wordsmith and mongrel

Category: Best Of (Page 1 of 2)

These are a few pieces of writing of which I am most proud.

nouvel ordre

May is traditionally full of days off in France – Labour Day, VE Day, Ascension, the 31 May deadline by which last year’s unused paid leave must be used up – making the month essentially one big long weekend. It’s somehow fitting that it’s now home, too, to the big Day On. 11 May: déconfinement.

As COVID-19 took its stranglehold in March, signs began appearing in shop and restaurant windows, often crookedly hand-lettered. Fermé jusqu’à nouvel ordre.  

And although at the time it seemed Gallicly melodramatic, today does feel like it marks the arrival of the new order, the beginning of the end of confinement and the end of the beginning of the post-COVID world. As of 00:01 this morning, we can leave our homes without filling in a form, gather in groups of up to 10 people, travel up to 100km as the crow flies. These seem like exceptional liberties after nearly eight weeks at home. I text a friend, feeling breathless. Maybe next weekend we can go to the forest? She replies, Or even just a walk along the river. And I picture it with the same romanticised anticipation that a year ago I might have imagined a Cycladean beach: the long sweep of a bike path, the hair-ruffle of a gentle breeze, the unease of post-boat water.

It’s amazing how quickly just about anything can become normal. The beginning of the lockdown scared me, because it was all so unknown; now the end of it scares me almost as much. I tell my boss I’m in no hurry to come back to the office, and am secretly not sure I’ll ever do a full week without télétravail again. I’ve become accustomed to being able to start and finish later, play Dvořák all day without headphones, cook myself lunch, occasionally stop for a mid-afternoon dance session to relieve stress.

Having been in the immensely privileged position to be able to continue working full-time from home, and to go shopping once a week for more than I could possibly need to eat (and drink), I’ve leaned into confinement in the most cliched way possible. I’ve taken up yoga. I learned to play a song on the guitar, tried to study economics, cleaned out my wardrobe. I’ve spent entire blissful afternoons in bed with a book, often with my shirt rolled up and my window wide open so that the unseasonably warm sun could toast my soft winter belly. I’ve made numerous potato bakes, four loaves of bread, and – over many hours one memorable Saturday – 18 wonky but perfectly textured croissants.

I’ve shared breakfasts over Skype and wine over Whatsapp and I’ve reconnected with people I haven’t spoken to in years. The people I speak to often have been more present than ever, messaging, phoning, laughing, commiserating. We finally have a family group chat, filled with heart emojis and photos of chooks. Confined in Bretagne with her parents, my friend invites her father to our Thursday drinks and he tells us stories of sailing the world and youthful mischief. I begin to look forward to weekly instalments of Papa Jean-Marie almost more than anything else. Across Paris, another friend’s children clamber into view during a videocall; I swear they’ve grown in confinement.

I feel flashes guilt of how much beauty there is in all this, the staying in, the reaching out, my good fortune.

Having no one to share them with and no self-control, I ate all 18 of the croissants over a 24-hour period and then fell into a chasm of self-loathing. Spending hours a day in Zoom meetings and Whatsapp afterworks has kept me employed and connected but has also meant that I have seen more of my own face in two months than I had in perhaps the two preceding years, and had a lot of ugly thoughts about my appearance.

I’ve spent nights lying awake, heart pounding, worried about everything and nothing. One night at 11pm I packed a backpack and left it sitting by the door for a month, just in case coronavirus hit me hard and I had to get myself to hospital. I Googled how to get myself to hospital. Another night I thought about making a death box, a neat kit that would allow my family to clean up my French life with the least amount of administrative trauma in the case of my rapid demise. The loneliness that was constant but manageable before the pandemic overtook me from time to time, knocking me to the floor in a ball.

My friends are forced to delay their wedding by a year. Others are laid off, furloughed, have their hours cut or see their safety nets disappear altogether. People I know (and so many I don’t) are trying to navigate grief and funerals in a time of isolation. I am lucky, I tell myself over and over, staring at the ceiling. I am so lucky.

A new manager has taken over the laundromat I frequent once a fortnight. I meet him for the first time on day 33, when a machine stalls mid-wash, holding my clothes hostage until I call for backup and he arrives, tall and curly-haired, optimistically dressed for summer in bare arms and thongs. He expertly defuses the situation, gives me a new wash and dry cycle for free, phones me an hour later to check we’ve all got home safely.

On the 11th, he is mopping the floors as I turn up to empty a dryer and waits patiently for me to traipse across the clean wet floor, offers to spot me another cycle if my clothes aren’t dry, checks I haven’t forgotten anything. Disconcerted by his kindness, I mispronounce my thanks and run for the door.

Scurrying home, I spot my next-door neighbour smoking with his friends outside the bar he runs underneath our building. After more than three and a half years of living five feet from one another we still share nothing more than a thankfully soundproof wall and the occasional bonjour on the stairs. I am overcome with a longing not to be invited to join their tiny deconfinement party but to have the social chutzpah to make it happen.

Back in the last months BC – Before Coronavirus – I felt like I was evolving, working some things out about my life and my purpose, what mattered and what didn’t, what needed to change. I was making some headway with my social anxiety, developing tactics to trick myself out of near-constant terror and into something approaching healthy interaction with strangers and acquaintances. After two months of next to no in-person interaction, it feels a bit like I’m starting from somewhere in the negatives again.

In the two days before deconfinement, thunderstorms lash Paris, growling and flashing and soaking. Storms are so rare here that when the smell of ozone floods the city, people take to Twitter wondering, what’s going on? There’s a feeling we’re all just waiting for the next catastrophe, and it seems inevitable: the second wave, the economic downturn. Natural disaster?

But I find them strangely comforting, these Brisbanesque storms. We may be in the new normal, but some things feel the same. I sleep better than I have in weeks with the rain pounding on my windows.

The sun comes out of confinement with us on the 11th, and Paris gleams.

Here we go.

skin hunger

In many ways I am innately prepared for isolation. A lifelong introvert and recent vegetarian, I am nourished by lentils and my own company. Having nowhere to be, not needing to wear pants, no longer required to find excuses to stay home when I am drained from social interaction: these are rare pleasures. I have made a career out of the kind of work that, with a bit of ingenuity and a good internet connection, can be done from home. I have a flat full of books I haven’t read, a head full of stories I haven’t written, and enough (but not too much) toilet paper.

For more than a third of my life, my dearest friends have lived in other cities, in other countries, in other hemispheres. At any given moment I can tell you what time of day or night it is in Minneapolis, in Canberra, in London, in Brisbane. Despite – or maybe because of – a staunch dislike of speaking on the phone to anyone who isn’t my mother, I’m a virtuoso of the WhatsApp voice message, the witty text, the lazy Sunday-morning video chat from bed. Even – at times – the poignant handwritten letter. Distance, I maintain, is just a state of mind.

Except, of course, for one critical thing.

Mid July, 2018. The carpark in front of the Biarritz train station bakes under a hot, slow sun. I am waiting for a bus and then another bus to take me to Saint-Sebastien, three hours into a six-hour journey. I rest my backpack on a bench but don’t sit down; I have a woman’s innate hesitance to look too static in a public place.  

I watch two men nearby, first as a precaution, then out of interest, and pass the time by imagining how they met. On a rugby field, maybe, judging by the look of them. I try to overhear which language they’re speaking in case I can offer some assistance. Maybe we’re going the same way.

I’m on my way to meet a friend who has just met the love of her life at a festival. It’s surely not impossible that I could meet mine in a parking lot.

A tall man emerges from the train station with a duffel bag slung across his back, his long strides eating up the space between the door and my two companions. They come together in a flurry of handshakes and backslaps, voices booming in welcome, careless of the cars around them. Then quickly to logistics: bags up off the tarmac, the shortest leads the way to the bus stop.

One of the remaining two turns back to his friend, reaches out for another handshake. I can feel the grip from across the carpark. It says: It’s so good to see you, mate.

It says: I love you.

It says: I missed you, and I need to touch you.

I absentmindedly lift a hand to the back of my favourite earring, bent from the time my friend hugged me so hard she drove it into my neck and made me bleed. We’ve only been apart for a few weeks, this time. Still, she will kiss me welcome and we will walk along the beach arm in arm, skin to skin, the Latina and the gringa.

We humans have a primal need to touch one another. It’s well documented that babies need to be held not just to be calm, but to grow, to thrive, to survive. Skin-to-skin time is encouraged for new parents. Cuddle carers are a common and angelic presence in paediatric wards, holding babies when their parents need to run an errand or take a desperately deserved break.

But it’s not a need we grow out of, even as we grow out of our parents’ arms. Touch deprivation, they sometimes call it, but I’ve always preferred skin hunger. It’s more potent, and more accurate. In my family, when we were kids, we ran on “hug juice”: it was entirely normal for me to walk up to a parent or a sibling, engulf them, and say, I was running low. We’d never read the science, but we knew the feeling.

These days, as a chronically single person who lives alone, I am almost constantly skin hungry. I survive on handshakes and cheek kisses. A clasping of hands with a friend is a hearty meal; a hug is a banquet. I have an unconscious habit of gently touching colleagues and acquaintances on the upper arm when I speak to them. It’s the least intrusive way to get tiny sustaining doses.

But I do get these doses every day. Even far from my family, I rarely go more than a few days without a hug from someone if I need it. Research is starting to show just how much of an impact skin hunger can have on those who are severely deprived: elderly people in institutional care; people who are housebound; heterosexual men in some cultures.

When the first social distancing measures were announced, they began with the most fragile, the elderly, the ill. Stay home, they said. Limit contact. Limit risk.

And it was good advice. Sound. People started to buy up long-life goods, out of fear of going hungry.

I, too, was afraid of hunger. Who’s going to touch them, I thought?

With particularly cruel timing, the first sunshine for the year arrived in Paris just after Covid-19. In a northern winter, sunshine hunger might be even more dangerous than skin hunger: after months of rain and cold, Parisians resoundingly ignore the advice on social distancing to fill parks and pathways on the first clear Sunday of the year.

The next day, the President takes to the television again to scold them, and to announce an enforced 15 days of confinement.

I am prepared, even a little pleased: it seems the only effective way to bring this madness to an end. Besides, I’ve got plenty of food, and a good excuse to dance wildly along to Zumba videos on YouTube if I can no longer go running. People are rushing to leave Paris and a friend offers me a bedroom in the countryside, but I feel somehow safer, more comfortable, in my own home.

But still.

In a moment of weakness I go looking for the small stuffed hedgehog an ex-boyfriend gave me and that I kept for much longer, and with much more fondness, than I did him, but then remember it was thrown away in the Terrible Bedbug Incident of 2019. Nothing to hug, then, besides my doona and myself. Perhaps by the time I get back to my office I’ll even be pleased to see the neighbourhood cat that wanders in, claws at our windows and occasionally vomits on our desks.

This is not a cry for help. If anything, it’s a warning. If you’re the first person I get to embrace when this is all over, you might not come out with your bones intact.

uneaten

You like to tell yourself,
when it gets dark,
that you’re here because you came down from
the runners
the evaders
the survivors
that your veins rush with the blood of those who managed,
by hard work or
sheer dumb luck
not to end up eaten, and so you,
though your unchewed bones are aching,
must be able to hang on.

But what if.

Maybe your ancestors were the sabre-toothed tigers.
Maybe you are descended not from the fearful but from
the fearsome, maybe your ragged nails
are not those of prey clinging to life, but of a hunter
clawing to its rightful altitude

Maybe,
daughter of tigers,
you are here to do more than survive.

lament

The cattle are coming in
up the creek banks, through the billabong
over the hungry ridge
the cattle are bearing
their pall of dust
they are coming in, heads tossing,
bellies sagging,
a thirst of Devons at
the trough of kindness.

The cattle are going
to town, they must
the cattle are going to sale
and none will come back
they cannot wait
they are going onto the truck
carrying on their backs
the candles we did not blow out
the wedding waltzes we did not dance
the prayers that were not answered
the rains that did not come
the cattle are going
it is time
it is done

The cattle are gone
do not look for the twilight skitter
of newborn calves
the comfortable camp of summer mothers
do not count heads
or hooves
do not check the feed, it belongs now
to the kangaroos
and the ghosts
do not go walking quietly among them
they are not there

The cattle are gone
and soon we will be like them.

City of Lines

Not long after I arrived in Paris in 2016, I caught two trains to Manchester for a weekend to run 10 kilometres in an elephant suit. I stepped out of Manchester Piccadilly into light rain and a motley crowd of teenagers with blue hair and men with septum piercings and overweight women in fishnets and miniskirts.

I didn’t realise until I left how narrow Paris is, in terms of everyday fashion. In the centre at least, in the more expensive quartiers, the limits of “normal” and “acceptable” are tightly defined. I have joked lovingly about the Paris uniform – jeans, sneakers, shirt, leather jacket optional – and as a girl living out of little more than a suitcase I am infinitely grateful for it: my practical wardrobe is suitable here for both work and play, for early mornings and late nights and most things in between.

In summer, the rules change slightly to allow for cotton dresses, a-line skirts and t-shirts, wedge sandals. Jeans go, sneakers stay. The very occasional tailored short. Sleeveless is fine, strapless is unheard of. Everything is slightly loose-fitting, so that bodies move inside clothes not as though the clothes are too big, but as though the bodies are small and delicate.

It took me a long time to work out what the difference was, why I could tell the visitors from the locals instantly even if the tourists, like me, were wearing the uniform. But it’s possible, oh so possible, to get the uniform wrong: running shoes instead of casual sneakers, ill-fitting jeans, polo shirts. A lot of exposed skin that is not smooth and luminous. This is where non-Parisians go wrong all the time, in addition to the other blatant misstep of being overweight.

My Australian friend, visiting from London, pinpointed it over a long lunch.

Aesthetics, she said, doing an irritatingly good job herself in a patterned sundress, white sneakers, and tousled hair. I, sartorial sinner, lost cause, was wearing a Hogwarts t-shirt. They value beauty.

And beauty, it seems, is even more rigidly defined here than elsewhere. It is casual and practical, ready to step off a bike and into a bar. It is often loose-haired and fine-boned and light on accessories. It experiments with scientific reserve, one variable at a time (a brocade coat over jeans and a white t-shirt; a snakeskin boot with a straight black dress).

A Parisian friend is more blunt. If I see someone with blue hair, he says, I assume there’s something wrong with them.

 

Little wonder, though, that a city so physically dominated by lines – proud boulevards, stately avenues – tends sartorially to colour inside them.

The grandest and most recognisable line is the Axe historique, which since the 17th Century has been Paris’ spine and today marches on unbent from the Louvre, under the Arc du Triomphe du Carrousel (“the little one”, topped with a quadriga that always makes me think of the Brandenburg Gate), through the Jardin des Tuileries, across the Place de la Concorde, the length of the Avenues of the Champs-Elysées, la Grande Armée, and Charles de Gaulle (passing through the “real” Arc de Triomphe on the way), and finally over the Seine to the modern Grande Arche in the business district of La Defense. Crossing the road on a clear day at almost any point along this triumphal way, as it’s also known, is an exercise in awe and timing: the perfect linear grandeur of the thoroughfares between monuments demands to be admired, while Paris traffic charges on unmoved and willing to run down the momentarily mesmerised pedestrian.

If Louis XIV and Napoleon laid the foundations with the Voie Triomphale, it was Georges-Eugene Haussmann’s renovation of Paris in the 1800s that turned her into the City of Lines; an ambitious project of demolition and creation with the explicit intent of making a grim urban landscape more spacious, interconnected and beautiful. Today it is impossible to imagine Paris without the perfect symmetry of Rue de Rivoli, or Boulevards Sébastopol, Magenta and Voltaire.

 

I have a theory that it’s the lines that have made Paris, throughout history, such a haven for artists. What better place for the beauty-obsessed and the subversive than a city physically and culturally defined by lines demanding to be either admired or transgressed?

Paris is an immersive masterclass in perspective and light, its arrow-straight boulevards lined by stone buildings dressed in much the same style as the modern Parisian woman: slight variations on an elegant theme. (While their balconies and turrets and windows are rarely uniform, Haussmanian buildings never exceed six storeys and their height is, or at least once was, proportional to the width of the street at their feet).

Although Haussman went out of style, lines never did. The Arch built at La Defense in the 1980s not only aligned perfectly with the arches at l’Etoile and Carrousel but also, in a different direction, created a new axis with the two tallest buildings in the city, the Eiffel Tower and the modern Tour Montparnasse in the 15th arrondissement.

What the lines mean, in practice, is that in almost every neighbourhood of Paris there’s an elegantly framed, precisely centred and often unexpected view of something. Round a corner in Grands Boulevards and you’re face to face with the domes of Sacre-Cœur; turn your back for a moment on the Pantheon and the Eiffel Tower peers over the Jardin de Luxembourg. Even after 18 months these picture-frame moments still sneak up on me: from the very modern heights of Frank Gehry’s Fondation Louis Vuitton building on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, the Eiffel Tower appears perfectly centred between two curved roof sections.

 

Haussmann would perhaps be disappointed to discover that the line that most powerfully defines Paris both physically and culturally today is its least beautiful. The Boulevard Périphérique ringroad draws a shaky circle along the city’s administrative limits, separating the city of Paris from her suburbs with absolute authority. If you live outside the Périph, you are not from Paris; you are from the banlieues and you will correct anyone who misplaces you.

The not-Paris beyond the Périphérique is infinitely more diverse; cross the physical boundary of Paris and you’re more likely to transgress her intangible limits. The word banlieue has become weighted with poverty and racial tension, with insecurity and ugliness.

But the banlieues range all the way from desperation to decadence; from the “hot” neighbourhood of Saint-Ouen in the north-west, it’s a short drive to the central business district of La Defense, all glass towers and global insurance firms. Venture south-west and the suburbs are village-pretty, filled with detached houses that smell of woodsmoke in winter and have little gardens where fat snails and lost hedgehogs take refuge.

 

The French Government – famous for drawing incomprehensible bureaucratic lines around everything from employment rights to handwriting – seems to enjoy sending newcomers to the end of metro lines in search of its elusive approval. In September I approach the Périph to visit the Prefecture de Police, an application for a French driver’s licence clutched in my hand. I walk a past a long, silent queue of people behind an A4 printout directing Asylum Seekers This Way, and join a shorter line that shuffles towards the bleak administrative building. I’m wearing my good sneakers and my leather jacket for the occasion. Please, my dossier says in triplicate. I’ll drive within your lines if you’ll let me.

Nice

The same cars that preceded the President of the Republic sedately along the Champs Elysées during the military parade, speed ahead of him, 12 hours later, to Place Beauvau.

I was on a rooftop when I got the news, perched amid the chimneys and turrets of Paris’ skyline with the Eiffel Tower effervescing in the distance. I’d gone up there with a man I barely knew to watch the fireworks and when my friend sent me a message saying, are you ok? I assumed she meant, he’s not a creep is he?

But then.

A truck has crashed into a crowd in Nice. They think it’s terrorists.

We had come so close. There were only minutes left of the 14th, the national holiday, and we had almost got through it, clustering in defiant joy along grand boulevards and in vast parks and beside famous seafronts, flags in our hands, shouting bravo! for the sapeurs-pompiers in their shiny helmets, lifting children onto our shoulders to be a little nearer the pyrotechnic peonies that bloomed in clear summer skies.

France needs the 14th, people had told me with quiet but emphatic nods. After November, today is important, to be happy.

And we were happy, or at least it seemed that way. The police who patted us down before we entered the exclusion zone around the Champs Elysées to watch the parade were businesslike but warm, bordering on unexpected friendliness. Men with idle machine guns gave cheerful directions to bewildered tourists. The officers in plainclothes dispersed among the crowd joked and grinned, prodding us to cheer loudest when their unit marched past, putting gentle arms around a woman having a dizzy spell.

In the afternoon we spilled onto grass, laden with rosé and cheese and prosciutto, and basked in uninterrupted sunshine. We talked away the long evening until at 10:58 we fell silent and expectant, turning to our skies or our televisions, waiting for the first shock of beautiful, violent colour that would explode harmlessly above us.

But then.

Choosing Nice was brutally clever. Recognisable, beloved, packed with locals and tourists, but perhaps without the extreme level of security that encircled Paris.

As I descend from the rooftop another friend asks, are you okay? Rumours of smoke on the Champs Elysées. I stop on the silent street and wonder: is this it? Is this the moment when I go from optimistic observer to endangered citizen? Twitter tells me it’s a fire caused by a stray firework and I fall back from afraid into sad. I look along the silent street and wonder how they do it, the people who live in places where they get those messages every day. The people for whom the smoke is almost never just a wayward spark. The people for whom a jet flyover is not a spectator sport. How do they keep going?

I hurry home but I do not sleep until 2am. I send a lot of pre-emptive messages and a lot of responses to concerned questions but I am safe, so very safe. The flicker of police lights fills my tiny flat from the television screen. I do not cry until a reporter says, there are many children among the dead.

I am desperately sad but not surprised and that makes me even sadder. This place we are in has no exit that I can see. This morning we paraded our military might in all its splendour but what good is might against a truck and some reckless hate? When the danger worms its way into isolated minds and springs up in unexpected places, the tanks and fighter jets start to look as anachronistic as the cavalry with their swords and the soldiers in their Napoleonic hats.

I can see a myriad of ways this is going to be responded to, and I don’t like any of them. I am as afraid of what we will do as what they will do.

All I know is that I would go back, today, if there were another parade. I would dance again on the Champ de Mars and I would follow the crowd to the spectacle. I would sit on busy terraces and I would duck under police barricades to get to concerts. I would move to Paris.

I would continue to live with bullish joy, and I would risk dying happy. Because I have that option. Because I’m one of the lucky ones. Because joy is the only weapon I have ever had to wield.

But then.

Today we are all Nice. Last week we were all Orlando. Last month we were Istanbul, and before that Brussels, and before that Paris. We should have been Dhaka and Baghdad and Aleppo and Mogadishu. It makes us feel better, to type these things, to stand electronically alongside grieving families. It makes us feel righteous, and ever so slightly less helpless. And in some small practical way it helps: hashtags on Twitter can identify the missing, find beds for the desperate, demand attention for the forgotten.

But it scares me too, because we really are all Nice. There is no longer a there and a here, a deadly and a safe, an us and a them. We all inhabit the same small world and it doesn’t work that way anymore. It feels like it’s not working at all. And I have no idea what we’re going to do about it.

galeophobia

Originally published on Feminartsy.

how we desert sprites grew into
sharks, i’ll never know:
creatures of the depths that roam
without ceasing, that cannot stop
for fear of sinking death

Does the sea envy land
its solidity? Does it tire of the
dip and crest and break, and dream
a restless dream of ancient rock?

Is it why, from time to time it
hauls back and overreaches, jealously dragging
unwitting earth away to its
fretful bed, to rest but
never settle

and is it saying, when it rattles through
the comfortable moorings of
indolent boats: if i am never to be still,
why you?

or is it us,
we little sharks still longing for the land,
that quake the ocean
with our mortal fear?

Valentine’s Day

Originally published on Feminartsy.

i.

my heart is a nightwatchman who
still fears the dark, a warrior woken
in peacetime by phantom gunfire
crashing through his dreams

my beloved walks even when there is
nowhere to be, feet duty-bound to shake off pursuers
who have long since
lost his scent.

ii.

my heart is a child among the gravestones, skipping
over resting bones and hiding
in the shadows of stone angels
pulling with impatience on the skirts of women
who stand and murmur over lush grass:
Our Father, who art in Heaven

my love collects stray petals, blown
from other people’s vases, and does not understand
why they must be taken back.

iii.

my heart is a widow leaving roses
in the sun, to fade and die
in honour of a love that never will, a sorrow
that grows quiet but
plays on.

my sweetheart is a callused hand that still
slips into mine on
winter mornings, a laugh that still bursts out
in hushed rooms.

iv.

my heart goes on other people’s dates and
reads bedtime stories to other people’s children and
commits to other people’s weddings and beats
fastest in pursuit of things that
are not there.

v.

my heart is you but it is not
yours.

Sultan Pub

Short-listed for the 2015 World Nomads Travel Writing Scholarship.

Meet me at 19:30 at Sultanahmet. Come up from the elegant gloom of the Basilica Cistern, or down from the chattering alleys of the Grand Bazaar, or through – if it’s late April – the flame-petalled tulips that congregate outside the Blue Mosque. Step off the sleek tram that pulls into the Sultanahmet stop. Wander, replete with humus and charcoaled chicken and flatbread, from a table nearby.

Dart boldly across Divan Yolu, ignoring exhortations to spend a lira on roasted corn, to step aboard a Bosphorus cruise, to sample soft nougat rolled in pistachios.

Where the tramlines curve gracefully away toward the bright peace of Gülhane Park and beyond, to the spice market at Eminönü, to Galata Bridge draped in fishing lines, to the grand sweep of Istiklal Avenue up to Taksim Square, that’s where I’ll meet you.

Sultan Pub commands the corner: hiding in plain sight. Forgive its neon sign and its naff name and its tourist-trap location. Catch the eye of the host who strides back and forth outside. Return his warm handshake if you’ve been by before (he’ll remember). Follow his outstretched arm as he passes you along the human chain formed by his colleagues, each of them smiling and welcoming. The terrace, they’ll ask?

Say yes to the terrace.

Up the stairs, they’ll say, all the way, and you’ll climb and climb and curse me for suggesting this.

One last climb, a glorified ladder.

Meet me beneath the Turkish sky at a little table – one of only eight – covered in incongruous gingham.

Now ignore me entirely. Turn yourself instead to the 160-degree vista before you. Sweep your eyes up spires and down domes from the Aya Sofya to the Blue Mosque (minarets just beginning to glow), with the sea and the hazy shape of Asia, rose-tinted in the sunset, in between.

Absentmindedly order an expensive glass of local wine from one of the blue-shirted staff who are, by now, calling you friend, and understand that it’s not the wine you are paying for.

Watch the light fade over the water. Trace the leisurely trajectories of distant ships.

And after 8, fall silent as the call to prayer rolls out through the evening, now from the Blue Mosque, now from the Aya Sofya, as you – tiny, transient, blessed – eavesdrop on a thousand-year-old conversation between two mighty structures.

Sip the last of your wine as the muezzin’s voice fades off into the unseen edges of the city.

7:30, my friend. Don’t be late.

Gallipoli

In 2015, you said, you’d go
(you who had never left these shores)
perhaps that’s why I took it up,
why you became we: in 2015
we’ll go

War broke out in 2012.
You were scared, when they said
you’re going into battle. I know
you were, I saw the tears, but you
strapped yourself in
cracked a joke
got your affairs in order, and
off you went

I remember we sat in wicker chairs, watching
stars glitter behind gum leaves, and listening
to the sounds of nothing. You told me you believed
we could win.
It’s not going to kill me, you said.

Like all the others before, you had
boyish faith in your survival.

The grim reality came later, the sounds and smells
the pain that went right through you. Still,
you never quite believed it;
never really thought you might not
make that ridge

In 2013 you lost your war.
We buried you in the rain, your hat
atop your coffin
your best boots on. In 2015 I’ll go alone
to mourn you in a place you’ve never been.

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