“Well, I’m back home for the weekend but Cee will be around. She’s got friends up and she’s not heading back until tomorrow. Leave it with her and I’ll get it next week.”

One

It is hard to imagine I’ve been at 6/66 for over a year. Number of the beast jokes wearing thin after the first few weeks, as I’m reminded of that television skit: the dwarf in a devil outfit, pitchfork in hand, as he sprints down the sidewalk, shoving people aside, to a building numbered 333. Roll canned laughter. Fade out.

When I arrived at the beginning of my three month stint, I made the calculated gamble on signing up for a year-long internet contract, figuring that I could talk my way out of a cancellation fee if I wasn’t extended. I would never have guessed that the contractual obligation would expire before I moved out. I survey the array of half-packed boxes spread across the lounge room floor and sigh. There is too much. This is too much.

I am convinced that a key part of the human psyche is the demarcation of territory, be it the contents of a backpack tipped onto a hotel bed, a room in a share-house, an apartment of your own, or the high brick fence around the property that stretches, “mate, for miles.” I’m willing to bet there are whole swathes of academic publication devoted to this particular branch of environmental psychology, and I picture papers scattered across a professor’s desk, with titles like Proxemics and the definition of personal space: Territorial boundaries in the Dharavi slums. Liberal use of the words conducive, perception and cognitive. Clumped mono-spaced type and faded baby-blue cover-sheets over yellowing paper. In my mind, I stereotype academia like this often.

My take is rather more simple. Once the boundary of your influence is defined, you proceed to fill it with stuff. Flat-packed Scandinavian ingenuity is employed to find more efficient ways to increase the amount of stuff you can fit into that defined area, ingenuity already deployed to full extent in the packaging and assembly of the products you will use to facilitate the storing of more of your stuff. When it comes time to shift, collapse, or expand your territory, you discover with horror that you have accumulated far more than you imagined possible.

So, here I am with a floor of junk, and a car filled with boxes. I should probably make a move on redistributing some of the lighter and more valuable stuff. I load a backpack with Photoshop gear, add some Japanese cookies for good luck, and swing by Braddon to unload.

Two

I can never remember the numbers I need to press to get past the gates of the complex, but I remember the pattern of movements I need to replicate: down to up, right to left, left to right and then back again. After a couple of attempts, the gate clicks and springs open. As I climb the stairs, I notice the door is open, and an argument issues from within. “that’s bull, she’s a total trashbag. Look what she was wearing when she…” before the voice is drowned out by the tinkling clamour of cutlery spilling onto a tile floor.

“Hey which is mine? Is it this one or, um, that’s yours right?” a girl in a grey dress is pointing at identical flutes of champagne as I stick my head in the door, “Um, hello, is Cee around?”

Six heads swivel to face me. “She’s in the bathroom,” says grey dress, having made a decision on which of the two glasses to take possession of. I can see a hat, moving back and forth behind the bench top, which reveals itself to be a youngish Asian guy, bottle of vodka in one hand as he stoops to pick scattered knives and forks from the floor with the other. “Did you want a shot?” as he nods toward the bottle.

I shake my head, “Thanks, but I’ve got a heap of packing to get through and,” he inclines his head and ducks back down to focus on scooping up the last of the forks. “So, how do you know Cee?” asks grey dress, who’s seated herself at the table and is now demolishing the champagne. “Though work. I guess we have what you might call, um, contractually opposed viewpoints on a lot of things, so we tend to spend most of our time arguing with each other,” I say. “Ah, that would be Work Dan,” Cee says as she walks into the room. “There is cake. Eat it.” and as I debating my position re: the eating of cake, she does the round table of introductions.

There’s a bunch of them, friends since Uni, or before, and they have the easy familiarity of a group that has grown together over the years. I am reminded instantly of the seven dwarfs, T’s circle of primary school friends who, over the years had spread outward and away. They’d plot yearly intersections where they would come from afar and gather in KL, or Malacca, and drink and dance and yell at each other as they swapped stories and compared life and love. There was a heady mix of social tension and factional politics, and favour changed from month to month, year to year. But while the geography and the social dynamics shifted and ebbed, the core tenets of the friendships remained constant. There is a similar dynamic here, an easy friendship accumulated over time.

Three

Several hours later, I’ve run the last bag of garbage to the bin room, and crammed my last bag of stuff in the space between the glove box and the floor of the car. There is nothing left to do, and the apartment is empty. It is nine pm. One gin won’t hurt, surely.

Four

They’re huddled in a corner at parlour, sprawled over each other as they argue. There doesn’t seem to be, yet, a definitive conclusion on whether “she” is a trashbag or not, but points are articulated and supported with much gesticulation and pointing. “Tip for young players,” I say as I lean forward across the table, “don’t ever try and move out of a house on the same day you’re planning on traveling overseas. Don’t even consider it, because it’s fucking stupid. Stupid, and hard work.”

Later I realise that one of the guys is someone we played at soccer several months ago, snarling abuse as he bounces off Paul into the green netting at the edge the indoor court. Social sport taken far too seriously. I wouldn’t have picked it. The one gin turns into several thousand. I wouldn’t have picked it. Unipub is still doing three-dollar shots. I wouldn’t have picked it. I end up having an hour long conversation about the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle that I can barely remember but which involved both cats and baseball bats. I definitely wouldn’t have picked it.

I thread my way back through Garema place as the clock on the DEEWR building hits four. Two teenagers are making out on the sculpture of the giant silver cushion, a trio of bums sit opposite, watching but abstaining on commentary. I have to be awake in an hour and the gin fierce is just beginning to dissipate.

Five

I leave my keys on the bench, pull the door shut behind me for the final time, and point the car toward the silent back streets of northern Canberra in the dark. A kangaroo startles me as it pulls itself upright and bounds off into the bush, and it occurs to me that I am probably still over the limit.

The sun is barely cresting the horizon as Mick drives me back toward the airport, and I’m having trouble focusing on his pointed questions about process, forward planning and governance. I clear security and push my way into the back corner of the lounge. As I nurse a strong black coffee, I notice my hands are shaking uncontrollably.

Tonight I will be in India, a dusk flight low over the slums that press relentlessly against the fences of the airport, and with my territory here diminished to a couple of boxes in the boot of my car, as it sits at the back of Mick’s garage. I’m glad to be on the move again, glad to escape the golden handcuffs of the capital, but I note there is a change in the air, a shift in perspective. There was never meant to be any permanence, but I’ll be back.

So there’s that.

Posted in Mwah on Sunday February 5, 2012.

I am unsure whether it is the wind, or the spray being kicked up by the boat, or whether it is conceivable that I am cold. This seems impossible, in Bangkok, at this time of year. Nevertheless, the driver has donned an impressive looking ski-jacket and is using the hand not on the tiller to fiddle with the zipper. I notice that the North Face logo appears to be sewn on backward, and that the stitching doesn’t quite seem to match the pattern, but he certainly looks warm. Overkill for sixteen degrees, maybe, but there is no doubt the wind is cutting. He’s mastered the zipper and reaches his now free hand up to his neck and tucks the amulet there inside the jacket and out of sight.

More throttle. More noise. The wind is cold.

.

There is a tiny hut, a ramshackle collection of planks held together with rusty nails, that sits at half way down my soi. In it are housed a desk, an angle grinder, and a concrete plinth upon which sits a hand-drawn checkers board and enough bottle-tops for two teams of draughts. Singha for red, Heineken for green. The kings have inscrutable Thai symbols scrawled on them with thick blue paint.

This is where the drivers of the motorcycle taxis that ply their services from soi spend their days when they are not running people to work, or weaving wildly down alleys while kids in school uniform ride side-saddle, or doing lackadaisical, effortless, chin-ups on the parts of the street lights that are supposed to hold flowers but instead simply outline smudges on the sky.

They share the space with an old man who makes amulets, and a carefully maintained cage containing the old man’s tame bird. This is a vicious black and yellow thing who is let out on weekends to terrorise the local dogs and will scuttle and swoop back to the cage at the sound of metal on the grindstone, or from the slightest whistle from the old man.

On Sundays, the motorcyclists sit in a circle around the checkers, still flaunting jaunty orange vests, and pass around a glass bottle of coke that has been judiciously topped up with Sang Som. The bottle stays full, but I notice the colour of the liquid inside gets lighter and lighter as the sky darkens.

..

“Can you hold it?” she says.
“Hold what?”
“The bottle. Hold the bottle.”
“What in god’s name are you doing?”
“Mixing them. There’s enough space in the bottle now.”
“You’ve never done this before, have you?”
“What, why?”
“You pour the spirit into the can. That way it just looks like a normal can. It’s actually quite hard to look inconspicuous when you are standing in an airport taking slugs from a bottle of imitation vodka”
“Oh, yeah. Okay.”
“That man over there is laughing at you. Hell, I’m laughing at you.”
“Give me the can.”

And I do.

.

We dip to the right to avoid one of the idling barges and an arc of spray slaps the oily water beside the longtail. The engine cuts and we roll forward as our wake overtakes us.

“It’s because of China,” the man sitting opposite me says, as the driver opens the throttle again, sliding us back over the wake and onward.
“What’s because of China?” I ask.
“The weather. A low pressure system up there and it throws the whole thing out of whack. It’ll be another two weeks at least.”
“And then?”
“Hopefully some bloody heat. This isn’t right, not for March.”
“It’s nice though, right? A break from it.”
“Sure, if it was a break, day or two, right. But it’s been a week. Close to. Upsets the locals. Don’t like that,” and he stubs the butt roughly against the hull and flicks it into the river. “You saw the paper today?”
“The Post?”
“Yeah, that idiot with the earthquake predictions. Tsunamis. Wipe out half the fuckin’ coast down there . Just like oh-seven.”
“I didn’t see that,” and I’m thinking about 2007. Really? It was then. Earlier, surely?
“Some nutjob from up in the provinces. Reckons they’ve predicted every major disaster in the past twenty years. Flawless record. Blah blah blah. Well now my wife is too scared to travel down that way and half the bloody office are acting like it’s Armageddon rather than a holiday. Reckon if he’s that bloody good he should’ve had a go against Paul,” he says as he glares at another oncoming barge.
“I’m sorry, who’s Paul?” I ask.
“The octopus, mate” and now I am utterly baffled.
“The octopus? What octopus?”

..

The two sisters are identical but, dressed as they are, you have to look closely to see it. One has donned a bright pink apron, pockets overflowing with notes of small denominations. She works the cleaver rhythmically against a rubbery octopus, clinically separating limbs from body. Thump, thump, thump, swipe. The other wears a simple black polo shirt and a silver charm, and rolls tiny bags of lurid vermilion chilli-sauce between her fingers. They move in harmony, the cleaver and the fingers working taut rubber bands over the lip of tiny bags. Two bodies as one. She’s created a small pyramid of the bags, and it glistens like a tiny shrine to some god of fire, or fertility, or clay-red dirt. A shrine with an offering of tentacled limbs piled below it.

.

“Soccer person? Football, whatever” he says, and looks ruefully at the cigarette packet that’s been soaked by the river water.
“I guess. To play. A bit.”
“You didn’t watch the World Cup? -” and then I remember Paul, the octopus who chose winners from a box and who was now, if I recalled correctly, stone-cold dead.
“- picked the winners for ages. Magic run. I’d trust him over some bloke with a fold-up table, tarot cards and a couple of plastic chairs. Thieves, the lot of them.” This makes me think of an article I read the other day stating that Australia now holds the ignoble honour of having the highest per capita rate of gambling in the world.
“I think he’s dead,” I say.
“What? The article was just today.”
“No, the octopus. After the World Cup. I think,” although I am less certain now than I was a few minutes ago.
“Someone probably had a flutter that went the wrong way, eh. Not a good job to have, octopus.”

.

The river is the colour of freshly-poured miso, and the sediment swirls behind us in ever diminishing loops. Fibonacci is at the tiller, and I’m watching the angle of the sun as it tips behind Rama 9.

..

At the mouth of the soi, near where the motorbikes are parked, I notice the bird pecking at something curled on the ground. It is the skeleton of a frog, and the tiny fingers are splayed wide, clutching at air.

…

On the way to the river today, I saw a girl coming out of Seven Eleven, letters on her shirt in a sharp abrupt sans, “I’d rather die terrified than live forever.” And I would.

Or at least that’s what I said in the hypothetical.

Posted in Mwah on Sunday May 29, 2011.

The motorcycles swarm and huddle in the shade under the bridge, like so many angry bees, waiting for the green disc up ahead to light up, so they can soar back into the sunshine. Summer is like that, here. I see us jumping from pocket of shade to pocket of shade, using the accusatory fingers of high rise apartment buildings to block the sun. These are our gnomons, writ large, as we scurry across the dial plate of our world, tracing the hours with our harried, sweaty feet.

They have made the telephone boxes bombproof. Over the past six months the men in dark blue shirts have worked, disassembling glass boxes and replacing them with dull grey plinths. The metal is cool to the touch, even in the hot sun, and several inches thick. I note the notches at the edge and wonder if they can be used as firing positions. Whether they would be used as firing positions. What they would look like with a dozen burning tyres rolled up against them, thick oily smoke blotting out the sun just as effectively as the high rises.

In one of these new metal boxes stands a lady wearing a full motorcycle helmet, visor pulled down, clasping two full bags of cooking oil. She is wearing a bright pink apron, with a portrait of His Royal Highness. Waiting for her own buzzing velocipede to scoop her up and transport her to the cooking stove. Nearby, out in the fierce sun, is the woman who cleans the two hundred metres of road between the lamp posts and the bridge. She is emptying a mug of coffee over the stained patch where the garbage piles up every night. She is smiling, as she reaches for her broom. She is always smiling, always says hello.

I wonder what you would say of all this, if you were here. There are seven space invaders, pinned up on bridges and under overpasses in Bangkok, their tiny mosaic tiles smeared with dirt and grime. The closest is on Surawong, on the crumbling facade at the entrance to a Chinese cemetery, and it is blue and red.

Mach’ es wie die Sonnenuhr: zähl’ die heitren Stunden nur!

Posted in Mwah on Sunday February 13, 2011.

He will win the next hand. I know this because from where I stand, under the soft blue glow of three enormous Chinese characters, set in neon, I can see his cards, both of their cards. There are two others here, standing in this crisp Shanghai evening, and they are watching too. They stand apart from me, in avocado-green uniforms, leaning against identical mops, and stare as the players reveal their hands.

From the outside, it is hard to get a sense of the interior’s scale. The room, benches pressed against the windows, is a cavernous excavation at the centre of the red-ochre castle that is the Australia pavilion here. The ceiling is draped in huge ribbons of lime, aqua and hot pink: streaks of painted colour suspended in the air. I take a final slug from the long-neck, and reach up to loosen my tie. It has been a long day.

He wins the next hand.

I toss my empty beer, leave my green-suited companions to their furtive cigarettes, and walk back inside. In the corner, atop a tiny stage, the Sneaky Sound System are playing to crowd of a hundred Chinese, who stand and look confused, clutching souvenir bags, stuffed toy koalas and assorted ephemera. Connie Mitchell is dressed in an outfit that approximates a space suit designed in consultation with David Bowie, and dances in short, abrupt movements as she plunges into the next song.

There is a neat division, then, between the Australians, most kitted out in Australia Pavilion staff gear, going nuts, and the Chinese crowd, grinning nervously and snapping photos of the flailing white people. The pavilion staff do their best: wheeling and spinning through the spectators, as they try to get people on their feet, but the crowd are having none of it. They form a neat semicircle in front of the dancing Australians, and hold their cameras aloft.

The guy next to me, tall, with a wild mop of reddish brown hair, leans in, “We’re playing outside, after this. Tell the bar you’re staff, and they’ll kick a couple of bucks off the beers.”

.

So we do, and an hour later are nursing a small collection of empty Coopers bottles, as the house band launch into an acoustic cover of Land Down Under, the flute part energetically recreated, but noticeably lacking men from Brussels, sandwiches, or ever a Koala on a leash. We can see the pavilion’s freight exit, tucked neatly behind a stall, now closed, advertising meat pies and ‘authentic’ cookies. A trickle of staff begin to emerge from the door behind the loading dock, in groups of twos and threes, and then the Sneakys appear, and Tim jogs over to grab a photo, and I hold the fort.

Today has been the quietest day of the entire expo, but there’s still a decent crowd here, sat in the rapidly cooling Shanghai evening, as floodlights begin to be switched off and people crowd into huge pedestrian snakes that wind their way toward the subway. “So, apparently there’s a party at the Latvian pavilion,” Tim announces as he returns, “Shall we wander over?”

I lean back and look at the pillars supporting the huge bridge directly behind me. The sound of the flute seems oddly out of place here, in this concrete playground where just a few years ago there was nothing but mud, and grass, and the lapping wakes from the steel ships headed upriver.

“Thanks all, we’ll be here all month.”

..

The citizens of Latvia seem to have decided that their national identity can be represented by two elements, notable above all others. These are extreme sport, and also flowers. To this end, the room’s walls are covered in huge murals showcasing the floral biodiversity of the country, and in the middle of the space is a giant glass tube, enclosing an enormous fan.

This on-demand wind tunnel is the centrepiece of Latvia’s themed self-expression. As we enter, a man in a white jumpsuit and helmet is doing lazy back flips, floating in apparent zero-gravity. He extends his arms and is tugged upwards, soaring toward the roof some twenty metres above. At the base of the tunnel, away from the push of the whirling turbines, two men struggle into person-size hot-dog suits, and then sprint in opposite directions around the glass.

As they reach the same point on the far side of the room they careen into each other and the smaller one crashes to the floor, legs kicking frantically against the plush red sausage, as he attempts to regain his balance and stand up. Above, the white suited gentleman in the wind tunnel is fist pumping to the thumping euro-house, suspended six metres above the ground, perfectly upside down.

It is a moment of such utter surrealism that I am, for a moment, struck dumb. I stand at the entrance and gape. Tim stops beside me, “Cor. That’s cool,” and he pushes forward toward the beer tap in the corner. A crew of five Chinese split from the crowd members who are staring transfixed at the man inside the tunnel and break into a synchronised dance to the song that is blaring from the speakers. Everything is lit in a light pastel green, shot through with red lasers that pick up details on the flower-covered walls.

I feel like a mediaeval peasant who’s been catapulted through time, to land in the middle of Times Square. A bearded and bedraggled wastrel, taking in the gleaming neon with a horrified, open-eyed stare, before he sinks to his knees, head in hands, and weeps. There is too much happening here, too much newness, and nothing to anchor it against. I turn around and step outside.

…

On the stairs that curl downward and out of sight, are a collection of beautiful twenty-somethings, all with matching lanyards announcing that they are staff. A group of girls are parked on the steps, passing a cigarette lazily to each other. I collapse next to them, and turn to look behind me, at the massed crowd.

“What is that?” I ask, “What was Latvia thinking?”
“You should see Spain. There is a giant baby. Like a car, some small car, that big. It has eyes and they are dead,” says the one closest to me, as she passes the cigarette back to her friend.
“Dead?”
“I do not know if this is how you say in English, but it is like real, but not. Because it looks real, but not so real to be the exact, it is more, uh, dead.”
“Right, uncanny valley.”
“Valley?”
“When something is almost real, but not quite real enough. And because it’s almost real, it makes you feel uncomfortable. Like, I don’t know. Like robots that move like people do or, or movies. Like animated movies where the characters look almost real.”
“This is a valley? Like a space between hill?” and she makes a gesture with her hands approximating a vee.
“It’s called uncanny valley. I don’t know why.”
“Well, the baby is in the valley, and the Latvia is crazy.”
“That is the most sense anyone has made to me tonight.”

It turns out that they are the staff from the Estonian pavilion, and they have just found out that there is a competing party at the Angolan pavilion, at the other end of the expo grounds. They are debating whether it is worth walking the significant distance required to go and check it out. Apparently party stands-offs like this are common, and it is a mark of status if you can throw the party that manages to attract everyone, all the staff from the rapidly assembled tower apartment blocks that surround the grounds here, sucking the punters from the far reaches until it is dawn and the army of cleaners shuffle in to hit the reset switch.

We are going to Angola.

…

Distance is screwy here. As with so much in China, what is represented as adjacent squares of colour on a neatly labelled map turns out to be a thirty minute slog through the darkness, the hulking polygonal shapes of unlit modern architecture looming like fragments of a half-remembered nightmare.

We forge past the still traditional shapes of the Asian and Pacific pavilions, which recall temples and monuments, gaudy and ostentatious, and head toward the more theoretical geometry of the European pavilions. Further still, and the African buildings are smaller, squarer and considerably less refined. It is quite clear that there is a party happening at the Angolan building.

Tall, well-dressed, Africans cluster around the entrance, and an impossibly skinny model, microphone in hand, interviews a man that appears to be wearing a barely contained bag of railway spikes, wrapped in a tea towel on his head. Inside, it is madness. A black, barely-lit square, people everywhere and the Chinese dancers from Latvia in a corner, having taken up residency.

I talk to someone who claims to be royalty, and someone else who claims he is full of shit. I dance. I sweat. I realise that my quota for the bizarre has long been exceeded and that all the strangeness is beginning to press at the seams, threatening to spill out in a stream of brightly-lit capsules, rendered on architect’s foolscap and then made massive. I push my way back into the cold and begin the walk home.

Outside, away from the huddled crowds, I pause for a moment to get my bearings. I feel a hand on my back, and a smiling Filipino introduces himself and points me in the right direction. He’s a musician, playing in the stage show, but wants to be an architect. He talks about Gehry, and the tensile strength of steel plating, and the place of deconstructivism in these temporary structures, and this all seems very relevant as we stride through the darkened architectural canyons of this pre-dawn space.

The final building I remember seeing is that of Finland, and it looks like an iceberg, shining and adrift on a sea of concrete, alone in the dark.

Posted in Mwah on Sunday January 23, 2011.

‘Chee cheong fan, one please,’ I ask the lady who is stooped, scowling, behind the counter.
‘Pork. You can, ah?’ she retorts.
‘No problem’
‘Chilli? Dai, ah. Dai dai.’
‘Please, and a coffee. Kopi o. Siew dai, okay?’
‘Can. You sit, ah. I bring’ and she smiles as she takes the plastic note and inspects the tiny transparent pattern in the corner.

The two aunties that run this hole-in-the-wall coffee house at the arse end of Chinatown have a polished double act that indicates many years together. They yell to each other from opposite ends of the shophouse, and create a bubble of bustle and bluster as they stomp up and down, slapping the tables with sodden rags. The woman at the register grabs a plate, piles it high with food, and then passes it back to the other auntie without a glace, confident in the knowledge that a hand with be there, ready to receive it and relay it to its destination.

It is the first Sunday after New Year, and even the flies seem lazy. They buzz in slow circles, not bothering to land. The streets are near deserted, shops shuttered and barred, and the only traffic an open-backed truck full of laborers in matching blue shirts. It does a slow lap of the block, looking for shade, and then parks under an overhanging awning and turns on its hazard lights. No one in the back moves.

At the front of the shop, perched on the myriad burners, beneath contraptions girdled with frayed wires and caked-on fat, are an array of pots, steaming. I can smell the rich anise tang of bah ku teh, and the fatty note of pork hock, until the ancient grinder is cursed at, hit, and forced into service. The aroma of coffee floods through the shop. At the table next to me three people in business shirts, a heaped plate of kaya-toast in front of them, talk of the year ahead.

From the street comes the sound of the Indian temple up the road and, if I crane my head, I can just make out the heaped piles of shoes sitting on the pavement, beneath the watchful eyes of a porcelain cow, liquid eyes glossy in dead painted perfection. “This year, I get fit,” the eldest of the group says, as he grabs a piece of toast, smeared with butter and smothered in sticky kaya, “start to run, lah.”

When it arrives, clunked onto the table with a nod, the coffee is black, viscous and strong, exactly as a cup Hock Chew’s finest should be. My eyes water as I take the first sip, and I concentrate on the chopstick dexterity required to pick up the slippery cylinders of rice flour that are my breakfast. At the neighbouring table, the final piece of toast is snapped up and fingers wiped on greasy napkins. “It’s 2011. A good year. Heng, ah.”

It is, and it will be. I can feel it.

Posted in Mwah on Monday January 3, 2011.

Time for another year of travel. I took a dump from Dopplr and worked out where I’ve been. A little less this year than last year but still a decent crack, I feel.

Adelaide *
Auckland
Bangkok *
Brisbane
Canberra *
Chiang Mai
Hobart
Ho Chi Minh *
Hue
Kanchanaburi
Krabi
Kracheh
Mae Sot
Melbourne *
Parramatta *
Paxe
Perth *
Phnom Penh *
Savannakhet
Shanghai
Siem Reab
Singapore *
Stung Treng
Sukhothai
Sydney *

25 in total. One or more days were spent in each place. Those cities marked with an * were visited multiple times on non-consecutive days.

Posted in Travel on Sunday December 19, 2010.

She feels the beads form, clustering on her forehead and running toward her nose. A scattering of droplets, pulling together like a splash of mercury on a rutted concrete floor. One runs into her eye and she blinks fast, reflexively, then again, more slowly. She can feel the heaviness in her eyelashes, and see the softening at the periphery as her vision greys and the water forms. She realises she is blinking with the strobes, blinking at that silent lightning, blinking against a wall of heat, blinking back tears. Vivian has grabbed her arm, and it’s not happening. Not like this.

“You need to back off.” she says, “You need to understand.”
“Understand what?”
“Understand that just because you don’t understand something, or don’t have the context or background to take any sort of informed position on the subject, it doesn’t mean that I’m wrong, it just means you’re running your fucking mouth again.”
“That’s very British of you.”
“Hey?”
“Runnings of the mouth. Informed positions. Context.”
“Non-sequiturs. Fucking great.”
“Nik, pull it together.”

She spots a bench and pulls herself onto it. Looks out over the massed people. Doesn’t look back to see if Viv is following.

.

You come in late. How late I’m not sure, but by the way you look around and gauge the crowd’s reaction I think you’ve just got here. This is strange, because you’re dripping wet. So are we, sure, but we’ve been throwing ourselves off the walls in sweat-stained madness for what seems like hours. At the front, through a haze of fog, or condensation, or perhaps just more sweat, Z-trip is working like a madman, ducking and shifting from foot to foot as he drops track after track of gold. I don’t understand why more DJs don’t play music like this. Music that makes being trapped underground in a tiny concrete box not at all claustrophobic, but an understated euphoria, like a barely remembered party, the heat stripping the intensity of the memory even as it forms.

It is at least fifty degrees in here, condensation on the roof and the baffles that were flush against the windows at the start of the night now sagging in the heat. The gap between foam and frame large enough to see the shoes of the hundreds of people standing outside. They won’t get in, not tonight, it is packed, shoulder to shoulder, and sweat on everything. I flash you a smile as you climb onto the bench next to us and dance. Then the glassie does a round and pulls you down, and pushes you toward me. “You stay down. Stay down, or you’re out.”

You shout at him and wrinkle your nose, tiny crenulations edging toward your forehead as they displace freckles, then turn and yell something to me that is lost in the pounding bass. I lean in again but still can’t hear a thing but the shape of words, the hint of consonants. I can’t place the accent immediately, and the noise is making it very hard to distinguish. I dislike this. It’s either Pacific North West, or Canadian, but there’s a distinct Australian twang and your phrasing is all ocker. Z-trip cues a Dead Prez song and the crowd surges forward, sodden clothing clinging to everyone. A guy in a flannelette shirt catches your hip and I grab your shoulder as you stumble. And we dance. And we sweat. And it is disgusting and awesome. This is base hedonism, and I love it.

You say something I can’t catch, and I lean in, lips against your ear. “I can’t hear anything. It’s sweat on sweat,” I say, “we’re just slipping against each other.”

..

We push upstairs into the cold and suddenly my dress is clinging to me, and steam rises from my shoulders. It is freezing, and Viv has disappeared. The backpackers mill around the entrance as they negotiate lifts or decide to stay put, fingers twisting knots in the hostel-issued lanyards around their necks. Cattle marked in clip-on crimson. The more dedicated drinkers have quarantined a section of plastic chairs and are arguing with bouncer who is pointedly telling them to pack it in. It is 3 in the morning. It is a Monday. I have to work in five hours.

I press my back against the tree and call, dialing with one hand as the other works a cigarette out of the pack. Three taps. Muscle memory. Her phone’s off, which means she’s gone. Gone and is pissed. I hope this means she’s has pulled, because that will be easier tomorrow. Less drama, less tersely worded texts, and less being pulled behind the bar before shift for the expected apology and debrief. He squats beside me, and inspects his top, a blue shirt turned black, heavy with sweat. The last taxi pulls from the rank. I need to make a decision. Have already made a decision.

“So, I can explain my disgusting state, but how’d you manage to get so saturated?”
“We were at the Waldorf. Someone got us into the pool on the roof. I didn’t have anything with me, so I went in the dress. Then this seedy old guy turned up who I think took a fancy to me. Anyway, Viv knows the bouncer here so we jumped the line, ducked in.”
“You picked the night for it.”
“I’m freezing,” thinking, why won’t you ask.
“I’m five minutes from here. Want another drink?”
“I wouldn’t mind a towel actually”
“Could probably stretch to that, as long as you promise not to laugh at the prints.”
“The prince?”
“Pictures. It’s a soulless, heartless, serviced apartment. How do you feel about plastic tulips?”

I don’t care about plastic tulips.

…

I kick the empty bottle toward the fridge. The blunted knife snicks as it ruts against the glass chopping board, and I’m having to ungracefully saw these limes open. My brother would have a fit if he saw me, first at the knife, then at the glass. The light above the bench jiggles madly as it swings away from where I’ve bumped it with my head. “The tulips aren’t so bad, eh. It just feels like my Gran’s”. She sounds so much like Mags, same timing, same appropriated slang, same dropped vowels. Looks like her too. It’s messing with my head.

“I don’t get it, your accent seems to be parked somewhere between BC and Bendigo, and you eh’ed me about five times on the way home. So are you a Canadized Aussie, or an Aussified Canuk?”
“Melbourne.”
“Huh.”
“My mother died,” you say, “and after that I moved overseas. Thought I’d get away. It’s been eight years now. Mostly Vancouver. Whistler, three years there”
“The snow?” I ask.
“The snow, and the escape. Things are crazy there, complete party town. I’ve done some crazy stuff. You know, on the slopes after work, there’s… Every night it’s something. Some house party, some après thing at one of the resorts. And there’s booze and there’s coke and there’s sex. I did some bad stuff, and I think I lost myself for a while.”
“The escape from the escape.”
“You get wrapped up in it. Consumed. But I still think I’m a good person, I still think I can do good things. That’s why I’m doing what I do. Working toward something. I’m a good person,” as you focus intently on the ice in your drink. Look up. Meet my eyes and then look away.
“But why Canberra?”
“Because it’s the opposite. It’s measured. It’s balanced. I don’t have to worry about getting into trouble.”
“Says the girl wrapped in towels because she broke into a hotel at midnight on a Monday night, to swim on the roof in her only clothes,” I say, and laugh, but break off when you glance up again, sharply. There is pain in your eyes.

….

I wake at six and he’s snoring. Outside, sandbags slump like dead kangaroos in the morning mist, their tan shapes huddled in sodden clumps. There are no blinds on the windows, and as the sun rises above the pool across the road, the dew catches the first rays of light and refracts. Sparkles. Lines across the roof in a lazy kaleidoscope of half colours.

Canberra is remarkably quiet in the mornings. It is measured, and balanced, and I am beginning to suspect it is not at all what I need. But it is so very hard to tell. Like usual, like always. I can see the dress, hanging over the back of chair, and it looks dry.

I roll back over and shut my eyes.

Posted in Oz on Wednesday November 10, 2010.

I finally fixed the page of (very) broken links to favourite posts, and thought I would share for those of you that haven’t seen this stuff before.

I’ve split it into four sections, the first dealing with the everyday and mundane, like the light on card-yards at sunset, or the memories of a childhood totem. I also wrote about ruining colour film, leaving 2046, and that time she was raging at the world, and I couldn’t work out why.

I wrote about travel, and the early-morning smells of pakoras in Jalgaon, and the town in southern Laos that just installed their first traffic light. When I was in Prague, we talked about glial cells and sex, and outside the snow kept falling, although nowhere near as much as in a station in snow country, Japan. Another train was the one in Taiwan, and the gaggle of aunties surrounding it.

Sometimes I write about things that hunker down at the edge of my thoughts and scratch and scratch and scratch until I let them out for a run. If ever been curious what William Shakespeare has to do with stealing canoes, you might enjoy Leschenaultia. The Lord of the Forest is about a trip across the ditch, but is also about trees, and letting go. If you’ve ever wondered whether you had it in you to be a superhero, perhaps you should try Singapore, but not if you’re certain that the world is about to end.

Japan is a fertile ground for stories, particularly when you have friends that enjoy breaking into Alien buildings or swimming with phosphorescent algae amid the lightning. Dizzy knows that old men come a knocking, and old women get that foreigners just don’t understand, while sumo wresters, well, they just like kitsch.

Posted in Textism on Monday October 18, 2010.

Today, the river is green. Clumps of broad-leafed plants stretch from bank to bank, spinning in delicate patterns as they are pulled into eddies that ripple from the centre, where the water runs fast and deep, and the squat barges, heaped high with gravel, spread tresses of silt behind them.

Toward the banks, the plants clog the water, a blanket bunched around the boats manoeuvring between the piers. The surface looks solid and substantial, like the tops of clouds, as the seatbelt sign dings to itself in resignation and you soar upward into the sunlight. I always imagine pulling myself through the window, running down the wing, and swan-diving out into the white.

I want to hop-scotch across these plants. I want to run like a basilisk. I want to be free.

We hit a narrow channel and slow to avoid the curling wake of a passing longtail. A swarm of tiny grasshoppers, green as the plants they’ve leapt off, launch themselves into the air and onto the woman in front of me. There is a wet slap as a catfish hurls itself from under the plants and smacks into the side of the boat, as if in competition with the grasshoppers. The woman doesn’t react at all.

The shrill whistle of the conductor sound from the rear of the boat, as he guides it toward the dock. Endless wolf-whistles to anyone who will listen. We are under the bridge now, in a moment of shade, and in the distance I can see the building that is built but not finished, near-fractal recursions of faux greco-roman balconies stretching 40 floors into the sky, the columns less and less complete the further you crane your neck.

The river is green, and as we whistle our way up against the dock, I remember green Pepsi.

.

“You want green Pepsi?” he says, as the lady with an apron bulging with cutlery leans over to place bowls brimming with thick brown soup in front of us. There are small chunks of meat in here I can identify, and larger ones I can’t.

“Green Pepsi? What?”
“Is special Pepsi. You want, you try?”
“I want. I’ll try.”
“Okay, I go for green Pepsi.”

At this stage, I am imagining one of two things. The first is a special edition bottle, bright green, with energetic Thai script, and with pictures of cavorting, oiled young things, smiling as they frolic over whatever beach or forest setting the men in suits deemed appropriate to “really, like, connect with the demographic.”

The second is a bench, somewhere in this mass of people sat on plastic chairs under the bridge, where sugar syrup and an assortment of tiny bottles are used to concoct whatever bespoke beverage is required for the occasion. I am thinking about green Pepsi. I am thinking about bhang lassie, happy pizza, special cookie and ‘hey mister mister this one just for you special okay?’

Okay.

What I am not expecting is enormous cans of Heineken, and matching green straws. He grins and pushes one across the table. “Green Pepsi!”

The lower balconies of that building behind him are covered in bright green paint. It hurts to take it all in at once, the building, such is the enormity of the spectacle of 40 stories of crumbling opulence, a tall, broken kingdom surrounded by a sea of humanity. It’s not something you expect to see in ascendant Thailand. Instead I think of rural Japan, and of their struggle to retain a sustainable population, as the excess of the bubble years is slowly reclaimed by the trees.

..

I dream of a river with deserted, crumbling schools lining its banks. Where blackbirds swoop between the trees, harassing hawks three times their size. Dragonflies as big as my fist hover above the surface of the river, iridescent and ancient. The train fills with school children and then empties again. Lungs. Like lungs.

I dream of you. I think this is important.

You bound through the glass door, and the house is as it was when I was growing up: orange map of Texas on the back door, potted plants crowding against the glass criss-crossed with fat strips of masking tape, to stop the dogs running through it. The bricks outside are specked with moss.

You throw yourself into my arms and smile, really smile, then nestle your head against my neck.

“How did you know I was back?”
“Your brother called. He said I had to know.”
“He said…”
“We all know.”

I wake and, in the dim light that filters through the curtains, everything is green.

Posted in Mwah on Wednesday August 25, 2010.

Gnarled and pitted wood rests where it has fallen, shapes transformed by the tiny creeping filaments of the moss that covers everything, in this place so textured with age. It is in everything: in the soil woven thick with fibrous, sinewy roots, in the song of the tiny birds that whip amongst the canopy, and in the Maori prayer that echoes through the trees, a complex baritone chant that surrounds the knuckly boughs and reverberates, liquid and substantial. But most of all, it is in him, as he towers above, timeless and massive. There is an air of certainty here. Of inevitability.

Kauris spend the first hundred years of their life fighting to clear the canopy, and to reach into the sun. There are trees of that age scattered around the edges of the clearing and their slender trunks look fragile in comparison to the massive bulk of Tane Mahuta squatted in front of us. This is the world’s largest known kauri, and it is some two and half thousand years old. His name means the “Lord of the Forest” and he is the one that dug his shoulder into the muddy ground, coiled, heaved, and rent Papatuanuku and Ranginui asunder. In this, he created the earth, and the sky, and brought the huddled god-children, blinking, into the light.

I spin a slow circle and take in the vertical abbreviations in endless green, and try and judge their age. It is sobering to think that before these trees reach the sunlight, we will again be returned to dust in the ground. Still he towers above us.

.

A school of fish are pinned to the wall with nails. They spell the Maori word, Koha. It means a gratuity, a gift. The fish are chocolate, and I take one from the wall and chew on it. Behind me, a mountain of butter or, more specifically, a particular mountain modelled in miniature, in butter, shares centre stage with a radio in the shape of pavlova. I am in New Zealand. I ponder if I can get away with taking a second fish.

..

It took longer than we had planned to clear the sprawl of the city of sails, Auckland’s network of freeways, perpetually under-construction, are lined with witches hats and empty in the pre-dawn light.

In time the blocks of prefab industrial buildings give way to the rolling greenery of the hill country, the road ducking and weaving between hedges of scraggly gorse. On the way we talk of the burden of assumed responsibility, and she says, “It’s getting easier, you know, getting easier every day. At first it was demanding, and difficult, and it put me in a bad place. It still is, of course. It still is difficult. I guess there was an element of guilt there, a sense that somehow, in some way, there was something you could have done differently that would have changed things. You have to let that go, or it’ll tear you open, but once you do, it becomes much easier.”

She had mentioned this in December, briefly, as she stood by the window and looked out over the city. A punctuation, a pause, and a furrowed brow before she turned away and pointed out her school, her college, the path we had traced in the rain as we tramped the back streets beside backpackers on the piss. The lines on the hotel window remind me of those painted on the inside of the cabin that undulate as they trace the curve of the fuselage.

…

I have spent fifteen minutes in an unfocused daze glaring at the walls of the cabin. The lines. This is dendrochronology for the jet-set: a record of the passing of designer signed glasses over dappled grey Formica, white linen, and perfect half triangles of folded navy-blue tissue paper. My head rests against the wall of the cabin, and the gentle vibration of the engines rattles my teeth.

I follow these lines as they buck and curve, cut short by dotted plexiglass, and the blue on blue on blue of the early morning Tasman beyond. The Weather Report mutter in my ears in approbation, bass, strings, and the clicking of my teeth an unintended solo.

I have the volume down enough to hear cabin noise and this half-heard jazz is entirely at odds with the Chilean pop, as interpreted by the immaculately-manicured hostie, that issues from the galley behind me, accompanied by the soft clinking of cutlery.

The seat belt sign above me illuminates, dings, and Senores Pasajeros are asked to secure their seatbelts. I drift out of consciousness.

….

The sign, framed in the green and yellow so favoured by the DOC, informs me that this tree is partnered with another. One whose clumpy, knotted branches stretch into the mountainside mists of a pentagonal island several hundred kilometres off the southernmost tip of the four major islands of Japan. I’ve been there too. It took a pre-dawn departure and seven hours hiking up trails set between the roots before we stood at the top and leant back slowly, marvelling at the spread of branches shaped over four thousand years.

Jōmon has rested there since humans huddled in groups around their fires, set between the barrows, shaping tools of bronze. This squatting giant felt the pull of seasons before people had arrived, before roads, before cars, and before the view from the clearing took in the structures erected on the islands in the blue haze of distance. Cranes and gantries that plot the initial point in the parabolas of white scrawled across the sky, tracing the rockets launched from Tanegashima as they claw their way beyond the pull of the earth. That there is evidence standing in front of us of these kind of time frames leads to a very acute feeling of insignificance, and the realisation that we humans, for all our bluster and self-worth, are but a buzzing noise, half-heard, at the edge of the world’s history.

…..

We collapse onto the grass at Manukau, and my heart soars. The spray-flecked breeze brings with it the smell of chips, and the laughter of the kids playing touch with a rolled-up ball of newspaper beside the fountain. I can just make out a santa-hatted figure at the far end of the beach, reaching forward into a yoga pose I cannot identify, nor replicate. We are engulfed by the familiar sounds of summer: that meaty thwomp of a wet tennis ball being lofted into the ocean by a cricket bat, the squawks of those enormous red-beaked gulls as they fossick amongst the kelp, the snap of unfurling canvas in the breeze.

The essence of the Pursuit of Happyness, she says, lies in seeing mistakes, feeling the shape of them, and then laughing them off for their triviality. That y, for example, it has always bugged me, “and that’s the point,” she says, “that’s the whole point of the movie. Seeing the frivolous for what it is and moving past it.” This resonates, the cracks meld, and I stretch back and take in the sun. One of the kids has scored a try and is thumping his chest, newspaper held aloft.

……

This has been a pilgrimage of sorts, I think, a quest to reach out for something spiritual, if spiritual is the right word for we two godless, empty vessels. But there is spirituality, for me, in the wonder I feel in these two places separated by hemispheres. For all the treated pine boardwalks, the shutters of cameras clicking behind me, and the carefully hidden dark green barbed wire wrapped around the base of the tree, there is something beyond measure in the age of this place.

Our fingers wrap, brown on white against green. She is back then, for a second, and I drink it in.

Then it flickers and fades and she recedes. Disconnects. I fail to chase it because I know something has changed. Something fundamental. And from that comes a powerful desire to grasp the present and to shape it. To leap between the connections and to trace them back to their source, and be kinetic and frantic and alive in the way only humans can. For all the crossed paths, confusion, and duality of the past few days, this is good madness. It is transient in a way that is entirely at odds with this place, but that is human, and it lifts me up and gives me purpose.

We look out over the forest. There is a spider crouched on a broad leaf at eye level, powerful jet-black front legs tapering to a rear of mustard yellow, the outline of a smaller spider in reverse, and its whole function centres around this deception. It jerks a few steps backward then leaps forward and is gone, in the perfect choreography of something that is not what it appears to be.

We are here, both of us, in this place beyond time, and we are both thousands of miles away, seagulls chasing each other into the pines and the smell of salty air as irresistible as the call of friends and family, as they collapse onto the grass ahead of us, laughing. The future unfurls beneath my feet. It ripples and shears, and is beautiful in all its scattered, tangled complexity.

Posted in Mwah on Sunday May 30, 2010.