4. Pulling the Pin. Or Not.

Louise Katz

22 Oct 2025 — 8 min read

Awkward conversation with the cousins.

Pyoongggnang, complains His Royal Heinous, Richard Dickson, Cat. Seoouuul!

He starts speaking Korean when he’s upset. You see, I’d been away for a few days and when I returned Richard was in a temper.

A lot’s been happening here, Person. And none of it good. I’ve been watching the tide, he says. It could swamp us all.

Ok Dick, yes, these are times of supercharged uncertainty, old patterns can no longer be taken for granted, all true.

Hearing him voice this view is disturbing though—he wasn’t always a big news reader. He used to prefer the classics.

We’re on the veranda, the two of us. It’s raining lightly. I just looked up ‘soft rain’ in some other languages. I like the Polish: miekki deszcz. Such forgiving sibilance… miekki deszcz, wonderfully onomatopoeic… mostly soft but with sharp little light-glints in it reflecting off gunmetal-grey, like the sea when the rain’s about to stop and a rainbow might be coming.

You speak Polish now? interrupts my invisible friend, AF. And ‘gunmetal glints’ and rainbows? Seriously?

No and yes. What’s it to you?

AF slinks sulkily away into a crease south of the pons and north of my brain’s medulla oblongata. Richard remains. He glances at me tautly as I sit down next to him on the cane couch, not because he thinks I want to damage him, as we’re old friends, but because he’s a cat.

You went away, he accuses. A woman came into our home. A stranger.

You know her, Richard. She’s a friend. JJ.

He glares. All human people are strange. And she brought her dog. I had to contend with a real and present dog. Almost my height and slavering.

You know her, Richard. She’s a friend. JJ. But tell me, what did you do about JJ’s real and present poodle?

I gave her the death stare, obviously. It failed. My powers were diminished because I was weak with hunger. So I swiped her across the nose. It bled. Delicious. Fresh. Ideal. Where did you go, anyway?

I told you. I went to Margaret River with George. (George is the man who sometimes lives with me in this flat above the actuarial agency and the café. He is a sanguine person, an optimist, which I enjoy though I find it bizarre. We manage to share our lives largely without anxiety and with a level of equanimity but I don’t want to tell you too much about our relationship. I mean, I may know some readers but I don’t know all of you, so, well… but you may learn more if I come to feel more confident and trusting over time. (It doesn’t come easily to me, trust, nothing personal.)

Dick looks away from me, stares into the distance. The rain is getting a little bit heavier and nobody’s around on the street at all.

A couple of George’s cousins have just moved to WA, and we were to meet them in Margaret River. When we turned up at the hotel they were both waiting for us in the foyer and there were kisses and hugs all round, which was nice. I’ve come to realise that my idea of family is a bit limited. Mine was never close—or no, maybe some of them were, but I wasn’t part of that huddle for reasons I may explore one day, but then again, possibly not.

These people, the cousins, sometimes exhibit quite different perspectives of the world to mine so although I’m very fond of them both, sometimes they’re as strange to me as poodles and people are to Dick. So I decided that during this trip, should disagreements arise, I would remember the thought experiment I’ve been conducting intermittently, though with limited success, for decades.

Like this: trying to discuss things about which I have strong opinions with people who disagree with me while exercising civility rather than charging in with big guns ablaze, or maybe, when I’m feeling gentler, just throwing grenades from behind my parapet. Both are discursive approaches I was taught from childhood. Our dinner table could be a bloodbath.

And you reckon you’ve been working on this for decades? says that voice from the inner lining of one of my cranial folds. Slow learner, You.

Hi, AF. You’re back.

I’m here to help even though you don’t deserve it, having recently abandoned the puss, Richard Dickson. But really, decades?

Early habits are hard to shake, ok? Here’s a memory from Dinner at Ours. My dad, Bernie: Oh ho, darling daughter mine, you might say that (after I’d offered an opinion), but plenty would disagree. Just think about it. And of course I know that Bern’s ‘think’ in this context means: Yield! Your views are nonsense. If you consider what you’ve said for as long as it takes to flick a fly from the potato salad then you will see that I am right and you are foolish.

I never really got the yielding thing. I learned instead the strategies of sarcasm and condescension; also that arrogance is strength, that compromise is synonymous with weakness. Of course, many years ago I understood that this was all wrong, having observed that conversations could be pleasant, could be edifying, and that my beloved father’s world was harsher than I could ever know because he came from a ferocious angry hungry place and I did not. He was severe and big-hearted and volatile and loving and damaged and would’ve had no idea what I was learning from his example.

One conversation we had in Margaret River with the cousins occurred in a very smart café attached to a hotel with a pool, which is not the sort of place I’m typically attracted to out of aesthetic as much as pecuniary considerations. So I was a bit out-of-sorts to begin with. There were people sitting on the edge of the pool drinking coffee and others on a kind of pontoon in the middle, looking content, and it was all turquoise water, pale grey stone, multicoloured umbrellas. We were in the shade and they were in brilliant sunlight that streamed down all over them as if it loved them.

Meanwhile, our discussion had become contentious. It was curling the edges of my liver, which had become like a giant tongue folding in on itself. I could feel it getting foldier and curlier as the conversation—about investments—progressed. Both cousins play the stockmarket and favour of coal-mining companies whose dividends are generous, so I mentioned the effects of carbon on the world and the terrible changes occurring climate-wise, to which they argued that if I thought an individual’s investment choices would change anything I was mistaken, so they might as well make the most of the most profitable companies.

At this point I paused instead of saying that I found this position cynical and nihilistic and immeasurably short-sighted and stupid and it destroys any possibility of hope. I drew breath, a few breaths actually, in that pause there at the shady table, and I heard the breaths distinctly as well as other small sounds around me. Quietly lapping water. That vivid blue with its oily sheen of block-out sounded loud too. Traffic hum. Conversational buzz from a nearby table and, more faintly, the bar, the kitchen. And the sound of my heart racketing around my chest cavity like a lonely marble in a bucket.

George went to the loo. His chair scraped very scrapily. I became aware of the sunlight creeping across the tiles towards us and it now felt more surreptitious than loving.

Meanwhile, the calm, relaxed voices of George’s relatives as they continued sipping their coffee and talking, and their obtuse equanimity in the face of the encroaching cataclysm, were intensifying my liverishness to a degree I was struggling to contain. But I understood how high were the conversational stakes. Exploding my relationship with George’s cousins seemed inevitable, practically speaking. And now I was sad as well as angry. I liked them both and they’re family. George’s family. And he loves them and he’s a gentle person whom, I fear in dark moments and sometimes in lighter ones, deserves a much kinder woman than me. After a few more breaths I realised I’d passed the phase where I’d normally have eased the pin out of my grenade. The softness of the sad feeling had graced my heart for long enough for me to remain within my thought experiment, to exercise restraint, to be judicious, even reasonable…

Ha! Reasonable! You. Good one.

Shut it, AF. But yeah, ok: the softness drained away after a second or two and my soul rebelled. How can anyone be reasonable about the end of the fucking world?

AF asks perkily, And then the sunny breakfast table became a bloodbath?

No, as it happens. I told my soul to shut up. I put my grenade back into its whatever-it-is soldiers carry grenades in.

You dud. Piker. What a fiasco. Fizzler flop failure.

AF, sometimes you have to shut your soul up because souls can’t think. It’s not what they’re for, if they’re for anything at all, if they are anything at all … god, this is all getting a bit numinous. Anyway, the conversation at the hotel continued. Reason was used. Information exchanged. Torpedoes unlaunched. Blood unspilled.

I could feel AF’s invisible face looking deeply ratty, as if I’d committed an act of betrayal. But AF, I say, it gets better. You know how sometimes when you’re talking intensely with people and their eyelight changes?

Obviously I know eyelight, AF mutters irritably.

So you know that a glitter of enmity can turn into a light that is friendlier, even curious, interested? Sometimes it can happen quite spontaneously.

So?

So, this is what happened over the breakfast table that morning. Their eyes, my eyes. Eyelight exchange as much as word-exchange. To me it was a small miracle.

Very small. Bit of glinting? When it comes to miracles: tiny. Insignificant. Meaningless.

AF. Don’t dismiss small wonders. Rare isn’t insignificant. It’s precious. (I was quite proud of that rejoinder—dudding the grenade with AF too, haha!)

Then what happened?

Well, nothing dramatic, just conversation. Bloodless and edifying. I wasn’t about to change my mind of course, and neither cousin actually came around to agreeing with me, but I could see that one of them was taking on what I was saying, and also I did get a useful glimpse into how she sees the world and that her position was likely to fluctuate a bit and therefore her investment options might be open to review. She could change her mind for a number of reasons, including economic ones, and I began to mount a case for that—

There is a sudden loud clang from downstairs. Richard jumps vertically, almost a metre I’d say, then lands on rigid legs. But it’s just Imelda, rolling down the café’s metal shutters against the rain, which over the course of our conversation has by degrees started to drum down very seriously. Dick creeps away and is now keeping a weather eye on the weather from the doorway.

Nope. We’re doomed, Pollyanna, opines AF.

It’s always a struggle against AF’s sardonicism. That’s where it starts though, I say, hating my didactic tone. But I persist: One instance. From there, we continue…

AF’s eyeballs roll invisibly, rocking around in the back of my head. Discombobulating sensation, that, it really is.

But now, a sudden fierce gust of rain-soaked cockatoo-bearing wind bears down on us from beyond …Kim-chi-i-i-i-i- shrieks the cat, as the birds come skrarking from the blue like a murderous host of horn-beaked helicopters, arrgghhh, arggghh …