geoffreygilmour.net

IV

Rolling down the highway in a bus. Full of people. He didn’t know any of them. Maybe the woman two seats up on the other side of the aisle looked vaguely familiar. But so many people look familiar to him these days. So many women who could have been lovers. Sometimes he thinks he could love every woman who ever lived. At least for a short while during that intense closeness before the predicable inevitably overran the imagined. He dragged his attention back to stare again from the window at the flickering landscape. Dry and dusty, no houses, no trees. At least not anywhere near the road. Far in the distance he could make out a line of bluish hills slinking under a heavy sky. No clouds. But heavy. The bus rattled on muting the sounds of the other passengers. He closed his eyes. His ears remained alert, on guard, constantly scanning incoming signals for danger, for relief. He wondered briefly about his ears. How come each has a small flap of cartilage which might block unwanted noise if it were to fold in; seemed there was something of a design flaw…but then, lying in your cave, in the dark, before there was time, you wouldn’t hear an approaching predator. Not good. But it looks like the body had given some thought at some stage to the possibility of earlids; then abandoned the project leaving the little flange, an evolutionary supernumerary. As he drifted off further into the velvet underground he thought maybe the flap was useful after all, herding sound into the ear…

Somewhere the bumpy ride stirred him. From the window he saw the journey no longer rode along smooth bitumen but had found rough terrain, slowing down. The hills had quietly approached in the meantime and the bus began a snake-like penetration until, at the top of a small rise, it came to an uncertain halt. He closed his eyes, still heavy from sleep, for a moment feeling the bus settle into quiet.

He was the only one left on the bus. Even the driver had disappeared. The hills were sandy, cropped with a thin layer of yellowing grass he had to shuffle through on his way to the crest. From there he could see the other passengers spread out on blankets and towels, taking the sun, relaxing under a breathless blue sky before a vast and shining ocean. It seemed the water was deep at the shore with no gently sloping continental shelf to shape the incoming tide into waves. He moved towards the water. His steps squeaked as they see-sawed through the hot sand. He took off his shoes and socks to feel the fine burning sand tickle sharply between his toes. At the water’s edge he stripped off his clothes and plunged in deep, stroking out for a few moments before taking breath and turning to look for the shore.

Far away. Could it be that far? He’d only done a few strokes. A single breath. The shore seemed almost on the horizon. A moment of panic brushed around him as he felt the tug of a rip pulling him out. Take it easy. It’s only a rip. Relax. You’re not that far out. It’s an illusion. An unusual perspective. The brain’s making it up. Don’t fight it.

After a while of steady, rhythmic swimming he escaped the rip and could feel the soft underwater sand at the water’s edge. He began to crawl up the quite steep slope to dry land. But crawling was difficult, he kept sliding back, his hands and knees sinking too deep to catch any purchase. The water kept him buoyant, but was too shallow to swim and the sand offered insufficient resistance to get out. He was running out of breath. In the distance he could see some surfers on their boards. Maybe he could call them over. Just then, on that thought, the sand seemed to firm and give traction. He dragged himself out and lay on the hard, firm shore, breathing deeply, thankfully, the hot sun quieting his overwrought nerves.

His clothes were nowhere to be seen. He began to walk down the empty beach looking for them, for the bus, the other travellers he’d left sunning only a matter of minutes before. But no bus, no travellers stretched upon happy coloured towels. No clothes. He decided he must have been carried much further in the rip than he’d imagined and began to walk back up the empty beach straining his eyes to recognise some feature of the landscape, some clue which might indicate the spot where the bus had been parked. After walking for a while he thought maybe he’d gone the wrong way so he retraced his steps. To the point where he’d clambered from the ocean. His scumbled track marks coming from the water gave him some comfort as he set off once again across an unfamiliar land, hopeful this time he’ll recognise something…the bus, the other travellers still lying in the sun…his own footprints going down to the water. Once again, after walking for awhile, he recognised nothing. Saw no one. Only a shoreline disappearing in the distance. He kept moving. What else to do?

Some time later he came across a small pile of clothes waiting patiently for his return. He had to search for the shoes and socks. He could find only one sock. Perhaps the wind…? He dragged on his clothes, scratchy over his now salty body and began to look for his tracks to guide him back to the bus. But there were no tracks. And where the sunbathers should have been – nothing. Just a lightly grassed hill, waving. Had they left without him? He stood and stared, turning around, disbelieving. His senses must surely be tricking him somehow.

Far away, carried on the afternoon breeze, he heard the broken sound of laughter. Abandoning his shoes and desperate to locate some humanity in this lost world he hurried along the beach towards the sounds rising over a dune in the middle distance. But as he reached the crest of the dune there was no crowd of happy bathers, no familiar bus load of fellow travellers, no humanity, just more expanse of empty beach and vacant sky. Then he caught sight of a single figure, small and dark, sitting on a rocky outcrop where the beach and the sand hills met. The figure was hard to see at first because it was much the same colour as the rock it was sitting on. An extension of stone. But something about the figure was decidedly unrocklike. Was it the profile? The way it leaned out towards the ocean? As though breathing in some vital force? Pulsing. Yes, the figure seemed to pulse. And then he heard it again, a faint giggle, a laugh from far away and the little figure seemed to bounce slightly on its rock. In the midst of all the unfamiliarity and aloneness he felt a moment of recognition. A dart of hope.

At that moment Babu jumped up from his rock landing softly on the sand. Heath’s eyes filled with tears as he stumbled forward to embrace his old friend.

“Long time no see, little frog” said the old man.

Heath could find no words to speak. He stared stupidly at the kaleidoscopic vision his watery eyes were creating and wept. His heart was tearing apart, his ears screaming. He knew nothing. He was totally bewildered. He sank onto the sand finding some comfort from the warm earth. Slowly he began to breathe again.

The old African sat down next to Heath and whispered, “Have courage my friend, this is just another beginning…”

III

Now Heath was getting nervous. A ‘little bit vacant’. That didn’t sound too good. He remembered his time in boarding school and the priest’s sermons about idle minds being the devil’s playground. But this ‘seed’ came from a different tradition, a much older culture. Babu said ‘from a very long time ago’. Heath’s anthropology teacher had told the class some African cultures had existed for more than one hundred thousand years. Trying to match or compare them was confusing. Very confusing. He put the now charged thing back in his pocket and resolved to find some container for it. Maybe a small metal box. Then to try and forget about it – and Babu’s explanations. Spiralling time? He’d not heard that before. He always thought time went in a straight line. Linear history. Like counting. But a seed for dreaming a straight path through spiralling time? It was all a little bit much for the young boy. So it wasn’t long before he forgot about the quietly shining marble. He hadn’t even found a container for it. It lay buried in the dark of one of his drawers snugly sheltered by ripped t shirts and holy shorts that were all too small for him, forgotten things, mementos in a world where forgetting made way for new impersonations.
*
On Heath’s seventeenth birthday he had just returned to the house of his childhood after finishing at his boarding school in faraway England. Birthdays were of no special interest to Heath who always saw them as a rather pedestrian exercise in counting. And when the total was never likely to go much past eighty or ninety there wasn’t much challenge in prospect for his numbering brain. But it was his birthday so he’d added another unit to the slowly climbing edifice that was his life. He’d gone with his mother to pick up the mail from the city post office and they were sitting in the little Fiat in the shade of a mango tree as his mother tore open an unusual looking envelope.

“It’s a telegram. From Australia.”

The cloth roof of the tiny car was rolled down and he could see the big old shade tree was full of green mangoes. A dark red lizard was stalking something he couldn’t see along one of the tree’s main branches. The hum and clatter of city traffic provided an uninterupted sound track. Heath lay back in the seat and started counting.

“Oh no! God. No! No…”

The ache and urgency in his mother’s voice drew him back from the numbers. As he turned to look at her he could see streams of shining tears rolling out of her eyes and down her lightly freckled face.

“It’s Uncle Ron. He’s died!”

Aside from his dog dying Heath had had no experience of death. He’d wept hot tears of grief for his dog – dead while he was away at school, but here was his uncle, a human being, his dad’s brother, dead. Fallen from the sky in his aeroplane. The emotions flooding out his mother stirred strange and embarrassing feelings of his own, nothing like the feelings he’d experienced with his dog’s death. An entirely unwelcome grin was rising from around his neck threatening to rip right across his hairless face. Fortunately his mother seemed too distracted to notice the struggle as he clamped down hard on those delinquent muscles apparently determined to expose him and his inappropriate response to this bad news. He had to assume it was bad news. Death was always bad news wasn’t it? He didn’t really know this uncle. He’d met the man a few times. All he knew about Uncle Ben was he was something of an artist. And a pilot too. But now no more. No more an artist. No more a pilot. No more a brother, father, uncle without the added adjective ‘dead’ or ‘late’. Late for what? Heath wondered as his mother tried to pull herself together. Did that English euphemism try to suggest, ever-so politely, hopefully, that at some point he’d be on time? And maybe live again? But so far as Heath understood death, Uncle Ron had moved on into the memosphere and the winds of time would slowly flatten the tracks of his passing.

As his mum drove them home in silence Heath closed his eyes and began one of his favourite counting exercises: a simultaneous count in both directions. On this occasion the event was themed – from birth to death, counting started at zero, climbing to one hundred – and from death, a revision countback, one hundred to zero, to birth. He decided a generous allocation of one hundred years was most suitable for the exercise. He’d heard people say you’re dead for a very long time so he thought a big round number best to go for. Using his inner ear he counted the years from birth: zero, one, two, three while his inner eye watched the numbers decline from one hundred till eventually the zero of birth matched the death’s final 100 year ascendancy…This was a surprisingly satisfying activity for the boy. A sense of completion at the end left Heath in a buoyant frame of mind. His mother however was so preoccupied with her grief and, he presumed, the terrible task of having to deliver the news to her husband she hardly noticed her seventeen-year-old son or the effects of his existential numberings on his mood.

He walked into his bedroom and began absently to look through his drawers. The interweaving of the fine patterns of double counting had plaited something of a cord-like impression in his mind. As he followed the abstract cord he found himself exploring dusty recesses of his room he’d not thought about since he spent his holidays with Kejebba and Babu.

The dust mites in the drawers did not appreciate being disturbed and attacked Heath’s over-sensitive nasal membranes causing his body to erupt in white blinding sneezes. He loved these dusty sneezes which would start by tickling his nose and then as he drew in a full breath the sneeze impulse would curl around his diaphragm before bursting madly out into the air in a spasm of sweet pleasure. Sometimes as many as eight or nine giant sneezes would wrack his body before it came to some arrangement with the mites and everybody settled down allowing him to continue, here, with his exploration.

Next door in their bedroom he could hear his mother and father talking quietly. Mostly his mother’s voice, occasionally a conciliatory tone from his dad as he tried to comfort his stricken wife.

Each item Heath picked out from the drawer produced its own fragment of memory, a picture or a series of pictures, faint but pleasurable nostalgia as he mined the reservoir of his past. He noticed an intriguing smell coming from the drawer. Very subtle, hardly there at all and at first he thought it was his nasal membrane tricking him after its recent work-over. But the aroma was persistent and seemed to be coming from a sock jammed into the corner. Not a particularly sock-like smell he thought. As he pulled the sock out its weight instantly reminded him of the marble from all those years ago. The seed Babu had called it. The attractive smell and the memory of Babu’s warning flooded his mind confusing him with their contradictory signals. Slowly he unwrapped the sock and there it was.

In his emotionally charged state the marble, stone-like orb seemed to throb and glow in spite of the midday sun burning through his bedroom window and saturating all before it. Heath lifted it to his nose and sure enough there was that smell, like a flower’s promise of nourishment, a smell with a distinct colour. Was it red? The too-bright sunshine flooding the room was interfering with his senses. Clutching, but not too tightly, the gift he’d received all those years ago and making sure some of the sock was between it and his hand, he went over to the window and closed the curtains. The room fell into shade. He could feel the heat of the thing through the sock. Heath imagined it must have picked up some of the sun’s heat before he closed the curtains.

*

He sat down on his bed, reached over and pulled out a thick old hard-cover anthology of gothic tales from the bookshelf, rested it on his lap and began disentangling the Seed from its old sock, carefully avoiding any direct contact. The heat coming from it seemed to be intensifying. He decided its heat had nothing to do with the sun. Its outer circumference appeared to pulse and glow – from the inside. As though it was minutely expanding and contracting. He had the bizarre thought that the thing was breathing as it sat on the leather binding of the book. The curtained room now revealed the self-generating colour of the seed to be a variable indigo, cycling between red and violet, as though undecided, seeking its comfort.

Heath was captivated by this display. All sounds from the house faded; finally all he could hear was a vast and distant echoed space as though he stood in a great cave or an empty cathedral, his own scale shrank to the size of an ant. His peripheral sight began to close in. He tried to turn his head to the window to see whether it was getting dark outside but he seemed to have lost control of his neck muscles. His will. The seed continued to pulse. He felt drawn in as though by a magnet. His self a tiny slither of iron filing sucked in deep by the gravity of a gigantic, irresistible force. His head began to spin. For a brief second he felt a wave of panic stir in his gut, like the sensation he’d had when the stranger, what had Babu called him? the Ngede… something, had confronted him and Kejebba with his gaze before handing over this weirdly animate object now gripping his mind. A fragment of the Bible’s New Testament drifted into his head. Something about rocks and stones singing. Maybe the thing really was breathing. It was. Pulsing at the same rate as his breathing. In, out, in, out. Heath’s heart beat responded to the realisation that he and the stone were somehow connected and began to gallop uncomfortably fast. He applied the total power of his will, now only accessible through the thinnest of channels, to slow his breathing. The pulsing in the seed slowed. After a few moments his breathing relaxed and the light within the stone cycled its colours through cooler tones, still holding true to their indigo essence and now unmistakeably in rhythm with his own breathing. He could taste something in the air. Aniseed. Purple black. A wave of pleasure rolled through him as his mouth filled with memories of all-day suckers, saturating his head. Burying his mind.

II
Now between them shone this mysterious gift. Heath rolled it into Kejebba’s pink palm. He lifted it up to his nose and drew in a long breath. There, far away, like an echo, the distinct sense of purple. Heavy and rich but so faint Kejebba thought he’d tasted it.

“What is it?” asked the younger boy.
“It’s a marble.”
“It’s too heavy…”
“Looks like juju – we should show it to Babu. Here.”

Heath put the thing in his pocket with all the other bits and pieces agitating to escape through the thinning pocket lining, the unlikely weight of the unexpected gift dragging his pants down a bit; he had to shrug them up before they headed off in the dying twilight for Kejebba’s place to see what his grandfather would say about the marble.

The sudden black African night had already strangled all detail from the world as the boys crossed into the warm cow-dung glow of the grandfather’s hut.

“You two little frogs should watch out for the Mbongola. They love to play with the innocent – before eating them…”

Kejebba glanced at Heath, a knowing smile tickling the edge of his wide mouth as they both acknowledged the old fairy-tale they’d been hearing since before they could remember. It was a favourite of the old man who would shiver with feigned apprehension as he rolled his shiny eyes and recite the warning narrative to keep the children in at night, away from the ever-present and very real dangers lurking in the predator darkness.

“We met someone on the road Babu.”

The old gentleman continued to stir the pot, squinting his eyes away from the stinging spiral of smoke curling slowly towards the chimney. Heath sat down on the floor next to Babu and peered into the mass of hubbly bubbly spotting the occasional recognisable bit of vegetable. A chunk of goat – he decided it must have been goat from the sweet aroma seeping into the small room – otherwise one bit of flesh chopped up and cooking looked pretty much like another. The goat though had a very distinctive smell, gamey, unmistakeable. The evening meal was nearly ready and he could feel his mouth filling up with anticipatory saliva. As his tired mind relaxed back into the security of Babu’s place he began drifting into a half sleep, the numbers and patterns of flies he’d been trying to count that afternoon played across his imagination as the sounds of the night insects animated the images in his mind hustling with one another for ascendancy. The marble appeared and seemed to push all the counting aside. It was huge. As big as a world. Everything else vanished and there weren’t enough numbers to measure the size of the giant orb pulsing in the half light of an incompletely imagined object floating somewhere in space. It had one great eye. The eye looked familiar. Suddenly it was a goat’s eye. Its tail flicked, it lowered its head and butted him with its hard horny eyeball. He opened his eyes to see Babu shaking him awake.

“You want to eat or dream?”

Heath sheepishly wiped the cooled line of overflowed saliva from the side of his chin and accepted with a small nod the bowl being offered by Kejebba’s grandfather.

“Sorry Babu.”

“Don’t be sorry. Eat.”

The background sounds of hunting gekkos, a near-by curlew calling for its mate, the Doppler whine of mosquitoes all mixed with the gratified breathing, chewing and swallowing of three human beings filled all available thought space.

When the meal was finished and the long silence finally collapsed with a few appreciative murmurs, Heath reached into his pocket and fished out the marble. In the soft light it seemed not only to reflect the yellowish flame from Babu’s single lamp but also to generate an uncanny faint blue iridescence. Together the combined sensation was of a greenish, slightly sinister ambiance. The old man reached out and took the shiny thing from Heath’s hand.

“Where did you get this?”

“The man we met.”

“Did he say who he was?”

“No…do you know what it is Babu? We didn’t have a chance to ask him before he just…walked off.”

“Why do you think he gave it to you?”

“Don’t know. We were following him, counting. The flies on his shirt…”

“What? Counting flies? Why?”

Kejebba decided to join the conversation.

“He just suddenly turned on us as though someone had called him. He’s not from around here. I’d never seem him before. He took it from a leather pouch. I think there were more in there.”

“It’s a seed.”

“A what? A seed? For planting?”

“No. Not for planting. For dreaming. A special kind of dreaming. But it’s powerful magic. There’s a price to pay. Did he give it you Heath? Or Kejebba…”

“He gave it to Heath. Frightened him too.”

“No he didn’t, but he looked like he was going to whip me for taking it. Why would he want to give it to me?”

“I don’t think he wanted to frighten you. Or whip you. The man who gave it to you is an Ngede, they come from across the border. Looking for people who are … a little bit vacant. Perhaps unfettered. Ripe. The seed is not always a good gift. Not always bad. Depends on… I don’t know…many things. Maybe your counting drew his attention.”

“What should I do with it Babu?”

“Nothing. There’s nothing you can do with it. It’ll do with you – more than you can imagine. If you keep it. The old stories tell it as a plumb line to draw a straight path through spiralling time. An ancient story often told, rarely heard. Be mindful of its unconcern for you.”

An episodic short story

Kejebba and Heath were strolling down the small town’s hard-baked dirt road behind a man in a white shirt. Their bare feet hardly seemed to touch the warm earth as they counted the freeloading flies squatting on the back of that so white shirt. But there were too many and there appeared no pattern to their settling which might have helped the boys get past twenty five or thirty around which number the speckled mass became a confusing blur. They decided there must have been more than a hundred. At least. They drew closer and closer to the man in their determination to get every one of the flies properly counted.

Kejebba’s grandfather, if required to answer a silly question like ‘how many flies can you see on that white shirt?’ would have simply said there were “many”. In his world when it came to counting things, in general there was one, quite often two or three and otherwise, many. Perhaps ‘more than a hundred’ was the latest version of ‘many’.

But for the two boys the question was not so silly. They’d discovered the fascination of counting. The infinity of numbers stacking unerringly one upon another, building a tower that would surely reach up past the sky. And they were intent on counting anything that sat still for long enough. Or the number of steps it took to climb the hill overlooking the town or the number of breaths you had to breathe waiting for the sun to come out from behind a cloud.

There was something comforting about the predictability of numbers and the patterns they made. A way of probing into the future with a measure of certainty. A way of wrapping up the past with clean, unambiguous shapes. But the real beauty of counting was that it always took place in the immediate present. Each number counted was a mark of the moment in which it occurred. The magic of a moment marked, identified with a number, each number making itself one with its instant before fading into the distance in an orderly queue with those that went willingly before.

Of course the boys had no conscious inkling of such considerations, they just loved counting. It was a skill recently learned. Like reading. But you didn’t need anything in particular to do it. You didn’t even have to think. So, lost in the reverie of their counting and now quite close to the man, they were profoundly shocked when he suddenly turned around, scattering half of the black flies into the evening air and out of sight. He’d stopped and was looking back over the heads of Kejebba and Heath. They automatically pulled up, vaguely guilty for their intrusion into the privacy of the man’s personal shirt; they looked first at each other and then back over their shoulders to see what had attracted the man’s attention. But they could see nothing which might have provoked the intensity of the man’s gaze. By the time they looked back he’d lowered his eyes and was looking straight at the grubby pair’s bewildered scuffling.

“What you boys doin’?”

Kejebba, the older of the two, shrugged his shoulders and mumbled something inaudible. This seemed to make the man soften his look and reach into his pocket from where he pulled out a small leather pouch.

He was not a tall man, dark-skinned, neat and cleanly put together, his shaven head shining ebony pink in the fading light as he reached towards Heath offering him something he’d taken from the pouch. Heath instinctively held out his hand and received what looked like a quite large marble into his now lightly sweating palm. The object was a dark cream colour, opaque and heavy, as though made of something other than glass. Perhaps a metal. He glanced momently sideways at Kejebba to see what his reaction was before looking up. But by then the softness had gone from the unknown man’s face. Deep in shadow, it seemed to have transformed into an ugly mask. Heath’s stomach lurched up into his throat. He was so busy swallowing hard to keep whatever was in there down where it belonged, he hardly noticed the stranger turn on his heel and walk away into the west where the sun had just sunk behind the town’s sentinel hill.

I knew there was nothing startlingly original about the ‘kill an animal before you can eat meat’ idea (Ethical killing? – below), but watching ABC2′s Hungry Beast on Thursday night they reported Mark Zuckerburg, Facebook code-monkey, had set a personal goal for year 2011…“only eat what you kill with your bare hands”

I’d just seen “Social Network” on Wednesday and decided Zuckerberg was such a dick I’d abandon my enthusiasm for his little steal. Now I see he’s picked up on a perfectly sharp idea. And more than that, he’s actually putting it into practice. WOW! The billionaire gets my vote.

The moral majority are in fever of righteousness about the torture of cows in Indonesian abbatoirs. OK, it’s probably not just the moral majority. All animal lovers out there are impassioned about how come it is that we must suffer our Indo-Aussi  bovines to be cruelly treated on their way to oblivion.

The idea of killing another animal surely must tickle the refined conscience. But for whatever tickle might whisper in our hearts when it comes time to eat we easily forget that to eat an animal you have first of all to kill him/her/it. To aid our forgetting we mostly drop the gender detail and an animal for eating becomes an ‘it’ whether it’s had its gonads chopped or not. Most of us have never had to kill anything before we satisfy our hunger so it’s easy enough to cultivate the probably self-serving idea that there’s a ‘humane’ way of doing the dastardly deed. There are ways to reduce the terror and torture. But does that alter the harsh reality of the FACT? Our sensibilities might be appeased but the soon-to-be bloody animal in question still has to be killed. And generally they’re killed in large groups so the stench of death is a clarion blast into the brains of the queued victims.

The size of the public outcry seems in direct proportion to the amount of forgetting that goes on regarding our predatory nature and its propensity, indeed need, to kill for consumption.

Perhaps we need to have the State licence meat eaters. You must first of all kill a beast before being allowed to buy it from your butcher. Not necessarily a cow. It could be a chicken. More manageable. But anyone who’s ever killed a chicken will know it’s no picnic. It’s a cruel deadly act made even more so by the fact it’s not actually necessary. It’s cruel because even chickens enjoy their lives.

We can quite readily live on vegetables and grains. I don’t. But I’m not preening my conscience with sincerely confected froth and bubble about the killing style employed by Indonesian butchers. Let’s make sure it’s as humane as we can make it, but not forget that killing’s a barbaric act, a feature of our primate origins. Like the gorilla, we might one day collectively support a cruelty-free means of filling our bellies.

Starting on June 11 and running for a few months the GOMA gallery in Brisbane is importing a bunch of surreal stuff from Paris. A mostly historic perspective it seems.

Here a repro of  Magritte’s The Summer Steps Can’t wait to see its flesh!