You get further as
I draw closer as
You whisper words
That I never thought
I’d hear again
You get closer as
Days grow longer as
You say to me what
I don’t want to know
I get further as
Night draws nearer as
Birds draw wings over
Tired eyes
I get closer as
Those wings draw nearer as
The night draws the curtain on
You
Tuesday, 28 August 2007
Sunday, 26 August 2007
Vinyl Diaries IX: Feist
A little while back, in a vinyl diary not so long ago, I mentioned the physicality of music – music for the feet, the mind and the heart.
Well I’ve realised I overlooked something when I left out the shoulders; it seems there’s an artist for everything.
The music for the shoulders that’s been growing on me lately is one Leslie Feist.
The Calgary chanteuse has been around a while, but I only stumbled on her a few years back through her dalliance with the Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot It in People, where she does a rather splendid job of cutting through the hazy shambles that is ’Almost Crimes’, an album highlight and jump-around-like-a-lunatic delight only topped by the banjo-plucked Emily Haines-driven ‘Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl’, which to this day never fails to steal the breath and cut to the quick.
It would be easy to file Feist away as a composite of ballpark fellow-travellers – ‘marked by specks of Dusty Springfield's soul, Björk's confrontational adventurousness, and Joni Mitchell's warmth’ as Pitchfork would have it, with a dash of the piano bar jauntiness of Catpower or an edge-roughened Regina Spektor.
But there’s more going on here than that… there's the shoulder thing for one.
Don’t take my word for it though, pop over here and try to sit still.
I kinda like the video too… even if there are certain shades of OK Go about it.
Well I’ve realised I overlooked something when I left out the shoulders; it seems there’s an artist for everything.
The music for the shoulders that’s been growing on me lately is one Leslie Feist.
The Calgary chanteuse has been around a while, but I only stumbled on her a few years back through her dalliance with the Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot It in People, where she does a rather splendid job of cutting through the hazy shambles that is ’Almost Crimes’, an album highlight and jump-around-like-a-lunatic delight only topped by the banjo-plucked Emily Haines-driven ‘Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl’, which to this day never fails to steal the breath and cut to the quick.
It would be easy to file Feist away as a composite of ballpark fellow-travellers – ‘marked by specks of Dusty Springfield's soul, Björk's confrontational adventurousness, and Joni Mitchell's warmth’ as Pitchfork would have it, with a dash of the piano bar jauntiness of Catpower or an edge-roughened Regina Spektor.
But there’s more going on here than that… there's the shoulder thing for one.
Don’t take my word for it though, pop over here and try to sit still.
I kinda like the video too… even if there are certain shades of OK Go about it.
Saturday, 25 August 2007
Regret
I dream of the flower
The bird on the bower
I watch as it takes nervous flight
I spin upside down
Begin now to drown
I wish that I’d wished you good night
The bird on the bower
I watch as it takes nervous flight
I spin upside down
Begin now to drown
I wish that I’d wished you good night
Friday, 24 August 2007
Fade
Starved of sun
He fades to an echo
Of what she first thought she had found
His ruby red lustre
Shortly proved bluster
But it was a promise to which she was bound
He fades to an echo
Of what she first thought she had found
His ruby red lustre
Shortly proved bluster
But it was a promise to which she was bound
Steam
The mist of her memory
Pooled on the mirror
Rendering reflection mute
Blocks of non-colour – shapes
Without edges
She wrote her name with a finger drawn
Awkwardly eking
Sudden squeaking
Where she pressed too hard and then slipped
She wrote his name in the space beneath
Had to squash the last letter in
She had not left enough room
Thought he might fit in the space
He did not
Pooled on the mirror
Rendering reflection mute
Blocks of non-colour – shapes
Without edges
She wrote her name with a finger drawn
Awkwardly eking
Sudden squeaking
Where she pressed too hard and then slipped
She wrote his name in the space beneath
Had to squash the last letter in
She had not left enough room
Thought he might fit in the space
He did not
Thursday, 23 August 2007
Kindling
Misty matter and pliplop splatter
Winter devotion grows ever fatter
On fire’s warm gloating
And me ever doting
Sending you mad, as they say, as the hatter
Curled up in its shad’der
As smoke climbs the ladder
Of beams that sit under the roof
And if you needed more proof
Of the folly of youth
Then watch us get gladder yet sadder
As the sun starts to scurry
With most undue hurry
Towards hidden homes for the night
Our thoughts turn to dreams
That will burst at the seams
As our angel wings unfurl and take flight
So turning on in
With an end to the din
On the rooftop that sits right above
We lie deep in silence
And consider the violence
Of some little thing they call love
Winter devotion grows ever fatter
On fire’s warm gloating
And me ever doting
Sending you mad, as they say, as the hatter
Curled up in its shad’der
As smoke climbs the ladder
Of beams that sit under the roof
And if you needed more proof
Of the folly of youth
Then watch us get gladder yet sadder
As the sun starts to scurry
With most undue hurry
Towards hidden homes for the night
Our thoughts turn to dreams
That will burst at the seams
As our angel wings unfurl and take flight
So turning on in
With an end to the din
On the rooftop that sits right above
We lie deep in silence
And consider the violence
Of some little thing they call love
Wednesday, 22 August 2007
Spill
Weeping, soundlessly, wordlessly, a pouring forth of hidden consonants.
Sprouting violently from the ducts, the welling ache of unspoken acts, unacted speeches, unsure of where they might land, what may grow, who will tend the tangled garden.
Not even sure who you are, why you came here, what brought on this sudden – nameless – response, the unbidden retort to the fallen leaf, the slanted light, the crooked branch, the too-soft petal.
Bruised, battered, forgotten.
Alone. Surrounded by the alone. Buried by the alone. Just one amongst many who thought there would be more. Not even special in your pain – it’s everyone’s. Not even different in your torture – it’s the usual.
That’s what is hurting most, that the hurt is not even yours. You wear the cast-off coat of hurt immemorial. And worse: it doesn’t even really fit, the shoulders are too big, the seams don’t align, it sits on your shin (not at all today’s style).
Their words rings in your ears as you lay in damp grass, gazing upon the curve of the sky, the night (endless) and the million pin-pricks that can’t burst it, bleeding its white blood that trickles and winks at you in mock-solidarity. You reach up to tend (or taste) its wounds, but it, like the rest, doesn’t need you.
I really can’t help. Those consonants you cry, the dry, ragged, hoarse scrape of unfulfilled promise, fall in such a twisted jumble that there’s no saving them. Their sharp edges pierce whatever soft rounded vowel tries to tend them, they crash and jangle with no sense of sense. These, at least, at last, are yours only, and I watch as you (cackling) jealously guard over them, sweep them into a little pile of dusty fear.
My tears I offer but they would only confuse you further, although we shall never really know, for you keep them at arm’s length. You are afraid they will melt your edges, your hard-fought angles turned to slippery curves that catch every passing shower, sensuality where there was a steely resolve never to let anything in.
I leave you weeping, soundlessly, wordlessly.
Sprouting violently from the ducts, the welling ache of unspoken acts, unacted speeches, unsure of where they might land, what may grow, who will tend the tangled garden.
Not even sure who you are, why you came here, what brought on this sudden – nameless – response, the unbidden retort to the fallen leaf, the slanted light, the crooked branch, the too-soft petal.
Bruised, battered, forgotten.
Alone. Surrounded by the alone. Buried by the alone. Just one amongst many who thought there would be more. Not even special in your pain – it’s everyone’s. Not even different in your torture – it’s the usual.
That’s what is hurting most, that the hurt is not even yours. You wear the cast-off coat of hurt immemorial. And worse: it doesn’t even really fit, the shoulders are too big, the seams don’t align, it sits on your shin (not at all today’s style).
Their words rings in your ears as you lay in damp grass, gazing upon the curve of the sky, the night (endless) and the million pin-pricks that can’t burst it, bleeding its white blood that trickles and winks at you in mock-solidarity. You reach up to tend (or taste) its wounds, but it, like the rest, doesn’t need you.
I really can’t help. Those consonants you cry, the dry, ragged, hoarse scrape of unfulfilled promise, fall in such a twisted jumble that there’s no saving them. Their sharp edges pierce whatever soft rounded vowel tries to tend them, they crash and jangle with no sense of sense. These, at least, at last, are yours only, and I watch as you (cackling) jealously guard over them, sweep them into a little pile of dusty fear.
My tears I offer but they would only confuse you further, although we shall never really know, for you keep them at arm’s length. You are afraid they will melt your edges, your hard-fought angles turned to slippery curves that catch every passing shower, sensuality where there was a steely resolve never to let anything in.
I leave you weeping, soundlessly, wordlessly.
Thursday, 16 August 2007
The Well-Read Man
We sit here on the same bench, every lunch time. I can’t recall who was here first, who joined who. Every day, the pigeons bob their heads and coo, a safe distance at first, just past where our legs would reach if we kicked a foot out (neither of us would), but once we sprinkle a few crusts around they seem to forget our threat. Until next time that is, when we are strangers once again, until the crust offering ritual settles them into their uneasy peace.
They pick up their broken crust in their beaks keenly enough yet seem at a bit of a loss as to how to deal with it. It’s too big to swallow, surely, but without hands, opposable thumbs, a serrated knife and two sizes of fork, what are they to do?
“I know what they’re thinking,” I say. “I can speak with them you know.”
“That’s not true,” she says. “That’s Dr Doolittle.”
“Ahh”, say I, unsure once more. But I had shared something with them hadn’t I? Understood their inner turmoil? Was it direct communication, or merely empathy?
Day after day we come here. I like watching the birds, of course, but it’s the lake that I love. It’s only a pond really, but there’s nothing quite like sitting here, watching the ducks wriggling their fat bottoms in the air as they stick their head under the glassy surface, or making a sudden dash forward as their feet brush a wayward eel, clearly embarrassed at the kerfuffle once they realised there was no need to jump out of their feathers. I like the way the ripples start off around their waist like a duck tuxedo cummerbund, but are soon travelling to the furthest reaches of the pond, concentric circles passing through the water away from the feathery epicentre of their creation, sending leaves bobbing, waving to us, and detaching reflections from their owners.
“You know I was out on a boat once,” I begin, the water pressing me on. “Fishing for marlin. Just me, and the sea. Well, wouldn’t you know it, but I hooked the big one. A terror he was! Dragged me well out. I knew I was in trouble, he was sounding and leaping with a life-force you just simply can’t imagine – once you’ve been on the other end of a line with a fish like this, you know life is far more slippery than we ever imagined. But more miraculous too – and far bigger than you and I, that’s for sure!”
“I see – and then what happened?”
“Well, for days this went on. Day after day I was dragged, into the rising sun, away from the setting, past one horizon after another. Out beyond where the trade currents could even find us.”
“And then?”
“Well, I... I’m not quite sure.” Why couldn’t I remember the rest? How I got home, how I got to be sitting here, on this bench, balling up a crumbling piece of stale white bread by rolling it between my thumb and forefinger and then trying to toss it to a particular pigeon I’ve spotted lurking beyond the usual suspects because he was missing out, but watching him stampeded by one of the more assertive and scared off it just as it was in his reach.
“No, I could never finish Hemingway either.”
“Pardon?”
“Hemingway – you’re thinking of the Old Man and the Sea.”
Week after week we come, day in day out. We rarely talk. It’s like we don’t really need to, like there’s a shared history linking us. But it can’t be so – I don’t even know her name. Even through summer not a day is missed, no matter how warm it gets. It’s a relief when the shadows finally start to lengthen, when the pigeons seem less frazzled and lethargic in their feathery coats, almost annoyed at having to move to collect their crusts.
“You know there’s something about this time of year that is remarkable. It’s just the most subtle of shifts, but the light in August truly grips me.”
“Is that so?”
“Indeed it is. A man can sit here, the weight of the world just kind of dropping off his sloped shoulders, shrugging maybe, at one moment those rounded corners of his uppermost corporeal existence lifted around his sinewy neck as though pistons have pneumatically though silently cranked them to their most austere reach, then dropped again, all while barely seeming to move to anyone who might be watching, but to him shifting more than his shirt, shifting the weight of his mind, his thoughts, all the preceding things that bumped up against him all that long day, or flying in from a day he may have momentarily thought back to – a memory cobbled of a fleeting instant that made no real impact at the time, but was coming back to him at this very juncture for who knows what reason, bearing what message – all this sitting there on those shoulders, each shoulder with its own story to tell, its own memories fashioning into a different knot; knots of hope, of dreams, of unanswerable puzzles, all their own distinct shape and all jostling for space with the devil and the angel, the dandruff and the pollen, ephemeral tokens taken for granted as always there yet never the same, while all the while he sits, looking (possibly for the first time in days) at something like these ducks – really looking, not just registering them in the primal part of his mind that processes all he needs to keep out of danger, no more no less, but really seeing them in their splendid sentience – and willing these knots to be gone, for the ducks or whatever he is focusing on, be it the cracked and crooked light, or the tepidly waning warmth on his cheekbones and brow, to take their place, to become the new knots; for he knows there will always be knots, but if we can at least choose what the knots are going to be, what form they take and how they will line up, then we can let that weight that doesn’t really belong to us anyway disappear for just that fleeting moment, allow that glimpse to be a conduit, a window into the soul of the world – a two-way window that puts the world into his soul.”
A long silence followed. I wondered if perhaps she hadn’t heard, and even had a slight panic that she had left – I began to wonder if perhaps I hadn’t even said anything; that my mind had drifted off on an internal tangent of tangled and confused words that I still see bouncing and buffeting around haphazardly on a layer of cool green felt. But then:
“You like Faulkner too then?”
“Faulkner?”
“Never mind.”
Sometimes there will be others. A mother showing the ducks to her child, encouraging her young progeny to replicate the noise a duck might make; an old grey man in a too large coat, young lovebirds early in their courtship with brows blissfully unfurrowed.
There seemed to be an almost unseemly amount of the latter this autumn, crowding the pond’s edge and sharing cheese and bread on stolen lunch trysts or walking arm in arm as the sun dipped behind the church that stretched skyward over on the far side of the pond, its dying golden rays no doubt mistaken by many as lending an unearthly religiosity to the rough-hewn stones and faith-charged steeple.
“Oh to be that young and carefree again,” I sighed.
“Mmmm,” she returned, the loose skin across the knuckles entwined in her lap rippling a little as she stretched them.
“Did I ever tell you about my first true love? We were very young, the two of us. Our families were embroiled in a most terrible feud, but by a stroke of fate we were brought together. How I fell for her! Her family would not have it, of course, she was desitined for higher stations, greater things, but though I was banished from her side, we met again the very next day and were furtively married. Well, things took a dramatic turn for the worse I tell you... much scandal and mayhem was to follow - great tragedy in fact - but I think that I may have already said too much. Tomorrow – tomorrow I shall tell you more.”
She smiled.
Soon the clouds returned; blindingly white and bilious. I knew what this meant and, sure enough, small flecks of desiccated snow soon danced across the streams of air, jigging to and fro as haphazardly as a sea of butterflies migrating to only they know where. Each was a facsimile of the other, each wildly unique. At first they would fall and we would watch them disappear, leaving only a darkness, a tiny moist spot as black as the flake was white. But, at one point – you could never say quite when – they stayed as they were, welcoming the next flake and the next, linking outstretched hands until they were not flakes at all, but an undifferentiated blanket; soft, hard, delicate, crunchy, welcoming, treacherous. Of the sky, the air, yet of water too. Land, also, a new earth to replace the old, a layer or crust upon which a new layer of life would wander, seeking out its own stories. And fire – cold enough to burn.
“This snow,” I say.
“Mm-hm?” she allows.
“It is qanik – big, almost weightless crystals falling in stacks and covering the ground with a layer of pulverised white frost.”
“Is that so?”
“Oh yes. That’s what we get here, of course, with these snow flurries. There’s not much likelihood of sikussaqi, or hiku – certainly no chance of hikuaq or ivuniq. But we’re still a chance of some apuhiniq if that wind keeps up and compresses it.”
“Hmmmm.”
“If you’re wondering how I know all this, my father was a scientist and my mother a Greenlander.”
“How wonderful! That means I have the pleasure, then, of sitting with Miss Smilla?”
“Excuse me?”
“You must be Smilla Jaspersen – fearless avenger of the death of six-year-olds, with a rather advanced feeling for snow.”
“Well, no, that’s not my name.”
“No, I imagine not, but it is the name of the person you’re thinking of – Peter Høeg’s best-known character in his worst-endinged book.”
“Is endinged even a word?”
“How would you say it?”
“Worst ended. Worst finished. Book with his worst ending. I don’t know, that’s not really the point – you’re saying that it’s not me?”
“Who knows? It might very well be. You’ve not ever told me your name, where you live, what you do when you’re not sitting here, so perhaps you are all the above and more. Tell me – do you rent a small room and a write a manifesto that a young boy will one day read and discover you to be the Steppenwolf? Did you wake up one morning to find you were on trial for a most serious crime but could not find out what it was supposed to be? Is everything you do and every conversation you have under surveillance by an omnipotent controller? Have you ever lived in squalor and tried justifying to yourself the murder of an old person? Were you ever washed up on a deserted island after a shipwreck? Did you, perhaps, spend year after year riding the countryside on a donkey, tilting at windmills, in the hope of winning the heart of a beautiful damsel? Or maybe you were born near midnight on the day your country was also born and you have magical powers that enable to you to telepathise with all the other children born that day?”
I was confused. All this felt so familiar. But how did she know so much about me, my past?
“Well, yes, I think so.”
For the first time in all the time we had been coming here, she turned to look at me – really look at me.
“I thought so too. Then surely you remember me? It’s me, Juliet.”
***
I smile sadly, slowly shaking my head.
“That’s not how it ends,” I say.
She fixes me with a steady gaze, blue eyes dancing with the last of the day’s reflected light.
“But why on earth not?”
“That’s too neat. Too tidy. Too soon. Worse – it’s cliché.”
“But this isn’t a book, a fiction, a made-up story. This is life.”
“In life as in books. Many things are forgivable – the most heinous of crimes against humanity, or love, or indeed both, can be carefully constructed, retold, refashioned, so as to explain them away. But cliché – unforgivable. A fate worse than death.”
I stand, brushing the crumbs that had collected on my jumper onto the ground, folding the paper bag now empty of bread into quarters and carefully placing it into my pocket. I walk away.
They pick up their broken crust in their beaks keenly enough yet seem at a bit of a loss as to how to deal with it. It’s too big to swallow, surely, but without hands, opposable thumbs, a serrated knife and two sizes of fork, what are they to do?
“I know what they’re thinking,” I say. “I can speak with them you know.”
“That’s not true,” she says. “That’s Dr Doolittle.”
“Ahh”, say I, unsure once more. But I had shared something with them hadn’t I? Understood their inner turmoil? Was it direct communication, or merely empathy?
Day after day we come here. I like watching the birds, of course, but it’s the lake that I love. It’s only a pond really, but there’s nothing quite like sitting here, watching the ducks wriggling their fat bottoms in the air as they stick their head under the glassy surface, or making a sudden dash forward as their feet brush a wayward eel, clearly embarrassed at the kerfuffle once they realised there was no need to jump out of their feathers. I like the way the ripples start off around their waist like a duck tuxedo cummerbund, but are soon travelling to the furthest reaches of the pond, concentric circles passing through the water away from the feathery epicentre of their creation, sending leaves bobbing, waving to us, and detaching reflections from their owners.
“You know I was out on a boat once,” I begin, the water pressing me on. “Fishing for marlin. Just me, and the sea. Well, wouldn’t you know it, but I hooked the big one. A terror he was! Dragged me well out. I knew I was in trouble, he was sounding and leaping with a life-force you just simply can’t imagine – once you’ve been on the other end of a line with a fish like this, you know life is far more slippery than we ever imagined. But more miraculous too – and far bigger than you and I, that’s for sure!”
“I see – and then what happened?”
“Well, for days this went on. Day after day I was dragged, into the rising sun, away from the setting, past one horizon after another. Out beyond where the trade currents could even find us.”
“And then?”
“Well, I... I’m not quite sure.” Why couldn’t I remember the rest? How I got home, how I got to be sitting here, on this bench, balling up a crumbling piece of stale white bread by rolling it between my thumb and forefinger and then trying to toss it to a particular pigeon I’ve spotted lurking beyond the usual suspects because he was missing out, but watching him stampeded by one of the more assertive and scared off it just as it was in his reach.
“No, I could never finish Hemingway either.”
“Pardon?”
“Hemingway – you’re thinking of the Old Man and the Sea.”
Week after week we come, day in day out. We rarely talk. It’s like we don’t really need to, like there’s a shared history linking us. But it can’t be so – I don’t even know her name. Even through summer not a day is missed, no matter how warm it gets. It’s a relief when the shadows finally start to lengthen, when the pigeons seem less frazzled and lethargic in their feathery coats, almost annoyed at having to move to collect their crusts.
“You know there’s something about this time of year that is remarkable. It’s just the most subtle of shifts, but the light in August truly grips me.”
“Is that so?”
“Indeed it is. A man can sit here, the weight of the world just kind of dropping off his sloped shoulders, shrugging maybe, at one moment those rounded corners of his uppermost corporeal existence lifted around his sinewy neck as though pistons have pneumatically though silently cranked them to their most austere reach, then dropped again, all while barely seeming to move to anyone who might be watching, but to him shifting more than his shirt, shifting the weight of his mind, his thoughts, all the preceding things that bumped up against him all that long day, or flying in from a day he may have momentarily thought back to – a memory cobbled of a fleeting instant that made no real impact at the time, but was coming back to him at this very juncture for who knows what reason, bearing what message – all this sitting there on those shoulders, each shoulder with its own story to tell, its own memories fashioning into a different knot; knots of hope, of dreams, of unanswerable puzzles, all their own distinct shape and all jostling for space with the devil and the angel, the dandruff and the pollen, ephemeral tokens taken for granted as always there yet never the same, while all the while he sits, looking (possibly for the first time in days) at something like these ducks – really looking, not just registering them in the primal part of his mind that processes all he needs to keep out of danger, no more no less, but really seeing them in their splendid sentience – and willing these knots to be gone, for the ducks or whatever he is focusing on, be it the cracked and crooked light, or the tepidly waning warmth on his cheekbones and brow, to take their place, to become the new knots; for he knows there will always be knots, but if we can at least choose what the knots are going to be, what form they take and how they will line up, then we can let that weight that doesn’t really belong to us anyway disappear for just that fleeting moment, allow that glimpse to be a conduit, a window into the soul of the world – a two-way window that puts the world into his soul.”
A long silence followed. I wondered if perhaps she hadn’t heard, and even had a slight panic that she had left – I began to wonder if perhaps I hadn’t even said anything; that my mind had drifted off on an internal tangent of tangled and confused words that I still see bouncing and buffeting around haphazardly on a layer of cool green felt. But then:
“You like Faulkner too then?”
“Faulkner?”
“Never mind.”
Sometimes there will be others. A mother showing the ducks to her child, encouraging her young progeny to replicate the noise a duck might make; an old grey man in a too large coat, young lovebirds early in their courtship with brows blissfully unfurrowed.
There seemed to be an almost unseemly amount of the latter this autumn, crowding the pond’s edge and sharing cheese and bread on stolen lunch trysts or walking arm in arm as the sun dipped behind the church that stretched skyward over on the far side of the pond, its dying golden rays no doubt mistaken by many as lending an unearthly religiosity to the rough-hewn stones and faith-charged steeple.
“Oh to be that young and carefree again,” I sighed.
“Mmmm,” she returned, the loose skin across the knuckles entwined in her lap rippling a little as she stretched them.
“Did I ever tell you about my first true love? We were very young, the two of us. Our families were embroiled in a most terrible feud, but by a stroke of fate we were brought together. How I fell for her! Her family would not have it, of course, she was desitined for higher stations, greater things, but though I was banished from her side, we met again the very next day and were furtively married. Well, things took a dramatic turn for the worse I tell you... much scandal and mayhem was to follow - great tragedy in fact - but I think that I may have already said too much. Tomorrow – tomorrow I shall tell you more.”
She smiled.
Soon the clouds returned; blindingly white and bilious. I knew what this meant and, sure enough, small flecks of desiccated snow soon danced across the streams of air, jigging to and fro as haphazardly as a sea of butterflies migrating to only they know where. Each was a facsimile of the other, each wildly unique. At first they would fall and we would watch them disappear, leaving only a darkness, a tiny moist spot as black as the flake was white. But, at one point – you could never say quite when – they stayed as they were, welcoming the next flake and the next, linking outstretched hands until they were not flakes at all, but an undifferentiated blanket; soft, hard, delicate, crunchy, welcoming, treacherous. Of the sky, the air, yet of water too. Land, also, a new earth to replace the old, a layer or crust upon which a new layer of life would wander, seeking out its own stories. And fire – cold enough to burn.
“This snow,” I say.
“Mm-hm?” she allows.
“It is qanik – big, almost weightless crystals falling in stacks and covering the ground with a layer of pulverised white frost.”
“Is that so?”
“Oh yes. That’s what we get here, of course, with these snow flurries. There’s not much likelihood of sikussaqi, or hiku – certainly no chance of hikuaq or ivuniq. But we’re still a chance of some apuhiniq if that wind keeps up and compresses it.”
“Hmmmm.”
“If you’re wondering how I know all this, my father was a scientist and my mother a Greenlander.”
“How wonderful! That means I have the pleasure, then, of sitting with Miss Smilla?”
“Excuse me?”
“You must be Smilla Jaspersen – fearless avenger of the death of six-year-olds, with a rather advanced feeling for snow.”
“Well, no, that’s not my name.”
“No, I imagine not, but it is the name of the person you’re thinking of – Peter Høeg’s best-known character in his worst-endinged book.”
“Is endinged even a word?”
“How would you say it?”
“Worst ended. Worst finished. Book with his worst ending. I don’t know, that’s not really the point – you’re saying that it’s not me?”
“Who knows? It might very well be. You’ve not ever told me your name, where you live, what you do when you’re not sitting here, so perhaps you are all the above and more. Tell me – do you rent a small room and a write a manifesto that a young boy will one day read and discover you to be the Steppenwolf? Did you wake up one morning to find you were on trial for a most serious crime but could not find out what it was supposed to be? Is everything you do and every conversation you have under surveillance by an omnipotent controller? Have you ever lived in squalor and tried justifying to yourself the murder of an old person? Were you ever washed up on a deserted island after a shipwreck? Did you, perhaps, spend year after year riding the countryside on a donkey, tilting at windmills, in the hope of winning the heart of a beautiful damsel? Or maybe you were born near midnight on the day your country was also born and you have magical powers that enable to you to telepathise with all the other children born that day?”
I was confused. All this felt so familiar. But how did she know so much about me, my past?
“Well, yes, I think so.”
For the first time in all the time we had been coming here, she turned to look at me – really look at me.
“I thought so too. Then surely you remember me? It’s me, Juliet.”
***
I smile sadly, slowly shaking my head.
“That’s not how it ends,” I say.
She fixes me with a steady gaze, blue eyes dancing with the last of the day’s reflected light.
“But why on earth not?”
“That’s too neat. Too tidy. Too soon. Worse – it’s cliché.”
“But this isn’t a book, a fiction, a made-up story. This is life.”
“In life as in books. Many things are forgivable – the most heinous of crimes against humanity, or love, or indeed both, can be carefully constructed, retold, refashioned, so as to explain them away. But cliché – unforgivable. A fate worse than death.”
I stand, brushing the crumbs that had collected on my jumper onto the ground, folding the paper bag now empty of bread into quarters and carefully placing it into my pocket. I walk away.
Sunday, 12 August 2007
Vinyl Diaries VIII: The Cure
photo by me
The Cure
Sydney Entertainment Centre
August 9
Three hours. It's a long time to be under bright lights wearing enough waxen make-up you could effortlessly mill among the figures at Madame Tussaud's. It must seem even longer when you're squeezing your heart and a fair lashing of soul out through six strings and a microphone. Yet for the rest of us, it passed all too quickly.
The Cure - you may have heard of them. English chaps, been around a little while now; write fairly decent songs, play them quite well.
This was their first trip to Australian in seven years and many who saw those 2000 shows must have wondered if that was the last they would see. Thankfully, not so. A little heavy on Bloodflowers material, that tour was nevertheless one of the most remarkable I had seen up to that point, a drenching, mica-flecked encounter that served as a bruising culmination of a teen obsession.
This time aorund, without an album out until the end of the year, the shackles were off - The Cure were able to deliver a fan-friendly parade of delicious musical high points spanning nigh on 30 years.
Announcing their arrival with the dark, swirling epic Open from the near-faultlessWish, they signalled their intention to confront and exorcise some musical demons along the way. Catchier numbers may follow, but patience would be its own reward.
A dip into Disintegration was to follow, a bass-thrumping exhortation that we join them on a sojourn down the sideshow alley that is Fascination Street.
Simon Gallup's hammering bass-line propels this beast along, although Porl Thompson's shimmering guitar adds blinding showers of scattered notes. Porl was in blistering form the whole night, helping us see glimpses of the gritty heart beating beneath. Impossible not to notice was the fun they were all having, the realisation that they were doing what they loved and the sense that they felt damn lucky to be doing so.
This was The Cure grippingly unadorned - gone was the lush keyboard wash of 2000, in its place an immediacy and directness that breathed new life into old favourites, stripping them back to their beautiful skeletons.
Alt.End let the tension slip a little, before the wishful whimsy that is the other end of The Cure oeuvre made its first appearance with A Night Like This. The Walk and its new-wave-goes-oriental clash was a timely blast of fun. There is a hint of saccharine to End Of The World, but the sting is in the plaintive chorus brimming with heartbroken, maxed-out love... but things take a turn for the better for poor Robert in Lovesong, making him whole again, young again, fun again. The Big Hand gives Robert a little respite and lets the guitars dazzle up front, Porl wringing out some nice tail-chasing moments.
Then it's time to get a little excited, as a glittering Pictures of You butters us up for the sticky web arachnoid brilliance of Lullaby, a disturbingly, spine-tingingly claustrophobic nightmare of creeping paranoia – it truly is “much too late to get away".
Catch, Hot Hot Hot, The Blood and Push made an enjoyable cluster, and what other band could then breezily rip through a run that included such jaw-droppingly divine pop moments as Inbetween Days and Just Like Heaven, swerve into the hammering punk punch of Primary and the terrorising haunted house howl of Us Or Them and snarl on into Never Enough, then slide into the drowning brilliance of From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea? I suppose it’s a rhetorical question, but if you can think of anyone, please let me know…
This was easily the high point of the show thus far, the band gelling perfectly with Jason Cooper's precision drumming, plenty of colourful meandering in the bass, jagged guitars slicing through and then Robert's voice soaring over the whole affair. The jittery urgency was contagious and the whole beautiful mess just built and built until we could hardly breathe.
It seemed to take its toll, however, and the intensity just couldn't be maintained through the still enjoyable Strange Day, Wrong Number, The Baby Screams and One Hundred Years.
It was back with a vengeance, thankfully, for the murky, low-slung simper of End, closing the first set as perfectly as it closes Wish. It was dark, dirty and delicious, an abrasive sludge of musical misanthropy.
At this point, as they leave the stage, I wonder whether perhaps The Cure really are the woe-betiding miserable miscreants many might accuse. It all makes perfect sense and the hat seems to fit.
But then, how to explain encore number one: the upbeat, polished pop gem trio of Lets Go To Bed, Close To Me and Why Can't I Be You? Surely this is not the band that had just left the stage.... But such, I think, is at the heart of their timeless appeal, these bipolar, late-night moodswings in which no one end of the spectrum has any right to claim to be the 'real' Cure over any other.
The real mystery is how it doesn't jar - how they can toddle off stage (nearly spent by this point, dripping with sweat and barely able to lift their feet), then come back a few minutes later for encore number two and dive into At Night and M, jitter through Play For Today and then - presaged by a fleeting glimpse of trees on the screen at the back of the stage that sent my heart jumping into my throat - deliver a stunningly foreboding A Forest.
Teasingly, this was built up as slowly as can be, trace elements levered into place, dropped away, then brought back, but all in a way that had us blindingly following the bread crumbs we were sure we had left behind us, but which were now looking like they were heading somewhere we really shouldn't be going.
It was so perfectly executed, such a flawless 'ending' - with Gallup's double-note bass outro hanging in the air and the heart - that it was sorely tempting to leave at that point. How could it be topped? They were looking thoroughly shagged and surely the last rabbit had been pulled out of the hat.
But I stayed. Then when they returned and told us "we've decided to finish with this song" I have to admit to being a little disappointed at a run-through of Three Imaginary Boys that felt a little paint-by-numbers. But they were fibbing - and so. They danced on into Fire In Cairo and fired the audience and seemingly themselves back up with a remarkable Boys Don't Cry. So it's an obvious one, but I'm a sucker for it, an old old favourite that owes a lot more to the Violent Femmes than I think I ever realised.
Avoiding another urge to flee, I'm damned pleased to have stayed as they were seeming to be more and more re-energised by the moment. Robert thickened his accent for the nicely stilted Jumping Someone Else's Train and throwback stomping shock of Grinding Halt. What more could they possible do? I was hoping not to finish with a Lovecats or Friday I'm in Love (despite a soft spot for such frippery), so was more than a little chuffed to recognise the tap dripdripdripdripdripdrip of 10:15 Saturday Night and more than a little excited by their closing choice - the twisted, punk-drunk screw-you literary absurdism of Killling An Arab.
Three hours and a few odd minutes later, I felt like I’d been through the wringer – it’s impossible to imagine what it must have been like for them. So why was it so hard to see them leave the stage, and why the urge to go through it all again right there and then?
Thursday, 9 August 2007
Vinyl Diaries VII: Magnolia Electric Co
photo by slowmotionlandscape
Magnolia Electric Co
Annandale Hotel
August 8
What comes after the blues?
On Jason Molina's lips, it's a funny question, but, it seems, also deadly serious.
Those who came to Molina in his Songs: Ohia guise may be a little unsure what to make of Magnolia Electric Co. On one hand it paints from a very similar palette - a Midwestern prairie mythology rich in primal, near-mystical motifs. There is still no shortage of wolves (who are never just wolves), moons both crescent and full, the devil, serpents, freight yards, lonely highways and dusty roads. There is still plenty of the ever-present blue - the blues, blue moons, the blues, blue lights, the blues, blue eyes, the blues, blue skies - and the blues.
But where Songs: Ohia belonged out there, under the starry sky, travelling dusty back roads, even roaming with the coyotes, Magnolia Electric Co brings it on home - the nomadic troubadour returning with tales tall and true, collected from far and wide and brought back to a wide-eyed listener.
Yet they remain intensely personal stories - not so much exploits or even impressions, but feelings made flesh. We don't know what the experience really was, but we're left with no uncertainty about how Molina felt.
The recurrent imagery makes this no less effective, because he climbs into it so well and through repetition reshapes it as his own, beats it like a blacksmith into something we can all recognise. His shape-shifting women (lion women, tiger women, wolf women) may seem on first glance to walk a fine line towards misogyny, but in the context of his eternal bafflement you realise he's not painting them as merely ruthless predators bent on cruelty; there's always an abiding respect.
As they sink their teeth into his warm, bleeding heart, he's offering himself up, submitting to his perplexed notion of love. He wants to be consumed because he doesn't know how to give anything less than his all.
The heart is a frequent topic - invariably broken. But it's not just Molina's heart in question, it's also our own.
Music is one of the most physical of arts, but the body will experience it in many different ways. There's music for the feet, to make us move. there's music for the mind, to make our neurons bump and fizz. Then there's this - music for the chest, the stomach, the heart. It's music you feel through the body, the organs, direct emotional impulses that cut through thought and go straight to the heart of us all.
It's here that Molina sets up a space that separates him from a Smog/Bill Callahan and his dry ironic detachment, but draws him closer to Will Oldham or Catpower, despite mining quite different musical veins.
While there has been a subtle lyrical shift that suggests that these days he is a little less lost, a little less overwhelmed by the spiritual dimension of existence, the biggest shift that gives this away is musical.
When Molina plays solo - either formerly as Songs: Ohia or occasionally still under his own name, less is almost always more. A cavernous sound is created by a few intriguingly open chords, the spaces within giving us enough breathing room to better experience, as it closes in, the suffocation that follows. We drift through these spaces, hang on the unspoken.
While the words are near obsessed with movement and displacement through landscapes, musically motion is never key - we enter a space, inhabit it.
Magnolia Electric Co, on the other hand, fills these spaces. The itinerant boxcar travellers move the narrative through space and time, kicking, at times, into a bar-room stomp. The two guitars, capo-constricted, dance mostly in time though have the occasional falling out. The Hammond keyboard does a lot of the driving, whereas the drums remain fairly loose, playing stumbling witness to the unfolding drama. There is no bass at all tonight bar for the last three songs, where it makes a late appearance taking over from the Hammond in pulling the whole show along.
This rollicking, jamming approach brings Molina a lot closer to that touchstone that has always lurked just beyond the periphery, the ghost of Neil Young (one of those who can have ghosts before they die). And though his brow is still furrowed, that thick bushy eyebrow drawing down over his troubled eyes, one can't help realising that he enjoys this moment of catharsis. Molina tours near ceaselessly, perhaps restlessly, but as though there's really no other option for his survival. He lives to play, and the companionship on stage seems almost vital to his wellbeing. When here a few months ago playing by himself, he promised to bring the band back and we knew he truly meant it. What we didn't realise was just how much they mean to him - even though we could manage without them just fine.
We may pine for the Songs:Ohia days of the tortured soul, the lost, battered, broken body, but it would be a tad churlish to begrudge Molina his shard of light, to wish him ill for our vicarious musical edification. Tempting as it is.
So what does come after the blues? Well it's more blues, but with a glint in its eye. The wolf-headed conjurer in the cross roads is not pure malevolence after all. We can pick a direction, walk the road, and if we don't find what we're seeking, there may still just be a second chance.
Monday, 6 August 2007
Maps (silent)
These silent maps, a Mute cartography,
Tracing forgotten journeys of dreams and solitude.
Etching contours of valleys and hills that none have in flesh traduced
He relies on the taste of the air hidden beneath the tail end of the trade winds, the known routes through territories delineated by impossible events, veiled rumours, unspoken struggles.
To read his maps one must have fingertips as light as forgotten snow
Dancing up and over and through, the drop just one of the thoughts of freedom that sidles alongside the rest
There is no sound to share the stories yet untold, unlived – to break this vow a risk; a shattering of lips
Cracked and parched with the raw essence of life lived in salt, brine blood
Within each, its own, unheard
What music, then, what notes do we allow?
The moon for one, the milk of eternal renewal, that waning breast that feeds us until we, with it,
spill
From over the side a splash a splash; the ripples of a time that stays a beat ahead of our best guess
It takes more
It takes
The silent awareness of patience and time
The place where they meet and sketch out lessons to take to heart and slip into crevices
Safely stowed for the time that follows time
A pencil scrape
Nothing more, no less, a graph of the space within
Where our own leaps and splashes go unseen by most until after we’re gone
Beneath the surface we spend the rest
We can see the air they breath but it’s not for us. When we do, finally, dare to taste
we find it for what it is – a promise broken before uttered
Theirs, though they do not see it. It had been ours, too, but we let it go
To taste the other side. And what do we know about where we are? Less and less until the smallest snippet
Becomes so important we lock it away so nothing more can be taken from it
There, starved, of light, touch, belief, it grows in the eyes of others as it dwindles away to nothingness.
The less it is the more they believe until gone, they demand its release, to see it
Too late? They won’t accept they can’t accept they won’t accept that
They invested their dreams hopes lies into its story, carved etched and burrowed every vein they could and let it bleed in, bleed out.
They thought they knew. The less they remembered the more they grew sure they had the essence in their eye
But blinded to the hollow heart they see a glow brighter than a million suns
And what of the map? Its mute glory
A work of peerless breadth.
They turned it over and began again – none trusted its silent truth
A new truth was drawn, loud and clear – a single kernel spun round and round until it resembled this one small thing – the everything it promised.
How to explain its contradictions and crossed paths, contours in twists and tangles – words.
Words that glossed its impenetrable heart, that slid in and filled, every groove that grew
Matter not that the words had no trace no truth no understanding
Matter not that the words fought amongst themselves for attention, to blindly lead
Matter not that the words no longer bore resemblance to the immutable heart, for they no longer cared
The words chose to ignore the map, to leap off and enter the very world they believed their own
They danced a merry dance they did, believing themselves king
What fear was there of overthrow when they had drawn the rules
What fear was there of falling off when they had drawn the edge
But of course, boys and girls, you know it’s not that simple
The rules they drew the edges they knew
Were nothing like the world that existed beyond the page that had been the world in which they grew
They tumbled and fell, twisted and yelled, slipping into the abyss
The end was swift and merciful – and in their wake; silence
The silent map, the mute cartography, outlived them one and all
It had no need to assert itself against that which it knew so well
Content to live and breathe the air that coursed across the plains, that dipped from mountains high above that fell with fresh new rains
The stars they knew they smiled to see
The taste, now, of earth and clay, stale before its time. The smear of mud and blood and gore of metal twisting
The barren shore, the desert wreck, scoured of the fleeting life, that tricked itself into believing
It knew the answer
It did not
Tracing forgotten journeys of dreams and solitude.
Etching contours of valleys and hills that none have in flesh traduced
He relies on the taste of the air hidden beneath the tail end of the trade winds, the known routes through territories delineated by impossible events, veiled rumours, unspoken struggles.
To read his maps one must have fingertips as light as forgotten snow
Dancing up and over and through, the drop just one of the thoughts of freedom that sidles alongside the rest
There is no sound to share the stories yet untold, unlived – to break this vow a risk; a shattering of lips
Cracked and parched with the raw essence of life lived in salt, brine blood
Within each, its own, unheard
What music, then, what notes do we allow?
The moon for one, the milk of eternal renewal, that waning breast that feeds us until we, with it,
spill
From over the side a splash a splash; the ripples of a time that stays a beat ahead of our best guess
It takes more
It takes
The silent awareness of patience and time
The place where they meet and sketch out lessons to take to heart and slip into crevices
Safely stowed for the time that follows time
A pencil scrape
Nothing more, no less, a graph of the space within
Where our own leaps and splashes go unseen by most until after we’re gone
Beneath the surface we spend the rest
We can see the air they breath but it’s not for us. When we do, finally, dare to taste
we find it for what it is – a promise broken before uttered
Theirs, though they do not see it. It had been ours, too, but we let it go
To taste the other side. And what do we know about where we are? Less and less until the smallest snippet
Becomes so important we lock it away so nothing more can be taken from it
There, starved, of light, touch, belief, it grows in the eyes of others as it dwindles away to nothingness.
The less it is the more they believe until gone, they demand its release, to see it
Too late? They won’t accept they can’t accept they won’t accept that
They invested their dreams hopes lies into its story, carved etched and burrowed every vein they could and let it bleed in, bleed out.
They thought they knew. The less they remembered the more they grew sure they had the essence in their eye
But blinded to the hollow heart they see a glow brighter than a million suns
And what of the map? Its mute glory
A work of peerless breadth.
They turned it over and began again – none trusted its silent truth
A new truth was drawn, loud and clear – a single kernel spun round and round until it resembled this one small thing – the everything it promised.
How to explain its contradictions and crossed paths, contours in twists and tangles – words.
Words that glossed its impenetrable heart, that slid in and filled, every groove that grew
Matter not that the words had no trace no truth no understanding
Matter not that the words fought amongst themselves for attention, to blindly lead
Matter not that the words no longer bore resemblance to the immutable heart, for they no longer cared
The words chose to ignore the map, to leap off and enter the very world they believed their own
They danced a merry dance they did, believing themselves king
What fear was there of overthrow when they had drawn the rules
What fear was there of falling off when they had drawn the edge
But of course, boys and girls, you know it’s not that simple
The rules they drew the edges they knew
Were nothing like the world that existed beyond the page that had been the world in which they grew
They tumbled and fell, twisted and yelled, slipping into the abyss
The end was swift and merciful – and in their wake; silence
The silent map, the mute cartography, outlived them one and all
It had no need to assert itself against that which it knew so well
Content to live and breathe the air that coursed across the plains, that dipped from mountains high above that fell with fresh new rains
The stars they knew they smiled to see
The taste, now, of earth and clay, stale before its time. The smear of mud and blood and gore of metal twisting
The barren shore, the desert wreck, scoured of the fleeting life, that tricked itself into believing
It knew the answer
It did not
Thursday, 2 August 2007
Ghosts I Have Known (II)
Outside my bedroom window ran a wooden staircase. It was a poky little bedroom that nine-year-old I shared with my sister. We had a set of bunk beds and I had the top one, which meant I was sleeping right alongside the window. The window was actually at the top of a door, but the door had been sealed to the outside, where the stairs ran past, passing from the back yard (which was a level below our ground floor apartment, due to the slope of the property), up to the first floor. My door would once have opened onto this staircase.
Walking up this staircase one day, I reached my window. Looking further up, I noticed another window above it, in line with the second floor. I was curious to see that the window was filthy on the inside, completely dusted up as though it hadn’t been cleaned in years. This was surprising given that one of the jobs that I helped with was cleaning the windows every so often, after guests had left rooms or intermittently in cleaning the rooms of the longer staying residents. I couldn’t work out how this window had escaped such a cleaning, or what had happened in the meantime if it had been cleaned.
I headed to the top of the stairs and went through the door. At this point there was no more house to the left, but a row of rooms that formed the front of the hose was directly in front. Turning right down the hall led back towards the middle of the home and the main set of stairs. Another right turn led down a long hall that had no doors off to the right, until you reached a bathroom at the end and another room that sat to its immediate right. This hall, I knew, was directly over the hall of which our own door came, leading to our handful of rooms. But if a wall ran the entire length of the hall, where was the window I had seen?
I retraced my steps back to the stairway to make sure I had worked out the right spot, and it was definitely right over my own window, and unmistakably a window. I returned to the hall and walked back down to the bathroom end. The room that was past the bathroom I knew we had only recently cleaned. Its doorway was a little around the corner and its window overlooked the back yard. Standing at that door, I looked at the wall that stood opposite. It was just wide enough that you could fit a doorway there, but there clearly wasn’t one.
I returned to my room and sketched out the floorplan that I knew of for our floor and the one above. The corner room with the window over the yard was right over our lounge room, while the bathroom would be over our kitchen. So what was over my room? It had never really occurred to me that there was anything amiss, until I saw the window.
That night, lying there in my top bunk bed, only a few feet from the ceiling, I gave it a knock. It echoed hollowly. A few minutes later, just as I was dropping off to sleep, I heard a faint knocking sound come back.
I didn’t sleep very well that night.
The next day I rustled through the bottom kitchen draw, finding a small screwdriver. Returning to my bunk, I unstuck a poster that I had pinned above the bed. Slowly spinning the screwdriver’s pointed end against a spot on my ceiling, I spun it bit by bit in the small divot until I felt it break through.
Placing my eye against the new hole, I could now see into the room above. It was quite well lit from the window off to the side, and was an enormous space. The paint was a light minty green, which confirmed that there was something strange going on, as my father had slowly repainted the entire (or se we’d thought) boarding house in a creamy tone.
Looking around the wall I saw a fireplace, then off to the left the bottom of a staircase. The stairs led halfway up the wall to a doorway, which explained why the ceiling seemed so far away – the room took up two storeys.
Covering the hole back over with the poster, I didn’t really think about the room much for the rest of the day. That night, however, I lifted the edge of the poster and took another look. The room was letting in quite a bit of light, seemingly from a lamp in the alley behind the home.
From the corner of my eye I caught a small movement. There, at the top of the short stairway, sat a girl, balancing on the top railing. It wasn’t light enough to make her out clearly, but it was possible to clearly see her shock of shoulder-length blonde curls, ruffled white dress and long white socks, at the end of legs she dangled over the rail, kicking restlessly back and forth. I watched as she sat; one hand on the railing and the other in her lap. Her swinging legs were all that was moving and she seemed to be staring ahead at the centre of the room, where a light fitting hung down from a length of wire.
I tacked the poster back in its place as quietly as I could, dived under the blankets and tried as best as I could to sleep, but all I could see was the girl sitting there, swinging her preternaturally white socks, almost directly above me.
All was quiet.
Walking up this staircase one day, I reached my window. Looking further up, I noticed another window above it, in line with the second floor. I was curious to see that the window was filthy on the inside, completely dusted up as though it hadn’t been cleaned in years. This was surprising given that one of the jobs that I helped with was cleaning the windows every so often, after guests had left rooms or intermittently in cleaning the rooms of the longer staying residents. I couldn’t work out how this window had escaped such a cleaning, or what had happened in the meantime if it had been cleaned.
I headed to the top of the stairs and went through the door. At this point there was no more house to the left, but a row of rooms that formed the front of the hose was directly in front. Turning right down the hall led back towards the middle of the home and the main set of stairs. Another right turn led down a long hall that had no doors off to the right, until you reached a bathroom at the end and another room that sat to its immediate right. This hall, I knew, was directly over the hall of which our own door came, leading to our handful of rooms. But if a wall ran the entire length of the hall, where was the window I had seen?
I retraced my steps back to the stairway to make sure I had worked out the right spot, and it was definitely right over my own window, and unmistakably a window. I returned to the hall and walked back down to the bathroom end. The room that was past the bathroom I knew we had only recently cleaned. Its doorway was a little around the corner and its window overlooked the back yard. Standing at that door, I looked at the wall that stood opposite. It was just wide enough that you could fit a doorway there, but there clearly wasn’t one.
I returned to my room and sketched out the floorplan that I knew of for our floor and the one above. The corner room with the window over the yard was right over our lounge room, while the bathroom would be over our kitchen. So what was over my room? It had never really occurred to me that there was anything amiss, until I saw the window.
That night, lying there in my top bunk bed, only a few feet from the ceiling, I gave it a knock. It echoed hollowly. A few minutes later, just as I was dropping off to sleep, I heard a faint knocking sound come back.
I didn’t sleep very well that night.
The next day I rustled through the bottom kitchen draw, finding a small screwdriver. Returning to my bunk, I unstuck a poster that I had pinned above the bed. Slowly spinning the screwdriver’s pointed end against a spot on my ceiling, I spun it bit by bit in the small divot until I felt it break through.
Placing my eye against the new hole, I could now see into the room above. It was quite well lit from the window off to the side, and was an enormous space. The paint was a light minty green, which confirmed that there was something strange going on, as my father had slowly repainted the entire (or se we’d thought) boarding house in a creamy tone.
Looking around the wall I saw a fireplace, then off to the left the bottom of a staircase. The stairs led halfway up the wall to a doorway, which explained why the ceiling seemed so far away – the room took up two storeys.
Covering the hole back over with the poster, I didn’t really think about the room much for the rest of the day. That night, however, I lifted the edge of the poster and took another look. The room was letting in quite a bit of light, seemingly from a lamp in the alley behind the home.
From the corner of my eye I caught a small movement. There, at the top of the short stairway, sat a girl, balancing on the top railing. It wasn’t light enough to make her out clearly, but it was possible to clearly see her shock of shoulder-length blonde curls, ruffled white dress and long white socks, at the end of legs she dangled over the rail, kicking restlessly back and forth. I watched as she sat; one hand on the railing and the other in her lap. Her swinging legs were all that was moving and she seemed to be staring ahead at the centre of the room, where a light fitting hung down from a length of wire.
I tacked the poster back in its place as quietly as I could, dived under the blankets and tried as best as I could to sleep, but all I could see was the girl sitting there, swinging her preternaturally white socks, almost directly above me.
All was quiet.
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