The Grand Tour

The pale chinless girl could be a family member in a  portrait by Gainsborough. Instead of  the bleaching fluorescence behind her it is possible to imagine foliage, instead of the expensive tee-shirting, satin. She is speaking of shopping. We listen to her rapid clipped narration allowing no interruption with a tense fascination.

Dubai. She opens  her eyes to convey limitlessness, the infinity of the spheres.
It  took my mother and me two full days. Literally  and we only really covered a wing.
The skating rink's huge and there's Candilicious.  But it is so massive you would never see it all.

Someone has experienced  similar wonderment  in Las Vegas. But, then she had not realised until her last day that  there was a regular mall where average people went where you could buy things that weren't labels.
The chinless girl is amazed  how someone could  be in Las Vegas for a week  and not know where this mall was.
It is just off the main strip, there are signs everywhere. Come on.  But really L.A. is so much  better  in terms of high quality anyway.

We see the movie.  Her  on Rodeo Drive leafing judiciously through a rack of delights, in the shadow of  passing celebrities.  It gives us all pause.

Someone quite timid  has been to Paris.  It had some good shops.
Well it has some good department stores, the girl says, but the malls are really awful.
She did not like Paris much at all. It was so old and  there is  so much smoking in the malls. They  were all so smokey they made her sick.

We see  her pale expressionless face, green in a  dense pall surrounded by ancient buildings and average people who smoke and have no idea.

Entry

People watching.
Defences, released by way of
Interest, in the variety of
Involvement, absolved from
Judgement, the  abeyance of
Objectivity,  arising from
Passivity, involved in
Relaxation, evoked by
Self, the  transparency of
 

Carnevale

A  father, taking his two small children to school has positioned his son in the bright morning sunlight against the  shiny galvanised iron wall of one of the housing units. The son is wearing  a black cape with a red raised collar.  He screws up his pale little face and squints into the sunlight and lens. His mouth is filled with plastic fanged teeth. An  older sister, costumeless, watches on with the  intense reserve of a sibling.

A man dressed in smart casual work clothes has the red face and pointed ears of a Lucifer. He stops momentarily to lick away the black grease paint that has spread from his lips to his teeth. He glances suddenly self-conscious at the passing traffic as if caught gazing at himself  in a mirror.

Co workers.

The man  has seen everything that has happened in his dynamic work place from  its recent  origins to it current insecure present. He notes that it  has a high turn, over just in the time we have been there there have been 20 or more like 30 people who have gone.

The young English woman  does not want to be drawn. She has been forced by another worker  to make salad last night for a  farewell, her own is coming up. She does not eat salad much, it has been a challenge. She  is moving on to another city  where she will be very busy with an expanded role.

The man would not be popular but possibly  not actively disliked. His relentless need to witness and describe would make colleagues  uneasy.  Mention of him among others would lead to a momentary  silence before a  change of   topic. Only someone brash and outspoken would risk a  derogatory comment.   He  has an unhurried delivery as if he is laying out a collection of disparate objects on a table whose overall truthful function will be revealed if only he can complete the process without interruption.

The Gap Years.

Two not so yummy mummies with babes expensively suspended.
One  in full on black high performance lycra stands  her foot hefted  up at a steep angle on the outdoor table, in the courtyard of  a gourmet food store. The other sits.
Well I work for him 3 days a week, it has worked out really well. Really well.
Oh that is so good, the seated woman says bleakly to the black running shoe.
And then I have my own business of course,  two days a week. Training.
Training what? The seated woman asks finally lifting her eyes from the shoe.

The funeral.

Under the stained glass  window of  the funeral home, the coffin covered in beads and knickknacks seems as small and insubstantial as that of a child's.

A brother comes up and says  that he had little contact with the deceased for many years and it was only in recent years  that he had come to see her more often.  He had some memories of her as a child. She loved  horses. She had her own horse and when she had a baby she had named it after that horse.  He had thought that they lived  a normal family life in a quiet rural province but in fact this sense of normalcy had been proved mistaken. He  had later  found out that  the deceased was not his full sister.  She  had been born out of wedlock in a period between one of  his mother's other  marriages. His younger sister also had another father.  He also found out that his uncle had been the subject of court martial  in the Second World War.

A young woman who  looks as if she manages a complex love life says she has grown up with the deceased in her life. She had always admired  the woman's style so she was wearing all her arm bling in memory of her. She then sings Bag Lady by  Erica Badu accompanied by a man on an  electric guitar.

A Polynesian care worker comes  up trim in jeans and a sweatshirt. She has brought a small ukulele with her wrapped in a cloth and says that she had spoken to the deceased many times since she  had come to live at the home.   The deceased often asked her  if she  would go to heaven.  The care worker always told her, of course you will,  you have  so many friends.  She and the deceased had  sung  songs of praise together.   She will  sing one now, the one  she had taught the deceased. She unwraps the ukulele and sings a sweet song in an surprisingly  thin off key voice.

Two young mothers and a small girl come up. One of the mothers says she had been fascinated by the deceased from the moment she first moved  into  the neighbourhood and   had seen her fossicking in  a rubbish bin for treasures.  Among other things, the deceased  had taught her about lending.  Once the deceased asked her for $20. She  replied that she could not give it to her as  she did not want money lending to come between them. Yet  one day she had run into the deceased outside the supermarket and had commented on the variety and nutritious  value of her groceries, where upon the deceased had gone into a nearby cafe to borrow a knife to dissect a wheel of  brie and divide it between them. She had found out that the deceased had been forcibly separated from the new born baby she had given birth to  when she was staying in England as a young woman.  The deceased always had this child  on her mind and was very damaged by this separation. Maybe this is why she always had a pram and pushed it around, empty of a child but full of treasures.


The other young mother says that she had been given a suitcase by the deceased. She lifts up  a retro yellow suit case high into the air. She has  taken the suitcase around the world with her, it is  so easy to spot on a carousel. Her young daughter has a large purple plastic creature  on wheels that she has also been given and reportedly  loves even though it is plastic. The little girl tries to  lift her toy off the ground to show everyone.


A  Buddhist nun comes forward  on thick oedematous ankles supported by sturdy sandals.  The spiritual life encases her as solidly as  a large wooden block. The gifts she received of 'borrowed' library books on the Buddha, the anger and pain of the deceased are mentioned.  She says that they had spoken of many things and much had been shared even the fact that one of  the deceased's lovers had  urinated on her.

At the back of the chapel, spilling out of  the entrance, the deceased's friends and lovers_ lenders and borrowers all, stand smoking and silent in the warm autumn day.

Murnau

We watch the old movie on an old TV sitting on an old couch
with a curtain pegged sideways over the french doors
In the film a man is stripped of himself and so dies.
Or his luck turns and he lives in a gemutlich heaven on earth.
There is an option.
A studio in Germany between the wars got up into a sliver of city.
The business of the world is condensed and flickers with a rage, slowed to squeeze the cruel second fully.

Suddenly the french door is quickly, quietly  opened.
A gust of wind?
But then the curtain is moved  by  a small force.
A dextrous animal?
From behind the curtain, out of a late summer night
a child appears, so out of his expected place he stops dead, his face a mask.
This sudden beauty makes me smile and say hello.
The child as silent  and remote as any film, only sees  our very strangeness
and vanishes to those who guard him.
On screen,  neighbourhood urchins torment in play.
They  would be ancient now if they had survived.
We glance at one another, the apparition still with us and the loss of another between us

World Class Life: the mash up.

World Class Life

Coming here tourists will swim in a world of sheer luxury and exclusivity
the pool water was so cloudy  we could not see the bottom of the pool
always there are guys standing at the entrance
and open the door whenever guests come
the  processed ambience quickly renders customer’s senses
 a pillow menu and a choice of exclusive soaps
signature long stem 430 thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets
with stained carpets all around our bed
sunglasses cleaning, and daily beach treats served on a complimentary basis
coral species that can survive the next hot water events that may affect the gulf
set off in search of Hanuman, the monkey god and legendary guardian of the bay
gave him a tip, he was very happy and swarmed me with many bottled water everyday
the TV system hanged a few times and we had to call 2 times
the perfect blend of idyllic tranquillity and perfect comfort
somewhat outdated furniture
the discerning connoisseur will come to expect
infused with an ambiance enhanced by touches of aesthetic charm
grime buildup on the white doors
and lets them indulge themselves in the seduction of brands
however, after 3 hours, the TV hanged again
even though they come from the world-class life
they may find it hard-pressed in the experience here.

Hometown news.

In that quiet city of ghosts.
The son was found on a quiet street, in his pyjamas distressed and hysterical pointing back to the small low rent house.
He was mentally impaired and his mother was quiet
She was quiet and kept to herself
She could be seen some mornings scooting with her son down the hill to the local school, some mornings not.
He was led away in his socks by relatives
The quiet mother was unwell.
Winter in that part of the world could fall like a slab of cement
It gained weight if you lived on the wrong side of the street, shade imposing an icy months' long sentence.
It required resources to work lose from the pressing night air seeping out of the  early darkness
People were invisible, they floated into their homes unseen and stayed there while outside the street lights were like sharp sticks in the eye.

Saying boo to a goose.

Because you speak so little, make even less and I never see you
I take a photo of a flower arrangement you make to celebrate my being where I belong.
It was constructed one bloom at a time,  during a day long circuit between indoors and out.
Greenfly occupy the buds.
I had prepackaged it sentimentally, but now I see
reflected on a the glossy pitch pool of a dormant tv screen
two heads, myself and the animal watcher at my shoulder.

If I should lift this shade's hand away and slip away from you
leave as you slip away from me
Who are you, I love you, who are you, I love you
I love you so much

If I should shift away from so much love
which binds the pupa to the stick good and strong
Life rattles and shakes. Nothing.
Again rattle and shake. Nothing.

Who am I then, unaccustomed as I am
Now to take the stage and sing a song long in the throat.
To emerge with a 'fro in a flowing gown of green paisley silk and hold the mike in coral talons and belt it out.

I love you, who are you, I love you, who are you.

Mothers and sons

In the dream the man was a suitor to  a mother who had a child and that child was seen by the man as someone whom he could torment at his leisure.  But for now he had to win the trust of the mother.
In a sitting room come bedroom in a converted villa frontroom,  a sparse bedsit out of the 70s.
A divan as a sofa. The boy on it.
The man stood in the doorway while the mother tried to tie the  child's shoe lace for instructing the child had proven useless. The man at the doorway continued to give instructions as the  child withdrew his foot which seemed to flop uselessly in front of him. A pseudopod.  The mother  succeeded in getting the thin as hair laces into a lose knot. But the man was not happy, he said he would take the boy on a trip with other boys and they would play with a rope and a metal bell which they could beat the boy with. It was only a tiny bell, it would cause no injury and only do good. When the mother  disappeared the man said to the other boys, lets take the big heavy duty bells and attach those instead.

The man became a small dark haired woman possibly the mother whom I attacked with a surge of outrage, shoving her up against the wall, telling her I found her contemptible and evil and I would destroy her.  Nausea woke me before the alarm.

At the bus stop in a warm summer drizzle, a black winged insect kept landing compulsively on my bare arm below where the sleeve was rolled, again and again it came back battering against me. I thought the moisturiser might prove toxic to its fragile system.

From the bus I saw the elfin woman often seen   around that part of town. She was tiny, dressed as usual in a tremendously  strange yet expensive style. Today she had  on little pointed slippers and white socks. Her glasses which were always exceptional were wrought in delicate metal whorls with decorative intricacies, glasses belonging  to a fairy godmother from the 50s. Her son, whom she had pushed around in a pram  was now a tween languishing against the bus shelter holding a thick
paperback, wearing the glasses and costume of a nouvelle vague hero.

Tack

In the sky

Powder blue gelato air

The kindest cut

In the street 

Outside the window

People  with little money

clothes washed to a shapeless comfort

In the shop windows 

disposable garments

heels  so high they appear correctional, quasi limbs missing from birth  or accident.

Outside the window

The birds on the large green field, evenly spaced, a mix of marine and terrestrial, sizes and colours

As they lift and resettle their collective movement reprints a complete pattern 

again and again.

Inside the window 

The young man  stretches

pushes his chair back off its front legs

raises his arms above his head, revealing  a bare midriff  

a kitten's lets play

but as they all do 

he catches himself 

shuts up shop

bumps suddenly forward.

He has the ice blue eyes of a young narcissus  gazing intrigued and aroused

sickened by all that is not him

7.30am Xpress

closest shave
sharpest haircut
crispest shirt
the most savvy  phone
softest skin
clearest eyes
heavenliest scent
the girl cradles the iphone between two sets of slender fingers, cupping it in a way that suggest a flower held by a debutante.

Transport

The beautiful  visually impaired girl reads the questions blown up to A3, centimetres from her eyes   and identifies the bits of Australia which are of  interest to tourists on an A2 black and white map. Iluru is really somewhere dead centre of that great hulking island.

Then the short answers. "In 1967 the referendum was signed which recognised the Aborigines as citizens of Australia". The national preoccupation with  a signature putting her wrong. Half a mark off.

The weather outside at midday was compressed grey and stagnant with brevity.  Nothing much could move the spirit on such a day.

On the 002 a pregnant woman and her two toddlers sit on the alcove seats at the front.
A man  sits up the back talking at her down the bus.  He says that the guy is a stupid cunt and he will tell him so. The woman attractive and proud grins at a small serious boy sitting opposite. A grin which is culturally  borrowed, pasted on and makes the eyes fill with pain.

Up the front a middle aged man debates something in fruity tones with the bus driver.
His girlfriend leaves him there and sits down in the middle of the bus.
One of the children starts to grizzles. It is at an almost subliminal level and could be just part of the day.
Shut your mouth. You want me to smack you across the face Crunchy, a man calls down the bus.
The silence is sudden and a shock. The child is quiet.
The man relaxes now he has attention.

The middle aged man  with a white goatee ends his conversation with the bus driver
He joins his girlfriend and says that he tried to get on with a pensioner's pass but the driver wasn't buying it. He is wearing a distinctive  black jacket with some  complex embroidered Asian motif on the back and the front, his hands are covered in heavy gold rings.
He talks with the projection of a radio DJ and tells his girlfriend that he has always called the guy a little gollywog. Always. He has always given him a hard time. He worked at the mission with him. Knows him well. That was when he himself had owned an upmarket property in Mountain Road, the
one with the swimming pool, yes that one and it was very nice, very nice indeed, insinkerator, washer dryer all included. The guy he sold it to made a loss on it when he sold it but he didn't.
The pool was out the back wasn't it? The girlfriend is younger by half a decade,  and has a whine which is set in relief against his mellow elocution.
No no it was around the side, the grounds were nice. Swimming pool.
You needed a key  to get in though? No no not if you knew the key pad code. It suited him and his Chinese girlfriend of the time.

In the Asian food market  entrance through the food hall  and the strong smell of medicinal herbs, there is a recent colour addition to the rogue's gallery of shoplifters _ a photo of the middle aged man with the white goatee wearing his embroidered black jacket. His eye brows are raised over glasses which he must have put on after being apprehended  and before having his photo taken. He seems to
say, oh so you have caught me you little wogs but I am impervious.

girls

she  said she wanted like her own identity
she said stuff like that to me but i think she is bullshitting
she is always saying stuff like that but i don't think she means it.
in our group we battle things out but she was fully like wanting her things her way
i know, if she thought stuff was wrong she would nut out and become more stubborn
she was so quiet and gentle, i am so cute and small rah rah rah
and the way she dresses i would not see her that way
she is so funny but
i mean i wanted to say that is the dumbest thing ever but  she didn't need to hear it from me
how can we encourage her
she is so lost
she covers it up by saying things like
i find it funny
i wish she would be more open about it.
i hate kay he has never been nice to me
he is so cold
it is so funny she said none of the boys like you guys
thanks genelle.
She is telling everyone different things
i always hide myself around myself
they are geeky
they look at us like us
I don't know what they expect from us.

Weekend

It was a warm night. It could have been early spring which it was not.
The late night air of the inner city park was filled with the fugitive   scent of high quality hydroponics. The park was in an ancient gully that had been grassed over,  its steep boundaries held in place by huge trees which floated out  canopies of branches. From where she was waiting   in the car  looking down, she could imagine as it had been when it was a sewer and midden, the old time citizens flinging shit out, getting rid of stuff they didn't want, squatting in rough shacks on the ridge above  until querulous letters to the editor drove the city fathers to do something. Once something was done they had named it in their own honour. It was their town after all.


Quartets and trios of people in light clothing stood under the sodium lights talking quietly to one another.  Down at the bottom of the gully at the feet of giant marble replica of a ever brooding Moses,  three drunken boys  shouted, threw themselves down and  picked themselves up again increasing in volume as they did so. She then remembered the old double story boardinghouse villas which had sat  on the cliff up above them. To visualise them was to bring to mind a chunk of time that had its own specific sadness. The sadnesses were bottled each in their own vintage. This one contained these houses which she realised  were like dead friends whom she now realised she had never really known or appreciated. In the heat of her first summer here they had been part of the city's  underlying tropical aspect. People had sat on the verandas looking and calling down to the park, their possessions, washing and lives on show. Now the white  facade of an office block formed a rampart of small square windows.

Toby slept only a few hours and was gone  before she woke and would not be home for hours. She
would be alone all day.  In the dairy/convenience snacks  section of the supermarket, a tall transvestite on high platform espadrilles and skinny jeans was stuffing items into a large paper sac labelled "PROPERTY OF PATIENT' in blue lettering. She was slender with a bruise on a lightly beaten face and was still wearing a hospital id around her wrist. She moved speedily down the aisle  and up again rapidly selecting items as if shopping urgently for a impromptu dinner party. The sac
was filled to bursting and she had to throttle it to get a proper grip. She marched quickly  to the self check out aisle, passing  right through to the exit  doors. As she arrived  on the curb a white taxi drove up the hill to the corner,  a companion  leaned across the back seat to open the door and they drove through the intersection and out west.

On the way home, a song bird in the pensioners' housing garden was singing to itself quickly and delightedly, an old school  typewriter turning out a real page turner.

Pigeon pie

It was this time of the year, when everything was stripped down and reduced to its essence, that human beings appeared to become more  hostile. Perhaps we were in the grip of one of those very unfashionable innate drives, with its source in ancient winters of such great scarcity that each mouthful of food was to be wrested from the hand of another who would then perish. It could all be seen most clearly in the behaviour of receptionists.

Receptionists appeared to take a bleak view in all weathers. It seemed a cruel fate  that those who disliked others so much should have to come into contact with them so often. The woman in the Hospitality office, in a warmer season, usually masked her dislike behind a sliding smile that made it part way up her face. But now; did she snarl? It was as if behind the barrier of the front counter and from her lair in the corner, she snarled, lowering her grey shaggy curls, the whites of her eyes momentarily visible. Maybe not. She was a drinker with a grey lined pouchy face. She was also a smoker. Possibly the night before had been filled with gaiety and talk and now she had no use of either. During the day she often stood on the side walk where the smokers had been relegated by sweeping smoke free policies to puff her cigarette thoughtfully among the fumes of passing traffic, her shoulders hunched and brooding.

She did emit a little friendly spirit from her closely husbanded reserve for those in her world who were able to cross over behind the counter and breeze by her with organisational updates or complaints. She then laughed a short harsh smoker's laugh. There was no form of human behaviour that she had not witnessed and found predictably ridiculous. But now she sidled over and snatched the paper Lotte wordlessly held out without meeting her eye.

 Lotte thought of her again at bus stop while she sat in one of the two black enamelled shelters bequeathed by a benevolent couple who had had an evident desire to seat six people from among the crowd of pale commuters. A pigeon was walking about in hope of crumbs. Its plump body was bound at the base of its tail by dark grey markings crisscrossed over like a thong _  bound and caught by
nature for some unfortunate purpose.

Winter solstice 21.6.13

Snow on tv and the photo ops that brings
Thunder and lightning converge over the  hall skylight at bedtime
A woman is reported suffering of a heart attack when a sonic boom
activated by a bolt of lightning blasts the windows from her home.
In the heavy grey air the city is black tinged beige, the same colour as her rejuvenated leather boots
Across the harbour the sugar factory's pink  rambling structure, a modernist painting of a sugar factory with deftly painted planes over a sure perspective, fades in and out of the sea mists like a the slowest of heartbeats