The Garden of Eden

*

Lush, plants growing everywhere, caught in a dripping world of strange shapes, these things, dank, beautiful. And then: born again. Baby, I always take the long way home, sang Tom Waits, and if he looked for answers, now he was frightened of inconsequential things: of Alex saying he always lost interest because their English wasn't good enough for a decent level of communication, intimacy, as playful, as fun and as handsome as they might be. I'd move them in holus bolus and worry about the consequences later, he said; and Alex said: yes, I used to do that. These simple things haunted him now, as if there was nothing left to worry about but boredom. Boredom can be good, at least it's not crisis, one of his many old chief's of staff Madonna King had said. She went on to have children and a successful career in radio in Brisbane; he went on to do the same old, to stay on general news, to feel the years passing and the weight gathering, surrounded by a whole new generation of young reporters and photographers; to become, in effect, a living fossil, a voice of conscience from a demonic past, demented in the dawn, truthful by day, odd carriages of justice, the synapse for the city's stories, told without spin, accomplished in fine form, one stunt after another towering in upon themselves.

These quiet days took him by surprise; as he laboriously worked his way through a list of things to do he didn't want to do; the list a mile long. Most of the items to do with money. He just wanted to go to the ATM and take out money and hope like hell this little bit of paradise lasted forever, the convenience of the baht spitting out. The world didn't work that way, unfortunately. He was being forced to re-enter the real world after six months on the loose. Everything collapsed but everything had been divined. He walked through the reversed landscapes, with their sickening colour schemes and their malignant feel, out into the street lights where the fluorescent, hyper-coloured bars called in unison and everything went marching away the minute he looked at them, the tantalising flick of a skirt, a handsome face, a swishy boy who looked at him a second too long, so that the slightest glance became full of intent and possibility, everywhere, money the oil which made everything possible, to Pnom Penh where the words you want take care I tip you $20 led in real short time to a naked young man declaring: you can do anything you want to me. Or the go go bars of Bangkok, where a hundred boys a night paraded their wares to a small number of customers, the numbers still down after the curfew despite the European summer: and all one of them had to do was smile at him and that was that, the rest was always history.

Don't get into a relationship in the first year, the rehab gurus would always declare, which of course meant he wouldn't have had much loving in the past few decades; depending on how puritanically you counted these things, the marijuana maintenance program being common for some, even some of the oldest and most prominent members, hypocrisy ground deep, talk of a fellowship which didn't exist except within the brief confines of a room, a fantasy, a laugh out loud, a stray glance, a brief compromise, because all of it was empty and all of it was bullshit. The Russian girl, up from some remote Thai island where she was living cheaply with her beloved dog, sitting amongst them outside the Bourbon Street Bar off Sukhumvit Soi 22, a famous place amongst both practising and recovering alcoholics, for it catered to both in equal measure; well perhaps the practising more, that's where they made their money, when they drank all day and stumbled upstairs to one of the rooms, unable to get home, unable to make it past the front door, and the area itself was just perfect for it: down at heel, untidy, lots of bars where you could perch at 11am with your first beer of the day and feel not just perfectly at home, but perfectly right with the world, as he saw so many do every time he went there; and nearby was every fleshpot imaginable catering to foreigners, Soi Cowboy, the girls dancing above the mirrored catwalks, the Mamma Sans organising business, the girls beckoning. So when he used the word "bullshit" the Russian girl grinned in recognition despite her poor English. "This word I know, I met an Australian man here before."

And so when they gave him a medallion for a month's sobriety he had an unaccustomed moment of emotion, having never received one before. Hard won, this time. Now bored, how was that, where was the frisson, the threesomes, the wild nights, the aching dawns, the dereliction, the despair, the drama, spilling out gloriously from one nightclub or another into the breaking dawn. Now he slept next to his hot water bottle of a Thai boy, who slept eight hours a night at night and took himself off to university at 9am every morning, a perfect little saint who didn't drink, smoke or take drugs and who repeatedly declared he loved him; how was this paradise? When out there, beckoning, lay all the drama in the world, the sickening chaos, the money pouring down the drain like water, the humiliations both public and private, the girls derelict on yabba and the boys doing anything they could; because everything was away. Baw bought all his friends girls, he heard, after he left, because some stupid Australian had given him too much money. Well no doubt so. No doubt his money was rapidly distributed through the local economy of sex workers, with the family mopping up whatever was left, and those plaintive calls declaring he missed him meant only one thing: the money had run out. Don't believe half of what you hear, he had taught him; but it had rebounded. He didn't believe most of what came out of his mouth any more; and any naive notions he had vanished rapidly once they returned to Bangkok. You are welcome back, but the boy is not, they had said at the guest house in Chiang Mai, and it seemed like the story was the same across half of Thailand. Well, that was one damned wild party, that was all there was to say for it. And in the end being sober was bloody boring, and a damned sight safer.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/preference-deal-means-carbon-tax-abbott-20100721-10jy6.html

Prime Minister Julia Gillard has to explain what promises on climate change policy the Labor Party has made to the Greens under its preference deal, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott says.

He says a carbon tax will re-emerge if Labor is re-elected, because of its partnership with The Greens.

"This Greens preference deal is probably one of the sleaziest and shonkiest deals," Mr Abbott told Macquarie Radio on Wednesday.

Labor will be given Greens' preferences in most lower house seats, in exchange for Labor giving its preferences to the Greens in the Senate.

Mr Abbott said both Ms Gillard and Greens leader Bob Brown had denied being personally involved in the deal, but that should not dissuade voters from working out what a re-elected Labor government would do.

"The fact is that both of these people are trying to run away from something which could fundamentally change Australia," he said.

"These preferences don't come free.

"What will happen, if there is a re-elected Labor government in Canberra, there will be a carbon tax.

"This is why she (Ms Gillard) needs to explain exactly what promises the Labor Party has made to the Greens in order to extract these preferences that are necessary to get Labor over the line."

http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=2371992372220763819

LONDON, July 20 (Xinhua) -- British Foreign Secretary William Hague said on Tuesday that the country's combat troops should be out of Afghanistan by 2014.

In a BBC radio interview, Hague said: "We are trying to make sure that the Afghan state can look after itself in the future so that our forces don't have to be here in the long term. We have said we won't be there in five years time with combat troops in combat, but that is not remotely saying we cannot win."

"The Afghan forces are building up their own capacity so that by 2014 they will be able to cope without us. We can get to the state where the Afghan state and the Afghan armed forces can stand up on their own," Hague added.

He said the target was to get to 134,000 Afghan members of the armed forces by this autumn and that target had already been reached.

"More and more we have to encourage the Afghans to have ownership of what's happening in their country and have more and more armed forces," said Hague.

He added: "There is now a large Afghan army which is getting into better shape -- it needs to be much bigger and better yet, but that can be done, I believe in the next four years."

Hague was speaking after a conference in Kabul, the Afghanistan capital, at which Afghan President Hamed Karzai revealed that foreign troops in the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force could be out of Afghanistan by 2014, because Afghan troops would be capable of handling their own security.

Karzai committed himself to this goal.

Hague was also following policy already established by new Prime Minister David Cameron when he spoke at the G8 and G20 summits in Canada late last month. Cameron said that he wanted British combat troops home from Afghanistan within five years.

Britain recently committed a further 300 troops to Afghanistan, bringing the total up to 10,000, the second largest foreign force behind the United States.

A total of 322 British troops have been killed in Afghanistan, with many deaths coming over the past four years since the British moved into the southern Helmand province to take on the Taliban with a force of 3,300 troops.

Picture: Peter Newman.