I wake at eleven thirty and know, at once, that it is food poisoning. This is followed by the realisation that, in less than six hours, I need to be on a plane. My fare is non-flexible, non-refundable, and on a public-holiday long-weekend, near impossible to rebook. I grit my teeth as the first waves of nausea ripple through me. I will make that plane.

I roll onto the floor and reach for the backpack I have yet to completely unpack, the zips still covered in the tape the disinterested Laotian border guards applied after a cursory search and a half-hearted push for bribes. I feel inside for the battered plastic shopping bag, the one with a grinning number one, muscled Popeye arms giving a dopey double thumbs-up; “Clever shoppen auf Plus.eu.” This is my travel drug collection, and it is both versatile and extensive. I begin to prepare myself three courses in tablet form: a smorgasbord of pills from crisp foil pockets, a chaser of stale water, and the sour metallic taste that comes with the realisation that I will not be sleeping, not tonight.

That night, I discovered that my roommates will be on the same flight, and we plan to pool our resources and share a cab in the morning. When they awake at 5, I am standing in the kitchen, staring at the floor, a fizzing rectangular canister of blackcurrant flavoured oral rehydration solution in my hand. I am sweating and shivering simultaneously.

“Morning”
“Good mor… what happened?”
“Woolies potato salad happened”
“Oh. Oh, right.”
“Food poisoning”
“Oh, Dan.”

The last is phrased so as to communicate three things. These are:

1. You look like shit. Really, all kinds of fucked up. Are you twitching?
2. I asked you to book the taxi last night. Did you book the taxi?
3. Will they let you on the plane? If we travel with you will they let us on the plane?

These are answered are simply:

1. Yes.
2. Yes.
3. Yes. In fact, I have been through Canberra airport so many times the past year that the security theatre has sunk into a lower level of consciousness, and is so finely ingrained I don’t have to think as I pull things from the pockets they belong and put them into the pouches they belong. So, while you wrestle with bags, check-in machines and the conga-line of people struggling with their shoe buckles, I will be upstairs, behind the mirrored glass doors of the Qantas Club, kneeling on the floor of one of their pristine toilet cubicles, throwing up blackcurrant flavoured oral rehydration solution.

I spend the rest of the day alternating between bed and floor and enjoying Prochlorperazine tablets. These, although yet to be endorsed by Mike Myers, are nonetheless little, yellow, and very, very strong. When I wake, it is afternoon and I can eat bananas. I can drink tea. I am overjoyed. To celebrate, we head out to buy alcohol.

The rain thumps the windshield in wet slaps, a schoolyard bully with a history of rapid escalation. He’s working his shtick, and the routine fits like a glove, so practiced is he in its execution. He’s balanced in the ebb and flow, and the way he juggles the expectations of this newcomer is in lines set to perfect verse, drummed in iambic pentameter against the tempered glass. Lash. And pause. Then, as if taunted from across the quadrangle, the droplets yield for a second, and there is a suitably dramatic intermission. The wind darts into the wheel arches, then golf-ball-sized lumps of ice begin to slam into the windows.

The sound is of someone throwing rocks into a trash pail. Large rocks, small pail. Outside, my partner in crime scrambles to pull shut the door of the garage. The rain is so heavy all I can see is the odd limb jerking spasmodically, a shadow puppet silhouette behind a wall of water. On the news that night, there are pictures of cars with ragged holes in the windows, houses stippled with damage from clouds sheeting mortar-fire from above, shrapnel of ice from the sky.

Going out in this to buy bitters, mixers, and those little cherries that taste like everything your grandmother ever baked, is mental. I’m grinning as we aquaplane over roads that look like rivers and even though I don’t drink, the payoff is a night of new faces and new ideas, and tiny pieces of candy scattered across a suburban driveway from the belly of a shattered pinata.

The next day, an inch thick carpet of leaves covers Melbourne. The cartoon fat kid drawn in the condensation masking the inside of the train window defrosts from the inside out, revealing a tapestry of sheeting rain outside, outlined by a chubby double chin. Shops struggle to outdo each other’s flood signs, and while there are a few “CLOSED DUE TO FLOOD DAMAGE,” I also spot a “Water, MAAAATE” and a “Closed, slight water issues. (ie. TOO MUCH!)” Inside, a huge pedestal fan is balanced on its side on the floor, blowing against a stain on the carpet that is far too large for the fan to have any reasonable chance of influencing.

I step into North Face and emerge fifteen minutes later with a jacket that will sit in place of the one stolen that night in Berlin, when we sat in the gloom of a squat bar under a disused railway bridge, and downed shots of Jäger amidst the yellowing propaganda, all angled lines, shades of grey, and futura on everything. The Aussies we had met were there, and we played up our challenge, shambling around with arms akimbo, poor facsimiles of bears on hind legs. We ran home through the snow-lined streets, me in a t-shirt, pale skin turned peppermint blue with the cold.

The pockets are in familiar places, the right places, and muscle-memory is at play as I reach for the zip that fastens on the right. It is like meeting an old friend after an absence of years, time dripping away, and shared experiences of the then settling comfortably together with the now. I quite like this pocket metaphor, and I wonder if it will stand up to being applied to a person. Who is not a garment, does not have pockets, nor a zip that fastens on the right. The metaphor is retracted and we hug under the row of clocks, amidst the shirtless teenagers in enormous, see-through plastic bags, then climb three flights of stairs and sit sipping steaming cocktails from a teapot, on the roof, in the rain.

Melbourne, you are completely fucking bonkers, but I think I’m starting to love you.

Posted in Mwah on Wednesday March 10, 2010.

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