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Reunion Voices Sing

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I can tell you that I didn’t ever think I’d see her again and if I did I would have to talk to her instantly, away, by ourselves and tell her who I am and how sorry I am for what I did even though it wasn’t so bad and evil and all of that but still so wrong and stupid and that I know it now and that I am so very sorry and I would want her to talk, say whatever, say everything she thinks. I mean, Christ I have no idea who she is now or what she’d say or anything or even if she thinks the same or even needs me to say all of it out loud like I want to but as soon as I saw her, dressed in a nice proper dress and with her combed back and held back hair, walking into that room with a man on her arm I can tell you all of that and more came straight though me and I was transfixed and heard someone talking to me right next to me and that was the only thing that snapped my out of it and I answered and slurped down some beer and looked back at her but she was talking to someone and I thought “later”.

 

Look if I tell you now it’s going to sound…no, really, I wasn’t there for the high school reunion, and, as bullshity and improbable as it sounds YES I was there seeing a friend, yes also from high school, but it was coincidentally the time when he was moving interstate ok? So we had lunch and oh god what a bunch of unknown weirdos were congregated there that I had to sit near and because I was late I was at the crap ass end of the table where all the loser people who got pity invites were sat so I knew I was in for a bad hour or so but luckily being late meant lunch stuff was over and these morons where leaving. I only had to endure a few conversations like “what do you do” and I lied and they told me what they did and I said “that must be so boring” and like that until me and my friend and his now ex-girlfriend (thank god) were alone-ish to do the goodbye stuff you do but the real story lies ahead in that I was the same damn town that my high school reunion was in and for fucks sake the same old people I went to school with filed into the pub I was meeting my friend at so there we all were, me from the city back where I grew up and all of them touching me and drinking and being friendly so yeah sure I got caught up in it and yeah sure so I agreed to follow them down the road to the reunion.

 

High school reunions have all those people who come from your misty history and have maybe appeared as weird representations in your dreams where you forgot a whole bunch of information and you thought “I should have prepared, god damn it!” but of course you wake up and think fuck that I am glad I am not there anymore. That’s a reunion, being awake inside a dream and seeing pretty much the worst apparitions or reflections of your past because they are real and more horrific than you could have imagined. I walk around in the fog and every person I bump into has a big smile and so do I I feel and we say three lines and each one I can feel makes me seem so callous and theirs are so honest as if they are real people who actually live lives and believe the things they say. It happens so often that I end up sitting with those I have known for long time/were friends with in high school and they say “what’s wrong” and I answer “what the fuck is going on” and we laugh together.

It’s bad, straight away it’s bad, I mean the venue is bad to begin with, as if the pensioners have left because bingo is finished and there’s one middle aged woman behind the bar not knowing what the fuck is going on because there are people there after seven pee em and we want drinks. Oh god do we want drinks and after I’ve had maybe five glasses of wine she shows up. Oh man fuck I say in my head and I knew her and I can see what she looks like now and I think oh fuck that better not be my fault. She walks over and we see each other but she is hugged by some massively overweight ‘friend’ who I sort of remember but I guess they know each other since those days and I finish my drink and finish talking to this muscle bound moron who I used to know was ridiculed by everyone for being basically feeble and ugly so he pretty much found hid place bulking up and joining the army and I can only say over and over “you’re fucking HUGE” to my detriment.

 

She comes and sits with us because we are from the same clique, that’s how we met and in the most natural of implanted-in-our-psyche way we end up sitting next to each other, not listening to anyone else and talking. It is so lovely and we are smiling and it is as if the decade meant nothing. She had three kids and I have none. This doesn’t matter, I touch her knee and tell her she is so thin (we used to like being incredibly thin) and she says my face is chubby and I say ‘hey, I am healthy…fat and happy!’ but she reassures me in her way that I am not chubby and we laugh at ourselves now and how we used to be so incredibly insensitive to fat people. And we look over together at a fat woman we went to school with grotesquely kissing a much older beared male she brought with her and we screw up our faces and like “ewww gross” or similar and laugh and I light a cigarette and when she says ‘oh you still smoke’ I feel stupid. I try to make her see me as independent (i.e. different to her) so I say “Yeah” casually, blow out smoke and take another sip of wine.

 

Making my way though the idiots, trying to reminisce over things I could hardly care about anymore and some are really trying to sell me the idea of moving back and I can only say “Back? Doesn’t that sound bad to you? ‘Back’?” but they laugh because I have always been strange to them. I am next to her and she eventually finishes up the jargon to some other stranger and I say “Hey” and she says “Wow, you’re here. I didn’t think you’d come” “Why? Because I’ve always said reunions are stupid and weird and that I’d never come to my own?” “Well pretty much and also because why would you bother?” “Well that’s pretty complimentary, I mean, thinking I’d have way better things to do or even that I would b so occupied with my life that I wouldn’t even know about it or something” and she laughs dismissively remembering she knows what I’m like and all that so it goes on. I tell her I think about her every day and I can tell my her reaction that I need to finish off the sentiment by telling her “no not like that I mean you come up, you pass through, you are a thing that happens and, here’s the funny thing, as soon as you pop in I am forced to think of all the others, so funny, like a conga line, ha ha…her and then her and her, you know…it’s funny”.

 

It’s a weird moment, the end. We’re all getting up, finished reminiscing, finished watching and looking one another over. I am just looking at her. To girl I first loved. She is looking at me and we are smiling. I tell her I want to talk to her again and she promises me we will. I get an email address and I giver her my mobile phone number. It’s so terrible because we both know I will never write and she will never call. She has her family and her life and I have so much to write. I compose hundreds of emails every day, but to write her is something different. In the age of paperless transmissions, where we can communicate every five minutes or less, still there is something powerful in writing to someone who you used to love, and have seen them again, and have had that ting again where you remember what you had, and the beauty in knowing that you had to exchange something in order to let yourself go again, this time to a fate much different when you stupidly broke up over childish reasons twelve years before.

 

I get four more glasses of wine from the bar because I don’t want to go back there and I am sitting with them in front of me and she takes one and says “thanks” and I say “they’re all yours…”. She drinks half the glass down and says “Don’t worry. It’s ok.” “What?” “What you did to me” “Christ fuck, yes I know. That’s just so, oh man so fucking gross you know, I don’t mean you I mean me like, what the fuck kind of asshole juvenile dick was I?…thank you, thank you though for understanding…Christ I mean what has it been like, twelve years? Oh god its so,…I think about it every day. Really…every…day. I can’t even kiss a woman without thinking about it. And I wasn’t even drunk or anything!” “Okay okay calm down, geez. You’re acting all crazy” “Yeah? Ffff God okay I’m sorry. I guess, I’ve just been thinking about it, you know, in isolation, like, just my ideas and stuff. Can I say…I am so sorry for that, I mean, it was stupid and weird and wrong and…” “I get it, okay?…I was there you know, I was…pffft well, we were kids right, stupid little kids. I know, no.. I mean, I’ve been with a bunch of guys and you know, it’s always fucking weird, you know? It’s a fucking rape game this sex shit I tell you” and we laugh and chink glasses (plastic cups at this shit place) and we are smiling so it’s all good and I just needed to day it all out loud to her and it fades away; this sick feelings I’ve had.

 

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MENTAL HYPERTENSION, AGAIN, IN WHICH SOME THINGS FALL APART BUT YOU REMEMBER, THEY ARE APART

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If she said anything, I know it would be a whole bunch of things that I’d have to respond to in more and more intricate ways, things I’d have to remember and recall not only during my long winded explanation and examination but much later, as in, two or three weeks later when this type of yell/fight/conversation thing whatever it’s called comes back again. She’d say “you said this ‘line’” like its an affidavit and I’d have to again go into the intricate reasons and realities to justify a single line out of context for a moment, so I am careful now[1]. I asked her ‘do you want me to be careful from now on, like, do you want me to only deliver fully fledged finished complete sentences you can use tat have been so thought out and carefully matriculated so as to be all encompassing and so finished that really there is no room for argument and are intelligently thought out to a degree that even my momentary feelings have been packaged and presented in such as way that can be taken and processed with minimal if no rebuttal/confusion/refutation/confusion?”[2].

 

I didn’t say any of that, I thought that after saying these really horrible ridiculous things. Like how ‘I need to keep drinking in order to deal with this world’ OR ‘How terrible it is to live though all this shit and not drink a lot of wine very day’ OR ‘How I can’t possibly live with all these humans doing all the disgusting slash beautiful things that they do and NOT have a bottle of wine every night to handle it all’[3]. That’s, in the end, what she hates: The Bottle of Wine. I switched to a cask and that helped (because there were less empty glass bottles left over and it was harder for her to count). I can keep talking until the cows come home about how important it is for me to drink wine every night and I am hard pressed to get any resolution or intervention from this. The only way out is to be loved and supported and feel safe, that my world is crumbling and that people are useless and stupid and that I am dying in vain and that I have a future in which I am alone[4]… Ironically it seems that this low level drinking thing could cause the latter lonely life yet I have no evidence from the rest of the writing world to substantiate this analogy, only the tale of morons who had nothing to contribute in the first place[5]. Sorry for the arrogance, but…[6]

 

I forgive myself every morning, only when dressed of course. In the mirror I see a person I am becoming and it’s refreshing, better and better, not worse and worse as before (although to be honest in some sick world ‘worse and worse’ was also doing so damned well as well…). Dying is not scary, dying is in some ways honest and proper. I’m not scared of dying, sickness yes, it sucks but dying itself is somehow loving and proper. Inevitable. Now for me its dying in the most humane way and with a certain level of accomplishment. That’s all it is…if I can touch a large population with the things I know and feel and have seen then guess what? Bye Bye. Lovely and finished and done. I will be heartbroken to see her go but I will know that my love is real and true and even though I have said so many bad things and been so horribly manipulative and false and leading a multi-faceted more than double life, I will know deep down that I gave what I could, now, knowing all I do. We’re worms[7].

[1] The delicate word play and emotional management, we think, is so important when in reality, truthful emotional response to every and any thing is the most desired, true and cared for result. We don’t do this often enough…we want the other person to smile and then as a result we can smile again as well like we have achieved something, like we have made the world better but what have we done rally but continue pretending, behind our own backs this time. As if sweeping emotion under the rug is the cure for cancer.

[2] Disgusting, but, if you can do this well (to your soul’s detriment) then there will be no more nights like this, but of course, then you will be watching a movie with actors and you are a director or at least the lead actor with a his or hers trailer.

[3] Lies, falsehoods, justifications…how easily we fool ourselves and how funny they are in hindsight. Like ‘oh my god did you seriously say that? You didn’t even believe yourself, let alone convincing someone else. You are an idiot. Don’t pretend you don’t wake up somewhat hungover and thing ‘no more please god no more, please help me I can’t stop, I know it now and I don’t want this anymore’

[4] No comment…it sounds worse than it is. I am happy.

[5] More justification for my behaviour. Like posting Wikipedia links or telling long winded stories about how pretty much every good writer was a borderline or fully fledged alcoholic…Kafka, Carver, Dostoyevsky etc. I can’t do that right now, I am not a fully fledged published writer…sure I wasn’t born in the renaissance of creative fiction, I was born in the grey goo of modern blog/self publishing/video log days. No editors, no publishers, no reason to listen to anyone anymore.

[6] Not really…have you been reading/writing?

[7] http://www.minion.co/short-stories/worms-a-love-story

 

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MENTAL HYPERTENSION EXTENSION, IN WHICH YOU GET MORE THAN YOU BARGAINED FOR

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MENTAL HYPERTENSION EXTENSION, IN WHICH YOU GET MORE THAN YOU BARGAINED FOR

I am finding it hard to believe anyone anymore. The starving musician, the penniless artist, the aspiring writer, the greedy capitalist…anyone. What they have in common is they recreate a stereotype, an assigned and played out role that is apparent in an instant and yet still desired as real and a goal[1]. As if there is no other way to live other than to align yourself with a preconceived desire to become something that already exists, yet in achieving this formulaic pre-existing ‘truthfulness’ they have already failed because deep down they know they are choosing something, they are choosing this or that theme/appearance, choosing this or that aesthetic, and then the worst part is choosing ‘this or that stuff’ to think and feel[2], and the resultant choosing ‘this or that’ thing to say[3]. Self censoring with a gauge that is self-referentially checking whether or not ‘this or that’ feeling/sentiment/sentence fits in with the overall goal of the persona they love so much (admire) that they want to create[4]. It can become easy over the years to believe that you really are what you wanted (chose) to be, the more you cultivate and edit and asses your ‘output’ (clothing, speech, sentiment, opinion, musical tastes, themes, furniture, behaviour et al), the closer (you assume) you will be to achieving a sense of honesty in your persona because surely over the years of telling and demonstrating to that many people you are this and representing yourself as such will ergo make you ‘such’[5].

GROUPS CAN DEFINE THE INDIVIDUAL, WHICH COMPICATES THINGS

People know, by preconceived assumption, what they think is authentic. We are aware of truthfulness straight away. From this, there is a mental checklist, prerequisites, that need to be ticked off in order for like-minded associates to accept another as being authentic. This is the horror of reality. We can all smell a fake a mile off. How? Because they do not pass the ‘rules’ we’ve created in our insular, checklist-based ‘pass or fail’ test we force people to undergo in order to assume an inclusion in an invented, imagined and created-based-on-precedent reality. The better you are at concealing this, or more, the less aware you are of this, the better. Now, as a huge aside, there is nothing sinister and calculating and exclusive about any group that exists, you can pretty much ‘get in’ by simply knowing one person (ergo nothing is exclusive)[6]. But hilariously the hierarchy and the way ‘members’ are valued or exalted is remarkable, i.e. those who attain the highest ideals of the whole are the (oh god) leaders, or…what do I say…best of us[7]?

THE DESIRE TO BE AN INDIVIDUAL IS NOW COUNTER POST-CULTURE

We now hate everything that is manufactured, obvious, already done, conceived, born[8] and so the only option is to revert to the pre-aware days of tribe based living; community; circles; bands of like minded people you can shun the world together amongst etc. There is an amazing beauty in this, yet alongside this a fear in progress, as if the hands that reached out for something else where cauterised by the fear of not knowing what else there could possibly be[9]. By reverting in disgust to what has already been our sickness creates an inherently twisted new sense of both self-aware post-irony boredom coupled with a futuristic Hellenistic desire to re-emerge as better than any other ‘version’ of this sense of impossible commune honesty[10]. So now then what is the individual, but one of a group of individuals, unable to exist without some type of ‘banding’, hopelessly lost in the void between not wanting to exist in a band but inadvertently being in one per se. This new horrible world has rules, and in breaking the rules you are a rule. You say things that are expected, you think things that are expected (of you), you try so hard to say something unexpected, but you are trying, and we can see that. There is nothing between heaven and hell we have not foreseen. That is our new mantra and we are sticking to it[11].

THE WAY TO HAPPINESS EMERGES IN WAYS YOU DIDN’T ENVISION

I hope. But lately I’ve become attracted to transsexuals who look really really like women.

[1] Imagine in your mind a musician who works as a part-time telemarketer but he is really good at playing guitar and sings in a local bar. Got it? Really? You can actually imagine that? Well then…that’s exactly what they look like, without irony.

[2] Politics, ethos, reason, purpose you name it

[3] So many examples, let go with the underground musician/hipster/artist, who are so post ironic that they no longer care about anything. How the very act of creating is useless(!) so we are trying to find ways that are still expressive and real but not so all-inclusive, like it’s a way to make people feel again (when of course they have given up feeling beyond wanting others to feel). For example what would they (all!) say to the question: What do you think about privacy?

[4] Thinking on this level on the fly is amazing, either you are able to process that fast or who have brainwashed yourself, that is, convinced yourself of your (desired) true identity, being to be able to actually respond truthfully.

[5] It gets complicated here. You of course are who you are, and what you want to be. But how much of you now is really who you are in comparison to who you want to be and how far away are you from acknowledging to yourself that you are not only real but also seeking to achieve a desired version of yourself and how much importance do you give (or grace) to the intermittent transition whereby you are not what you want to be now but are in the transition of becoming who you think you should be.

[6] Really, have you been to a party? In fifteen minutes you’ve made a stranger a friend. And you don’t care about them in any way! They give you their number and the next day you make sure and delete it. Security overrides humanity.

[7] Jealousy etc

[8] Although it has become do bad an confusing that now things that are obviously abhorrent have found their place in a nonsensical neo-hate/ironic love sense that they re-emerge. I would like it to be a real love of something for the thing in itself (which can happen) but more and more it seems to be a quasi-performance art piece people play with their real (read: not real) sentiments…and it gets gross because we then buy our friends gifts based on their recalcitrant “post-modern ironic representation of ‘like’ as art” newfound beliefs that’s gets so complicated that they themselves don’t even know whether to say “thank you” anymore, but instead react overwhelmingly happy because they have to (performance art, remember) continue the reality that they are in love with this type of thing…and it goes from there.

[9] Let’s go: long hair, drugs, shitty clothing. Again and again and again, right? No? This is the problem, you can see it happening around us, we can see teenagers NOW wearing Nirvana t-shirts. Nineteen years after they made their first album.

[10] With the desire to preserve all the ideals of this, as insanely sick as they have become these days. Allow ALL? Are you CRAZY J

[11] See? The individual, the real individual is nothing but an insane moron unaware of what they are or what they mean (as an unartist, say). Any meaning can be attributed, any subversive sentiment can be categorised. We have created a reason for everything, to fight against it is the be another reason that already exists. What is the answer: to be completely and unequivocally honest, loving, open, true and real. Yet, who among us wants to sit for any length of time with that person?

 

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Belief is only inside of you (four related parts of one life where belief is elusive)

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Dying because he loves her and she loves her god

When I went to visit Henry, when I was asked to go with Jane to visit Henry I thought ‘how funny: “Jane asked Alan to visit Henry”‘. His leg (her uncle’s leg, like she owns some of it!) had grown to the size of three legs and he would not get an operation because his new wife (of less than a year) was a Jehovah’s witness and those idiots think medical intervention is against god’s will whilst simultaneously believing that all events happen due to god’s will so that this god that they believe in wants him to have aggressive (reversible and curable also within god’s world) cancer that will kill him very painfully soon. He even shows it to us and it’s huge and lumpy and strange (the growth has made the leg look different, like a twisted muscle with patches of hair) and he is smiling for some reason so I smile too and ignore the fact that his leg is huge and clearly he will not be alive much longer and Jane is really upset, visibly upset but Henry’s wife is by his side smiling as emphatically as he is and all I can think of is that (a) they are happy and (b) they are fucking stupid as hell as we are in a hospital and maybe fifteen doctors pass by in less minutes and probably every one of them can (or could have) saved his life. She loves him so much but not as much as she loves her moronic faith so this love sick and cancer-sick fool will die painfully (no medicine) because (a) he loves this idiot woman (who is quite pretty lets face it) and (b) out of her love for him (and her basic pathetic religious beliefs) she thinks this is right and good and proper and loves him even more for sticking to her-version-of-a-god’s plans.

 

Thou shalt love no other god but me

She left me sitting there in my house and we never had kids because we wanted money and style and taste and holidays and she told me she was leaving because she wanted to have children and she found a man she knew would be a good father and she didn’t want it to be too late (she was 36) and I said ‘wait, you never wanted to have kids’ but I only said that in my own head, sitting there now on the lounge (part of the suite) looking around at our wonderful stuff that looks so good really and I laugh because it all looks so good but it is sitting there, not moving, sitting there being good to look at, being designed well, being perfect and I hate it all. It is not perfect it is disgusting, it is in place of a child. Did I want children? Did she trick me into not wanting children when in fact she did? The worst pain is that she did want children but not with me. I pour myself a drink at the bar and only now realise ‘I have a bar’. I am not me anymore. I became not me. I liked not being me because I was filled up to the point of emptiness and finishing another drink (of which there will be plenty more to come) I knew then why she left.

 

There is nothing left in this world without your god

Carpet. Feet. Drink. Cigarette. Walking to the window, looking outside. Sitting on the bed. Drink. Turning on the TV. Watching it empty inside. Hating them on the TV because they are dead and like corpses stink like decay and remind me. Drink. Drinking and walking. Carpet under my toes. Dirty feet. Dirty carpet. A picture on the wall of a bunch of flowers in a vase. Motel room picture, motel room bed, motel room sink that I vomit in. I didn’t need to vomit, I wanted to vomit. It hurts and I smoke again. Drink. I call for a prostitute to come and its going to be eight hundred dollars. Eight hundred dollars to not shower and get my dick sucked in a condom. I laugh and wait. Drink. Cigarette. Turn the TV on again. Its worse. Hang out the window and its midday. Cars and people moving about. I don’t wish I was them anymore. I fart. I drink. I smoke a cigarette and the knock at he door. I open the door and the most beautiful woman I have ever seen is standing there fresh and clean and so pretty. I finish my drink and ask he if she wants a drunk and she says no and I say ‘I’m going to take a shower. I go and take a shower. ‘What does she think, sitting there in my room, clothes and broken glasses and some cigarette butts on the flor. What does she think is going to happen. Is she repulsed? Do I care if she is repulsed?’ and I know, standing there with water running on my head, I realise I have changed, I do not care what she thinks. I will get her to suck my cock while I drink and I may not even cum but I will get this stranger, this young stranger maybe fifteen or more years younger than me to suck my cock in five minutes time and not care at all about her and perhaps even like not caring. That is how far away I am. That is what happens after all. After all that has happened.

 

Alone because you love your god and no one knows that god

You should come down. It’s speakers corner! It’s as old as the city itself. My great uncle used to come down because he hated the japs but of course you can’t hate the japs anymore and my grandfather said he was fighting in Turkey he had nothing to do with the japs but my great uncle, who didn’t actually go to war, was here when we might have had to give Queensland to the japs and they bombed Darwin and that’s why he hated the japs but he had another theory about what was wrong with them and his theory was that they were perverse and wrong because they didn’t believe in anything and anything could happen, ‘you just never know with those japs’ he’d say and that really scared him so anyway that was the type of stuff he’d go on about at the old speaker’s corner in Hyde Park. You should come down, is on the weekend, the best day is Saturday because old Bill, really that is his name, Bill! Old Bill he’s on about this energy thing with…and I listened to him a few times don’t get me wrong but it’s like, he says that we can all feel energy and some of us ignore it or whatever or know it and can feel it and I get what he means but he isn’t that good at explaining it but one time this chick all in tattoos was saying ‘yeah yeah’ with him and she wasn’t laughing and she was alone so I don’t know what she was doing or if she liked him or anything. But my idea is that, it’s the same as before you were born when you are dead and when you think about before you are born its all white and nice and soft and asleep and when you think about after you are dead it all dark and bloody and nothing so I think we need to change that and so I have this thing that I always say and its ‘when you die you will remember what it was like to not be alive’.

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There is something wrong with the world but I don’t know what it is yet.

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Wake

 

I had her hand in mine, I could see she was crying and I knew that she was upset but in my head I was thinking “how long until I can go for a cigarette, really, and if I go for a cigarette, and even if I make it last, maybe six minutes maximum, then I’ll have to come back in and I will have lost my place here with her because some family member will ‘fill in’ and so then I’ll be lost in a way and have to, fuck, talk to some of her family and that will be, just, hell” so I sit there still thinking of the cigarette because its probably some nicotine biology thing and not that I am an asshole and really I am not because what I want to do is say (yell) “HEY!” out really loud and then go on to yell (say) “this woman was absolutely beautiful and loving and caring and she only met me twice and each time she was so loving and beautiful and happy that I for one wish to go on celebrating how lovely and soft she was, not just think ‘oh no I’ll never see her again, oh poor me, I’LL never see her again’”. I drop her hand and take out my cigarettes and gesture that I am going ‘around the back’ for a cigarette. I disappear down the side of the house and sigh (what, for the cameras or was this a real sigh, like sighs actually exist?) and two little, maybe ten and eight year olds roll up on a scooter and skateboards respectively (what ages and what vehicles who cares) and I light my cigarette, blow out the smoke and realise they think I am cool (because I used to think that was cool and their faces tell me they think I am cool, so I don’t say anything and take another long pull on the cigarette then say) “how you kids doing today?” realising instantly that they just attended their grandmother’s funeral and that my fonzie-esque stance crumbled in about ten seconds but I am saved because the older one says “okay” and I say “your grandma was pretty cool, huh?” breathing out a huge plume of smoke. “Grandma? She was alright” he says, bashful, cute. And now I do my part with “Nah man, she was really cool. I talked to her once out on the back deck and I was like whoa man you know what you’re talking about. She was like was out there. Never met anyone like her”. They smile I think and turn their vehicles around and go. Can’t hang out with this bad ass smoking weirdo they’ve never met any longer. It’s not right because they are children and they have been taught their place and it’s not right because they are not worthy (they think).

 

Wedding

We kept making eye contact and it was strange and I didn’t know what to do about it because she was wearing a wedding dress and I was a guest (of the bride). She was making the rounds and I thought “oh my god she’s just making the rounds” and I said something horrible so she could hear and she got to me at some point and it was just me and she said “what’s wrong with you” and I said “nothing. What’s wrong with you?” and she smiled at someone else who came towards her and then she was gone.

 

Party

They look at you like you need to do something when you walk in to any party and this one was different because fuck you I have known them for ten years you weird-ass-looking-getting-there-early-probably-married-losers who have no depth or reason to look at me like that “hey Amelia how are you, wow fuck looking hot” I say and we kiss twice and I introduce Sandra and she is all shy because she doesn’t know anyone and I mistakenly do that thing where I don’t care about that and have to remember after about one painful (for her) minute to introduce her and make her feel comfortable but then of course that shit thing happens where she needs me way more than I want to be needed so we are (after pleasantries) in some corner sipping drinks and discussing how fucking retarded everyone is and I am telling her stories about each person I know there and it feels really bad and terrible to be there then and we have become the douchebags sitting and staring and judging people as they pour in.

 

Funeral

 

“Tell me you won’t let mine be like this”

“No way! I mean, look at all this, really. That song, yeah right like we need to hear that! No. I can honestly say your funeral won’t be like this”

“Thank you”

“I’ll tell you what the problem is though. The problem is people want this, expect this, like there’s no other way for this thing to happen. No other possible way. They need the usual step by step process, and then this happens where we do this and this happens and we cry now etcetera”

“Exactly. Oh please don’t do this for me”

“Mum, please, who are you talking to? My only problem is, by the time you, ha, need one of these, Ilm going to be…I’m going to, I don’t know, go too crazy, go too different”

“But that’s what I want”

“Yeah I know but like, no format, you know? And it will be real. Heartfelt and honest and none of this bullshit sentiment that means nothing. None of this selfish, blah blah she would’ve wanted this crap. Fake mind reading bullshit stuff, that’s, that’s designed to make you cry, as in, ‘I wrote this trite garbage to cause you to cry’ because that’s what you’re supposed to do i.e. you’ll feel better if you cry i.e. you will achieve the role in playing a funeral guest…complete the act! You must cry at that moment otherwise you didn’t love that person, right? You get what I mean. Fuck I have no way of knowing how to circumvent this”

“Okay, okay honey. How funny, they’re looking at us know”

“Ha yeah, like we can’t plan a funeral at a funeral. I’ve been to too many, like weddings, all the same. We all end up in the car park talking about our jobs, some of us smoking cigarettes. They’re ok at funerals though. You noticed that? No one complains.”

 

Relationship

 

“Really? Really? Really? Really?” the boyfriend exclaims, at last at the end finally not knowing her anymore than he thought he did, thinking her an insane woman, thinking that she has no idea about life or him or the words she says out of her mouth and he is hot and has tears forming on the edges of his eyes and if anything isn’t clenched he doesn’t know about it and for once his dick is flaccid and he can only see a strange person in front of him and trying to see if she can possibly say something that makes any sense by repeating the word ‘really’ over and over trying inside himself too to understand that this may actually be reality and something he is missing, struggling to come to terms with what is happening, with what she is saying and what she wants from him and what he has said to her before and none of it coming together.

 

Writing

 

All the letters on the keyboard, sitting there, making little three letter words, on the right there is p o l i in a weird pattern to inspire you to write p-o-l-i-c-e and then some story with police in it; I could write a story with police in it and drama and a crime and some (this will be clichéd) dumb police in it and then things will happen and one of the police officers will have an epiphany. There is too much cop drama available on TV, every episode they have an epiphany or realise their place in the greater scheme via betrayal, questions of right and wrong, corruption, role vs reality. It’s even already been written how a cop is stupid and simple and black and white and then has heart which is why they got into this thing in the first place: to protect (Magnolia). I would write about a police officer who is pregnant but hasn’t told anyone yet because it is only six weeks and can’t bear the thought of getting hurt because of the baby so actively ignores calls and knows she is letting violence/crime happen but has chosen her baby over her (what she things it is now just a) job.

 

Nightlife

 

The bar is about three people deep, we’re all drunk and it’s fun because some are posing badly, I am posing (in a posture I assume is ‘I don’t want to be here but I’ll entertain this place for a while longer because I am buying drinks for others who do want to be here, for now’) too but its far less complimentary than these guys with their shirts down and sunglasses on their head. I girl next to me says ‘hey’ and smiles and I say ‘hey’. In my mind I can tell she is stupid so I turn away and look around over their heads because I am tall and can only think ‘what is the neatest way for me to leave tonight? Seeing as I have to pretend I like this and like going out and like everyone and am a fun person and am entertaining etc’. I get to the bar buy the drinks (blah) and head back to the table, putting the drinks down and maybe some girl kisses me on the cheek “thanks!”. So I sit down and some other person says “what’s wrong” and I sigh and say loudly “nothing. Hey! Oh my god this dude at the bar was so lame! He glasses on his head like that Alex Perry dick! And there were these three losers just like standing there trying to get chicks, obviously never been here before and like, no idea about style. Shaved chests? Open shirts? What year is it 1990?” and they laugh and I keep going on and on with banter and get drunk like this with them.

 

Divorce

 

It’s a bright, they say perfect, day, the ex-lover sits in a lounge chair looking through eight centimetre gap in the curtain out to see grass and a clear blue sky. The ex-lover is wearing pyjamas, old pyjamas, flannel pyjamas. The ex-lover sits on the lounge looking though the gap in the curtain and imagines or sees birds flash by. The ex-lover sits and feels his fat stomach on his chest and thinks that’s something she didn’t like. The ex-lover feels his face and its unshaven and he feels sick and gross and needs to brush his teeth. The ex-lover is alone and can hear children playing next door and thinks of his children (of course), his son in the city, his daughter in the country married to a man he’s met twice with three kids and she’s fucked it up he thinks, not happy or sad just…she fucked it up. His son. Call his son. The ex-lover sits on the lounge in his pyjamas looking at the pyjamas thinking I don’t like these pyjamas, she probably didn’t like these pyjamas either. The ex-lover thinks of his ex-wife having a good day. It’s a good day, he knows it is a good day but instead he takes up the bottle of whisky that is left there on the lounge with about a third of it left and drinks it for no reason and it tastes good and he thinks this is not good by the ex-lover knows what he is now or wants to be this now. He wanted to be this for a long time and now she is gone so he can be this. He will finish the bottle, shower, dress, walk about ten minutes to buy two more bottles, drink some of one on the way back, sit back on the lounge, finish the bottle and call his son but his son doesn’t want to talk to him because he is drunk and makes no sense and keeps talking about the son’s mother which is not right.

 

Love

 

How do you know it’s not love? Because I know this is not what I want. But you have made that up, you have made it all up! But I will know when it happens. When what happens? Love. But you don’t know what it is! But I will know when it happens. But I love you, I love you now. With all your heart? With all my….no, not with all my heart. Then that is not it then. No, that is not it, it is what I have now. And I want more. So do I.

 

–

 

They all seem so real to me, but I know they are not. They can’t be, or else the world is nothing and we are nothing.

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Brakes

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What they say about breaking up is just not true.
Breaking up is easy to do.
You know I break up every time
I break up with you.
- Violent Femmes “Breaking Up”

 

On January fifteenth which they were painfully aware was only two weeks after the false magic of the new year both her and him talked about and decided to split, break up, part ways, separate or whatever the words are you are told that you are post event. The event itself is insanely long and incredible and both proper and impossible, with tears and a type of hugging they didn’t know was possible or that they were even capable of. It’s at these moments they realised they do care or that they do actually really want the best for the other person even though all the months leading up to this they were in their ways coercively just saying they want to the best for each other or things in the vein of “it’s for the best” just so that there can be a modicum of pleasantness in the final final decision. The final final decision was natural, thought out and rang true but also almost stupid in its insulting unknowing baseness.

 

At 2am she crept into her twelve year old daughter’s room and gently woke her and when her eyes were open she said “come on, we’ve got to pack our bags” and she guided her towards her chest of drawers and said “put your stuff into your bag ok sweetie” and crept back out. The young girl started putting her clothes into her bag until it was full but there as more to take. She sat next to her bag and looked about her room that she had only just got used to with three posters on the wall, one she stole from her brother. It was maybe ten or twenty minutes until her mother reappeared and gestured for her to come with her so she got up and dragged her bag behind her and the mother gestured ‘shhh’. The left through the front door and the mother quietly closed to door and put their bags into the car. “It’s ok darling, we’re just going to leave for a while ok. We just need to get out of here tonight”

 

The first barbeque of November when it was warm enough to get everyone around we had a nice big fire going and some steaks and sausages and lamb cutlets going and I was talking to the guys and the girls were all sitting on their fat asses, no really they have fat asses, but we have kids and when they have kids mother fucking hell they get big asses, fucking hell. Some guys like big asses? Yeah fucking rappers, heh heh. Big asses are gross and I told her she’s gotta lose some of that ass meat and I keep slapping her ass telling her that and she knows it and wants to lose it but fuck me if she’s doing anything about it. The little one she had from her last bloke comes over trying to poke a stick in the fire and I tell him to fuck off you little pyro and his mother says to me don’t talk to him like that and I say fuck off he’s a little pyro and Mike laughs and I get another beer and the meat is pretty much done and Johnno’s wife is a hot little Asian slut and he says she’s as tight as a condom.

 

After three years of living together it was hard because her father died when we pretty much just got started living together and she was really messed up and spoke to her mother maybe three of five times a day and she talked to me pretty little. I was working a new job and luckily got to know a couple of pretty cool people a thirty year old guy and a twenty something chick who had epilepsy but she took medication and pretty much only talked about it after a couple of beers she said she probably shouldn’t have. She had a shit job with a shit boss who was basically a pervert cunt, had porn bookmarked in his desktop and made her use his computer as if he wanted her to see all the shit on there but we didn’t know for sure whether he was stupid or gross as hell. We got up enough money to take a holiday, she felt guilty she was using her father’s inheritance to pay for it but I convinced her (fucking finally) that he would have wanted it and she didn’t suspect the cliché. We went to a Queensland rainforest lodge retreat and it was good to get away. I told her how lovely this is and how she needed this and she said what do you mean and I said well, to get away from all the stress and she yelled at me that her dad dying isn’t stress it was that her dad is dead and she is only twenty two and I said but yeah I mean its good to get away from the reminders and…she cut me off to call me an asshole and it took three days which cost about eighteen hundred dollars until she spoke to me again and it was hard to imagine going on with her anymore. I know how that sounds.

 

My name is Tom but guess what the fucked thing is I get called TJ because my last name is Jameson and I have a picture of a rabbit (from Alice in Wonderland) tattooed on my arm which the guys in prison call ‘Jack Rabbit’ and I don’t know if it’s an insult or not but I don’t care and even though I hate TJ because it sounds like an American sitcom character I don’t want to fuck with these guys. I’m in the wing for murder and these guys think I am just like them, some fucked up hard ass insane killer guy but really I drowned my daughter in her little bath when my wife was out shopping and what happened was I didn’t want her anymore so I was giving her a bath and I just held her little body under the water for I don’t know like only two minutes and she drowned. My wife, or ex-wife, yeah, still visits me. She still comes once every two months or so to tell me how much she hates me and curses me and wishes I was dead and she bothers to come and cries and yells and I sit there because I know I have to see that and cry myself and I don’t give a fuck if the other guys see me crying. I am being punished and I deserve every second of whatever pain I get.

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Eight more short stories

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Her right hand was bent inward in a way in which she couldn’t use it, like a permanent lame half fist but the fingers were straight. She could use it by shaping it, like, to hold the sponge she used to wash her body in the shower or masturbate with it. Her fingers were basically numb so as she rubbed it back and forth over her vagina she could really let go as the only thing that told her in her head that she was doing it was the motion she felt in her arm. She hated her hand.

 

His left foot was like a worm as in he didn’t have any toes and the foot tapered off into a point but he could move it at will like a foot, or more like a foot with one large toe so it could basically squirm which even to himself looking at it was gross. He could wear socks and shoes and appear normal, he could walk around and no one needed to know it looked or acted like that. He had sports days in high school and instead of making an elaborate story to excuse himself he tried to quickly change shoes in the change room so as to get away with it and it worked for over a year until one boy saw the foot. Then he was lost amongst the crowd.

 

It was a malnutrition thing from his parents that left him with a tongue that looked like it had huge gashes out of it, basically if he poked his tongue out it would look like it had chunks missing from the sides. He ignored it when eating or denied himself the temptation to chew the bits that were exposed until when he met a girl and she kissed him for the first time he kept his shameful thing inside his mouth and after a few weeks of this she actually asked “what’s wrong” and he said “nothing, I just don’t like kissing like that” and she thought “ok” but it was weird from there on. They stayed together and after a while (as it turns out) he went down on her and she didn’t notice and he felt good to be using his tongue and was also eating properly now and wanted it to go away like his doctor said it could. The damage was irreversible.

 

She trained a lot, her natural talent for gymnastics meant she could maybe be in the Olympics and over the years she got so good and thin and flexible that as her friends all got their periods she didn’t and after a two years of this she asked her mother what was happening and her mother said “it’s because you are training so hard” and she thought that she was elite and different and so grew further and further apart from her friends who she now thought of as animals and so progressed closer towards gymnastic perfection. At fourteen she fell pregnant and her mother was crying and her father was yelling and she didn’t know how it could happen. Her parents aborted the child with a signature.

 

In the bathroom he kept masturbating using the wash cloth over and over and over in his teenage years so before he was fifteen he developed a hard callous growth under the head of his penis and even though he saw it growing and knowing he had to scrub harder he kept going until the day he felt regret at growing such a thing. It was when he met a girl and kissed her for the first time and felt his penis grow in his pants that he realised he would have to reveal this hard growth to someone at some point. Three evenings later he tried to cut the hard callous off.

 

I wanted to kill my mother because she had cheated on my father and I was now living with her and her lover and I felt sick and alone and was crying a lot for my Dad who I could only see on weekends in some clichéd modern sharing court based ruling. I took a kitchen knife out of the drawer and practised and imagined how I would plunge it into her chest or belly and took it with me down the hallway and opened my parents’ bedroom door and saw her on top of the guy she was cheating with moving up and down and really fucking him. I closed the door before they knew it was opened.

 

In her hand she held a letter that professed a type of undying love spelt out in a very basic kind of poetry but because he had written it for her it felt real and pure and better than anything else ever written. She went to bed with it next to her having read it ten or twenty times, imagining his face as he wrote it, remembering his face after they’d kissed with his doe-eyed love and blank expression. She started to drift towards sleep and her phone buzzed twice with an SMS. It said: omg Clive is pashing some slut at Empire bar! Where are you?. She read the poem again and cried herself to sleep.

 

Her grandfather was dying in the next room and there were so many family members everywhere that it seemed so strange to know that he was dying and she had to smile or nod or do things in acknowledgment of the situation like it was an event. She stood up and walked towards the room he was dying in and was stopped so many times by people crying or talking to her or hugging her and maybe it was ten minutes from one side of the room to the door. She pushed her way between her aunts and was at the foot of the bed and by that time he was not breathing and had died. She felt that she had been held back and denied the final goodbye she wanted by selfish role-playing family members who didn’t care as much as she did.

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Wet, cold and dying.

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Walking along the street in a dark old town, overgrown trees, winding paved streets, broken sandstone spewing old earth as wet mud with moss and some small blue-violet flowers that look nice and menacing like how death is romantic. It was dark so I couldn’t tell what it was so far away from a streetlight but it was whiter than anything else, not a piece of bark, was it? I thought but coming closer to it it was a shivering little thing that was flesh with a curved back and a head with some type of hair on its head. I stood there looking at it for a while, horrified, disgusted, confused. Is it dying, what the fuck is it? It was wet, could be from the rain an hour ago. It’s really more like a shaved lamb or a small horse-thing with a half-human head/face…it’s, I can’t describe it really but it is curled up in foetal position like a human baby, shivering and crying in a weird “heeeee heeeee hee hi hi hip” kind of sound which really does sound like a child thing and I reach my hand out and touch it and it’s cold and wet and smooth like a human and it reacts to my touch with a quick flinch and I thought it was just a piece of bark before this and now it’s maybe dying a little thing lying there in the dirt, naked (I guess) and cold and crying. I look around and there’s some headlights coming but that’s it, dark and winding up towards some houses with lights on but not many. “Hee hi hip heeee” it says, crying and shivering and curdled in a ball. Fuck. I pick it up and hold it close to me, like I know what to do with a baby. I look at its face, large eyes under closed lids, extended jaw and teeth, small nose shrunk into the skull, curly white hair on its head in one small patch, long neck into a thick small body with equal sized limbs, hands and feet one and the same, tucked up in half fists like baboon hands. But no hair expect for that tuft on the head. White skin, wet, cold, goose pimples, soft and young, like a baby born of a sheep, human and snake. Out from the night I am carrying a crying naked thing that is maybe hours or days or weeks old, dumped naked and scared in the night, a bastard child of rape or incest or something unholy.

 

I woke up and immediately thought of the thing next to me. I have a double bed and had wrapped it in some jumpers and placed it in the bed next to me. It seemed to calm down and sleep and now warm was not shivering so I let myself sleep. Now in the morning I looked at it and it was asleep, breathing heavily through its long nose. I took a shower and came back and it was gone. I looked over the bed and couldn’t see it but found it under the bed, alive and looking around, making a small “teet teet” sound. I put my hand under and it shifted away. I said ‘shhh shhh’ and reached over slowly, trying to get it’s limb or something or have it trust me enough to relax. It looked confused and scared, of course, making “tsch tsch tsch” sounds and I reached further towards it. It let me catch a limb, its back leg and slowly drag it closer, only just struggling and making a “eeeaaarr eeeaarrr” sound, slightly distressed. I had it pulled out and in the light, it looked right at me and I picked it up and put it on the bed, wrapped it in last nights jumpers and tried to quiet it’s nerves. It’s ears darted and the small body tried to pulse away from me but soon it relaxed, wether tired or content.  I knew I couldn’t let it go again so tried to dress with it sort of in my arms and eventually got everything done and didn’t know what clothes to put on it so left it wrapped in the jumpers. I took it down with me to my car and got in, placing it on the passenger seat before changing my mind and putting it on my lap. It curled up and relaxed, I started the engine soon after that.

 

Waiting at the medical centre with it in my arms, sleeping, hopefully ok and not hypothermic or pneumonic or something. After forty-five minutes they call my name and I take it in with me. The doctor says “so what can I do for you today” and I just give the thing over to him.
“This is…this is…your…baby?”
“My baby? No. No, this…I found this last night and I…”
“Found?”
“Yes, I was…I was walking and I came across this…this…thing and I…”
“Thing? This is…your baby”
“What? No this…this is not my baby, it’s…”
“Sir, um, Mr Michelson, this…your child is very sick, she’s”
“She?!”
“Mr Michelson…your child has sever hypothermia. Okay we need to get her into protective care ASAP”
“Oh my god”
The doctor turns away, the child-thing in his arms and makes a call, a nurse comes in a takes it away, all so quick and he turns to me with
“Mister…John. Can I call you John”
“Ah, yeah sure, I mean, what’s”
“John, listen. We’ve, we’re going to help your daughter but you must realise what is happening here. I mean, she’s very ill and you’ve…you’ve clearly been neglecting her and by law we have to report it.”
“This is crazy I mean, I was trying to save it and I…I wrapped it up and I slept with it and I brought it right here, I mean…I…”
“John. I don’t know what to tell you. This, this child is your daughter. I can see it right here. Madeline. Her name is Madeline, John.”
“What? I…I found this…thing…last night, and I…”

 

Looking forward at the ground is just plain grey concrete and looking up is plain grey shiny metal bars and looking left and right is strange men I really don’t want to be near and its all clean and cold and hard and maybe half the people look away and they are going to call me soon for an interview and two people are pacing and one is cleaning dirt from under his nails, uncaring. I don’t feel so bad because there are lots of security freedoms, open windows, lights, minimal guards so I don’t feel too detained, well, not prison detained. I don’t care so much because this is so stupid. It’s maybe twenty or maybe forty minutes until a guy in a suit with a cop next to him says my name and I get up and they let me out and follow them unrestrained which makes me feel good. We walk along the corridors, many varying entrapments of people in different states of interrogation or processing and we get to a door and they open it and we go in. They gesture for me to sit and when I approach a chair they tell me to sit in the other one. There is a glass of water on the table and a tape recorder. The suited man and the police officer sit opposite me and say
“we’re going to start the recording, okay?”
“okay” I say.
And the officer presses the button down. In an obligatory gesture I sip the water. The officer starts
“My Michelson, we have detained you for gross neglect of your child, do you understand this”
“Yes, I have heard but”
“Good. Okay. This is Doctor George Kindle. He will be talking to you for most of this first session, “Doctor”
“Yes thank you officer. Okay Mr Michelson, John if I may?”
“John is fine”
“Great, okay, John.” pause “John, do you know that you have a daughter?”
“A daughter? No I don’t have a daughter!”
The doctor talks to the officer, I hear him say something but I can’t be sure if it’s ‘stress case cause’ or ‘stress crazed kill’ or ‘strained child kiss’ but none sound right.
“Your daughter, John, is dead. And we think you killed her. It’s called ‘Post Traumatic Stress disorder, and in women we call it post natal stress syndrome, but it differs between genders and timelines and situations, do you understand?”
“No I found… this…this…thing and I brought it in to the doctor and I … I don’t know, I wrapped it up and then, then I brought it in, I”
“Yes, we know what you did, John. Ok. I think I’ve heard enough. Officer, you can take him back to the holding cell.”
“Ok, what’s going on here, I mean really. What the fuck is going on?”
The officer gets up and stands behind me, guides me up and pulls my hands behind my back, putting cuffs back on me and leading me out. The doctor is sitting at the desk finishing writing a few lines on his clipboard.
“Doctor, what the hell is going on?”
“John I’ll be with you soon. We just need to look into this, okay”
“Yeah…yeah okay” And they lead me back down the corridors and I see a woman I think I know but I can’t be sure.

 

They tell me I have post natal depression. They tell me I killed my child, left her naked and alone outside. Took her for a walk with me and left her in a patch of wet grass, moss and mud in a dark corner of the neighbourhood. Not wanting to kill her, just to leave her there and let her go. But then, they say, I went back for her, and found her right where I’d left her, and picked her up and taken her home. Washed the mud off her and put her in bed with me. That I had hated her because her mother had left and I felt alone and trapped, that I hated her and wanted her to go away so I took her and left her naked and alone. That I had given her pneumonia and hypothermia and all that and then gone and picked her up and tried to take care of her and then the next day not knowing who she was took her to the doctor to bring her back to life but that it was too late. That I had killed her and that I was a murderer. That I had killed my child because my wife left me and I couldn’t handle it. That I was insane and crazy and would kill my child. But I know I was walking and saw a half-dead strange human thing dying in the mud and I tried to help the thing to live.

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Death and Life

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After the funeral we sat in the garden near the crematorium where inside arguably her father was being burnt to ash and we looked out over the flowers and manicured plots and saw the breeze working. She asked me

“Do you believe in heaven?”

“Well, yes in a certain way. Probably not the way you think”

“In what way?”

“Well, okay, so, you’re asking because you hope that your father is still somewhere right?”

“…”

“Okay can I ask you this then, do you believe in the soul?”

“Yes”

“Okay then, so we have that. We feel there is something such as a soul. OK, so then lets imagine that the soul really exists and is outside of what we think of as body”

“Okay”

“So you believe in this”

“Yes, I do”

“Okay. So, the soul then, has no relation to this meaty living life thing we thing is happening here. Look around, all of this, the soft sun, the way it’s so quiet, all those people who were talking to you up there…all of that, has nothing to do with the soul”

“But…”

“Well I mean they all have souls yes but I mean, the way in which we all work is so…so, meaty and human, right? That stuff has nothing to do with the soul”

“…okay…”

“Okay so what I mean is, if there is a soul, it is way beyond what we can understand, WAY beyond what we know and think and feel, so, I think, it’s amazing and immense and important that we think like this, that we think of this as something out of our grasp, an impossible thing to, just, imagine“

“Yeah”

“Yeah and so, your father, what is essentially your father is is, somewhere. I mean, I’m not going to lie to you and say, ‘you’ll meet up again in some wonderful place where, lets face it, sounds pretty stupid, right, like, ‘where all souls meet up’, BUT, and here’s the cool thing, if you are a soul, I mean, why not meet up? Why NOT get together in some way, right? And, in getting together, maybe THAT is heaven. Maybe all the souls noticing one another, being together in this other this world thing we can’t possibly imagine…maybe that is heaven”

“Wow”

“Well why not. Maybe your dad is just, you now, getting there now, getting into this huge crazy unknowable thing just now”

“Imagine…”

“Yeah and knowing him he’d be all like ‘hey, what the fuck is all this!”

And she laughs and I hold her hand and we look at the bees moving from flower to flower.

 

- – -

 

In the waiting room while my sister is in labour for the tenth hour, had maybe eight bad coffees and am talking too much to a guy who is waiting for his wife to give birth. I offer for fun and to break the tension in the room:

“Fucking hell how long does this take?”

“No idea. It’s my first”

“Well good for you. I’m not even having a kid. It’s my sister”

“Ah ok. Well cool, you’ll be an uncle”

“Ha, yeah, I didn’t even think about that. I was just thinking ‘fucking hell there’s a baby in my sister’. That was freaky enough for me”

“Where’s the father?”

“In there. Hey, why aren’t you in there with your…wife?”

“Girlfriend. Yeah I have been in. Been over 30 hours now. This is just…fuck this is just…”

“Hey, you wanna go grab a cigarette, I mean christ, 30 hours. You been up that long?”

“Fuck of course I have. Man, this is…this is. Yeah fuck lets go out for a ciggie. I’ll just check with the nurse”

And he gets up and walks into a room. Poor bastard, covered in sweat, smells like onions. He comes back and nods for me to get up. We walk along and get into the lift. In there is an old man in a wheelchair that looks dead, standing next to him is a middle aged woman in a full suit playing with her iPhone. We get out on the ground floor and go out the front to the car park. I hand him a cigarette and we light up.

“Fucking weird to smoke outside a hospital, feels wrong”

“Yeah. Hey, check out the nurses over there”

And there are three nurses in tight blue uniforms smoking.

“Crazy”

We finish our cigarettes, quickly and in silence really and go back inside. Walking past the others who look either upset or happy. Hospitals are for the many dying and for the few who are born. That’s it. We get out on our floor and soon a nurse runs over the my smoking buddy and pulls him but the arm and is talking quickly. I go and sit down and my see my dad talking to a nurse. He sees me and comes over with

“When are gonna quit that shit? Anyway, forget it, your sister had a boy”

“No way! Cool! Can we see him?”

“Not yet, give them a chance”

And I sit back down and feel weird. My sister had a boy. Fucking hell. I feel proud and pathetic at the same time, thinking ‘there’s no way me and Christina are having a kid’. Saw my father’s face, he was stoic and exalted at once. Became a grandad in a minute. I see the other guy, having his first kid, come back out of a room and walk slowly over to the waiting area seats, slumps down, looks exhausted. I decide to go over and talk to him

“Hey. My sis just had her kid. I’m a freaking uncle!”

“Huh? Yeah yeah…”

“What’s up?”

“The baby…is dead”

 

- – -

 

 

Three knocks on my door. Sturdy ones. One two three. I opened the dor and it was the police, a man and a woman

“Yes?”

“Mr Bernstein”

“Yes”

“I’m constable Peters and this is constable Hedrick. We are her to inform you that your daughter, Imelda Turner, has been murdered”

“Imelda…? Fuck. Imelda…I…I haven’t seen or heard from her in…thirty years”

“Sir I know this is tough news to hear”

“Tough? Yeah it’s….” blow air out of my mouth “tough, sure”

“Sir if you can we need you t identify the body”

“Me…? I…um. Well, I frankly wouldn’t…I mean, I don’t know what she looks like”

“Well, sir, you are the closest living relative and”

“What about Jane…uh that’s, her mother”

“Jane is living on Norway sir”

“Norway? Jesus Christ. She’s in Norway? Fucking hell”

“Yes Mr…can I call you…”

“Jack”

“Jack, okay. Jack can you come with us to indentify the”

“The body yes. Sure. Okay, um, let me, let me get some things”

And I close the door trying to remember her face but can only see the two year old and her mother in that house that I left and it seems so long ago and strange and not even part of my life or thoughts and those two or three years try to flood back but they are just snippets like photos and I grab my jacket, keys, cigarettes and lighter and head out the door with the police officers. We drive for a while and they lead me into the morgue, signing in where we need to and talking to me

“She was involved in a robbery”

“A man is in custody for shooting your daughter and the shop owner”

“We don’t know the details but we think she may have been an accomplice”

“Did you know your daughter whereabouts recently?”

“Are you in contact with her mother?”

I can only say “No” to everything. I have not seen or heard from them since I left in 1983. I don’t feel comfortable saying this. I feel ashamed for not being a proper father. We walk along the cold concrete hallway towards a grey metal double door and there is guy sitting there and the police says a name, he gets out a clipboard and they sing in, hand it over to me and I look at it not knowing what they want and the attendant puts his finger to a blank rectangle and I scribble my name. We go in and the attendant gestures to us to come to a table and there is a body with a sheet over it. I know it is my daughter and I am surrounded by strangers and a sheet covering my thirty or so year old daughter and I don’t want them to take the sheet off.

“Sir if you could tell us if this is your daughter?”

“I…I’ll…” little cough “I’ll try”

And the attendant removes the sheet to reveal her face and I cannot see the little girl I knew but I cry anyway, proper tears because my only daughter is dead and the woman police officer puts her arm on my shoulder and I say “I’m sorry”.

 

- – -

 

Waiting for my daughter come home, it is one am but I told her midnight. Twenty minutes later she opens the door and I get up and say

“Where the hell have you been? I told you MIDNIGHT!”

“Oh dad”

She says, running over to me, throwing herself in to me and crying. I hug her back and say

“It’s ok honey, I just want you to be safe that’s all”

And she wouldn’t stop crying, really sobbing into my chest so I say

“It’s ok honey. I’m not angry at you. It’s just if I say to be home at…”

“Daddy….daddy…I…” and she wails loudly, hardly able to breathe, loud crying and I now some thing is wring by the way she is pulling at my back.

“Honey, what is it, what’s wrong?”

“Daddy…….I….daddy I was raped”

I pull her face away from me and ask “What!”

“Daddy” she says, eyes blood shot and only now do I notice how bad she looks.

“You were…raped? Who? Who did this?”

“Some guy, some guys at this…this party”

“What! Where? Who? I’ll fucking kill them!”

“Daddy…” she says, falling back into my chest and crying harder than I’ve ever heard

“Shhhh darling shhhh. Where was it. You were at Cindy’s party, right?”

“Yesss”

“OK. Are they there?”

“I don’t know…”

“Honey, go and talk to your mother ok. I’m going to…I’m going to Cindy’s”

“Dad-eeee” she creams, crying and scratching at my back and my face is hot and I’m trying not to cry. I take her up to my bedroom and put her into bed with my wife. I leave her there, go down to the garage and put my golf clubs in the car, open the garage door and drive out. I feel sick, imagine smashing in the face of the young cunts who raped her. Imagine them now drinking their beers and laughing and telling everyone. It takes fifteen minutes to drive across the suburb to Cindy’s house. The party is dying down and I take my nine iron inside with me. A few kids stare and I start asking for Cindy. I eventually find her in the kitchen doing shots with some other girls. I tell her what happened and she tells me ‘Scott’. I go around looking for Scott and find him out in the backyard by the pool. I tell him I am Sarah’s father and he says “So what” and I hit him on the side of the heat with the nine iron and he falls off the deck chair and onto the small pebbles around the pool. I bring the club down onto his young face over and over until someone grabs my arm and asks

“what the fuck are you doing man?”

And I say “this kid raped my daughter” and they say

“this is Sarah’s boyfriend! What the hell are you doing”

And I say

“Which one of you mother fuckers raped my daughter?”

And none of them move and I ask it again but nothing happens.

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I have no idea why you came to me with this

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I came across the best way to get money and that is to threaten an alone mother with her child, you say ‘give me your money or I’ll kill your baby’ and they give you their money straight away.

Being an artist means living truly, waking up and then immediately being an animal who wants love. Masturbating in bed, masturbating as you get up and walk around, gesturing with your cock like a politician.

Waiting for something to happen, waiting until you make something happen, sitting on the floor and tearing their faces off from magazines and cutting their eyes out.

I call my sister and she tells me how successful she is, I tell her I am sorry for being her brother.

Drinking alcohol, champagne this time left over from your birthday, inside the place where you live, remembering drinking champagne at your ex-girlfriend’s wedding.

Showering and shaving, cutting your hair, putting on a suit, putting on shoes, putting on fragrance, standing in front of the mirror, taking off your suit.

Watching a video of a penis going in and out of a vagina, letting it play on in the corner of the room, watching it from over near the door, the flesh and the sound over there ridiculously happening in the past.

She comes home and ignores me, I ignore her, she goes about doing things and I stare at the wall. We’re waiting from someone to speak but wanting no one to speak ever again and to go away.

Eating old bread with a glass of water and pretending you are a criminal and living in hell.

Visiting a café and reading the paper it became clear I do not care about anything. I looked down from the page at the things on the table and was horrified by the still cups and salt shaker and ashtray.

I was walking along a path in the botanical gardens and noticed lots of ants killing a writhing worm.

In planning your suicide you think of things like your parents, your employer, your friends and the way in which you’d like to die and hardly once think of yourself.

Ah, the voice inside! How it is true but leads to such pain. How ignoring the voice leads to such pain.

A mere acquaintance touched me gently on the back and since I hadn’t been touched like this for so long I instantly felt human and all of my evils melted away.

I awkwardly made love to her, manoeuvring my limbs in ways that were inexperienced and stilted. Soon I had my penis in and started moving it in and out.

Reading The Bible in a hotel room I threw it away because the delicately thin pages drove me crazy with temptation to hold them roughly or tear them.

Stabbing a person feels better than cutting chicken breast, there is a point when you know there is no going back, like bursting a balloon it pops in and is quickly done.

At 23 I lost a tooth when three guys beat me up thinking I was a homosexual so now I have a false tooth and take it out every night and put it on my bedside table.

In prison I made friends with a Maori guy who told me the best way to become a citizen here is to get a white girl pregnant and then her parents do the rest.

I try to go to sleep but I keep thinking about how it is impossible for the girl I love to love me and how there is nothing I can do for her to love me.

Being depressed forces you to appreciate things like a blanket, a shower, clean clothes and food. Other people want you to smile to make themselves feel better.

When I was homeless a person from a charity group tried to talk to me but they were smiling so much I couldn’t believe them and I asked them ‘what do you want’ and they said ‘to help you’ and I said ‘but what do you really want?’.

A twelve year old boy was standing outside a clothes shop listening to his iPod standing on his skateboard and texting a friend and he was the coolest person we’ve created.

I was lying when I told you the truth, there is no way that there is any truth to simply tell.

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