This is a sad and compelling something, encountered by Polly on our driveway.
"I don't know what it is," she said. "But if I look at it again, I'll vomit."
In a night or two I will have finished reading her Enid Blyton's Faraway Tree trilogy. Next will be Arabel's Raven.
On Thursday I took the long road to Langwarrin in order to console Kylie, who broke four ribs falling off a fence. Interestingly, she claims to have been only slightly intoxicated - at least in comparison to her personal precedents.
Kylie is one of my dearest friends and near to qualifying as a nurse. I cannot think of a person more suited to the job. She is almost pathologically empathetic, particularly when it comes to animals. She is feared by local vets, to who she regularly brings near-dead possums scraped from edges of roads. She keeps a blanket in the back of her car expressly for this purpose.
It’s been a while since I’ve been down that way and it was unrecognisable. Indeed, I got lost. What was once pleasant and semi-rural is now undergoing rapid change.
Housing developments are spreading like a necrotising rash, an untiring cloud of unknowing. These are the fabled mcmansion estates, which may only be visited by converting large amounts of gasoline into poisonous exhaust. Other means of transport are either impractical or non-existent. The children who grow up here will struggle to avoid alienation in their cavernous, appliance-filled houses. Perhaps the internet will be their saviour. Perhaps there will be helicopter airlifts.
I saw no solar panels. No water tanks. I imagine the large developers have lawyers to sleaze them out of those annoying obligations. Do these houses have double glazing? Solar hot water? I wonder just how ugly they really are? When carbon trading begins, just how difficult will it be for the dull sublunary occupants of these macmansions?
At least the financial ‘meltdown’ will slow the carbonators down a little.
I do go on.
I’ve got a stall at Camberwell Market tomorrow, in case any one is in need of vast quantities of ridiculously cheap books. It’s been a while since I’ve culled the distributed tumour that is my book collection. The blame rests with my embarrassing second life as Lampsucker the ebay seller - and with what my wife calls my ‘Asperger’s syndrome’.
Admittedly, I do have trouble disposing of objects. I am a recovering hoarder. And I am subject to sudden consuming obsessions. And I have a well-established reputation for saying inappropriate things in social situations. And I have been accused of lacking emotional reciprocity. And I do react with abnormal intensity when others interrupt my routines ...
Aspeger’s is a ‘spectrum’ now, not a ‘syndrome’ – so perhaps I lie somewhere in the very mild reaches. Personally, as the occupant of my own mind, I think it’s possible. Others, excluding my wife, say it’s just eccentricity. But these days even things like eccentricity seem to need a medical description. So be it. After all, Einstein has apparently been post-diagnosed with Asperger’s.
Days pass. Little changes. I clutch at my routines as if they are all that prevents my fall into the abyss.
Since I’ve been attempting to correct my financial situation by selling on ebay, I’ve had to actively search for stock. Books. My wife is incredulous about my need to keep buying, when the house is littered with ziggurats of piled books. She doesn’t understand. Those great mounds are composed of incomplete trilogies or series, which I am waiting to complete. You get a better result that way. There are also an awful lot of books on which I’m undecided. They look like they might sell… but I need to do a little research… and rarely do I have time… What I really need is have a market stall to clear everything out…
Then there are the books I want to keep. Every time I’ve abandoned or sold my library down the years, I’ve bitterly regretted it. I feel peace in a house full of books. A library has an aura, it emanates a gentle bookish radiance. It is a great seam of potential, there for the realisation. I love scanning shelves, head tilted sideways, waiting for a title or author’s name to leap out at me. I love it most when the books are mine, and I know that every one of them was chosen for a reason. I love having so many books that I can’t keep track of them. I love being surprised by what I’ve forgotten.
But, of course, it’s also a burden. A great weight of material for which I am responsible and which I must keep in order. At present there’s anarchy. I have nowhere near the amount of shelving I need. My ebay stock bleeds through my personal collection. The kitten knocks over the teetering columns, and time turns my neat arrangements into kipple.
I didn’t mean to talk so much about books.
Currently, my wife has a debilitating virus. Of course, I’m suspicious, but my instincts are telling me it’s not the kind of ‘virus’ one gets from consuming too much [or too little] of the soporific honeycomb.
Indeed, she’s been reasonably controlled of late. I believe I have managed to expunge the Romanian’s phone number from her phonebook – though in the past he has shown a nasty tendency to ring out of the blue, just because ‘he’s in the area’. Thankfully, without his number, her ability to ‘just pop out for a second’ is massively reduced.
Strangely, with the easing of my own enslavement to drugs, I find it increasingly difficult to ascertain my wife’s state. I have hacked my way clear, I think, to another plane, where priorities and potentials are very different. Perhaps that’s why my first knowledge of any flare up on my wife’s part comes only when the problem has gotten out of hand. Mind you, she is now on a mind-numbing dose of Spasmo-Dromoran - meaning she needs a hell of a blast of high-grade honeycomb to become visibly stoned. She openly admits feeling little or nothing when she does it - so why does she do it? Such are the mysteries of addiction – though needle fixation and simple habituation I’m sure play a part.
But trust is a problem. Since I can no longer rely on my senses, I find myself automatically assuming the worst, assuming that any explanation is a lie, that any trip to the supermarket is a scoring expedition …
*
Depending on luck, Camberwell market can be a good place to find the kind of books I sell. I’ve taught myself to ignore the things I might be at risk of purchasing for myself, [ie stuffed animals, general grotesquerie], and concentrate on my task. It’s frustrating how prices vary. One or two dollars is the normal market price for a paperback, but there are stallholders who charge over ten…
Yesterday was the first time in ages I’d been at the market. I encountered two faces from Erin and Hendrik’s wedding – Kerry and Linda – working a small conceptual jewellery stall. Seated comfortably in the shade with drills, snippers and glue they do all their work on site, creating freaked-out accessories from materials sourced only at the market itself.
They were kind enough to present me with a necklace recombobulated from the legs of plastic superheroes.
The science of physiognomy [or face-reading] has long been discredited, but it retains a certain curiosity value. In my possession I have a book entitled ‘Character Reading From The Face’ by Grace A. Rees M.B.E. The author freely admits that physiognomy is not an exact science, yet feels certain that its use ‘in several ways, is both of the utmost importance and interest.’ Particularly, she says, in the field of vocational guidance.
Samuel Wells, a leading authority on physiognomy, explains its scientific basis. ‘The cranial nerves rooted in the brain, spread, along with muscles, over the face. These nerves and muscles effect and make expressive the facial features.’
Let us then, for interests sake, apply the rules set forth in the book. As I have given much contemplation in these past weeks to the fortunes of Eddie Groves - CEO and founder of ABC Learning, the behemoth of privatised childcare – I shall use him as the subject of a brief study.
First let us regard the overall appearance. ‘When the body is plump, and flesh rather than bone predominates, the Vital temperament is indicated. The body is round likewise the face, neck and chin.’ This seems to clearly apply to the subject. ‘This rotundity denotes vitality, resilience and stability, “Let me have men around me who are fat,” said Shakespeare. Conviviality is the keynote of this disposition.’ But be warned, ‘this temperament needs to have signs of self-control in the features, otherwise love of good living may get the better of the subject, Look out for this in the formation of lips, jaw-line and width of mouth.’
Very well …
Groves’ distinctive mouth does indeed provide a bounty of information. The book instructs us, interestingly, that ‘ a love of money, greed and a desire to hoard will lift the upper lip, exposing the centre teeth – with a decided droop at the mouth corners.’ Groves’ mouth appears to conform very closely here, but the following seems also to have relevance: ‘protruding full lips, loosely closed suggest a boastful disposition, large gustatory desires and unrefined, even coarse, tastes.’
It is said that ‘intemperance, sensuality and unbridled appetites mark the mouth indelibly. Muscles definitely slacken when passions are allowed to sway the whole nature.’
A somewhat short round chin is easy-going, warm in affection but not passionate. There will be a fondness for kissing, a desire for marriage and children.
Much could be discerned from a profile view - the positioning and shape of the ears, the angle of the jawline can be very indicative - but as I do not have access to one, I shall have to work with what I have. Groves does appear to have a relatively weak jaw line. People with weak jaws are 'often the tools of disreputable, bad companions’.
Groves seems to have light bluish eyes. ‘A light blue eye in an adult indicates a nature likely to philander, that is inconstant in attachment and emotionally capricious.’ He is slightly heavy-lidded, which would suggest a reticent, reserved nature; receiving confidences, but giving none in return. The general puffiness of the area and the underlying bags may reinforce the suggestion of intemperance mentioned with regard to the mouth.
His eyebrows are darker than his hair – therefore strong feelings, passionate intensity, force of character and ardour are indicated. Their ruffled nature suggests irritability and quixotism.
Groves’ ‘boxer’s’ nose does not conform to any of the general types described in the text, although a ‘broad base from root to tip shows that the mind is logical, solid and enduring. On the negative side, ‘thickness in the breadth of the nose just above the wings of the nostrils is a sign of acquisitiveness and love of gain.
I am afraid Groves’ lack of wrinkles are not a good sign. ‘Self complacency and self-centredness may save you from having wrinkles. An insipid nature and a frivolous, mediocre mind will not acquire wrinkles until later in life.’ His light hair colour belongs to a demonstrative nature, perhaps with a love of ostentation and fickleness with the opposite sex.
How one combines this information into a meaningful whole is anyone’s guess - but here and there, to my mind, it reveals more than the odd flash of truth.
