following the car to the ponds

The car was an AU model Ford Falcon, one of the ugliest machines ever built. The sound of its approach put me on tenterhooks and I jerked my head free of the hedge. I was surprised at the number of painful scratches I suffered while freeing myself as I couldn’t remember being scratched – let alone feeling any sense having to force two objects of incompatible dimensions to fit together – upon going in. But welts had already risen in crisscrossed scores on my neck and so it must have been that other sensations had hidden the pain in a kind of sensory fog. I got to my feet and spun around just in time to see that the driver had turned on the radio; a retractable antenna rose in telescopic segments from the silver bonnet, which looked clean in the sunshine. I saw the big aftermarket rear spoiler and the taillights, shaped like huge prayer flags, pass Wilson in the direction of the park. There were no bumper stickers on the back window that might have suggested what station the radio dial was tuned to. I rubbed the welts on my neck for a time, thinking that if one body part suddenly expanded, another must have atrophied, and for a while I was convinced that my left leg, even if it was by microns, had shrunk. Everything around me seemed to be in very faint motion.

I followed the car. The car, of course, quickly disappeared. Maybe, though, it was just that I was imitating the car, willing myself to imitate the motion of it, because the way I was walking was strange, faster than normal and yet unfatigued, as if I could have kept on for fifty k’s without taking a hard breath. A lot of the roofs on Lincoln had been solar-panelled during the big government rebates; the panels looked like strips of motionless quicksilver from a distance and even in a squint I started seeing purple. There was one roof with the intestinal black pipes of a solar hot water system on it, maybe for a swimming pool. I realised that, looking only at roofs and the sky, I’d drifted off the footpath and onto the road. I could smell wattle, and leaves in the early, pleasant stages of rotting and my own hair, curly clumps of which had come free of the ponytail and blew in and out of my eyes and mouth. I made no effort to tie them up again, or to get off the road.

I walked down Grant, and for the second time that morning cut through the grass alleyway flanked by houses with old wooden fences covered in graffiti, fences so low that I could see all the K-Mart clothes hung out to dry and the barrenness, interrupted by pieces of crappy play equipment or a toolshed here or there, that was the typical Watsonian backyard. A good thing about the suburbs, though, was that people lived lower lives; it made me sick how high people in the city lived. In Mckinley again, this time I headed downhill past the dog exercise enclosure, to the ponds. There were five of them, of identical size and shape, like a line of little crop circles, partitioned by mud and trash-strewn bulrushes. Beer bottles and the occasional duck bobbled pathetically in the water, which was more grey than brown; once water had been polluted badly enough its colour seemed to lighten again. Little pine footbridges stretched across all five ponds, from one side of the bike path to the other. On the railing of each bridge was a plastic-covered plaque with the Banyule emblem and a blurb about a supposedly native animal – Ornithorhynchus anatinus Crinia signifera, Lymnodynastes tasmaniensis, Phascolarctos Cinereus, Cheerax destructor – that I was sure had never been, or would ever be, seen anywhere near those sad waters. The whole arrangement looked like the part of a sewage treatment facility that schoolchildren visited on excursion except that it had a bunch of crumpled UDL cans and empty stubby bottles to anchor it firmly in suburbia. I sat down on a little slope next to pond number three.

Sweat started to drip from my nose; the grass I looked at between my crossed legs was yellow. Salivating as though about to spew, I spat a few times and wiped my mouth with the sleeve of the khaki King Gee work shirt I was wearing. The shirt reminded me that I should have been at work. A few people walked past with dogs; none of them were Labradors. I took off my Blundstones and Explorer socks and stretched my legs out. By the time I tried to think about the boy, I was lying on my back with closed eyes. I was untroubled by feeling the spit I had done seeping through to the skin on the small of my back. Even though he seemed to be right there, I couldn’t get the boy past the outskirts of my thoughts. Trying to think of other things was hard, too. Unable yet to say whether I’d found the experience traumatising or just plain ridiculous, it was true that a sort of posttraumatic lack had already seized me, similar to the feeling I had had as a teenager when I watched a man collapse in the Chadstone shopping centre food court. The memory of the man’s convulsions and his concave facial expression, as if he had just eaten the sourest food on earth, and the flimsy chrome-painted chairs he punched and kicked skimming across the shiny floor like pucks on ice, came back to me. I tried not to receive it. Then there was nothing in my head at all. At that moment I felt a gust of wind on my face and heard a whooshing sound and, sitting up, saw a shadow growing on the grass in front of me. I covered my head and ducked; there was another whoosh and then a painful jab to my right hand. The shadow disappeared for a time, before growing again as if by magic. Whoosh: I wasn’t hit. On its final three swoops the bird, probably a magpie but I would never know for sure, seemed to miss me by increasingly greater margins, until by the third I couldn’t even hear the whoosh. They were swoops, I thought, which for all their chest beating were really about contrition: the bird had felt bad about hitting me and consequently appeared even weaker than before in my eyes, even more vulnerable. I lowered my arms. I stood up. My hand wasn’t bleeding.

making electronic music, in public, at night

what you ought to do is not go home tonight –

                   “psychedelic trance is like starport indra’s engine”

and you’re thrill-riding you’re chroming on its fumes,

sucked along in a slipstream of eau de parfum

with ‘ocean’ and ‘sport’ and ‘romance’ and ‘euphoria’

in their names – using a worn-out broom to disinter

the pine needles from those graves in the pavement

that shouldn’t be there – the render on your sober face

crumbling like the handiwork of a third millennium husband –

you watch a man with one leg try to jump a fence –

he succeeds and it’s the holiest the world’s been

since that solar eclipse in Cape Town you were too high for

and too low to be lifted beyond sea level by anyway –

emotionally low that is – so, what is on the other side of the fence?

Fennel weeds pointing like arrowheads toward the city

and then an embankment and then a highway and then

an embankment and then fennel weeds and then a fence –

no-one’s saying light out for the territory –  only

to not go home quite yet – the night smells too much like rain

for the preclusive dryness of an apartment roof

for the twenty-six plastered ceilings atop your own –

you sit on a bench and unravel your polka dot bindle

gnaw on the bamboo shaft and open a laptop

that wasn’t there before, turn the wet on the Ableton arpeggiator

to a million percent, imagine the redlining CPU as a hypertensive heart –

notice that the moon is almost red now,  and that the pulsing sweep

on every seventeenth beat, if it is any thing, is that thing meltingly –

Melbourne is like a wasp nest lopped and broken,

much of the colony saddled and ridden by smaller insects,

most of its poets saddled by the skittled cricket wicket

motif and other tongue-twisting Australiana, and train stations –

well there’s a Russian doll containment to the notes in your lead

synthesiser line too, a Pandora’s Box that’s got you pretty ensnared,

a melody so beautiful it must have been a saintly fluke

because you can’t even see that the keyboard is capitalised

or that there are some men with designs on robbing you.

after the boy

I found Sarah at the breakfast table, halfway through a bowl of Special K. Her hair was tied up very high and neat, certainly retied after she’d gotten up, and she was wearing the pink satin singlet and shorts I’d bought her from Peter Alexander around the time of the move. I realised then that there were no firewheel flowers in my hands. When she saw me she used one of her hands to hide the chewing taking place in her mouth, as if I was oblivious to the fact of her needing to eat.

“Phil! What are you doing back?”

It took me a second, and an acute pang of anxiety, to comprehend that my entrance into my own house was unexpected, that I should have been out until four or five. Much the same time as it came back to me I told her that Steve had never shown.

 “Steve? That’s weird. That’s so weird. Did he call?”

“No”

“Did you?”

I shook my head. “I waited a long time. He’s never late”

“Time’s money, right?”

The way she said this, repeating verbatim something I’d said to her about Steve, made me flinch a little bit, but I nodded. The newspaper on the table was still rolled up in the plastic, like a roulade about to be cooked sous vide, and the orange juice bottle had almost nothing left in it. I picked up the newspaper and unwrapped it messily and then skulled the last drops of orange juice and then put the bottle in the recycling bin, which was in the laundry. From the laundry I heard her ask if everything was okay.

Was it?

On hearing Sarah’s question I knew, from the indefinably wretched way it made me feel, that I wouldn’t say a word to her about the boy. I read something invasive into the way she’d asked, and something pathetic into my face’s inability to turn away the orders sent it by my mind. Had I no recourse other than to dumb faithfulness? But it was uncharacteristic of me to react like that; I didn’t believe that. For a time I looked at my hands and my arms, turned them, swirled them as though they were curlicues of ash instead of flesh and bone, tried to trace the long blonde hairs, which glistened on certain angles, to their roots. The thought of ripping them out like a sick dog started to eat at the back of my eyes, and I found that I was slapping myself in the face and miming pull the fuck together.

“Of course it is, babe,” I finally responded. Maybe the voice I used was louder than was called for, I didn’t know. “Actually a magpie swooped me, so I’m, yeah, a little racy over that, but…”

I didn’t have time to reiterate that I was all right: Sarah was on me with all sorts of feminine ministrations, she was planting a lot of kisses on my lips and forehead.

Rock Kissing

Over there, at an almost clean diagonal to the corner of the tartan rug I am sitting on, I had my first kiss. It was with the face of a jagged river rock and I was five or six years old. I remember the slimy viscosity of the face on my lips, and its sponginess on my hairless little arms as they bear-hugged it, and the effort the gentle rapids made to try and part us, forcing my legs to bobble out prone on the surface behind me. Suspended in the water, I remember feeling completely disembodied except for my lips, and hoping that all kisses made me feel like that.

Now I am twenty-one and I have taken her here for our first real date. I have not kissed her yet but have been unbearably close a few times. On the rug there are some salad rolls in a cheap cooler bag and also a bar of the organic chocolate she would always bring to school, and a bottle of orange juice. I have known her since year eleven. It is a beautiful afternoon and we can see a long way in either direction, towards the city and out to Eltham, my hometown, perched as we are on a little peninsula of weedy grass at the river bend. The barbecue area is close by. The cries of children die away quickly amongst the overgrowth and the trilling birds and the nostalgic murmur of the rapids. We start to eat.

“So,” she says after a period of silence, “Domesticated, aren’t we”

“Domesticated? But we’re out here”. I hold my arms out: beetroot and carrot spills from my roll.

“You know what I mean. The picnic in the park, the river, the picnic food”

“We can go somewhere else, if you want”

“No, I didn’t mean it like that,” she says. “I never said domestic was bad”

I bring up the efforts made by some of the theorists I’m studying at uni to stratify the naturalness of nature, from the remote wilderness to the planned city gardens that are called ‘domestic picturesque’. We agree that this place is somewhere in the middle and that it would be better if there was more middle around. I talk about the old man I see every day, sitting on the only bench in a slither of green in Flemington, which is where I live, who never seems to be looking at anything but who always seems to be really happy. I use him at an example of how nature, even the most unnatural nature, can do things to the soul. She doesn’t believe in souls.

“Humours, then”

“Humours?”

Soon we are lying down. The sky is full of particulate matter, atomised flowers, dandelions and pollen and other beautiful sorts of coordinates that remind me how even the most remote distance is three-dimensional. The sky is enveloping me and I have to sit up. Then I lie down again, closer to her. It takes every ounce of courage I’ve got just to grace the bare arm next to me with my fingertips. She takes my hand in hers and puts pressure on different spots. Our hands are playing of their own accord. She is humming a made up tune and making feminine sounds when she yawns. I feel as if everything she is doing and wearing and smelling like is for me. I want to kiss her; I can’t kiss her. I am going to kiss her.

But then I feel that I am about to break wind and hold it back, before another memory of this park comes to mind. This one makes me flinch, and look into empty space, and move away from her, nauseous. I was sixteen and had come to swim with my older brother and his mates. We had also used an old boogie board and a rope to jet ski someone idiotically around the parking lot a few times. I had fallen, hurt myself, but not badly, except that the fall had shifted my bowels and I could not reach the toilet in time. I had bolted towards the river and squatted in a dug-out hole on a little peninsula of weedy grass at the river bend.

“I think we should move,” I say

She looks down at the rug first and then towards the river. The frustration in her face is plain to see. “Okay. Maybe we should just go home”

“No, I don’t want that, I just think it’d be nicer downriver”. I stand and she stands and I kick the cooler aside and pick up the rug and begin beating off the dust and dirt, which the wind whisks away.

“But you chose this spot, you said yourself that this spot was the best one”

“I know, I know”

“So?”

I have to tell her the truth. That is, I have to tell her a truth. And so I tell her that I am embarrassed because when I was a kid I made out with one of the rocks in that little section of rapids that is at a diagonal from the corner of the rug. My expectation is that she will laugh at this, maybe even find it endearing, maybe even give me a pair of lips on which to redeem myself. But she doesn’t do any of these things.

“I don’t know if I believe you, James,” she says, downcast. “I don’t know if I believe that you want to be out here with me”

That is when I drop the rug and in desperation throw my arms around her. She doesn’t object. Neither does she seem to condone it. I feel numb, dismal, dissociated, kissing her: but I feel all right, too. It is as if she is another rock, a beautiful wedge of basalt maybe, and I am a child again, returned to the gentle waters, to that suspension of the bodily, and despite the likelihood of it being our last kiss I am not unhappy that it has happened this way.

strawberries

she is using the back of a hammer

to shatter the ice sheath –

rain lolling, like the diffuse pulp

from some vital paper pulsed

into sleeted vagary, like goose down

in the stolid grey, towards the courtyard

I look at, between her demure blows,

from my balcony window –

that keeps us from them: the crystal-

-addled strawberries I bought god-

-knows-when, on sale for another girl

who was allergic –

and the courtyard fountain is as empty

as the withered centre of the ancient fruit

which, out of propriety and maybe for liking me

a little, she swallows – whether failed efforts

endear more than do successes I don’t know,

is saying all the wrong things a good way

to do it I don’t know,

but I am thinking such things while she is here,

that couch pillow with floral tracery in her lap,

nice perfume on her pale, elaborately-veined wrists,

her in-breaths cold, her tongue and her teeth

berry-reddened, humming a children’s song

that buffets my heart so unbearably, smiling –

that we were both twenty-three this summer

is the overwrought coincidence

on the shoulders of which we arrive

at the cliff top of the stony dark –

I water the peace lilies, tear the hairs

from my hands at the thought of thumbing

the glitter flecks around her eyes –

the flimsy plastic punnet, frozen so long,

lies half-disintegrated on the countertop

in a little oblong of water: while she washes

her face I break up the countless flakes,

turn the laminex into a huge jigsaw board,

dip a few in the water and taste them –

they taste of strawberries – before the archway 

at my back says I think I will stay next time,

and the sound of a returned hammer happens.

walking home opposite a beautiful girl

I’m walking home, overheated,

and it’s hard to ignore the girl

on the other side of the road

waving around a dead lacrosse-stick-

-palm-frond-tribal-prodder-thing –

there are no palm trees on this road –

that says look at me to the press of traffic,

and picking up rubbish, and being pretty –

I wonder if the paper bags she carries

and deposits the rubbish into

are as full of books as mine, and if

she uses the same hair ties as I do –

I wonder how many years younger

than my little brother she must be –

I wonder if she is going on that walk

for solar energy this coming Sunday –

I feel sure for a second that she’ll switch

sides because my wonderment

has willed her to, and my haircut,

and my rolled-up left sleeve,

and the meeting of our eyes a few times,

and the likelihood that my heart

will eat itself if she doesn’t, but now the tasseled

tip of her scepter graces the close-cropped grass,

rakes gum nuts that bobble in its dusty wake,

and she is as raucously disinterested in me

as the fucking gorgeous parrots in the brambles –

and I don’t cry then because my screwtight

solitude springs leaks when any girl

prompts my mind to ask ill-tempered questions

of them, or compare them to birds, or often

incorporeal matter, mist, even though it’s true –

no – I cry because she drops her bag and it spills

and inside there is only more rubbish.

an early morning walk, a very horrible sight

I was standing on the footpath outside my house at twenty to six in the morning. Steve – the boss of the landscaping company I had recently quit university and moved to Watsonia to work for – was late. A few wattlebirds were trilling and the sky was so clear and white that it looked to have had a curtain of muslin thrown over it, the sort scattered around our bedroom (Sarah bought muslin at op shops to make baby clothes with). The lemon and apricot saplings in our front yard, which must’ve been planted by the previous tenants, had begun to flower. I was disheartened to see that there were weeds in the saplings’ planter boxes and stinging nettles all over the rest of the garden, and so I resolved to do some upkeep that Sunday. I was feeling poetic and noticed within myself that combination of power and impotence that came with waiting for things while being half asleep. It was nice. You could loll your body around like a slinky while your legs stayed anchored to the spot, every movement, every perception so unfocused and meaningless. You didn’t give two shits whether the thing it was that you were waiting for ever came or not.

My mouth still felt coated by the filmy residue of Sarah’s cornmint oil mouthwash, which I hated but had used in a rush instead of doing my teeth. On my work clothes I could smell the shavings of the Mirbau deck we had been building at a house on Zig-Zag Road the day before, and could feel the shavings in my pockets and at the heels of my Blundstones. A couple of cars went past and with them another ten or twenty minutes. The exhaust fumes the cars put out hung in the cold air a long time. I was on the lookout for either Steve’s work van – one of those turbo diesel Mercedes rigs that all the rich young tradies like him got around in – or the Nissan Patrol, on springs as jacked as a monster truck, that he took pig hunting on weekends. He was never late picking me up because time was money; I was in no hurry to call him because I didn’t need the money that much and I was feeling all right where I was. Before too long, though, the sky had been uncurtained to its full sunlit blue and I was awake enough to realise that something must’ve happened and that neither the Mercedes nor the Patrol would be coming that day.

I went inside. The house still had the mood of sleep; I could hear the fridge motor and the bedroom door was closed. Awake and washed and fed as I already was, I felt that I was interrupting something, and left again after having a drink of water. I decided to go for a walk. I didn’t have a regular walking route – we weren’t dog people and I was usually buggered after work – but headed downhill for a block and then cut through the biggest park in the shire, called McKinley. Sarah and I had picnicked there on the Sunday of our move, that is to say we had sat on a small embankment of grass eating fish and chips. In the park I saw a few people out walking their dogs, and a very skinny elderly bloke plodding along the path in clothes that seemed too young for him and too brisk for the spring air. I saw that the footy oval was glazed with dew and that the cricket pitch was fenced off and being readied for competition. The smell of the wet, close-cropped grass sort of rushed at me on a gust of wind, which I drank in and then gave back out as reluctantly as possible. I did the same thing with the smell of wet tanbark. I saw that along the path a lot of the bins were stuffed to the brim with beer bottles, but didn’t venture as far as the dams at the other end of the park, which was where most of the teenagers went to get pissed.

*

Pretty soon I had left McKinley; some time after that I found myself on Lincoln.

It was deserted as usual.  My pulse was eager, endorphins were flowing, I was darting my eyes here and there like a child making its first index of things, the weather was beautiful – but still the head of my anxiety reared, fanned, struck. It was a shame that in adulthood I had managed to retain the enthralling part of being in an empty place but not the enjoyable part. I quickened my steps and looked ahead. I thought that I would pick a bunch of flowers from the firewheel tree and then turn left onto Grant and then return to my street via Madison Parade. I would be going to bed with Sarah within fifteen minutes because that was what other young couples did, and it would have been opportune, considering the steps I’d just taken to summarily turn my life on its head, if we were a little bit more like other young couples. I was interested in the way she smelt and how profusely she sweated, and in the way I could fit my fingers in the folds between her hamstrings and her arse cheeks, or cup her demure pussy in my hand from pubic pone to perineum as if I was its custodian, and in the way she would put my hand around her throat and roll her eyes back, and in the way I felt like more of a man when we were fucking than I felt myself to be at any other time in my life. I was genuinely interested in all of that. The problem was that I was even more interested in the reasons, still unclear to me, why we were fucking less and less and why I was all right about it.

When I got to the yard with the firewheel tree, I realised that my footsteps and maybe my thoughts had been covering the sound of a child, or possibly a woman, crying. It seemed to be coming from a few houses up or down from my position – I couldn’t tell which way. It startled me at first, before the thought of asking what was wrong, and of saying good morning, and of breaking my Lincoln hoodoo, filled me with intent. I walked apace towards Grant but then stopped because the noise was weakening, turned around and walked back to the tree, where I stopped again. I listened more carefully to the crying. It wasn’t the acute sort brought on by physical pain, but more of a low, plaintive moan, a sob. It soon became clear to me that what I was hearing were sobs, and that they weren’t actually coming from a house on Lincoln but from someplace on little Wilson Court.

I rushed towards the turnoff. I could see all the houses in the court fanned around the wheel of asphalt, and close to a dozen coloured tennis balls stuck in a mat of leaves that was blocking a drain. A set of metal wickets lay on the nature strip. One of the houses had quite a high box hedge around its front and sides and a wrought iron gate that was shut, and I was sure that whoever was making the noise was in there, in that compound. I thought I wouldn’t be able to see in and was frustrated – almost distraught, as I remember – until I noticed a section of hedge in the bottom right-hand corner that was browning and patchy. It was in the largest space between the foliage that I positioned my head, and saw a boy.

He was squatting on his front porch, wearing a facial expression of such awful intensity that it made me grit my teeth and brace my mouth with my hands. His cheeks were bright red and wet with tears, his hair was matted to his forehead in dark shards. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or throw up at what he was doing, or at the sounds he was making while doing it, because the hopelessness it all signified seemed to be almost calculated, numb, as if this person of less than ten years old had already seen what the world had in store for him and found that it was nothing but despair. Or maybe it was a sickness, one of the obsessive compulsions, a sick sickness. I was numbed. At that moment I couldn’t specify what physical position I was in, how agape my eyes were or my mouth was, because I don’t remember anything but the senses which attended to that very unbelievable and very fucked up spectacle. The reason I’ve written his front porch is that after he had pulled up his little green corduroy pants and had spent a further few minutes with his head in his hands, pulling at his fine blonde hair so hard that blood must have come up on the scalp, the boy opened the door with great care and went back inside.