Cigarette Girl

Her spot was outside the convenience store on the corner of YueYang Road, just up from The Eager Beaver, or opposite, by Abbey Road Bar. The first time I saw her, through the window of the Beaver, I thought she was another westernised girlfriend of some dopey ex-pat. I think it was late summer at that stage – before she got into the all encompassing winter coat – so I could see she had a hot body. On closer inspection I realised with amazement that she was hawking cigarettes from the standard sandwich board type arrangement – you know the fake Marlboroughs, those Indonesian cigars etc. After a few ales I went over and bought some fags off her, she was from Anhui province, as a lot of people doing low class jobs in Shanghai are. Seeing her for a chat become one of the pleasures of my nights out. Not being a smoker I ended up with a pile unopened ciggy packs at home. She also had a constant companion, a cute old beggar man, who I kind of liked too. She did developed the annoying habit of saying ´hello cigarette´, but she wasn´t as aggressive as some of the older hands outside bars with more western foot traffic.

My regular drinking companion couldn´t understand why I was so into such a dirty street urchin, but the owner of the Beaver agreed she was attractive. We asked her in for a drink, but she wouldn't come: ´scared´ she said. Once I was talking to her when my date, a not very attractive Swedish girl, turned up, cigarette girl looked a little disappointed – I could have asked her out I guess, but I didn´t, because she would have said no.

The Polar Bear

When I´ve set a class an activity, and they are working away happily, I am usually too caffeined-up to sit down, I begin to pace as much as the confines of the class allow – no one seems to mind. I go back and forth, back and forth, much like two Polar Bears I remember in the Wellington Zoo. They did it down to the same swing of the head on each turn. Funny, some twenty years later and I´m living very near that zoo, I should go back and take a look, I remember it being on a hill with the lions at the peak, indeed the animals near the bottom were the ones that held little interest for a child – but things got progressively more interesting as you went on – lamas, to baboons, to chimps, to wolves, to bears, to big cats. But the yellow coats and mania of the Polar Bears was a glimpse of how the world really is for my ten year old eyes.

Local Colour

In an effort to save money I´m renting a room sub-let to me by a nice Christian boy. I´ve been here since December and will be out in February when the lease is up. The guys who rented this place signed for a year, somehow forgetting they would want to go back home once the Uni holidays began. And so all but one of the six rooms are now being sub-let. Thing is the landlord is unaware of all this and so every time he wants to show through prospective leasers, we all have to make ourselves scarce. The landlord, an Indian guy, owns the whole street, and is also the boss of some immigration business. His Mercedes parked outside is one indicator that its not safe to stay at home. Before he comes round he often sends Peter the Painter to warn us.

Peter is an old guy, bald with a shaggy beard...I saw him on the street the other day and asked how it was going. Bit of a mistake as the answer was a philosophical rant about boredom, he then advised me to fake a heart attack and claim I was dying of excitement...something like that...guess painting isn´t doing it for Pete, or he´s sniffing the stuff.

The Happy Fat Child

Dinner last night consisted of four eggs (which I thought conservative) microwaved with grated cheese, eaten from an old ice cream punnet. Several spices, including oregano were added. The night before was an 8 pack of precooked sausages. He ate seven of them, the eighth is still in his room on a plate beside the bed.

This is my flatmate, a 21 year old from Invercargil. The South of the South Island, Redneckville. Despite working in a call centre and as a bouncer he hasn´t paid his rent and is going to get kicked out. I´ll miss his work stories. Although, having injured his thumb at cricket he´s off doorman duties for six weeks. Apparently the worst place to work door is the late night Burger King – hungry drunks being more troublesome.

I won´t miss his mess, we have two bathrooms for six people. He has one to himself as he´s made it so dirty, no one dares use it. Still he´s a hit with the ladies, brought home a blond the other night, she even offered to tidy his room, must admit I was almost angry when he said no.

´Why the hell not?´

´I was scared of what she might find.´

Another Rendition of the Fish Market

Take this whole thing as a joke, but the day which really ended it for me, was the one we went to the fish market. It was the hottest day of that summer, which while a simple fact, certainly didn´t help the situation. Nobody had said the fish market would be worth a look, it was my idea to go, I had to drag him out of bed, throw him into the shower etc. The market was near a temple district, one of those rebuilt, burnt down in a fire jobs. Shops, full of the usual knick-knacks, dried foods and all. Not five minutes after we got there, I took not a bad picture of an old guy hanging up a bunch of ducks. Looking at the picture now, it reminds me of a photo I´d seen in a magazine; white ducks hanging upside down, getting their throats cut, flapping wildly, spraying blood on each other. I can hear a universal groan... just what we need another woman who gets upset about killing animals! My picture of plucked dead ducks looks a little overexposed, an accurate shot of how bloody hot and glarey that day was.

Before that day, to be perfectly straight with you, I´d already been thinking about getting away from Reece for good, his drinking and phobias were becoming a drag. His world was a mess: sleeping all day if he could get away with it – and he often did, given that he could work from home. He dozed with one ear open waiting for sound of his boss messaging him via Skype. He drank all night and this made for meeting some interesting characters, but also for times like...times like when I realised he couldn't protect me from anything, and neither cared to do so – the episode I´m referring to is nothing special. Just a small badly lit restaurant, white paint peeling of the walls to reveal dirty brown underneath, a drunk middle-aged business type leaning too close, telling me how he likes to get pushed about in a wheelchair in airports all over Asia and Europe, pretending to be sick. He´d get drunk on the aeroplane and then too lazy to walk, he´d demand a chair. It was good to have somebody wheeling him around, he didn´t like to be without someone to order round – he´d even bought his maid to the restaurant! I can still picture that scene with disturbing vividness: Reece has his arm about the man, the man is buying Reece drinks. Reece worships this decaying mess, who is breathing all over his girlfriend.

And so... I wanted to just to get out during the day, do something other than drink and get interested in the city that, for better or worse, we were so tied into. It was a shame it was so hot, and Reece was so hungover...but the perfect day never comes. This day, or more specifically, this trip to the fish market, would make or break us, as ridiculous as that may sound.

We were already sweating by the time we got to the first stalls on the street which led to the market. The first thing we looked at were Geoduck Clams. Elephant Trunk Clams, Reece called them. He said that they didn't farm them in Asia, but from California all the way up to Alaska. The bigger ones on display could well be over a hundred years old. As usual I had no idea how he knew this stuff. It seemed unlikely that he´d been preparing this trip by googling things, that was more my style. Disgusting things Geoducks, like very wrinkled penises. Gross, but I couldn't stop looking at them – a salesman picked one up and water squirted from its siphon. At least it didn't squirm, that would have been unbearable.


Down the street past various crustaceans, clams, fish heads, undecipherable fish bits and eels we came to the market proper. I stopped by a polystyrene tank of turtles. God where are they from? Reece asked the seller, a very smiley man, who said Brazil. If the animals there could´ve spoken I would´ve blocked my ears...but this is a silly thought.

The floor in the market was wet rubbish covered metal and I was quite concerned about falling flat on my face. Look you haven't noticed? said Reece pointing, I looked, a mezzanine level, small hovels for sleeping in. The fishmongers lived above their stinking produce. This discovery led to Reece´s first complete sentence of the day:

´The problem with us...you see nothing of the greatest horrors but pick up the most minor faults – your days ruined by such things as a slug in salad, here this all passes you by.´

I didn´t know quite how to respond to this. I looked at him, his frown, the life of the people who never left their fishy building on his mind, his face kinda green. Damn, I had been hoping to eat some seafood, but now the sensitive idiot would never stomach it.

We made our way out the back. Men were shovelling fish off trucks to the waiting fishmongers, grasping their square white plastic buckets below. The men on the trucks, standing in fish to their knees, revelled in being above the others, barking contemptuously at those who complained at what they were given. My camera battery failed at this stage, I badly wanted some pics of those tattooed fellows. My cell phone camera just couldn´t do them justice.

This shouting is unbearable, Reece moaned

´OK lets go home´, I said, giving up on having a full and interesting day out of the apartment. The trip had still been worth it on balance though I thought, despite the smells and smirking salesmen.
We headed for the the subway stop, it was one of the more dirty ones – surrounded by the usual unhygienic looking kiosks, which have refrigerators that never seem to work, and even the warm bottle of ´iced´ tea you buy tastes of eggs. Still crowded on the weekend, there were no guards at this stop in a shitty part of town to make sure people could alight before others got on. And so, we were submitted to the usual scrum of bodies. I was troubled by the fact that this still bothered me even after living in the city for some time.

It was quite a long journey back. Reece quickly grabbed an available seat and offered it to me, but I preferred to stand. I listened to the slightly distorted recording endlessly reminding us of which stop was coming next, until it lost track of the progress of the train and became nothing but misleading information. I tried to ignore the atmosphere: the light of the Shanghai subway which makes faces look slightly green, and the subtle yet insistent smell of disinfectant, most people find this all a little disturbing on the senses I guess. I was able to block it out with vague funny memories, back as far as my school days, again this must be how most of us cope. I looked at Reece slouching and found with a kind of triumph that he obviously did not have such a ability to deal with the situation. ‘Feeling OK?’ I asked, as we whisked along. ´Yea´ he grunted. His face, however had taken on that tight look and he was rocking himself back and forth, almost imperceptibly – but it was there, one tortuous thought going through his head over and over.

The funny thing, I thought to myself, is that the actual thought was unimportant, it was the repetition which counted. The hell of your mind skipping out like a CD. At the next stop a seat became available, on sitting down I suddenly realised how tired I was. I fell asleep moments after.

When I became conscious we were still five stops from home, I was able to remember the last scene of my dream... a train suspended in thin air - racing haphazardly between massive green cliffs, it seemed like it was defying gravity, such was its forward acceleration... I hated when this happened, I am an empty vessel, and sometimes dream Reece´s dreams. He suffered from acrophobia and the falling train was one of his fantasies. I´m not afraid of dying, he always said ( rather pretentiously to my mind), just the falling.

When we got home I found it vaguely amusing the way Reece kissed the apartment floor, so happy to shut himself off from the big bad city. He´d picked up some beers on the way home and soon got a bit of a buzz going. We started talking about the treatment of turtles in those parts, glowing in theorizing about human cruelty. Reece become quite animated and really began to champion the case for other countries banning turtle exports to China. ´Even turtle populations in the States are under threat from the exploding demand here´ he claimed. This was interesting at first, but I soon realised that we were falling back into his irrational world: the thought of a Sisyphus-like turtle, ever trying to climb the side of its glass bowl only to repetitively fall back into water, filled with its own waste, became far to much for him. Not surprisingly his next step was to start telling me about his recent nightmares. Two kept on coming back to him, both contained animals. In one he was looking down, suspended in the air (as usual acrophobia was involved) above a bay, the shallow water full of Great White Sharks with horrible blind, mutant eyes, split open by prodigious growth.

In the other dream, both of us were looking at flats back in Wellington – one flat had dogs which jumped up – I was afraid, I am very scared of dogs you see.

The second flat we went to had a pet pig. The pig, to Reece´s disgust jumped up too, threatening to put its mud covered trotters on people, rub its fleshy snout against your thigh. It didn´t just jump, it bounded fences and did flips, performing with grunts of pleasure. But, apparently, nobody but Reece thought this odd, both the people at the flat and I acted like it was the most natural thing in the world. Reece was convinced these dreams meant something, something important for us. I sighed inwardly – these dreams were dreamt under the influence. Don´t you know, Reece, such dreams mean nothing? As I looked down on him and the ever increasing pool of drool, I tried console myself that it was better to be living with a little boys imagination than a car freak or religious nut. He was still wearing his trousers and a T-shirt which smelled of dry sweat. At 38 he was already getting a bit paunchy, but his unkempt hair surrounded a fairly youthful face. Is it simply genetics which dictated it, or did his mental refusal to grow up have a physical manifestation?

I went into the bathroom, and looked in the mirror, I was only wearing a singlet – my state of undress had no erotic motivation, I had taken my pyjama pants off for a rather violent bowel movement and was still cautious about replacing them. I looked at my reflection, I was still a fairly young, reasonably attractive woman – you´ll have to forgive me for the tepidness of my statements, that´s just the way I am, I find everything to be more bearable when you don´t go out on a limb, nice reliable understatement – that´s the way forward. I stretched out my arms like an actress in the DVD I recently watched.

The actress had been a famous child, playing a number of cutesy roles. In the film I had watched she played a heroin junky. That was the point her career took off. By playing a broken soul, she could finally be taken seriously. It was an interesting progression...the child star, to heroin junky, one can´t beat that kind of downfall if you take a succession Hollywood characters as a progress of a single entirety, a wretch on screen, a path to professional respectability in real life – to me another strange mask presented by the world. At this stage I got bored of looking at myself and my mind ticked over and I began to think of Reece´s fear; why a falling train?

Why not get your silly acrophobia in one of the many skyscrapers we were always staying, working or living in, or on planes like your old man, but you went for trains and went for them bad I guess. It doesn´t matter if it was planes, trains or automobiles does it? I suppose it was real for you, can I at least believe that? Just as long as you had it – not so bad as it stopped you doing things, but just enough that it was inevitable. Do you remember those scenes from childhood stories? falling in space forever; sinking into the Mariana Trench with lead weighted legs; the magic spell of the staircase that never ends? Yes? Magnificent the feeling of eternity in a second, or the same second forever.

At this stage I began dreaming, I was sitting in a hotel lobby waiting, I read and I read, but Reece did not come back... then, as dreams work, I saw where he was. He was walking along train tracks and I knew his thoughts: Exhilarating if he met a train on one of those long bridges, there he could chose being mangled or the relative bravery of jumping.

Or would there be to run for it, make to the end of the bridge get off the tracks? Or time to put your thoughts in order before the end? Brave acceptance or panic, that´s all you wanted to know. Once you knew that even going on living would be possible perhaps, but that´s not the way things work out. I think that´s a line from a Western, I don´t need you here to tell me though.

The dream continued. He was found below a bridge by some passing local. I had reported him missing at the police station. The police smiled, they weren´t going to do anything and this only differs from every other story you´ve ever heard or read in that I had no expectation that they would. I simply wanted them to contact me when they heard something. Would they email me? It´s funny to think of people in this world who don´t email. But they´re out there. We have to know everything instantly these days and so the existence of these non-mailers may in future cause phobia in others. I hope they cope better with it than you did with yours.

And then came the part you wouldn´t have liked Reece, all the rigmarole: filling in of forms, informing your family, finding out how much it would cost to send your body back home.

I can even remember the exact amount of money, a good practical dream in other words, and taking its advice, I´ve since split with the man. Who wants to spend their life with an alcoholic hypochondriac full of childish nightmares? I still wear the watch with the picture of Putin on the face though. The one Reece bought me at the shop in Nanjing which sells Russian souvenirs, made in a factory near Nanjing! Well I don´t actually wear the original watch, the piece of crap stopped ages ago – but I´ve replaced it with another one, from a street vendor here in Shanghai, who might very well purchase his stock in Nanjing?. He drove a hard bargain, a bit of a bastard really, must have known somehow I really wanted one of those watches. I should turn myself into a harder bargainer. I´m going to hit the fakes market tomorrow. I´m obstinate enough. I´ll put who-bloody-ever on the ipod, and look straight ahead. You never could do that, Reece, too disorganised for technology and too unfocused to look straight ahead – you lacked the skills needed for the modern world...and so it´s better you´re gone. Compared with your putrid corpse-like self I prefer the vendors at the fish market, their squalid abodes and the way they do business down to two decimal places. I even prefer their government, which drags them through the desert, for a few sluggish gains and savings, that see them survive as they get dragged through the desert once again. They and I are ready.

Music For Airports

My mind has been completely blank of late, and I have to tell you it´s a delicious state to be in. In fact I hope that you may have such happiness.

I´ve just been listening to Brian Eno´s ´Music For Airports´ as I´m sick of rock and reggae (not to mention electronica), am I about to discover classical music?

I´m no great fan of the concept album, but this is a good practical one, I wonder if any airport ever actually bothered to play it? Aural atmosphere is something which needs to have more attention paid to it, that is for sure.

People I Wish I Worked With

And I hereby humbly ask others to put forward their own choices of preferred colleagues. No offence to those who are now my colleagues, but we are a bigger, better, faster trade-in species.

Anthony Burgess



That crusty Brit who created Enderby, the man who wrote poetry on the toilet. In ´The Clockwork Testament´ Enderby does a stint as an English Professor at ´The University of Manhattan´ in New York. He turns up to class completely unprepared, and as not to be caught out by his multi-ethnic class, who are studying somewhat resentfully about the wonders of the Elizabethan civilisation, he starts lecturing about a completely fabricated playwright. By doing this he can´t be chipped at by some smart-alec who may know some stray fact, or ask about some detail that Enderby can´t drag to the surface in his prematurely senile mind.

A brilliant way to get through the hour, he had already negotiated a hostile poetry class that day too.

This from the New York Times 1975:

Though Mr. Burgess’s description of Enderby’s classes is quite funny, there are some professors--not necessarily visitors--who may feel that “The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby’s End” is no laughing matter. When a black student submits a poem about castrating “whitey,” Enderby argues that poetry is not made of emotions, as the class would have it, but of words. Though, like them, he is only half right, Enderby is more amusing as he attacks the notion of the “relaxed” approach to life and art. “There is,” he says, “no essential virtue in comfort. To be relaxed is good if it is part of a process of systole and diastole. Relaxation comes between phases of tenseness. Art is essentially tense. The trouble with your art is that it is not tense.”

Enderby is still better when, in an involuntary revulsion against his literature class, he invents several fictitious minor Elizabethan dramatists. “Gervase Whitelady,” he writes on the blackboard, “1559-1591.” “Whitelady,” he continues, “was the second son of Giles Whitelady, a scrivener. The family had settled in Pease Pottage, not far from the seaside town we now call Brighton, and were supporters of the Moabite persuasion of crypto-reform Christianity as far back as the time of Wyclif.”



Arnold Schwarzenegger

I don´t really like Arnold´s movies or his politics – I just think he´d be a fun guy to be posted overseas with...and I draw this conclusion from the vid below of Arnie in Brazil... Arnold you´re off the hook! You´d be great to go out with and get into the local culture. I´ll teach you a word in English ´bite´...hilarious