8. Exuberance Co-opted

and the trouble and joy of not being there again, the beauty of bats and vampires, and observing a fucken travesty

[Note for readers who haven't started from the beginning of this series of tales: AF (Annoying Friend) lives in my head. Dick is a highly educated cat. George and others are human characters who may exist outside my brain. Daisy is possibly an editor.]

I wake up this morning thinking about my conversation with Stephen Fry, who was very kind about my ignorance about most things we discussed. I was under the impression that our colloquy had arisen when he queried one of the ideas in a famous piece I had written for some famous publication. I was very chuffed indeed that he’d found my work of interest; in fact, I was hugely pleased that Stephen Fry wanted to talk with me and to spend the afternoon eating cheesy snacks at my old flat in the inner-city, where I had lived for very many years, and also to go for a short walk together through those streets that also somehow merged with those of this seaside village where I currently live. Cloisters were also involved in this complicated landscape, and together we passed along stone-scented shadows, deep in conversation, our gowns billowing in the breeze, our minds occasionally departing from the subject under discussion into momentary appreciation of the swifts darting and diving before us with such grace. But then I found that I couldn’t actually remember the title of the piece of writing that had so impressed Stephen. That memory glitch would have occurred in the phase when you’re no longer asleep but not yet quite back in consensual reality. It was only on becoming fully awake that I realised that there was no memory glitch because I had not written that piece—or perhaps several loosely linked shorter pieces that formed an amalgamation of wise thoughts and highly astute observations that had so impressed Mr Fry—and that I had never had a conversation with the man at all. Stephen Fry and I remain strangers to each other in the waking world. 

Oo-oo-oo-oo ahahahaa-hah ahahaha-ooo … 

A sudden onslaught of morning kookophony. Sounds like a personal insult.

Ooo ahhhhh-eeee-eh eh eheh… You think anyone wants to read a book you wrote?? Hahahahahah!! Hahahahaha heeaww.

Send Daisy those excerpts, mutters Richard from a crack in the wardrobe doors behind which he’d secreted himself during the birdshriek.  What possible reason do you have for not sending them to him already? You’ve already revised them to bits. He sallies forth and sits very neatly and properly in the doorway to the veranda.

The cat is right. I reach over the side of the bed, pick up the laptop and with no more than one tiny last glance over the file I’d already prepared for Daisy, click it off into the ether, feeling slightly sick. 

I get out of bed and do some deep breathing to soften my intestinal knots, then touch my toes and bend into a cat stretch while Richard looks on with a patronising cast to his gaze. Annoyed and embarrassed, I get vertical and head towards the kitchen to put the kettle on. You can get to the kitchen from the bedroom by walking outdoors and proceeding by way of the veranda, which runs parallel to the corridor indoors. The indoor corridor is handy for winter. 

We—Richard Dickson, AF and occasional other invisibles, George and I—used to live in a fibro shack that we left only a few months ago when the owners decided to sell so we had to look elsewhere. The shack may have been disadvantaged by black mould and a broken roof, but it also had the huge advantage of facing directly onto the beach which was a few metres from the front step, and it was just as pretty when viewed from the creek at the back, so long as you ignored the understandable disapproval of the mangroves crouching in the tidal shallows. Out the front, there was also an enormous Port Jackson fig tree whose shade and density created another entire room. George and I suspended strings of fairy lights from its branches so that at night it was like a ballroom, and when a breeze came, the russet undersides of the leaves shone ruddily. In season, it filled with fruit bats and I loved the bats’ squabbling and chirruping, but most of all their languorous, sensuous way of wading through the air in their flight from wherever it is they’d come from to hang upside-down together in this particular tree, like bunches of black bananas. Sometimes I think of bats as kindred spirits, which is grandiose of me as I cannot fly, but would very much like to, especially in bat-style, and also because of the association of bats and vampires, which has always intrigued me as I’m very keen on the romance of the vampire—dead but also intensely alive, able to see and think and scent things in the world with senses and intelligence refined to that unholy extreme. And, of course, vampires can fly. 

After we moved, the new people came and cut down the tree. Why? Because they are soulless creatures who should’ve chosen a house in any number of horrible up-and-coming and very smart ‘estates’ in a suburb where the environmental depletion is already complete—eucalypts, koalas and fig trees all gone. Could’ve saved themselves a motza on real estate ‘improvements’. It’s unlikely that any massive lumps of space junk will fall on their new roof as such occurrences are rare, but I gained some comfort from the knowledge that they’ll be flooded out sooner or later. 

As I walk along the veranda towards the kitchen, Richard is tiptoeing towards me from that direction, looking shifty. I suspect he’s probably been grazing on the geraniums, leaving cat-bites clearly marked in their particoloured leaves. 

Good morning, Person, he purrs as he comes to a halt and sits down with economical grace, neat slippage of horizontal back to 45 degrees effected by simply dropping his bum from his pelvis-hinge without moving any other parts, then wrapping his tail neatly around his body which now forms a nearly perfect triangle when viewed in profile, and when viewed frontally there’s that feature I always enjoy: the stripes of his forelegs line up perfectly.

Morning, Dick. I give him a scratch behind the ears; he arches his back appreciatively and turns to accompany me into the kitchen. 

I haven’t been eating the leaves of any of the geraniums, by the way, mentions Dick as we stand together surveying the contents of the fridge. So don’t worry. You misunderstood my expression. As a matter of fact I rarely do anything shifty in the night. I spent most it compressing the upholstery fibres of the couch in the living room, polishing my stripes, and putting down another thin layer of fur. Incidentally, I was going to mention that you might like to give me a bit of a brush sometime this morning. 

Sorry, Dickson. And I’ll give you a brush soon.

And save the fur.

I will save the fur.

I’ve been a perfect cat all through the many hours you have been sleeping. I’ve been felting and guarding. I have not challenged your delusion of authority, a thing I know you really don’t like. By the way, that half a cold chicken looks appetising. 

That’s tonight’s dinner for George and me, Dick, so sorry about that, I tell him briskly. 

I’m looking forward to it, too, planning to put it into a curry, and have already bought the lemongrass and makrut lime leaves from the continental grocery several kilometres away as these commodities are not often found at the local shop. George and I work pretty well together in the kitchen, even though I do tend towards culinary overbearingness and am troubled by the zest he brings to chopping things up into bits that are far too small in my view. George occasionally rebels against my preferences, but he’s usually pretty civil about it. I wouldn’t be. 

I retrieve a sack of chopped mastodon and put some of the contents into Richard’s trough, which is currently on the borderline between indoors and outdoors, like the placement of my desk in the room up the corridor, so that we can both feel vaguely Balinese, although neither of us is Indonesian. But at this juncture, Indonesia meets Europe because beside his bowl is a big round weathered red earthenware pot of purple petunias whose velvet petals are an example of natural perfection. 

So: making tea. Tea has to be strong. You have to wait for it to brew. In a pot. Teabags are an invention of the devil. 

You’re getting hyperbolic again, says AF from a corner of my mind. Also haughty.

Haughtiness is bad, AF, I agree, but my point remains: teabags are nasty little packets of tannin-laced dust and broken leaves and each one releases 11.6 billion microplastics and 3.1 billion nanoplastics into every cup of tea. 

You just Googled that to score a point. Ducked it, I mean.

Yes. And?

The cat and I return to my desk up the corridor, me with my tea; him, sated with mastodon. Richard’s remark about authority-challenging was close to a subject I’d discussed yesterday in a seminar with a particularly lively and thoughtful cohort of students. We’d got onto the concept of Carnivale and the grotesque in medieval Europe—the previous week I’d provided historical readings and some videos—and now the conversation naturally turned to the Pride and Mardi Gras parades in Sydney. I asked the students if they thought that modern Mardi Gras parades were faithful to the sensibilities of Bakhtin’s rebellious ritual spectacles in all their energetic vulgarity and parody and irreverence towards accepted norms, and they laughed, except for Yu from Beijing, who was looking puzzled, but after I explained ‘irreverence’ he said, Oh! Got it.

Then another spoke of the violence that could break out. Dangerous! The students murmured to each other for a moment, until one Dalia from Darlinghurst claimed she’d love to have been around when the Sex Pistols spoofed the Queen on her jubilee. That was irreverence, she said. Then Miao from Hong Kong succinctly explained the term ‘spoof’, and who the Sex Pistols were, for the benefit of the other International students. I didn’t want to discourage her, as she’d obviously been researching independently, but I knew that at some stage I ought to turn the discussion towards a more nuanced cultural understanding, like the opportunistic acuity of the Sex Pistols’ manager which effectively co-opted them into the irresistible machinery of capitalism, as has happened more recently to Sydney’s Mardi Gras. But I wanted to enjoy a few moments of vindication. You see, I’d recently had an argument with a friend in which I’d expressed disgust at the inclusion of bank floats, chain store floats, and even a police float and other profoundly non-anti-authoritarian floats, surely medieval Carnivale’s antithesis. My friend said, Rot, it’s a party, lighten up, and now at least the cops are in it rather than out arresting queer people. 

I agreed that yes, it’s good that the police are no longer abusing people but are instead wanting to join the party, but, I said, my point is a festival of earthy uncouthness and saturnalian celebration has now become little more than a hugely profitable marketing venture. And yes, I know that the corporatisation of anarchy isn’t new to the 2020s, but it’s still a fucking travesty.

So. In the seminar we laughed together for a minute until an uncomfortable silence crept out from the corners where the cockroaches hide, and it muzzled us. As our hilarity ceased we looked around at each other’s faces, nonplussed at the dearth of wildness that this century affords people in community celebrations in big cities. 

After class, Yu approached me and said, I know the world is scary, but I and my friends are too much worried about being always safe. There are so much worries to have because the world is dangerous. But now there is no… he consulted the translation function on his phone… not so much, mmm… excitements? Joys? 

No thrills?

Yu nodded, his face still lowered to his screen, thin, nervous fingers tapping. A moment later he looked up and said, There is danger always but no thrills. We are all the time checking where to go and what to do and how to travel there to do it, then we check the reviews because we have the app. He smiled sadly. Not so much surprise. Not so much thrills. 

Richard now jumps up onto the back of my chair and looks over my shoulder at the screen on my lap. I’m thinking of all the risks I took when I was young and there were no apps. He turns his furry triangular face towards mine, pushes his muzzle-whiskers forward a bit in sympathy, then leans in and gives me an affectionate head-butt. You are sad for the kids, Person. I know! Let’s go for a walk outside into the driveway and I could eat a bit of paspalum that I’ve noticed is growing out of the bitumen cracks and you could do a bit more stretching for your poor knotty human spine that has so little give as you age, or maybe you could have a chat with somebody at the café. Then we can go back inside and each have a nice long drink of cool water and I can chuck up the paspalum in a gout of stomach acid—did you know that the design for the Alien was based on a cat? Clever, eh? And we can both be refreshed before we return to our respective tasks of felting the furniture and writing the book.