2. Buyer, Beware! Liar, Exuberate!

The narrator experiences an attack of electric eels followed by an assault of creeps and slithy toves, thence to a brief disquisition on the value of lies and the rare apparition of love at first sight

Ping! 

Oh let me unglue myself from the poisonous excreta of the enshittified internet!

And it started out so sweetly, didn’t it? Pleasant yet exciting at the same time, a place that was everywhere for everyone. You could find friends there, and also nifty stuff in this new, vast space pocketed with odd little shops and eccentric notions. And now? A tacky mall, a wicked shit mall, a fathomless, immeasurable zone teeming with striving souls wanting to buy and sell stuff, maybe just innocent stuff, but so much of it, a surfeit, a profusion, a terrible overabundance of, I don’t know... 

...shoes, maybe, or recipes, cute pets, information about the spring temperatures in Sarajevo, the most convincing designer knock-offs, where to find a house in Rooty Hill near the old folks’ home and the shops, socks. Then there’s those wanting, needing, to share their love of snuff movies or pictorial reminiscences with like-minded tormentors of children and women; there’s those seeking cheap human organs or the best tyrant to emulate, the most brutish Nazi influencer to follow, purveyors of lies to align with delusional world views  (like, I don’t know, NASA is concealing the existence of the planet Nibiru which is on a deadly trajectory towards the Earth, or the world is flat, or the climate isn’t changing or Bob Dobbs’ Church of the SubGenius is not a parody but a religion, godssake, and they’ve got the scholarly backup to prove it! (But why invent mad fantasies and terrifying vistas of destruction when you can just read the news?)).

And there are so many lonely people there in the teeming void, seeking love, love and attention, yearning their way through this mall now bulging with predators, liars, shysters, creeps and perverts who want you, all of you, body, mind and gizzard… 

Person, interrupts Dick from the foot of the bed. You’re hurting your brain, and mine too. You’re all tied up in digressions and tangents and whatnot, worse than usual. Also, my breakfast is late.  

I growl softly at the cat, who narrows his eyes at me then turns around to give me the benefit of his nictitiating bumhole. Together we sally forth onto the veranda. The surly-looking sun’s held up in a dense traffic jam of backed-up cloud. Cup of tea, then. Onwards: to the kitchen! Dick is now figure-eighting around my ankles. I heft him a stegosaurus to graze on, and then...

… then there’s The Tidying. It destroys me. I stand there, my head still hullabaloodling. I’m motionless, kettle in hand and the light coming through the big glass doors, light that’s all sort of glary in the cloud-jam, picking out that dogeared stack of papers on a chair, mucky fingerprints on the fridge door, the sink all greebly… Look, it’s all  just ordinary daily stuff and I know people tons messier than I am who live perfectly normal lives. But when I have to do a thing regularly, any particular thing that I don’t love, my skull fills up with electric eels. They’re at war. They want to slap each other violently with their tails and smash and bite and electrocute—whizz, bam, zap—and feast on each other’s frazzled corpses.

Your skull does not fill up with fish, gainsays my Annoying Friend from his perch on one of the cerebral nodes deep within my brain. It just fills up with hyperbolic foolishness, he clarifies. Just do your chores, you big galumphing baby. 

No. Not now. No. I’m going out, even though the horrible sun is now skulking inside a particularly hefty cloud built like a sumo wrestler. Makes for a dangerous light the like of which inspired Lewis Carroll to invent ‘brillig’. 

Away, slithy toves!

I return briefly to the bedroom, pull an aqua shirt on over spotted trousers

and paste blockout all over any exposed skin to mitigate the damage the sun inflicts on me and everybody else under it, then trot down the stairs and out of the flat. I cross the decking in front of Pellmell’s actuarial consultancy, which is next door to the café—our flat is long and thin and spans both shops—just as Pell emerges from her office with her phone held out in front of her like a divining rod (the reception inside our building is bad and outside's not that much better). She’s  talking very loudly on speaker, as ever, (she’s deaf) at a client expressing concern about the percentage of people likely to be attacked by sharks in Sydney over the next decade given the ever-increasing water temperature, population growth and overfishing  until he's interrupted by Pell sneezing eight times running. Poor Pell is plagued with allergic sinusitis. 

I nod good morning, she smiles back over her phone; it’s a warm smile–Pellmell is a mild and gentle person—and my mood shifts perceptibly upward, just a bit, even though the sunlight is still murky. I love you, Pell, you in your mocassins and tiny round spectacles like those once worn by Simone Weil.

I then say hello to a couple of dogs, Mutt and Queen Sybilla and their humans sitting outside the café, and go inside to request a coffee from the proprietor, Imelda. Then Samson, sitting at his favourite outdoor table under the umbrella amongst the leaves of an overbearing monstera deliciosa, summons me to join him. So I do, grateful to be out of the way of that pale but septic light filtering gangrenously through the haze. As I approach, Samson clicks Save and closes the lid of his laptop, looks up at me earnestly from under his russet-and-steel-coloured ringlets and says, My mother’s a kind of monster, an anastrophe.

Anastrophe, Samson?

Samson’s a show-off. His first language isn’t English though, so I suppose he has reason to feel proud of his linguistic acumen. His accent’s impossible to locate as it’s got scrambled with all the places he’s lived. 

My mother, he continues: She inverts all those attributes you associate with motherliness. She is cruel beyond reason. A reverse mother.

A perverse mother, Samson?

Quite so.

Is she cruel to you?

My mother is old, very old, Samson answers. 

Samson’s always polite, so he’s never mentioned that he finds direct questions invasive. But that’s obvious because he never answers them. (Q: Is she cruel to you? A: She’s old. Right, gotcha.) Still, I do persist, which is probably not very clever or sensitive of me, but I find his particular unstable relation to reality strangely soothing—does he make me feel steady and sensible by comparison? Dunno, doubt it—it’s all just air, isn’t it? And also I’m curious about him (as he’s happily aware, the dogged contrarian), so whenever we chat I continue to ask questions just in case he tires of being gnomic for a minute. I see him often because he’s there most days some time between seven and eleven for a couple of hours. He sets up his laptop and notebooks at the same table on the deck every day, under an umbrella and very close to Imelda’s hugely overbearing triffid-ish plant, and writes his book about his mother. He’s been writing it for more years than I’ve known him. Probably it’s taking that long because he likes being interrupted, or so he’s mentioned several times, so it’s likely to be true.

Samson’s mother being old didn’t need to be stated because Samson’s youth is hardly recent, though I’d be hard-pressed to guess his actual age (forty-three? Seventy-six?). Samson is a liar, you see, which is one of his charms. His lies are often obvious—I love peas, he’d said last week after eating everything on his plate except the peas that came with his pie. I raised my eyebrows at that one. He smiled happily and said, Well, would you eat anyone you loved? 

Although his style is usually understated, Samson is an unabashed, joyous liar. This is refreshing to me because so many lies you hear are nasty or else shameless boasts or political messaging and other forms of advertising designed to lead us astray in many ways from banal to horrible both off- and online in the Dire Mall of Need…

Excuse me—Samson now says to Miranda, Imelda’s daughter, as she arrives with my coffee—may I have another latte? Miranda turns on her heel looking unaccountably cross; she often does. Oblivious, Samson returns to me, saying, Mymble (which isn’t my name but that of certain Swedish cartoon characters—he’s got a habit of nicknaming people; maybe it’s a way of owning his friends? I never know if I should be offended or flattered by this. Then when he addresses me he usually says ‘Mymble' in italics, ebullient ones, not sarcastic ones like the sort AF uses on me sometimes). So, Mymble, he says, is there any hope at all for the rapidly receding Dead Sea?

This is one of Samson’s many concerns. He’s told me he was born and bred in Jerusalem, which is not so far from that once-massive saline lake. But then again, a year or so ago he told me that he’s Romanian, born in Bucharest; another time he was Lebanese, from Baalbek. And last week I heard him strike up a conversation with a Finnish tourist, a diminutive backpacker with a red-and-white scarf tied over her head, the requisite complicated shoes for extra spring, and yellow and green zinc worn like camouflage all over her face. Samson told her he was from Graubünden, the Romansh-speaking Grey League canton of eastern Switzerland. This might have had some truth in it, as he wears a tie always—even though he lives in a village by the sea—emblazoned with Alpine ibexes. When I googled (I mean, ducked) ibexes and the Grey League, the ibex did actually turn out to be that canton’s heraldic symbol. Then again, the ibexes could have been goats and I’ve yet to check whether goats herald anywhere.

My mind returns to the sinkholes: By now, I say to Samson, who is waiting for me to respond, the Dead Sea may be beyond the help of any kind of human intervention.

Human intervention, pffaahh, Samson scoffs. When was that ever helpful? What you have to understand … 

But just then, forestalling Samson’s disquisition beginning with that most excruciatingly superior-minded phrase (what you have to understand—do I? Who says? Why? You reckon you know better? Well, fuck off!, I don’t say) a stranger walks up the steps into the café courtyard. I don’t look too closely at first as I have to recover from being told I need to understand something, so I gulp my coffee, scald my mouth, sputter then swallow cruellypainfully, none of which Samson notices because his regard is elsewhere. His eyes are riveted on the stranger.

She’s possibly a tourist but then again, maybe not as she has no zinc on, and she has a dog, a wolfhound, and no backpack or trickily layered bouncy shoes. No, the feet that had walked up the steps to the café are encased in flat, strappy sandals of soft green leather. Now she takes a seat a table away from Samson and me, murmurs something to Miranda, then shakes back an errant lock of curlicued hair the colour of Baltic amber. The lock settles against her porcelain cheekbone, curved like an orphic harp. She has lots of hair, dark goldish and gingerish and chestnut with a few grey strands throughout, like a tabby cat, and a very dashing flash of silverwhite at the front. The whole assemblage is piled up on top of her head, the sort of pile that looks like it could fall down at any time like a torrent of tigers. Her eyelids are lined in kohl and her full lips unpainted, her cheeks pale pink. She’s as stately as a many-masted brigantine putting into harbour. Her dress is a simple shift of something slippery, the colour of sugared violets, its line uninterrupted by visible evidence of underwear.

Leaning towards me, Samson whispers, god preserve me. An avalanche of sensuality. A gorgeous explosion of delicious lubriciousness. The war zone of my soul is imploding. If her hair comes loose, I could die of bliss. Will you look after my dog when I am gone?

The sun smiles knowingly. Samson has no dog. 

I smile also. And my personal dog, a black one, has slunk away to its deeper cranial reaches, troubling nobody but AF, for now.