I'm trapped in a conversation and I can't get out, the animated talker trying to break the record for most words per minute, and the words tumbling in a cascading crescendo of self importance. My mind wanders through a series of thoughts until the words fade into nothing. I was trying to remember in the maelstrom of this conversation whether or not I have a first memory, and it's funny but I really don't. I'm suspicious of absolute purity of vision from someone remembering exact details as a four year old. Sure, you thought there was a monster in the closet but you can remember the archetictural curvature of your house can you? Mind, my own memories maybe be fatally flawed - there was after all a particular episode of Home and Away which was proven to be ridiculously out of sync with how I perceived it that I got really worried I was on the fast track to senility. And this is from someone who after 6ix is able to tell you how our groundskeeper mowed the football oval on specific days. Mostly flymoed and a little longer around the boundary. I do know that my cousin, the one I don't like, broke his arm when he was 5ive and I was 4our - he would always win the fight, bang bang etc - trying to swing like Tarzan on a curtain cord. I remember sort of shrugging my shoulders and resuming my play, with crayons or whatever, and when he got back from the hospital we had an ice cream shaped like a hamburger, so I had a fantastic day. I don't know if any of this is true though, or in the theatre of childhood cruelty I've conjured up that my life was much better because he was in pain. Well he did turn off my imaginary TV. The conversation I'm in meanders to an inconclusive punchline, and I do a sort of Diane Sawyer fake laugh and get out of the situation - in the void where you shuffle onto the next person sitting at your pub table and talk to them like speed dating but with more Guinness, in the little gap before your brain has to re-engage in conversation, I notice a 15teen year old in alarmingly high heels and piled on blonde hair baffled by the conversation going on around her. She looks at me, I look at her, and we have a moment of mutual recognition, the mutually bored exchanging looks across age, cultural and hairstyle barriers. She rolls her eyes as her beau begins a conversation about work, I roll mine back as I'm swept up in a conversation about what football coaches should do, and we leave it at that, for the age difference would just be a nightmare. I mean, by the time you have to explain what an ATARI it was an why you played it all year when you should have been looking for a job, those hairdresser eyes have glazed over. Besides, pub chats aren't so bad - when you are giving glib nods and affirmations, there's plenty of space for personal reflection...
They've taken away some of the more gaudy foilaments, replacing them with clay animals and an ornamental cat where they've taken ye olde wash basin and made a cats body out of out. There's now a staff member in the shop guarding the creations, although her job is to talk mostly about the necklaces slung around the disembodied mannequin necks that fill up the middle part of the shop. There's an old man who looks like the 2nd Uncle Albert from Fools and Horses leaning near the Muffin shop, with a big circular beard that curls around his face and encases it like a whiskery plague. I internally wonder about a reference from the early 90s as some kids wander past - age is creeping into me as much as I try and deny it, and I notice it in every moment that goes on even when I'm not think ATARIs are great. Old man Albert is showing his wife one of the tables in the store and stroking his beard with old man wisdom as he goes through the process of explaining exactly how you take a lump of clay and turn it into a cat for sale at a reasonable price. His wife has thick horn rimmed glasses and a face set in cold cream concrete. Without a facial expression changing, she begins a vicious monologue directed entirely as some young people who are sitting giggling about something in a Dolly magazine, broken up as much as if someone had just said the word regina. She begins to immediately assume that the young people are plotting to strip the store entirely of all it's foilamental finery, and shoots them a disgusted look. Much like my home town in Scotland, she's succumbed to the monsters in her head, the fear and threats so real and clear to her she can't see people eating a muffin bar she's conjuring up a spellbinding mix of loathing and self protection. Having heard it all before, Uncle Albert isn't even listening, and even though he has a good 6xty years on the blonde in the pub, the eyes and expression are exactly the same, as he turns all his focus entirely on one of the washbasin cats. As I walk past, he even shoots me an apologetic glance as she gets increasingly loud and right wing. I think for a moment she's about to judge me, as if I pose a threat to the shopkeeper in mid spruik, but she bottles it when she sees I'm listening, and clams up, putting the monsters back into her purse until I've hit Sanity, saving her judgement of me for the sewing circle, or down a phoneline to another person bored out of their mind in a house somewhere, trying to stay awake and remember their name as they doodle spirals onto a pad and try and fast forward the talker to the point...
The pub crowd never increases in size, I mean who would have thought the introduction of the worlds thickest bouncers would displease a clientele, and the hairdresser blonde leaves with her hot pink heels click clacking across the floor, her place taken by a rotund man in one those weird T-shirts that meant to look like motorcycle clothes, every piece of fabric straining and working overtime, and luckily for my sanity we don't exchange any glances that are meaningful. We're talking about a game we're all playing, a real game not the game of life which somewhat circuitously is actually a real game, and we're talking about how someone playing the game failed to take a risk, and again circuitously we end up talking about how someone playing a game failing to take risks is now code for the relatively safe life they lead. Who would have thought Irish Murphys, home of thuggish bouncers and cheap T-shirt tie in promotions would be such a hotbed of philosophical thought and interchangable coded meanings? I start to worry though that if we can sum an entire life up in one failure to act in a game, how am I judged with each aspect of my own personality? I like Calippos, and Lily Allen, are they prejudgding all my faults and foibles through the prism of philosophical pop records and frozen ice blocks? I can't tell them beer makes me sick in the stomach, but so does nerves, and just because I can get a laugh remembering the push pop doesn't mean I don't have my own monsters to face - I risk, but I fail, and I feel awkward looking at 3hree in the morning when jamming joints are allegedly at their foxiest dancing peak. A bouncer in a black puffa jacket meanwhile is shoving a guy out of the door, like Millhouses Mum pushing Bart Simpson out for smoking. There's some Americans in the corner who down their drinks with undue haste and make their way out once the ambience of the evening is spoiled by the confrontation. I think at the moment of possibly SMSing - well she wouldn't have SMS, it would have to be mailed - the old lady with the horn rimmed glasses and saying in theory she was right. I go as far as to pick up my phone, since for a brief mildly drunken moment I get my phone out and get confused that she's someone I know, and when I do, theres a txt msg that my football team won against all the odds, and somehow, I feel so much better, it's impossible to stay in this environment of faux Irish glee, after all, all joy must be punished, and all men who show expressions of enjoyment must be evicted, turfed to a taxi rank like unruly schoolkids late for an outdoor assembly...if I set the angle of my mind just right, I can still feel sometimes post Irish Murphys as if my school tie is just a fraction too tight you know...
My football team setting my mood for an evening is so childlike, I might as well sit with crayons and eat hamburger shaped ice cream. Had they lost, perhaps I'd have slumped off home, but they didn't win by enough for me to go to Syrup, luckily. The conversation had tailed off by the time I left anyway - one of those nights where everyone takes so long to decide where to go, everyone sobers up enough to realise we're still in Hobart and there aren't enough options to have a 20ty minute discussion about it. I can't help but feel childlike tonight, such is the simplicity of everything that happens around me, the way the night illuminates people and seperates them - ugly and non ugly, brutish and pleasant, risk takers and dullards, Calippo eaters and...it's not too dis-similar from schoolyard sureties, the surety that ice cream was nice and teachers were bad and girls were gross. As a committed dullard with a stomach unpredictability reactive to beer, it was time to go home, as if the bell for the end of lunch had rung. They've moved the taxi rank, so one old fashioned surety is gone, but outside another pub, some girls are arguing violently over who was first in the taxi rank, whether it started from the left or the right or the north or the south until another taxi drives past them both, their argument on who's a bigger scrag so out of control some guy in a Hawaiian shirt just shrugs and steps into the taxi without a care in the world. They look exactly like me and my cousin did, they look entirely like two kids fighting over an imaginary TV being switched off, and the worlds seem impossibly small and repetitive. My taxi driver, since I also get a taxi in the scrag fight vortex which is now horribly offensive to single mothers and women of ill repute, sits in perfect silence as we drive home, until a song comes on the radio he doesn't like and he says it sucks in an emphasised block capital kind of childlike way. To him, ice cream is nice, but Grinspoon are not, and such is his 4our year old surety and squeaky tone of voice, I giggle all the way home, trying not to ask him if he's got his cootie shield up and if he wants to see a broken arm, because it's pretty gross, but also pretty funny...
And if we'd lost, I'd have gone straight to bed without any supper, until Mum woke me up for a Country Practice...
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