look what the cat dragged in (things appearing on my welcome mat)

I opened the door to a prostitute. I knew it the moment I saw her.

Actually, that’s a lie.

The moment I saw her I felt suspicious…

That’s a lie, also.

I heard a knock at the door, and ignored it. The prostitute knocked again. I felt uneasy.

I saw her through the peeping eye in the doorway. I was looking at her through a funnel. She was beautiful and hideous at the same time. Her hair was ginger-tinted blonde, uncombed and flawless. Her skin had no make-up covering it and it was mottled in an attractive way. Pale. But damaged; not English rose pale. Not hauntingly pale. Or ice. Just pale.

It was her legs. I saw her legs and I knew she was a prostitute. There were scars and freckles side by side sharing the awful space of her skin. She was standing there in a black coat in the freezing six degrees temperature and the bottom quarter of her legs poked out, unshaped, beneath her. Her legs were bare from the shin down and the same motley pale as her face. She was wearing ankle socks like mine - faded blue, thin - and canvas sneakers.

And she was a prostitute.

I knew this the instant my eyes fell on her legs. I caught her ankles as she walked towards the hallway, a prostitute in my kitchen. The curiosity in my stare tripped her up. I tripped up a prostitute in my kitchen with my eyes.

But it was her kitchen more than it was mine. It was hers before I even knew it was mine. My room was hers, too. She has done more in this room than I have. I pay $150 a week to live with the remains of a prostitute. There is a slutty skeleton in my closet.

She, however, makes $150 in a single hour. $150 for a few farts and groans, a ride with a stranger, for uncertainty. Yet I can afford to eat far better than she can.

If I were rich I would buy a prostitute. I would buy her off the street and make her sit in my living room. I would ask her to talk. I would teach her how to sing and show her this piece of writing. On cold nights when goose bumps appeared below her shins she could sing to herself and keep warm.

Would she rather my money? Or theirs? I get the feeling she’d prefer the latter. She’d rather be paid for uncertain familiarity than gamble the ambiguity of my purposes.

I talked to a prostitute on my doorstep, and let her into my home.


All of the above is true.

'how to'

Tonight’s a night for fucking. You can hear it in the bass.

You wouldn’t have known at 9:07pm in the confines of the bathroom, pre-sleep rituals being carefully carried out in a logical and practical order. Face first, then teeth. But having stepped into this air - the kind of air which lingers around beds - it is obvious. It is anything but logical. It’s rough and scratched and out of order and not at all practical.

Especially on a Sunday night.

For one thing, fucking messes up the sheets. The beautiful, orderly sheets. Impractically chaste in colour. Folded like origami to mimic the shape of the mattress. They end up on the floor like discarded paper. Shredded. Torn. Crinkled. They end up on the floor; they always do. It seems more natural there.

And it is only Sunday.

My mother used to make a roast on Sundays. Sunday night dinner: A roast. Every Sunday. 6:30pm. Without fail. It was served on floral patterned china plates. Knife to the right and fork on the left. Everything just right, left, right. Immaculate. We’d eat it nicely, our pretty little family. Would you please pass the gravy and isn’t this divine!

And then they’d go upstairs to fuck. My parents. Fucking on a Sunday night. Messing up the sheets. Left-right-left-up-down-in-out. Genetic hand-me-downs. We do it the same now and have done for millennia.

It is absolutely a night for fucking. So I listen to Impulse, I find creases in his body, breathe in the dusty mattress. I make swans from the bed sheets, cut them into squares. I improve my cardio, open the dresser drawer, don’t read the label, ignore the warnings, know how to already, find faces in the dark, know where I am going where I am who we are Vitamin A and oranges and red and blood and heart rates and I don’t know anything except for this and now and that I’m fucking in the dark on a Sunday.

Our trash bin is a shrine for empty noodle cartons, because Sunday night is take out night. And that’s all you need to know to do it right.

puddles

I have never understood why some people like the rain. I am very much a hot-summer-sun, get-out-your-shorts-and-chuck-on-your-t-shirt type of girl. I don’t do wrap-up-in-five-layers-and-whip-out-your-umbrella sort of weather. But there are some people who enjoy the rain. When it rains they feel good to be invisible. I only feel dull and bland. The grey sky restricts my plane of sight and causes the world to appear as if it is caught in a void; a nothingless vacuum. The place where my feet meet the ground is separate from the rest of the universe.

Becky was a rain girl. She was the kind of girl who’d strip down to her underwear and prance around in the rain until she was completely drenched, unable to speak from a sneezing fit prompted by the cold. I have a distant vision of her sneezing through smiles… Sometimes if I was in an agreeable mood she’d convince me to stand outside in the rain with her. But I never experienced rain with the same delight she did. I couldn’t understand how grey-sodden skies could put so much life into a person, how they fuelled laughter and energy. Maybe on cold days people need to create some sort of light within them to stay warm.


Memories.
“Are you excited about the beach this Saturday?” Becky asked me once on the way home from school.
“Mm. The weather,” I murmured.
“It’s alright,” she said, looking down and running the toe of her shoe around the outline of a puddle.
“Do you like your reflection?” she asked. “In the puddle. Do you like it or no?”
“It’s different to a mirror,” I replied, “I look funny in the puddle. My face is all blurry and muddy coloured.”
“Pretty though,” Becky mused.
I frowned down at myself all out of skew.
“I think it is,” she said.

On Saturday we packed our beach bags, remembering our combs for when we came out of the surf. Our hair was always such a shambles after being tumbled around by the waves like loose coins in a purse. As we hovered in the water I informed Becky that I liked the sea better than puddles.
“I can’t see my reflection in here at all,” I explained.
“Why wouldn’t you want to see your reflection?” she asked. “It’s just yourself.”

By the time we got out my skin tasted of salt and my hair was an atrocity piled on the top of my head. Disgusted, I picked my way through the sandy fish egg infested mess. I envied Becky. Her hair was so fine she could run her fingers through it and it’d dry soft and straight. Even with numerous comb-throughs mine stubbornly refused to comply. Bedraggled, I gave up with a loud and disgruntled Oh! to make my point.

Becky looked at me, a neutral and momentary stare. I returned the stare, perplexed. I watched as the giggles crept up her throat, twisted her lips and escaped - bursting - from her mouth.
“What?!” I demanded, appalled that she was laughing at me. “What’s wrong with me?!”
My hands jerked up to touch my face, examine my cheeks.
“Becky what’s wrong with me?!” I shouted.
Silence.
Her stare returned, but her eyes traced mine with a secret.
“Whaa-aat?” I whined, desperate.
Becky just shook her head. I wanted to slap her.


I often replay this moment in my head with the most intense curiosity. Random memories and moments stick with you for no apparent reason, more vivid than some you’d prefer to recall. For instance the precise details of a particular time in my childhood come easily: My mother presents me sliced apple in a blue china bowl as I sit reading in the lounge. Irrelevant. Yet I can see the furniture arranged in its exact position in the room. The apple lying lifelessly in its bowl, its green skin suggesting it should be avoided. What a waste of brain capacity this memory must be. Perhaps if this stupid memory was not here taking up space I’d remember Becky’s expression better. I’d be able to figure out what it meant.

***

I’ve never understood why people dislike the rain. I love summer, how the days stretch on and the sky radiates warmth, but I have always found rain so much more exciting. You can kick puddles so they make swissssh noises and splatter the ground with inscrutable shapes. You can paint the world with your own colours because it becomes a blank canvas of white. When the sun shines the world is clearly visible and nothing is secret. Effort is not required to see in colour and so the mind takes happiness for granted. You can become dangerously lethargic in this state.

I used to have a friend once who was a sun girl. People don’t have to be alike, you see, to be friends. In fact the more opposite you are the more you can learn from them. So I was quite lucky to have a sun girl, once.

“Bad weather” – that’s what sun people call rain. It’s “dull” or “dismal” or “dreary.” People’s sadness catches up with them when it rains, leeches onto their thoughts and words. The whole world seems to slow down, become a painful pantomime of what it formerly was. I wonder: if the sun never returned, would people learn to create their own sunshine? Invention comes from necessity, I heard.

What we invented was distance. We morphed our friendship into something else: Reflections being scattered by crashing waves. The smallest ripple can travel so far; rings of doubt disrupt tranquil surfaces. The sea was “better” she told me. No reflections. No doubt confronting you. Only waves to disintegrate uncertainty. Water to dissolve friendship.

Friendship bracelets. We used to tie them around each others’ wrists but in the end we might as well have choked them around each others’ throats, tugged each other along like nuisance pets. “I hate you!” she’d yell, lines learned from movies and brattish kids scorning their mothers on the street. “You don’t understand, you don’t know!” Secrets she desperately wanted to disclose but couldn’t for the risk of tears. Tears are water, and therefore a reminder of old times. The beach, puddles. Rain. The ripples of doubt gradually grew bigger, trust faded as more stones of hurt were thrown in. At this point, it was no longer possible to simply comb out the knots.

***

Becky thought it was something ‘fixable’, an illness or injury. Injury to pride, perhaps. There’s a moment where you realise things can’t continue as they are, you feel change pulling at your fingertips, coaxing you to give in. We grow up and we discard people who no longer fit our puzzle of ideals. We drown them from our minds so that they no longer hinder us. We learn to avoid optimism so that we may avoid disappointment when our expectations fail to be met. In time, we come to realise that rain leaves you sodden, that friends who smile cannot cure doubt, and that by letting go of rain girls you are keeping their hope in tact.

Or was I, if letting go hurt?

At the time I thought it was right. At the time this was my logic. Discard girls who were happier than me. Prettier than me. Girls who danced in the rain. Who liked their own reflection. It’d make way for my own goodness... What little of it there was. I was only a sapphire: Alluring, until compared with a diamond. But if the diamond is removed from the sapphire’s side then the sapphire may shine brilliantly.


On Monday night I walked home by myself. I didn’t wait for Becky outside the back of M block. I let her go, let her sparkle alone, let the rain pour onto her body and lift her head upwards to the sky. Alone. She blinked delicately as the rain seeped through her lashes and ran into the corners of her eyes.

I didn’t sit with Becky at lunch on Tuesday, nor Wednesday. Nor did I go to the beach with her that weekend. Instead I spent my hours at home, imagining life now, and contemplating which colour best complimented sapphire.

untitled

It’s quite a lonely thought: No matter how long I live and regardless of how well anyone knows me, I will never fully nor completely be understood. Because I am the only one who shares intimacy with my own thoughts, no one can ever know exactly what it is like to be me. The reality is that amongst this crowd of six billion I am in complete isolation.

When I walk down the busy city streets people do not care who I am or where I’m from. They do not care where I’m going, what I’m doing, what my intent is. They see me only as the girl who walks down Queen Street today, clutching the strap on her brown leather bag, weaving her way between the people. Despite the many people I encounter these instantaneous meetings will be quickly forgotten by almost everyone I pass. Does anyone ever remember?

What would it take for me to become someone? Not just anyone walking down the street, but someone. What would it take for people to notice me? Be shocked by me? Envy me? Be drawn to me? How big do I have to act for people to step aside as they approach? I know I am lacking an element which would make me superior to them if I possessed it.

As I’m walking down the street, pushing against the crowd, my bag catches suddenly on someone’s hand. Someone’s. He has jet black hair and is talking on his phone. This is all I see of him before the current sweeps him past me without an apology or acknowledgement of our contact.

I continue to walk. My legs subconsciously carry me forward the way they’re trained to and my mind whirs. Who is he? Royalty. What does he do? Smokes. Graduate. Fucks. Where is he going? Secret. Did he even see me? Through the back of his head and the crook of his arm.. He is too engrossed in his conversation. His mobile is the most important thing in his life during this instant. He is completely alone, as am I, despite his attempt to connect with the person on the line. Will he remember me in ten seconds, minutes, eight days, four years? Or am I just another body who brushed past him. So physically close yet having absolutely no impact. Surely everyone we see, meet, talk to, observe – from the shopkeeper who sells children his treasure for $1.95 to the person we sit next to on the bus day after day – they must all hold some sort of significance in our lives? It seems like such a waste for people to just come and go when we could learn so much from them.

As I’m walking down the street, pushing against the crowd, my bag catches suddenly on someone’s hand. Someone’s. He has jet black hair and is talking on his phone. As my bag hits his fingers he jolts, startled, and I see the phone slip from his hand. Falling... Falling... It hits the concrete.

Before he’s digested what’s happened; before he can reply to his girlfriend’s demand as to why he’s late; before I can gush “I’m so sorry!”; it is smashed by the stampede of shoppers rushing to ATMs, job interviews, hair appointments, looking directly ahead and absorbed by their destinations. While these people glide past he stands stationary. How the loss of this tiny object, which before fitted so snugly into his hand, has affected him.

“I am so sorry!” I repeat, having no idea what else to say. “I just… my bag… sorry!” He doesn’t look at me. His eyes remain fixed on the silver shards and his head shakes a little.

“’S fine,” he says but not to me. His right hand brushes his hair forward and back. He looks up at me with his lips together, frowning. I actually have no idea what to do. I want to throw myself around. I am so overwhelmed by my stupidity.

“I have some money on me…” He shakes his head again looking totally lost amongst the busy street’s shoppers. They continue to slide past us on the outside of our now conjoined worlds. This guy, who was so at home with them moments ago, has now unintentionally slipped into the bubble which I live in. He has unwittingly become a part of my day, my life.

“I can’t,” he mouths monotonously, “I’m supposed to be meeting someone and I’m late. Sorry. Thanks.” He glances at me so briefly I wonder if I imagined it before pushing past me. He shakes off the diversion I am. Once again he merges with the people rushing up and down the street. As quickly as he found himself detached he has joined them again. I am left standing alone, a pile of rubbish at my feet and shards of plastic in my curiosity.

As he disappears into the crowd I feel a strange annoyance begin to irritate me. Initially I feel it as a light tapping which progresses to a prodding, then a sharp stick being stabbed into my forehead. Can I be so insignificant that he cannot even look at me? During our short conversation I was exactly what I was before our days collided: A random nobody. Again, I am filled with frustratingly unanswerable questions: What does it take to hold respect? Why shouldn’t I be someone? Why should I be just another person on the street?

I am so enraged by this thought - this refusal to be granted identity - that I shut my gaping mouth. I clench my lips together and whip myself around to keep walking up the street. I begin to notice that suddenly there is no one in my path. People notice me. They are shocked by the weight of my feet against the concrete. They envy my ability to be so unaffected by the burden of those who are in my way. They are drawn by curiosity as to why I am in this state. They step aside, driven by fear. The elements of superiority I now possess are impatience, hostility and negativity. I have become part of the robotic parade striding up and down this straight, narrow street.

And suddenly I feel larger. Everyone around me is small and insignificant. I am not bothered by them; In fact I hardly see them. The wall around me ensures they do not disrupt my focus. Although I cannot remember where I was going I keep walking. I keep walking to avoid vulnerability, to maintain my new-found authority. Although I now have what I desired, I am more isolated than even before. The reality is that amongst this crowd of six billion I am completely and utterly.

ALONE

the subordinate cause

On Saturday nights
We take photos in the car park
Capturing the dark
Within the lens
The light
Within our eyes
We mix ourselves with grunge and underground
We pretend, for moments
That we are alive
Like the static of cocaine
And the drone of ecstasy
That awakens our senses
(But our sense… ?)
Within the car park

It is 11:55
It is raining
It is empty
It is post-rugby game
The city is melting
The lights running down the shoulders of the road
It is smudged
Each building blurred against the sky
This is the city
While outside it rains
This is the night which we photograph
In the car park

Back and forward
Erase the melting
Erase the smudge
Screech, squeak
And clarity forms
On my windscreen

And like the pores of our skins
We visit cigarettes
And conjure up thoughts of alcoholism
And visions of being trashed
And stoned
And deep fried chips
From the BK across the road
This is how we were taught
It’s how we’re bred
This is who we are
Underground
In the car park

And who else are we?
Mostly, we are music
We are rhythm
We are disease
We are garbage
We are black
We are in gutters
We are stars
We are crooked frames
We are chemicals
In our lungs
In the darkroom
On the film
In our veins
We are the coolness of dusk
We are jackets and beer cans
No-one knows who we are
We cannot be researched
We are indefinable
But we are NOT defiance
As some may think
We do not deviate
We are not a minority.
We are the norm.

There is a culture down here
In the car park
It’s our earthly hell
These photos, our proof
But it is our rapture also
It is a place we retreat
It is innocent
It is brushing criminalism
It is not far from the police
At 441 Somewhere Street
They probably have video cameras down here
It’s probably locked
We probably climbed the gates

Our hair is jagged with heat
Our eyes are shadowed in smoky greys
Our lips exhale grey puffs of smoke
Our jeans are cast to our skin, our eyes to the ground
There is a figure in the corner
Who we invite with our eyelids
He knows the deal
He knows we are untouchable
We know he can touch us however he likes
We invite what repulses us
We live in parallel worlds
The space is surreal down here
There are no vehicles
It is an uninhabited shell
The remnants of daily life
In a matter of hours, minutes

This space transforms
Into ours
No papers are signed
It is an unspoken declaration
Which we decide
This is what it’s all about
This car park

The shutter click echoes
Faint
Distant
Immediate
Hollow
Sharp
It fills the space
It sounds square shaped
Much like the cold concrete
With its cracks
And lines
Splattered paint and graffiti
And horizontal yellow
A picture which resembles a skeleton in a chair
Is tagged near the entrance by officials
By members of the public
Who know better than us

So what is authority?
It is us
We are the authority

Until those who call themselves the authority show up.
It’s all about being humble
You see
We don’t announce ourselves as such
We just are

And even when they shove us into their cars
And remove our apparatus from us
And check it for deviance
And take us to those cages
They call justice
And barricade us in
To fight with ourselves…

We are still the authority.
In this city,
In the car park
We are the authority


It is an unspoken law,
and the law knows this.

ANZAC

..
..
We felt much, much worse afterwards.

You know that intense adrenaline and feeling of victory after you win a game? The elation of accomplishing something huge? You look at your mates, grinning crazily. You feel yourself begin to levitate. Joy creeps into your face. There wasnt that. As a normality, people cheer and laugh when theyve won. We didnt cheer or laugh. We felt awful for our achievement. Murder equates to success here. Its, sickening.

When I was baptised they poured water over me for protection. Here, underwater, everything is audible. But not in an immediate way. Noise around you sounds removed - like you are listening to it through a dense layer of cotton wool. Cotton wool softens hard landings. But its so thin it barely suffices for its purpose anyway. What a farce. Noise is several yards behind us; my ears are hollow. I can hear the General yelling at me but his speech is faded and melting into the air. It doesnt quite reach me. He's got eyes in the back of his head and I'm staring at them through his face.

Drowning is what it is. Not 'like' being underwater, but actually drowning in the rush of shrapnel and the ebullition of orders which fly amidst panic. Your legs are amputated, and you are expected to run a marathon. The boys in front are dog meat. They are our sacrifice which we offer. Who wants to die proudly, in dignity, gloriously, for their country? They dress it up, skeletons dancing in expensive suits.

Who wants to be slaughtered in a meat works factory and chucked into the freezer compartment? You wont be plastic-wrapped like home kill (which is more humane, apparently), but you will be put in a pretty bloodstained red tin. Your grave will bear a cross that looks just like every other product on the shelf. Youll even get a barcode, for reference. You already have an expiry date.

Tick.

Tick.

You will be one of many, and die completely alone. Just like all the others.


Here's how the casting works: Everyone is lined up, and told to march forward. If you make five metres you have a featured role in this play. You'll stand out to anyone who looks back over the beach. Unfeatured extras hide in the massacred crowd. Twelve metres is a cat walk. To the quarter: Three guys will make land. They will be our protagonists. Often, the director has chosen them before the audition even begins. Their fate is pre-determined; you can buy that in the supermarket aisle too next to cake packet mixes. The other hopefuls will drown in an unconventional manner, the water surrounding them, yet not a millilitre of it in their lungs. They will have choked on bullets fed to them by the enemy on a silver spoon. They strap you down into a high chair (because you are, after all, a juvenile) and satisfy your avarice for adventure. Isnt this what you ordered? the chef will ask you. It's a la carte.

That's the catch in marketing, you see. It comes down to money, and power. Cultural capital: That's what we are fighting for. “The greater good.” Greater. They have more power, and therefore they are greater than us, and therefore they are good.

Objection? They will without a doubt call treason. They blindfold you for that you know; you die using your aural senses. POP, goes the weasel, SLUMP against the wall. Treason is a war within the war; it is us fighting ourselves, fighting grey bricks. Treasonous soldiers are consorting with the enemy. Sex has always ruled men, all throughout history. It is the burden of our society, our vice, our fatal flaw. And sex does kill. On the battlefields, you see the leftovers, and leftovers without 'eft', discarded limbs and hearts. We are all bleeding red, as do the women for life, for sex and death and love. But theyre not even here, they exist only in our memories now. We are all bleeding red. You just cant always see it.

The usual reaction to these sounds and lights is fear. Fear sounds like an echo: You hear it once, loud, suddenly, and then it continues to irkpreoccupydisturb you, a little quieter each time, but all the more repulsive for its decreasing decibels.

And occasionally, there is the one who shines. His head is clearer in this circumstance. He strategizes, he makes a plan. He is one of the bodies which makes it to land. He is the mechanics of the factory; he refuses to be a sacrifice because he is, in his own right, purposeful. He makes it through alive. But he must not forget his time to die comes later if he forgets the rules.



Stains seep through my skin, and out my ears, I know it.

These images are indelibly imprinted on my mind.