Thursday, October 19th, 2006...1:40 pm
commuting
The bus driver says “Not your bag love?” as I climb the steps. There’s a bulging green shopping bag behind the bus stop seat. I tell him I think it must belong to one of those terrorists. He looks at me funny. I watch him to see if he’s calling up the hotline.
A freshly lit cigarette smells fantastic to me, but the man behind me on the bus smells vilely of old ashtrays. I have to stop reading my Helen Garner book because he’s making me queasy, just when it was getting really exciting.
I walk past the ex-junkies outside the methadone clinic. One, just arriving, is complimented on how well he looks. He does, and he smiles and thanks the other guy before going up the stairs behind the blank door. Good on them both.
The slim assistant in the patisserie tells me she has started the Atkins Diet today. I tell her she is an idiot. She has dark honey coloured skin - really, it’s honey coloured - and green eyes. She speaks in French to the squat lady who runs the joint. She thinks bread is fine, but alcohol is tehibol. She stares at my swollen stomach as she says “Au revoir, madame!” I guess six months pregnant makes you a “madame”.
There’s a nearly toothless man in the middle of the pedestrian crossing. He’s not old, though. He starts talking to a woman with long dark loose hair and white clothes in front of me. Imagine being able to wear white clothes to work! The man’s angry because the cars he’s daring to run him over won’t do him the fucken favour.
I look at the big cranes and count six concrete trucks. Just up the hill and along the path now. I look in through the gap in the fence and see the crane’s wheels are off the ground and it’s balanced on little poles. I know they have a name, but I can’t remember that bit of my son’s excavator book. I drift off during the excavator book, but my voice is still expressive and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t notice. I think I would prefer it if the wheels were on the ground.
23 Comments
October 19th, 2006 at 2:00 pm
Stabilisers?
October 19th, 2006 at 2:02 pm
I hope so.
October 19th, 2006 at 2:44 pm
What a beautiful post.
October 19th, 2006 at 4:39 pm
I am reminded again why i love this blog!
October 19th, 2006 at 4:57 pm
Agreed, sublime cowgirl.
…
On white clothes: I once worked on a stocktake in a train parts warehouse where we were given white coveralls for visibility and dust and chemical protection. They fit with elastic at the feet and wrists, zipped up from the navel to the neck and had a hood. We looked as if we were all about to step out from the launcher platform in slo-mo into a Gemini rocket.
We’d walk around with clear safety glasses and white dust masks asking each other ‘who are you’? until somebody went and made big name badges.
Beware, anyone thinking of trying it out, wearing white clothes makes you a spectacular target for your bored co-workers, armed to the teeth with little one-serve squirty tomato sauce packets and rubber bands.
October 19th, 2006 at 5:08 pm
To illustrate, here are some casually employed stocktakers about to start work somewhere at the back of an enormous warehouse, somewhere a little walk away from Auburn station, 7.30am:
Note the glazed look on the faces of the workers. That’s what a 7.30am start will do to you.
October 19th, 2006 at 6:22 pm
And no one picking their nose?
October 19th, 2006 at 8:01 pm
What, with those helmets on?
(and thanks for saying nice things, particularly since I feel like my brain is entirely mush at the moment.)
October 19th, 2006 at 9:17 pm
whatever hormones you’ve got going right now, i think they’re agreeing with you x.
October 19th, 2006 at 9:19 pm
Are you reading Joe Cinque, Zoe? I love Helen Garner. Every time I read one of her books, I compose a mental letter to her to tell her how much I’ve enjoyed it, but then I never send it.
October 19th, 2006 at 9:49 pm
Nah, redcap, it’s The Children’s Bach. I promised to write the letter a while ago, and I truly am going to!
October 19th, 2006 at 10:10 pm
Hey, your brain when mushy is still superior to the common garden variety of brain… nice writing!
October 20th, 2006 at 12:20 pm
I’d like you to know that I’m wearing a white shirt today, tho I’m with you in general on white — esp pants (too eighties in the wrong way).
October 20th, 2006 at 12:21 pm
And my burkha is evidently white too.
October 20th, 2006 at 2:20 pm
Zoe, Google seems the indicate that you’re the coiner of the excellent word ‘tehibol’, just saying it under my breath makes me feel all Gallic, quite an achievement for any three syllables to work that kind of tansformation. thank you.
October 20th, 2006 at 4:34 pm
Mais, l’alcool c’nest pas tehibol. C’est super.
October 20th, 2006 at 10:19 pm
Isn’t the Children’s Bach lovely? I think of it every time I clean the bathroom
I spoke to Helen at Adelaide Writers’ Week this year and she was so shy and sweet.
October 20th, 2006 at 10:25 pm
Oh redcap and zoe, I have to disagree! Helen Garner lost me with The First Stone. I found her tone patronising and self serving. She strikes me as one of those feminists that can never believe that young women are as passionately feminist as she and her cohorts are, albeit with a different agenda. Like somehow they all fought so hard to blow away the false consciousness only to have us all fall back into it.
Of course, this is just my opinion x
October 21st, 2006 at 9:59 am
I rise with my coffee. Outside the sky is teasing between rain and bright morning sun. I check the real estate on the net, and flick lazily across to my blog. I read Zoe’s funny comment about harbls again and decide to click through.
I read a beautiful post. Outside the sun has won the battle.
October 21st, 2006 at 11:16 am
Lovely post Zoe. It made me homesick for Canberra… odd I know.
Perhaps you should mention to the lady in Croissant D’or that Mr Atkin died massively overweight from heart failure (a secret that his family tries to hide in order to keep reaping in the cash)…
October 21st, 2006 at 11:29 pm
ce blog n’est pas tehibol, il est beau
October 25th, 2006 at 8:37 am
Mmm, Cosmo Cosmolino is Helen’s best, I think.
Wonder what happened to the mystery shopping bag.
November 4th, 2006 at 4:59 pm
Six months already? That went fast (though probably not, I realise, for you). Then again Mikaela is already four months old…
I do that thing with Liam’s truck book. Actually I do it with quite a number of his oft-read books. I don’t think he notices either.
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