No Pablo Neruda
Essays on life, work and literatureArchive for August, 2010
Really Not Myself
Dear god eyes, please don’t get wet,
Not even through this Tuesday yet,
Yet screaming hormones from a pill,
Insist I will, insist I will,
And thoughts from Sunday wreck my head
My heart has stopped, I think I’m dead,
Oh no, I’m not, it’s them, instead,
The refugees I can’t protect,
And clients whose small wealth I’ve lost
And my own dreams, for this, the cost,
So stressed, and stretched, and strained.
Can’t I,
Just lie here for a little while?
Part Three: Diet Coke and Candles
I knocked forcefully on the door. Often times his door was left ajar – either by intent or omission – but it seemed securely in its place today. After I had knocked, I leant forward and put my ear to it, hoping to hear something from inside.
It seemed unlikely that he would be out of the apartment. The man had an uncanny ability to assume a position in front of his big screen tv and remain there for hours on end. If he was sick (and the last I had seen him, he certainly didn’t seem well), he would only leave his place to pick up diet coke or python snakes or perhaps to order Thai food from one of the local places down the road.
I knocked again, and louder. It was possible he was in the shower. He had sixty-five of those a day. If he was in the shower then I may also need to wait for twenty minutes before knocking again, as the duration of his showers rivalled the length of time he could sit in front of the tv.
When I finally heard the slow, loping grace of his bare feet on the floor boards of his flat, my heart leapt in my chest.
“Julian,” I called through the door. “It’s Katie. Open up!”
He walked to the door and pulled it open, standing gloriously in the hallway in his ‘jorts’ and vintage Chevrolet t-shirt. I didn’t have time to admire how perfect he looked – while I had been waiting I had felt the floor beneath me buckle ominously. The shock waves were continuing to roll through the city. If their focal point was the centre of Martin Place or near thereto then by increasingly expanding circles we would feel the same magnitude quake in short course.
“Haven’t you been listening to the news?!” I demanded angrily as I stormed in.”What are you doing bumming around for? Get your shit together!”
“Whoah. Hold on!” He said, following me into the flat. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know what’s going on.” My tone was still curt, touched with anger. I found myself blaming him for this unpredictable situation. “Martin Place is caving in and all the buildings are falling down.”
Julian walked over to the tv and switched it on. I didn’t think there would be any power but surprisingly it blinked to life. There was nothing alarming about the programming – as Julian flicked through the channels the regular, scheduled shows for three o’clock on a Thursday afternoon were still playing.
“Put it on channel two please.” While I spoke to him, I rifled through his closet for a bag to carry some things in. I assumed he would have a backpack – didn’t most boys? Unfortunately, Julian wasn’t like most boys. The best I could find was his mother’s overnight bag which she had left in his closet from her last visit.
I dragged it out and started stuffing some jumpers into it.
“Katie, what are you doing?” Julian asked, standing over me. “Where do you think we’re going with all this? Why don’t you just stop for a minute.”
I paused and straightening, standing almost eye to eye to him (despite his regular protestations about his superior height).
“Look, I think something bad is happening.” I said. “There are shock waves going through the city – it can’t just be a bomb or something like that. Maybe it’s an earthquake. I don’t know. But all the buildings are falling down and if we stay here this one will probably fall down to.”
He was about to argue with me – explain the physics behind the structural soundness of nineteen twenties apartment buildings or some such – but before he could there was another tremor and the ground wobbled. A wide crack split in the facade of the wall closes to us. I saw that he now believed me.
“What else do we need?” He asked.
“I don’t know. Bring some food. Do you have a torch? Bring your phone in case we can get reception.”
We spent a few minutes throwing some things together. Julian lived a fairly spartan lifestyle so there wasn’t much to collect. I went hopefully to the kitchen, but predictable the cupboards were mostly bare. He had a few heat up microwave meals which I took and a sealed bottle of water which I dropped in the bag too.
Julian then held the door open for me and we headed back toward the central stair case. Contrary to previously, the staircase was now crowded and noisy with people. I saw that other cracks had broken in the foundation and that the building was slowly crumbling from the unsteady ground which had originally given it such reliably, structural support.
As we passed the tenants on the stairs, some with children, others seeming only half awake, we caught the snippets of conversation which followed such an event – “What the fuck is going on?”, “Can you get reception?” “I never get reception with 3″ “Does anyone have wireless on their phone” “What are the government doing about this.”
More than once I caught Julian’s eye and he gave me a look as if to say ‘who are these fuckwits?’ I was surprised by him. I would have thought he would be adamantly standing his ground and refusing to leave the building, doggedly, though vainly, trying to regain reception in his blackberry so he could read the latest newscasts on SMH.com. Instead he was listening to me – really listening to me! And when we emerged on to the street and I said to him quietly, “Let’s go to Rushcutters Bay.” He nodded.
There were boats at Rushcutters Bay. Dozens of them. I was not against lying, cheating, stealing or soliciting my body in order to get on to one.
We headed in the general direction of the bay. Before we did though Julian made me stop at a convenience store. Whoever had once manned it had long since left and a handful of people were picking choicely from the aisles, taking full and unabashed advantage of the moment to steal. When he emerged again, he had two plastic bags of food, candles, and diet coke.
“Was that really necessary?” I said derisively, indicating the diet coke. “Yes.” He replied simply. “In that case I’m getting some scotch.” I replied, and so we made a second detour to our local bottle shop before continuing our progress to the water.
Tantalising Snippets
Fascinated by the woman’s grace – by her straight back and the perfection of her short, blunt fringe – Adeline leant forward in her seat so that she could make out the rest of her.
She was tall, her legs sheathed in a pair of very dark black stockings. She had slipped off her shoes and her feet, though not exposed, had a visible delineation equally as graceful. The whole picture, from the top of her head, over the slope of her breasts to her rounded stomach and the neat skirt fitting in an A line over her generous hips was perfection – she spoke to Adeline about what she, if she showed steadfast dedication to her personal upkeep, could hope to achieve.
But this was, perhaps, only a dream. She was forty-two. If she had had the inclination to be beautiful it would have demonstrated itself by now. Instead she was ordinary – in a perfectly nice way, but ordinary none the less.
There was flesh on her body where flesh was want to be but also spaces of such youthful smoothness you would be pressed to guess her real age. She had a pair of honest, coffee brown eyes and blonde hair which was progressively thinning as she aged, but which looked passable when she had it freshly bleached at the hairdressers. She was generally kind, prone to be a little romantic, sometimes deeply jealous, but rational enough to suppress any nasty urges should they arise.
In sum, she was a normal woman – a woman who married at an ordinary age but who, extraordinarily, chose not have her children. She looked at Alex who was asleep beside her in the plane seat and the reason why she chose not to have children was answered in his face.
Alex was five years younger, but may well have been thirty-two years her junior. He grew older but not wiser, more mature and yet consistently prone to making mistakes. He gave Adeline a constant sense of impending disaster, which, Adeline had early realised, was not the right environment for a child.
So this made her distinct, she hoped. She fervently hoped that with the changing of social mores, her decision not to have children would be highly regarded. “How wonderful for you,” people would crow. “You didn’t buy into all that bullshit.”
She leant her head back against the headrest and allowed herself to have a little fantasy. In her fantasy, she was seated at an old distressed kitchen table which a group of warm and funny friends had taken from inside a rambling country house and placed in the sun. They sat about it, all of them at varying ages, and drank cold wine while eating sweet fruit throughout the day and well into the night. There were no children to disturb this reverie – just the camaraderie of some lovely people, mellow and content and free of responsibility.
It wasn’t a fantasy that could be prolonged. A tea cart rattled down the aisle and nudged her shoulder, causing Adeline to bump against Alex, who promptly awoke. His eyes, sleep crusted, turned in her general direction and there was, vaguely, a look in them as if for a moment he didn’t quite recognise her.
“Your wife,” she reminded him. He made a little sound of amused acknowledgment and closed his eyes again, returning to whatever infantile dreams would, no doubt, preoccupy him for the remainder of the flight.
Adeline turned back to the woman who was seated further down the aisle. She now had one long arm outstretched and was accepting a glass of red wine. Her lips were already a little stained red which indicated this wasn’t her first.
When she accepted the glass she shifted her right hand across her skirt and Adeline noticed that a piece of paper which had been laying on her lap slipped down on to the ground and rested underneath her chair by the feet of the person behind her. Adeline craved that paper – desired its knowledges and secrets. She wondered if she could, if she kept her eye on it, slink across at some point and slip it in her hand.
No one would notice. The lights had been dimmed and most of the passengers on the plane were in a state of semi consciousness. If she was discrete she could collect it. She could disguise it in a mistake of her own. She set her heart on doing it, voracious, suddenly, for the words the woman may have written.
Love
When love colours your thoughts and deeds, you are love;
by these things, it’s plain to see, one becomes what one has sought -
a veritable truth, an intuitive word, a song for days to pass by,
be love in old age, love in youth, love in sentiment, on sighs.
Love’s a parable for every era, soft as moss and hard to source,
yet so simply wept and long declared, the search though grim,
the lack or loss is worse.
Some Days
She wanted to be warm and cold – hot around the face but with a pair of cool hands that she could lift up at will to tame the heat in her cheeks.
She wanted to be childish, she wanted to be small, so small, in fact, that if you put out your palm she could fit in its centre, a shell of a person, barely a heart, barely with a heartbeat, safe and almost invisible.
Rather she was a wide, wet ocean, tempestuous with storms – she was a disappointing well of emotions, incapable of order, virulent in their strength – like a communicable disease.
She was a wish made at a prior point in time that developed by careful and fastidious intent but which carried all the memories of her early imprint. She was a decorated flower in the flush of mature age with a sensitive innocence that crumpled in on itself under undue pressure.
She was a light bulb in a dark hall, a terrible sound when the night was not punctured by sound at all – she was a history of maddening complication and a future of such elegant design.
But at this time she wanted to remove all the robes of skin which formed the dangerously thin layer of her flesh and be a shower of raindrops from an umbrella tip, tumbling down unseen, spread about, a shared burden, a light weight on a shoulder, a holder of rainbows.
