lips a lick. She tasted, eyes closed in concentration, with all the pomp and ceremony of a food critic.
“See? Just cream,” he said, “so lay off”
“And onions actually,” she replied. “You taste like a chip”
“Yeah, well”
With an affectionate smile Briony said, “you shouldn’t have touched the cream either, it’s a component of the dish so it still counts as a cheeky taste – and when did we eat the onions, like a half hour ago, more? Can’t you use a napkin?”
“Whatever” said Daniel
Briony pretended not to hear him, or notice his thumbnail covering a nibble edge. Instead she chewed her nails and washed her hands to the elbows.

…

He spooned a pool of toffee onto his plate, took some cake from the middle and laid it neatly in top, doused it in more toffee, then got a big a dollop of cream and, using the back of the spoon, spread it all over like the centre of an Eskimo Pie. At the same time she quartered her slice and made a little stepladder, to which she added streaks of half-melted cream and toffee from the top, drizzling artfully down the cake. Eventually both streaks trickled onto her plate. There must be airbrushing afoot, she thought- it didn’t much resemble the picture. They began to eat.
“How is it? Would the cravat-ed one be impressed?”
At first Daniel seemed not to hear her; then he half-jolted and, making fork imprints, said, “good”
“Just good?”
“It’s good babe…delicious, what do you want me to say? Let me eat it first”
Affectionately, “uh, how about it’s the best cake ever baked?”
“Did you make coffee?” Was his gruff response
She put her hand over her mouth. “Oh my god…you know what I was so buzzed about how this turned out I didn’t think to make it”
“yeah- I got the coffee cups out though”
“I know Dan I meant to…I can make it right now, although the percolated stuff may take a while, the beans are in the outside freezer encased in, like, an icicle”
“don’t worry then”
“should I just boil water for instant? The stuff in the sachets is okay. Or tea, there’s plenty of tea, Russian Caravan or”
“it’s alright Bri”
“well are you sure?”
“it’s alright”

…

She picked absentmindedly at her plate and ate a small mouthful. There appeared to be a problem with her tastebuds; they were numb and unresponsive, as though coated with beeswax.
After a period of quiet Daniel said, “it’s good cake Bri, you…did a nice job”
And Briony thanked him, even though he sounded to her like a nervous actor who had drawn a blank trying to come up with a line on the fly. Actor: it and similar notions shook rabidly in her head, strange alien notions that had landed only months ago, her mind a kettle drum full of problems without pretext- maybe there was more to that housewife fancy...these absurd crises every time a cake or tray of muffins went into the oven…and all of it a biscuit’s throw from Banff, and Calgary, glacier water that turned curly hair straight and black hair grey, lakes bluer than veins, and wild Moose, and the tundras! How could she have let this stalemate happen? She knew how: a love coated in Teflon, envied for its perfection. All was confusion, except for this: by leaving on such terms she would come home to a life without Daniel, and by staying a part of her would flutter irretrievably away. Briony peered into the kitchen into order to smile and not cry.

Pulled from the ConFest Vault

Dredge your garden for mutants,
stake out forests for fictions,
follow an endless path; it is
hardly easy to say, "this dumb
little trinket has lit my dark".

I light an incense stick; my boots muddy the frayed strips of pink and purple carpet. All the trees attain machine-like perfection in the back-lights. Thousands of faces twitch and writhe; bellies heave, symbols and strings are plied, plucked, and the chai tent's cup rental policy is seldom taken for a ride (such is the goodwill supervening.)

From under her massive lampshade, no view of the monstering night.

Downcast faces beat a rhythm of empty-eyed togetherness, beat through incense fog
and languid steam and tea light bags
burn like brown sacks of disclosure, thicket spikes stick
into calluses on feet, elbows, thighs knee-deep in chalky grey mud;
collapsed tents, tee-pee canvas water-stained, and everywhere
butterflies flutter on a stiff breeze of good luck omens, banana-skin
cloudlets and a girl with one leg shaved, the other a fuzzy forest to worship in.

And children parting crowds with velveteen hands,
and silken cobwebs snaring sunset surfers,
and loot lessons left 'til later; drums,
drummed into giddy oblivion,
and chess board tables footballed clear.

Naked sun salutes, nakedness on parade
as tailored suits another leaden day, dreadlocked
dancers lost in ecstatic silent space,
soothsayers spinning skipping ropes aflame,
the bitter kick of unsweetened Chai
rapturous renditions of the English
alphabet by illegal campfires- prettiest
girls on earth a bevy of signets, flock
of good luck omens.

Like rivulets running uphill
their bodies betray the secret
rituals of heaven, book-bound
magic of Eden aroused in body odour
birthed by those dizzying modal
movements of our origin;

we with jester hats on watch them,
we declare our love for lines
of rhapsodic strangers, laugh at
laughter, scream until our skin is
pimpled; we exercise, amidst all
of this clownish contrivance,
our forsaken capacities.

For silent hours I sit, patiently observing each person's response to this, to their upheaval. Weird women weep for the incurable lack in our souls, goddesses glimpse truth in shooting stars on mushrooms, others blush at bare dicks but nod with approval at that 'modular intimacy' picket sign, and children who know no other Easter gather eggs by the tantric massage tent; tennis court dotted with hard boiled good luck omens.

A misty jealousy claws at my half-open heart; to fill a womb,
to hurl musical rejoinders without embarrassment,
to upbraid the selfish,
to harbour no ill-will toward my physical defects, to abolish 'defect'
from my endless game of dialectics, to climb a log outcrop in the frigid Murray
with only one arm, to care nothing for the slant of sunlight
illumining my arse for no-names, to walk barefoot over morning dew
and not feel I have suffered -
to be as impressed by a single human as I am
this carnival of humanity but who - who will it be?
There are many candidates, many good luck omens.
To help a lost girl home. To trust a man in a loin cloth. To believe in redemptive activity for the soul -
to believe in more than monism, to grasp the sacred influence of India
when I see no Indians here.

Losing Marlin: Part 1

“I felt like we were one of those wedding cakes in a shop window, that look really beautiful, all ornately decorated, all hand-piped, with roses…but really there’s foam inside!’”
She burst into tears, then sniffed and laughed self-deprecatingly. “That is the silliest thing anyone has ever said before crying”
“Hey, hey” he soothed. “But you’re right”
“about the crying or the cake?”
“Take a wild guess”

…

“We have to argue more, to practice”
He nodded. “Don’t think you won though”

…

“I’m sorry”
“me too”
“so you’ll wait for me?”
“They’ll be the hardest six months of my life”

..

“Marlin” (she did not move).

…

The water turned scolding. Briony ran the good serrated edge under it for a few seconds.  A little cascade fell over the blade and onto the dirty dinner plates. Slithers of caramelised onion detached and writhed about like baby eels in the dishwater.

…

She flipped the tap shut and shook. A beautiful smell seeped from the open oven, along with what remained of the half hour’s worth of 180 degree, fan-forced heat. On TV last week Briony had seen an oven advertised- a new and revolutionary oven powered by light that could roast a chicken in nine minutes. It incensed her enough to pen a letter and tear it up, repeat the process, then sit pensively in her room, moved as if somebody dear to her was listed in the morning obituaries.  Gratification of the store-bought kind, at home:
what was it if not the death of feeling in the kitchen, of that beautiful time spent waiting for the oven to deliberate, so that when the time did come to reap what had been sown, the food was not only impregnated with flavour but with emotion also? But of course it all sounded so overdone- the best course of action was to rip up the letters, and simply mute the TV whenever that ad came on.

…

See a well-warmed knife – according to Tuesday’s Epicure – wouldn’t smear the icing. And the crumb should remain, to the greatest extent possible, imbedded in the slice, rather than imploding like vintage cheese when cut into. Mounds of crumble weren’t exactly praiseworthy after all, and these sorts of ‘efficiency problems’, as she’d come to think of them, kept Briony up at night. Thus the heated knife- just another artisan’s tricked she’d learned since booking a flight. That is to say, for reasons beyond explanation, making plans for her holiday had also meant months of floury bench-tops, draw handles greased with cake margarine, egg stuck like old sponge in the sinkhole, bedside tables – Daniel’s too – piled high with food magazines; icing sugar here, caster there, no brown or raw left for porridge. Suddenly this peculiar room, scented differently all the time, with its sharp instruments and unscaleable mountain of guidebooks and training DVDs, with its machines capable of burning and maiming and hurting, suddenly this had become her sanctuary, one that offered up its riches as a bed of nails did its rest. Only Daniel knew why: him.

In the sitting room Daniel had St. Germain on, the track with jazz flute. It completed the picture enough for Briony to imagine herself hostess of some swanky dinner party; napkins in gilded holders, all the other florid touches, jazz flute, and Briony in her apron busily preparing dessert for all the small-talking guests. Using the knife as a drumstick she beat the rangehood, and bobbed her head and cancanned with her feet, while Fergus’ tail kept tickling her calves. Through the half-open door she saw candles burned to the rim of their whisky glass houses. A pale hairy forearm rested nearby. She felt a sneeze rise up but it pulled away, right on the threshold. Then Daniel said marlin loudly and the fantasy blew out.

 He had (A) just farted, or (B) pretended to let one go in order to be alone a little while longer. For marlin was both a plea for privacy and the very public boast in a game of bodily one-upmanship they’d been playing since their first night together. On that occasion Daniel had pushed her onto a couch, all but thrown her like a doll, flinging her legs back to her shoulders in one of his amorous fits.
The intensity with which he plied that body, in combination with its sheer unexpectedness made Briony tense with desire, but at the joy of his entrance she’d slackened and inadvertently broke wind so loud and foul smelling that tears of embarrassment welled in her eyes, a capillary-bursting blush seized her head to toe, and she made to run out of the bedroom and the house and the world of eyes and ears and noses. She would have, too, had Daniel not taken her by the ankles. He could barely manage a marlin over all that laughter. Then, after calming down, he’d threatened,
“I’ll beat that before you get sick of me, mark my words”

…

Her creation was cooling on the wire rack his mum had bought for them, a helpful nudge towards housewife duties disguised by the happy housewarming card it came with. She thought so, at least when things went badly- in other words, often. Widthways, she cut the first piece and inspected.
“Not much of a marble cake, but reow”
She shrugged her shoulders. No big deal; she knew she’d gotten carried away when swirling the white and brown batters, so that homogenous beige colour was hardly a great surprise. But what was a surprise – hell, astonishing even – was the texture. Nice even porous, no gaping air pockets or other mutations typical of her baking. Soft and spongy to touch. Just cake, the way it was supposed to look and behave. Flush with pride, Briony smiled and shook her head- how ridiculous that a cake recipe filched from New Weekly’s Nice ‘n’ Easy section, over the page from all the pictures of grubby babies and pets wearing hats and sunglasses, could leave her so…elated? But it did. And anyway, who but religious people made hierarchies of good feelings?
“Hey Dan,” she called out, “when I get back I’m auditioning for Masterchef, that’s how good this cake is”
he said, “the new season will already have started by then”
Briony winced and bit her nails. Then she washed her hands to the elbows, according to correct hygiene procedures.

In that tragicomic moment she realised that intimacy was a different animal for this pallid, gawky guy. Something wonderfully different compared with all the also-rans of her past. Nuts as it sounded, that single incident had disarmed her to the point where love became all but a matter of course- an afterthought. Marlin had been a staple ever since. For six years, as indispensable to their honesty and good humour as they were indispensable to one another. Perhaps more than anything it was a reminder that nothing was outlawed, that at one’s worst held no meaning any longer. When etiquette was followed it was done so out of affection, not hollow courtesy.
But there was a qualifier: unshackled as she’d been by him Briony was still a princess at heart, and while she happily gave her own she would still leave the room, almost to keep up appearances, whenever Daniel said it. Therefore, of marlin’s two functions, only Daniel exercised the latter- the beauty lay in Briony never knowing.   

…

The Hill

Lonely water droplets fell from the towering ceiling, breached the opaque glass like drips of condensation formed in a deep cavern, through shrouded smoke, projected collages of religious iconography and flora and fauna and the Statue of Liberty wearing a garland of barbed wire coloured in psychedelic neon backlighting them all the way down. Onto the dimpled brass of a colossal old fermentation vat – one of eight in this red brick building that loomed like genie’s lanterns in a vast desert – each of them bigger than twenty men, all dirtied with loosely handled drugs and people with dreadlocks down to their ruddy ankles. The lonely drops fell down, faint murmurs of a torrent crying outside, hurling itself into hillocks of snow that benumbed his feet and left him pensively sad, as if he were watching the whole world turn brown from the crest of a rainbow.  Every murmur was a microcosm of decay.

The small black hairs around her areola come away so easily! Slackly they hang, few in number, like frayed wires bordering a little pinkish outlet to some immense energy. She asks him not to tug on them: what if they grow back blacker? And it is making her less sexually attracted to him. So he doesn’t do it anymore: he would do anything for her. Ecstatically he licks the outlet; it is like licking a battery end. Her legs are neither smooth nor hairy; her bottom half is draped in a perpetual stubble. The pit of her knees is always sticky, ticklish.

On footpaths of ice she is quick-footed but unaware of her own clumsiness- wonkiness, as she prefers to say. She likes the word wonky. She had never heard of that one before; his gifts to her are that kebab she dropped all over the pavement and wonky. Wombats are her favourite animals, which could, he speculates, have something to do with it.

Several times he must hitch her from the ground bruised and hysterical, velour dress snow-stained, with a cattish lilt to her voice that makes him want to marry her even though it is just days since their first meeting and the sound of a person’s voice is scarcely considered suitable grounds for entering into wedlock. Onward, onward, he urges her up the steep slippery knoll. There are joyous people everywhere. The clamour of urgent feet and joy. She falls and falls. Clinging to a frozen stair rail and inching higher he thinks seriously about proposing tonight, maybe even by the light of this panorama of fireworks awaiting them at the top. Astonished and touched by his seriousness…but alas, she is marrying Jani in an hour. When he looks back her dress has parachuted up again in a fall and her little arse, in peach panties made of lace, is imbedded in the hillside- she finds it excruciatingly funny. When she gets up her gait is all wonky.

Scorching pyrotechnics aflame, gas hissed from the trembling hose; the open ends of fuel lines growled, and a lifeless brewery packing room bled again. Confetti, arranged in troughs similar to those used by weightlifters and gymnasts for their gripping powder, seemed now to be cascading from thin air. It was in everybody’s hair and festooned around everybody’s collars. Women wore angel wings and furnished their faces with pupils like black marbles. Women of sixty dressed like little girls at a fairy party. Men slapped each other with the empty sleeves of their sweaters, big acid-tripping trolls. Gesticulating madly, the old man behind the decks played Goa trance without a smile, without enjoyment, programming impeccably, white moustache prancing here and there across his leathery wrinkled face. And with every crescendo another flame shot high into the air, illuminating the gigantic inflatable insects that prowled across the dripping roof.

English is not her first language. She cannot pronounce the letter H. When he speaks to her he subsequently feels as if his words pass first through a sort of semantic nebula, an affecting murk that both steals and ascribes meaning, just as he imagines her thoughts must be altered according to what she can and cannot say in his tongue. This insoluble mystery – for he will never learn to think or dream in her language, nor she his – excites most of all.
Finally they arrive at the summit to an orgy of colour and languages, men and women, energy, anxiety, a panoptic of Berlin in pandemonium. The countdown is being counted down. Her cold hand wriggles out of his grip, her restless spirit bucking against propriety, against any semblance of how this thing should go. Hurriedly he searches the square for my friends. Bottle rockets are exploding at his heels. There are no familiar faces, just a legion of festal strangers. His gaze trains then upon the bleary sky, draped in a frigid mist, crackling in anticipation- its bleariness the brother to that stink of explosives which has suffused this city for three days already.

He wants to bluff her out of existence until that ultimate moment, when, turning to her alabaster face as to that of a freshly found soul mate, he will kiss her everywhere and say, happy new year, happy new year, making naïve internal and external pledges about faith and eternity.  But she recognises someone– a man with blue eyes, an oddly shaped head. He introduces himself as Jani and tries to shake his hand in the elaborate gangbanger fashion. And because of this he takes stock of her ten seconds too soon. The moment is stripped of its perfection. She seems pleased to see him.

Total darkness – and music close to 150BPM – prevailed in the basement. It had the pitiless aspect of some neuropsychological experiment, one entered into willingly by lunatics. And maybe that was close to the mark. By a chain of palms they led themselves through, unclasping for wrecked ravers too consumed by the order set by their beloved bass to move out of the way. Bodies rattled inside their shells like half-boiled eggs- the synthesisers stabbed at waning sensibility; cleaved chunks of reason clean off. Once a suitable spot was found the dancing began. People bumped into him, checked his expression, tongues hanging out of their mouths like exhausted dogs. There were no droplets down here and the heat was infernal.

In his misery he saw punishment; the fine line between enjoying this horrible carnival and viewing it in the full, garish light of logic had been overstepped…and she had pushed him over. Why didn’t she come? It was all he could do to think positively, think in the present like a Yogi in order to avoid the trip taking a turn for the worse. So, spiralling his arms around fanatically, he wore holes in the toes of his boots. He looked up in the air as though he were receiving a musical benediction. He mouthed happy New Year, happy New Year to anyone who cared to collide with him. But the harder he tried to extinguish the thought of her the more fierily it raged. Face veiled in white muslin. Finger ringed. Walking haphazardly down a vast aisle flanked by purple flowers and gangbanging Fins. God damn it, he was about to enter a demon world with an angel oozing out his ears.

All desirable things he can offer her- all the things she desires that is, except one. He can circumscribe the globe with cursive love poetry, fuck her so many times it becomes as menial an act as buying milk, he can let her punch and elbow him in the chin until he falls unconscious and wake up bleeding from the ears, tell her what he thinks of her desire to commit suicide at twenty three, he can be a stone for her or jumping castle to ricochet off, pick her up when she falls in the snow, he can furnish her English vocabulary with new words, think it plausible that she’s twice as intelligent as he, he can pinch her cheeks like a grandmother and throw her around like a brother, he can kiss her on the forehead like a mother or on the chest like a lover, he can get as sick of her as she can of him, he can boost her up fences and lay the very clothes off his back down over barbed wire for her, for her, for her he can offer it all…but he can never make her a citizen of Europe.
Jani has that over him, despite his deficiencies in so many other areas.
For now, for the change, she is in his arms, the gleeful, hopeful beginning of a new parade of days. When they kiss he looks at her. He tries to say a lot with his eyes- but they are crossed because of their proximity to hers and only make her laugh. Behind her, Jani rubs his hands together as another blonde guy gets the wick of a big red block sparking. The hill rattles with jumping bodies and sparks and loud I love you huddles. The hill seems taller now, as if in the changing of the calendar it has overtopped itself, shed its smaller stature and shot up anew. Fireworks enfold the skyline on every side. The hill is where he will win and lose her.