Tinker, Tailor, Soldier – but why?
Just got back from seeing Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy at the Metro Cinema, Bathurst. For me this was a visual and aural feast. That beautiful, liquid music. That mid-century aesthetic. The stirring burst of the Soviet anthem. The art department’s amazing attention to detail. The scuffedness of things. The wallpaper, the corridors, the types of shoes and socks. I had a pure nostalgia hit just looking at the swirl of colour on the balloons at the spies’ Christmas party. There’s a photo of me as a tiny child holding a balloon just like that. Do they still make them?
It was nice to be back in the Cold War again – so much more attractive and comprehensible than whatever we’re doing in Iraq or Afghanistan. And nobody ever did a particular type of mid-century aesthetic better than the Soviet sphere of influence.
I loved the slowness. I lapped it up. Nothing like a bit of slowness as an antidote to Hollywood’s blaring cues and cuts. The actors were so instantly inside their characters – all intriguing, deftly differentiated characters – that you forgot all about the acting and went back to enjoying the experience. I loved the frankness about people being old or ugly – Smiley getting his eyes tested, an older woman spy making zero attempt at attractiveness – without making more of it than necessary.
This is a gorgeous, stylish, film and I never stopped enjoying it – in fact I’d happily see it again, listen to that soundtrack again. But there is a problem with it, which is that below its flawless skin, is there actually a beating heart? It feels like there’s a beating heart, but that’s not the same. I watched, knowing that at some point we’d find out which one of these interesting, haunted Englishmen was working for the Other Side. The problem was – it was hard to care or even wonder too much about which one. Maybe that’s the difference between making the film back in the 1970s, when it still all meant something, and doing it now, when it’s about a good wallow in the beauty of another time – because another time always becomes beautiful; nostalgia works like that; the hipster aesthetic works like that. (And I’m as sucked in as the next person.) Or maybe it’s because the art department was ultimately allowed to trump storytelling.
One of the characters actually says this, more or less. Explaining why he became a traitor to his country, he said it was an aesthetic choice, as much as anything. Really? Is an aesthetic sensibility really enough to live or die for? Maybe it is, but if it is, maybe we could have heard more about it.
Speaking of one of the characters speaking – another thing that bothered me was that nobody had a decent conversation in the whole film. What we’d get is a beautiful location, a beautiful set of stairs to go up, a perfect bit of spy-going-upstairs music, the arrival, two words exchanged and then on to the next scene and repeat. There were some exceptions to this rule but I found myself longing for a bit more time at the destination. Arrgh. Why don’t you let people speak once they’ve gone to all that trouble to get up the stairs? And if you’ve gone to so much trouble to evoke a past time, right down to the smoke-fug in every room, why not evoke a little of the conversation of that past time?
I came of age in the last years of the Cold War, when it seemed to stretch back forever and forwards forever. It was a time when you’d arrive on campus straight after high school and be surrounded by people who wanted to talk until three in the morning about socialism, capitalism, feminism, sexuality, utopianism, whether Judaism was a race or a religion, and you read the books and had the discussions and then tried to go out and live according to whatever bracing principles you’d just adopted, because it actually felt like it mattered. And people are still doing similar things today – note the Occupy movement, raving on to each other all night, in tents. Some are even hipsters.
But Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is too stylish to get bogged down in ideas, and too stylish to do more than lightly suggest a story of betrayal and terrifying choice.
Anyway, it’s a beautiful film, worth seeing and hearing – but don’t get fooled into believing it’s more than it actually is.
Goodbye bra drawer. We won’t be needing you.
The small top left drawer of my dressing table contains a tangled mess of bras and various bits and pieces that go with them, like transparent plastic straps for wearing under a revealing dress (can’t think of the dress I had in mind; never worn), extenders to take account of extra poundage; bras worn when thinner; bras from the early 1990s, hardly worn, not very comfy but too pretty or far back in the drawer to throw out. Whenever I’ve had the luxury, I’ve had separate drawers for the underwear triumvirate: bras, knickers, socks, descending in that order, with that sense of importance. And now, suddenly, no need for the bra drawer. I have a flat chest! There’s nothing there but two angry red stripes! Even when the reconstruction process is complete, my silicone bosom will be a never-sag job. I may never need to wear a bra again. They’re still there, for now – a tangled mess of straps and lace and underwire and comfy options – but when they go, I get a whole empty drawer. I could use that drawer for… hmmm … hankies? Imagine a whole drawer of hankies. I only own two or three cloth hankies. No. Maybe bathers. My three swimming costumes (two too small) could stretch out in a drawer of their own. I know! Pajamas! Pajamas can have their own drawer! For most of my adult life pajamas have been a big old t-shirt and knickers but since my two operations I’ve garnered a full winter set (ovaries out last winter) and a summer set (breasts off this summer).
In the meantime, I still have two drains coming out of my midriff. I’m over them now. Get out of here. Still at least a couple of days’ worth, though. I’m itchy and uncomfortable but feeling good, just wanting to stop being sick person and start being sick enough to keep slouching around at home but not well enough to get out and do anything too taxing. Actually this is a good zone, doing sweet F.A.
I feel like something out of Dr Who
To paraphrase Monty Python, I no longer have breasts; I have ex-breasts. The area that used to be inhabited by my breasts is completely numb. Numbness is strange. It’s not just an absence of feeling, it’s much more active than that. Much more present. So my chest is in a very present state of numbness. Each breast has been reduced to a red horizontal line about three or four inches long. The skin is a bit baggy, waiting to be pumped up from behind by sacks of saline, to be replaced at some point by sacks of silicone. Under the horizontal lines I have plastic tubes emerging from my body, two on each side. These long plastic tubes – they’re like small versions of the tube Dad would use to siphon petrol out of a petrol tank – terminate in four bulbs that look like toy hand grenades. They look so like hand grenades that Dr French even described them thus. When I was still in hospital, one of them actually exploded! There was blood everywhere! Nurse after nurse, as she came on shift, would examine my faulty grenade and add more sticky tape to it. Then there’d be a loud, industrial sort of squealing noise as it died, or a silent popping and leaking of its contents and another call to the nurse and more sticky tape. Eventually we were able to get someone to give us a new grenade and there have been no problems since. The colour of the fluid in the tubes is a little bit like the colour of petrol. The same sort of air bubbles.
Anyway, I’m back at home now, nicely set up on the couch. Every six hours we’re measuring the contents of the grenades and squeezing them out into a stainless steel bowl, then emptying the brilliant red dye into the toilet and flushing. And recording the measurements in a Numbers spreadsheet that Steve has set up on the iPad.
I’m taking it easy here, surrounded by i devices. There’s Apple TV, the iPad, the iPhone, a Macbook Pro. There’s a Kindle, too. I’m sure Steve Jobs lay round dying of cancer with devices just like these.
I don’t have cancer. Now that I’ve had my tits off, I’ll never have breast cancer (unless there’s one stray cell that has decided to be very, very mean). Take that, BRCA1!
There’s lots of other “stuff” around this, not just bright pinky orangey reddish fluid leaking out of my midriff. The whole thing has brought up “issues” – the things that counsellors love. I can almost feel counsellors across the land prick up their ears, lean forward. Look at all these issues that have risen to the surface, like scum! Look at ‘em all! I’d love to enumerate them here but there’s a red light flashing on the horizon. It’s saying, “Don’t overshare, even though you are feeling weak and are surrounded by i devices.”
So I won’t.
Anyway, overall, everything has gone very smoothly. I’m back at home with Labradors reposing at my feet, a gentle fan over my head, someone to run and get things if I so much as call.
The last three days of my two breasts
Just three more sleeps, then I go into hospital and my breasts will be no more. Every now and then I have an attack of, “Why am I doing this? Am I nuts?” And then I just have to remind myself of the facts: Every female family member I know of who has/had the BRCA1 gene mutation has had cancer. That’s 100 per cent. Nobody just slipping through. I have the BRCA1 fault and I’m overwhelmingly likely to get breast cancer. I just have to repeat this mantra every now and then as I face off with the idea of a double mastectomy. If I actually had cancer, I’d be running in saying “Get them off, get them off!” But I don’t have cancer. It’s hot here (Australia in January) and I’m wearing a little black top. I look down and inspect my breasts. It seems rather incredible that these major parts of my anatomy will simply disappear. But it’s not an arm or a leg or an eye; I’m not having to deal with chemotherapy and vomiting. In a few weeks’ time I’ll be adjusting to life with a new chest. I’ll be teaching again, doing all the stuff I usually do. And these few weeks of discomfort and difficulty could mean that I have a long, healthy, cancer-free life. It’s not much to pay, really.
A giant pair of bosoms
I’m aware that my last post is hanging there (as it were) waiting for an answer. Will I or won’t I? I think my answer is yes. I think I’ll have them off. I’m going back to see Dr French next week. I intend to walk in to his consulting room in a decisive manner, one way or another. Will keep you posted.
In the meantime, I happened to see Dolly Parton on television for a few minutes yesterday with the sound off. I was working at National Radio News on the producer shift for the afternoon. We have two big tellies going all day, one on ABC News 24, the other on Sky. Younger journos can cope with audio from both on at the same time, plus the radio tuned to 2MCE. I can’t. My brain quickly reaches fugue state so I tend to turn a few things down or off. That’s how I happened to be watching Dolly Parton with the sound off. She wasn’t singing or entertaining – it was some sort of chat, being delivered from a standing position. The camera zoomed in, fascinated, at her giant bosom. Nothing prurient there. It’s what anyone would do. To have a closer look, to marvel. What is interesting is that Dolly Parton is no longer buxom in any other part of her anatomy. Her waist is terrifyingly tiny. There is no rib cage to support those enormous breasts. How does it all work? Actually, I’m wrong about that. The camera cut back to her face and that’s when I saw her lips – they, too, were buxom. With the sound on, she was probably being witty and fabulous. With it off, she was scary. Anyway, I have the right to look carefully at artificial breasts. I will probably have my own set, soon. They’ll be smaller, though. Smaller than the ones I have now.
Should I chop my tits off?
Sorry to startle, but this is a serious question. I moved closer to making a decision today when I booked a Hertz hire car online. I chose a small hatchback, an economy car. I also discussed it with my friend Kirsty. We sat outside for a little while on the low brick wall attended by two Labradors. After these exertions, I took a nap. There is part of me (the part of me that can’t pass the couch without an overwhelming desire to sink into it) that wants to shut my eyes and wake up at some point in the future – next June, say. I used to be good at sleeping on long-haul flights without the aid of tablets or alcohol. I’d just coax myself into sleep and get rid of the hours. So I think I’d do quite well at sleeping until next June. If not continuous sleep, at least a sort of gliding in and out of sleep, getting up from time to time for another cup of tea, another magazine, another game of Solitaire on my iPhone, only to snuggle back down into the crochet rugs and shut my eyes. Should I chop my tits off? Let me go back to sleep.
There are arguments for and against the removal of my breasts. On Friday I’m going to drive the Hertz Rentacar to Sydney, to Castle Hill, to see a Dr French in his castle. He is going to show me before and after photographs of double mastectomies. There may even be some during shots. (Let me just have another little rest on the couch.)
In January I discovered I was the carrier of the BRCA1 gene mutation, which gives me a sickening, overwhelming, possibility of breast cancer and/or ovarian cancer. This explains why a whole lot of female relatives on my father’s side have succumbed. I was told that ovarian cancer is almost impossible to check for, because by the time it reveals itself, things have generally gone too far. Therefore, said my fleet of doctors and advisers, it’s a no brainer. Your ovaries are ticking time bombs. They’ve got to go.
I had my ovaries out in June, throwing me into instant menopause alleviated by hormone replacement therapy, a process carrying its own bodily weirdnesses. But on the outside, I looked just the same as ever.
But breasts. You can see breasts.
To keep them on is to continue to carry around bodily tissue that is enormously susceptible to cancer. It’s something like 80 per cent for me, compared to about 11 per cent for women in the general population. The odds are not good. But unlike ovarian cancer, breast cancer is eminently treatable. It’s not necessarily a death sentence. I’d probably survive it.
And if I decide to keep my breasts, I can have free checks every six months for the very earliest little wisp or suggestion of cancer.
The thing is, it appears the breast cancer associated with BRCA1 isn’t like common-or-garden breast cancer. It’s a little more evil. So that if you have it at all, even if caught very early, they’ll give you chemotherapy. Chemotherapy is disgusting. It can leave its own trail of health problems. If I actually get breast cancer and go through chemotherapy, will I curse my earlier decision as I vomit and gag?
And what if I’m actually one of the twenty percent who was somehow marked out to defy the odds? What if I have my breasts removed for “nothing”?
I’m aware that these are the “problems” of a healthy person who has the enormous advantage, unlike my female relatives going back through the family tree, of being forewarned. If I actually had cancer, I know everything would look different. I’d do the chemo in a flash, knowing it could save my life. But as a healthy person who has been told it’s all up to me, I’m stuck here amongst all the pros and cons in a state of uncertainty.
Circus
Today I went to the Great Moscow Circus at Learmonth Park here in Bathurst. As we approached, I noticed that all of the vans were extraordinarily clean. I should have realised this was a warning sign, a portent. The dusty, bedraggled air of the circuses of memory was nowhere in sight. Once the show started, it became clear that there was not much Moscow-ness in this Great Moscow Circus. The opening scene had a billowing floor and fake snow and little Russian children playing with snowballs, and a great wash of Russian male voice choir. After that there were references to vodka, a thumping Russian song, and and the ring master said do svidaniya at the end. But that was about it. Nobody seemed to be speaking with a Slavic accent. I realised the whole thing was actually from Generica, the same place that breeds shopping malls, Darling Harbour and top forty hits. It was all about lights and a great blare of sound. My little friend Marcus, five years old, actually asked to be taken out a couple of times, such was the noise. Another little boy that passed my seat a couple of times had his hands over his ears both times.
Maybe the loudness and machines were there to make up for the lack of animals. There were no lions or elephants or any other uncontrollable things on the premises. It was a loud, giant, literally well-oiled machine and it made the skilled performers seem small and maybe not such a big deal. They had been swallowed by the machine. It was all about bigness, the sort of bigness that has no end; it must just keep getting bigger, like the mining machinery at the Cadia goldmine, like the hole in the ground at Cadia.
There were lots of little kids there. Tellingly, the greatest response from the kids came with the lowest-tech performance. The ringmaster took off his red coat and became a drunken clown, splashing “Vodka” from a bottle over the audience. He climbed a ladder to a diving springboard, hurting his crotch on the way. The kids were in gales of laughter and participation. There is nothing like the sound of hundreds of children laughing. But then it was back to the Big, Loud and Overwhelming. The kids were pinned back in their seats in shock and awe. The finale was a giant metal spherical cage in which three loud roaring motorbikes rode in tiny dizzying circles. The riders would die if they made a false move, but they didn’t. There was great skill there, but somehow it was buried inside the gigantic machinery of the set-up.
We walked out into the bright, warm spring sunshine. Across the fields were people playing with frisbees and it was mercifully quiet.
There’s a convoy in my head (with a red dog in front seat)
I have a convoy in my head and a red dog in my heart. Let me explain. I know these people who’ve driven down to Canberra in their big rigs. I know them well, because I grew up with them. When I was a child, Dad drove a red truck all over the red dirt of the north west of Western Australia. I lived and played in the red dirt. We lived this life directly, without a narrative. What I mean is, we weren’t self-consciously part of any bigger story about life in the outback; we just happened to be there at the time. The dirt just happened to be red and the sky happened to be the biggest, bluest sky there is, climbing down to the biggest, bluest Indian ocean, complete with migrating humpback whales. Lobsters (we called them crays) sat idly on reefs waiting to be picked up and popped in a driftwood-fired billy boiling on the beach. At 17, I fled this idyll without a backward glance. But now, 30 years later, I go to a screening of Red Dog and just about die of the pain of nostalgia. When I was 14 I worked at the Ampol Roadhouse making beetroot-sodden burgers for truckies, and that’s where I found Sara Davidson’s Loose Change, on a wire rack of slightly racy novels about sex. In the book, Sara Davidson said some of her memories of the sixties made her writhe on the floor. As a 14 year old I was puzzled and slightly embarrassed about this. Watching Red Dog the other day, I got what she meant. If I hadn’t paid for my ticket I might have had to leave. It was so nostalgic I couldn’t stand it. It was writhe-on-the-floor nostalgic. Okay, so when the convoy hits Canberra my leftie feminist intellectual head says “#truckwits” like the other leftie Twitterers; but my heart is full of Red Dog.
This morning Merrill Findlay and I had a quick phone conversation about this. Merrill was in Carnarvon, my childhood town, in the early 1980s, after we’d left. She wrote a wonderful book about it. Now we both live here in the Central West, having lived for years in Sydney and Melbourne. Merrill’s creating a Song Cycle about the life of Kate Kelly, sister of Ned. There she is, in the bush, using some of the same material that we find in mainstream Aussie mythology (history, landscape) to create a new story that includes women, Chinese people, Aboriginal people, maybe some Afghan cameleers. Writing them into the story as if they were, preposterously, at the centre of it and not part of the colour around the edges. It has always felt impossible, reconciling these two parts of my life: the red heart and the critical mind. Maybe they can’t be reconciled; maybe an attitude of tolerance, an admission that we’re all here, criss-crossing this landscape, is as much as we can hope for.
This convoy… what’s it all about then? The men in the big rigs are at the centre of mythology but they’ve never been at the centre of power. That pisses them off. Somehow, someone is taking something from them: the big blue sky. City types are saying it’s no longer infinite; it’s full of carbon atoms and their trucks are to blame. I don’t know. I’m just dashing off these thoughts.
Today it’s (not) jettison
For a while now I’ve been wondering whether to jettison my last post – the one where I was stark raving mad about not getting a contract with a certain publisher* after a year and a half of dutifully drafting and redrafting and sending off to a certain editor*. But I’m going to leave my post where it is, along with the one before that, because that’s how I felt at the time. I was looking for companions in that particular form of rejection-madness and couldn’t find any. All I got was variations on “if at first you don’t succeed” and lists of all the writers who received so many rejection letters they could paper the walls. All of which could F off. I was disappointed.
Anyway, I’m writing a novel with a first-person narrator that happens to be a female pink and grey galah who has insightful observations about Australian identity and history. Through these observations and digressions we get the story of Mrs Johnson, who has an affair with the local dogger and her daughter, Stella, who thinks she’s the daughter of an astronaut but is actually the daughter of the dogger. And of Kevin Kelly, who is writing a love letter to right wing politician Pauline Hanson. What’s not to love about that? Anyway, in the end that certain publisher didn’t like it but I will go onwards, onwards, flying into the gum-scented morning, looking for another one.
PS Today’s Word of the Day on Artwiculate is jettison.
* Would like to name them but will not, because burning bridges is generally not a great idea.
Assonance can go the f*k to sleep
I’ve just been to drop Steve off at work. Very few cars on the road, for some reason. Then I went to the vet. I sailed past it and then turned left into Stewart Street and left again into the vet, pointing the car the wrong way. Could have been a problem, if a car had come in the IN. But I got away with this manoeuvre. I was picking up tablets for the stiff and arthritic Taro the white Labrador. She is woofing outside. I need to get up and let her in. She will not always be with us. It’s just gone 9am, so that means there’s a new Word of the Day.
I let Taro in. I checked email. I looked up the WOTD.
The word of the day is Assonance. My tweet:
“Assonance can go the f*k to sleep. I’m more in tune with dissonance.”
When I saw today’s word I said “fuck off” to myself. I’m really, really dirty on the world today. Last night, as I tried to go to sleep, I went on a violent mental rampage. I’ve never done quite this thing before. I was willfully imagining stabbing at various human bodies – they were men, big ones, like footballers – with knives, hurling rocks at them, pushing them off cliffs. I was chanting “fuck off, fuck off, fuck off”. I am violently opposed to not getting a publishing contract (the disgusting email came yesterday).
I woke at 3am with the grief.
After the vet, I went to get my coffee from Country Fruit. I was thinking about breakfast. There’s not much viable food in the house. I thought of buying nuts, an apple, plain yoghurt – things to make muesli with. It all felt too hard. It felt too hard to buy things other than coffee. So I went in and got the coffee. I stood there amongst all the bounty that is Country Fruit. The seafood behind the glass, including whiting. We used to catch whiting, in Carnarvon. When my sister Deb and I are waiting for something, we say we’re Whiting. There was a pile of dead whiting, silver skin, translucent flesh. And large, orange prawns. Two TV screens were going, one further back in the shop, one just above the counter where the woman was operating the coffee machine. There was a boy with long, styled hair (still trying to get used to young probably heterosexual men with styled hair) saying we should ban the burqua. He said if he couldn’t go to a servo with his face covered, why should anyone else? He is using Facebook to organise a demonstration. The ticker text across the bottom of the screen was saying – hopefully perhaps – that there could be a riot like the one at Cronulla. Lisa Wilkinson and Ita Buttrose were sitting there, poised to comment. Lisa Wilkinson started speaking. She was saying she grew up with a community of nuns at the end of the road so she was used to women in religious clothing.
Distracted by the screen, I barely registered the woman who took my money and gave the coffee.
Outside, there were ducks. There were a couple of ducks on George Street, small, vulnerable. One on the median strip, one on the footpath looking awfully like it wanted to cross. On the grass in Machattie Park, a whole flock of ducks. It was as though they were assembled for an event, a demonstration that might start a bit later.
Assonance is the word of the day; dissonance is more like it. I feel quite expletive about my rage. Quite willing to be loud and fast and furious and devil-may-care and the words I want to say over and over again are Fuck off or Go the fuck to sleep. As in, Go the fuck to sleep for ever.
Taro sighs.
I’m tired of everything being about death, illness, decline, loss, missing organs, the shutting down of possibility.
I’m tired of the endless self help CRAP – including from a friend who dropped in just now – about picking yourself up and dusting yourself off.
Grief doesn’t need a word – NOT A WORD – about how it will be all right in the end. It might or might not be all right in the end. Tragedy is always a distinct possibility. You can be the ant on the footpath, crushed under a careless shoe.* You can be swept away in a tsunami but not before you’re smashed horribly against a car and then a wall, dying in moments of sheer terror and horror. So fuck off with the perky stuff.
