God’s comic

On the cathedral there is a statue of a woman. She holds a pilgrim’s staff in one hand, in the other a torch. Her eyes are wrapped in cloth so she cannot see. Our tour guide, Sandra, with her red umbrella, small Madonna mic and red speaker swinging from her belt, who we followed for two hours around Santiago yesterday, told us the statue represents faith.

Now, inside the church, I wait for mass to start. You and your Mum are currently lining up to view the tomb of St James, to kiss his statue, something I have already done. Well, not the kissing part, but I did place my forehead against the cold stone shell on his back. That’s all you get to see when you file past because the front of him is facing outwards into the cathedral and the path, which goes under the altar to the tomb then weaves around behind it, is separated from the rest of the space by wooden bars.

It’s a strange procession, an antline inching down into dark stone passages, up narrow stairs, looking out into the vastness of the cathedral through railings and secret vantage points. As though we’d stolen our way back there, furtively, carefully, lining up to steal a secret kiss from a saint.

Now I want to reiterate again that I didn’t kiss the saint, I’m not Madonna (a reference that will be explained when you see the Like a Prayer music video). I just laid my brow on the shell on the back of his head. But I did linger. I felt the pull of the experience, as though my head were being drawn down, and I took time to reflect on the path we’d taken to reach that place. Not the antline, but the longer one that stretched out across the last month like a ribbon pulled out of me. We’d followed the same shell for weeks, finding it crudely swiped in yellow paint onto rocks and buildings, on the road beneath out feet, or nailed to a tree, painted on a piece of tin. It was a symbol I didn’t know much about when we started but which came to represent everything about the camino by the time I finished.

I became aware of the person shuffling behind me when I laid my head upon the sculpted stone. The antline was waiting for me to move on and the church had positioned someone there to monitor our progress, ready I guess to ask people to move on, in case anyone might linger too long or become too emotional with the back of this saint’s bust. Like I said that person wasn’t me but as I lowered my head I wanted to feel something. I wanted to stop there for a while, to not disregard this procession, this object, this act of devotion. I pressed my forehead to the cold stone and felt the vertiginous pull of the shell as I yoked myself to the memory of our journey and I wanted to stay but, after what seemed like only a breath, I straightened up and moved on.

Saint James. Saint Jacques in French. Iago in Italian. In Spanish it’s the same, hence Santiago. The city is named for him. So said Sandra of the Madonna mic yesterday, in her tinny amplified voice as we raised our heads to observe the paths of stars and statues and saints and hermits and apostles and kings lining the streets and buildings around us. She said this city exists because of the pilgrimage, it is built for pilgrims.

During the tour we felt proud because the group was a mix of tourists and peregrinos and Sandra mentioned the efforts of the pilgrims often. She honoured our travels and our commitment to the journey we had taken, and we saw that the city did too when she revealed it to us.

And I think,

we have inched our way here, across the face of the earth, through deep dirt paths.

Like worms.

Worms are blind, so is the statue of the woman who represents faith, is that what we are? Or aspire to be? One hole for eating, the other for shitting, not much in between, coiling ourselves through the earth, prostrated before something we cannot see, can barely imagine.

The church is filling with the faithful. And the less so. Tourists gawk at everything like it’s a sideshow and I feel strangely protective of the devoted among us. I watch you return from the crypt and climb in next to me on our wooden pew. I shuffle over until I come into contact with the person next to me, head bowed already, hands clasping the wood of the seat in front. The pews are filling up and I’m glad we got here early because we are in a great position to watch the mighty Botafumeiro incense burner swing, if it does swing today.

Sandra of the red umbrella told us the Botafumeiro stands at over a metre tall and takes eight men to swing it. It reaches speeds of over seventy kilometres per hour as it passes over the altar and was built originally to fumigate the noxious odours of the pilgrims, to cleanse them because they were so filthy from their travels. It swings side to side across the transept of the church which means it will pass, if they swing it today, directly above our heads.

It’s not scheduled to do so, but that doesn’t necessarily matter. They only swing it on special days of the year but when Sandra of the red belt asked the group if anyone had already seen it, they all seemed to say yes. That’s because you can pay 400 euros for the privilege and in a church as packed as this one is, with large groups who have travelled halfway across the world and walked at least 100 kms to get here, like crawling, creeping worms, chances are not bad that someone will cough up.

There is an excitement building as more and more people enter. We got here early, originally thinking we would just have a look and then leave, but you’ve been pretty enthralled with the glamour of it all, so we stayed for midday mass. Every now and again, when the excitement translates into too many voices, a nun steps up to a microphone behind the small wooden fence that separates the altar from the rest of us, and declares “Silencio”. Her amplified voice pushes out into every part of the cathedral, that enormous cross of stone, and I lean over and and ask you how the crypt was. “Pretty good” you tell me. I ask if you hugged the bust of the saint and you say you put your hands on it “like this,” putting your hands forward, palms facing up.

We have a short whispered conversation about God and I mention a book I once read called The Name of The Rose, by Umberto Eco which, apart from being a medieval murder mystery, also debates whether Christ had a sense of humour. Together we try to make up some Jesus jokes without being sacrilegious.

Jesus doing stand up on the cross, you offer as a suggestion. Or the devil to his demons, “hot in here or what?” You catch yourself and look around. “Is that ok?” You worry. I reassure you it’s fine although, to be honest, who knows?

The mass will start soon. The nun is lighting candles, her voice rings out “Silencio”, the lights are changed to draw attention towards the altar. Everything is sombre, charged with ritual older than I can imagine. Above us I see the Botafumeiro hanging from its platted rope getting ready to perform its duties, we hope. To purify, to cleanse. As Sandra of the squeaking speaker pointed out yesterday, the camino might have been difficult and uncomfortable for us, but in the middle ages many pilgrims would die along the route and by the time the survivors arrived in the city they were diseased, filthy, nearly destroyed by their efforts. There were no alburgues on their path, no donativos, cafes, ice creams, cafe con leches, foot massages, luggage services, horses. Only suffering and exaltation.

You look up at the ceiling. We’ve been in here for nearly three hours but, surprisingly, you are still into it. You tell me it’s one of the most amazing places you’ve ever been. Apparently the graphic nature of Spanish Catholic symbolism and storytelling appeals to you.

“Does God have a sense of humour?” you ask.

“I think so.” I say.

You think about it. A voice calls “Silencio” and the chatter in the cathedral dips. The air is rife with symbolism, anticipation, the charged nature of ritual. In the quiet you lean over to whisper into my ear.

“Living eternally,” you tell me, “you’d want to have a sense of humour.”

The trees tell me it’s time to stop walking

Re-emerging. Coming back from an experience defined by its relentlessness.

I’ve been suffering the last 2 days, trudging instead of walking, feeling the effort of every step. But today I recognise the closing of this particular path, the way the trees draw tight around us, shielding the hum of the motorway that has become an ever present companion these last few days into Santiago. The sky darkens and presses on us and in this darkness we walk down a hill into a forest of eucalypts.

The smell of them dislocates me because it takes me home, to Australia. I think of the choices we made to return there from Germany ten years ago, when you were born, your Mum ferrying you across continents at 6 months. I still remember watching her dance on the main stage in Freiburg before we left, the weight of you distending her belly and her balance, pitching us forward into a future we now inhabit.

A future tied to a land of eucalypts.

They rise up differently from the forests we’ve been walking through. These gums are prized for the way they thrust themselves into the light, for the verticality of their timber. I heard they’re used in the textile industry but for what, I’m not sure, only that they seem to be everywhere in this part of Spain.

This is not the only country they’ve been exported to, we saw them all over Peru when we travelled there B.U. (Before You). Our guide, a local Inca descendant with a upper body like a beer barrel, told us they were a real problem, they were too thirsty and drank up the water table because a tree used to arid conditions takes everything it can.

That seems less of a problem here…

The wind shifts through a grove of towering gums and I recognise the sound. I feel myself being called, a song for the end of this path. Tomorrow we reach Santiago, tonight we sleep 10 kms away from it. If we stay up late enough to see it, the city’s lights will fill the cloudy sky with white noise.

I wonder how old these trees are? The gums were planted purposefully this century I assume, but the others, the twisted and gnarled woods, the occasional large tree that splits the soil and rises between stone walls, how long? How many pilgrims have these trees witnessed walking along these path? Our feet falling on the dirt, steps thrumming through their roots, buried deep, mute witnesses to our passing.

As I have this thought I realise I don’t know if I’m ready for any of this to end. It seems sudden after the endlessness of our path, but it is a moot point because tomorrow we will arrive. We will complete the walk. We will be carried home in the belly of a plane. I will go back to work. I will remember. We will make a book of photos of our trip. We will talk about it together, for a while, to try to hold onto it.

You will tell everyone we forced you to do it.

This will never happen again. These steps will never be taken from us.

This is the camino of our lives, nursing our hurts, our loves, carrying our hopes, packed and strapped to our backs. Foot sore. We go.

The trees whisper it

We go blindly. The rain collects in the emptiness and falls upon the page before us.

They know

Each foot falls. No longer trumpeting explosions of dust. In the creeks water bends and fractures, each raindrop descending and making a perfect circle, perfectly expanding into the next.

Venn diagrams of us.

Sorry to bring science into it…

The trees whisper it

We are walking together, often apart. You. Me. Your Mum. Us.

There will be no end.

One day my ashes carried in your arms, like that film with Martin Sheen.

Sorry to bring Hollywood into it…

The aircraft are close now as we walk around the airport for the final descent down the hill. Factories spew the horizon. Fog wraps the valley, the trees thrust out of it, the crowns of their heads lost. Somewhere in the valley ahead of us is the place where we finish.

The beginning of our next camino.

The trees whisper it

The trees know.

Beneath and between

Halfway.

Suspended between two points. The place where we started and the (imagined) place where we end.

Yesterday we crossed the mountains, falling down the broken shale of the western side into the sun, into the haze of light that drew out the shape of the next range, across the valley. We slept that night in a five star peregrino resort. Bunk beds with a side order of swimming pool, valley views, communal dinner, lawn chairs. 12 euros only. Was it a front? A dream? At least that when we dragged ourselves over its threshold, the dust still settling from our suffering shoes, dirtying the pristine terracotta tiles.

Today we’re slowing down. A short walk to a medieval town with a swimming hole of fallen rainwater collected by an ancient weir at the foot of a stone bridge. It’s a beautiful town, a real star of the Camino, a place to stop and rest. To collect thoughts the way the weir collects water. Drop by drop as they run down the valley.

Springs and streams.

Runnels and puddles.

Collecting into something vaster and deeper.

I can’t see the bottom but after an awkward towel change into my togs, I dive in, hands ahead of me, reaching into the blackness, into the unreadability of what I am experiencing.

Halfway.

Caught between.

For this moment there is no need to surface, to take stock.

No need to understand any of it, just to be immersed.

To dive deep.

Not seeking either the surface, where I re-emerge, or the bottom, where the fallen pebbles lie.

The water is cold.

Frio.

My skin thrums with it.

My fingers tingle.

Land of the lotus eaters

Where your treasure lies, that’s where your heart be.

Those words are written on a piece of green paper in a little black bag that’s slung across my shoulder like a sash. The paper was given to me as a token at the end of a pilgrim’s mass, our first on the Camino, and the bag is always with me because it contains our passports, credit cards, a notepad and pen, our most important items. It’s across my shoulder now as we sit in another mass, in the town of Sahagun, in the chapel of the monastery we are staying, where the priest is again talking about treasure.

Where is your treasure?

Maybe God is trying to tell me something. I haven’t done a lot of mass but everytime I do these words seem to crop up. The first time I was asked that particular question was at the Harlem Gospel Church in New York, when I was in my 20’s touring with a dance company. I think it was summer but maybe that’s a result of watching too many Spike Lee movies. Inside the church was a preacher who knew Jesse Jackson, a gospel choir, locals and tourists packed side by side in the heat, and those words, half spoken, half sung, bellowing through the congregation. They had an impact on me, even as my fellow dancer and I attempted to exit the service early, bypassing a profoundly menacing look from the woman next to us.

She told me “no you aint.” and I told her “but I have to...” in a voice that was not big, and did not bellow. It whimpered out of me attempting to explain the pressure I was under to go to a lunch with a Brooklyn Academy of Music donor. We had been instructed not to be late, the lunch was very important and the service seemed to be going on and on.

Yeah I knew exactly where my treasure lay. In keeping my job.

We caught a taxi out of Harlem and arrived fashionably late to the ‘meet the artists’ brunch at a house on the edge of Central Park. A huge house it turned out, with a carriageway, nannies and servants, where the children were displayed then removed when you weren’t looking. A house where the staff shook their heads if you tried to strike up a conversation.

Where is your treasure?

We will leave this town tomorrow by crossing a stone bridge, the Puenta del canto (Bridge of songs), built in 1085. Charlemagne apparently fought the Muslims here. They came across the bridge at night and surprised the French who fled, sticking their spears into the mud as they ran. A forest of poplars grew where the spears were stuck, we’ll walk through it in the morning.

Inside the church the priest explains the Camino is a pilgrimage, not a hike.

What makes a pilgrimage? That feels active, not an external thing, a choice made consciously. The priest mentions whittling down your belongings to what you can carry on your back. Yes, that helps, to reduce to necessity what you have, each item in our packs weighed, measured for its service, looked over, considered. I pat my black bag protectively and our passports, wallet, kindle, notebook and Grip Plus Faber Castell Clutch Pencil (TM) move around under the weight of my hand.

Inside the church the figures of Mary, Jesus and the saints twist through gold, framing the darkness. I am sitting before them, we both are, you under duress. I feel your impatience like a ticking, fidgeting clock.

They speak the Lord’s prayer in Spanish with thickened English translations obscuring the words underneath. After a while your Mum approaches the altar to place the wafer on her tongue. The two of us stay sitting, watching the procession of locals and pilgrims who present themselves before the altar of Christ.

We are outside this ritual, starved of its fulfilment, because neither of us is baptised. Not that the priest would know but I assume it would be sacrilege to take communion. Your leg kicks the pew in front and I put out a hand to still it. I imagine the wafer on my tongue, the cheap tastelessness of it as food versus the richness of its symbolism, the hypothetical flavour filled with both yearning and judgement. I am outside this ritual yet somehow still involved in its trappings, caught in the gold filigree and incense smoke, transported across the vaulted ceilings as I watch. I recall how we were compelled to learn the Lord’s Prayer at school, I still know it word for word, just as I know the Jabberwock poem from Alice in Wonderland.

When your Mum returns to us from the clump of people in front of the altar, I see her holding the wafer in her mouth, letting it dissolve. The ancient being absorbed in the present, assimilated on her tongue, a ritual that has been passed down over hundreds of years, now housed beneath the vaulted roof of her mouth.

It strikes me as a very sensuous ritual, the placing of the wafer. I see that there is a choice to be made, whether to take it from the priest in your own hand or let him place it upon your tongue with his hands. I look at your Mum and for a moment I have impure thoughts (forgive me father), but it passes and I look around the church to distract myself.

I can’t meet the eyes of any of the saints.

Not Caravaggio, take another look...

Where your treasure lies, that’s where your heart be. Where is your treasure?

Sitting in my pew, head bowed beneath the gaze of the saints, I realise there is one thing in my pack that is unnecessary. A heavy item not used day to day, that’s not even been touched at all in the last week. It’s your first novel, purchased in Barcelona at the train station before we boarded the train to Burgos. Read twice by you, it now lies forgotten in my pack, replaced by the kindle.

You don’t want me to leave it behind and neither do I even though the weight is notable. It’s your first ‘real’ book. You’ve always been a reader but it’s taken a while to wean you off comics. Since you opened this on the train to Burgos you’ve read four other novels by David Walliams and have now graduated to the Percy Jackson series.

My own first novel was a retelling of The Odyssey for younger readers. I can still recall how it felt in my hands. I remember the characters, the Cyclops searching the wool of his sheep after Ulysses has blinded him. The lotus eaters, Circe, Scylla, Charydbus, fantasies and myths now woven into my flesh, my life. I hear the sucking of the sea, whirlpools in my imaginations, as giant tentacles snatch sailors from the decks of passing ships. I am tied to the mast screaming to be released, pleading, crying, on an odyssey of my own. My life in words. A book I remember ordering from book club, waiting for it to arrive and then tearing into the package, greedy for the fabulous stories it held inside. A book titled for the Roman name of its main character instead of the traditional Greek.

Ulysses.

Your middle name.

You’ve asked us a few times why we called you that and we’ve given you lots of answers. It’s a name that exists in your Mum’s family tree for instance. Also Samuel Ulysses Webber sounds cool, like a poet or a jazz musician. And it’s because of another book called Ulysses which I bought after winning a creative writing prize in Year 10 (just to mention).

Ulysses, or Odysseus as he is known by the original Greek name, was a traveller like you. 10 years to arrive home after the Trojan war. Wily, creative, full of pride (maybe) and questionable choices (undoubtedly) but courageous and favoured by the Gods. In the Merriam-Webster dictionary it states “an odyssey is any long, complicated journey, often a quest for a goal, and may be a spiritual or psychological journey as well as an actual voyage.” The Odyssey, Homer’s tale of Odysseus, is one of the oldest pieces of literature in existence.

The mass ends and I tell you not to say anything out loud in your relief, which you can tend to do. Like Ulysses calling out his name to the blind cyclops Polyphemus and getting himself in all sorts of trouble with Poseidon, you say things aloud that would be better kept under wraps. Released from mass you jump up and race outside and we all stand and start to file out of the church. We’ll go for a walk to get an icecream and some supplies for the communal dinner we will have with the brothers and other pilgrims before hitting our bunk beds for the night. Your Mum smiles, her wafer long gone and we walk out into a late afternoon sun that never seems to set. It doesn’t get dark until 11pm. We are always in bed long before that and wake up after sunrise so this particular odyssey is happening in eternal daytime.

You skip ahead. You’re so much faster already than you used to be, calf muscles outline the back of your legs where, with some pride, I notice your pilgrim’s tan, a browning at the back of the legs as our pilgrimage takes us west, followed by the sun. Tomorrow we will shoulder our packs and cross the bridge of songs heading towards Leon, where we’ll rest for a couple of days before we start to climb. The mountains wait, as does Galicia, land of fog and rain. Inside my bag will be a treasure, wrapped and cared for, an entirely unnecessary item which I carry willingly into a future I know little about.

The sudden weight of a single stone

I died on the plains.

On the Meseta.

Like I was meant to.

Meseta. A word with bite, two softnesses before the teeth and tongue take the end off. Like Nabokov. Bitten.

And now at the top, before the cross, the Cruz de Ferro, I contemplate the tradition of leaving something behind. I have my stone. A chip of quartz, an arrow head, sharp enough to draw blood. In my palm it points away. A way. The way.

What should I leave? My fear? Yes, I hope. The need to please? Please. Looking for approval perhaps? What do you think?

The idea of a world that is dangerous? Yes, that.

The sharpness of thoughts in my palm, I imagine them going. My hand opening as if it held something else, a flower perhaps, released into a stream, gravity running it downhill, into the blue haze of the plains. There to rest, my stone flower, petals shearing off, settling on the bank somewhere unknown.

I let it go. It drifts away from me, even as the rest of the world collects around my feet.

On the way to Cruz de Ferro, we stop on the track and take our stones from our pockets. We talk about what we want to leave behind, at the top of the hill. What things we will leave at the cross, burnt from us as we walked across the open plains below.

You decide you don’t want to leave the rock you’ve chosen because you like it and want to keep it.

“What about taking that one?” Your Mum suggests, pointing at a rock at the side of the path. You agree and bend down to pick it up, your rucksack shifting as you do so, threatening to spill its contents. You stand back up and we keep walking, still talking about what to leave.

“My toenails.” You say.

“Yes!” We both jump on the thought too eagerly.

“Let go of the fear of cutting your toenails.” Your Mum says.

“Good one.” I add.

“No.” You respond. “ Let go of my toenails. Then I won’t have to cut them.”

…

We keep walking. We are surrounded by green, shaded now and again by trees. Moss hangs off them, cobwebs of it like sea mist on the masts of old boats. Trees like boats. A flotilla of them sailing across a mountaintop. The rain has stopped and the sun is again blazing heat into the day. Not the heat of the plains though. It’s softer. More humid. We clutch our stones, carry them as we climb the hill. The road snakes around just below us but up here cars are few. We are suspended momentarily, out of touch with the rest of the world. We keep talking, tossing around the things we want to leave behind as if they are light, easy to discard.

Fears. Expectations. Dissatisfactions. Their weight is variable but up here, where the trees float on the green sea grass and the sky opens over us, anything is possible.

We keep walking because that’s what we do these days. The rain has stopped but you still have your raincoat on. You swish when you walk and look a bit like a plastic hobbit. A hobbit named Sam. Your head swishes towards mine and you peer out from your hood. Your face is serious.

“You won’t leave me behind?” You ask.

“Never Sam.” I say. “I will always carry you with me.”

Are you the Baby Jesus?

Hey Sam,

I’m not a religious person. I wasn’t raised that way and I don’t identify with any particular religious order, I’m not even baptised. Neither are you actually but there is one distinct difference between us. You go to a Catholic school.

Your Mum went to a Catholic School and she says there were Nuns, but not the flying type that I imagine. Her nuns were grounded and must have been nice enough because your Mum also says that, for a hot minute in her youth, she wanted to be one. If we ever spot a nun in the real world, your Mum is always keen to look at them, to check them out, as if they are an example of a life she might have lived. A life, I guess, that wouldn’t have involved either you or me. From your perspective it would have sucked actually, because you wouldn’t have been born, but all of this is still not the reason that we have sent you to a Catholic School.

The real reason for that was that we heard the school was good and kind, and since sending you there, considering the difficulty you have with fitting into our education system, we think it’s a pretty good choice. Ok, we’ve been conflicted at times but despite me not being baptised and your Mum not a nun, we have been mostly happy with the religious aspects of your education. We just tempered the overtly Christian side of things with visits to Buddhist and Hindu temples and mosques when we travelled. In Singapore we took you to the Hell Museum, in India to the Hare Krishnas, and on the way to school, on the back of our electric bike, we listened to Black Sabbath’s War Pigs.

The whole spectrum.

Despite this there was one moment, in grade one, where you came home from school and declared you were the Baby Jesus. I was Joseph, your Mum Mary, three of our artistic collaborators, the three wise men, and your uncle Grayson, the donkey. I worried (Grayson also a little bit) but it was really only a passing phase. You didn’t hold onto the whole Baby Jesus thing but now, approximately

400

kilometres into our camino, since you received three gifts from strangers, I’m beginning to wonder if we should have paid more attention.

Last night we stayed in the Ermita de San Nicolas, a 13th century church by the side of the way, a medieval stone building that squats next to the camino like a… well, like a church…

It’s just before a bridge which crosses a small reedy river and a dirt road which heads into the next town. We’d read about this church before we came and wanted to stay there, even though we knew they only had 12 beds and that we would inevitably arrive late when it was already full. It was a donativo, a donation based pilgrim hostel that can’t be reserved in advance. On the Camino there are different accomodation options, ranging from expensive hotels to simple bunk beds, sometimes with forty plus people in one room. You can book ahead for some but others are on a first come, first served basis, prioritising walking pilgrims over people on bikes or horses. That includes the donativos which usually serve a communal dinner as well. It’s an old custom, to feed and house the weary pilgrims on their way to Santiago.

At this church there were two old Italian brothers. I say brothers, even though I think they were just volunteers, because they looked a bit like brothers and felt a bit like monks. We turned up late, which wasn’t unusual for us because our pace was slower, much slower, than most. We walked later in the day also because we never got away as early. Even when we tried it was always 8am by the time we hit the road and most people were long gone by then because, as we discovered, pilgrims like to leave early to get the walking done before it gets too hot.

Smart plan.

By the time we were approaching the church it was getting late. You had developed a habit of going slower the closer we got to our destination, so that our goals had a way of turning into exponential nightmares of distance, drawing further away from us the closer we got to them. It was as though we entered some kind of quantum physics calculus where you multiply the exhaustion of a ten year old against the degree of kilometres walked and time spent, adding in a factor of zig zagging across the path, doubling the distance by adding legs half the size.

On this day you’d started limping and we were trying to keep you distracted so you wouldn’t notice. You and I had already co-created our first Netflix series, The Thistle Man. It’s about a young man called Kevin, who hates his parents, is turned into The Lord of Weather after a drunk Zeus accidentally drops a lightning bolt out of the sky and down onto his family’s farm, where it strikes young Kevin on the head while he is out doing chores. At the same time another boy (note to examine the gender bias before we get to pitching stage), who has lost his father (of course) falls asleep in a mushroom patch after ditching his Mum on a bush walk and, due to a toxic waste spillage by a truck driver (gender unknown) who is momentarily distracted by the blinding flash of a lightning bolt in the distance (see the link up?), becomes The Mushroom Man.

The Lord of Weather and The Mushroom Man hate each other and the world is in the balance.

But in a mid to late season twist, neither of these super heroes is our actual protagonist. That role falls to a young thistle plant that Kevin was trying to kill with weed spray when the lightning bolt hit. Bits of bolt deflected off Kevin and landed on the thistle plant, bringing it to consciousness. Over the course of the first season The Thistle Man (definite gender bias), becomes a sidekick to the human super heroes, learning their ways and slowly crafting his own plans to destroy the human world because he is sick of being treated as a weed.

“What’s so good about fucking flowers? Huh?” (Ok, I didn’t swear on the Camino, but I feel like we could pitch this as The Boyz meets Plants versus Zombies. Give it an R rating, make it edgy, just a thought…)

The Ermita sits all by itself. When I first saw it I had walked ahead, you were zig zagging  and limping and your Mum had taken up the role of chief distractor. I crested a hill and saw the building that we knew had no electricity, but the brothers cook for you by candlelight and, in an ancient ritual, wash your feet.

Yes that’s right, they wash your feet. We didn’t tell you that part at the time, just booked you in when you limped down the hill. They were booked out (of course) but took pity and let us sleep in camp beds on the nave, the raised platform before the altar and, while dinner was boiling away, they gathered us altogether in a semi circle. One spoke a prayer while the other removed the socks and shoes from our right feet, poured some water from a chalice (have to use that word), wiped it dry with a towel and then kissed it.

Yes. Kissed. Your. Foot.

To your credit you didn’t laugh or pull your foot back, even though you have a thing about your toenails, which you don’t let us cut, and which look like raptor’s claws. That’s a topic for another letter (or for your therapist later in life) but I think you held your discomfort at bay because of the importance of the ritual, the way the brother prostrated himself before you, and the pure and overwhelming selflessness of the act.

Also I think it was because the same brother had already given you the first of your three gifts.

He placed it around your neck and said, “You are a true pilgrim Sam”.

 Then, outside, sitting on the wooden bench, you posed for gift number two.

I love this drawing, you were so still when the young Italian guy drew it, I even think I can make out your raptor claws if I look closely enough…

Then the third gift…

We had met The Director the day before, he’d slept at a church ruin, under the open air and we met him when we stopped there for water. He had a black, beret, black shirt, black pants, everything black and you said he looked like a director, so we called him that. He told me his past was as dark as his clothes. A DJ from Holland who had gotten into some very troubled ways before he found Christ. I suspected addiction of some form, maybe because he was now addicted to Jesus and was so driven to proselytize all the time. We walked with him a few times and you and he had debates about belief and imagination.

He had a stick, a magic stick, he called it when he showed you. He said it had appeared when he needed it, when he had a bad foot another pilgrim had gifted it to him. Then his foot got better and he lost the stick, but when the foot injury recurred, the stick magically reappeared.

“Maybe it was a coincidence.” You told him.

“There are no coincidences.” He said.

“How do you know?” You asked.

The stick was named Jesus and had writing on it, Jesus’ name and some faded blessings, in green Texta. The director walked slowly so we managed to keep up. He was taking everything as a sign, every moment, because he was experiencing, in all the things, the voice of God. I envied him his belief and tried to mirror the way he was making every detail important, the smallest things, the shape of a cloud pulling away over a field as though the field itself was moving, the places we come to rest, the shade of a tree, an accidental meeting, the choices we think we make.

What if it all the voice of God? Or Gods, or the universe, Mother Nature, Mother Mary, take your pick, no coincidences.

How do we know? How can we tell?

Your third gift was lying on the path the next day. We were walking and there was the magic stick, lying on the dirt.

On it was this note.

When we arrived in the next town we stopped at a café (as usual on the Meseta, it was the only one) for lunch. Everyone in the café sprang to life when they saw you. “Sam!” They all shouted, because every one of them had passed that stick as they walked that morning.

They all recognised you as the boy who walking with a magic stick.

Buen camino,

Ragnar.

Scallop

424

What’s their story?

Martin, the Austrian who’s been living in Spain for 15 years, and his girlfriend Monica, from Tenerife, the Canary Islands. Joe, the older Irishman who is quiet over dinner, perhaps not hearing everything, especially after the TV is turned up as Spain trounce Croatia loudly and enthusiastically in the European Cup.

Saffron, the Canadian with the shin splints, the French guy, I didn’t catch his name, or the German couple who also started walking in Burgos and gave us magnesium to swallow (“for the muscles”). The sullen looking man at the picnic spot after we climbed our first hill, who obviously slept there. Maybe he was worried about being caught? He was friendly when we left but suspicious when we showed up.

The people who pass us on bicycles, some electric, often clad in lycra. People with loads they carry, or none at all, because it’s easy to get bags sent forward. The large beefy guy who walks past us with his phone pressed to his ear, talking loudly in German amidst all the wheat, passing through the Meseta like it is an office corridor. 

All of us drawing towards the same point, not only on this path but on the multiple caminoes that head towards Santiago. The coastal route, the Camino del Norte. Or the one that passes through the mountains, the Primitivo. Or the Portuguese, traveling up from Lisbon. So many paths leading to the same goal.

I think about the shell, symbol of the camino. Most pilgrims carry one on their packs, loosely dangling away attached to a zipper or an unused toggle, the symbol of the way, but up until now I assumed it was just another Christian thing I didn’t need to know much about, like a fish on a bumper bar, a wafer, a cup of wine.

But then the meaning of it hits me and I stop and tell your Mum. She looks at me with as though I’m stupid. I know the look, it means she’s already told me something before and only now am I understanding and talking about it as though I have come to the realisation all on my own (which I have). With an air of impatience she proceeds to tell me something she probably told me back in Australia when it didn’t mean that much to me and I heard but didn’t really hear, if you know what I mean.

That must be annoying, so this time I really listen, and she points out that, on the camino, the shell always faces a certain way. When she says that I say “yeah, you’re right!” (which doesn’t help), because all the shells we have seen so far are either on their side or upside down (as I think a shell should be shown). The open fan part is down so that all the lines end up converging at the top. The top being Santiago! All the lines are all the roads leading to Santiago de Compostela! I say it out loud as though I’m the first person to ever see this (which doesn’t help).

I keep walking and turn the thoughts over. Ok, I should have (listened) thought about this before because it is symbolic and symbols are becoming important. They tell stories and this one, the shell that points the way, is about how all these people I’ve met, and all the other people I haven’t, are moving on different paths towards the same goal, physically, geographically, spiritually.

Many roads leading the same way.

The sun burns the back of my legs. No-one mentioned this, or at least I didn’t read about it, but because the Camino travels west and we’re trying to get the majority of our walking done in the first half of the day, the sun is always behind us, snapping at our heels, scorching the backs of our legs. I’ve already seen a dark patch of skin, a camino tan, on dozens of pilgrims as they walk past us, or spotted the sock line at the back of their legs when they’re stretched out munching on a bocadillo.

Speaking of bocadillos, it’s getting time to stop for our lunch soon. I look ahead to see if there’s any shade coming and as I do so I realise I’ve been staring down at the path, watching each foot strike the gravel as we cross the expanse of wheat, barley, sky, crumbling stone, wildflowers. Each foot sending a puff of dust into the air when it descends and lands on the dry earth.

I grunt out loud. My hips are killing me, and they occupy my thoughts. Recently I had the right one x-rayed and the news wasn’t great, a degeneration from overuse. Now I think about all the ways I have pounded that hip over the years, always favouring it to land on, repeating the same moves over and over in classes I was teaching or shows I was performing. The life of a dancer. I think about the way I always performed a kind of suffering body onstage, and how that was no longer a performance, more of a reality.

My feet hit the dust.

“Hip, hip hooray, there is joy in every day. I move forward with joy and ease at every age”. I repeat the wonderfully daggy Louise Hay affirmation to myself. It’s not lost on me it’s the same hip that has caused my Mum so many problems. My hip is part of my story now. Each step I take is both beautiful and horrible, pain and discomfort, mingled with the joy I feel to be here. When I sit down it takes me a few moments to straighten, if I have to put my shoes back on after a break, it’s a long and awkward reach. I recognise that I am a long way away from the dancer I used to be.

Dust.

I look up and out, away from this story that’s condensing inside me. Ahead on the path I see others moving forward. Behind me, still more, currently out of sight but inevitably catching and passing us at our current pace. Further away, out of sight, dozens of other caminoes, other routes to Santiago, full of people all converging on the same goal. Facing their own realities as they walk their paths through life.

Lines on a shell. All of us carrying our stories, whatever the weight.

Hip, hip hooray.

You see dead people

444

Fields of flowers so unexpected they cause a bloom in us.

We are finally here, walking. We’ve left Burgos and the choices we made in Australia 13 months ago are becoming real, even if the questions we asked ourselves back then are still unanswered. Should I have brought this shirt I’m wearing? These shorts? That extra book for Sam? What about the sleeping bag? We could have brought only the liners but we opted for the bag because it was still cold when we looked on google. Now, out here, it feels warm, the sun is strong on the back of my legs and last night the room we slept in was hot and stuffy. Maybe we should have brought the liners not the bags?

Random thoughts are left to roam and evaporate in a landscape that is quickly emptying as we walk out of Burgos into the wide open wheat fields of the Meseta.

A lot of people skip this part of the Camino but we have opted to begin our journey here. That’s your Mum’s fault and I thank her for it. It’s beautiful. We climb up onto the tops of mesas, plateaus that are flat on top and that rise up unexpectedly out of the surrounding farmland. There is wheat growing, and barley or oats, I’m not sure which. Fields of hard, husky grain like the backs of grasshoppers thrusting their spiny way out of the soil.

And flowers, everywhere. Yellow, white purple, the blood red of poppies, which you tell us mark the remains of the dead. You remember something the teachers said at school when we stop for lunch next to the path. You point at the poppies and say, there are dead here, people who fought and lost, just like the soldiers who died in Burgos defending their castle. You tell us we are walking through a world littered with the dead.

You say it with relish but then spook yourself and want to move on. I look around at the flowers rising up out of wheat fields, turning their bright faces to the sky. It’s strikes me that with so much history buried beneath this soil, you are probably right and after we’ve eaten our bread, jamon, olives and cheese I slowly, gingerly, get back to my feet.

Once back walking I stride ahead and a man passes me on a bike. He looks me in the eye and wishes me “Buen Camino”. It’s not my first. All the way out of Burgos we’ve been getting them, but this one makes me stop and something shifts, even though the moment is nothing unusual in and of itself. I am walking, the man passes on a bike, he looks me directly in the eyes, he says “Buen Camino”, I reply “gracias” and he rides past me. Nothing unusual but suddenly, completely, walking next to a field of wheat under an open sky, I feel blessed.

I repeat the words under my breath. Buen Camino.

If you google translate those words you get “good way” or “good journey”. I always assumed it was like saying “have a good walk”, especially if the “way “part of it refers to “The Way” then maybe it means “have a good pilgrimage”. That’s how I had been treating it as we walked out of Burgos, as we got lost on the way to a supermarket and kept being directed back to the camino by friendly locals. I thought everyone was telling us to have a nice walk, have a nice day. But now, beneath the gaze of the meseta, suspended between the worlds of the living and the dead, I realise it means much, much more.

Buen Camino. Two words stretching out like the horizon from where I stand, shared across time and space.

I look at the sky, the wheat, back towards your Mum and you trudging along the dirt path next to each other and throwing grass darts. It’s as though my eyes have only now started to adjust to the light of this ‘way’ that stretches away ahead of us and I realise my journey doesn’t end in Santiago because the blessing I have just received from the man on the bicycle is a blessing that travels beyond a dirt trail stretching from one geographical point to another. It’s an acknowledgement of a bigger path, the one we all tread, crossing innumerable roads and hills and shadowed valleys. A recognition of our shared humanity, from life to death, the pilgrimage of all our lives weighed against the expanse of sky, of sun, of pain and discomfort, joy and uncertainty. All things weighed in one moment, suspended between past and future.

I am overwhelmed. You are walking with me. Kate also. We walk together. And my eyes burn, they fill with everything I see, an unavoidable collision of things.

He catches my eye.

He speaks.

He moves on.

The blessing stays.

Buen Camino Sam.

Life is a dice roll

450+

On a train to Burgos. You are listening to Jim Gaffigan, an American comedian, and pressing your face to the window in search of castles I have promised.

There’s a school group of kids your age all around us. Their teacher is sitting next to me as I write this. They are Basque, speaking a language which has no known roots. It is unlike French, Spanish, German, English, a language that is thought to date back to the neolithic, or even older. They laugh and muck around like normal kids though and, as I watch the boys I wonder, are they like you? Are you like them? This is a question that opens outwards like a flowering plant, but it’s a plant with thorns because it makes me think of why we have brought you here.

So why have we? To get you off screens. To challenge you to do something difficult. To give you calf muscles and put you in your body, not your brain. To spend time together as though it was a resource, something quantifiable and measurable, able to be held and moulded. To take ourselves out of our routines and into the world. To do all this with you before you become a teenager and slowly slip from our grasp.

The train is a detox from two days of flying and sitting in airports. I feel my body returning to earth at speed, landscapes flashing past, horizontally stretched out before us. On the flight these places were held below, out of reach, out of conception, but now they are getting closer, almost within touch. Like you I press my face to the glass. It’s warm from the sun which is baking the rock, fields and cliff walls. We pass through a gorge with a river at its base and I want to get out and walk but that won’t happen for another couple of hours when we arrive in Burgos. I touch the glass. My forehead is warmed by it.

I am slowing. Literally. Metaphorically.

The pace of me, of my life, my thoughts. The distance we have crossed, three flights, three continents, Singapore for a night then Istanbul for several hours, then Barcelona overnight and now here, on this train. It’s as if we have been catapulted across the globe, shot from a cannon, torpedoed from our usual selves, and now we are losing momentum as the trains tips the world on its axis and us, like a dice roll, tumbling out of it, down valleys, across rocky plains (with the possibility of castles), rolling free of the habits and routines that have calcified around us and now have the chance of breaking free as we are deposited on the other side of the globe, losing our momentum, our impetus, and landing finally, inevitably, onto our feet.

This is a long way to travel in order to just slow down and walk.

Next to me the teacher is exasperated with her kids. Across the aisle your mother is equally frustrated with you asking for her phone to play some dumb shark game. Both women sigh heavily at the same moment, expressing a weight of responsibility that suddenly reaches further than this carriage. I feel guilty for leaving the bargaining to your Mum to deal with so I offer to swap positions, to give her the chance to press her head to the glass and watch the landscape flash past. She declines, just for the record.

Another teacher, another woman, enters the carriage and offers the teacher next to me a coffee. They talk. It’s fast and I’m left unsure whether they are speaking Spanish or Basque, but I see the solidarity they have together, the support. The same support they offer these children, despite the weight it affords them.

It makes me think of my Mum, also a primary school teacher, and of the way she allowed me to shape myself, never forcing a direction, just giving me the space to find my own. She gave me freedom but also support in case I fell when I reached outwards into the dark, which I often did. Which I still do. For what else is life except a blind reaching? A seeking of meaning when there is none, always a movement forward, hands out in front, tentative but tenacious, delicately poised, almost off balance. Only ever a single moment from falling.

And I wonder, what is the cost of all this blind groping? How has my motion forward impacted others, these women for instance, that for some reason, when everything tells them they no longer have to, still offer support to blind and stupid men.

Which way is The Way?

Hey Sam,

Recently we made you walk 450 kilometres along an ancient pilgrimage in Spain. Camino de Santiago. The path of St James. The way.

Yes that’s right, we made you. We forced you. At least that’s the version of events you like to tell now. That version, that story, has earnt you some big laughs, both during and after the course of our camino. I remember at one of our first communal dinners on the trail our host, after giving you gifts of croissants, decided to ask you what lessons you had learnt from walking the camino so far.

“To never walk it again.” You said to significant and clearly self affirming laughter.

450 kilometres is not the full camino. That would be 750+ starting in St Jean Pied de Port, across the border in France. We started our journey in central Spain, a town called Burgos, which is approximately 500kms from Santiago. When I say 450 I’m factoring in a couple of train journeys in and out of Leon to avoid the suburban sprawl.

This was all due to your Mum’s research on the subject. Beginning in Burgos put us at the beginning of a fairly flat part of the pilgrimage. Flat, open, hot. A place called the Meseta. That was a good choice because you had time to deal with walking first, before we added hills. My contribution to your Camino was more prosaic, I taught you your first Spanish words, how to say thank you. “When you sit down in a park and get back up, you have a grassy arse”, I told you.

Job done.

Over the next few weeks I’ll keep posting some of the stuff I wrote along the way, but I’ll only post photos of the back of your head because you’ve recently become mortified by the idea of your face on social media. That’s the subject of another blog but for now rest assured I have listened and none of this will be socially damning. Also it’s not really a record of our trip but a bunch of thoughts and feelings that were embedded within it, often written on the trail as I dug out my notebook and tried to capture some of the complexity I was experiencing in that moment. I want to get those thoughts down here because the story you’re now telling yourself, the joke version where you “liked everything about the camino except the walking” is only one version of events, only one Camino. The real one was much larger, it wasn’t flat like the Meseta, or fogged in like Galicia, it’s not easily reduced to a tagline, or a joke.

After the first couple of days of walking your Mum asked you what you liked about the camino so far.

“Two things”, you said. “One, Iceream. And two, my mind is free to roam”

I don’t want you to forget that Camino.

The one where we walked beside each other for 26 days, eating croissants and saying Gracias with too much emphasis on the last vowel sound. The one where we spent hours making up stories about Thistle Man, The Lord of Weather, Mr Mind and Dr D. The Camino that held pilgrim gifts, great friends met for only a day, lands above the clouds and below the trees, saints in silver tombs, giant pots of incense swinging above our heads, portraits in blue pen, magic walking sticks, the threat of blisters, tears and trials, giant slugs that looked like poo, Cola Cau, Aquarius, fresh orange juice, menu del dias, a horse called Paula, a friend named Jay, a Minotaur in the labyrinth of an ancient Albergue, Castles, too many masses in Spanish, your first novel (and your second, third, fourth and fifth), a road, a track, a path winding through forests, towns, fields, farms, mountains, valleys. A way forward, never seeming to end but always leading us towards our conclusion.

Don’t get me wrong, I love your stories, especially the funny ones, but our stories make us up. They become who we are. In your case that’s a 10 year old who just walked 450 kilometres along the road to Santiago, the Pilgrim’s Way and, as a boy with an aversion to school and an imagination that is as endless as the sky in the meseta, life can get challenging. So whatever you do don’t forget what you accomplished over 25 days in June/July this year.

Hopefully this will help you, and me, remember.

Buen Camino.

Love, Ragnar.

The Looking Glass

He made up the person he wanted to be

and changed into a new personality.

Even the greatest stars

change themselves in the looking glass.

Kraftwerk

The song lifts up from the speaker bouncing around in the basket of our bike. Electronic trills fly up around our heads like a flock of birds lifting off from a tree and flapping into a sky that is deep blue and without a cloud. And we’re flying ourselves, approaching the small gully that runs across our path at the end of the parkway we’re on, the one that leads to the back of a Woolworths car park, our cut through on the way to school.

First term, grade four.

You bounce on your seat when we hit a crack in the path where an obstinate tree has pushed up through the concrete, and then we’re swooping down into the culvert that occasionally floods when it rains, something it has failed to do much this summer. The grass is brilliantly green nonetheless and we free fall into the heart of it, powering down the slope so we can use our momentum to lift up to the other side, where we cross over the street to Woollies. We’re at the point where we’d lift our legs if we were still in a La Nina version of summer, riding through the water, splashing our calves.

Today the concrete is dry. I hear your voice, singing quietly.

Even the greatest stars…

This was the first song you ever sang unbidden. Singing was never your thing. At the local library, when you were still in nappies, you shook your head and refused to join the song circle at baby rhyme time. Maybe it felt too much like a cult to you. I don’t know, I’m projecting obviously, but I was stupidly proud of your refusal to join all that happy clapping.

That’s because you come from a family of non-joiners…

Your Grandfather, Poppy G, my Dad, retired and moved to south New South Wales, near Merimbulah, ostensibly because there was a golf course and he loved golf. He bought a house that backed onto a golf course. He bought a golf buggy that he kept plugged into a power socket under the house, so he could just jump straight in it and drive out to the fairway, which swept down the hill in front of his house, descending towards the beach. In the evening, kangaroos hopped out of the bush onto the fairways and helped themselves to whatever it is that kangaroos like about eating grass.

It was bucolic, idyllic. Ridiculously so. Dad had spent a lot of time deciding to move there. Within a year or two, though, he quit playing golf. “It’s all anybody talks about”, was his complaint.

Sometimes we worried about your reluctance to join in. We even heard the word autism in reference to you when you took you to kindy for the first time. We knew that wasn’t right though, you were just suspicious, biding your time because we travelled so much in your early years, and you missed out on the norms of kindy behaviour.

But it marked the beginning of a storm of scary words. Spectrum, autism, attention, and other words like deficit, disorder, deficiency, and the first of many acronyms, the ADHD’s and ADD’s finally moving into the dys’s. Dyslexia, dispraxia, dysgraphia. Words to label your difference.

Or indifference perhaps.

Even the greatest stars

find their face in the looking glass.

The first time you sang that song, you were four, and we were staying in Brunswick Heads for the night. It was the summer holidays and the local park had been transformed into a sideshow. That was before we were entertaining dietary words like gluten and intolerance, so we’d just left the park and were walking to the local pizza joint, bare feet slapping the pavement, hands linked and swinging. You quietly started singing to yourself.

Even the greatest stars…

That song hypnotises you. Even now I use it as your morning meditation on the way to school. You stop talking and I feel your body press against my back when you stand in the saddle, rocking slightly as we hit the bottom of the incline, wind slicing through us, music trailing ribbons behind us.

The world passing and your voice singing quietly to yourself.

live their lives in the looking glass.

Recently I’ve changed myself. Willfully. Deliberately.

At the end of last year, I had long covid. Or I had exhaustion. Or I had bronchitis and the flu mixed together into something new, a word I’m yet to find. In short, though, I wasn’t well.

We went to Singapore and Malaysia for holidays and I was determined to keep ignoring my condition because I thought a holiday filled with laksas and poh pias and teh tariks, dosas, rotis and sambals, was going to be the perfect way to get better. I ignored any feeling of being rundown so we could hunt for foodcourts and take you into giant glass domes of cloud forests and orchids, 8 hours bus rides to world heritage cities, theme parks, interactive science museums, 5 star hotels, 4 star hotels, 3 star hotels, no star hotels and guesthouses. For two weeks we pushed through everything and in the middle of it all, in the middle of the night, in the middle of a Malaysian guesthouse with no windows, in the middle of a double bed under a ceiling fan, in the middle of a dream about losing my passport, my heart started pumping erratically.

I eased off on the teh tarik and waited to see if it would get better. On the morning of the World Cup Final, back in Singapore, I got out of bed early to exercise as you and your Mum headed to the hotel pool. In the middle of a down dog, my heart went into full palpitations and I couldn’t stand up without feeling faint.

I saw a doctor the same day and took anti-biotics, which had an almost immediate effect. That night I watched Lionel Messi win the World Cup (it’s important to have your priorities straight) and even had a glass of bad wine in celebration, but every time I thought I was in the clear, it kept coming back. For the next couple of weeks I lay down a lot and tried to rest, but that didn’t help either, it kept returning. When we got back to Australia I saw another doctor and had an EKG but that settled nothing, least of all the heavy feeling in my chest, or the anxiety that seemed to blossom out of that feeling. Like I had a bird in my sternum, trapped in a cage, and it was beating hard against the bars, unable to find a way out.

I decided I needed to do something so I enrolled in an Ayurvedic detox program, an Indian medical system that posits you as your own doctor, believes in food as medicine, has incredible detox programs and great massages (it’s important to have your priorities straight). I became gluten free, dairy free, meat free, sugar free, caffeine free, and nightshade vegetable free. I was so free that I felt like I was floating away.

For weeks I ate mostly dhal and had great massages.

And there were a lot of enemas.

Now I’m not sure when you’re going to read this letter but I assume you will read it. It’s the reason I’m writing them after all, so you’re kind of obligated. I have read a couple of the funny ones to you, which you seemed to enjoy. Most of the time when I’m writing, I’m imagining you reading as an adult, maybe sitting by a fire with a cup of warm cocoa in your hand, but for the purposes of this next bit, I’m just going to assume you’re at the age you are now, 9 years old, on the back of our electric bike, on your way to school…

An enema (as I now understand it) is a process where a doctor (who may or may not have a white coat on) sticks a tube into your bum and squirts a packet of warm fluid up there. You’re required from the moment of squirting to pull up your pants and to hold the enema inside you for a period of up to 30 minutes, before releasing it into the nearest, easily accessible toilet cubicle. At the time I was staying in an Airbnb in Brisbane because we were making a show which was (fortuitously) just up the street and round the corner from the clinic. You were with your grandparents.

That 30 minutes of enema holding is pretty much up to you how you spend it. You can waddle around the waiting room and let go in the toilet there (if you like) or perhaps (like me) waddle home and hope (pray) your flatmates have remembered to leave the key out. That way you can let go peacefully in an empty Airbnb because you have carefully timed the experience to coincide with warm up at the theatre (a warm up you won’t be attending, nor will you need to, considering you’ll be feeling pretty warm already).

It’s a highly intimate procedure. Often it was the same person who massaged me, stuck me into the steamer (a small box that fills with steam while your head juts out free and cool), and then applied the enema. Because I was well raised as a child (a set of values I hope we’re instilling in you), I would usually chat to my doctor and, due to my general affability, attempt to look them in the eye as I did so, rotating my head and looking over my shoulder as they bent to their task.

I don’t really know how this was for them, or if there exists a better enema etiquette. They didn’t seem particularly flustered by my attempt to catch their eye but they also didn’t seem to really notice my efforts much either. They were far too focussed on where to stick the tube with one hand while holding a bag of warm fluid with the other, pinching it tightly shut to avoid early deployment.

All of these photos are from our trip to Singapore and Malaysia. The one above is from the Hell Museum in Singapore, one of our first stops when we arrived, when Teh Tarik was still very much my drink of choice and enemas were still an unrealised health option.

Over the two weeks of the detox, I lost a lot of weight but something else happened, I became lighter. I don’t mean this in only a physical sense. It was a weight coming off me, one I hadn’t even realised I was carrying.

One of the massage treatments involved two therapists rubbing a herbal paste into my body for over an hour. At the end of the massage they used large jugs of warm water to wash the paste off. They lifted and cradled my legs and my head in their hands while warm water poured over me. I was moved around and manipulated, the paste running off and draining away efficiently (even miraculously it seemed to me) into the gutters of the wooden massage table, my body yielding to their touch. I felt both like a baby and an old man, two life vectors coming into collision as the dross of me was rinsed away into large buckets I couldn’t see through my half opened eyes.

I sat in the wooden steamer box afterwards, my head poking out into the cool air while my body ran rivulets of sweat into towels, and realised I was scared. This could be anything, I was telling myself, and I thought of you. Of you and your Mum. Of leaving you too early, causing you to face your life without my help. Perhaps only leaving behind the dusting of these few words, words that might be of no help at all to the life you want to live.

Just to be clear, the detox worked and I’m feeling better, but it’s made me think about what I take for granted.

Which is everything I suppose.

Even the greatest stars

live their lives in the looking glass.

On the bike we fly down the culvert and I feel my stomach drop. I realise you aren’t hanging onto me. Your hands are stretched outwards like birdwings and you’re bouncing around on your seat. I feel the wind pass me by, speed blurring everything. I worry about you for a moment but then I let go in my own way, the weight of fear soaring away, rising up into the sky like a burst of birds.

We’re sharing this moment together, the drop of gravity as the path falls out under us, the wind shaping itself in our ears, the green of the grass and the height of the trees we ride beneath. The trills of electronic music made at the end of the 1970’s, when I was your age, rising out of the basket of our electric bike and soaring upwards, lifting our lives with them, carrying our dreams and our fears into a blue sky, devoid of clouds.

Love, Ragnar.

Roy and Timothy

Hey Sam,

I’m leaving the balcony door open as I write this because it’s nice to feel a breeze and to be connected to the outside world, even though the sounds coming in are not what I’m used to. In the last 2 years I haven’t really travelled, and when I did it was for family holidays, but now I’m alone, in another state, another city, and what I hear across the road isn’t the ocean anymore.

I’m self isolating for 2 weeks in this hotel. I’ve paced the room out, 5 metres across and at least 7 from door to balcony. It’s a bit grimy out there to be honest, dirty from the street, with a couple of fake cane chairs and a fake cane table that has a cigarette burn on its vinyl top. When I sit out there and look over the adjacent rooftop, I can see a back lane, an automatic gate, the street and a train line that passes into a tunnel to my left. Beyond that there’s a view that expands to a few taller buildings and a lot of sky.

Time is getting difficult to pin down. It feels strange to be away now, without you and your Mum. She’s here as well, but because she travelled a few days after I did, she’s in a separate room on the other side of the building. She has a much bigger balcony than me and a bath (I’ve only got a shower) but I’m not complaining. My room is a good size and I have a kitchen. I’ve heard of worse situations than this.

I keep trying to imagine myself into the future, into the day I walk out of here, but that’s difficult to do. I have to deal with the here and now, so I’ve created clear routines to keep me sane. I’ve set these routines to make use of every area in the apartment, creating specific tasks for specific spaces.

For instance at the moment I’m sitting at the writing desk so of course what I’m doing here is writing.

My phone is at hand with Uber Eats ever ready to deliver whatever I want; like I said I’m not complaining. I have been ordering in quite a bit so far. I’m currently waiting on a laksa and as I write my stomach gives a discontented growl, rumbling in concert with the sound of a passing bus. When my food arrives I think I will leave the writing area and make a bold move to the dining room, which is not a separate room but just a table next to the kitchen (also part of the same room). These three locations comprise the overall living area. 

In the northern corner of the living area are two doors, one of which leads to my sleeping area, which is large and well maintained, and the other to the cleaning area. After I eat I think I will retire to the entertainment precinct (or couch) and watch Netflix. As previously stated, it’s good to have routines.

They glad wrapped the remotes!

I’m not quite sure of the logic of this. I get the need for sanitation but if you’re going to start wrapping everything in plastic why only the remotes? Why not the phone as well? Or the microwave? Or just be done with it and wrap me…

That’s not me, that’s your Uncle Grayson. It’s from a show we made before you were born. Don’t worry, he’s fine now.

On the day I was leaving to catch my plane, I took you walking up Tallebudgera creek We’ve had pretty constant rain on the coast this summer so the creek was really full. Water seemed to pour out of the ground in every direction, little rivulets joining larger and larger ones and spilling down over rocks into the main channel of the creek, which tumbled down the valley on its way to the ocean.

The day before I left we dropped your Mum at the train station because she was heading into Brisbane for work. The train sat on the tracks and your Mum stood in the doorway, triggering the doors and performing small, idiotic, slapstick routines for our amusement as we stood, side by side, up the hill and behind the chainlink fence. Your hands grasped the fence and your face pressed into the gaps. We kept waving until the train left and I think it triggered something in you because suddenly you were crying.

Afterwards, up the creek, we plodded through thick reams of mud, squeezing it into the soles of our matching Keen sandals, and listening to the rub of cicadas that rang through the trees over our heads.

During the first creek crossing I looked back to check you were ok. You weren’t. You were managing the creek well enough, up to your ankles in it, picking up your feet and placing them down again in your oversized sandals like a tired giraffe, but your efforts were made more difficult because at the same time you were wiping tears out of your eyes with the back of your hand. I hoisted you up over the last few metres and plopped you down on the bank of the creek, watching your sandals drain out onto the rocks.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. You wiped at your eyes again.

“I’m just afraid you’re going to die.” you said.

Ok, I thought, this is because I’m going away.

“And when you die,” you continued, your voice hiccupping in little sobs, “I’m really going to miss the elves.”

Ok, time for a bit of back story…

At Christmas, on a family holiday, we visited Adelaide where my Mum and sister Kelly live. When we arrived Kelly gave you an elf on the shelf as an early Christmas present and it’s fair to say you got pretty obsessed by the whole idea. ‘Elfie’ got up to a lot of mischief each night after you went to bed, spurred on by the antics of Kelly’s three elves which were doing increasingly complex manoeuvres like photocopying their own butts (see picture above).

Once we returned home and Christmas passed, Elfie fell back into his deep slumber, hibernating until the moment when we’ll sprinkle cinnamon on his face to bring him back to life, something that presumably will happen each December, up until the point you tell us you know he’s (spoiler alert!) not actually alive.

Once Elfie was hibernating, I was inspired by your fascination with all things elf related and I started making up stories about two other elves, not Christmas elves but creek elves, who didn’t have to wait for significant moments in the Christian calendar to do their stuff. They were named Roy and Timothy.

Now for some reason apparent to no-one, not even myself, I gave Roy and Timothy both Cockney accents. I don’t claim that I can do a good Cockney accent. In fact I’m pretty sure I can’t, especially because I got inspiration for Roy’s accent from Keith Urban’s character Billy Butcher, from the TV show The Boys, and I’ve since read a number of less than flattering reviews of that accent. But, “wha’eva”, on the day I started doing Roy and “Timofy” there weren’t any critics from the British Isles present.

And I think it’s fair to say that despite the possible bad reviews of my accent, Roy and Timofy were a hit with their intended audience.

I’ve been doing elf voices just about every day since. Do the elves! That has been a constant refrain and they’ve often replaced bedtime stories, breakfast reads and general holiday downtime entertainment. So I knew they would be called upon sooner or later when we took our walk up the creek together and I wasn’t caught completely off guard when you told me my death would be sad, not so much because of me, but because it will signify the end of Roy and Timofy.

When you’re a parent you start to hear about children’s developmental stages and attachments. What’s often said is that for the first 7 years it’s all about the mother, then there’s a shift for the next 7, towards the father. I’ve felt you shift your attention to me and I know that sometimes that’s hard for your Mum. Although, to be fair, you still turn to her for certain things like unconditional emotional support. With me it’s more about the elves but I’m not complaining. At least I have your attention. I’m holding onto the elves because the next phase, when you’re a teen, is that you’ll start looking beyond both of us, and I’m not convinced I’m ready for that.

I’m away for 6 weeks, which feels like a lot at this stage of your life. I’m conscious of you changing. When we FaceTime each other I’m looking and listening for the subtle shifts happening in you while I’m away because I’m aware that what we have right now is finite. 6 weeks is a mass of time that we won’t get back, a measurable amount, tumbling down the rocks through the valley of our family, and flowing out to sea, never to come back.

I know your bond with the elves is your bond with me, a recognition of me taking the time to be silly, both of us engaging in the kind of stupid jokes that we find funny. Like when Roy is trying to explain the limitlessness of the universe and Timofy keeps thinking he’s talking about a car.

Where’s the steering wheel Roy?

It’s the universe Timofy, it’s boundless, impossibly big. It’s not a car!

What you’re really crying about is our time together, disappearing because we’re going away. That’s what you’re really missing, but it’s coming out through something else, like water bubbling up through rock, flowing out of random places because the water table is so saturated.

I put you down on the banks of the creek. It’s higher than I’ve ever seen it before. Rocks I’m used to seeing dry, are submerged, the creek running fast over them and refracting sunlight that filters down through the trees. I suggest quietly that I could make recordings of Roy and Timofy, so you can listen to them whenever you want to, even after I’m gone.

You suggest that one day you could do the voices yourself maybe, for your own kids. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard you say anything like that and I decide to take the pressure off you by saying that’s a great idea but having kids is a decision for you to make a bit later on, when you’re ready. Not everyone wants to have kids or can have kids. You don’t need to choose now, when you’re 8.

I add that I think you’d be really good at doing the voices.

You nod. Wipe your eyes again.

I decide to tell you that, anyway, I’m doing everything I can to stick around as long as possible. That way you won’t have to do the voices on your own, we can do a double act! I let you know that’s why I do yoga, why I meditate, why I gave up my deeply uncommitted relationship with cigarettes when I turned 50. It’s why I hardly drink alcohol anymore. Because I want to be here for you as long as I can. For you. For me. For your Mum. I feel guilty because I’m older than I should be and for the first time, as I’m saying all this, I think that maybe it was a selfish act on my part, to wait so long, to be the age I am now, while you’re still just a boy, dealing with an absence of elves.

Sometimes I imagine a past where I am born later. I meet your Mum when I’m closer to her age. We have you and I’m still busting out moves in a Belgian dance company. We tour the world together. I know there are complications to this scenario because maybe if I’m touring with the Belgian company, you and your Mum are stuck in Belgium. Or your Mum gets work in Germany, like she did, but can’t take the job because she’s pregnant. Each scenario I make fractals out into other scenarios and I dismiss them all and bring myself back to the present we’re in. The one that I’m finding impossibly hard to imagine the future of.

I tell you again I’ll record the elves for you. I promise to do it every day I’m away, so you have something to enjoy and connect with, something silly. Roy and Timofy discuss the cosmos. Roy and Timofy discuss their farts. Roy and Timofy discuss what families are.

They’re not a car, Timofy!

That way you can store them somewhere and have them with you always.

I look at you on the wet rocks next to the fast running creek. Again I tell you I’m not going anywhere. I’m planning to stick around because I love you. As much as you love me.

You wipe at your eyes. You gasp in a little breath and say, “Maybe even a little bit more?”

Yes Sam, maybe even a little bit more.

Love, Ragnar

Shipwrecks of our understanding

Hey Sam,

your teachers have recommended you get tested - for ADD, ADHD, ODD, Dyslexia, etc. I wasn’t there when they said the words, your Mum relayed them to me after a parent teacher meeting that I couldn’t attend. They say they’re not concerned with your progress, they’re just suggesting it because they want to support you the best they can and the school gets funding when a kid is diagnosed, which means they have more support to give to those who learn differently.

I understand that, really I do, and I’ve never been worried about your progress at school. But hearing the words, even though they came to me second hand, had an effect.

Monday, 7.55am. 20 minutes before school departure. Wrestlemania has commenced.

I’ve revved you up and now you’re bouncing around me on the bed like a bean. A jumping bean. Something that Willy Wonka might have cooked up. I’m calling for you to stop, even though I’m the one responsible for your excitement. That’s because I’m looking for the telltale signs of one of the acronyms.

I’m trying to get you to concentrate on some sight words as your eyes appear to roll around in your head and you leap and throw your lightweight frame around the sheets. You’re still hoping the game hasn’t finished, but I’ve decided it has and I’m watching for the signs of a deficit of attention, such as an inability to focus, constant fidgeting, acting without thinking, excessive talking, being unable to sit still - especially in calm or quiet surroundings.

Yes I’ve googled, of course I have, but the signs are there when I look for them, glimpsed between the locks of strawberry blonde hair that we’ve been letting grow. I am the stillness at the centre of a whirlpool of excitement. I sit on the bed, pretending calm.

I tell you to focus, to look at me, but your eyes run across the room instead.

And I’m suddenly singing under my breath,

I want you to be you.

It’s a song by Captain Kirk, aka William Shatner, from a surprisingly good album he made with Ben Folds of the five folds fame. The songs are catchy, funny, ironic (at least I think they are). The one that hums inside me now is about accepting someone for who they are, with all their idiosyncracies. But, really, it’s about all the things Shatner can’t stand.

Spit out the gum, it doesn’t work.

Focus Sam, I say again. Your eyes are rolling around like they’ve weighed anchor. You’re adrift.

Now a nursery rhyme takes over my internal jukebox.

See how they run.

In the descending chaos of our room I lose you. You aren’t lost but I lose you. They named it a disability, the thing you should be tested for, an ability not properly made, a boy not properly put together by parents who don’t know what they’re doing. Trying to craft a golem out of mud, but mud that is sliding down collapsing hillsides, filling houses, burying the simplicity of us together, wrestling on our bed.

I’m the one who’s lost, not you.

Did you ever see such a sight in your life?

I try to call you back but it’s me who has wandered off. I can’t see you anymore and I feel the fear rising as I’m caught in the storm. I am calling you to come back, like someone searching across rocks for a shipwreck that never happened, though they swore they heard the splintering of wood through pouring rain and crashing waves. There I am, hunched in the darkness, flaring a torch through the salt spray, seeking wreckage that just isn’t there.

Because you’re not broken Sam,

but just for a moment,

a morning,

a few days maybe,

I started thinking you were and I racked my brain for the things we’d done wrong as we raised you, where our searchlight went out.

Where we let you run against the rocks.

That’s us travelling through the southern states of the US just before Donald Trump was elected president. We were visiting friends and performing in North Carolina but in this photo we’re on the road to New Orleans. At the time we were confused by American politics, gun laws and the inequity between one state and another, but also equally confused by our food options along the highway. We ended up in Hooters as you can see and your Mum and I had a beer and some chips (fries). For you we ordered a glass of milk.

And that’s when the well stocked waitress told us they told us didn’t have any.

Your Mum couldn’t come to terms with that, she was shocked. No milk at Hooters - it seemed like an oxymoron.

We probably shouldn’t have been ordering milk in the first place, because now we know your little body doesn’t tolerate dairy and that’s why you were so fussy eating when you were younger. That and you seem to be gluten intolerant too. Or maybe the dairy is ok and it’s mainly the gluten that’s the issue, we’re still evaluating that. Either way it sucks for a kid, who has to miss out on birthday cake at parties, chocolate and ice cream. Generally you’ve taken the news pretty well and we’re lucky there are so many options out there for dairy and gluten intolerant kids these days.

Maybe we should have fed you less dairy when you were younger, and maybe we should never have taken you to Hooters either because its bad role modelling. I would like to point out at this stage that it was your Mum’s idea and, besides, it was a choice between Hooters, Crispy Creme and a Taco Bell. There were no healthy options on the highway, just a bunch of bad choices.

Sometimes, to be honest, parenting feels like that. Heck, life feels like that. We’re navigating the fog of our understanding, trying to see by stars that have been obliterated in the gloom. We peer ahead and try to make out vague shapes in the darkness. Rocks rear up out of the fog at the last moment, when it’s too late to turn.

We’re occupied with presentiments of disaster. We anticipate their onslaughts, plan for them, build light houses on cliff faces that thrust their searchlights through the gloom.

I don’t know where you’re heading or what will happen to you along the way. I want to. I would do anything to guarantee your happiness and success but I am limited in my vision and inability to see through the fog or to cover every cliff face with light. I can’t think my way through this, in the same way I can’t answer your Mum when she asks why Hooters do not stock milk. I don’t really know. It’s as simple as that.

See how they run.

Back on the bed it’s now 8am, 15 minutes before school departure. I take a breath and bring myself back. Your eyes settle and focus on me. They tend to do that when I am focussed on you, not sweeping the waves or trying to confront a future that hasn’t yet risen out of the darkness. You might have ADD, but I don’t think so. You’re the child who can sit for hours acting out stories in your imagination, or sir down to draw while we have long and boring meetings that seem endless to all of us.

If anything maybe it might be dyslexia that’s the problem. I don’t know. I don’t even really know if we should be using a word like problem. You learn differently, that’s what your teachers are telling us. Yes, that’s true, you’re different, but then look at the bunch of artists and misfits you’ve been modelling behaviour off all your life. People whose lives evolve around their imagination and ability to engross themselves in a world that is entirely constructed out of thin air.

You’re just like that, like us. You’re the boy who gets dressed up every dinner time to serve the family in a minimum of two imaginary roles in a restaurant that exists only in your head. One of those figures is ‘the waiter’ who is lovely, polite, and very attentive. The other is the ‘little gentleman’ who is part of the family being served by ‘the waiter’. Occasionally when I am busy in the kitchen, being ‘the chef’, you will also play the surprisingly gruff voice of ‘the father’, ordering food.

That voice isn’t mine, it’s deep and sounds a bit grumpy. That’s not me as far as I know, but maybe it’s the voice I have when I tell you to focus, to stop being yourself.

I want you to be you.

Your eyes focus on me and I realise I’m the one bouncing around. When I stop and look you’re right there. Smiling as always. So many gaps it’s like a graveyard of teeth. You’re right here, sitting, fully focussed, waiting for me. You’re not running over the walls, not steering for the rocks. You’re not a problem, not broken, there is no wreck for me to find.

You’re just you, sometimes the little gentleman, sometimes the waiter, always the trickster, the happiest boy in the world, sailing through life. You’re here, always here, waiting for me to join you in the improbable beauty of this moment.

Waiting for me to stop shining my light off into the darkness.

Love,

Ragnar

The black fire

Hey Sam,

today we went to Anna’s place for a swim. Anna lives in a weird Gold Coast housing estate, with a gate and a bunch of identical units on curving streets next to a canal that has bull sharks in it. At least that’s what I told you. It’s probably true. You were a bit ‘creeped out’ by the idea of the bull sharks while I was just creeped out by the dense suburban sprawl.

To be fair the place has more of a holiday vibe than an Edward Scissorhands suburban horror and I’m just being facetious because I know you like a bit of drama. The place feels like a resort, with a giant lagoon swimming pool (next to the canal with the bull sharks) and a hot tub that’s built up on fake rocks that resemble a volcano.

Anna likes it there because she’s a musician and the unit she rents has a soundproofed garage. That’s because a past tenant was a DJ and presumably needed somewhere for his ‘beats’.

OK, now I’m sounding like a Dad but like I said, it’s all for your amusement, rest assured I’m much cooler than I appear here…

The canals on the Gold Coast sit in former marshland behind the beaches. They curve around houses, force streets to end abruptly and detour the pavement over bridges. Often from the road you don’t realise they’re there, flanking you. Deep waters still like mirrors or, when there’s a wind up, ruffled and foamy and reflecting nothing back.

We’re rode our new bike to Anna’s. The Yuba Boda Boda Stepover electric cargo bike. Now I’m not looking for sponsorship or anything (??) but this bike has changed my life. Our lives. You sit on the back with your own set of handlebars that steer nothing except the joy that’s in your heart, and I’m on the front, with our bags casually tossed into the basket. That basket is welded to the frame, which means when you turn a corner it stays obstinately facing forward, as though it has a better idea of where we’re meant to be heading than I do.

I used to find this quirk unnerving. I’d start to turn and imagine it wasn’t happening, I was leaning to one side but still travelling directly forward at the same time. I’d always feel like I was going to tip over. All the bike baskets I’ve ever used were attached to the front wheel so they turned when you turned. This version is much better because the weight sits on the frame, not in the hands. It’s just another reason the Boda Boda Stepover is one of the best family sized cargo bikes around.

As we approach a bridge the houses drop away from either side and the canal fans out suddenly. It’s a beautiful day. Autumn, my favourite time on the Gold Coast. The wind drops, the humidity recedes, yet the ocean is still warm. The sun seems brighter, clearer, as if every detail has been wiped clean. In the distance I can see the hills banking up out of the plains and I imagine waterfalls tumbling out of them, spilling down into the canals around me.

A year ago we went into lockdown here. At the time it seemed the whole world was embarking upon the same experience together, united by our common experience, but since then we’ve inevitably split once more. What we’re experiencing in this country is nothing like what’s happening elsewhere.

I remember that first lockdown. Open blue sky, much like today, and a highway of bright blue butterflies that seemed to flow into the spaces we left behind.

There aren’t so many this year. I heard it was actually a plague of butterflies, possibly a result of the dry months, the bushfires, the end of a tough summer. At the time it felt like nature was responding to our absence and I was witnessing a world like the one before we came.

We exit the bridge and I turn into the short driveway before the gate. There we pause, have a drink and call Anna. We wait for her to come down and I read the sign once more. Sailfish Cove. Selfish Cove, I joke. There is something about a gated estate that makes me judgemental.

Anna comes and we head for the pool. You’re in full flight, excited and talking non-stop, because I’ve made the rookie parenting error of letting you snack on some tri-coloured fairy floss left over from last night’s trip to the Surfer’s Paradise night market. At first you seemed ok with the yellow pineapple layer, but after you excavated down to the sedimentary blue (berry?), you took off. It’s probably due to the food colouring, you’ve hit a rich seam of chemicals and you’re now bouncing around the pool area. Your voice has jumped two octaves higher and increased to a decibel level that I’m not sure even Anna’s soundproofed garage could smother.

I keep telling you to keep your voice down but fortunately the pool area is mostly empty so we’re only really disturbing ourselves. Anna and I throw you around in the water a bit, trying to wear you out, then we hit the volcano spa, ready to relax.

By this time you’ve decided you’re a dragon named Johnny.

Johnny lives in volcanoes (obviously), flies higher than any cloud in the sky (although probably a smidge lower than you’re flying at the moment) and can breathe fire of every colour. Anna asks you which colour is your favourite.

Black fire, you answer.

What does black fire do if it hits you? I add.

If black fire hits a person, it causes them to have a bad memory of their life…

…

…

Um…

I’m still dealing with that.

I think I’ve spent most of my life making good memories and reforming the bad ones into something positive so I can just get on with it. I think that helps me find a way forward.

A British psychologist named Richard Wiseman conducted a number of experiments with people who considered themselves lucky and people who considered themselves walking disasters. In one of these he arranged to meet in a cafe at a certain time without telling the participants they were being filmed. Outside the door of the cafe was a five pound note on the pavement and inside, standing at the counter, an actor playing a businessman and investor, the type of person who could make a dream a reality. The ‘lucky’ person found the note, struck up a conversation with the businessman and had a great day. The walking disaster missed the five pound note, didn’t talk to anyone and got a crappy coffee.

So as I understand it we make our own luck and our own good memories. But still, when the fire causes you to have a bad memory does that mean the memory itself changes (like Arnold Schwarzenegger in that Mars movie) or is it just your perception of the events that changes and the events stay the same?

I’m not sure what’s worse.

You complicate the situation later in the day, when I’m telling the story to your Mum, by adding that if a person has only good memories of their lives when they are hit by the black fire, they are immune to its negative effects. That seems positive at first but then you top it by saying being hit by the black fire can actually become a bad memory, which means you will subsequently have a life of bad memories, even if you started out with only good ones…

I ask myself quietly, which circle of Hell are we in exactly?

There is very little we can be certain of, especially not the stories we have constructed that justify our place in this world. But if we let go of them who are we?

An emptiness of self bathing in black fire perhaps, someone able to maintain a good memory, a benign imprint of the past with the present unfurling like the leaf of a fern.

You sit behind me on the ride home, the rise and fall of your fairy floss fixation passing. My hands are wrinkled from the volcanic hot tub as they grip the handlebars. I ring the bell and we circle the roundabout outside Sailfish Cove. The wind plays in my hair because I have left my helmet at home. You have yours on because I am a responsible parent who has learnt from the past.

I feel the wind passing through me, my arms away from my body. A car passes by us but I feel safe because the Boda Boda Stepover is a large bike that commands the street. You have your hands on your own set of handlebars, even if they don’t steer anything yet. You’re quiet now but both of us turn to look as we rocket onto the bridge and the canal yawns open next to us. The water is still and deep.

Beneath the surface, somewhere, are bull sharks.

Love, Ragnar.

There and back again

Hey Sam,

tonight 2020 ends.

But today, I’m sitting in an indoor treehouse themed playground, surrounded by kids running and screaming excitedly as they climb plastic trees and bounce off painted shrubbery walls. Next door a giant toyshop advertises its latest stock of Avenger weaponry on an enormous LED screen. The shifting light provides our fake forest with a dappled effect as I spot you in the throng. You climb on a log that will never decompose and declare that the floor is lava…

In 10

9

8

7

6

I’m distracted by the din and by the view of the escalator that rises from the floor below, outside the playground window. People appear as if being drawn out of the ground. They rise to full height, adding torsos to floating heads, then arms, legs, feet, until they step off and join the multitude of shoppers.

5

A multitude that includes us. Somewhere in this hyperdome your Mum is filling our holiday cart as we sit and let the last moments of 2020 tick past.

4

This is a long way from the real forest we were camping in a few days ago. That one had waterfalls, enormous fig trees, plateaus that cast a green eye over valleys shielding long extinct volcanoes like the bones of dead giants.

3

And giants were on our minds while we were there because we were deeply engrossed in your first reading of The Hobbit.

2

1

At the last moment a couple of other kids clamber onto the log beside you.

0

The floor is now lava.

2020 is the year that everyone says they want to forget. The year that wasn’t. Now we tell ourselves we want to get back to normal, but we don’t know what that means. Maybe we’re all just pining for the past, rewriting it as we remember it and making it safer, nicer, easier than it probably was, because the new future we face has dragons in it.

In the fake forest, one of the little log kids (brat?) just told you you look like a girl. You tell him you’re getting your hair cut, which is true, and you start fingering the long locks at the back, the ones with the curl in them, wishing them already gone. Down the escalator, and out the window behind me, our names are written on a chalkboard at the barbers. If I look over my shoulder…

…I can vaguely make out the shapes of our names hastily scrawled on the board. From this distance, across the mall space, it just looks like a snail took a shit and there’s still at least a half dozen other shits lined up before ours. I’m happy to wait. The truth is your hair is not that long, even if your Mum and I wish it were, and you don’t look like a girl, you look like Sam. The two brats (?) you’re playing with both have buzz cuts that make them look like child soldiers, so there’s no point listening to them. Maybe it’s also your leopard print pants? I don’t know, I think you look great.

Yesterday we were at a friends 40th birthday party in the park. A random game of cricket started up and pretty soon I found myself at bat. You seemed surprised and delighted to see me there, so after I spooned up a catch (on purpose of course) I joined you in the outfield to encourage you to join in. As I wandered over I told you to catch the ball if it came our way.

You responded, “I’m not that kind of man.”

Back in the neon hypermarket you’re playing pretty well with the child soldiers and even I can see they’re actually pretty cool. The question about your gender was nothing more than curiosity. Maybe you’re just pretty, that’s the issue. Like an elf king.

I notice you’re ostracising a small girl who wants to join your game in what I perceive as an act of masculine bonding. I look up at the girl’s father to try and gauge the situation but I don’t get much back, just a nod that’s hard to read, so I tell you to be nicer.

Less Thorin, more Bilbo.

I loved reading The Hobbit to you, it took me back to my own childhood. Perhaps it was the combination of that book and our campsite, which looked like a tropical version of Hobbiton, but Middle Earth really caught your imagination. And held it, at least until screens came back into our lives. I glance with annoyance at the giant display pointed at the playground. Hulk thunder blast. Captain America’s sonic missile. Iron Man’s fist of fury. Something like that. It doesn’t seem fair to line up a plastic forest next to the Times Square of children’s toys.

I crane my neck and look back out the window to the barber’s shop again. We’re inching closer, only a couple of snail shits to go…

The year ticks along to its conclusion, something I personally feel myself lacking. At the end of The Hobbit the dragon is slain, the goblins are routed, dwarves, men and elves all get along without fighting (or calling each other gender related insults) and Bilbo gets back to his home safely. In our world it’s less clear cut. Our dragon keeps mutating and our home no longer seems to be the nice little hobbit hole we left behind when we journeyed under the mountain.

I don’t know whether I should get your hair cut short. I love it long but I don’t want you to get teased either. Still, I’m not ready to pay for something that makes you look like you’re ready to shoulder an AK47. On the other hand I also don’t want you to be hurt or to make a decision based upon my own ideas of personal rebellion. I don’t have long hair, so what’s that about? Am I wanting to live vicariously through you? I don’t know.

I remember your hand playing in your hair at the back of your neck self consciously. Such a small thing but maybe it’s trying to tell me more. For a moment I am overwhelmed. The simple decision of talking to the barber suddenly seems important and I can’t seem to find the right path, it’s like I have strayed off it somewhere and got lost.

Should I have taught you how to catch when you were younger? Maybe we should have watched cricket on the couch together, fists pumping the air and shouting out random “Aussie, Aussies” and “oi, oi, ois”? I don’t know. I really don’t. I’m like Bilbo in the dark under the mountain, scrabbling around on wet, smooth stones, Gollum watching me with his twin fisheyes. I’m slipping about in a sea of grey that imagines itself black and white.

Even in the dark Bilbo had some clear parameters to work with (not to mention a magic ring):

A dragon must be slain to get the gold.

Only the brave and the true win out.

Tick.

I crane my neck.

Time’s up.

The floor is lava.

Happy New Year.

Love,

Ragnar.

Hulking out.

Hey Sam,

We have some control issues we’re dealing with right now…

That’s my Dad voice, in case you hadn’t noticed…

It's taken you six years to call me Dad, before that I was Ragnar. When you were small I used to carry you into the surf calling out ‘Ragnar’ every time a wave hit us (at the time your Mum and I were watching a viking TV show) and the name kind of stuck.

Your version of Ragnar sounded a bit more like ‘Ranran' but in my mind it meant I wasn't just another middle aged Dad getting thicker around the waistline, I was some sort of Norse warrior. It felt cool, heroic. At least it felt different.

But now you've decided to switch to ‘Dad’ to match your classmates and even sometimes to ‘Daddy’, which I have to admit, provokes an existential horror in me. So I've decided that if you're going to call me Dad, then I have full licence to occasionally utilise a 'Dad' voice.

Now I understand that my Dad voice makes you feel as if you’ve done something wrong but you need to understand something; it's meant to do that. The Dad voice has been carefully calibrated to a frequency and pitch that renders the recipient powerless and amenable to suggestion. It’s a mind control trick that has been passed down from father to son for millennia. I will pass it to you one day, but before I do that I will use it to control you.

The problem is you keep ignoring my Dad voice and I’m starting to think I’m not doing it right. Perhaps my own Dad left something out when he passed it onto me, some secret ingredient, a way to stand, a certain timing or pitch. I’m not sure but we’ve been crammed together for a while now (with world news buffeting our doorstep and a virus you tell us you ‘hate’) and it’s clear your Mum and I need to exercise some level of control. You’re back at school now but that doesn’t stop you flexing your independence muscles.

They rip through your shirt, turn you green and make us sorry we ever made you angry.

If we’re honest though, we have our own control issues to deal with, and that leads to the trickiest part of parenting; working out where (and when) to draw a line. I feel like it’s a random choice but a necessary one. While you’re turning green, we’re switching to red, like a traffic light, trying to stop you to allow other traffic through the intersection.

Which works, but you know what? I think you can sense the random nature of our parenting choices.

This morning you spent some time playing by yourself while your Mum and I were sitting on the balcony, enjoying the lack of anything we needed to do. After a bit you fronted up at the door, looking fairly pleased with yourself. You told us you had a story you were inventing and that you wanted to share it with us.

It went like this…

There is a Duke and Duchess who live on Treat Island. All the animals look after the Duke and Duchess and everyone else on Treat Island. Even the ocean is nice to them. If they go for a swim the jellyfish don’t sting them and the sharks don’t eat them.

On Treat Island the children get to do whatever they want, whenever they want. If they want to watch a video they just can. If a parent tries to tells their child they can’t do something, like watch TV, an enormous tube comes down and sucks the parent up and spits them out into the ocean where the sharks eat them up.

Yesterday your Mum made the observation that everything that shits her about you is her, not you. 

We all have our own baggage and we all get frustrated. Our feelings infect our view of the world and we no longer see each other. Emotions rise up. sudden anger, sadness at change, loss, regret, fear. They take so many forms and we don’t know how to deal with them all.

Let me tell you a story…

There was an island called family. Family Island. Only three people lived on the island but it was part of an archipelago, a chain of islands that reached off in every direction. The people who lived on Family Island were happy most of the time and they worked together to make sure they could live off what the island offered, but sometimes they wanted to travel, to go see other islands and meet other people.

Yes this sounds a little like Moana but bear with me.

This impatience made the people on the island feel unhappy but they still had to work with each other to survive. Sometimes there were terrible storms that came in from the ocean. The sky would turn black and waves would rear up and tear at the shore. In these moments their island would feel tiny and they would huddle together, afraid that their world was going to be torn apart.

Often the storm would tear away everything they owned and they would get angry because they missed the things they had before. They would start to argue and the sound of their arguing would ripple across the water to other islands. When the storms passed, they would hear each other in the sudden calm and they would feel ashamed.

The people of Family Island didn’t know what to do with these feelings. They seemed too big to keep on such a small island. They tried to attach weights to them and sink them down to the bottom of the ocean, but they kept bobbing back up to the surface, and when they did, they started to think that, in any case, these feelings belonged to them and should be treasured. So they dried them off and kept them close.

But the feelings kept growing and there came a time when they were so big the people could no longer share their hut with them and they found themselves outside on the sand, while inside the feelings stomped around and broke all the best crockery. For the first time in a long time the three of them looked at each other again. They’d been so busy with their feelings that they hadn’t seen each other in ages and now, when they did, they remembered the love they felt for each other.

They started to laugh at the noise their feelings were making and as they did so, their feelings stopped. Together they cleaned up the mess their feelings had made and then sat outside to watch the sun set on another perfect day.

Love,

Ragnar

Of the Father

Hey Sam,

in my last letter I wrote that my Dad “assumed I was a bit dumb” as a boy. It was a joke, but I now realise that quoting your Grandfather out of context might paint him with a certain broad brush stroke he doesn’t deserve, so I thought I’d try to fill you with a little more detail.

In general I have to say I’m pretty happy with the selection of parents I made in this world, even if they weren’t always as satisfied with each other. They got divorced when I was eleven. Sean and I stayed with Mum so she became my main role model growing up. Her view of the world and the way she dealt with the divorce, when it happened, shaped me in more ways than I can count. Instead of moping around (or after moping around) she flew to Nepal, climbed mountains, drank yak milk, prayed at temples (before Elizabeth Gilbert) and fell out of a boat while white water rafting.

She was (and still is) a rockstar to me. That’s part of your DNA too, just so you know, so if you find yourself with a sudden urge to milk a yak, you know where it comes from.

On my Dad’s side, things were a bit more complicated because we saw each other less often. He was dealing with guilt and responsibility and we sided with Mum. It took longer for us to come back together and understand each other and, as is probably common, it’s taken me a lot of time to realise the things I inherited from him.

That’s him in a local newspaper, advertising canned water. It’s a product that never really seemed to cement its market place value but I remember thinking of him as some kind of rugged adventurer, like Bear Grylls in a car. He was a rally driver and seemed to change cars every year. In particular I remember a Peugot with hydraulic suspension that would rise up like a dog when you turned the key, and a Triumph Stag convertible that, when the top was down, often sported two excited boy’s faces high up above the roll bar.

He once took us down a dirt track and over a jump in the Triumph. We held on, got serious air, and nobody was hurt. When we landed there were still two excited boys in the back, no empty space where a boy used to be. At least I assume that’s the case because my memory finishes mid air, like the credits of a Dukes of Hazard show, with an airborne car and two grinning faces sticking out the roof.

In another car memory (and this one is getting to the point so bear with me), we were crossing a succession of crossroads and I was in the passenger seat. In rally terms that makes me navigator. Dad asked me to keep an eye on the left and to let him know if any cars were coming. I was flush with the responsibility.

‘Clear?’ He would ask.

‘Yes."‘ I would respond.

‘Clear?’

‘Yes.’

‘Clear?’

‘Go for it.’

I don’t think I ever said that. It was a minor change he added in later that evening and the effect of it (plus the way he told the story) caused a whole table full of dinner party guests to laugh. That moment is very bright in my memory, as if I have taken it out many times and polished it to a gleam. I think in that single moment I understood the role of story telling and how the truth can sometimes be subservient to the desire to entertain.

When I was a teenager I became obsessed by the musical Jesus Christ Superstar. I can still sing (badly) every song by Jesus, Judas, Pontius Pilot or the Jewish Priests. For some reason it’s only the men’s parts I remember, I’ll get stuck if I go for Mary’s tribute to Jesus for instance, the one she sings after Jesus trashes the temple in Jerusalem. The chorus is fine but if I try to remember why she doesn’t know how to love him, I’m in trouble.

When I was around ten, the movie came out at the cinema in Adelaide. We were all going, me, my brother, my father, my mother. The whole family. It was my first viewing, but not my last, and it led in a direct line to a teenage version of myself compulsively acting out entire scenes alone in our living room, one moment down in the dust as Jesus and the next washing my hands as Pontius Pilate.

Jesus Christ Superstar is pretty brutal toward the end. The main character gets nailed up on a cross and left to bake in an unforgiving backlot in L.A. by a bunch of Romans in pink singlets and chrome helmets.

Now I’m aware that this outcome shouldn’t be a shock to anyone, but at the time I was surprised, due to a couple of hasty parenting decisions Dad made on the drive to the cinema.

Before I get to the film in question let me fill you in on a bit of backstory. My Grandma on Mum’s side (your great grandmother) was Catholic and, in my memory, fiercely so. I used to stay with her sometimes. She would brush my hair, something I still love, but it often happened under the gaze of a representation of Jesus that looked like it belonged in a David Cronenberg movie.

The memory plays out like this: Grandma Morgan is brushing my hair underneath the picture of Jesus. He is looking directly at me. His forehead is bleeding from the crown of thorns, the blood runs down his cheeks into his eyes, dripping back out like tears. He should be squinting from the sting of it but he isn’t, he’s staring straight at me, as though I am to blame. His hands are on his chest. No, wait, not on his chest, but in his chest, because he is pulling apart his sternum, cracking open his rib cage with his bare hands and pulling the skin back to expose a beating heart, like a piece of gristle, a half chewed thing on the edge of your plate after a visit to Sizzler. His open and bleeding heart.

That painting on my Grandma’s wall was enough to traumatise me away from organised religion my whole life. It was also enough to start me crying and wailing in the car as it dawned on me that the movie I was about to see was going to end with the same guy’s death scene.

I cried and wailed in the car, trying to get Dad to turn around and take me home.

“I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go. Stop the car!”

Dad got creative. ‘Jesus doesn’t die.’ He said.

‘What?’

"‘Jesus doesn’t die. They changed the ending... Jesus lives!’

Ok, now this might sound bad. And at the time it was, kind of. I remember sitting in the cinema dark an hour or so later, thinking ‘He’ll be ok, any minute now they’re going to get him back down.’ Instead he bled out and there was a weird laughing, screaming, dissonant soundtrack, like fingernails over blackboards, as the men in the pink singlets and chrome helmets laughed at Jesus bleeding from his crown of thorns, asking his father why he had forsaken him.

Fortunately for both of us there was a great song and dance number to end the thing.

I don’t know if this episode created trauma in me (now I get it, I’m a parent too and I understand that sometimes you’re desperate enough to say anything to your kids to make them calm down because you don’t want them to be in pain, especially not within earshot) but it stayed with me and, like the joke at the dinner party, I learned something.

With the power of storytelling comes the responsibility for what stories you tell.

We all make a fiction out of our lives. We tell and retell our stories, taking them out of the attic and showing them off, but the more we polish those gems we have stored away the more we turn them into what we want them to be, not what they are (or were). I think it’s important to remember when we tell stories of the past, that’s what they are, stories.

When we become parents we realise how much of our parents are in us. Dad’s initials are E.G. which stands for Edward Graham, but I prefer to think of him as e.g., an example of what a Webber can be. I know I’ve accumulated stuff from lots of people but from my father, I now realise, I took the ability to spin a yarn.

So Dad, if you’re reading this, I hope you don’t mind me taking these old stories out for a spin, they’re too good not to share.

And Sam, if you’re reading this, maybe you’ll regard me with the same caveat that I have granted my own father, a caveat best expressed in Mary’s song. One lyric I remember very well:

He’s a man. He’s just a man.

Love,

Ragnar.

The price of art

Hey Sam,

that’s a prize home.

It’s up in Tallebudgera Valley, has a pool, a shed the size of our dance studio, trees, even an outdoor fire pit. We bought a ticket for it even though it’s a bit white for my taste. To me it looks like something that’s crawled out of an American TV show and planted itself on the side of a hill.

If we won I wouldn’t complain but if I were given the choice (and the money) I’d go for something more ‘log cabin in the woods’ vibe. The overall size of the house doesn’t matter to me but you have your own opinions. Lately you’ve been telling us you want a bigger house, you hate where we live, you want something more like your Grandparents or your Uncle Andy’s, but you’re missing an important point:

We’re artists.

A family of artists who, in the American TV show mentioned above, probably use the drugs being sold by the people who own the big white house on the hill, a family that are likeable but inevitably suffering at the end of the first season because of some bad choices they made in episode four.

It’s a cautionary tale.

About drugs.

And the fragility of an artist’s existence.

My first ‘real’ job was at a petrol station when I was 15 but it didn’t last long. I can distinctly recall the sinking feeling of watching yet another car drive off with a petrol cap sitting on top of it’s roof, glinting in the sunlight, winking at my failure to remember the most basic task of my short lived gas station attendant career. I can also remember my friend’s face, the one who got me the job, watching the same winking petrol cap as he filled another car. His look, when he directed it at me, contained a lack of comprehension about how I could be so vague.

Art is the only job I’ve ever really had and maybe the only one I was ever suited to. I was described by my teachers as an ‘absent minded professor’ and my Dad told me recently he just assumed I was a bit dumb (his exact words I think).

When I watch you teleport yourself around the house in your Darth Vader costume, ending up in cupboards, or on top of the kitchen bench, I know the same thing is happening inside you, an imaginary world that often seems more real than the one you inhabit day to day. You make a small buzzing, teleportation noise as you run from one place to another, appearing in a new location with an astonished look on your face, as if you have no idea how you got there.

Since the quarantine ended and you returned to school, we’ve been told you’re behind in class. Your teacher says it’s because you have too many ideas, you’re off in your imagination, you can’t focus on simple school tasks. We’re working hard at home to bring you up to the level they say you should be at, even if it means you have less time to teleport.

It seems odd to me that having too much imagination as a six year old is a problem, but perhaps that’s because I’ve made a life out of being in my imagination. It’s always been a land of solutions, not problems.

We didn’t win the prize home (I guess you already knew that) but we didn’t self destruct like the family in the American TV show either. We’re still in our two bedroom flat that has the ocean lapping at it’s heels and salt eating its iron. Your room is still the one at the back, with too many toys because you won’t let any go, and a map of the world stuck to the wall with all the places you’ve been marked in round, red stickers.

There are green stickers there too, for all the places we want to take you next, but in this post Covid version of the world, green no longer means go it means wait and see…

From our tiny flat (two bedrooms, a kitchen attached to the lounge, a bathroom with no bath), I can see blue waves crashing through the pines and the sound of the ocean is so loud we shut the balcony door when we want to watch a movie. I love this place, not just for the view but because we have spent five years here, five of your six, mapping ourselves in terrain that is constantly reforming.

Our way of life has been weathered over many years of doing what we do. We know you should never build too high because the soil is sandy and you have to be ready to move on. We’re nomadic because the crops don’t last.

We think; most people couldn’t live here.

We know; we wouldn’t survive elsewhere.

No matter how small our flat might feel to you, there is space around us, and it’s not just the space of the beach either. It’s the space we create through the work we do and the people we work with. You might not always see it but our world is open to the horizon because art can do that. It clears space like a wrecking ball.

Landscapes we all thought immutable are changing, rivers are breaking banks and mountains are crumbling into dust. A whole world is reforming before our eyes but in our small part of it we also have you, a river carving its own canyon through the dirt.

We have to keep adapting to the changes as they come, even though they seem to arrive faster and faster, like a world in time lapse. Now, more than ever, it’s clear the nature of life is uncertain, but if we have one advantage it’s that we know uncertainty well. Our landscape has always had tectonic activity and instability has always been a part of our imaginings.

So we’ll make you do your homework to help you find your way in this world, but we’ll also give you enough time to play. Enough time to imagine yourself teleporting around our tiny apartment even if, in reality, you are just running from space to space.

Love,

Ragnar.

Rainbow staircase

Hey Sam,

this morning I got really angry with you. We were getting you ready for school, which may sound simple but I have to be honest, it’s not. There’s reading to you while you eat breakfast then sight word/wrestlemania on our bed. After that second breakfast (so that we don’t send you off with only Nutri Grain in your stomach) and bag packing, shoelace tying, teeth brushing, getting to the car.

Each of these small tasks is like a wormhole that can consume whole chunks of time. Inevitably they pile up one on top of another, like multiverses of negotiation overlapping and unfolding into a kind of Stephen Hawkings version of hell. Your Mum is currently doing the drop offs because you’ve requested afternoon pickups in Vera (our kombi) and the stress of getting you out of the house and in the car when the minutes are melting off the dial like some kind of Dali clock face, is exhausting.

Your Mum and I work hard to get you out of the house without any meltdowns. I usually invest in whatever imaginative world you are inhabiting at the time so that it doesn’t become a battle of wills. I speak monkey to you, or do a Yoda voice, whatever the current vibe is.

Usually it works but this morning you were excited. Somehow our success with sight word/wrestlemania amped you up. You were running from room to room, slamming doors, saying indecipherable things to yourself, or to us, I don’t know. And in the middle of all that excitement I became aware of time like a concrete thing that had run out.

You wouldn’t listen to me no matter what I said and I surprised myself when I grabbed your arm, trying to drag you from your room. You’re going to be late, don’t you get that? Your Mum is getting stressed. I was trying to take control of the situation so we could continue to enjoy our morning, like we had been, only moments before, laughing on the bed, sight words done and dusted, lingering on a couple of wrestling moves that were more like cuddles you had to get out of. Us. Together. Before I decided to act.

We both knew it was an act. An act of failure because I hadn’t understood the situation fully and I was ahead of myself, out of context with the moment, trying to push you through a wormhole into a future where you arrived at school on time, your bag packed, your manners impeccable, you and your Mum laughing together. Me at home writing something brilliant.

I had your arm in my hand and I could feel that I wanted to impose myself. I’m not sure I knew what I was planning to do. I tried to change tack and pretend it was your choice. You’re going to be late, you’ll have to go to the office and get a late slip. I raised my voice, if you don’t get moving there’ll no movie tomorrow, no movie on our special movie night. Is that what you want? It was a threat as empty as the dark blue school bag that remained unpacked on the couch. We both knew that.

Nobody ever mentioned to me that having a child would make me confront my own control issues.

I remember the first time I understood that part of the gig, a night when you were only a few months old. We hadn’t slept much because you were crying a lot so I decided to go for a walk with you cradled in my arms.

That was in our Coolongatta flat, the first place we rented after we unpacked our lives from Germany. A small place, but it sat on top of Kirra Hill with a view that ran all the way up the coast to Surfer’s Paradise. For months we’d been watching whales cruise past us on their way south, huge bodies jumping out of the ocean only a few hundred metres off shore. When the wind picked it up it would scream through the space between our apartment block and the next. Our windows rattled and we had to stuff folded bits of paper in the cracks to sleep.

We couldn’t believe our luck. You rarely cried. Our friends called you the happiest baby in the world.

Not on this night. Your tiny face, screwed up into a wail, a force of anguish coming out of your mouth. You’re like a tiny set of bagpipes, pounding out a marching tune. Normally going outside would fix something, but not on this occasion. I decide to take the rainbow steps next to our flat, each one painted a different colour, down to the beach.

The stairs are steep and I’m talking to you, taking them quickly.

Blue, orange, green, red, yellow, purple.

Almost running down because the night air hasn’t soothed you like I thought it would. If anything you are louder now, protesting the change, challenging the decision to remove you from your mother. I’m aware of the neighbours.

Green, pink, yellow, blue, red.

Halfway down I am bouncing you in my arms, talking quietly into your squelched face, trying to anchor you with my voice.

Orange, blue, red, red.

You’re getting louder and I am starting to understand the saying ‘you’re getting on my nerves’ because that’s what you are doing, shredding my nerve endings. I am suddenly very tired because I haven’t slept properly in days and you just won’t stop crying, even though I really need you to right now.

Red, red, red, red.

Anger bursts through me like a sudden wave appearing out of an otherwise flat sea. I don’t see it coming. I’m not prepared for it and in a moment I have the impulse to throw you.

It’s hard for me to admit. Even now. I feel a lot of shame, the same feeling I’m carrying with me after grabbing your arm this morning. Shame at my own anger and lack of control.

That photo, by the way, was taken on Magnetic island, just off the coast of Townsville. On your stomach is blood from an oyster cut I got when I was swimming and it’s on you because I just changed your nappy. The rest of the mess is avacado and sand.

You were going through a sand eating phase back then. Sometimes I called you gummy shark.

Before you were born I didn’t know I could be filled with so much love and happiness. It was a love affair, strong, intense, overwhelming. Nobody mentioned that. Emotionally we were linked together, all of us, wrapped up in our flat, whales calling as they lumbered south, sea and wind and salt and sand.

I don’t consider myself an angry person, it doesn’t happen to me often, but in that moment on the rainbow steps I realised how easy it would be to lose control when you’re emotional and tired and stressed.

I didn’t act on my impulse, just to reassure you. I didn’t throw you. Of course I didn’t, it was just a rush of blood. I ran back up the stair, flicking backwards through the colour spectrum and into our flat where I presented you to your Mum, arms outstretched, like I was holding something dangerous.

Take him. Take him.

And I knew also that we were fortunate because we had each other to turn to. I wondered what it would be like to be a single parent.

Later I spoke to Grayson about it. You remember Grayson right? Big guy, lives (lived?) in Berlin? Milo’s Dad? Anyway he shared a similar story. The lack of sleep, extreme tiredness, frayed nerves, leading to a sudden burst of anger where you are no longer sure what you might do. I don’t think it’s just men either, I think all parents deal with it in different ways.

And I’m thinking, why did no-one mention this? In amongst the recommendation for sleeping patterns, nappy use, feeding, cleaning, reading, raising, caring…

Why no mention of anger management or control issues?

In a moment of realisation I release your arm. I lower my voice. I step out of the room, breathing deeply. I quiet my heart rate. I ask your Mum to take over. I consider if it really matters that you might be late. I take a moment.

A moment away from action, from doing. Away from a mental pattern that is pushing me into futures that don’t even exist yet. I take the time to step back into a world that we inhabit together, the sun shining brightly outside, the sound of waves crashing against the shoreline.

Your face, cheeky as usual, looking up at mine, quizzing me.

Are you ready for me yet?

Are you?

Love,

Ragnar.

Goodbye Mister Crow

Hey Sam,

a while ago, not sure if you remember, we were sitting on our balcony eating dinner and watching the ocean as the sun set. You were most likely eating spaghetti bolognese. It’s your meal of choice and on standby all the time. You love it and we love it because it’s full of hidden veg.

Anyway we were out there eating dinner and enjoying the breeze when a black shape fell out of the tree across the road. It hit the bitumen with an audible thud. It was a crow. As we watched it started convulsing and trembling. It looked as though it was panicking but then it stretched its wing and the fight went out of it. It gave a final shudder, almost a sigh and then it relaxed. It’s wing closed against its body, its head dropped and it died.

It was a startling thing to witness. You started asking what had happened to it…

It’s dead Sam. The crow just died.

We left our dinner and walked across the road to it, holding tightly to your hand even though there were no cars. It was quiet, dusk. We knelt down. The crow had landed at the top of a disabled car space, just above the blue box with the wheelchair in it. There was blood on the bitumen and already ants crawling all over it, making it look like it was moving when it wasn’t. We found two sticks and lifted it up. I was careful not to touch it and warned you away as well, as though the sickness could somehow pass to us if we came in contact with it.

We put it down at the base of one of the big pine trees that grow in the strip of park before the beach, right next to where I taught you to ride your bike. It was the same tree the bird had presumably dropped out of.

We placed the sticks next to it, framing it. It had the beautiful shape that birds seem to possess when they die. Body arched back towards the head, wings pressed to its sides, legs and beak sharp spikes coming out of the curve of it. I think I took a photo but I can’t find it now. We decided we should have some kind of ceremony. One of us spoke, or maybe all of us did, I can’t remember, but I do remember feeling honoured and somehow responsible because we had been witness to the bird’s last moments.

When we got back inside your questions started in earnest.

Where is the crow?

It’s dead, its molecules will go back into the earth.

I remember feeling I wanted to sit with the enormity of the experience, meditate upon the idea of death but you wanted me to explain something I had never really pondered in any detail.

Will I die?

Sam. Sammy. You knew and understood what we had just been witness to. You started to wail.

I don’t want to die

I don’t want to die.

Over and over, distraught. Tears and snot covering your face and your Mum and I holding you, trying to comfort you about something for which we had no answers. We talked about energy. Your Einstein book. How we’re all made of atoms and those atoms, that energy, doesn’t disappear, it goes out into the world, into other things. That crow still lives in other form.

I don’t want to die.

And suddenly it was over, purged from you. You stopped crying, stopped grieving.

Like the crow, you lifted a wing, shuddered and then let go.

As for me, I was still unsettled by the suddenness of our conversation and its topic. I wasn’t prepared, no-one had told me there would be an exam on the transient and existential nature of our lives that day. Or that we would have to not only understand the subject but explain it to a 4 year old. I kept thinking, if I had a bit more time I could have prepared something, then I would have really nailed that conversation.

As it turned out you were fine. The next day you asked if your great grandmother was going to die soon. I said yes, waiting for the meltdown, but you just accepted the fact and we talked about atoms.

Is she going to be atoms too?

Yes Sam, her atoms will go out into the world, like the crows.

You accepted the theory easily, without existential drama. You’d already done the work.

In Indian mysticism there is a tradition to sit at cremation sites and watch the bodies being burned. It’s meant to give the observer an understanding of the true nature of our lives, that we are not the physical body, it is only something we inhabit in passing, something that is bound for death as soon as it is born.

The bodies never really burn all the way through. There are so many cremations in a day, bodies stacked up waiting for the torch, that the process is often left unfinished. The smouldering remains are shovelled off into the sacred waters of the river, where they will bob and float downstream until they reach the ocean or are pulled apart by fish and birds. Heads are often left completely intact, features seared from faces, skin split open and peeling, skulls showing. The river takes it all, ash, bone, charred flesh. Remnants of people who occupied a life on this planet. Like you and me.

I won’t always be around for you. I’m 52, late to the party because it took me a long time to locate your Mum in this world. I’m a delayed Dad contemplating your future as I drift into what is commonly known as my Autumn years, like a leaf going from green to yellow to red.

There is a point in life that your gaze seems to travel from where you’ve been and starts to eye off where you’re going, but it seems to me its better to stay focussed on where you are. And that is here, with you.

So I promise, even as I fall from the tree, I will attempt to blaze brightly for you.

Love,

Ragnar.