~ a fine kettle of fish

I guess you could still call me a relatively new blogger. I’ve been uploading lunacy since the dying days of September 2007, and more or less keeping to a self-imposed regimen of four to five posts a week.

But lately it’s been getting hard. Not because I’m losing interest – I want to make that very clear, as I believe the weblog is an important new medium. It’s more because of my recalcitrant brain. I have reams of ideas, it’s not writer’s block - but I’m prone, as regular readers may have gathered, to periods of despair during which writing is a trial.

Why am I subject to these lapses? I must be bi-polar - at least to some extent. My mind has probably been set askew by drugs. Or slowly fogged by the murky vapours of hepatitis. The intermittent stress of living with a beautiful sylph who has an even more hellish inner life than me - that must play a part too. Then there’s the accursed Spasmo-Nemigron and the way it drains the spirit. And the chaos I have naturally generated about myself as long as I have walked this Earth. And the fear, love and stress of serving as progenitor to the precious Polly. And the nagging witch of penury. And the slow ripping talons of age. And the lofty expectations I set myself – while blithely ignoring the existence of all the above.

But before I drive myself deeper ad profundis with self-pity, I will cease this catalogue of my trials. After all, you are probably quite familiar with most, if not all, of my afflictions. I suspect I’ve moaned and groaned enough for now.

I just want to beg your indulgence, apologise for not answering your comments in a timely way, for being generally uncommunicative. It happens from time to time, there’s not much I can do about it, and I pray you won’t damn me for it.

I’m thankful I have a forum where I can vent so openly. I'd like to think that other online diarists suffer what I am suffering now and live to write another day. Actually, I feel better already. You can put away the restraints. I’m feeling much much better now. Really. Nurse, I won’t be needing whatever’s in that needle …

Now a delightful reward for enduring my lamentations. For your certain pleasure, allow me to share a little tale I’ve been wanting to tell for a while. It’s the kind of story that only works because it’s true. And because it happened in Queensland.

I was determined to include it in my slowly evolving play, Ambergris, but it wouldn’t fit, it seemed made-up, and today I finally admitted this to myself.

As wise old editors say: once you’ve finished your final draft, go back, find your favourite line and delete it.

*

It was Nikki Lambert who posted me the article from the Courier Mail. I think this was around the turn of the century..

I had intended that it be retold like this …

beamish: The Midas was a long-line fishing vessel … They’d hit upon a concentration of tuna; the sea was boiling with them, and with frenzied sharks... The crew couldn’t haul fast enough; they’d been working like dogs for hours, not a second to scratch themselves, when Tony noticed that The Greek was missing….

This was a guy they'd hired at the last minute; big ugly bloke with a ventriloquist moustache, ears like starfish and a hairy black mole on his nose the size of a marble. They scoured the ship for him, but The Greek, he was well gone. Reluctantly, they abandoned their work and criss-crossed the area till night. It was dawn when the captain called it quits. There’d been so many wired up sharks that day; he didn’t hold an ounce of hope for the guy.

You see, this captain had a special respect for sharks; once, he’d almost been taken overboard by a grey nurse they’d brought up by mistake. The thing was rabid and smeared in blood and convulsing round the deck like something they might have fished out of hell. It bit down on the guy, nearly dragged him through the rail, and he still bore the scars…

Anyway, the crew of The Midas had a meeting that night. What to do? Sail home, make a report? They were way out in international waters, the hold only quarter full in the middle of a teeming sea. If they left then they’d take a beating money wise, if they stayed, they’d clean up. It didn’t take long to decide what The Greek would have wanted. They’d fill the hold first. After all, what difference would it make? So they spent another week out there. Good catches – tuna, pink snapper, cod, jewfish, even an massive grouper which the captain knew he could sell for a mint to this particular Vietnamese restaurant.

blueboy: Which restaurant?

elspeth: Fine Kettle of Fish!

beamish: Shut up. I’m telling it. So they get back home, report the incident, sell the catch - and the captain goes out of his way to personally present the grouper to this extremely delighted restaurateur, who serves it up whole that night to a party of his most valued customers. This thing was fat and more than a metre long and nearly a hundred pound - there on a huge plate garnished with lemon slices, coriander, whatever. The maitre de starts slicing it up in situ and they tuck in with a vengeance. But just as one of them picks this hairy meatball the size of a marble from his mouth and all eyes turn to the fish - a filthy big human head just rolls on out onto the tablecloth.

elspeth: GIGGLING: With starfish ears …

morgen: I wouldn’t have recovered from that.

beamish: It got in the papers.

elspeth: TO BLUEBOY: Up here anyway.

blueboy: Really?

beamish: Yeah.

blueboy: Where’d this happen?

beamish: Way way up north.

blueboy: And… It’s a true story?

beamish: I said so, yeah.


*

Now, the original article has long been inhumed within the turmoil of my room, but I assure you the meat of this story is real. For accuracy’s sake, I’ll give you the important discrepancies

The name Fine Kettle of Fish is on the money, but unfortunately further research seems to suggest that it was a seafood wholesaler not a Vietnamese restaurant. Sorry. I’m sure the level of shock would have been similar and the human head was definitely said to have ‘rolled out’. [And I guess, at the restaurant, the fish would have been gutted first.]

The fish was probably a 97 lb. 1.6 metre long Morgan Cod. This species, unlike groupers, are opportunistic bottom-feeders. ‘As cods do not attack humans it is believed that the crewman was ripped apart by sharks that habitually follow fishing boats to feed off fish scraps thrown overboard and that the giant cod, a bottom feeding fish, found and swallowed the head.’

~ the smiling ghosts

My regular visits to Queensland began during the early 1980s when my band began touring. The first thing I found there was Nikki Lambert. She worked for CBS records, decorating record shop windows with posters and album artwork - though she also painted beautiful lavish canvases of her pets, and led a secret life of crime.

She was older than me, but looked sixteen. She was tan and lithe and spirited, and spoke with the broadest strine I had ever heard from a woman. She became my window into the outlandish northern regions, and remains so twenty-five years later.

Her house in Mullet St, Kenmore was a tumbledown queenslander, haunted by lazy, smiling ghosts and held together with pink-flowering bougainvillea. You could lie in bed there and watch the coming and goings of paper wasps from their nest in the ruin of the ceiling. Downstairs there was a gargantuan children’s python in the bathroom walls. Called Clancy [of The Overflow], sections of it were always visible, here and there, among wires and pipes and beams, but never its head. The toilet cistern had a broken lid and in it lived green tree frogs - sometimes, on entering, you would see as many as three lined along the front, forelegs hooked over the rim, their sweet eyes delving.

Mullet St was an idyll, but it’s all suburban now. It evaporated with the inexorable expansion of Brisbane.

Nikki became a solid friend and occasional lover. In time, she was to descend into various hells, but ultimately floated to the surface on Stradbroke Island with her daughter Sidonie. In the years I’ve known her, I have never seen her less than enthusiastic about anything - except drudgery - and she is a genuine seer through of projects. Nikki will almost always ignore a person’s given name and replace it with one of her own devising. In her company I have met Dead Tom, Snapper, Kaptain Kronk, Graderhead, Twenny, Brasso, Lizard, ad infinitum … As you enter her universe, you are renamed, as Adam did the beasts.

Nikki is also the author of one of my favourite quotes - “There’s something deeply relaxing about chickens, don‘t you think?”

As I write, in her yard on the island, there are at least four full-grown hens with a dozen chicks scrabbling in the mulch, clucking peaceably to themselves. Nikki will never be without chickens - or, indeed, a menagerie of dogs, cats, horses, birds, guinea pigs… In that past she has told me she judges people by their interactions with animals.

I have a lovely table beneath a blazing poinsettia tree at which to work. The drums of doom are fading already, the fear abates, the paranoia withers into the breeze. I just hope I have enough time here to really reset my spirit … before I lurch once more into the breach.