So there I was, at 4pm on Christmas Day in a floor-length pink gown and bare feet, hair hanging in my face, squinting as I angled the scissors to cut approximately 3cm (3/4inch) of loose, bloodied skin from the top of my mother’s big toe (right foot, propped on the kitchen table).
‘Loose’ is perhaps not the word. It was covered in blood, as, at that point, was basically everything- the floor and seats of my brother’s car, where we’d first discovered that the skin of her foot had decided to hastily part company with its previously inseparable neighbouring epidermis; my hands; three party hats; my mother’s shoes; three feet of gauze hastily applied roadside- everything, in fact, with the strange exception of my mother, who above foot level was pristine as the Virgin Mary. The fact that she was swearing like a sailor who’d lately been set on fire is irrelevant.
To return to the flap of skin- it was covered in dried blood, and was therefore stiff. It was also extremely thick and unpliable. Think the thickness of a decent wedding ring band, or of a standard-issue plastic ruler. Plus it was surrounded by a semicircle of unprotected, scarlet, oozing flesh which not half an hour ago it had been covering up. A difficult opponent.
But it had to come off; and so I lowered myself so that I was approximately three inches away from a gaping flesh wound, prised the corner of the flap which had caught under my mother’s nail free, lifted it upwards (cue Mum's renewed rendition of 'Fuck Shit Bloody Fucking Hell', in a slightly higher pitch), and snipped at it with (extremely carefully wielded) kitchen scissors.
Then, of course, all I had to do was dispose of the flap of skin, apply antiseptic wound cream, a wound pad and two types of bandages, disinfect the scissors, and clean the blood off everything else, all the while talking to my mother in a Comforting Yet Firm Voice and sending various extraneous family members off on missions of aid. Easy as ho, ho, ho.
Perhaps this is your idea of a horror story. To me it’s a fairly ordinary Christmas, really- just as much a part of the general Yule experience as the flaming pudding setting napkins alight, or my brother singing 'Happy Jesus-Day (Hip Hip- BLASPHEMY!)', or inexplicable fringed gifts from distant relatives which could be scarves or wall hangings or perhaps oversized false eyelashes, or gorgeous young cousins behaving like creatures out of Where The Wild Things Are. (My cousins are three things: they're all younger than me, they're all batshit insane, and they're all growing up to be unfeasibly good-looking.) Our tradition is not Dickens and eggnog- it's a mix of familial charm and blatant weirdness.
For instance, this year I inherited various pairs of designer sunglasses from my now-dead grandmother (huge-lensed, so that I resemble an expensive bug), bundled together in a dusty bag my mother found amongst her mother's things and did not want to keep. Also in the bag, as I discovered myself, late at night, was my grandmother’s wedding garter, in a tiny white box. Nobody knows how or why it got there, just as nobody knows how part of my mother's toe came to resemble an anatomy demonstration. That is Christmas, you see- strange and lovely acts, variously beautiful, bizarre or (in this case) extremely bloodied.
The best part of the story, perhaps, is that halfway through my painstaking routine with the wound cream, my brother came into the kitchen and said, brightly, “It’s all OK! I got the stains out of my car upholstery!”
My mother seems to spend her time in the Middle East doing several things. One is crosswords. Another is causing enough diplomatic trouble for the Australian Ambassador to eye her knowingly at a dinner and say 'Oh, so you're HER.' Yet another is getting the time difference wrong, calling me in the very early hours of the morning, and then sounding surprised that being suddenly awakened doesn't put me in the mood for long-distance chats.
However, the most immediately important thing she's doing- from my point of view, anyway- is collecting a truly bizarre set of stories, which she then recounts to me (in the very early hours of the morning). The feeling is not completely dissimilar to hearing radio communications from an astronaut in another galaxy- though I'm quite sure that Houston doesn't need to dial nearly as many numbers to contact a shuttle. You think remembering your mobile phone number is hard, try 42 digits sometime.
Here, then, are tidbits from the latest installment, which, because it was made at a reasonable hour, I was actually able to remember this time around.
Dubai, being the absolute golden-plated basket case of a city that it is, operates under the delusion that it is an Important World Centre, when most people would probably be hard-pressed to say whether 'Dubai' was a city or an exotic fruit. Part of this delusion involves having its very own tennis tournament. Its concession to reality (or rather the twin realities of obscurity and incredible heat) is that the tournament is a charity one, for retired world-class players- 'The Legends Rock Dubai', though perhaps it's less 'rocking' it than 'gently wobbling it around in its squidgy morass of Gucci and tanning oil'.
One of said players was Pat Cash, who was there this month, fighting for- some prestige or other. The fact that Legends Rock Dubai is perhaps not a stringently world-class event is demonstrated by Cash's behaviour with the ball-boy, who was all of eight years old. (Stop looking at me like that, it isn't that sort of story.)
Truncated version: Ball-boy, presumably addled by the heat and the stress of being surrounded by Rocking Legends, throws ball to Cash to serve, manages to hit Cash straight upside legendary head. I personally would find such aim rather inspiring. Cash, however, takes theatrical offence, throws balls at ball-boy's stomach, gives ball-boy racquet and tells him 'Go on, see if you can do any better.' Thrust onto centre court, ball-boy, being eight years old and stunted by continual exposure to air conditioning, demonstrates that he cannot hit the ball anywhere except into the net.
Cash proceeds to do the Legendary Thing: picks up stunted ball-boy (still holding racquet) in both hands, and plays the next game using him as some kind of racquet extension. Opponent is laughing too hard to play properly, crowd is in hysterics, waved-about ball-boy is presumably traumatised for life. Welcome to Dubai. (I suppose he's lucky it wasn't John McEnroe, because then he would have been used as the actual ball.)
It would, however, be a misconception that the UAE doesn't take sports seriously. On the contrary: this is a region where sport is everything and everything is sport, up to and including camels, who (brace yourselves) have their very own Official Racing League. Camels, however, are not very well-suited to sprinting. Their limbs are designed at best for a gentle lolloping, not a crazed short-distance dash, and are therefore, it seems, unable to get far into the latter activity without getting rather tangled. They also react badly to loud noises, which means that on the sound of a starter's gun, camels will quite likely lollop off madly in every direction except towards the finishing line, including backwards, or simply fall over on the spot.
Further, camel-racing often takes place on a circular track, like horse-racing- but the problem with a moving camel, once it's going in the right direction, is that it's rather fond of moving in a straight line. If it sees a large curving fence appear in front of it, then, as a boundary on the track, it will not follow said curve- it will simply stop. (It will not leap the fence; steeplechase camel races are sufficiently against the laws of physics not to even be attempted. Do not attempt to use your neighbourhood camel to test this.)
The way the camel-owners solve this is to park their cars at the curves, and beep their horns loudly at the stopped-dead camels to get them to start moving again. This means that a competitive time in camel-racing is something of an illusory thing. It also, of course, occasionally has the consequence that the camels simply turn around and flee back to where they started, regardless of the protests of the hapless jockeys saddled atop their humps.
Oddly enough, Official Camel Racing, complete with commentators, is given large broadcasting time on the heavily-censored airwaves, which represent the Western world solely through variously chopped editions of CBS and NBC, the apparently inoffensive Deutsche News, strangely truncated and stitched-together Oprah episodes where she'll do a telltale seesaw from one weight to another within one half-hour segment, and French cooking shows (in French, undubbed) where various articles are dipped in extraordinary amounts of wasabi and then praised as a delicacy. Going on this basis, Americans, at least, all have a newscaster's glossy hair, are intensely preoccupied with Book Clubs, and possess the ability to breathe fire. (Wasabi and I aren't friends.)
It sometimes, however, comes down to a choice between a) sitting in one's hotel room eating room-service club sandwiches and watching Oprah interview Sean Penn whilst apparently suffering from schizophrenia, or b) going to a Westerners-friendly restaurant and sitting alongside a German businessman unabashedly arguing with a Korean escort about her rising rates.
(Actually, the latter is how I found out through my mother that the American dollar was weakening, so I can't be over-critical.)
And then there have been the more crushing experiences- Nepalese workers informing her matter-of-factly that of course she loves her son more than her daughter; travel agents refusing to speak with her because she is a woman; the inability to venture anywhere on her own without a male escort (no, not the Korean kind), even just to buy flowers. You think I break my bright tone to speak of them; but this is a different world. Particularly as a woman, one cannot simply address, lightly, the camels racing backwards without recognising all the other backwards-racing, too.
Want to know a way in which to take ten years off my life? Fix my online university results so that, beside the Very Important Subject I Need To Ace So As To Get Into Honours And Have An Academic Future, it reads Incomplete- Mark: 0.
I have come close to having a heart attack a handful of times in my life. Reading those results was one of them.
Now, I'm a veteran when it comes to the incredible fatuity of Arts departments. I've handled being declared persona non grata by a foreign university two weeks before I arrived to study there, and being told that I don't actually attend university at all, despite all appearances to the contrary. I've coordinated an assault involving three different offices, a passport, a nonexistent university subject, and four people occupying the same job in an eighteen-month period (Head of English Honours seems to have a high turnover). I'm an expert in midnight phone calls to academic advisors in other countries, juggling eighteen different forms at once (in triplicate), demanding to see superiors in a Very Cold Commanding Tone, and various other types of armed and unarmed combat against bureaucratic nonsense. Forget the University Medal, I deserve a Purple Heart.
However, if there were a cake, this would take it. We had only submitted one 100% assessment for the Very Important Subject, so there were no other marks to comfortingly suggest that perhaps a mistake had been made. Across the country and the world, a select group of USYD English students read their results, imagined that their meticulous essays had been lost/shredded/set alight, and entered into a state commonly known as 'panic'.
Senior Arts students are, as a rule, rather highly strung (it's a medically proven result of over-achieving, looking pompously superior to Engineers and perpetually insisting that you won't be working at a fast food joint in five years). You would think that the Arts Office would be careful not to upset us, or make sudden movements. We can turn feral and footnote you into an early grave. Quite aside from that, making a large group of us believe, for at least half a day (before word got out that it was a mistake), that we'd failed was more than a stuff-up: it was frankly rather cruel.
One good thing came of this debacle- the 2008 Honours candidates drew ever closer together in our dismay. Phones rang across the country, crying 'Did you get Incomplete too? Oh, good, then we can freak out together.' Evidence is definitely mounting to support my theory that the English Department has embarked on a Darwinian quest to cull the weak from our cohort, and bind the survivors together in a mass united by terror, hatred and confused references to Derrida. We're being bred to be either prisoners of war or Übermenschen.
Either way, 2008 is going to be a very interesting year.
EDIT: So, I suddenly got my mark back. I am now, in the words of a friend, a sports car, because I went from 0 to 93 in 60 seconds. Yep. 93. The English Department is not forgiven, but if you'll excuse me, I'll be over here, doing an incredibly silly victory dance.
Over ten months in Europe, I experienced exactly one thunderstorm. When it hit, there was a mad rush to go outside and watch it. Herein lies the difference: the British treated it as an extremely exciting rarity, like Christmas, or nuclear warfare. I, however, regarded being threatened with death by lightning, drenching and hailstones as a very comforting reminder of home. The thunderstorm which has just passed over Sydney was a case in point.
On the left, boys and girls, we have its encroaching cloud over the course of five minutes. (The official weather reporter on the radio was squawking 'Anybody who is outside, GET INSIDE, RIGHT NOW.' There were helicopters warning yachts to get out of the harbour. And I was standing on my balcony, taking photographs. Truly I am either brave or very stupid.)
It gets better. On the right, we have my view of the city. It disappeared in twenty seconds, which is about as long as the average person takes to sprint 100m at top speed. Which is utterly ridiculous.
Australia knows how to do many things: win the cricket, ignore warnings about skin cancer, flatten vowels, populate unimportant rural towns with huge plaster sculptures of fruit, produce thoroughly repellent and thus fairly typical politicians, dominate the world market in crops such as wheat and apathy, be part of the Commonwealth purely for the joys of beating the English silly at the Commonwealth Games, kill unprepared nineteenth-century explorers, and confuse tourists with tales of closing the Harbour Bridge at 3am to let the kangaroos across. When it comes to weather, though, it's at its belligerent best.
As a nation, we are collective experts on drought, heatwave, flood, empty dams, water shortages, wind storms, hurricanes, hail, raising salinity and virtually every natural disaster with the possible exception of earthquakes. This is because, one, we're all know-it-alls, and two, Australia doesn't so much have a weather system as a perpetual act of God.
Resemblances to the Apocalpyse and Independence Day are not coincidental. With global warming, of course, the storms will only get worse. Australians, though, will probably just shrug, turn up the cricket and keep telling Americans that Australia Post uses wallabies for out-of-state deliveries.
Thing I Regret #21: Not taking a camera to the 2007 Movember Ball. (No. Seriously.)
Movember, for those of you not in the know (or 'not in the mo', depending on your personal correlation between puns and a desire to stab somebody in the abdomen), is a hugely popular November charity event whereby all those possessing enough testosterone to sprout hair on their upper lip are charged to do so, deliberately and vigorously, for a month. All these newly-moustached males then persuade their friends to sponsor their fledgling growth- or, as I heard, to sponsor a guarantee that it would be shaved off when the month was over. All the money goes to prostate cancer research (and, in Australia, beyondblue, the national depression initiative), and at the end of the month a Ball is held for those who raised the most money. Hence why I found myself at Luna Park last night surrounded by approximately 700 moustachio'd men. Here is what, in my infiltration of the partially-facially-haired ranks (cunningly disguised in the manner of the photo above), I discovered: 1) Men with new moustaches believe themselves to be fresh-minted virile specimens of supreme masculinity. Something about wearing one's testosterone on one's face counteracts the centuries of wisdom which positioned moustaches as the sole provenance of ironic art students, old German men, celebrities wanting a hard-luck Oscar, Eastern European widows and Yorkshire terriers. This means that the newly-moustached suddenly think their success rate has advanced, when in the real world (ie the world where everybody wasn't feeling jolly proud of themselves for supporting charitable causes) it would probably diminish. A female couldn't stand still without being eye-raked by a dozen pairs of eyes perched on scruffy ledges. 2) Moustaches, thanks to their long languishing in the vault of Things Fashion Says No To (next to gangrene and Milli Vanilli), have somehow attained some sort of exoticism. That, or Sydney's men don't get nearly enough opportunity to break out the fancy-dress. Tell a man to grow a moustache and dress to suit it, and you'll end up with seventeenth-century parsons, cricketers, pirates, mer-men, Mexican bandits and a faintly horrifying amount of lederhosen. Combine this with 1, and you have the slightly surreal experience of having to tell a Jack Sparrow imitator casually strumming a ukele that you aren't interested. 3) It's nigh on impossible to be down in the dumps when you're surrounded by grinning men in ridiculous costume who are celebrating a charitable cause. Bravo, Mo-Bros. You are thoroughly tasteless, blatantly unfashionable, and damn good sports.
Can one make a sport
Of ignoring elections?
Oz might be world champ.
(Oh, what, like YOUR country's polling day doesn't demand a haiku.)
Dear country of my birth: I love you dearly. You have decidedly cuddly cities, your beaches are downright cute, none of the other citizens you hold to your warm and sandy chest have knifed me (though they do spit on my car), and you seem to return the affection to the extent that I have not yet been deported.
There are, however, limits to our affair. I am an informed voter- I know which preferences connect to which kneebone, and which political party was in the drawing room with the lead pipe. However, I also partake in the fine Australian tradition of Not Caring Very Bloody Much, a fine mix of apathy, reclusion and sitting on the couch reading Agatha Christie novels. This means that, while I do understand the utter media madness used by our virtually interchangeable two major parties in order to combat NCVBM and get inside peoples' skulls, I must protest being leafletted, bombarded, picketed and privy to Moral Outrage so belligerently that it feels I am being tarred and feathered.
You are a lovely country. Don't take this the hard way. It's not you, it's me. I can't take it any more- the ghastly 'pork-barrelling' and 'me-tooing' assaulting my very grasp of the English language; the poor babies being kissed by a multitude of leathery political lips (with the exception of Peter Garrett, who doesn't have any); the apparent development of fourteen different ways to pronounce 'Kyoto'; the joker who listed Kirribilli House on domain.com (though I can actually deal with that). If I hear one more politician make a blithe accusation about rising interest rates without mentioning that the GOVERNMENT DOES NOT ACTUALLY SET INTEREST RATES, AT ALL, EVER, I will explode, fall over, die, lose my mind, and curse my Economics teacher for forever being deprived of the happiness of ignorance.*
I am done. I am out. I have done no campaigning, ridden no police horses through the hordes, galluped no Gallup polls, shaken no supposedly-capable-with-the-economy hands, and yet I am exhausted. Please: I have voted, now make it stop.
It is important to remember, in these dark days, that I am more than simply a single vote. I am, for instance, in no particular order, the bearer of an eighteen-inch scratch down my left lower bicep; able to straighten my fringe without burning it (yet); still getting marked down for 'metaphorical flourishes', much to my intense amusement; an excellent Axl Rose imitator; writing a brittle short story which doesn't seem to be saying anything very real; and disappearing to the Hunter Valley for the weekend bearing a Scrabble set, a sleeping bag, chocolates and a large pink bag resembling a liver. Let Rome burn. I can fiddle, at least, until Monday.
* If you make a smug comment about how governmental fiscal and monetary policy actually do influence interest rates indirectly, I cannot be held responsible for my actions.
++ The phrase 'bunkering down' becomes inexplicably hilarious.
++ You invent, and immediately seek to disseminate, the phrase 'eenie meenie miney mammoth' as a way of selecting between important options.
++ You also invent an entire system of punctuation based on the word lion, prompted only by a single slightly obscure segment of a single slightly obscure webcomic. Thus, full stops become (lion), exclamation points become (LION) or (MANY LIONS), question marks become (querical lion), and so forth(lion)
++ You get bored enough to start biting things- your brother's notes, his arms, books, letters, the occasional small electronic device- but with a lackadasial sort of dedication which turns to disillusionment when you discover that biting peoples' heads, despite the apparent enjoyment of zombies partaking in the activity in movies, is not half as fun as it looks, and generally tastes rather bad. (Note: if you mention Freudian oral fixation I will throw you over a fence.)
++ On commission, you construct a Martha-Stewart-esque paper called '10 Easy Steps To Home Homicide', with tips, tricks and an appendix on the complicated etiquette of beheading.
++ Conversations now include the frequent use of the phrase 'Have you ever really LOOKED at a fork?', sheeples, the waaaaaahmbulance, and whether all of China has a cholesterol problem.
++ You are developing a list of childhood Disney movies (see: 101 Dalmations, Dumbo, Bambi) to watch, on the logic that if you are getting embarassingly close to no longer being a teenager, you'd better get working on your second childhood.
++ When a waiter in a French restaurant asks "What do you call a Frenchman wearing thongs? Phillipe Falop!", you think it is the most hilarious thing to happen gastronomically since the invention of haute cuisine.
++ When your brother mispronounces "sprechen Sie Deutsch?" (do you speak German?) as something vaguely resembling "essen Sie Deutsch?" (do you eat Germans?), you dissect it for ten minutes and even then cannot stop giggling.
Please send help. Brain melting in the summer heat and leaking out ears.
Or, Abject Frippery, Because The Internet Is For Narcissists.
The Before:
The After:
Now, if I can just stop the edges stabbing my eyeball, we'll be in business. (I hear eyepatches are making a comeback this season.) (Actually I don't hear that at all, but Jack Sparrow needs to have at least one tangible fashion influence.)
76 pages = 15,500 words = brain has 'sploded.
Let's play a game. Let us say that you lived in England for about nine months, and along the way picked up the regional slang as thoroughly as a dentally unhygienic person picks up plaque. Now back in Australia, your home country, you still say 'sodding rain', 'bugger this for a bunch of bananas' and 'stop being such a prat' on at least a semi-regular basis.
Part of this slang-knowledge involves a vague understanding of the British term 'nobbling', which is, shall we say, the anatomical equivalent of 'getting one's leg over' or 'boinking'- though, in the great English tradition of rude/sexual phrases, it appears to have little or no technical relation to the actual thing it's describing. To me, 'nobbling' sounds like an aggressive activity involving shins and hockey-sticks.
Nevertheless, a (slightly informal) quote from a British scientist about beetles confirms the point:
"Males started getting nobbled by other males, so they evolved the female defensive genitals." (Sydney Morning Herald)
So! Let's assume that (despite your ostensible pure-mindedness) you've picked up this slang along with the rest. Now the fun begins. Imagine that it's racing time in Australia, and that in Australian slang, completely unbeknownst to you, 'nobbling' means 'to handicap a horse, usually by drugging it'.
Now, picture your Australian family happily discussing 'nobbling a horse' around the dinner table.
Insert quote about the positive disgust/humour values of comparative linguistics HERE.
Note: It had just come to my attention that this blog is now the First Result on Google if you search for the words 'bestiality comparative linguistics'. This is certainly fame of a slightly unprecedented kind.
