In June 2008, Germany beat Portugal 3-2 in a knockout soccer match. The winning goal was scored by a German who simultaneously pushed a Portuguese aside as he scored but was not called for a foul.

Germany-Portugal was like a battle between the head and the heart, the part that rejoices when the birds sing versus the part that knows it has to shove others out of the way to achieve something in this world of confrontation. Strength won out. Portugal, with their pretty little passing and movement, were found wanting at the moment of truth.

I used to like sport because I considered it the only sphere where the unlikely was able to happen. However, as the little guy keeps losing year after year and it becomes less and less worthwhile following the underdogs in the hope of that one elusive victory, I wonder if I and Portugal in general have their priorities wrong: what is beauty? Is ineffective activity, while aesthetically pleasing, actually beautiful, does beauty even exist in it, or is the real beauty being able to see a play all the way through to its conclusion? Were the isolated attacks that Germany rarely but successfully executed a cause for admiration? Germany, after all, are one of the very few countries that ever achieve, who never paint themselves as the losers in anticipation of a loss, who are never afraid in front of goal (a clear sign of an inferiority complex, see Portugal, Western Bulldogs, St Kilda on Grand Final day, etc.), for whom close enough is never, ever good enough. Should they be reviled for stereotypically choosing efficiency in attack (which directly wins matches and brings happiness) rather than prettiness in midfield, which is only temporarily appealing?

Fast forward to the Western Bulldogs vs. St Kilda preliminary final 2009, in which faulty umpiring decisions directly and mathematically decided the match in St Kilda’s favour after the Western Bulldog midfield had run riot in the last quarter (although, crucially, their forward line did not). I made the mistake of watching the game with an underdog-despising, John Howard-loving friend who actually laughed when St Kilda scored the clinching goal. Since his attitude is that there is no such thing as justice, that whoever wins in life deserves to win simply because they won, that there is no merit but simply opportunities to grab or to fail, he then argued with me that St Kilda deserved whatever they had picked up.

What he didn’t realise was this: to see the Bulldogs win even one key match in my lifetime and reach (and win) the Grand Final was my most passionate desire, and when you argue against someone’s most passionate desire you will never, ever convince them that they’re wrong. More than that: they’ll hate you for even trying. So now in my mind alongside The Loss is The Loss 2, version 2009, and I keep hearing my friend’s laugh when Riewoldt scored the last goal. I love the boy and I’ll continue to, but he laughed.

When you are hurt by even the most insignificant pains of yours and of other people, is there any point at which you blow a fuse? At that point do you just stop giving a shit, and stop considering abstract crap like “beauty” and “justice” and the desire to see the little guy win in a world that’s clearly not set up for it? But on the other hand, if success kills your empathy then maybe it’s something I don’t quite need yet.

This is a performance I did last week in front of my uni class and lecturers, an audience of about a hundred. My best mate here in Wodonga played a bass guitar as a backing tune and I sang the chorus bit (the rest I did as spoken-word, with gestures). It felt good, cause I’d generally made a slight joke of everything this year and no one in the course knew I could be a deep, serious dude. I got the shocked wide-eyed smiles that in a previous life people gave me when I gave this one uni talk as an eighteen year-old, when I scored a goal in front of the homeys in indoor soccer and when I sang to the camp people. I liked this occasion the best though because I knew words were my thing and I was in control.

So much to say…

Grown up
With or without our expectations
And take our dreams with us
Or ditch them as we trip along
They told me: get a piece of paper or we’ll never give you a job
They said: no paper, no career
And you’ll wilt in obscurity
So I went
And participated in a dance I didn’t believe in
But life is irrespective of beliefs
That tune self-perpetuates
I had one year left with my bros
But left them to come here
For my piece of paper
I know that the real smart ones are those who work the system
And rise through it instead of snubbing it
But I dissed the way it is
A job training course hijacked by academia
I said too much
Yet acted too little
Am I a person who would rather complain than set things right?
Maybe I’ll get my piece of paper
But in the end will I rise?

 

I was shacked up with a fool
Who in the end made me homeless
But four trips to Beechworth
Eliminated my concerns
And gave me a place to laugh the entire year away
Ephemeral crushes
Turned to disaffection upon rejection
But I maintained what mattered
In an unlikely setting
On multiple Sunday mornings
I started to drive home
For lack of a lower purpose
And someone to do it with
But back home was I still all there?
My Mum had to fly but did I see?
My bro got a job but did I see?
My other was a dude but I kinda lost track
My Dad was my Dad
But I forgot to have his back
And now it’s ending

 

So much standing here
Hanging about
And then there goes the year
And we’re out

 

And the pracs…
Oh my God, the pracs…
Supervisors make careless misunderstandings
Moments of joy
Occur but erased as kids file out the room
And begins a new session of incertitude
Is this exhausting time
Of one thousand little battles
Something I could love one day?
Something I could talk about?
Could I talk about love?
To friends within the course or strangers from without?
I tried
But she answered no
And that love is lost
Speechless nights at Paddy’s
Were far from compensation
But suddenly I found a chance to voice
That I never used on wasteful Saturdays
I didn’t listen
Or didn’t want to
I had so much to say
But no one to hear it

 

So much standing here
Hanging about
And then there goes the year
And we’re out

 

Little kids with sniffling noses
Broke me out of my somnolence
And contaminated me
With their joy
And their colds
And their spats
Their refusal to bow
And their quick forgiveness
At high school
In theory I went up a level
Searching for some intellect
In a thousand-person package with brick walls
Instead I found crudeness
And the beginning of society’s problems
They leave high school and they become the people that I doubt
But some become the people I admire
Were they equipped to function outside of school?
Were they equipped for this world of insincerity?
Will they rise?
Will I rise?

 

So much standing here
Hanging about
And then there goes the year
And we’re out

Pessimistic but I’ve stopped seeing the fairytale ending. When I spat the line, “But I dissed the way it is,” it felt so exhilarating! It was pure catharsis!

Not actually me, just a photo I stole from the net

Love is saved? I don’t know, but I think I’ve moved on to a world where people don’t emo out over unattainable things from years ago. I went to a mini-‘party’ on Friday, and didn’t end up brushing my teeth or changing my clothes or going home again until one o’clock on a Sunday afternoon in my cold, cold student-ish apartment. As I drove the winding, precipice-based backroad from Wodonga to Beechworth with my great ex-stoner mate in tow He came to me, a guardian angel fairy with filthy socks and a ciggie hanging out of his three-day growth bearded mouth. He was still wearing a ballet dancer’s leotard and had pinkish wings fluttering out behind him, but He carried his masculinity with pride and I wouldn’t have crossed him on a drunken walk away from a pub on a puke-and-fist-fest Saturday night in Melbs.

“Here’s the deal man,” He said to me, “adults don’t skitz about love, they don’t even fall in love anymore.” I listened as my mate in the passenger seat was blissfully unaware of the angel fairy’s existence. “You study and then you’ll get a job, and after that you’ll be so tired and your emotions will be so blunted that you’ll have long ago forgotten about the unattainable.”

“Nuts to that,” I replied, “I’m Peter Pan, ain’t never gonna grow up, even when I’m married my wife will be exasperated by my kiddish ways. I’ll pull my cheek lining to simulate masturbation noises like a thirteen-year old and she’ll wonder what she got herself into. Besides, studying sucks, it’s not relevant to anything.”

“Whatevs,” He replied in his computer-literate, Gen Y way, “but don’t say I didn’t warn ya.” Then He fluttered off to warmer climes.

My ex-stoner mate managed to intrigue every single female in the greater Albury-Wodonga area without quite managing to take the final step with any of them, but he had a brain and was disposed to losing it to alcohol every so often, as should happen. I was apathetic, but had danced on a table for a few seconds as part of an academic experiment and my grudging reconciliation with facebook had found some long-lost friends. Now I was strolling into a girl’s house in Beechworth who I had never spoken to, but I knew all the people and this year I had disposed myself to having one or two laughs despite my lack of an x-factor, a certain sexlessness that my suaveness and composure generally made up for.

In the house there were four guys now, but one was a weird gay guy and another was with his long-term girl partner (“I warned ya”, the fairy/angel breathed in my ear with breath that reeked distinctly of Crown Lager), making the odds somewhat in our favour. If only I’d done something to stand out over the year, but no matter how many zany moments come about through my initiatives it was nothing doing. I can occasionally see the looks that women give my mate, and think to myself that I really should learn how to talk to people one of these days. Even so, the tone had been set months ago; any hook-ups after all this time would have been a tad incestuous.

In the corner there was a girl making out passionately with a hippo, and another on roller skates who was balancing a jug of beer on her breasts. Actually the fairy had sanitised that scene too. There was no hippo-pashing and barely had me and my ex-stoner mate been there an hour that they started watching movies at 11pm and the party, such as it was, was apparently already over. The hostess likes dancing, and so do I, and we each vaguely know that the other does, but despite the shared knowledge she would have turned a cold shoulder had I dared try dancing with her. God I hate Australia.

The fairy/angel in filthy socks reappeared and said, “Intense emotions have no place within these walls, son. You’re an adult now, the only thing left for you as a guy is drunkenness and maybe drunken anger. I’m off to give oral sex to my girlfriend now.” He tapped his ciggie into an ashtray and fluttered off once more.

We snuck some bears into Transformers 2 in Albury the next afternoon (spelling? Whoops, beers). There were a bunch of kids in the theatre. The chick serving popcorn had been a student in my Year 10 French class a few months ago but didn’t see me. She has some great genes floating around her pool – the brains, the artistic ability and the looks. Meanwhile I was teaching some language that I didn’t completely know and that barely gets used anymore, but by God it’s still beautiful. Il a fait l’amour au concierge. He made love to the concierge. Who said romance is dead ?

Transformers 2 sucked balls, but apparently most people eat that shit up. I don’t get the world sometimes. I stayed sober enough to drive a couple of people home, then crashed at my mate’s place. We watched a TV show about nerds who had no sex appeal and were getting advice from pick up masters on how to talk to women. The fairy/angel appeared once more, this time with a fresh ciggie, and whispered in my ear with his Crown Lager breath, “Those guys are you. If you didn’t have Karina, you’d be screwed.”

Eve died first. Women are more durable, they live longer in other settings, but it was Eve who died first. This remarkable woman, whose story was apparently finished once she had painfully given light to a couple of children, was the first creature to experience the darkness of death. She had gone through a few lighter moments with her husband Adama once they had unceremoniously taken leave of the garden. As they had grown older there was a refreshing of the sentiment that they were the people in each other’s lives, for better or worse. They were not always unhappy.

Adama’s turn was later. I don’t know how old he was but he had had to bear up under so many mortifications that he must have felt like he was nine hundred and thirty. Ha ha ha.

But by then there were other people on the scene. Several generations down the line, after a succession of men had lived long and pointless lives according to the Bible (in the years before they suddenly had the length curtailed to a hundred and twenty years of life by executive order), there emerged an old man named Noah. While Noah was a proverbial good man, at this point it becomes more worthwhile to look at how God himself was feeling around this time. For wasn’t this the moment that he became so disgusted with the outcome of his world – his plaything – that he was that close to tossing it all in? He couldn’t have yet been terribly mature in view of the Abraham fiasco that was to come. So perhaps it wasn’t a deep crisis of disillusionment that he felt – but I’m not sure that it was the distraction of a spoilt child either. Some kids like building miniature worlds with Lego and then smashing them to pieces. But he had already gone through that phase a while ago and while old pleasures can be rediscovered later in life for a few brief moments, generally we all move on. So, I don’t know.

Because, it seemed, everything God had ever tried to achieve had blown up in his face. Lucifer and Adama had been friends who had turned their faces away. The dinosaurs had been bestial creatures whose only intent had been to tear each other apart. The garden had been a lovely dream of luminosity and buzzing vibration that had not lasted forever, as nothing ever would thereafter.

When we are depressed, the serene musings that ‘everything changes, but only over time’ generally don’t mean a whole lot. We can only focus on our pain, and desperately wish that the pain ends. This was the case with God in these moments. He wanted it all to end: the world (his world), the human race, his anguish. Refreshing the memories from his pioneering days of repetitive immolation, he decided that one day in the next week the seas would unexpectedly rise.

Noah had lived a long life. Cursed with the long white beard that all Biblical characters had to have in order to be legitimate, he had nonetheless at various stages of his life found a way around this hindrance to be quite productive. It as probably just as well, for he provided the counterbalance to the rest of the human race, which had degenerated. Much like the dinosaurs before them, they stole and ate each others’ eggs (?!) and generally were a nuisance to be around, casually placing daggers into each other’s backs and so on. If only there was a way to regulate them! With, for example, a pair of magical stone pillars or some other similar, crazy idea. But there wasn’t and the murderous race had long ago outlived its novelty value. They had to go. If something makes us unhappy it’s not immoral to dispense with it.

Noah was a level-headed man. Whenever there were clouds on the horizon he could see them – apt, for he would certainly need this foresight when the time would arrive for everyone to pile into the ark. Metaphorical clouds, such as the ones that peppered people’s brows just before they erupted with adverse emotion, did not escape him either.

God was sitting on a low tree branch when Noah approached him. The tree was above a lake, whose water level God was raising and lowering through the power of his divine will and skimming stones across, occasionally striking ducks and flamingos on the side of their heads. It was an appropriate metaphor for the destruction he was planning on a grander scale: to raise the seas and kill creatures. But I don’t blame him for it on this occasion.

Getting a conversation started is never an easy matter. Even nowadays, being able to deliver the perfect ice-breaker to a stranger is a cherished skill. I have no idea what Noah said to begin proceedings (I’m not one of those smooth talkers). My guess is that it was more than a simple commentary on the weather (which in any case was God’s domain and might have offended him anyway).

“…I don’t know, I just don’t know,” God was saying, shaking his head. “You try so many things, and if none of them end up coming off you tend to not want to try anymore. But I don’t see what is left for me if I destroy this world. These worlds are all I ever have. Outside of them there is nothing.”

It was a discussion about feeling, emotion; but it could have equally been about physics. Similar sentiments and ponderings were echoed by many people down the track who expressed in a puzzled frame of mind: what could there possibly be if not the universe? There would have to always be a universe in existence because how can nothingness exist without a universe? By definition, how can nothingness even exist? It doesn’t seem possible for a world to exist as pure nothingness.

“…I need to have something to occupy myself, otherwise I can’t go on and then there’s no reason for my existence either. But I can’t continue doing the same things if they always make me unhappy, and yet I don’t know anything else.”

This need to always be occupied would abate over time for the Supreme One. Eventually he would learn how to be blissful without action, he would evolve into the benevolent God we know today, he would stop treating people (and animals) with cruelty and he would earn the right to be titled with a capital letter: ‘He’ instead of ‘he’. That time had not yet arrived. Nonetheless it’s fascinating to note the clarity of his words, the wisdom, the anguish. How old was he, anyway? Had he grown beyond an immature teenage mind? For they were perceptive comments for a stupid teenager to make. I tend to think that no, he hadn’t grown beyond cruel immaturity – once again, in view of the Abraham fiasco that was to come.
God had a look at the life that lay before him, an eternity of making things for the sake of making them, destroying them (also for the sake of destruction simply to make space for new ones), all for the purpose of forcing his mind to avoid thinking about the sadness of his memories. God, being omniscient, was aware of his future failings in advance and realised that he couldn’t go down that road. He had to find a way to make this world work. It still had potential!

Noah offered the right counsel. I think the line that clinched the decision was: “You can only do what you think will help you. You don’t need to persevere with something that doesn’t work.” God took a scrutinising look at Noah and for the first time was overwhelmed by something other than his own self-absorption and self-pity. He marvelled at Noah’s selflessness and reached the conclusion that some lives, some beauty was worth saving.

“I’m going ahead with my plan, but build a ship and save your family,” he instructed. “I won’t start until the construction is complete.” How businesslike in its tones!

Noah began cutting down trees within the same hour. He inadvertently further undermined the lost Garden of Eden by killing some of the trees that had contributed to its (now fading) virtuosity and splendour. It didn’t matter because the Great Flood that was to come would wipe out whatever magic was left afterward.

One thing I’m left wondering is where Noah obtained the nails to staple together his rudimentary masterpiece. But that was less of a concern than preventing his family from being casually killed by the passers-by in the time that remained. To those passers-by Noah had always been a fool, and these sudden constructional urges were merely yet one more confirmation of that fact. Noah never said a word, not even to his wife or children. What could be said, anyway? “I’m building this boat because we’re going to live but you’re going to die”? No.

In the meantime God spent his time waiting for the end sitting with his shoes off, perched on the edge of a rock pool. The sometimes circular, sometimes twisting and darting motion of the fish held him fascinated, and he realised that he would miss the vagaries of these amazing creatures he had given life to. He listened to the song of the birds (many years later, soldiers would mimic the birds’ calls for altogether different purposes) and felt sad about the sounds and the sights he would miss after he killed them.

How long does it take to build a boat? Or, more pertinently, how long does it take to build a boat so important that it maintains the continuity of an entire race? Who knows, but Noah worked diligently and always maintained his silence over the endeavour. In time, Noah’s hammering and sawing became a permanent part of the background music, his crouched feature so much a part of the landscape, that the other humans got tired of the novelty and forgot to even make fun of him. On he went, whether the rains rotted his wood supplies or the sun streaming down burned the back of his neck so badly that some nights his wife could not even put her arms around his neck with affection for the pain his sunburn caused. He had his reasons, they supposed, and left him at that.

In reality his family had faith in his reasons, but he no longer did. God had made himself scarce since ‘the talk’, mixing with the animals and not giving the time of day to a single human being thereafter. Noah began to have inevitable thoughts that here he was wasting the final years of his life on a pointless endeavour instead of enjoying the (usually pleasant) company of his children, grandchildren and other assorted descendants (there were many because Noah had lived a long time). In a way we should rebuke him. He hadn’t lived for nine hundred years like his forebears (!) but just the same, if we whispered in his ear that these days people are lucky (diligent?) to reach eighty or ninety the idea would have been laughable. How can anything be achieved in eighty years, he would have asked with disbelieving mirth. Later there would be commentaries on this idea. Some, the Lucius Annaeus Senecas of the world, would insightfully say that one lifetime is plenty of time but we waste it. Others would irrelevantly say that humans are impatient but (at least these days) God has overwhelming patience and knows what he’s doing. Yes, but he doesn’t have to die.

More than once, Noah kicked his ark in frustration with his sandalled feet. Sometimes the rusted nails and rotted wood would give way in some places, necessitating that Noah start again in those places his sandalled fury had borne fruit. Perseverance was not its own reward but one sad day, when the sky was filled with black clouds, he finished. The work had left him miserable, but it had nonetheless become a part of him and, like God not being able to see a future for himself all of those years ago, Noah could no longer understand what use he possibly was if not involved in the construction of his archaic wooden vessel.

It seemed that the world had been taken over by the black clouds. While contributing to Noah’s less-than-enthralled mood, they at least gave him the suspicion that his work in fact had not been in vain. The ark was a pretty vessel that, while rudimentary, was grand enough for anyone who had single-handedly built it to be proud of his efforts.

It was at this point that God finally put in a re-appearance. He had spent so much time watching and frolicking with the animals that he’d completely forgotten what had moved him to save some of these humans in the first place. He looked at Noah’s ruddy face, his clawed hands with its multifarious scratches, his stooped appearance and, completely forgetting that it was his own instruction that had contributed to these infirmities, wondered what had impressed him about this man. It was a similar sentiment to what we can feel when we cast our eyes on a friend of the opposite sex after an absence of time, with whom the connection had been more emotional than physical: “What was it that I saw in her?” But a few minutes’ conversation usually dispels the doubts.

For his part, Noah wondered why on earth he had thrown away his autumnal years on this being who hadn’t even stuck around to offer encouragement from time to time. When we hold resentment in our heart towards a person, sometimes seeing that person in the flesh can dispel those feelings and sometimes it can exacerbate them. Noah was about to turn around and walk away in disillusionment when God, seeing his own underwhelmed sentiments echoed in Noah’s weather-beaten face, felt a slight urge of compassion. He did not rush forward to embrace Noah or say anything earth-shattering. He simply held Noah’s gaze, motioned him to stay and stated:

“You’d better get everyone on board. The rains will start soon.”

Noah gathered his extended family together. Some of the younger ones formed a motley crew but they were generally conscientious, understanding people who were worth saving. A portion of them were rather infirm and from a mathematical point of view would die in a few years anyway. They would take up space on the ark and go through food supplies, and would complain about the privilege.

Noah had personally escorted all of those who were unable to help themselves up onto the semi-elaborate raft (let’s face it, it was a glorified raft) when God motioned over to a curiously-assembled collection of animals who were remarkably well-behaved. They all sat stationary and watched proceedings with wide, wondering eyes. “You’re taking them, too,” God said, and Noah’s jaw dropped.

The ark had been designed with enough rooms for Noah’s family; that was all. Noah quickly scanned the options in his head. No matter how he considered the potential arrangements, the logistics simply did not work. The now malevolent, resentful snakes would surely bite and kill the blind, decrepit members of Noah’s family (and probably chomp on them as well). The giraffes’ necks would ache so much in the close proximity of the ark’s walls that that they would surely wish they had perished with the sinners. The constantly mating and excrement-producing animals would come up with smells that man had hitherto not dared to even have nightmares about, smells that would clearly make living conditions unbearable within a short amount of time. And what if they threw up in the dining room, the only room on the ark furnished with a carpet? Noah and his family had only stocked up enough sawdust for themselves!

Noah was about to spiritedly debate the merits of this ingenious plan when a drop of rain splashed onto his nose. God slowly looked up at the sky with a solemn face. The meaning was clear.

Noah and his wife hustled the animals up the ramp and onto the ark. They had to be a lot more careful in the collection process than God had been, being vulnerable to bites, scratches and venom in a way that God was not. For the time being they had not a care as to where the creatures wandered off to once on the ark: getting them aboard was enough of a headache to deal with. While leading a stag up the ramp and struggling every step of the way, Noah looked around for God but saw that he had already deserted them.

God had wandered away into the mountains to spend some quality time alone. Like a worker who enjoys the last day at his job because he knows it’s his last, God felt pleasure and relief at the prospect of soon not having to worry about any of the hassles he’d been dealing with for many years now. His search for the animals he wanted to preserve had not been terribly exhaustive but, he felt, had incorporated many of the better ones. He absent-mindedly forgot a few of the other species, subsequently to drown. He had kept the snakes for their symbolism: “mess with me and you’ll be despised forevermore, like these guys.” This included the anacondas (who preferred to eat their victims alive). An anaconda had once tried to eat God alive when out on one of his solitary musings but God had proven invulnerable to such criticism.

Noah decided not to bother with the anacondas. Why preserve what would certainly prove to be a handful? But these monsters adapted to the water outside the safety of the raft and eventually found a home that suited their adapted natures, in the Amazon.

In the meantime the rats scampered around and were already leaving their droppings. The rhinos were charging the already weakened inner walls and looking for other challenges. The lice were already finding safe houses in the hair of Noah’s terrified family.

The rain was falling more heavily, in fat drops that immediately make one wet if he is unfortunate enough to be caught up in such a maelstrom. Noah was clearly beyond merely being in an unfortunate dilemma. When everyone was in – of both human and bestial species – he shut up the ark from the outside, to the detriment of his concerned family’s mental health. Noah had seen the fracas going on inside the ark and knew that the present situation could not possibly go on in its present state. While his anxious family yelled at him to get in – what on earth was he doing? – Noah sealed up the ark. He had already set the ark upright with stilts so that whenever the whimsical yet merciless floodwaters decided it was time to rise and kill everyone (except the fish; I believe it was a freshwater flood) the ark would gently float on top of its own accord.

Noah had decided during the animal packing stage that death or help was better than living in the ark without either. His sandals constantly slipped in the muddy waters that were building up around his ankles as he ran off in search of the God that had condemned him to life rather than death.

The rain fell, lightning crashed, and yet Noah in his anger and desperation made so much ruckus down below that God could not fail to notice him among the blackness of the falling trees and the other desperate men and women. He made his way down to him, always striving to maintain a serene countenance – for he was God, after all – whatever the turmoil that happened to be going on in his mind at a given moment. Ducks when swimming look so calm above a lake but their legs are paddling furiously beneath it.

As were Noah’s legs paddling furiously. God approached Noah in measured steps as Noah was slipping and sliding across the disintegrating plain. “You need to step in; what’s happening right now can’t go on,” Noah shouted above the rain. His white hair was dripping all over his face, obscuring much of the face although not his words. He kept his fury in check and did not add, You started this shambles, you fix it. Dammit!

God had not realised there would be problems. He sized up the crumbling old man before him without pity or concern. God’s hair was black, gelled into fashionable spikes at the front of his head, and little did he realise that he would evolve to look very similar to Noah with the passage of time. But the main issue remained, beyond the discrepancy of appearance between the two: God had haphazardly figured that the ark could solve both problems (of saving the family as well as the animals). Not only that, but the birds could perch on the ark’s roof if they were tired of the constant flying. But it had been an erroneous line of thought.

There were two ways of looking at the situation: Noah had made the ark, therefore he should have been able to reserve the right of refusal to the generally disgusting, smelly creatures. But God was the owner and proprietor of the world and hadn’t been obliged to warn Noah in advance of impending doom – the call of ‘heads up’ had been a bonus and Noah had never really appreciated that fact. How God suddenly regretted that conversation he had had with Noah that one fateful morning many years ago, how he regretted opening his heart to Noah, however briefly. By committing to saving this family, God was complicating the act of destruction (which really should be a very simple action: after all, it’s much easier to bring an end to things than it is to start or maintain them).

“You can’t live with the animals?” God asked him, puzzled. “Yes, we can,” came the answer, “but we were not warned to beforehand and, furthermore, you needed to warn them.”

God accompanied Noah to the ark. By this stage the earth was breaking off into chunks and floating away but God and (more surprisingly) Noah were able to nimbly hop from island to island. When lesser mortals tried to imitate their actions they were swallowed up by the raging sea.

God surveyed the chaos inside the ark. He was surprised by the behaviour of the animals and came to the conclusion that it’s one notion to enjoy the company of animals and very different one to have to live from minute to minute with their habits, their smells, their lack of civility. He disconcertingly summoned them all, and they responded to him in a way that they would not have responded to any human.

“If you are to survive in here, you need to behave like the humans,” he told the animals, who looked at him with wide eyes but listened with sceptical ears. “You cannot kill anyone. Don’t make noise. Don’t wreck the walls. Don’t give birth to more than one set of offspring while you are in here. And you can only mate with your pair – you are forbidden to go outside your species for satisfaction.” There you have it, the first glimpses of one of The Ten Commandments, primary school discipline, China’s One Child Policy and a freaky hint of what lay beyond normality, all rolled into one.

Showing some of the responsibility he would exhibit around the clock in later years, God stayed in the ark for the rest of the day and the next one too. The main feature of that first day and night was the solemn gathering together of the humans and yes, some of the animals too, to watch the world die.

First the fires went out. They did so before any of the torrential rains started, as if presaging that for those left on Earth, their time was through. In the darkness that was left, the men and women re-lived their deepest regrets and reacted, alternatively, in anger and sadness. They bumped into their own kin without recognising them in the shadows of the clouds and the darkness of their own melancholy. They did not know that they were going to die but they could not fathom the change of mood that had enveloped the world.

They were briefly able to re-light their fires. In the glowing light their haggard eyes asked each other what could be happening. The black clouds closed off the last remnants of blue sky. In the distance Noah was loading up the animals. The time approaching when he would go on his mad dash was yet to come. He had purposely, from necessity, set up the ark far away from the other humans who had scorned him all their lives.

Stray drops of rain began to fall. Although composed of water, they burned the skin of the doomed like the deposits of a sulphur pit. Yet there were no red marks where the rain had struck the faces and arms of the men and women. The drops began to fall faster and soon everyone was coated with a shiny wet hue that paradoxically made everyone’s skin glow with seductiveness and gave them all a sensual physical allure. But they would not be able to use this allure to good effect, for survival was now the only issue.

As the rains became stronger and the drops fatter, streams of varying but always increasing strength began to flow along the ground, biting at the ankles of those that remained, climbing and eventually (but not slowly enough!) swallowing ankles and calves. Solid earth turned to mud as once-solid minds began to turn to insane, fear-inspired mush. As the water level rose to waist level, small children smothered and died. Their sedentary bodies floated to the surface and provided the night’s first debris. People splashed around and bumped into the corpses, stepped on them if they could. They climbed on top of each other and used each other as stepping stones (against the recipient’s wishes) to literally rise up and give themselves hope.

One by one, the smaller trees gave way and fell. The people who clung to the branches fell slowly towards the dark, swirling, muddy waters, still clinging, feeling – what? Is it possible to feel anything other than pure, abject fear in these moments? The trees hit the water and they and their assorted cargo vanished. Bubbles rose up from underneath the surface where doomed last breaths had tried to be taken.

Couldn’t there have been a more peaceful way to achieve these aims? A blinding flash, a meteor? No, for the planet itself was beautiful and needed to be preserved. The taller trees looked on in horror at what had happened to their smaller brethren. These trees, tall from all their years spent on the face of the Earth and also wise from this time spent thinking about their place in the world, could understand exactly what was happening. They had seen the excesses these prototype humans had indulged in and though these old, tall trees had foreseen nothing, their sudden hindsight provided perfect clarity. They suspected that the accursed humans had poisoned the smaller trees whose branches they had been embracing so desperately and, seeing some of the hardier survivors reaching up to try to make a play for the higher branches of their own foliage, drew their branches away in scorn and horror. These humans may have brought doom upon their own heads but they will not sully us with their grimy touch! History would prove just how clever these trees were in their assessment. They survived.

In the darkness of their last thoughts, the last humans turned on each other. Some of the more intelligent ones pondered in the moments their fear-ridden brains gave them a respite: should they have acted differently? But they had been given no instruction, they had always just done what they had known: no more, no less. Even so, they didn’t link the calamity to their own behaviour, sensibly. Why should they have? Did we question the motives of a planet that had chosen to revolt when a tsunami ripped through the Indian Ocean one sunny December day? No, and we didn’t need to.

The others fought each other with fists and debris. The water level aided the cause, as shoving heads underwater became a viable strategy.

The majority of the people who had begun the vigil watching from the ark were not able to stomach the spectacle in its entirety and drifted away with tears falling from their eyes. God stayed until the end, feeling much emotion but not showing it, his dark eyes taking in every part of the scene below and spread out around him. People struggled desperately to keep their heads above the water, kicking furiously with their legs as heads drifted above and then below the waterline, gasping, asking for a deliverance they were not destined to receive. The ones left were the ones who had avoided the fighting, the blaming, the scrambling. They had the energy and will left from reserves unknown, and for their tenacity they probably deserved to be saved, to live. What could they have contributed to humanity? The gigantic waves that poured over the struggling remainders were occurring with regularity now and yet they were not putting an end to the struggle. Yes, these last humans had proven their worth and deserve to be remembered. They couldn’t all have been malevolent, those who perished.

The lighting had stopped and the rain had slowed to a graceful, gentle drizzle. But there was no stopping the horrendous tidal waves that, when they crashed over those in the water, obliged them to swim forever upward to break the surface for a few sobbing gasps of the elixir that wasn’t able to fill their lungs before the next wave jumped on top of them and started the process over again. The reserves of energy drained with every repetition and there were only a few left now. They were now having to use copious amounts of will to compensate for the increasing lack of physical ability to continue making the long swim upwards, and some of them didn’t have enough will to continue the futile quest. At a point in time, they would realise with resignation that they had nothing left, neither in the arms, nor the legs, nor the mind. Then they would let themselves drift downward until their screaming lungs would less-than-politely ask that their mouths open up into a wide ‘O’ and give them a breath. Their bodies would oblige, the mouth would open and water would come pouring in. At that point it would be close to the end. The lungs would realise that they had been tricked and all that could be felt would be blinding, life-ending pain. There would be no ability for reflection. But some say that your life then flashes before your eyes: the luminescent parts, the few snapshots of happiness that jump out from the overwhelming amount of life that is merely used to pass time, the uninteresting parts that only serve the purpose of helping the arrival of the snapshots and whose time is immediately forgotten. I cannot confirm whether this actually happens or not because I’ve never died before, I don’t have a memory of ever having died before.

The pain (with or without the life flashes, but probably without) would go on until a malfunctioning brain would shut down. And at that point the pain would stop, though the recipient would know nothing about it, and blackness would be all the eyes would see, if the darkness hadn’t already descended beforehand. But perhaps the eyes would not see or register this black vision because they would already be without life. This, the pain, the brain turning off, the darkness, this is death.

The last one was a man who could have contributed to the world. God would watch him go under and each time wonder if he would come back up again. But the last time he went under God’s infallible intuition immediately knew that he was not coming up again. Because the Bible suggests that no one went to Heaven until Jesus died, that was the end. God remained watching the seas for a long time even after there was no longer any death to observe. The waves calmed a fraction but there was no possibility of flat seas for many weeks to come. The waters no longer moved with rage but still rocked the ark viciously. It would have been symbolic for the sun to appear on the horizon to usher in the end of this night of perdition but half the night was still to come and seeing the world consent to the stench of death by shining its light on it would have been a betrayal. If anything it was darker now.

God left his viewing point to walk aimlessly along the ark’s corridors, occasionally stepping over a skunk or tortoise. Aimlessly, for there could be no aims for anyone on the ark beyond staying alive and hopefully not suffering too much for the privilege. No one could look God in the eye while he was on this one of his many famous solitary musings, but he equally would not have been able to match anyone’s gaze had they been so bold. What did they feel about God after having witnessed such carnage? Respect that he had had the conviction to carry out an act that, although stomach churning, had been necessary? Fear and loathing? Awe at the incredible power at his fingertips? Pity for his now drained state, his head down, his breath quickened? Probably not pity, for they didn’t know him well enough and were too breathtaken by his action to look at him with normality.

He left a day later. The sun had eventually risen and then set again. The ark’s inhabitants could not work out which was worse: having light thrown onto the extent of the immolation, with the bodies floating around and the vultures swooping down from the roof of the ark (God, at least, had been correct in assuming the birds would be happy to be perched there)… or the onset of the darkness, the night, which brought back the memories of feelings, of the screams, the horror. The majority of humans would not look at the night with the same degree of trust ever again.

In his absence the ark’s inhabitants looked at each other in confusion, animal and human alike. What was left to be done now without the one who had blessed them all with their current predicament? They would continue to wander around the ark like zombies for the next month and a bit, not saying a word to each other, sometimes staring out at the sea world they had inherited. But after an amount of time they lost hope of a resolution. The sea would never change, land would never rise again. They assumed the termites would eventually bring the ark to ruin over time, in the moments that they too were not looking at each other in soundless confusion.

A fragile peace existed between the diverging species, no doubt supported and upheld by God’s original tête-à-tête with the animals. Perhaps that’s why barely anyone said a word: a ‘peace’ like that can be broken at any moment with the wrong utterings.

Noah wandered in and out of sanity throughout those mentally empty yet exhausting times. His family did likewise but never to his extent. Mental well-being lies in between the two extremes of over stimulation and zero stimulation (as always; balance between two extremes is the key, for everything). Yet for the last ten days of the vigil he was nothing but completely alert as to the happenings of the ark and the outside world. As custodian of the ark and its inhabitants he saw all and knew all. He knew, for example, that the snakes were risking God’s wrath on multiple counts. In a throwback to the days of the garden, the snakes had taken to playing malicious games of dice and cards, from which the winner would have the first crack at eating the mice once the peace broke. He also knew that fish had started swimming in the still-high floodwaters in large schools that decided together through collective osmosis in which direction they would next turn.

The fish were an indication that life had finally returned to the Earth after thirty-odd days of figurative ‘darkness’. Because one of the aspects that had contributed to the stunned stupefaction of the first thirty days was the pure sparseness of the Earth, its lifelessness. While the seas had continuously raged, only somewhat letting up every day without fail when the sun rose, the absence of other movement on the horizon or in the skies contributed to the solemn torpor. I suppose the birds could have broken the spell but they too were all held in place on their perches on the ark’s roof, held there by the force of feeling.

The fish gave Noah the first inkling that all was not lost. Any life existing outside the ark was surely a good sign. Later, in his search for further good signs and assurances, he would be greeted by the not-quite-fulfilling sight of a rainbow. That was hardly his concern for the moment. His brief was not to take his eyes off the fish as they twisted, darted and rested in languor en masse, as he tried in vain to confirm for a fact whether the beautiful sight was an illusion or not. He tried to make the vision persist forever but it disappeared.

Noah told no one about what he had seen, in the same way that in the past he had not said a word about why he was constructing an archaic water-based vessel so far inland. Why fruitlessly raise hopes over what had surely been illusion? The peace would shatter, the mice would be eaten, everyone – not just the rhinos but humans too – would begin charging the walls skull first; the entire structure would fall apart (both the physical structure of the creaking wood as well as the arrangement of near-cooperation between human and animal) and they would all drown in bitterness and water.

Another few days passed and Noah despaired. Perhaps it would have been better to not see the fish, he thought. Because he could have continued in the hopeless state of automated, zombiefied function indefinitely, but the addition of hope turned him into a human again, melted his heart and threatened to break him. He called for a bird to come down from the top of the ark, hoping that the other birds would remain in their frozen ways and notice nothing. How had they not seen the fish? he wondered, unless they had not been real. The birds showed no compulsion to return his interest. They stared out over the water, unblinking, unmoving to the point of death. He threw a stone towards them, aiming for it to fly across their faces and hoping to be the first being to attract their attention since they had uncomprehendingly witnessed carnage. But his throw was too successful. It gently plonked a bird on the side of its feathery belly. Although the throw clearly did not have the force to cause harm the bird motionlessly toppled into the water, prompting Noah to doubt whether it had ever been alive. Were any of the other birds still on this Earth beyond the shells that remained perched on the ark’s rooftop?

Noah would not wait another forty days to find the answer. He climbed up to the roof, the ‘birdhouse.’ His eyes would be pecked out for the intrusion if necessary but at least it would let him know that he was alive. For the moment there was no danger of that happening. The birds did not turn or breathe to indicate that they acknowledged his carefully creeping presence, edging his way not so much for fear of the soulless birds as for the very real concern of plummeting into the water. He went so far as to touch them but bird after bird that he gently tapped would invariably flip over into the water without doing anything to recognise their own demise. Tired of the entire charade, he took a raven into his hands and squeezed it. The act inserted life into the creature. It squawked horrifically and woke the others from their somnolence, which in turn lifted them into the air as one and demanded that Noah pull himself flat onto the roof and cover his head, while still clinging to the horrendously ugly black alarm clock that was the raven.

The birds circled Noah. Head determinedly down, he wondered why on earth he had worked to preserve any of these monsters. He had lived through too much distress over the years to now be killed by these inconsiderable birds! The birds, sensing his will, gave up their circling and potential swooping and headed out to sea en masse. But not all of them: the gentler ones stayed put, the difference being that this time they did so as living creatures.

Noah got down off the roof and stepped onto the floor that had been his abode for so long. The raven clearly hated him and Noah forcefully ordered that the raven go off in search of life in order to help the ark. Of course the raven did not come back.

A dove looked down at the ragged scene below her and felt a shudder of pity. Noah may have felt that he had exhausted his last avenue towards the faded possibility of being able to live again. The dove took it upon herself to find hope for the inhabitants, and quickly. For although the other humans and animals had seen nothing of the school of fish and had not accordingly had their hopes raised, they all knew that the birds had suddenly and inexplicably taken flight and the sense that the birds had somewhere else to go but they didn’t only added to the sudden restlessness on the ark.

The dove took flight. It stopped to coo in Noah’s ear, meaning reassurance, but Noah took it the gesture as a mocking one and a scowl showed on his face. He could surely not have had very long left to live even if he did one day make it onto dry land again in his life. His spirit had become too twisted, he had become too used to deception, disappointment and bitterness. He had continued running the ship with a strong hand, but only out of a sense of duty for all of the others, including the despised animals. Not for himself. He had lost the belief that all would turn out well, and even if a new world could have been magically offered to him then and there he would not have been able to accept it, for his mind could no longer accept the possibility of favourable resolution. Therefore his body would not have been able to live the dream come true because a body must always follow the mind that manipulates it.

Vast blue expanses spread out above and below the dove as it worked its way on its desperate mission. What the dove needed to find was a fracture in the blueness. On and on the voyage continued, day after gruelling day without finding a place to land. The muscles of the dove’s wings strained and asked why they couldn’t simply stop for a rest, for they had been working overtime for hundreds of consecutive hours. The dove’s head replied: because, without solid ground beneath you, rest equals death.

The dove began to realise and identify with the mental overload that the animals and humans down below in the ark’s hold had gone through staring indefinitely at blue nothingness with first hope, then despair and finally a frozen acceptance. She thanked the stars that the birds themselves had merely been lulled into suspension without either the hope or the anguish that should have preceded it. Physically, the others in the ark had not had to endure the gruelling weariness that hindered the dove and yet she felt grief for their plight.

Eventually, in the dark recesses of what was later left of the dove’s wits, she dreamily saw a sturdy tree branch poking out of the water. Her eyes were narrowed through sheer absence of anything left in her brain and for that reason she saw the miraculous apparition through a film a blackness that had steadily been descending on the higher reaches of her vision. She fell onto the branch as if shot by a bullet from below, without control or care. She stayed there for several days, recovering what she had given to the four winds in her mad search, constantly hugging up to the branch to ensure that it would not disappear on her like so many dreams of tree branches had done before.

She took a piece of twig back to the ark. The flight back was just as arduous, with the added burden of having to constantly guard against dropping the proof of her fidelity. Her beak ached and she could not change the position of the twig in her mouth. It had been very difficult to leave the branch, which had been her only measure of comfort ever since the entire flood nightmare had begun. She was back to navigating pure blue expanses again. But she didn’t have the steady nerve to hold her vigilance against such a foe again and toppled the moment she saw a break in the uniformity below. Fortunately it was the ark, and she landed on the ark floor in front of Noah.

Noah regarded the fallen present from the sky with pure astonishment. As far as he knew, all of the now unloved birds had either flown out to sea or still remained on the ark, once again lulled and now huddled in groups of three (see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil). The dove cooed in order to discard the burdensome twig and to communicate a message to Noah. Then, like the original marathon runner who would similarly utterly exhaust himself to communicate a message after desperately hurtling from Marathon to Athens, she died.

Noah saw what the dove had brought to him and knew the answer immediately: the end was near. Where there are living trees, land will soon follow. He reflected on the dove’s generosity in giving her life simply to reassure him and wondered where such a sense of service had arisen from in the seething den of distrust that the ark had become. It was time to end this thing, this poor charade of what life had originally promised. He took a gamble, called everyone in (those who had not died) and promised them land within seven days.

They got it in four. Noah knew that revolt was the answer if he had guessed wrong, but he was at the end of his tether and simply no longer cared. He would be killed if necessary. He had done all he could do, and then some. The animals waited, hoping that land would not be found so that they would have their justification for killing the humans who had preserved them in this prison, who by now were weak and haggard.

After four days, four days in which the humans were all fearful except for Noah, who had complete faith in his own word, the ark scraped land, bumped it and stayed put. Another day passed in which the water level lowered and sank into the ground as if by magic. They were at the top of a mountain and every inhabitant, from ant to elephant to everything in between, spent the last day at the ark’s seaboard looking around in wonder. Noah wanted a sign that reward would be coming to him for his custody of the ark, for he had surely held the entire ramshackle operation together single-handedly and had saved all of the lives now spread out before him chattering at the ark’s vantage points. His answer came, once the water had receded completely and the soon to be released occupants gaped at the rocky slopes of the mountainside with complete awe, in the inconsiderable form of a rainbow splashed across the sky. Noah’s reward had been that he was the first person or animal to ever see one.

Noah was less easy to please than the others, who gallivanted around the ark in delirious joy and pure relief, tears flowing from the eyes of even the snakes (who, caught up in the moment, had forgotten about their pre-planned gastronomic urges). The rainbow was a promise from God that he would not destroy the world again because he finally understood the angst that it had entailed to all involved, but Noah had long been through with symbology. He wanted definite words of thanks and praise from the definite mouth of a certain definite being who he wanted to be definitely standing in front of him, but it was not forthcoming. Noah spat on the ground with the familiar fury that he had otherwise experienced when he had been traversing the rain and the collapsing terrain on his mad dash at the beginning of the nightmare. He did not stop to address the occupants, for he did not have God’s oratory skills and knew that they only wanted one thing. He threw open the doors and everybody, human and animal, without acknowledging either each other or the fact that they had all shared an extraordinary happening, dashed off the wooden vessel and never so much as looked at each other ever again, except to occasionally eat each other in the future. Humans and animals had spent forty days of peace together but they would not need to do so again: humans would eventually build themselves concrete worlds with houses, electric lights, footpaths and bug exterminators so that they would need never mix with the animal world thereafter. Perhaps it wasn’t the most unintelligent course of action: who wants to be eaten alive?

Noah had had his fill with this God character. He never saw or spoke to him again and nor would he recommend him to any of his friends. In fact if asked for his opinion he would have remarked that God was a bit of a dodgy operator; there was something not quite one hundred percent about him.

The animals would continue to evolve. The basic specimens that had been cooped up on the ark would take the kind foundation that God and Noah had bestowed on them and move with it until they had subdivided and created several new wondrous creatures. The ark could not have spawned the marvels of the Galapagos Islands or the Australian continent. Evolution was still in progress and would always continue to be.

But how did the humans evolve? Noah’s family was righteous and each of them knew that they, the human race, could not return to the lazy practices of randomly killing each other for the sake of it. But there were a limited number of people left in the world. As Charles Darwin later speculated on, the genes of any new being that enters the world need to be the product of two completely different, unrelated parents. The structure of this new offspring will therefore be completely unique to the world. In this way the germs and illnesses of the world become confused and need to find new ways to try to attack that new person’s organism. An offspring of two people who are already related will have a constitution that nature will find easier to attack, for nature will already be used to the same genes that the similar parents have given him. Since the human race needed to re-form from the roots of the one family that remained – Noah’s descendants – the human race had no choice but to re-spring forth from the product of incest. The consequence of this was that the genes of subsequent offspring would invariably be flawed: as would the entire species be.

How’s your world these days? I wonder about the world sometimes, the countries that have spent two hundred years meshing with each other and are fast losing power to the fat-cat corporations, China excepted. Here’s how I see the puzzle:

United States: They spent 170 years building themselves up, sixty more being an empire, but what are they going to do now that they are faltering? How long will they still be on top? Probably only another fifty years at best. Strange, because Rome stayed put for hundreds of years.

Cheney and Bush killed them, eventually, even as they thought they were flexing American muscle. Now nobody believes them, their credo of wealthy living collapsed last September and proved just as flawed as the theory of communism, and while every country is still bound to America for the moment, they are starting to understand that they don’t have to listen anymore.

Barack Obama is a new example of sharing, thinky policy that everyone (those in power and observers like us) will love while it lasts but that, rather than heralding a new age, will only last eight years. America has a deep conservative heart that will never be denied. They will never get rid of their guns, their cash mentality, their ways. America’s main problem, apart from the fact that they bully other countries around and think there will be no consequences, is that as a people they are too resistant to change. This futile fight against the inevitability of change will ultimately bring them down, probably in the second half of this century.

China: They suddenly know the American adrenaline rush of being answerable to no one. When economic strength kicks in all we’ll be able to do is work with their whims. They have the manpower to be able to call the shots, the complete strength in numbers to achieve anything from a construction point of view. They can build anything they may need. For the moment only economics work against them, but that will fade once their economy gets a bit of money seeping into it. The Confucism and family-centeredness of their culture is an honourable backdrop, but money society is taking over in China.

Their fairly primitive rule-the-world ways seem pretty stupid, even stupider than America’s. They don’t care about the environment, they don’t care about local feelings (the way they are currently ravaging Africa is pretty 19th Century). They order people around, yet are hypersensitive to any sort of criticism. Once China takes over the globe people will end up hating them as much as they hated America, because they are too pushy in the way they act at a higher level.

Europe: What they lack in current glory they make up for in social advancement. Gay marriage, competent health care systems, an once-upon-a-time openness to immigrants (that by now is finished, they got saturated and got tired of it), to new ideas, an ability to adapt to change, and liberal ideas, are the things that keep me from spitting on Europe’s hypocrisy. Its people tour the globe lecturing everyone on how their countries could be better, while they dine out and relax on the proceeds that Europe plundered from those very places while destroying their institutions back in the days of colonialism.

Europe now is where America will be, a matron reliving past glories, with a bit of clout but likewise no one really has to listen to what any of them has to say.

Europe, unlike America, is not reactionary, and now that they’ve satisfied monetary urges that the rest of the world is still obsessed with, is probably where the advancement of the human race is going to happen, if your opinion of advancement is based on increased social acceptance rather than mechanical advancement, which is probably still slightly America’s domain.

Europe is probably where it’s still at in a day-to-day sense, at a lower level. It is the place to go to make money and get jobs, to experience ‘culture’ (I hate that word!), to learn relatively simple languages, to backpack and meet locals relatively painlessly. Relatively desperate people from Africa and South America will swarm into Europe this century: will they contribute to Europe’s grandeur or lower its standard of living?

Africa and South America: The brains will perennially leave these places, seeing a better economic opportunity to save themselves elsewhere (see above). That will leave a bunch of menial people back home doing a bunch of menial jobs, and hence these continents will not improve compared to the rest of the world. The increased wealth of the planet seeps down bit by bit in the form of mobile phones and the internet and all that, but these people will still have to waste their lives working hour after hour at meaningless jobs for scant wages. At the top level, debt servicing to the first world will keep these countries down. Economics forever kills them; we basically keep them down on purpose, and order them around because of the power of our better economics.

Collectively there’s an undercurrent of bitterness that I don’t see going away anytime soon. Colonialism took their possessions and destroyed their once well-functioning institutions, to be replaced by twisted parodies of Western ways that didn’t work too well at the level of governing and business. I’ll go back in 500 years when colonialism is a distant dream and see how they’re doing, and maybe then everyone will be free of historical bitterness and a sense of having been wronged. (Ditto Iraq: see you in 2511.) For a wrong to be forgotten, first the oppressor must acknowledge that what they did mattered, then the oppressed must acknowledge that the second step is up to them to let that bitterness go and let what happened not matter so much. But we never even do the first step, so there’s no chance of the second. In fact, the wrong in these continents is perennial and has never ended.

It must be added that many of their infortunes are also self-inflicted, due to a deep-seated corruption, which must be shed if these places are to have any hope of advancement. Is corruption a product of poverty? Is poverty a product of corruption? Either way, corruption is killing these countries.

Middle East: So much money and yet it never seeps down to their general societies. Will they one day mesh with the rest of the world in anything other than business? Probably not, because I feel the deep religion of their society keeps them at arm’s length from the rest of the world, separating them (anti-religious crusaders would say that religion separates people on purpose).

At the top level the Middle East countries have to be tip-toed around as much as China because of their hypersensitivity, and while oil still calls the shots, so do they. What does the Middle East do when the world runs out of oil? I personally will celebrate the day, since it will facilitate the cleaner energy that we should undoubtedly already be using. But does that mean that the Middle East stops being relevant to the world, and becomes even more insular? Have they set up to use oil revenue to benefit themselves in the future? Can it be used to better the standard of living of Joe Middle East? It hasn’t yet, and why would it ever? We’ve been buying oil for years already and the money just goes to the sheiks.

So the 2000s are building to become the Asian century at a higher level, but it can’t yet be called that while their people underneath still have no personal money. End of layman analysis.

I’ve lost my mojo with this blog, and seemingly my audience too, slim as it was. Maybe I just said everything I needed to say, and need to go through new things to be able to say any more. But there is one night that I still need to talk about: Peru, and Ana Cecilia… eventually, in a roundabout way.

“Marty’s too stylish to look at those girls.” It was one of those dirty post-midnight nights where you end up shoving aside someone else’s rubbish and cleaning the table yourself to distractedly eat McDonald’s across from Flinders Street. I had blazer and collar, dolled up, and was with my best mate and two women across from us, one of whom I had mistakenly hooked up with the year before. That night I had not been able to hide just how nuts I am; I particularly cannot hide it in the moments I get dragged out to the bar scene on Saturday nights. I weirded out my mate and also the girl I had once dated, who mentioned that I seemed to have a lot of anger against Australia and my mate consented with, “Against the world. It’s not a good way to be. He probably has to get past that,” but I never did. The girl’s friend gave me a few minutes of kind respite where I actually got into a conversation that I enjoyed. I’d spent the rest of the night kind of staring off into space, and they had both turned to look behind them a few times to work out what the hell I was looking at. I wasn’t.

Anyway… two little ho-ey teenagers in their skin-flashing apparel were sitting next to us, and my sort of ex looked at them and made some remark about me. But my best mate knew me better and responded, “(see above)”. I felt so vindicated in my approach to the world, for a moment. Someone had noticed my feigned or maybe real elegance. He had fed my vanity, but also, he was right: I would never have been interested in them. They just sent out the wrong vibes, the wrong age, the wrong level of politeness, of intellect. A body without a brain or at least a level of understanding, is kind of repugnant, just a germy other person. No girl who would assess me on external matters is ever worth wasting time on.

“You seem like a bit of an intellectual.” I was in Queensland one weekend in 2007, the lost year (as opposed to 2004, the lost year). We had all hit the piss on Sunday, and on the Sunday night a girl walked out on a guy. He was a bricklayer with dreds, who mentioned the following morning that “I could go out and get drunk today, or I could get on with my life.” We laughed our asses off and naturally chose the former option.

I didn’t know him, but I sensed that if you lose your girl then it can hurt, and perhaps a lot. She was a prize: a good-looking lawyer, and they’d been together two years. So as I found out repeatedly that day that Bundy and Cola is on tap in Qld, I said what needed to be said without saying anything. He was a man’s man, but I listened as he told me that to be a brickie you have to put your emotions aside even if you’re feeling off the ball, because you are paid per brick so you need to keep your focus. Somehow he had noticed me amidst all the blokes standing around and felt like talking to me, and said, “(see above)”. Like the comment about style, the brain bit was how I had tried to paint myself and was happy to have been noticed as a thinker. It’s harder to show that than what you might suspect.

I went through a series of half-conversations with him about his spot. I didn’t say too much, but I showed him that I understood, that I got him, that he was perhaps going through shit but that as blokes we couldn’t say too much about it, and he knew that I knew. At the end of the day he told me that I had been a bit of a legend to him. Thank you.

I’m sad that no further chances have since popped up for me to be kind to anyone, to help someone. Later on I paid for three of a woman’s uni semesters and saved her each time, but that was only because I loved her.

“No. Te conozco.” This one was very beautiful. I picked up Ana Cecilia, a pretty, mature, young 19-year old Peruvian, when I was 24 and passing through, you guessed it, Peru. We danced together as the centre focus of the club and I ended up kissing her.

It was my greatest night, and I would write an entire blog about her if I hadn’t already done it, if I wasn’t so lazy and if the story wasn’t so old. Ana Cecilia was my what if, my one-night romance, my night where everything came together and I proved myself, without touching a drop of alcohol and despite some dumpy clothes (I had just done a four-day trek; my track pants and purple shoes (!) were the only things that didn’t smell). She was dancing in the centre of the surrounding ring of people and I decided that she would be fun to dance with, so I slid in, popped some moves and held my hand out to her with my chin raised in smirked challenge: who are you to refuse?

Does she still think of me? She said I was the first foreigner she ever kissed. She was the first Peruvian I ever, and the only. She had a tongue stud but hadn’t told her parents about it, and I enjoyed it. She had had her heart broken, same as me. She was studying architecture in Cuzco. We whispered these things to each other as we danced in each others hands and arms, and occasionally kissed.

She walked me back to my hostel with her friends, because I was alone at night and a foreigner, a tourist ripe for the picking. Thank you Cecilia. She mentioned that she had to keep an eye on her friends, because they were with guys she couldn’t trust. I asked: “How do you know you can trust me?” And she replied, “(see above): No. I know you.” I know you. We had met each other only a few hours earlier, and I could hardly have dreamed of getting her on any other night, but my dancefloor confidence was soaring that year and I managed it. She had seen something in me beyond the funk, and had decided for herself that I was real, that I had already given enough for her to trust in.

It was tender when we said goodbye. She kissed me on my mouth, then on my nose, and asked how we could see each other again. So we arranged a time for the next morning, but she never showed up. She said the word goodbye, in English, then kissed me, then said goodbye, then kissed me, then said goodbye, then kissed me. I don’t remember her face in detail but a vague shadow still floats in my mind. Her skin was light brown, her hair was cut at her neck. I wrote: I would have liked for her to be more than just a memory.

And there she is still, the briefly attained but eternally unattainable, the girl who saw something in me as I saw something in her, our attraction but also something beyond that, and that something I could not have kept but have wanted to every day since I lost her, even if I didn’t have her beyond a few wonderful hours. And so I have to ask…

Ana Cecilia, born in 1984 or 1985, studying architecture at university in Cuzco, in a small nightclub in Machupicchu (“Aguas Calientes”) with her university group on the night of Saturday, May 6, 2006 and who went to see the lost Inca city Machu Picchu a day later, who danced with a tall foreigner who had his most inspired night despite his ugly, heavy shoes, who danced fluidly and spoke Spanish to you: Ana Cecilia, do you remember me?

I’ve been thinking about America lately. Not the America that’s on TV, or the political America, but my own personal one, the one that I’m kind of intrigued by but certainly don’t want to get too close to. My impression of America is not the pristine one that I saw so many times as a kid in the late 80s and mid 90s, but the one I saw in 2003 and 2004 the last time I was there until now, and forever.

2004 was for me the lost year, where I lived in the past (I was trying to re-do the magic of 2003 but it had dissipated), was alone, had people to see but who didn’t care so much if they saw me. I took walks alone, was tense and sad but happy that I was free, free to not have to associate with people, free to not have to work, free to not have to do anything except soak up my solitude. For if 2003 was the year that travelling worked, then 2004 was the year that it didn’t. I wanted a girl to give a shit about my presence, and I looked for it from past memories and moments that were gone baby, gone, girls who had moved on and hadn’t forgotten but I was a memory to them like they were to me, even as I briefly saw each of them again in the flesh.

I got sidetracked. I arrived in America in late May 2004, right as the impossible had happened on the soccer field (Porto European Champion 2004), and once there I ran into a bunch of people who lived in the rich country but dealt with the tension of its less-publicised lack: they were struggling, getting into and out of relationships and avoiding the African-Americans and having abortions and having to drop out of college for lack of money and get real jobs. It wasn’t ghetto, and I got a slight taste of ghetto that existed in its own world nearby, but it was something, and I felt that I would not want to do this, be American, have to fight for everything, be this fucked up. Because to some extent they were: their parents hadn’t really known how to raise them without them all turning into little emos ten years along the path, teens and twenty-somethings who never learnt how to control their emotions, who took pills, who grew up very fast but never matured, they never took that final emotional step into adulthood at any stages of their lives, wearing their hats backward as they visited bars and strip clubs well into their thirties.

My mission was a black girl named Ashlee.  Wait, that’s wrongly worded. I loved Ashlee. I loved her without even knowing her, not really. Her face was not attractive and if I hadn’t seen her face-to-face in 2004 I might have thought it was hormones, but I took a walk around a forest preserve with her and found that I loved her dearly, even though she repeatedly screwed me around by not showing up to whatever place we agreed to meet at.  I don’t know if I can say I love her anymore; she’s just an idea now, and to some extent even Lizeth the goddess of Paradise Lost fame (see blog title) is just an idea now too. Ashlee lived in dire straits, she scraped money where she could, by fair means or foul, and I was just some naïve white boy from Australia who had only had his first kiss the year before. She was my first kiss, and I’m happy it was her. That doesn’t mean a whole lot now, but still, Ashlee had a certain dignity, faith, kindness and soul amid the rubble, that other women just don’t have. She was fucked up too, but show me a person who isn’t, deep down.

I don’t know what I could have done with her. I couldn’t save her from the sordidness of her circumstances. I couldn’t form anything with her. Her mood was weird, and mostly she was exasperated with me, but we had that one talk in person and one talk by telephone in 2004, a year after we had spent a week together in 2003, pre-dissipation of magic. I am sure that I loved her, in a te amo sense in Spanish, the major one, not just the te quiero that you throw around willy nilly. But why? I don’t know, I just did. I wanted to save her. But she’s still kicking on somewhere out there in Chicago and it turned out that she didn’t need saving. I caused a tear to fall from her cheek, and when I said goodbye to her I placed my hand on one side of her face while kissing the other cheek, like a woman would do. To some extent I probably would have been a better chick than I am a dude.

In the last month I walked around aimlessly as the country got colder and time wound down. I was immobile, hanging out with a guy that had recently turned gay, whose sister went for the blacks and whose father drank, but who gave me a free place to stay and who I became fond of despite my original reservations. I stayed there in the middle of their parents getting a divorce, in the middle of everything. I was a prisoner of my physical placing, of my circumstance, of my unrequited love, of my despair, of my lack of friends. Yet I delayed going home, hoping against hope. I spent one evening at the house of a fantasy, Liesl. I was five years older than her and she was illegal. I charmed her parents though. She was beautiful, huge eyes, long blond hair, and I was stunned. But I left America in disappointment with Liesl and Ashlee on my mind a few days later, and I don’t believe I ever want to go back again. I got out just in time, on November 16, right before the snow fell and dusk was already happening at 4:45pm (!). I had spent months walking around alone on roads that went nowhere, thinking that I was on the frontier (but the place was really a meaningless nothing in hindsight), eating ice-cream Blizzards alone, taking long-distance bus trips alone, racking up the hours staring out the window, comfortable in my solitude but I had always known that something was missing, and that I had found it in 2003 but it was gone in 2004.

I discovered: I have a passport to this country, but this is not my country. I was lost there, chasing ghosts. I had no idea. I had to get out, start again, even if I went to Bolivia rather than Australia to find it, postponing real life once more. At least Bolivia was new, it wasn’t America yet again, that land of vagueness, not of sadness but of something-ness nonetheless. That is my America. And America will stay that way for me, because I will not do it again. I am not afraid of America, nor even have negative feelings against it, but I will never go back there.

Given the tumbleweeds that drift through this blog these days, I’m abandoning all pretence of being relevant and will just write about what is in my head, what I think about, and I might even hit the snooze button soon. This piece is a rambling, rolling fantasy and if it sounds like demented dream, that’s because it partially is.

Mali, Mali. It’s a country dead in the centre of Africa, one of the Sahara Desert nations, without a coastline. For me Mali is the end of the Earth, now that we know that the world is circular and we can’t fall off its extremities; as far as we could go towards the nothingness and away from the mundanity of our streamlined Western societies. Mali is the beginning of black Africa as one heads south away from Europe and the Arab north, although the Malians, diversely black as their ethnic groups are, are almost all Muslims and as I once saw written on an internet forum, the Bambaras of Mali would probably have a tad more in common with the Arabs to the north than with black ethnic groups in, say, Kenya or South Africa.

I became interested when a bunch of their kids (Under 23s) won a series of manic soccer matches against Portugal, Uruguay, Cameroon and Nigeria to get the bronze medal in the World Youth Cup of 1999, kids with names like Seydou Keita, Mahamadou Diarra, and other Malian surnames like Cissoko, Diakite, Touré, Coulibaly and all the rest.

Mali on the surface is the worst of everything: one of the hottest places in the world, where the Sahara Desert from the north invades ever-increasingly, where the plants die and there is never enough food for all, nor enough money to pay for the food that is left nor jobs to get money, where to survive people sell junk to each other “in a circle of increasingly dwindling returns”. The country is at the bottom of Human Development Indices, and I suspect the stats don’t lie in this case. Immigrants from Ghana and Nigeria find themselves there on their way to the miracle life in Spain and get stuck there with their money run out, alone and forced to cut hair for pennies or some similarly meaningless shit. (But I’m reading a book about science by Bill Bryson – atoms, the universe and all that – and it seems that life simply exists to exist, without ambition, simply for the purpose of survival.)

Malians are black, a shade that for unknown reasons finds itself at the bottom of the pecking order and a nationality that is either ignored or looked down on, for its lack of personal resources, for its AIDS, for its inability to succeed. Externally it is weak, but like Bolivia, Paraguay or whatever else, is a world within its world, rich in culture, in difference, not exactly rich in solidarity but as solid as such a poor country can be. The President is given the nickname ‘A.T.T.’ by a people that saw him liberate the country from dictatorship and in 1991 hand it over to what observers say are always free elections. Malian music, dancing and flowery traditional clothing are becoming somewhat better known now, taking over from what Cuba and Latin America once were before their New World exoticism was discovered, overdone and made cliché.

It is a country that is sprinkled with numerous black ethnic groups who traditionally had their callings: the Bambara were the farmers (and are Mali’s current-day majority population), the Fulani were the cattle herders, the Somono were the fishermen. Their languages are mostly related and when they don’t match the country is very loosely linked by the colonialist French language, a language that in War and Peace times was a symbol of refinement for the Russian aristocracy but whose future now relies on being transposed and Africanised into rolling ‘R’s, used to express frustrations of poverty, abjection, closed doors and migration.

What do Malians feel? I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. From birth they get trapped in a country that offers its citizens no purpose besides child-rearing propagation (say what you will about the chase for money but at least it’s a mission). Money is power, it is ability to alter things, and they have none, they drift from jobs to unemployment and if they can, find themselves in Paris or New York City, looked down on for being African and on the world’s bottom rung, working every day of their lives there without a day off. Back in Mali, Malians contract AIDS, they get malaria but it’s just par for the course there and they shrug it off, or else they die from it but that happens too with regularity and to some extent even death is to be moved on from, they get diseases that no longer exist here. They study by writing in workbooks but don’t have anywhere to apply their knowledge and they ask themselves: we have to study our culture as well as Shakespeare and European culture, so we know both, while Europeans know nothing about Mali, wouldn’t that mean that we are better? They dance, they play Beyoncé in their clubs, they get laid, same as us. A Tanzanian girl I knew in Australia told me, “Just go there. You’ll see that it’s not so different to anywhere else.” It’ll be the same as Australia, as Bolivia, as France, as Tanzania, just a bunch of people going about their day-to-day business. They support their extended families and are supported by others: socialism beats capitalism for the moment, whereas a month unemployed in New York and you’re done for, you won’t get a helping hand from anyone.

This is more about my idea of Mali, my imaginary emotions that it inspires, than about the country itself. It is so close to France and Spain and all the rest, so close to humdrum civilisation and yet so isolated, such a new world only a thousand kilometres away. I could tell you about the mosques made of earth standing strong in the middle of the desert, or the ‘bush’ feel that even the sprawling capital city of more than a million people still exudes, or the freakish River Niger that finds a way through the desert, curving inward against all logic, or Timbuktu, or their music that has not been commercialised just yet despite the wishes of the hippie set, or the fact that in Africa people die with regularity and the world couldn’t care less about Africa’s existence but that they are still standing and still find something to laugh about, and despite the fact they have the most reason to be bitter they just get on with it.

And then in my mind I evaluate which is more important, exotic curiosity and subsequent euphoria (but all the same, loneliness) or everlasting companionship, regular sex and a special person to talk to and look at all my life, and it is probably the latter. I couldn’t lose that for a few months bumming around Mali in heat and various states of composure, head up in the uncertainly of the early days, amused joy as I talk French to young women and dance with them (I suspect I would absolutely love African clubs), or the lack of composure as problems mount in the blistering heat amid the danger of living rich surrounded by poverty and I realise that however fun the whole endeavour would be in patches, there isn’t anybody there that I can depend on. Mali is so in tune with life but also so in tune with death, and if I go there I might die, either from a tropical disease or through violence. I don’t want Mali to be my graveyard.

There is so much to say about Mali and a thousand words have flown by without me having said anything, but I long for Mali against all hope and reason. I probably will not get there, and would not know what to do with myself once there. But even if I didn’t have a mission once I got there, a temporary purpose, I would have a moment when I stand there, breathe and say to myself in utter disbelief that right now, I am in Mali, I am at the end of the Earth. And I would know that a dream can be dreamt forever but the moment it hits us that it has come true is utterly indescribable, a feeling of complete disbelief. But if I get married it won’t happen, because what is real is what is real, and real happiness is better than imaginary happiness, but on the off chance that one in a thousand delivers itself then in those moments life becomes extraordinary, the impossible has unbelievably been made true, and that is where magic occurs.

Black people seem to be a people apart in America. Black America is an almost completely separate society with its own code of conduct and behaviour, its own dress sense and almost its own dialect of the English language. It also seems to be a much derided and despised group that at a glance would appear to be in perpetual decline.

A lot of my so-called knowledge of the situation in America and of a theory behind the suffering that black people in America go through has to do with a talk I had with a black American guy named Brandon while walking around what was approaching the Harlem area, New York City on September 11th, 2003, when I was twenty-one. That (American) summer I had worked at a summer camp in northern Wisconsin which hosted various black, white and Hispanic groups of kids from the Chicago area for a week at a time. It was named St. Mary’s, run by the Maryville Academy in Chicago, and the camp counsellors there were a mixture of Americans from the Chicago area and a few from Wisconsin and (two-thirds) internationals. I found that the black groups contributed a lot of fun in different ways to their camp week that was missing from the white groups. (There was only two weeks of Hispanic kids.) Overall, the black groups were more willing to sing and dance and contributed mightily to the talent shows and dances that we had on the Friday nights to send the week off and say goodbye. Black (and Hispanic) kids were also, incidentally, a lot more willing to support and encourage the counsellors if they tried singing or dancing as part of the evening festivities.

What the various groups could and couldn’t do well was, I feel, a direct result of their domestic situations. The black kids in general were terrifically skilled at basketball and liked playing flag football and occasionally softball (even though a few of them called it a ‘dying sport’) but were novices at almost every other sport, and virtually none of them could swim. The white kids’ tastes were more varied. They would almost all pass their swim tests and could show their aptitude in other sports like volleyball, water activities, soccer and one of the more select of sports, lacrosse. They liked basketball a lot too and some of them were very adept.

At the beginning of the season I preferred the black groups for the reasons listed above, but by the end I think I found the white ones easier to deal with. Generally the white kids were more sociable with the counsellors right away instead of being warier in the beginning and slowly thawing as the week progressed. But the ones who did thaw provided terrific moments. Each sort of group could bring things that others couldn’t.

Getting to Chicago in September after three months in remote Wisconsin was a difference. Black and white people did not even so much as sit next to each other on trains. I noticed a bad-tempered abruptness and lack of decorum among a lot of people in Chicago who had customer service jobs. At first I attributed it to the struggle and competitiveness of living in a big American city. But after about a week and a half when a few of us had moved on from visiting Chicago to New York, I realised that there was something else that all of these people had in common besides their deficient customer relations skills. Dealing with black people for something as simple a buying a slice of pizza for lunch could frequently take on a confrontational tone and end up being debilitating.

In New York I was for the most part with two fantastic friends who were both from Johannesburg, South Africa. I was very grateful to have been able to spend the week with Jono and Langu, a white guy and a black girl. At the end of the week they were set to go home towards London while I would hang around for another month before it would eventually become necessary to head home in the opposite direction. It was on the last afternoon, after the three of us that morning had been to see the two-year anniversary commemoration at the old World Trade Centre site, that Brandon showed up as we were walking back to our hostel on 101st Street in a Hispanic section of Manhattan. Brandon was a peripheral coach of a high school-age football team who had come from Chicago to use the camp for pre-season training during the camp’s last operating week in late August. I had not worked with them but Jono and Langu had. The players were black teenagers who were incredibly built and looked older than their ages, and were one of the more unruly groups we had for the summer.

Brandon and Langu hooked up that week. That year it wasn’t an uncommon occurrence at that place for the live-in camp counsellors to occasionally see eye-to-eye with some of the visiting staff from the groups themselves. Two months beforehand, in the camp’s early days, I had hooked up with one of the younger supervisors of one of the groups, a girl named Ashlee. And Jono – don’t get me started. When a sizeable (eight or nine) group of us left at camp’s end on August 28th to go to Chicago Jono was with us and so was Langu, originally. But Langu’s concerns about the unsafe nature of the hostel we were all staying at (possession-wise, not personal safety-wise) and perhaps Langu’s precarious money situation meant that she bailed after a day and went to spend the rest of the week at Brandon’s apartment somewhere on Chicago’s south side. The two of them showed up at a get-together we had one night at a local guy’s house, so she hadn’t disappeared completely. I was afraid otherwise when she didn’t show up to meet us and grab our bus to New York, but it was only a temporary hiccup, caused by Langu joking that she’d been going on ‘black people’s time.’

As one of our friends commented to Brandon, Langu must have been something special for Brandon to drive all the way from Chicago to New York for one last chance to see her the last day before she left for home. (But I already knew that.) The four of us went to Central Park, which is pan-Manhattan and no matter where you happen to be staying – even if in a run-down and severely Uptown section nicknamed Spanish Harlem – the Park is within a few minutes’ walking distance for almost anyone. After that, minus Jonathan, three of us decided to walk further Uptown to have a look at proper Harlem.

I was intensely curious but had reservations about the fact that my wallet was still strapped to my chest with $90 inside, and more importantly being white and especially having paid $25 the day before for a Beninoise lady near the hostel (along with Jono) to braid my hair African-style. I was worried I’d be making some sort of unwelcome statement by walking around black neighbourhoods with ‘black hair’.

Langu had once remarked to me that she had once or twice had vague thoughts about moving to Australia but that it would be difficult being one of the only black girls in a white society. I didn’t relate to this statement until the three of us were walking and gradually there were no longer any Hispanics and white people around. I said to Langu, “I’m starting to understand how you would feel if you moved to Australia.” Later I moved to Bolivia and it became my own reality for a year.

I generally kept my head down and looked no one in the face. I did notice one guy looking at me with a puzzled, “What the hell is this guy doing here?” expression on his face. Yes, the area looked in bad repair but not that much more than the area our hostel was situated. I was grateful for Brandon’s presence in these moments, even though he wasn’t all that built, and no doubt Langu was too, although perhaps not in the same way I was. It had been his suggestion to take a look here in the first place. We wouldn’t be there by ourselves. I was tense.

I can’t remember which Avenue we were walking up. Checking the map a few years later, it was probably either Madison or Park Avenue, maybe Fifth. At roughly 120^th Street there was some sort of block or dead-end so we turned right. There was an empty street in front of us and we’d been waiting for the little green man for about ten seconds, like they do in Chicago, when Brandon suddenly said, “This is what makes us look like tourists: waiting at the light.” No one in New York needs anybody’s permission to cross the street whenever they feel like it. Even cops do it.

I remember a few of the comments he’d made while we’d been walking. One was about a ‘ghetto whistle’ – you whistle out the front of a building so that a friend pokes his head out the window or something, ’cause you never just go into a building you don’t know in the ghetto. Another was about an Ethiopian restaurant we walked past, with Brandon laughing and suggesting that some very shady things probably happened in there.

It was while we were walking East along one of the Streets that Brandon said, “Do you know why they call it the projects in the first place?” Langu replied that she would guess that it was a project set up by the authorities many years ago to assemble the black people in one section away from the rest of society. He told her that she was right.

“They conducted experiments on rats. If a community of rats were given everything they needed, food and those things, then things would stay the same with those rats. Then they started depriving the rats of enough food to feed everyone. So the rats would have to fight over what they had. And what they found was that with each new generation the rats would get meaner and meaner. Then they did it with humans.

“All these black people, they put them here, in this one section of town so that they don’t mix with white people and everyone else. And they are deprived of the jobs they need to survive. So they fight with each other, like the rats.

“They’ll grow up with other people just like them, but their attitude towards the people they live around and grow up with, people who are supposedly their friends, will be, ‘I’ll hang out with you but I won’t trust you any further than I can throw you.’

“It’s set up so that everything a black person might want is right here, so that they need never leave this little section of town.” He pointed around as we walked. “There’s your grocery store. There’s where you buy clothes. There’s your cinema, your entertainment.” He indicated a Chinese takeout. “There’s your foreign food if you wanted a bit of variety.”

Then his topic extended beyond what I could believe in but I was listening nonetheless. By this point we were heading down Lexington Avenue away from black Harlem, back in the direction of the hostel. This discussion was about things I’d never imagined before. It was also distracting me from the fear I’d been feeling. “Every major American city was set up with streets in a grid formation. That’s so that the army can easily roll right on through if necessary. No one can take over one section of the city. And one thing that every major city has is a stadium. It’s there so a lot of people can be assembled in one place if they need to.” He quoted a few NFL franchises that I was unsure about, being a semi-foreigner. “The Cleveland team moved to Baltimore because there was an increase in the number of black people there, so they needed a stadium. But then they realised that Cleveland was getting a lot more black people too, so they moved another new team back there. Things were all set up this way by the government, so that a black person can’t rise up out of their place.”

“But why would they do that?” I asked, head swimming. The words had just passed my lips when the incomprehension immediately cleared and I answered my own question. “So that they’re fighting each other instead of them,” meaning black people battle with each other instead of teaming up to focus their energies on the people in power.

I suddenly realised that I was so absorbed that since we’d started talking I had stopped looking around and taking in the sights of what was undoubtedly a once-only opportunity in my life. I felt a pang of regret over this. I looked around trying to make up for lost time, and with new eyes, too. I also realised that I’d been paying so much attention to Brandon that I had forgotten about being intimidated by Harlem. Thanks, Brandon.

Brandon wasn’t even an angry guy either, although he spoke about these subjects with understandable annoyance amid his conviction. Generally he was pretty upbeat, joking a lot with opinions coming to the fore. The minute I had met him he’d clicked off a list of what was wrong with the city of New York. How would a less jovial black person endure these disadvantages given from birth? Yes, I believed the majority of what he’d told me. Thinking about all the violence that happens in the ghetto, perpetrated by neighbour on neighbour, these theories made sense.

What did Langu make of all this? She did not volunteer anything. She simply listened to Brandon’s outpourings and my occasional questions. But being black and coming from the country that had once given rise to Apartheid, the subject may well have been up her alley.

She had told me a few weeks beforehand about a movie called Lumumba, which she said was a terrific one to watch if someone wanted a picture of Africa and its politics, colonialism, the whole package. She was now telling me that it had been on in the last week, while we were all in Chicago. The two of them had watched it at his apartment. “We grow up in ignorance,” Brandon said. “When would I have ever heard about Lumumba if not for her?”

We had made it back to our familiar Spanish Harlem surroundings. He was telling me about a job with a car garage that he had obtained and lost. “The second-in-charge hired me and told me that I’d be on this starting pay rate. Then I showed him that I could do this,” (he spoke in specifics as far as money and mechanic techniques go but I’ve forgotten what he said) “and they said, well, you’ve got yourself another x dollars per hour. Then I showed them this, and they said, that’s another so-and-so dollars per hour. Then a week later the boss came back. I was out the door. If I’d held on another month, the boss was fired for an indiscretion. But I’ve got a mark on my CV now. ‘Why was I fired so soon after starting?’ they’d be asking. And what can I do about it?” I hadn’t known that this sort of stuff was still happening. “Some people have a certain look when it comes to blacks, you can tell right away they don’t like them and don’t trust them. The boss was like that.” Langu nodded. “Our boss at camp was like that too,” she said. I was surprised. She’d never said anything negative about our boss before.

We walked towards the eastern extreme of Manhattan Island and reached the river. I’m reconciling all of these directions years later with a map that I obtained of the New York train system a year later, when I was back for a few days in late August 2004 (but on the Upper West Side, not really near East Harlem). On one score I can be very grateful to Brandon, and Langu as well. In most similar situations I’ve ever been with a guy and his girl the guy will generally pay me scant attention. Here Brandon had his last afternoon with Langu and yet he was talking mostly to me and showing me a lot of respect.

He asked Langu what she would want to achieve with herself once home. She said eventually to own her own business. Brandon said that that was the difference between black people in America and elsewhere. “Ambition?” I asked. “Yeah. Here a black guy will say, ‘I gotta get me a job.’ That’s all. She wants to own her own business.” And then there was a regret on his part, half spoken aloud and half not, that he would want to be a part of that. The goodbyes that year were a sore point for me too, more so than in 2004 when I repeated the experience.

We were heading back when Brandon mentioned something else to consider. “They never found the killers of Malcolm X or Martin Luther King. To this day no one has the slightest idea who did those killings. But everyone knows that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy. Why do they know about that but not the others?” His belief was that they were taken out from above, and for a reason. And/or that no one doing the ‘investigating’ wanted to find the murderers. I asked him how old Martin Luther King had been when he died. “I don’t know,” he said. He turned to the black woman who was the cop ushering us across the street (there must have been construction going on or something). “Excuse me! How old was Martin Luther King when he died?” “Huh?” She understandably wasn’t expecting the question and didn’t know either.

On the walk back to the hostel we stopped off at the front of an elementary school building so that Langu could use the bathroom. The two of us started to move with her as she headed towards the bathroom as a sort of instinctive protective measure, or maybe because we’d all been walking around for a few hours together and were in the habit. “Gentlemen?” the security guard who had given us directions, asked. He was right, it looked suspicious. We waited and talked to him about the controversy over what would be done with the 9-11 site. It was a painful issue for New York. He also asked how the three of us had all met. We were an unusual combination, even if the hair did make me look like a wannabe black dude. I think on our way back to the hostel we talked about 9-11 conspiracies. But conspiracy theories or not, it’s a common belief that the aeroplane that crashed in Pennsylvania was shot down by U.S. forces. Brandon also remarked about Harlem, “You hear so much about it, I just wanted to see what it was like. It wasn’t as bad as they say. Except for the drug deal those two guys were working out on the corner there, that wasn’t good.” He and Langu were laughing. I hadn’t noticed it. I’d probably been too busy keeping my head down.

We got dinner in the area and realised how ignorant we had been all week to get most of our food at neighbouring McDonald’s and KFCs when the local Chinese places were so cheap. Inside while eating it grew dark. We collected Jono back at the hostel (Who knows what he’d found to do for all that time? I’d never thought about it before now) and went once more to see the wall of lights at Times Square. The pure neon was enough for even Brandon to be impressed by New York despite his reservations that afternoon. He and I each bought a pamphlet for $1 off a young Asian guy that showed drawings of 452 different sexual positions. It seemed an “I’m in New York, why not?” thing to do. Brandon was even able to find a cousin who worked there at a McDonald’s or something. While he and Langu were inside finding the cousin Jono and I sat outside and ‘rated’ any and every female that walked past, “No matter how old or ugly they were.” When he suggested it I had to laugh. We were all splitting up the next day and I would be sorry to leave these moments. Then we rated all of our girls back at camp (the counsellors).

Brandon slept in his car parked around the corner that night. It wasn’t all that big either. We all split up at noon, after hanging around the pavement outside the hostel for the last half hour. This included Brandon, Langu, Jono, me and two others with us named Nigel and Becca from England who had done a lot of things on their own in Chicago and New York (Becca was his girlfriend who had come visit Nigel at camp in late August). They were all going home that day, but I would be staying in the U.S. for another month. I was on my way to Maryland that day, by bus. Langu went off with Brandon who would drive her to the airport for an afternoon flight. It was the last time I ever saw her. Nigel, Jono and Becca went in the opposite direction towards the subway for one more afternoon downtown. I believe they were all catching the same flight that evening, for London. With all of them gone the hostel was very empty for me. I packed my remaining stuff and got out of there quickly.

Brandon and I had intentions of seeing each other in Chicago when I would arrive back there later on, but it didn’t happen. Plans change when you’re abroad. The next year I painfully learned in an even more comprehensive manner that when you are overseas and say goodbye to a person (even if only for the evening and you’re assuming another meeting in the next few days), you can’t ever take it for granted that you’ll see that person again.

Zidane’s dead, he retired the second he planted that headbutt into Marco Materazzi in the 2006 World Cup Final. He was France’s excuse as a nation: they were always able to point to him and pretend that their country wasn’t falling apart on racial faultlines; to the way he had won France its World Cup in 1998 and were able to blindly say, “But look, even Algerians can make it to the top in France if they apply themselves.” Meanwhile the real Algerians remained marginalised and unemployed in shithole suburbs at the end of the Parisian and Marseille trainlines while CVs with Algerian (or Senegalese or any sort of Arab or African) names were proven in a French study to be immediately thrown into the bin by French employers.

I was fascinated by the French soccer team. Even though each game was a struggle, somehow they were winners. They were a motley collection of Algerians, Caribbeans, Africans, Frenchmen all who were mostly first or second generation. There was Patrick Vieira, the man who as an ex-Senegalese lined up for France in World Cup 2002 against, yes, Senegal, who themselves were a team full of first-generation Frenchmen. That’s postcolonialism for you. And Senegal won!

I couldn’t really get a read on Zidane as a soccer player. He thought better than other players, faster: he played soccer with a one-touch style (that is, thinking ahead so that he already knew where he would pass the ball even before he received it, thus moving the ball on with a single touch without maintaining possession). It’s a trait I admire and a way I always felt was the best way to play in my own shitty little soccer games. Zidane had an innate sense of the field, but he would sometimes fade in and out of games. My hero on the French team was not in fact Zidane but his ‘rival’ for the French team’s number one, Thierry Henry. Henry had an all-action style, always involved with the play, whereas Zidane didn’t know how to get his own ball, so that if he wasn’t supplied by other teammates he got lost.

People are seldom able to think as fast as Zidane, on field (and nor are there many who can think fast off it). Most players are ball-hogs, both at local level and internationally. Zidane and Henry did not gel that well, and in fact until Henry’s famous goal that killed Brazil at World Cup 2006 (see below) they had never combined for a French goal. They both existed as the French focus, separate but equal, tying France over for four tournaments without having much to do with each other.

I loved the French team back in the day. They were almost Latin in their elegance, almost Germanic in their pragmatic efficiency to win all of the close matches, almost African in their physical strength and, well, blackness, almost Italian in their defensive strength. I was not a Zidane fan as such but he was indisputably the man. Now that he’s gone I just can’t bring myself to care about France’s results anymore, their terrible Euro 2008.

When they won Euro 2000 against the hated Italian team (although I now admire Italy since they won WC 2006) after Italy were seconds away from winning I was utterly overjoyed by the way it had happened; the good guys had won. And then in 2006 after I was sure that France were now irrelevant and finished as a force they, and Zidane, turned the clock back out of nowhere and beat all the same teams that they had in 2000. It was as if God made deal just with me: you liked France’s 2000 so much, here it is all over again. They beat Spain again by scoring goals, by having it, a force which Spain, for all their pretty ball possession, did not have. They beat Portugal again with a Zidane penalty. They beat Brazil again (those arrogant pricks totally needed to be put in their place; France is their daddy). All that was left was to beat Italy in the Final again.

Zidane chipped a beautiful penalty in at the start of the 2006 World Cup Final. But after that Henry’s buzzing was the only x-factor of the standoffish match. Ten minutes from the end Zidane’s header was saved by the Italian goalkeeper. If it had gone in Zidane would have been the two-goal hero just like 1998, France would be World Champions again completely against the formguide and my life would have been just wonderful. But it got saved and three minutes later he headbutted Materazzi and was sent off. In spirit that moment was the end of the 2006 World Cup; the penalty shootout afterwards felt oddly empty even as it was happening. There wasn’t a chance in hell that France would win the penalty shootout after all that.

He was the French team. When he trudged past the World Cup trophy on display as he was sent off, there trudged off the French team with him, leaving a bunch of ghosts to take the penalties. And then Italy won – think about how many trillions of times anyone has ever kicked a ball anywhere; Fabio Grosso’s winning penalty was the single most important kick of all of them, ever – and I quietly turned off the TV. I couldn’t bear to see the rest, the Italian happiness.

Zidane was from Marseille. Did he come from a place where you just don’t let insults against one’s sister slide, damn the consequences (even when the World Cup is on the line in the next ten minutes)? He must have had some sort of anger within him, a need to achieve, driving his career. I think most top athletes – apart from the insanely gifted ones like Roger Federer – have something fierce inside them, something that needs to set them apart from others, at the expense of others particularly. It actually wasn’t the first time that Zidane headbutted someone in his career.

Oh well. At least they all have 1998 and 2000. It’s funny talking about Zidane and Henry both underachieving in their insanely successful careers but those twin French victories came so early in their careers that I have to wonder if there will still be regrets for each of them.