There were two white cardboard plaques fastened with rubbish bag
ties to a tree, some kind of paperbark, maybe a Melaleuca. On one of the
plaques were the letters EW, in pink, and on the other LM, in green. Steven
estimated the distance from which he had seen them clearly to be thirty or
forty metres. Standing at the tree now, appreciative of the shade it afforded
from the midday heat, he touched the lettering on both plaques as if to confirm
that his vision hadn’t failed him. It hadn’t. The letters seemed to be cooler
than the bare cardboard; Steven shivered with elation and with chill as he
pitched his arms aloft. Kick drums thudded a long way off. He could see. He could see!
Some people passed him by, smiling. The three women were wearing
brown and dark khaki Bedouin skirts, festooned by leather belts that looked
like broken gun holsters, and they had water bladders on their backs and Henna
on their bare feet and hands and more holster cuffs around their wrists, and
Nepalese scarves over their dreadlocked heads. When the man, whose checkered
red Indian pantaloons finished above his ankles and whose sandals were of the
style worn by men in Marrakesh, and on whose concave chest a thin triangle was
tattooed, inside which the third eye blazed pallid blue like an iceberg, spoke
to the women in Hebrew, Steven understood that they were Israeli. There were
always a lot of Israelis at these kind of festivals. It was a of rite of
passage, one had told him on the Market Stage at Rainbow Serpent some years
ago, for young Jews to travel abroad after military service – three years for
men, two for women – which was not only compulsory but real: where were the post-conscription Norwegians, the Danes, the
Swiss, the Fins? Add to that a love of the harder and more unhinged styles of
psytrance – embroidered into the cultural fabric by the likes of Infected
Mushroom and the Iboga Records stable of artists – and you had the quintessential
electronic dance music hippies. Because of his long, mousey curls, Israelis had
often mistaken Steven for one of their own. It had been his ticket into the
sexy underpants – and hippies did wear
lingerie – of scores of Jewish girls, whom he found attractive but quite
brusque to talk to, and usually outright rude when they were in groups.
This time, however, the Israelis had smiled at him. Maybe it was the
mistaken smile of kinship again, but Steven thought it more probable that they
had seen his triumphant outstretching, and in it, the way New Agers often did,
seen a kind of involuntary homage to beneficent Mother Earth, or Pachamama or
Gaia, or one of the other names – almost always female – that were ascribed to
the great wheels of creation and destruction, life and death. The smell of
incense wafted into his nostrils; Petar Dundov’s Oasis and its magnificent refrains played over in his mind. Then
there was nothing except for a wordless sense of wellbeing. From the tree
Steven could almost make out the canvas weave on the teepees at the lifestyle
village, which was still some way downhill, by the Billabong. He could see the
ripples on the Billabong water, the throng of human bodies, most of them not white as his was, standing and sitting and swimming and floating on their backs in it, and the blueness of the big water lilies.
Somebody had assured him yesterday that the lilies were edible, but Steven had
to yet to find a reason to try them. He decided, adjusting the towel around his
neck, to tear a piece of one off and eat it while he swam. It smelled piquantly
of mud closer to the water. The crocodile warnings staked to the muddy banks
were so clear and steeped in sunshine that they seemed to glow.
*
The lily tore in a perfectly straight segment, and felt like tissue
paper that had been dusted with fine-milled flour. With his feet grazing the
bottom, Steven held the lily roots as he chewed. Sure, it was edible, but it
wasn’t good. Not poisonous, just not good, and how many things in nature were
‘edible’ in that crude sense? Mud, and maybe the smell of the compost toilets,
swirled around him on the breeze. The sunscreen on his shoulders face felt
slick and poorly rubbed-in; it was probably still white. The sky was so clear that it looked
whitish, and was full of particulate matter – atomized flowers, maybe lilies,
dandelions, leaves, flies (dragon, march, butter, blow) – which Steven could
not only detect but distinguish from one another like coordinates on a map of
unsurpassed complexity. He could even have counted it all, had he wanted to.
But he didn’t want to. He was still recovering from the previous night, and the
heat was fierce.
At the centre of the Billabong, an enormous white orb bobbled,
anchored to the spot by wires and a steel base that looked like an eggcup. A man
was breaststroking towards it. The orb looked to be made of polyethylene and
the base had attracted a thick perimeter of water grasses and tumbleweeds. The
man’s bare arse rose above the turbid surface with every frog kick. Steven swam
out a little further, towards the crocodile netting, to get a better look. When
it was too deep to stand up he treaded water and watched the urgent movements
of the body, the pallour of it, the absurd buoyancy of the black dreadlocks,
the plant matter enveloping the man as he reached the orb. Then a whistle
sounded, first a protracted blow and later a series of sort bursts, and there
were two men under the lifeguard’s gazebo shouting ‘Get back! Get back!
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