Holy backflipping porpoises Batman! Has it really been eight months since the last post? Yup. Any reason for the silence? Indifference, possibly. Sure I could have done something, but all too often it feels like screaming into the empty void.
But obviously that sensation has flown away with the mild Easterly breeze and here we are again.
Last night, The Dirty Three played at the Astor Theatre. I last saw them play at Kings Park back in 2003. I'd have to say that it was one of my favourite concerts. Surprisingly so, as the bands I usually dig are into bashing each other, and the audience, over their crowns with a guitar head stock.
Friday night, seven years later, and the high standard of the band's live performances had not dipped. Truly an unique band. However, something different from the King's Park performance and the Astor gig was the audience. What always struck me at the former was how the crowd were calling out requests between songs. As the event went late into the night, it became obvious that the band wouldn't be playing for much longer. So, whenever Warren Ellis introduced the next song, parts of the audience would cry out in anguish that it wasn't what they wanted to hear. The Dirty Three's audience was fanatical, such was their admiration.
However, at the latter, I noted a very different type of audience. To put it mildly, some sections of the crowd were heckling the band. I don't understand this phenomena; especially not in this context. The band was playing well. There wasn't a bill with large selection of acts; people knew who they were coming to see. Warren Ellis was good natured in his banter. Yet, some audience members paid to turn up, tell the band they looked old, and cheer when informed they were hearing the final songs, amongst other more severe comments. And these assholes still stayed until the very end!
They heckled, and they stayed! I really don't understand. I must be out-of-the-loop with gig attending etiquette. Now, sure, I can deal with witnessing 'the young kids' shuffle dance when Tangled Thoughts of Leaving played at the Ninja Tunes Label party. But this reaction is entirely, well, something else.
Anyway, in aid of celebrating indifference and assholes, here's something recent I've written. While I may work at the pace of a glacier; there's only one, maybe two, more chapters to write until the first draft of the manuscript is completed. And then shall begin the editing. And what a joyous occasion that will be.
Please note: Marcus Graham is a semi-famous Australian actor.
Please, please note: the following extract contains sexually transmitted, uh, sexually explicit language.
**************************
He
didn’t want to travel
with a bag full of dirty clothes. He was making use of the next couple of hours
to do his washing. They were apartment bound. She methodically watched the rest of the film shorts on
the AFTRS DVDs.
He
stopped writing mid-sentence and listened. He sat still, absorbed.
“I’m not
your mate, where the fuck do you get off calling me your mate?”
They
both favoured baseball caps and hooded sweatshirts. If it weren’t for the pitch of their
voices, their sex would have been androgynous.
She
was sixteen and pregnant. She was scared of the dark and slept under the bed
with her stuffed toy sheep and the rusted springs. When the sun went down, she
would go outside and wander the suburbs. The manager of the hostel had warned
her about the 6pm curfew but she ignored him. There was anywhere she wanted to
be instead of the run-down halfway house.
He
had problems at his last stay and had been sent here. All he could express was
silence or rage. He secreted a knife on his ankle. He hated the way the manager
threatened him with a return to juvenile hall. When he broke curfew, it was for
a specific purpose.
The
first evening he went out, she followed him.
In
a back alley lane-way, not far from the youth centre, he started a fire. It
wasn’t hard to do. With
his Zippo he lit some kindling and in a matter of seconds the picket fence was
in flames. He stood back and admired his work, transfixed, lost in the bright
yellows and reds.
From
the back porch someone shouted and told him to piss off. He ran.
She
watched from behind the bushes, her white eyes peeking from under the cap.
At
the hostel, she couldn’t stop glancing at
him. She told him that she had seen him. All he could say was “yeah, and?” She thought it was
cool. He told her to shut up about it. She “wasn’t gonna” say anything about
it.
The
next night he lit another fire. She watched him again.
Voices
woke her. From her vantage point she saw his feet. He looked down at her, the
expression on his face telling her to keep quiet. The manager informed the cops
that the boy hadn’t been at the
hostel tonight. They heard the police leave.
He
exited her room. The manager saw him and asked the boy where he’d been. He replied that he’d been in her room all night.
The lie wasn’t convincing. They
started shouting. He told the man to fuck off and pushed him. The man was soft.
He held the man on the floor and pulled out his knife. The blade was silver and
flashed a reflection of the lights above. The manager squirmed. She screamed.
He wouldn’t listen and was
ready to strike.
She
turned, scanning the TV lounge, frantic, at a loss at what to do. In her pocket
she felt it: a lighter. She struck the flint. She held the flame against the couch.
The fabric caught alight. The man and boy stopped struggling. The man stood up
and ran.
The
boy and girl didn’t move. They
watched the fire. The couch succumbed to the blaze. The fire spread to the
curtains.
Their
hands were very close. He brushed the back of her hand with his. They had found
each other by burning down everything else left.
The
screen faded to black and the credits began to roll.
“Can we watch that
again?” she begged.
Sean
nodded and Rachel grabbed the remote.
By
his estimation, the first stage of the washing should have been finished. He
left her watching the television and exited the apartment. Room service were
making their morning rounds. There was an isolated trolley in the hallway. The
drawers were filled with fresh linen, neatly folded.
He
thought about the disgusting bed sheets, stained in menstrual blood, which they
had to sleep on.
When
Sean rented out the room he had been sure to stipulate no cleaners. He couldn’t stand strangers intruding in
his personal space. That no middle-aged woman on minimum wage would have to
deal with Rachel’s and his mess was
a small comfort to him.
He
made his way to the elevator and down to the laundry. The room was empty. When
his machine had finished its spin cycle, he changed over the wet clothes to the
dryer. There were only just enough dollar coins.
He
returned to the third level. The trolley was still in its original place. He
walked by the open door. Inside, a vacuum cleaner idled as a Chinese woman
shifted a piece of furniture.
He
stopped and waited. The woman hadn’t
left the room. When he thought she wasn’t looking he walked slowly,
focusing all his efforts into stepping light. He reached out, paused, and
grabbed a sheet.
The
Mermaid threatened with a revolver. Marcus Graham called her bluff. She aimed
away from him and fired a round into the mirror’s reflection. Marcus startled
and grudgingly dropped his pants and drawers. He waddled over to the bathtub
and started masturbating.
The
Mermaid leant forward. “Do you want me to help?”
“No!”
“Fine!” She reclined in the
water and watched, feeling the weight of the pistol in her hand.
Marcus
shut his eyes tight and groaned. She frowned.
“Are you thinking about your mother?”
“There is a process!”
He
found her smoking by the window. She wore her brown woollen vest and nothing
else. The blind had been opened an inch. As she watched, she blew smoke from
the corner of her mouth.
“You bad boy. You bad, bad boy.”
Marcus
groaned.
“Wait, wait!” The Mermaid pushed
an unfertilised egg into the water and pointed. “There!
There!”
He
measured the lifted linen against the bed. He pulled the fabric along the width’s edge and made a discovery:
what he had stolen was for a single, not the queen that they slept in. He
sighed and tossed the sheet into the corner of the room, against the wardrobe.
Marcus
stared into the camera, his face full of loathing and resentment. “I
hope it’s a
flathead!”
“The washing should
be another forty minutes.”
She
looked up at him. One of her legs was folded under her bottom. The vest was
wide open. Her small pert breasts and sex were exposed. She arched her back and
pushed her pelvis toward him.
“Eat me out?” she asked, grinning.
He spoke before she could continue.
“This is what I’m talking about: You are a terrible liar.
You need to figure out how to lie.”
She sat very still at the end of the couch.
“Lying is kind of like acting. When you lie, you’re thinking
one thing but saying another. I don’t mean you
when I say ‘you’, I mean the royal you.”
She smirked. He
motioned at the television.
“Take for example that movie we saw yesterday about the
Mermaid and the gun.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Well, Marcus Graham and the girl are acting, obviously. But
the characters are acting too.”
“Yeah?”
“Acting, in sense of what the character says and what they
are really thinking. So, we have the Mermaid who starts out hating Marcus.
“Yeah.”
“But she doesn’t really hate him.”
“No?”
“No. She wants to be pregnant.”
“Oh.”
“But Marcus doesn’t want to have a baby with her. Neither of
them is addressing that issue at the start. He’s threatening her with a gun,
trying to get rid of her. She doesn’t want to leave but it doesn’t seem as if
she likes him.”
He smiled in delight.
“They’re both lying.”
“Because she – ”
“I mean, it’s pretty obvious, because almost as soon as the
short starts, she’s got him wanking into the bath.”
“Hah.”
“But, there’s a big moment in the film when – wait.”
He found the disc and loaded up the film.
“Here, Marcus is post-coital, she’s lying in the bath,
relieved maybe? Then Marcus says: ‘Are we done?’
“Are we done?”
“We’re done,” replied
the Mermaid.
“And the credits roll. But when he says that line, he
doesn’t mean are they finished with impregnation. He’s asking if their
relationship in general is finished.”
“Well, yeah.”
“That’s subtext. It’s when what the character is saying,
taken in the sense of the underlying understanding of the plot or the story’s
motifs or leitmotifs, or both, means something totally different.”
He pressed rewind.
“But watch the Mermaid’s face when he speaks.”
“Are we done?”
“We’re done,” she
snapped in reply.
Rachel shook her head. “She looked sad.”
“Sad, compared to?”
“At first she looked… relieved, happy. Then her face dropped
and she looked sad.”
“She was sad to hear that they were ‘done.’”
“Yeah.”
“But if she didn’t like him, why would she feel sad?”
Rachel smiled.
“Because when she was shouting at him, bribing him into
impregnating her: reminding him that he knew “what she wanted”; all the time she still wanted to be with Marcus.”
He held his gaze on the screen for a moment and turned to
face her.
“Pretending to do one thing when you believe something else.
Sound a little like lying?”
She nodded in earnest. “That’s like, like Nicole and the
Drover.”
“Like what?”
“You know, when he’s talking to her and she’s really
nervous. At the campsite, when it’s dark?”
“Oh, Australia. You
mean Nicole Kidman and Hugh – ”
“Yeah, him. And she’s like, talking back, and she’s really
nervous and doesn’t know what to say.”
“Yeah.”
“But what she’s really saying is: ‘why don’t you fuck me!’ Even though she’s saying something else.
And he knows it too, but he isn’t saying it.”
“Right.”
“It’s like when you’re going to meet up with a boy.”
“Yeah, I know all about that.”
“No it is!” she laughed. “It’s just like when you have a boy
to meet in the evening. Like, you’ve arranged a date. And you know you’re going
to have a sex and you have a feeling. You know, a feeling in your stomach?
Like, you don’t know if you should go for a run around the block or if it’s just
because you’re excited.”
“How… how does that relate to subtext?”
“I don’t know what I’m saying, I’m just trying to talk to
you.”
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment