S3:E5. Rope, burns and burgers

I make it to the casino.  The dirty-clean and artificially sparkling place with river views and buffet for miles, lobsters and strawberries and heavy chairs and everyone in Sunday best.  In homage to all this I am in cheap fake fur and velvet and animal print. I am deliberately under brushed under slept and over made-up.  My friend uncle and his bride,  and their friends (no one I recognise) are all a glow.  The palette is pale. I circle the buffet and, nervous in wonderland, grab tuna from a platter the moment it lands.  I am seated across from a guy. Uncle’s brother.  It slowly dawns on me that I know this brother as a Lounge regular, but I had no idea he was related to Uncle.  I can’t begin to explain Lounge to you here, find it in another book.  Let’s just say it was a nightclub, it was my university, it was my den of rogues. 

I have resisted looking into the personal life of Miyamoto Musashi, but this brother looks like someone who knows.  I tell him about my project.

Ah poor Musashi, he sighs.  He had a terrible life and a bitter end. Forced to become a hermit, alone in a cave.

How so?

He got his reputation as a kid. First kill at 13. From then on, everybody wanted to take him on.  He lived in the shadows, in a life of perpetual threat.

Then the brother eyeballs me directly:

So you work serving tea to old people. Who’s your favourite?

I don’t have a favourite.  I try to see everyone equally.

Cut the crap.  Drop the veils. Tell me the truth.

The truth? You really want to know?

It’s something I am ashamed to admit.  Don’t quite have the right words for.  So I just let it out.

I like serving tea to people as they are dying.

Now you’re talking, he says.

Later, I congratulate Uncle on his mystery brother.  Ah yes, he muses, little brother. Was in the army, never the same, IT now.

I stay with Uncle and his bride.  We wander through the halls of the pleasure dome and window shop diamonds in formations made for 12 year old girls – cold hard ribbons and bows. We are driven through the city, take tea, visit a Brazilian designer, buy a dress, drop out at the top of Little Bourke Street.  The new dress is thick corduroy – in tan and gold. It has heavy sleeves so I take the green plastic fur and wear it around my neck like a stole. A huge muff.  The crowd is bustling hard through China Town but this ensemble is enough to grab some stares.  Me, woman, 52, has just begun to taste what it is to be invisible. This visibility makes me cackle (inwardly of course).

I’m meeting Annalee at Elio’s Place.  I have asked her permission.  My newfound Cousin-In-Arms is coming too. 

Orright orright I’ll come I’ll have a shower I’ll be breaking the laws of the land risking my freedom to come I’ll have you know…where are you I’m close, not far….that’s you? In the dress? You look like a pumpkin. A lovely great pumpkin. How are ya mad thing.  D’you think I could have a beer?  Nice here, nice place….and so our night is defined by a man at war.   With himself, with his own chemistry, with the chemistry of any number of drugs, with ancient history, with recent history, with family history, with women and men (but not other animals), with the system, all the systems, with the colonisers, with the locals, with the government, with the council, with the police and with the private security guards.  Did we know that Melbourne City is now patrolled by private guards?  Young ones, with no experience.  He rises up and shouts, then drops to the ground, then rises up again.  One fist rises to the air, clutching for the heavens.  And again and again.  We are at Annalee’s place now, the one we call The Sweet Crib, for her warmth and welcome and wall of records and all the medicine she offers.

At 2.00am I leave him back on the corner of Flinders Lane and Elizabeth.  There is no passionate crashing hollering end to the night.  Between us, there never will be.  I get a flashback to something I did in college and a panicked-looking young gent imploring:

Please girls….no… please…. girls stop! It’s just not that sort of party.

My friend burnt a smiley face into his arm with the hot bit of a lighter. He was scarred for life, and wrote about it in the student union newspaper.  That was in the grunge bit, before the rave virus hit.  Before all the things, but not before my friend had been casually raped in a garden shed down the back of another kind of party. We must talk of these things, if we are to talk of war.  War begins early. 

Live this long, and you start to get an idea which kind of party is which.  Not every encounter needs to be slathered over with romantic fallacy/possibility/butter cream.  What happens when chemistry is thrown into the crucible of your quest?  Glancing back to the Book of Five Rings, Miyamoto outlines the importance of understanding structures and all the roles people play within them.  He describes the people and processes at work in the building of a house: what kind of wood is used for construction, what kind for decoration; the architects, the owners, the foremen, the carpenters, and so on.  When the fire comes, you need to know exactly who you are and where you are. You are ready.

It’s a short walk back to The Rendezvous, and a micro nap between me and the train out of town, but I am alive, alive, alive.

Back at the grind, down in the place they call Bottom Kitchen, I chuck a tub of cutlery into the sink.  We set the tables with sharp serrated knives. There’s a heap of them in this batch.  So many black-handled sharp serrated short swords.  They seem to me to be a picture of every small battle in this place.  My battle is to clean a fistful of blades and return them, shining, to the person who will struggle to use them to cut soft meat. I grab the handles of four of five knives at a time and scrub the blades as quickly and as carefully as I can.  It’s important to pick out the knives first, and get them in order, before tackling the forks and motley spoons. I am in service to the short swords.

Before too long, it’s 2.00am again and I am sitting on a kerb just one skip north of the city.  Back in my old patch.  I’ve worked a full shift up north in the small town, climbed into the car at 10.00pm and sailed down the empty freeway in one smooth slipstream.  Going in the right direction takes no energy at all.  By 3.00am, we – the warrior and I -  are standing at the counter of The Embassy Café.   The Embassy has been here forever, 23/7.  It’s dirty white, two storey, big forecourt, used to be the HQ for Embassy Taxis.  It is also the perfect place to meet a raging guy with a very short mohawk for a  burger with the lot.  It was once staffed by ladies with big hair and big eyeliner.  Now, we are being served by a couple who seem barely old enough to flip burgers, barely old enough to be an item, and yet old enough to be here in the forever neon, the forever dark, just before dawn.  And the burger is everything, as a 3.00am burger with the lot should be.

There is a lot of talk and maybe two hours sleep between this burger moment and us, up 42 storeys and on the roof of a city building.

You see it’s not strictly legal for me to be up without a spotter. Someone to call the fire brigade you know, if anything goes sideways and I get caught up.  Won’t be long, just have to put a bit of stuff on the leak. Here, put this on (passes helmet), go down to 12 and hold the ropes apart would ya. You don’t have to, but you could. See you in a bit then.

And over he goes. 

Miyamoto Musashi writes of the various ways that a person may follow.  The way of the pen, the way of the artisan, the way of the farmer, the way of Tea, the way….you get the drift.  A few years ago, when I had a kind of a trade store in The Small Town, a deceased estate come to me.  The departed uncle had been an accountant for a Melbourne rope company.  His Burberry trench coats, smokers kick-knacks and pottery quickly found homes.  His rope collection did not.  It included some particularly lovely hemp sash rope, still coiled and paper-wrapped.  I did an internet search on hemp rope…. And a whole new way opened up before me.

For me, the path of the way of rope was a quiet one to follow – through the photographic gateway which is the work of “the father of kinbaku” Ito Seiu, past the horrors of post war submission in Japan and the cheap tricks of modern online fetish, and into a quiet (but prickly) meditation space.    It peaked when a particularly pleasing pattern was worked out across my torso with a hot pink length of Bunnings tie down rope just as the youngest child hopped out of bed and wandered down the hallway seeking maternal attention, and water…leading to the re-discovery of quick release trucker knots…leading ever onwards….

To now. Me. Holding the soft black rope for a guy who is two knots away from plunging 42 storeys. Teetering with vertigo myself, gulping the cold hard sunlit winter air.

Alive, alive, alive. One knot at the top, and one on the harness.  Wind and glass and the two black ropes billowing out across the city and back.

We move through the day, and the city, in the same way.  It's the way that has driven my nearest and dearest to distraction and beyond.  It’s a zig zag of needs, plans and moments, led by the scent of the wind, the flutter of cash, the glances of strangers and traders and the arms of old friends.  To be crystal clear, this is our list:

Coffee and Bahn Mih

Fix leak in windows on floors 42-20.

Scream and howl loud as a hobo about social injustice on Russell and Spring Street

Pick up silk twill dress made by The Vampires Wife from Christine On Collins

More hollering

Beer and a Lime Soda at The Windsor downstairs bar

Visit High Court and Police HQ for paperwork

Drop in on My Friend in Black and smoke a lot of cigarettes indoors

Pick up The Warrior from a lawyer type bar.

Get a guitar out of hock in South Melbourne

Get burritos in Richmond

Attempt and fail to obtain self-medicatory substances

Drive a million miles through peak red light traffic to Camberwell to pick up four evening gowns, vintage perfume miniatures and an astrakhan coat

Pick up five artworks from a Victoria Street Gallery

Get tacos.

Go to West Melbourne to visit Socrates.

Wait. What? Socrates?

And that, my dear listening friend, marks the beginning of your next chapter.