that fell down during the fire and killed the people standing on it, in their white nightdresses and striped pyjamas and cotton bunting, that I saw a picture of once in a photojournalism book. Do fire stations still have poles to slide down (quicker than stairs, pole-escapes)?
Christos Tsiolkas, Loaded: “I detest the East. The whole fucking mass of it: the highways, the suburbs, the hills, the rich cunts, the smacked-out bored cunts. The whitest part of my city, where you’ll see the authentic white Australian, is in the eastern suburbs. A backdrop of Seven Elevens, shopping malls, gigantic parking lots… In the East, in the new world of suburbia there is no dialogue, no conversation, no places to go out: for there is no need, there is television”.
It’s not the only page I folded over in this book, but it’s the one I turned to today, thinking, the tiles on my roof will fall off in this storm and then the weatherboards will split and then the plaster will cake and the mortar drip like birthday candles, and where else would I go except back to the East? So it’s not the most logical conclusion, but I’m trying to reconnect my head to my body and the muscles are proving difficult to retie. Last night in keywords: passionfruit punch, berry punch, wine, lipstick misapplication, wine, wine, gin, wine, collapse, sleep.
I have a weird relationship with the East made out of black/white splits and intentional delusions. Structural hatred – for the lack of public transport, the homogeneity, the villages of identical houses with identical red roofs – and another hatred that’s harder to define, more biased. There’s sickness in the East and it festers in the bedrooms of bored teenagers who have nowhere to go except further and further into their own heads. Sometimes I would walk to a patch of trees a few streets away from my house and curl up next to a big tree and smoke stolen cigarettes and then extinguish them on my skin. I hate how the East provided the perfect background for this: suburbs of closes and courts and boulevards, empty playgrounds in primary colours, street signs bent the wrong way.
But I decided to like it – defensively, hopelessly. Walking in the evening, wan light in the kitchen windows of neighbours, pressing my nose to the wet asphalt, the absence of street lights creating a dark corridor out of over-wide streets. I never saw a ghost in the East, but I felt some slip under fences. I pretended to know people – we all did, I suppose, seeing faces in knotted wood, carrying a plastic-cup telephone system to the bus stop. The landscape seemed benign enough, tolerant, tolerable, and if I couldn’t see the beautiful details, then that was my fault.
Sex is everywhere and nowhere. Schoolgirls roll their skirts over at the top to expose thighs. Giant sex shops, open later than anything else, skulk along intersections, as sterile and fluorescent and painless as they come. I fuckin’ loved you – the sadness of interchangeable couples on mid-afternoon trains with interchangeable prams and interchangeable irresolvable disappointments. Wool jumpers stink when it rains, and classrooms fill with a smell that’s almost meaty. Boys fuck girls fuck girls fuck boys and the awkwardness, the clumsiness, the difficult condoms, the shyness, the post-coital delayed longing is better, so much better, than the perfect coupling they want.
Later, you’ll run away from her and blow your savings on a plane trip to Germany. The whole way there, you’ll clutch your stomach with white fingers, watching the effortless blue sky become effortless cloud, and the man next to you will turn to you and say something about immensity.
