21
He is susceptible not so much to the disease as to its images.
22
The locals are hardy, unlike their fearful former visitors (now departed). It is dangerous and unpatriotic to touch the ground. We have been warned that the ungulate pelts are highly infectious. We debate the merits of cooked and raw bones. There are too many available conclusions. The cameraman unfortunately and uncontrollably conflates several crises. The effect is to exaggerate his resilience.
23
Please excuse the assimilative and associative nature of the cameraman’s thought.
24
Dark-feathered statisticians fill the treetops or circle impatiently for outcomes in the war against the ungulates.
There are new cases every day. A special ‘screen within a screen’ on the television tallies the spread of illness. Despite this broadcast of relentless counting, the cameraman is unclear on the precise meaning of ‘case’. It seems not to refer to individuals, nor to unanimous or even general ungulate contamination in a location. His friend the journalist informs him ‘case’ refers to ‘observed viral presence’ and thus is measured by emplacement of film crews. But then the journalist giggles at the formality of his own expression, which seems inappropriate behaviour in the circumstances.
25
In official statements no one admits unmeasured probability, but without it there can be no such thing as hope. The ungulates cannot hope. One does not discuss hope with veterinarians. Absolute regulation of the ungulates is an already-given necessity, a sine qua non of the science.
26
Veterinary epidemiologists have come into their own. The government is pleased with its success in tracking. The cameraman is surprised that the term ‘outbreak’ has not been preferred over ‘case’, with the former’s connotations of rebellion and call to arms. His surprise persists despite the latter’s apparent tendency to minimise infection.
27
When viewing pigs, it is not possible to judge whether facial features are liquefying or simply that the animals are slavering uncontrollably. In broadcasts over the relevant epidemiological period, the map slowly shades inflammation-red.
28
The cameraman jokes to selected friends among the film crews that once the island is fully coloured the red of disease, humans shall regain their licence to move freely. All movement is currently (a) treacherous and (b) equivocally and simultaneously permissible and forbidden. It is patriotic to deny contradiction.
29
The prime minister goes to America to smile. He returns and now appears concerned. He allows himself some happiness. The leader of the opposition tries not to smile. He attempts not to nag. He labours towards positivity, but then flags. He attempts not to undertake a number of other attitudes. He disappoints the cameramen and is insufficiently conflictual.
30
War historians steer away from this discussion. They too understand mobility but they know how to set parameters. (This is a quality the cameraman lacks, the ability to set his own limits. He lacks realism, existing solely in the naturalistic. He has observed war historians through his fixed lens and they have eyed him coldly.)
31
The cattle are queuing. The sheep know not for whom they fall. Drawing on several mediated sources, the cameraman deduces that each case is metonymic of one thousand, seven hundred and seventy-nine beasts, supine.
32
Many humans openly support chemical intervention over the war against the ungulates. (Needles are also favoured for use among the humans, with few opposed.) This, they argue, would obviate the warrior imperative, but their approach is counterintuitive. Humans split into teams, barrackers shouting each other down in good-natured democratic interaction. Journalists applaud civility and regular contributions to the half-hour bulletins.
33
Rational humans cheer for death, believing that risk should be eliminated by conclusive means. Rationalists are also concerned about inconclusiveness, always a risk in peacetime. Our leaders wish to move forward and seek our consent. As the leaders weaken, one may observe rationalists on street corners pursing lips and frowning. They have made their case and can do no more. Consensus remains for progress. Only outsiders are against consensus.
34
The nation continues to grow rich and nutritious grasses. It grows grass. It grows poor and uneven. Grazing animals truck across paved commons. High streets everywhere are the same. Some farmers name their herds, fence, guard; others receive conversations. The cameramen repair to regions where disease can be relied upon.
35
‘I am afraid,’ the journalist reports, with flat remorselessness, ‘the cattle are dead.’
36
The number of new cases is falling; registered persons fell existing cases. Because of the urgency, past and future slaughtered are not shielded from one another. It is not a pleasant disease. (Not like ____? But there are no counter-examples.) The surfaces of their tongues dissolve. The virus destabilises cell governance for its own ends. Pigs sneeze uncontrollably. News editors choose to include cattle mucus. This is all part of the war effort, the cameraman reminds himself.
37
The national grass grows, undisturbed. Virulent organisms are arrayed within the soil. Above ground, cattle await. The sheep are collapsed against their pasture. One cannot estimate the travel time of camera trucks without evidence of their points of origin. Some roads are closed, and this makes accurate reporting more difficult still.
38
The prime minister smiles momentarily. There is no recrimination, only personal sorrow.
39
Thinking back on the war against the ungulates, the cameraman conjures, first, a logic of bodies and, second, a logic of broadcast rituals. First, the ground will be overlaid with flesh. Second, there will be no conflict, in which case audience size will diminish, and this must be countered.
We are barbarous in outlook and results. There are no longer farmers and nor are there writers. Camera trucks range along the highways in search of tendrils of malaise. We are all contributors to large-scale industries which must be understood in an international context. It is easy, reflects the cameraman, to rubbish national priorities.
I wrote this piece in response to the 2001 UK foot-and-mouth outbreak and to media and UK government responses to it.
Hoverdog
The River Fillmore was not in good shape. It stank bad. More mud than water, not even real mud. Dead fish swam by. (Kind of.)
‘I wish I didn’t see that,’ Small Lincoln said. ‘Gross.’
‘Yep,’ I said. I poled my kayak towards them.
‘Yep.’ Big Lincoln reeled in. (Zilch, of course.)
‘Whoa,’ said the same boy. ‘Look at.’
‘How the,’ said Small Lincoln, same vessel.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Up there.’ Small Lincoln jabbed a paddle. Dogwards. Wilson (terrier) was somehow in a tree.
‘Whoa,’ I said. ‘What the.’
‘How the flack,’ said Big, making mad signs.
Some kid laughed – but out of sight.
‘Show y’self.’
No one appeared.
‘Come out, kid,’ I said.
The laughter stopped. Silence.
‘I’ll count to six,’ growled Big.
Nothing.
‘Six?’ queried Small.
‘Whatever.’
It was way hot to paddle. Hat brims dripped. The Lincolns’ boat drifted. It drifted under that dog.
Wilson yelped. The kid laughed. Everything was slo-mo as. The dog. It fell.
Small Lincoln ducked. Big flinched hard. Wrong moves. Over they went. The River Fillmore. Boys in, dog in. Hats off. Dog snatched hat. Big Lincoln grabbed the dog.
�
��I can’t swim, you bastard.’ Shouting, now spluttering. Would the dog keep him up? But Wilson wanted the hat. It was towing him.
‘I. (Gulp.) Can’t. (Gulp.) Swim.’
They reached shore. Big Lincoln hanging on to the dog. Small Lincoln all arms. Big Lincoln grabbed Wilson. Bearhug. The dog yelped.
‘I love you, Wilson,’ he said. He kissed it on the eye.
‘Gross,’ said Small Lincoln. ‘I wish I didn’t see that.’
‘He saved me.’ Big started to cry. ‘He did.’
I paddled up to them. Two strokes and up. ‘Truman Kayak.’ Fibreglass on gravel: schhhht.
A twig cracked.
‘Kid! There!’ shouted Small. ‘There he goes. Get him!’
The kid flew for it.
Short Twos
Babycinos
The larger of the two little girls, perhaps five years old, was wheeling a small scooter which the younger child was trying to wrest back.
‘The reason I’m helping you,’ she said, ‘is because you hurt yourself and I want to thank you for hurting yourself because now we get babycinos.’
Parenthood
‘Stay out of the puddle,’ said his father, but one cannot stay out of a place one is already in.
Everybody Already Knows Everything
‘When you smash your skull,’ Damon said, as they passed the surgery on the corner of Coleridge and Milton streets, the one their parents took them to when they caught temperatures, rashes or what Dad called ‘distemper’, the one with stacks of Reader’s Digests in each corner of the waiting room, ‘When you smash your skull,’ he repeated, ‘you get a brain bleed and blood goes into your brain.’
‘Yeah, that happened to me the first time I cracked open my head,’ said Thomas.
The Chinese Meal, Uneaten
The meal I did not eat comprised chicken fried with onions and a few cashew nuts tinged unevenly with soy. This occupied two-thirds of the plate, the remaining one-hundred-and-twenty-degree segment taken up by white rice. Someone behind the curtain dividing dining area from kitchen had perhaps measured this with a protractor. The plate itself sat between cuprous spoon and fork as my then wife and I were, by any glancing judgement, not chopsticks people. To the fork’s left, a bread plate was surmounted by four small isosceles triangles of white bread, so smothered in margarine that the only foreseeable purpose to which the faux-bronze butter knife could be put was to engineer its removal.
‘Triangular,’ I commented.
‘I don’t know why you chose Chinese,’ complained my wife. ‘Have you ever liked a Chinese meal in your life?’
The meal my then wife did not eat was the Chef’s Special, Mongolian Lamb. I’m guessing that it was about as Mongolian as my wife was, with her fourth-generation Australian whine. Her fried rice certainly appeared to be rice, but considering the quantity of oil still adhering to it in little beads, one might be confused as to whether the frying process had already taken place or whether the table was a stop-off point on the way to the pan.
‘Yes, I have.’ I was feeling combative – she brought this out in me – even though she was almost certainly correct. I thought I could recall three other meals in different restaurants in towns along the Hume Highway, which despite being the main route between Melbourne and Sydney and about five hundred and fifty miles long, was in those days mostly a single lane in each direction and was not famous for its cuisine. I could not recall enjoying any. My memories of the three meals, if there were indeed three, had fused together into a glutinous compound of rice, cornflour and a pale orange-brown substance which was almost certainly not dilute tea.
‘Name one Chinese restaurant on Earth where you’ve enjoyed a single mouthful.’ The problem with my wife, as I knew at some level from the moment we became engaged, was that she could never disengage. At that time nor could I. Her hissing attracted a look or two from the other patrons – a couple at the table next to us and another couple across the room, early diners hoping to clock up a few more miles before checking in to the next cardboard-walled, substandard motel (if heading south) or arriving home (if on the same northerly trajectory as we were).
‘That one in Gundagai was good,’ I said. ‘What was it called? The Lantern or something.’
‘Rubbish,’ she whispered, as loudly as possible.
‘You don’t have to eat it,’ I said. ‘We could leave everything and walk across to the pub. The pub looks fine. Just the way you like it. Solid as Australia. Regular as the public service. I read the menu last time.’
She poked at a small strip of lamb with the tip of her spoon. Whenever in an ethnic restaurant, it was our practice to doubt the provenance and more particularly the species of the meat. This dated back to a tour group holiday we’d taken three years earlier, in which we’d spent a small amount of time in the company of a meat inspector from Darwin.
‘What do you think this is?’ she asked, in a tone which could almost have suggested a riddle.
‘Meat,’ I said.
‘Aren’t we all?’
The problem with my then wife was bluntness and aggressive passivity that would make a cliff seem friendly, from top or bottom. And stubbornness. She sat there without eating and without rising.
Problems, problems. The problem with me, according to my wife, her family and her allies, was indolence. The problem with indolence was that it had resulted in my lacking employment, a condition which limited my capacity to spend my money on her as all the money we possessed (by process of elimination of the non-earner) was hers.
‘Would you like me to shout you a pub dinner too? And after that maybe some Italian? If that doesn’t work, who knows what we could find: Greek? Fijian? Icelandic?’ asked my wife. ‘We could order and abandon meals at every restaurant in town. I’ll just phone my parents and ask for an advance on my inheritance.’
I’d heard this once or twice before and bit my lip rather than suggest that if one were actually to kill her parents there would be no need for a forward payment. I guessed she would not find this funny. My wife’s parents were not appropriate material for jokes. Her father made clear his dislike of me each time we met, and not so subtly. The employment section of the paper was always open on the table. Lately I had noticed a further downgrade, in that the Casual Work section was now highlighted. He had an inimitable manner.
My wife’s mother simply ignored me, or addressed me through her daughter: ‘Would he like a cup of coffee? Did he sleep badly?’
The hypothesis came to me that my wife had deliberately brought her parents into the conversation to ensure I lost my appetite completely. I studied the food and concluded that it made no difference.
‘So eat up then,’ I said, ‘and stop complaining.’
Amidst the clumped rice and drying chicken on my plate the cashews glistered like cartoon smiles in the weak lantern light. It was all about as appetising as the thought of our lives together stretching into the future.
A family of four entered the restaurant with a tinkling of the bells tied to the back of the door. The children were already complaining about the food. I could hear the older one rasping away, ‘Why do we have to have Chinese Australian food? Why can’t we just have Australian Australian food?’
The mother was responding with ineffective, gritted-teeth patience, ‘It means they’ve got Chinese and Australian food both.’
Wait till they saw it! Mu-um, this is neither. This isn’t food at all. My sour face must have brought the waiter, who had directed the newcomers to a table well away from us and nearer to another couple, still waiting for their meals, and now wearing distressed expressions.
‘Everything okay?’ the waiter asked.
My wife had already started calling him Peter, as he was labelled in black Dymo tape.
‘Fine thanks,’ I said, despite this being not the case.
‘To be honest not so good, Peter
,’ said my wife.
Peter stopped. ‘The lamb?’
‘The lamb’s foul and the chicken, well at least I didn’t order the chicken,’ she said, ‘but he is much, much worse.’
‘He?’
She’d done it perfectly: poor Peter was stuck between the impulse to turn around and attend and that to run away. The sight brought to life a memory of university, where I’d limped my way through a term of Jean-Paul Sartre’s thinking before dropping out (if shallow limping is philosophically conceivable). Sartre had been inspired to characterise the waiter-qua-waiter as the epitome of living in bad faith – role-playing obsequiousness, exaggerated formality, ostentation. Observing Peter’s response to my wife’s faux-honesty, I doubted Sartre had been musing on these most human behaviours in a Chinese restaurant. The fluent nastiness with which my wife had pinned this waiter: it was quite brilliant (brilliant, that is, other than using me as the lever for her trap) and Peter’s face lost its waiterish composure immediately.
‘Yes,’ she continued. ‘He’s lazy, rude and he never learns from his previous errors and misjudgements.’
‘Stop it,’ I told her. ‘This is unnecessary. Don’t pay any attention to her, waiter.’
‘I’m very sorry to you both. One moment please.’ Peter turned and almost ran back behind the tasselled curtain. I wasn’t sure where he’d scooted off to – to resign, effective immediately? Out back to reattach his waiter persona? Back to his books to ink a quick critique of existentialism?
When I Saw the Animal Page 3