August 8 2013
Dearest Lily, Am I dreaming or is it you? For the past few days I have been languishing in Bargaloo. They named the Suez Canal after it. Do you remember Simoney’s pet name for you in Gordon. It was sewerage. How could he have known that way back when.
There’s been a few strange incidents over the past few days…I actually relived the experience of being aborted. Firstly I felt this baby moving inside me but it was high up…not where you would expect to find a uterus. I felt myself fading out...
…and then later I smelled something really strange…it reminded me of that smell of the flaky grey matter I found at the entrance to the lizards lair in Spain all those years ago. I had the impression of being lifted out of a jar of formaldehyde. I remember looking into the eyes of a very angry reptilian character…his eyes were bloodshot, his skin colour an olive green, thickly textured and pockmarked like the skin of a person who once had bad acne. Needless to say I was not frightened, merely curious as if I was witnessing an event that happened so far back in time, it was irrelevant. The image faded out and I fell asleep.
About two days ago I had another strange experience…I was having a bath to which I had added lime and lavender oil. How was I to know that this would attract a horde of hungry piranha fish…I thought great … keep chewing.
Thinking about my brother’s pet name for me…sewerage…got me to thinking about the time when we lived in the eastern Sydney suburb of Gordon…15 Grey Street, Gordon to be precise. I was about nine…curiously I was that age when I lived in Melbourne…so there I was living in two places at once, remembering one later…experiencing another...and there was India too, I was nine then too…so three places.
It was my favourite place…a little cottage in a rain forest…it seemed to be the only house on that side of the street and it was accessed by a driveway with a steep incline. I don’t remember going to school for much of the time we spent there…and yet I do remember attending the Rudolph Steiner School in Middle cove for about six months…before we had to leave again.
Dabios was forever chopping down the privet which shielded the house from the street. He considered it to be a weed…but it always grew back.
Gordon was my Pandora. Simoney and I spent many hours exploring the rainforest…we had names for all the various locales…such as kissing rock and one other. I remember running along a tree that had fallen across a stream that was covered in moss.
One time we stuck pencils up our bums and ran around and around the house wearing capes. We did the same thing in Japan two years before.
Very close to the house there was a little pond and next to it a tree that had a swinging rope attached to it. One day we decided to go for a swim in it…I knew it was horrendously polluted at the time, because there was a storm water drain above it…the water was slimy and green. One time Simoney and me found the entrance to the storm water drain which was located near the house of his friend Greg and went inside. It was so cool coz we could see the road outside from the storm water openings in the gutter.
I discovered a very unusual arrangement of brightly coloured silk material upon which jars of urine and other liquids had been placed. I suspected Greg’s older brother had something to do with it. I did not trust Greg’s older brother. He had shown me his dick on one occasion, and made me touch it…plus he kept tampons in the freezer. He very proudly showed me one of these frozen tampons one day. I had nothing to say…what could I say.
The Rudolph Steiner School was the best school ever…my favourite memories include hiding from the boys in the bamboo patch and floating down a river…
…also I ran away from it with three other girls because the teacher had cut off one of the girl’s hair…because she never tied it back.
Meanwhile my other nine year old self is living in India…beautiful house with a lovely garden and a row of servants houses behind it. I loved going to visit the servants and would often invite them over for a swim in our swimming pool…the fact that it was slimy and green was no deterrent …Marine and Dabios didn’t mind us swimming in it either…or the servants.
While this was going on another nine year old self was exploring building sites in Melbourne and discovering a huge cache of women’s underwear in a bramble patch.
Enuf about Melbourne…In India…one of my favourite places to play in was the Lodi (Idol) gardens. We used to ride there on our bikes. Simoney had a nice new looking bike, but my bike was old and worn out and I was forever scraping the skin of my ankle bone because of a curious design fault in the manner in which the bike was manufactured. I had this scab on my ankle bone that was forever being ripped of every time I rode it. Where was Marine with a supply of band aids when I needed them?
When I wasn’t playing with Simoney in the Lodi Gardens I was either at my friend Hannah’s house or at my friend Mabel’s house…or occasionally sitting on the chauffers lap on the drive to school…which I can hardly remember. It was like I went there one day and never went back.
Hannah was the daughter of the Ethiopian Ambassador and Mabel was the daughter of the Ugandan Ambassador. They did not know each other…but I knew both of them. I cannot remember how we met.
The thing I remember about Hannah’s house is that it was flat and surrounded by whitish concrete…the house and the ‘garden’ around it were made from this exact same concrete. There was no green there and the concrete seemed to accentuate the glare of the sun causing me to squint…I don’t remember what it looked like on the inside…I never went in there.
Mabel’s house by contrast was a lavish multi-storeyed palace with opulent bathrooms on every floor. I ended up living there for a while…it was a case of one night became two nights became three nights and so on.
Whenever I wanted to stay the night, Mabel would never ask her parents on my behalf…I always had to ask them…in my most sheepish tone… “would it be alright for me to stay the night, please?”.
They always said yes. For a while Mabel and I were inseparable. We even became spit sisters…or rather exchanged spit as a sort of vow of becoming blood sisters without exchanging any blood. We wanted to be blood sisters but we could not bring ourselves to cut each other.
Mabel had the most beautiful collection of party dresses I have ever seen and on several occasions she let me wear one of her party dresses to a party. For some reason she didn’t want her mum to know that I was wearing her dresses, so I would have to put on one of my dresses…my one and only light brown dress, I should say…over the top of one of hers. Despite the fact that my one dress was sleeveless and made from flimsy material and hers were full skirted, brightly coloured, tulle and taffeta affairs and it wasn’t half obvious from the sheer bulk of them that I was wearing not one dress but two…my own and hers Her parents either pretended not to notice or if they did they never said anything.
Years later I remember hearing stories about a terrible Ugandan Dictator by the name of Idi Amin who went on a killing rampage, taking out most of the country’s intellectual elite, government officials and other high ranking people along with a lot of other people as well. I heard on the grapevine that Mabel and her family had been slaughtered in this rampage. I could not imagine the horror of it.
But now, when I think back on it, who’s to say that I didn’t meet Mabel and her family after this event rather than before it. Knowing what I know now…I would have to say that, that is probably what happened.
I watched a most eye opening movie a few nights ago…it was called ‘Scandalous Notations’ or something like that…The character played by Judy Dench reminds me so much of Marine…it’s not funny!
This character, Judy teaches at a school, whereupon she becomes friends with another teacher, a pretty blonde woman played by Cate Blanchett. When the character of Cate Blanchett begins a torrid affair with a fifteen year old boy at the school…Judy Dench’s character becomes incensed…not because the boy is only fifteen and the teachers pupil…no…not because of that…because she considers him to be a leprechaun.
I thought…hang on…her reaction to Cate’s character’s affair with the boy reminded me so much of my mother’s reaction to my relationship with Ben. When she found out about it, she was furious. She harangued me to break it off with him…and I’m thinking…for fuck’s sake Marine… I am a fifty year old woman. Aren’t I? Don’t tell me who I can and can’t go out with.
And I got to thinking…did Marine consider Ben to be a leprechaun too? The only person I know who dated a leprechaun was Rosie and that was a long time ago…He was the love of Rosie’s life…or so she says. Dear old Ben!
No comments:
Post a Comment