3. The Other Side

On not being present and of remembered presences; of encroachments small and large; of avoiding dark thoughts—or no, having dark thoughts and watching them progress through my system in slow pulses, like a kind of digestive peristalsis for the soul. Or something.

Although I’m usually a solitary swimmer, on certain days a group of us go swimming together at an hour appointed by the gods, so we stick to it. We swim across the bay and back. I don’t know whose wicked humour inspired the group to call themselves the Harold Holt Swim Club after a prehistoric prime minister who went swimming one day and never returned—it was before my time.

But I missed that swim this morning. I’m at my desk. Richard Dickson jumps up to join me, seats himself immediately behind the lid of the laptop and curls his tail tidily around his feet. He blinks heavy-liddedly and says with some satisfaction: PM would’ve been taken by a shark.

Probably. Want some breakfast, Puss?

I always want breakfast. And please don’t call me ‘Puss’.

Chopped creature?

Ideal. Dick jumps down from his perch and precedes me to the fridge in case I forget where it is.

I’m sad about my missed swim. I’d slept in, having been woken in the night by frightening thoughts away from which I now turn my mind because I want those thoughts to dissipate rather than solidify in such a way that my heart becomes a conglomerate of many small sharp rocks. 

Because of my late start I am bound to stay here until well after my fellow swimmers swim there and back, or AF, my invisible Annoying Friend who is currently lounging about somewhere amongst my cerebral folds, will be at me.  As this is writing time, I know he would say, you must stick to it or be driven to hell by a demon horde wielding knives and scythes and malicious barbed humour aimed at your heart, your head, your lungs.

Exactly, AF agrees, waking from his nap.

We swimmers always meet at the little beach on the other side of the jetty where there’s a sign saying, SLIPPERY WHEN WET.

Well, obviously, it’s a jetty, AF points out. 

Maybe its sign could read: ‘USUALLY WET & SLIPPERY, suggests Richard. The world is a dangerous place… 

‘… and (the jetty would continue) although I would love to keep you out of harm’s way I cannot follow you through your life issuing warnings because I am a jetty anchored to the sea-bed with hardwood pylons. But you, my creaturely friend, must understand that you are never out of harm’s way. Danger is part of life, so you must just enjoy the occasional bit of peace and the pleasures of being alive because the peace, the pleasure, the life, are all as evanescent as sea foam.’

Not sure many people would get to the end of that warning, Cat, mentions AF.

So, at the jetty: First there are a few greetings and brief accounts of village news headlines (such as Serif’s breakup with Bobby (sad but bound to be for the best as Bobby’s a bit of a, well, he’s a little self-absorbed wouldn’t you say?), Eric’s operation (likely as successful as possible under the circumstances, more news pending), the financial state of Imelda’s cousin’s sister’s small newsagency (bound to be dire), JJ’s heat pump installation (successful and cheap as chips!).

 We don finsmaskssnorkels. 

Each has their own technique for entry. Personally, I eschew the plunge. Wade in boldly when the water’s warm, slowly when cold. At chest height, pull on fin one then the other, duck face then don mask and slowly submerge, and it’s very good to scream once underwater, god how good! I never wear a wettie because I love the sense you get in winter of growing an insulating ice-skin that feels warm after a few minutes, but you do have to make sure you don’t stay in for any more minutes than there are degrees. 

I love the sense you get in summer of merging with water and light, what we’re made of,  along with a bit of carbon, dash of phosphorus to make us bright, all that… Head off over the reef and glide through a mass of tiny fish like water-confetti. Dive down among them, watch them disperse. Time now to mutter my essential shark-proofing invocation through my snorkel. No, I won’t say what it is or it won’t work. 

The gods pour sunlight down in broad streams and you can see to the sandy bottom where rays and flathead lie prone until your shadow reaches them. We’re umbrous beasts from beyond, encroachers, terrifying. 

But I’m not there. No. I’m at a desk, unscary, human, looking at a page. I doodle a haiku:

Floating akimbo … Sea skin is sky to a fish … Lying low and still 

Humans are terrible people, remarks Richard.

Are we, Dick?

Like you said on your page. Humanpeople encroach. From the air, the water, the land. They’re everywhere, worst creatures on the planet. 

We are, I sigh.

Viral. Invasive. Tentacular. Reaching into every crevice. Cracking the foundations of creation.

Of course Dick is correct.

I get up from my desk and go out on the balcony. Lean on the railings to admire the glinting water of the bay between the trees. It’s so lovely here it’s sometimes hard to conceive of the damage being done, damage which cannot be undone. And now the harm is too large for comprehension. I think of encroachments I’ve experienced or witnessed in my time so far, and a sensation like cold concrete seeps into my body and I wonder how long it will take to harden if I don’t have another thought, quick! And make it a warm one. 

Ok, a warm thought. Here we go. The story of a minor encroachment that I do not regret, as it happens, because it was harmless in the scheme of things. It was tiny yet it also contained a level of beauty strong enough to raise joy bumps all over my heartskin even now. Like this: 

Very many years ago I was living in a tent by the Murray at a time of year when the heat crackled audibly and the gumleaves sweated all day long so that the heavy air was always dense with the scent of eucalyptus. It was my habit to wake late in the morning when the sun got hot enough to get my own sweat prickling. I’d usually sleep through the dawn kookophony, having become accustomed to the din out of necessity—I really needed the zeds because I worked night shifts at the cannery just outside a little town called Berri, 200-odd kays north of Adelaide. 

So, this particular morning I’d woken to the subtle hum of insects and peered out from behind my tent flap and there, staring straight back at me from the foot of a gum tree about 50 metres away: a koala. I leant forward a bit so that I was now on hands and knees and I crept very cracklingly over twigs and leaf litter towards this wild creature. He seemed unfazed. Koala kept up the eye contact as I inched forward, so slowly and cautiously it took me about a year to get within arm’s length. We stared at each other for a bit longer. Two moveless animals in the bush with nobody else around. I raised my hand and extended it slowly towards him. When my hand was close enough he bit it.

I sat back on a bull ant. Ha!

Actually, interjected Dick, That’s two encroachments in one! 

True, Dickson Cat. So anyway, sore hand, sore bottom. I once saw a bull-ant rear up on two of her legs and wave her four spare ones imperiously at the colossus looming over her. Picture it! A bull-ant isn’t quite as big as a biggish big toe and yet she braves the terrifying opposition that is several krillion times her size.

Can you really call that bravery? the cat queries. I’d call it recklessness.

Could be, Dick. She didn’t grasp the perilousness of her situation—couldn’t take in the outrageous scale of the encroacher. She was lucky it was only me she challenged, not a little boy, say, who might’ve mashed her with a rock. I felt sad for the bull ant, who is a valiant creature.

Reckless. 

If you must, Dick. Meantime, Koala had turned his back on me and set his strong claws into the bark of the red gum tree to begin his ascent. I went for a pee I needed quite badly as he’d had really messed with my schedule, then I pushed through the bulrushes so that I could swim—this was the ’80s, so salinity, blackwater, wastewater, stormwater and pesticide runoff had not yet ruined the river. 

As my skin dried in the sun I set to boiling water for tea. Added a gum leaf to the brew as I’d been taught the week before by another, more experienced camper who lived not so far away, and I found the faint eucalyptus tang was delicious. 

I was there, in that place, at that time, quietly drinking tea and gazing at slivers of light on slow-moving water and allowing small notions to flicker into my mind however they fancied and I did not think about whether I had any business being there because I was just there anyway. 

But now, years later, this memory has me considering other places I’ve been, and where I may or may not have had any business being. From here I find myself wondering, where do I have any business being at all? I start to pace down the veranda and up again as more dark thoughts encroach. But unlike the bull-ant I can see the scale of the danger we’re all in now… floods and firestorms and even the air we breathe making so many of us sick and the machinery of our terrible new-normal life chewing like a monstrous caterpillar through all remaining resources in the world and meanwhile the technotopian neo-feudalists are telling us that AI can save us by gorging on more fuel and precious water and I don’t think I know how to be brave, don’t know where or how to find the courage to be with the truth of everything breaking down.

Person, says Dick. You’re talking out loud. I’ve noticed one or two passersby looking up at you and smirking. You could at least get out of your pyjamas.

Eh?

You know, the cat continues, it may also help if you pronounce ‘courage' in French. Like this: coo-rraage! (He says it with a gravelly burr to his purr that provides a particularly French-sounding audacity to the word).

Point, Dick. Sounds excellent, the way you do it.

There are people finding ways to live with a kind of radical hope within capitalism’s rubble, continues Richard, who is a very well-read cat.

Here, now, in this flat a long way from Berri, not swimming with the others, I go inside while my little cat-generated hope-gleam lasts, to look for a favourite book of pictures and poems by Mervyn Peake, whom I love for his ambivalence and his certainty, his sorrow and his irrepressible jauntiness, his nonsense, which, really, is just the back door to sense.

And I’ll swim soon, even though the breeze is kicking up and it’s getting chilly, because I know that it’s always better to get into the water than to miss out, no matter what. You never regret a swim.