Friday Night
The wind’s howling and I’m squatting down next to the rabbit hutch. It’s difficult to see a black rabbit on a moonless night without some kind of light, so I lit a candle and brought it out with me. The light flickered into the hutch and I could see Nero, in his usual corner. He was jumpy, perhaps because of the wind, perhaps because of the jets roaring overhead and the dog next door howling.
I opened the hutch and patted him, smoothing his long ears along his body and muttering the Russian word for rabbit, kro-leek, in what I hoped was a soothing way. I picked grass and dropped it in for him to eat, and looked back towards the house, where the back door was leaking a egg yolk light, and I could feel the weight of the warm rooms drawing my back inside.
"Poor Kroleek,’ I said, closing the top of his prison.
It’s quiet here on a Friday night, although there’s slightly more traffic than usual on the nearby main road. The sound of cars is a lonely one, indicating there are far more urgent and desirable places for people to be. I can hear the wind, cars and the clock ticking – that’s all. If I ignore the cars, turn them into an ocean or a static sound, I can pretend I’m in a lighthouse, or a castle on a hill, the type in cartoons that are perched on top of a mountain as spiky as an incisor.
Home’s enough for me tonight. I’m wearing a 1983 America’s Cup sloppy joe (ever since I found out that there was a food with the same name I worry that I’m the only person who calls fleecy tops sloppy joes) that says "Victory" across the chest (without the expected exclamation mark). It pictures the triumphant boxing kangaroo in front of a puffed out green and gold spinnaker, beside a statue of liberty with her hand over her eyes in shame, trailing a limp American flag. A band of green and gold provides the backdrop. It is spectacularly ugly, but it is warm, and I like the feeling of fleecy tops against my bare skin, it is like wearing a shirt lined with cotton wool.
I’m wearing a red beanie that I call the condom beanie, because it sits on the head in such a way that it forms a teat at the top. Also green and white pyjama pants that have lost their elastic so I have to keep pulling them up, pink bedsocks and cream coloured slide on shoes. I love wearing slob clothes when no one can see me. Ketzia once expressed a desire to see me in my at home clothes, makeup-less. She specified "track suit pants", but I had to break the news I didn’t have any. I think this outfit would be adequate.
I came home, flicked on the kettle, checked the phone messages, and ate my dinner to a mixture of ABC news and Home and Away. There was a hostage situation on Home and Away. A crazed, overacting woman with teeth to white and regular to be real and stringy hair was holding all the best known and loved characters hostage, convinced that one of them had killed her baby. Flynn tries to talk her down with realism: "you were on crystal meth. You don’t remember it, but you killed Felix." His approach doesn’t work, she points the gun at his head. She’s given them thirty minutes, and if one of them doesn’t step forward and admit to killing Felix, then she’s going to start shooting, women first. They’re all snivelling and the guys are trying to position themselves in front of the girls to take the bullets in their manly chests. As the episode ends, the thirty minutes are up, she’s stopped saying "tick-tock-tick-tock" in a sing-song voice, and she’s counting down. At zero we see a close up of the gun firing twice and a "to be continued" screen. We’ll find out who got it in two and a half weeks, after the Olympics telecast is over. There’s an ad for the Olympics that calls it something like a "life changing experience". Watching sports telecasts is not lifechanging.
Instead of doing something useful, I carefully read the preface to "Your Nerves: How to Reduce Tension", a pocket book from the 60’s.
The first picture is of a cartoon man splitting from his head to his chest. It looks like the tap roots of a plant that has embedded itself in his skull.
Let us take a brief look around us, and while we are about it, at ourselves as well. To begin with, we are all inextricably involved in "modern living". Whatever your attitude to modern life may be, however much you hate it, there is no getting away from it: it is all around us. We must adapt ourselves to it or go under.
Everywhere we are faced with noise, strain, tensions and fatigue. Nowadays the "nerves" which millions of people suffer from are thought of as quite normal! So much so that a calm person runs the risk of being thought cold-blooded. People do not work any more; they do hard labour and think they are enjoying it. People do not speak – they shout; they do not make gestures – they act like windmills. People do not walk anymore – they are always in a rush; they do not eat – they gulp down their food at breakneck speed, twisting their head round all the time to watch the news on television.
Of course, my favourite parts are: the windmill analogy, the gulping twisting heads, and "modern living". Later on in the book it says that excessive gestures are a waste of energy and should be curtailed! When I’m sitting in classes, I realise I have a chronic inability to sit still. I am constantly crossing and uncrossing my legs, chewing on my pen, fiddling with things, brushing imaginary cake crumbs of my skirt. Now I know why I feel unexplainable fatigue – it’s my unnecessary gestures. I find it so impossible to sit still that even watching people sitting still is painful to me, those street performers who paint themselves silver and put on big tinfoil frocks and move a hand for $1 annoy me terribly.
I thought of my quiet Friday night, and how far from "breakneck" speed it was. It was flicking through the channels on the television, the remote control dropping from my hand as if it was too heavy. Feeding grass to the rabbit. Poking the hot water bottle on my lap and listen to it slosh. Sorting papers into piles. I can waste my time with a book from The Pocket Library of Modern Living. No one knows what I’m doing.