Water is tapping on the window of your hotel room. It’s a dingy little place, but it’s the only one you can afford at the moment. You have budgeted, and, assuming you can live on two meals a day – porridge smothered in honey for breakfast; macaroni and cheese for dinner – you can stay here for just over a week. After that you plan to get on one of the pelagic fishing boats that leave every Saturday from the south dock.
As soon as you got into town, you checked in and then sent an e-mail to your girl in New South Wales. You promised her that you were getting the money to fly back to Australia, but that you were gonna be stuck in this dead-end fishing town for at least a week, and then there was a three-month stretch fishing for Pacific salmon, Pacific halibut and crab.
You spend your afternoons reading the one National Geographic magazine they have in the common area. You’ve read it so many times eating your porridge or your macaroni that you’ve almost memorised the articles.
Page 34. famous animals on stamps: Koko, a gorilla that knows sign language; Laika, that dog the Russians sent into space; Lonesome George, last of the Pinta Island Tortoises.
Page 38. tracing the genetic distribution of the epicanthic fold.
Page 60. a photo spread of astronomical objects as photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope. Your favourite is the ‘Trifid Nebula,’ though you also like the ‘Eye of God.’
Page 80. eels.
Page 110. insect eggs.
Page 122. oh, fucking hell!
You spend the next two days’ food and rent money on grog and as you ricochet home you start trying to figure out what you are going to do.
The next morning you bump into the man who’s living in the next room as he’s leaving. He’s with a young girl. When the man sees you look from him down to the girl he gives you a little nod as if to assure you that everything is above board, that nothing inappropriate is going on. Whatever, you don’t care, and you shrug as you push past him. Whatever. It’s none of your business.
Written on Sunday, 24 October 2010