9. Samson Invents His Mother

and Edith Piaf, and Joan the statistician, and tells a good story about poo and gold.

I’d been for a glorious swim amidst the iridescent confetti-fish. Then, for a little while I lay on the surface with the sun glancing off my goggles and felt calmly, peacefully purposeless...

I spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon at my desk, taking the odd break with sessions of cat-brushing, tea-making or stretching so my skeleton doesn’t seize up on me like a bony rat-trap. Now I join Samson downstairs in the café on this fine day. He’s sitting under the umbrella that barely manages to claim space from the big tentacular plant with its many triffidic arms. As always, he smiles in his courtly way. He explains that he’s up to the chapter in his mother’s biography about her phase as a busker and occasional sex-worker, when he was eight, or maybe seven. I doubt the veracity of much of this story as it borrows heavily from that film about the early life of Edith Piaf while she lived in the Parisian brothel run by her grandmother. Unlike Samson’s story, Edith’s brothel phases seem to have been happy ones where she felt carefree and cared for and was not expected to pay for her keep either with her body or with cash. 

I don’t want to mention my doubts to Samson, who I know is, 1.  averse to straight questions, and 2. an incorrigible liar. So I will never know how much truth his story contains. My logic is that if he’s lying outright then it’s his own business, because why should I expect him to confide in me, given that I’m not his confessor? He’s welcome to invent to his heart’s content and I, in the meantime, get to enjoy a story, factual or fictive, that I would not otherwise have heard. 

Anyway, the thing is, I’m more interested in news of the woman we encountered the other day and with whom Samson fell so precipitously in love, that glossy sybarite like a Roman empress in her silky shift. Since then, I’ve seen them walking together on the beach together once or twice. But obviously a direct inquiry is impossible because Samson hates that and would likely only answer with something like, Tomatoes taste like watermelon if you sprinkle sugar on them. 

As I’m trying to formulate a suitably oblique entree into the subject of this woman, he volunteers the information of his own accord. He says, 

So, after you left the other day, she came over to my table and asked for the sugar.

She? 

I gave her the sugar.

Does she have a name? I ask. 

We talked, says Samson, stirring his macchiato. She’s from Perth, an unlovely city, but the Indian Ocean, or at least the bit that Perth is on, is pristine. They have a triple-filtration system over on the west coast. 

I didn’t know about the cleanliness of Perth, no. Good news, true. But she?

Her name is Joan.

I was surprised at ‘Joan’, even though there’s no good reason that the parents of a tiny baby should not name her after a beloved great-aunt, ‘Joan’ being a great-auntish name. Neither is there any reason why a person named great-auntishly might not have a dress sense and personal style more like, say, a Ginevra. Or a Guinevere. Or Benedetta, Elisabeta, Seraphina...

…or a Miranda, like the one who is leaning against the counter next to what is probably my coffee, her forehead wrinkled up in a frown of concentration while her thumbs are at it like a couple of jazzed-up tap dancers as she attends to her socials. I get up to retrieve my cooling beverage as the glowering Miranda stabs her device with an angry index finger. One advantage of conducting your friendships online is that fewer people get their eyes poked out. As I return to my seat, I see a minibus has just pulled up outside the IGA. Tourists. Nice. I turn back to Samson. 

She’s a statistician, he tells me. 

Joan is a statistician?

Yes. She told me that her speciality is statistical analysis in psychology, which involves collecting and analysing data to discover patterns and trends, says Samson. 

Misreading my blankness, he adds, It’s complicated, I know, but despair not, O Mymble-dotter! 

I wasn’t— 

He continues pedantically and with that superior edge that always gets my goat. But I’m curious about what he has to say, which is: 

I’ll give you an example. Just now, she’s working on an analysis of data that measures the depth and breadth of different forms of psychic pain from the enervating enfeeblement of depression to a range of manias and phobias, specifically in response to the up-speeding catastrophe fomented by the savage barbarian fantasists trashing reality from the pinnacles of power, and the dire facts on the ground, of perpetual war and irreversible climate change.

Although I hadn’t actually been despairing at that moment, Samson’s last word-flurry has now moved my mind to moments when I’ve come close to it, to despair, though I’m trying these days to exercise what’s been called ‘hopeless hope’. Have to, because like so many, often enough I wake up in the morning and go, Oh god. It’s not a dream. The Middle East is being brutalised and people are bleeding to death in the ancient capitals of Gaza and Beirut and elsewhere. PetroState AusCo continues to sell planet-poison globally while yet another species has just gone extinct because there’s nowhere for them to live any more. Humans take everything. There’s more careless slaughter of civilisations along with of swathes of forest in Brazil/Bolivia/Haiti/Niger—Niger? People, look! You’re on the edge of the fucking Sahara already! Gone, trees. Gone, ice. The entire island of Tuvalu is not-so-slowly sinking into the warming waves of the Pacific Ocean. Meanwhile AusCo’s government is sneakily white-anting away at our democracy with sly laws to criminalise whistleblowers and protesters and prevent small parties from receiving support while taking fistfuls of dough from their sinister sponsors, the miners. Meanmeanwhile ferociously thirsty data centres are springing up globally to feed the machinery that replaces human memory and creativity. How? Why? Guys, what the actual fuck do you actually want?

As Dick the Cat would say, humans are truly terrible people. 

I say some of this to Samson—not so much as to shrivel his ringlets (because despite his garrulous and slightly superior ways, he’s a sensitive, porous sort of person) and I see his eyelight soften. It’s empathy, I know, and he knows I know, and I also know he doesn’t like to talk about that sort of thing; he prefers to perform, thus distancing himself from the clammy emotional humidity generated by fellow-feeling. 

Anyway, I‘m now distracted by the fairly large number of women and men from the aforementioned minibus parked outside the IGA. They’re coming up into the café via the three steps from the street, conversing in a language Samson ventures is Turkish. As there aren’t that many seats, Imelda, the somehow always efficient manager and her tall and plumpish son, Dazza, have produced some milk crates, which they’re setting up in front of Pellmell’s actuarial office next door. Pell’s out of my eyeline, but I bet she looks up briefly from her screen where she’s either devising a financial security system for a client or engrossed in an online poker game to which she’s famously addicted; it’ll be a brief glance helpfully distracting her from the noise of bells and whistles of her tinnitus (‘the bane of my life,’ she’s told me often, ‘the utter bane, darl’). The Turks are chatting happily and putting in a complicated order. One of the men sets up his hookah (or shisha? nargile?) and soon the air is fragrant with the scent of apple and mint. 

Samson says, I have a list of practical expressions of hope for desperate times I can share with you, my like-minded friend, because we must be prepared for the eventuality that, if we are spared a nuclear holocaust, cities will in any case break down as remaining resources are absorbed by the wealthiest of the human populace, a tiny but obscenely rich and brutal minority who will abscond to the tops of the most mountainous islands when they finally work out that the technotopian dream is a mirage and space travel is just silly and so is Melon Tusk.

I think you mean Elon—

Don’t be impertinent, Mymble. As I was saying: they will abscond with all their money, which of course they cannot spend because currency will have lost its currency and then they’ll realise that they don’t know how to look after themselves, having no skills in farming or making things. Therefore they will rely on raiding the small villages and encampments that the rest of the world’s human survivors will build. We will construct our new villages out of the wreckage of cities, and dig latrines. We will become reacquainted with our own shit and its disposal. 

I suppose we will. 

Certainly. We are, after all, surrounded by poo. Rural poo of bird, and dog poo, bat poo, deer poo, roo poo, cow, horse, sheep poo—all relatively benign and in fact useful in comparison to all that human poo, still kept out of sight in many countries… for the moment. But even in rich places with low-visibility poo, pause for a moment to think of city poo! All those pipes, my dear friend, running through and under buildings, across streets, flushed down ten thousand more pipes of ten thousand city skyscrapers to join a network linking us all by our humble, fallible, smelly animality. Our waste, daily reminder of our fleshly frailty and vulnerability, and our mortality—no matter how well groomed, how wealthy, how high up in the social echelons, how delicate and graceful. Gymnasts shit. Kings shit. Techno-feudal titans shit. Orange men with frightening hair and breathtakingly vast and egos shit.

Coinciding with Samson’s last assertion, a burst of laughter from Pellmell’s pipe-smokers reaches us, and despite myself, I find I’m smiling too, which Samson takes as encouragement to embark upon a divergent turn:

The esteemed surrealist Salvador Dali suffered from all sorts of insecurities, you know, he adds, just as another bus, the school bus this time, comes squealing down the hill on its way to the jetty to meet the schoolkids from the ferry, who need to get to the neighbouring village after their hard day’s slog on The Other Side. Samson continues: If Salvador felt he’d made a faux pas in company he’d be terribly embarrassed, so he devised a mental trick. His wise advice is to look at your host and imagine a shit-encrusted owl sitting on their head. But—and this is important to remember—Dali was laughing at the owl as agent of the anarchic hilarity, not at the host. 

Wise, I agree, hoping he’d finished. Over Samson’s shoulder I look out over the bay. I see: 

The homecoming ferry just rounding the point on The Other Side. 

The school bus now waiting patiently at the jetty. 

The driver exiting and strolling down towards a couple of fishermen for a bit of gossip while he waits for his passengers to get on board for the return trip, or maybe just to exchange a few manly grunts, a popular pastime among Australian males over the age of eleven. 

A flock of noisy mynahs swooping down on a queue of cockatoos lined up on the railing. 

A minor battle, with cockies triumphant.

Busy little burg, this.

Are you paying attention, Mym? 

I am, Samson, I assure him untruthfully, as I’m troubled by a series of sandfly bites that have formed an itchy bracelet around my right ankle. I inhale the lovely apple-mint scenting the late afternoon air to distract myself from scratching. I see Dazza passing by and ask him for a glass of wine. I raise my eyebrows questioningly at Samson, who nods at Dazza to indicate that the order is now two glasses rather than one. He doesn’t stop talking though.

Dali was a real networker, so he wouldn’t want to insultingly laugh in the face of a person who might well be a buyer … 

The school bus is returning up the hill now, and there’s much shrieking to be heard coming from one of the open windows, laden as it is with teenagers, and the Turks look up, curious. One, a man with a glossy black beard, waves, which produces much hilarity on the bus. Samson pauses briefly rather than raise his voice (he hates shoutiness of all kinds) before continuing with his thread. 

And Dali’s wife Gala was an even more conscientious schmoozer than Dali, Samson now tells me, so he kept the owl strategy secret for quite a while. If he’d told Gala about it at the time she would’ve been really cross. So next time you feel insecure in company, maybe you’ve just realised you mispronounced ‘oxymoron’ or ‘otorhinolaryngologist’ (though power to you for even attempting such a polysyllabic monstrosity!), just remember, your tormentors don’t shit little chocolate drops. 

I’ll save that for the next time I’m beset by social anxiety, I tell him as the ferry, which has exchanged schoolkids for a cargo of home-bound bus-free tourists, honks loudly to urge an overly relaxed swimmer to get out of the way, and Dazza appears with our wine and a little ceramic dish with a handful of smoked almonds.

And, Samson continues, sounding triumphant for no reason I can fathom, in this new world of making-do and building and rebuilding after the raids, and dealing with our excrement, other forms of currency will emerge. The value of goods will be based on their immediate utility in this new world of foragers and thieves, gardeners and carpenters and make-do-ers with engine parts and plastic bags and the odd roll of still-sticky gaffer tape. And for all of us, builders and raiders alike, the illusions of gold will at last be exposed. Gold, that vain old god, will have done his dash. 

Samson pauses here, possibly for emphasis, or to formulate his next thoughts, or so that I can ask a question that he’ll then sidestep. But I’m not playing. I sip my wine silently and nod ever so slightly as I admire the late afternoon light on the flickering bits of water between the tree trunks while resisting the urge to scratch my bites. 

He gives up waiting quite soon, as I thought he might, and resumes: The foremost illusion of gold, he tells me, is that it is good.

Ah, the old saw, good as gold, I contribute.

Exactly, my fine-feathered friend. He sips his wine moodily, and bites into an almond which makes a pleasant crack. Though of course with money you can afford to be generous, which is a kind of goodness, I suppose, and people will love you for it. 

Or not? I suggest. 

Or not! Yes! They might hate you. But so what! You can build huge walls and stud them all over with big guns in the sides and watchtowers on top and buy all the smoothest drugs and creamiest courtesans so you needn’t be lonely even when you’re most fearful at 3 am, when things go bump in the night and creatures with claws concealed in soft pads of fur come to eat your spleen. And you can take your money and travel in a private jet cos fuck the planet, and go to the resorts on tiny beautiful sinking islands. So: more planes and drugs and sycophants and really flash shoes and houses, more things to stuff into those houses, infinitely up-scalable stuff. Gold stuffs you to the gills with stuff, puffs you and stuffs you up. Yes, you’re stuffed!

Got it, Samson, I say, moodily scratching my bites.

With money you can be free, tra la! But, Mymble-dotter … your face is a picture of perturbment. So, two questions: One, are you with me? And two, Is there such a word as ‘perturbment’? 

One: almost. Just catching my breath. And two, not to my knowledge. But there should be such a word. Melds with ‘puzzled’ with ‘anxious’ and perhaps a little wistful.

Be not perturbed then. Breathe, my friend. Think of freedom, happiness, virtue. 

I breathe. I consider virtues. I see the sun sliding down beyond the treetops. A kookaburra yells. Miranda, sitting on the top step, scrolls through her Messages from Elsewhere with a gentler, more meditative look on her heart-shaped face. I scratch. God, it’s good. I wonder, briefly, when I’d hear more news of Samson’s glossy sybarite, Joan? Not today: he’s now making leaving noises. I move over to the Turks to ask for a puff of their pipe.