Category: Writing

Mother’s milk, jazz and running out of resources

There’s something about an accountant, our accountant, a lovely man, but one whose lens is squarely focussed on money and how to use it wisely. He hates debt unless it’s something you can use as a tax concession and introduces a way of thinking into my mind that I want to dismiss.

I don’t want to get bogged down with fears for the future. 

Mrs Milanova talked about the fear of running out of resources as a universal fear, which she likened to a baby’s fear that the milk might dry up and there’d be nothing left to sustain her. 

I have a tendency to treat all resources as mother’s milk and to operate on the same principle as lactation.

Supply and demand. As long as the baby feeds from the breast, the breast will produce more milk. 

I like this model for life. As long as you make use of what’s available in a thoughtful, ethical way, the world, or people or whatever else creates these resources will go on producing. 

It’s probably the basis of capitalism with all its problems.

 What about those who cannot feed from the breast and need to be provided for in some other way? And what of those breasts that cannot provide?

Last week, I was listening to the pianist and composer Paul Grabovsky talk about Miles Davis’s jazz number, Kind of Blue. He used the metaphor of a cat.

Grabovsky described watching as his cat perched high on a ledge. It paused to size up the distance, then with everything balanced, it leaped and landed effortlessly on its feet. 

Grabovsky likened this cat’s estimation to what he imagined were Miles Davis’s calculations before he launched into his improvisations. 

Isn’t it more the case that Miles Davis had a hunch which he then tried out?

A well-informed hunch based on all the years he had studied and practised and composed music.

Miles Davis had a hunch, maybe similar to the cat’s calculations about that leap, but he did not know where he was going or how his music would land. 

Any more than I knew this morning as I sat down to write that I would be going on about resources and cats and jazz and hunches.

In other words, about creativity.

Isn’t this what makes something new? A series of happy coincidences, a bit of luck and someone using their intuition to time things in such a way as they come together in a new and pleasing composition which makes sense to other people.

It can feel both new and exciting and also uncannily familiar. Not too new as to jar but not so familiar as to be boring. 

Earlier, when I was in that horrible state faced with the blank page and nothing to offer, lacking in resources, I noticed the golden lucky cat that sits on my desk.

It used to sit in my husband’s office years ago, a gift from a client or colleague and found its way here after he left. 

When I tidied up my writing room during the holidays, the cat appeared out of nowhere in my clean up and my daughter urged me to set the cat beside me.

I rested the cat there in the hope it might bring me luck.

And then I feared for cultural assimilation as I know little about these gorgeous, gaudy gold cats who wave a paw at you and grin broadly. 

This reminds me of a time when my husband and I were in a Chinese supermarket in Victoria Street.

Years ago, in the days when one of my daughters was into playing with cash registers and we saw all this fake currency on one of the shelves.

We decided to buy some. 

At the checkout, the woman looked at us suspiciously. I was quick to explain.

‘We’re buying it for our daughter, pretend money for her toy cash register.’

‘You must not. This money is for the ancestors,’ she said. ‘They will be angry if you use it this way.’

She implied a curse would fall upon us if we used the money thus.

We had already paid for our items before the woman spoke, and we thanked her for her warning and went on our way.

I did not give our daughter the money but tucked it away in a drawer.

It’s a resource of sorts but in my hands, it’s of no use, only I will not destroy it for fear of the ancestors. 

I tell myself not to be suspicious.

Still, I’d prefer that someone in the know remove it. Or someone ignorant who will not be spooked into thinking bad fortune will befall them if they disrespect the fake money.

Money that costs almost nothing to buy but like the Farex tasting hosts the priests used at Communion when I was a child, white bits of nothing, the significance we ascribe to them means we cannot use them for anything other than their religious purpose.

Otherwise, we will fall foul of god, and he will take away all our resources. 

The milk will dry up and we’ll all be in trouble.

Flower girls and horror movies

It’s happened before. I sit in front of the computer and type away, eyes on the keyboard. I cannot see the screen or notice, not a single word I’ve typed has registered.

A blank page and I have been writing for over fifteen minutes. 

I could go back and try to write all the things I put down earlier but now it’s boring. I’ve already been there, and I don’t want to return to the same old territory. 

Nothing to show for my efforts. It demands a certain calm, otherwise, I might be left feeling even worse than when I began.

So I start again.

My mother’s cousin Ria worked for the VVV (the tourist bureau) in Haarlem, Holland and every year she arranged for a different group of girls to represent her city as flower girls, Bloemenmeisjes.

They dressed similarly in the fashion of the day and each carried a flat basket of flowers and wore a wide smile. They travelled on a float throughout the city as part of the celebrations. 

There’s something icky to me about the concept of flower girls. I think of vestal virgins and young girls used as sacrifices to the gods, their beauty and innocence the biggest drawcard to seal their deaths. 

During my early twenties, I stayed one time on holiday with my husband, before he was my husband, in a basement flat, which my mother’s cousin owned. 

One-night late, curiosity overtook any respect I might have held for my cousin’s privacy, and I went exploring the secret places in her flat. 

In a separate bedroom from where we slept, I came across a deep trunk filled with photos and memorabilia of flower girls.

My second cousin had collected newspaper cuttings, photos of her bloemenmeisjes and photos of herself with the mayor and other dignitaries. 

My imagination went berserk. Fuelled in part by reading Daphne Du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now and haunted by memories of the film I had seen a couple of years earlier and based loosely around Du Maurier’s story, with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie as leads. 

The film follows a grief-stricken couple whose daughter Christine dies in an accident in the sprawling grounds of their country home after slipping into a pond in search of her ball. 

The daughter, Christine, was wearing a red hooded raincoat at the time of her death. The story is pockmarked with signs of what is to come. A naked woman’s dead body is winched out of the river in Venice. A killer is on the loose. Shots of gargoyles loom menacingly.

Christine’s father, who restores antiquities visits Venice to work on a crumbling stone church, flanked by monstrous gargoyles. His wife struggling over her daughter’s death accompanies him. In typical British style, the couple ships their son off to boarding school. 

The film then centres around their time in Venice. At dinner one evening, after a delicious lovemaking scene, the only joyous moment in the movie, the wife is fascinated by a couple of tourists, elderly sisters, one of whom is blind. The blind woman is a psychic and the wife encounters them in the toilets and begins a conversation. The psychic channels Christine who wants to warn them her father is in danger. 

The father won’t hear of it when his wife begs him to talk to the blind woman, and the film, which takes a long time to get you there, ends in tragedy.

I should not describe the end for fear of ruining the story, save to say when I first saw it I had not seen it coming. 

I should have seen it coming. In retrospect, there were plenty of warnings. A rock falls from on high as if pushed by a malevolent gargoyle and nearly crushes our hero. There’s the naked woman her dead body dripping wet, and in the blind woman’s future vision, we see flashes of a funeral, a coffin carried on top of a boat along one of the canals in Venice.  

Finally, the father races through the streets following a small figure in a red raincoat just like his daughter’s coat on the day of her death.

We think he might be following Christine, reincarnated. He thinks he’s following Christine, or someone come to tell him about her. But the red-coated creature turns into something from a horror movie. 

I refuse to go to horror movies and even as I write this, the horror stays with me. 

I could not sleep for days after I saw this movie and later in Haarlem when I stayed at my cousin’s house and decided I must read the actual book to put my mind at rest, I became terrified at the thought that my cousin’s preoccupation with flower girls might be something else. 

The two things merged in my mind, however unrelated.

In the flat below my cousin’s sumptuous apartment had windows in the kitchen that looked out onto the pavement. You could see people’s feet as they walked past. I sat in this basement apartment and read my book at the kitchen table becoming more alarmed every day. 

Haunted. 

In the haunted kitchen circa 1980

There’s no great conclusion here. I finished the book and it did not affect me so deeply as the film adaptation, perhaps made worse by the jenever (Dutch gin) and tonic I drank in copious quantities at night to help me sleep. 

When we left Holland for home, and I heard several years later that my mother’s cousin had developed Parkinson’s and died young, it left a hollow feeling.