like umbrellas

Written by Cathoel Jorss, published 10 years ago

Today was a torrent of windiness scouring Brisbane, everybody turning inside out like umbrella-bats. Wind Creates Friction, my hippie ex-boyfriend always used to advise: today is not the day to try transacting any very delicate business.

However it is the last of June and I had to rush down to the Department of Transport to register my car. My German companion was amazed at the Aussie informality. So many fields to fill out in the forms, but the blonde girl wrapped up in her scarlet scarf helped me through: How much weight can your ute carry, do you think? I lifted my hands. Uhm, uh. Well, she said, you’ll have to take a guess or else I have to make you go get it certified. Shall we say… maybe a tonne?

Oh, I said, maybe. I mean… it’s not all that big, maybe you wouldn’t get much more than a tonne’s worth of weight in there, unless it was lead.

One tonne, she typed aloud, to show me. “Oh! Good, we got away with that. Now, two seater? Or five.”

At the sliding doors – rattling in the high wind – I stopped to touch the screen and let them know their service was great, the girl in Booth One particularly helpful and kind. A gruff voice spoke at my elbow. It belonged to a little boy who had slid in beside me to watch. “I’m not goin’ out there,” he said. “Yeah!” I said, “it’s windy, isn’t it?” He said, pointing to his feet, “I had to put on me shoes and socks.” I said, “Well, you’d need extra-heavy shoes today, maybe with lead in the soles. Or you’d be in danger of just lifting off!”

He looked me over carefully. Clearly this was silly. But why? “I might just blow away!” he offered, tentatively. “I know,” I said, “and you’d have to be careful not to raise your arms out, like this…. otherwise they might act like wings and you’d be up, up, and away.”

A moment later he burst out of the juddering doors as we were crossing the pebblecrete quadrangle. “Like this!” he shouted, gleefully, raising up his arms like wings. “Yes!” I said. “And come up on the tips of your toes and feel the wind take you!” We wobbled gleefully at each other for a minute then I left him balancing there, amateur bird, laughing in the wind. We took refuge with our new Queensland number plates in an underground coffee shop with sweet, chirping songs playing softly and the hum of a rather old fridge. “How’s your day been?” asked the barista and I said, cheerfully, “Windy!” He said, “Oh, I know. It’s worst up at the cross-street there, a kind of a wind canyon, and I have to go against it to get here, turn up with tears in my eyes.” “That’s so harsh!” I said, exulting. You see I have a point to prove about winter in the tropics. It’s not cold, but it is rather cold. And cooler inside the house than out. It is hard for a person raised in the northern hemisphere to even imagine how this could be so. At home it is colder and you can die of it. But the sun won’t kill you. And the bureaucracy in the government departments relies on the administration of a thousand ill-paid hands. I remember the waitress aghast in a bar where I simply left my late, lukewarm, unappetising coffee and walked out. She followed me into the street and came up to me where I was unlocking my bike. She said, “We simply don’t do that!” Das machen wir einfach nicht!