Rock Bottoms

*

Violent conflict, not confinded to the home and hearth, spills out onto the streets. Moreover, I discovered that British cities such as my own even had torture chambers: run not by the government, as in dictatorships, but by those representatives of slum enterprise, the drug dealers. Young men and women in debt to drug dealers are kidnapped, taken to the torture chambers, tied to beds, and beaten or whipped. Of compunction there is none - only a residual fear of going too far.

Perhaps the most alarming feature of this low-level but endemic evil, the one that brings it close to the conception of original sin, is that it is unforced and spontaneous. No one requires people to commit in. In the worst dictatorships, some of the evil that ordinary men and women do, they do out of fear of not committing it.

Theodore Dalrymple.

And so it goes, the time sequences, the flash floods, the aching hearts. If all was well he would not be here, in this place, begging forgiveness. He felt so ashamed of himself for having wasted so much of his life. He would have been an entirely different person, if only he had been cured. But that was not to be. Life was to pass by in clouds of pot smoke and drunken evenings at the pub. In a life entirely dedicated to pleasure. Except there was no pleasure at the end, only a sad old party animal with the faraway glaze of a distant criminal, not of this world. It had been hard to manufacture such profound thought disorder. It had costs thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours. And so when he came to partake of the real world, he was little fit. Richard would embrace him, almost as a lover, and when Stephen cracked the code we were all jealous, because we had all been in love. That drunken embrace. That devine energy. Those astonishing good looks.

And now he's dead and nothing but a memory; and few of us made it to what must have been the saddest of funerals. Why did he collapse so quickly into dereliction, living in his mother's large old house in North Adelaide, rarely going out. His father had been an academic of osme mysterious kind, everything we didn't understand was mysterious, the beauty of the Adelaide Hills and the abandoned network where we used to go to pick flowers to sell around the office blocks. There were always ways to make money, it just required enginuity. While his own teenagers lived off his efforts as if it was their God given right; and never even thought of contributing. No government helped him. No gratitude was forthcoming. Peter's voice still remained in his head, shrieking, loud, angry, impossibly camp; and his solution to ever problem: What Have YOU done about it?

Talking to him was like taking a cold shower, bracing, confronting, and often enough it was a managemnet issue, keeping him calm and the light sabres innocent. He was trying to grow, trying to avoid the consequences of his own dereliction. It was not to be. Failure was imminent. That's how he felt. That there was no way he could turn this old ship around. That momentary piece was just an illusion, recovery was an illusion, the long nights where he could barely sleep just an illusion of progress. He couldn't last much longer. Life, God, the universe, call it what you will, had only provided hope in small measure and he had betrayed all the rules of nature; and therefore could not survive. There was nothing to look forward to. Old age would not provide the peace he had long sought. Shadows flicked at his heels, the foundation core dissolved into shadows at the slightest exposure, and his desperate search for some structure in which to hide, or to build quickly enough a frame in which to live, had all been swept aside.

He didn't know what the answer was. He was convinced of his special destiny but had made too many mistakes, smoked too many cigarettes, slipped once too often, and the cnacer was eating out his lungs and his body was shutting down. Emphesema for sure. Hypochondriac, for sure. He could not believe his luck, that he was still alive. Hauled unconscious from swimming pools. Walking, emerging live from the beach, Newport beach, where he had walked along waiting for the tablets to take affect, waiting to die, the sound of the surf crashing on the yellow sands, the cliffs cold and remote. There was no one to talk to. He cried and went home, to be beaten again. And again. And he never said: you bastards, stop it, stop it, I've just tried to kill myself and here you are giving me another thrashing. You bastards. How could you treat your own child like this?

Clearly he was hated. Clearly there was nowhere to go. But then he discovered something, hitch hiking one day to shooting practice out at Narrabeen Lakes. He was the object of desire for a whole rnage of men, who thought there was nothing more exciting than a 14-year-old boy. He stuck out his thumb and they screached to a halt. They didn't have to hint very much for him to be readily available. They puffed and they panted and they licked, and all of a sudden he discovered a source of power and affection, even if fleeting. Later, when he turned 15, Old John Mason, a friend of his father's, would pull up beside him in his nice, low slung Jaguar. Want to get in he would ask. He always got in. They would go back to his house. If only his father knew. Then there'd be trouble. But he never told him, he never told anyone, he just started hitch hiking wherever he went.

If his home life was miserable, suddenly there was another world where he was the centre of attention, plied with alcohol and money and their dribbling hands, touching him, touching him, because they couldn't get enough. You're so beautiful, they would pant, and he let them do whatever they wanted. Which usually wasn't much, suck him off, stare at his young frame, and he looked young for his age, which perhaps made the crime even worse, although no one thought of it as a crime back then. It was just boys being boys in a subterranean world, where everything was illegal and the real world, the solid middle class world of morality and churches, the place where the belts kept sneaking out aqt him, a thankless, cruel and indiffernet place, was hidden and gone, unable to hurt him. Their hands spread all over him and he did whatever they asked, it was a mystery to him. He couldn't see what all the excitmenet was all about. Come quick, get it over with, I want the alcohol, was all he could think.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8160341.stm

The Indonesian capital Jakarta is getting back to business after two US-owned luxury hotels were hit by twin bombs on Friday.

The attacks killed nine people and injured dozens more.

Police suspect they were the work of the Malaysian extremist Noordin Mohamed Top, believed to have links to the radical Islamist group Jemaah Islamiah.

Indonesia had been making progress against militants and held a peaceful presidential election earlier in July.

The streets of Jakarta were filled with the usual cacophony of cars, trucks and motorcycles.

People in the city were getting back to business - the first day back at work after the deadly attacks that took place last Friday.

The crowds that had gathered around the bombing site over the weekend and on Monday's holiday to pay their respects were slowly thinning out.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25816069-601,00.html

A GROUP of Taliban suicide bombers have tried to storm government buildings and a military base in two cities in eastern Afghanistan killing four people.
Six suicide bombers, some of them also carrying guns, tried to enter several government buildings in Gardez but were shot dead before reaching their targets, Rohullah Samoon, a provincial government spokesman told AFP.

"One of the bombers detonated in front of the intelligence department killing three intelligence officers. The other bombers were killed by security forces," he added.

Two other bombers were killed in exchanges of fire with police in Jalalabad as they tried to fight their way into the city airport, a base for Afghan and foreign troops forces, said the relevant spokesman, Ahmad Zia Abdulzai.

He could not give more details but a doctor in the city's hospital told AFP that one dead policeman was brought to the hospital.

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/global-warming/rudd-picks-howard-minister-for-emissions-job-20090721-drij.html

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has appointed former Coalition environment minister Robert Hill to head a key element of the Government's emissions trading scheme.

Mr Hill will chair the Australian Carbon Trust, a $75 million initiative that will promote energy efficiency in homes and small businesses, and allow individuals to feel they are making a difference by letting them buy carbon permits.

Mr Hill held the environment portfolio in the Howard government and his appointment has the potential to embarrass Malcolm Turnbull, also an environment minister under John Howard.

Mr Turnbull is grappling with trying to achieve a consensus in the Coalition on climate change.

The Senate is due to vote on August 13 on Labor's emissions trading scheme and the Coalition has agreed to vote the scheme down.