Birthday thoughts.

 

Answers? No, thanks.

I just want to keep on asking questions. Hoping for the mysteries to be more than ever before. 42 is not the answer to anything, and it’s not the end. Unless you’re Elvis Presley, and then, barring some mistaken identity in Walmart or a waffle burn shape, you are gone.

There’s this beach I like to go to which has moods. You wouldn’t guess that straight off the bat, but visit it enough and you’ll see: When the tide is coming in, the rock pools are a foamy flurry, but when the tide is low, the little ecosystems are tiny arrangements of shells, fish, living creatures and seaweed slow dancing to the breeze. 

The sand on that beach can be a range of textures: Soft enough to dig a little castle out of, and coarse enough to turn up brilliant mother-of-pearl shards and unholy digging beasts.

Sometimes, after a spring tide or storm, reeking swathes of kelp litter the strand and provide perches for seagulls. The hunch-shouldered brutes bully each other away from scraps of dead things and shriek above the rolling belch of the waves.

The beach is always the same, but the sun, sky and sea act as sculptors in a contest using the same material, snatching the clay from each other and tinting it backwards and forwards. A plastic bottle wedged between rocks turns out not to carry a romantic missive from another continent, but just one from nature: “10 000 years before I disintegrate”, it whispers, “10 000 years, 10 000 years.”

Trains pass intermittently on a track just metres from the shore, and there will always be one small child lifting a hand to wave as you stand on the rocks. You can wave back, but it’s probably the same child travelling up and down, simply to offer acknowledgment to those who are trying to embrace their isolation as they stare out to an ocean which never pours off the edges of the world.

The smell of coconut hangs in the air from the lotion rubbed on the flesh of the visitors and washed off by the shower which dribbles fresh water into the saline pools. If you stare long enough into the blue-green-white-black void of the surf, you may see a dolphin or a seal, but your eyes will start to hurt so you’ll look away, willing that rock to move again.

Footprints form temporary craters that get filled and emptied every day, brittle, brief reminders that people walked where once a sea creature shoved itself out onto the sand with fins and slid off into the hills wondering why it couldn’t find fish to eat.

My children would report, having visited there: We went to the beach, the one with the pool. We looked at the rocks and picked up shells. We dug holes and had fun.

A poet took her wax paper-wrapped ham sandwiches with her in a scarred leather satchel and pushed into the breakers, sank like a badly reviewed volume of verse.

Bring on 43.

Plathitudes

Goodbye is an echo which never fades. 

It hangs, reverberating, off canyon walls of grief. 

Words ill-chosen and clumsy, a distraction from the warm greeting which was life.

They’re shades, wraiths and mists drifting over the graves of the dead, blending and folding into themselves in a constant drift. 

Light retreats from them and the darkness consumes them.

What can be said of this absurdity we call life? 

That it can be a consummation of humour and love and that it consists of nothing at all. 

A legacy written in invisible ink; 

A vapour.

Nothing survives the analysis of the living, flawed with hope, fear and optimism. 

The contents of a beast’s belly cannot criticise that which consumed it. 

A butterfly’s wings blown free of colour, rendered translucent flightless. 

The echo of a doorbell in an empty house.

In the light the creatures are cornered in shadows, but in the dark they slip across the floor, scattering to their nocturnal pursuits.

A clock chimes, but nobody hears, and so it chimes again. 

A tar-coloured bird giggles in the darkness and then yells as if it is day.

But it isn’t.

A copper bowl sings with the strokes of a leather mallet.

Goodbye is an echo which never fades,

Goodbye is an echo which never fades,

Goodbye is an echo which fades, fades, fades.

There’s memory held in shades, shades, shades.

Death is the negative snap of life.

Life, inverted.

Temptation

It felt like roots. Light tendrils gripping his veins. In a panic, he tried to remember something happy. A firm stalk to grasp as his feet slipped against the mud. For some reason, the word “fig” slipped with ease into his head.

He remembered the stench of the fig of his childhood. The way the fruit smelt as it lay rotting next to the pool, and the way that smell dragged the fruit bats clapping their wings out of the dark like admirers of a cult leader. Clap, clap, in the dusk.

They’d gorge themselves on the ripe fruit, and then shit down the walls of the house in purple streaks.

It looked like blood in the slow autumn sunset.

He didn’t mind too much about the massacre happening on his parent’s wall, but, instead, went to the garage, where the chemicals were kept. The HTH for the pool, the Jeye’s fluid for the drains. His neighbour had shown him how to let the Jeyes dribble into the HTH in a jar and then bubble as the chemicals refused to get along… Explode…

A while later, his friend lay in the hospital bed, crying without sound as the fluid seeped through the thin tube into his veins. Living, not happy.

The burns doctors laughed as they shared pots of coffee in the cafeteria. The hats of the coffee urns dipping as they boiled. A sandwich sat under the lights, waiting for a surgeon to point at it wearily. The surgeon’s wife lay at home, crying as a character from a soapie fell out of love. Again.

He knew the dirty smell of his friend- the way blonde hair smelled as it fizzed into flames. And he knew that the time of childhood was past… The time of making fires for no reason and living without consequences. No fires without burns.

On the radio, an advertisement for detergent was playing.

Misadventure

There were ripples around the room. Mainly because the toilet u-bend had been smashed during the party last night. A palpable silence was dutifully poked by the small crowd which shuffled uncomfortably from foot to foot to foot, like a group of sheepish college students waiting for the cue to start a flashmob. None came.

The police were on the way. The detective had sounded grumpy when he’d ordered them all to stand still until he could get there, but that could have been the fried egg he was chewing, especially since a big glob had dripped onto his tie while he was talking to the hung-over party people. It was his favourite tie, too. The one his favourite barmaid had once told him “brought out his eyes”. He wasn’t too sure what that meant, exactly; he just liked the way R2D2 was dead centre if he tied it right.

He barked a gravelly cough as he pulled into the long, curved driveway in front of the guesthouse, the chipped gravelled surface echoing him. Checking to see no one was looking, he buried his cigarette butt under the stones, not noticing the long tendrils of cat poo which curled up at him. he driveway was a giant litter basket to a loose alliance of two Siamese cats, both of which were peering at the man as he looked first through the windows, then the keyhole before knocking on the front door.

Nothing happened.

Gingerly, the detective pushed the door open and stared at the low puddle of water which was lapping at the ball and claw-footed entrance table. A paper plate with what appeared to be nik naks on it floated past.

He called out.  A muffled voice came from a door behind a spiral staircase. On inspection, it belonged to a man wearing a muffler. It had been chilly last night.

The detective took in the scene. Possibly ten youngsters wearing what could only be described as fancy undress. Partially naked, somewhat covered by feather boas, voluminous hats and items of spandex they all gazed at their feet. On a purple sofa, one was obviously asleep, face down, arms at his sides. One of the cats was sitting on the reclining man’s backside, forming an even more bizarre image. 

Muffled man sobbed.

So, what’s the story here? The detective asked, clueless as to forming his own conclusions.

Phobe, the man gasped. He held out his iPhone, and waved at it as if he never wanted to see it again.

The detective held it between his fingers as if it was a dead bird. Muffled man shuffled through the water and retrieved it, swiped his way through to the saved video screen. Pressed play.

The detective looked at the small screen. It had been filmed in this room, that he could see, but a neater, less damp incarnation of the room. Ten kids sitting quietly, reading, knitting, playing chess. One suddenly appeared to have some sort of seizure, and horrible music blared out. Inexplicably, the room was suddenly alive with dancing party people with a mixture of hats, lycra and... nothing. Hell’s Village People.

Muffled man shook his hand at the phone as the music stopped. He had goosebumps on his legs where his cycling shorts stopped. A woman behind him sniffed and brushed a blue feather off her cheek.

Plaaakkkk, muffled man said. Plaaaaaaakiiid.

The detective looked again at the person on the sofa who hadn’t moved despite the noise on the phone. The cat looked up at him, stretched and stepped onto the back of the seat, twisting its claws into the upholstery.

The man was not asleep. He was dead.

All at once the room began to spin, but it was just the detective trying to get his head around last night’s nightcaps. 

What’s going on?

It wasn’t our fault/I promise/we didn’t mean any harm/and now he’s dead, a girl gushed the sentence as if it was one breathless word.

We all planned to do the Harlem Shake and have a party but Mickey didn’t get up and at first we thought he was just planking and then we realised he wasn’t breathing so we thought maybe he’d thought up a new one, uh, corpsing, so we left him, but then he was still there this morning and now he’s.... she blabbed

Deb! Muffled man gasped.

The detective shook his head and splashed his way out of the room. In the driveway, he called the coroner. A hooting distracted him- looking up, he saw a naked man squatting on the roof of the house near the chimney. Twit twoo, called naked man.

Damn owlers, muttered the detective, fingering his stained tie.

Bin day

The hunter is hunched over in the morning fog, his shoulders squared by the chill and the years of bad living. It’s been a long time since he could stand up straight- decades since he lined up with his classmates outside the hall, lines shining on his blazer from when he tried to iron it once, proud.

He’s shaking slightly, the wind whistling through his dried lips onto his deserted cemetery of a mouth. Nobody else is around, and that’s good. It’ll give him a chance to get to the good stuff: the bottles, cardboard and other salvageables in the bins left out on the pavements for the garbage truck.

Lights are switched on and then angrily off again in the distance as sleeping dog owners are roused by their barking pets. An burglar alarm perhaps a kilometre away has been whining for some time.

He flips the lid on the wheelie bin. The stench had made the owner of the bin retch a little when he dragged it outside, but the hunter doesn’t notice it anymore. Oblivious to the leftovers wrapped in newspaper, the nappies and sanitary napkins folded in on themselves, he follows the clinking sounds all the way to the jars and bottles. Slips them into his sack.  Holds one up to the amber of the streetlamp and coughs. Spits.

On to the next one. He’ll make a few bucks with this load. In his mind he’s mixing his fantasies- in one he’s buying bottles and bottles of cheap wine and throwing a party outside the furniture store where they’ve set up huge speakers and blast loud music on Saturdays. He’ll dance on the pavement and say funny things to the people who will sidestep past him into the road, frowning, not making eye contact. In another dream, he’s parking his car outside the pizza restaurant, going inside for pizza and beers, and then tipping the car guard with abandon, because, shame, the car guard probably comes from some hellhole of a country where he couldn’t be a radiographer anymore and had to flee with his family.

The glow of dawn brings him back to the street. The birds sound like they’re offering each other coffee up there in the trees. Coffeecoffeecoffeeteateatea, they cry.

He swings up the lid to the bin. Blinks. A doll’s hand wrapped in an old blanket has startled him. Then it twitches.

He drops the lid of the bin in alarm. Who to call? He tries to imagine who looks after babies in bins. Not the police, surely, the swaggering, barrel-chested men who have too often rolled him into their vans with unnecessary force. No. Too violent. Not the homeowners who scream at him to stop lying, stop drinking, to get a job. Not the hookers with their vacant faces, the only light in their eyes are drug-fuelled embers. He can’t call his mom or dad. They’re long dead. Down in the tangled grass amongst the other old bones, an unmarked wooden cross above them.

He thinks about running to the night shelter, but he’s not allowed there, either, since the confusion about the cold showers; he’d forgotten to check that it was the men’s turn- how the old woman with the endless folds of breasts and belly had gasped at him with her toothless mouth and clutched her facecloth to her body, as if it could have helped redeem her modesty.

There’s a rustle in the bush next to him, and a rat slips into the drain. He thinks about the children’s home nearby, and the kids in their massive jerseys and shorts, all cheekbones and gap-teeth. He considers the jail cells where he’s seen the kids become dead-eyed killers, slaves to the gangsters.

He thinks about life on the streets. The scraps, the pain the noise, and a trickle of snot dribbles out of his nose as he weeps for the baby and walks away, old wine bottles clinking against his hipbones.

The truck grinds and rumbles in the distance.