Falling through Time

I imagine the calling of the dawn-birds somewhere in the wings of eucalypts, accompanied only by the sighing of wind. Holding memory of the soundless mountain-air in my lungs, I allow the emptiness to spread through my body’s tributaries, irrigating me against the dry and thrumming terror I feel in the day’s foreign dawn. I can’t force my eyes to focus outside of my immediate, body locus. Suddenly an uninvited picture-card posts itself on the inside of my eyelids. It inveigles me into an Islamic trance, seeing my feet bound by saddle-thongs to a recalcitrant camel, journeying to Mecca: helpless to the whim of the goddess, Fate. Through stress, my ears thrum this imaginary force into the thundering of a bus-engine. I can hardly breathe. I am in Jordan and totally alone, and cannot touch anything at all that is familiar. The wheels vibrating on the casual bitumen-tarp hum into my nail-beds and the soft flesh of my thighs. Gritty lemon-shadows leak from under the caramel window-shades half pulled against dust-grimed windows. I sit in an unexpectedly clean and comfortable bus with bench-seats of substantial dun leather. The windows are trimmed with heavy, burgundy curtains but it is a bus filled with heavy hooded-eyes; a bus filled with men - dark men, short men, careful men - absolutely silent men. Shafts of interrupted prayer slice out of male, twisted eyes and I see myself an insect with strange predator-bugs trapped in a steel and glass box. The razor eyes dissect my distress through to my underwear then drop back to contemplate their lovers: tasselled strings of prayer-beads. I sit in a cacoon of apprehension, loose threads of nervous fibre plaiting into dangerous ropes around my body. I feel the asphyxiation of my dream-vision – which once gave me a feeling of being deeply loved in a Middle Eastern past life – but which is now my solo and sordid companion. I have directed a mind play, since I have imagined myself free, riding a camel through the desert, dressed in beautiful clothes, but finally I am meeting my ideal in its terrible, modern light. There are no free-thinking, 70’s love-children as fellow travellers, and the deceit of waiting twenty years in the solitude of a travel-dream means, I have stepped out of my youth and time, and I can’t see out of the bus-windows. Arriving at the inner, Amman bus-depot, I slip into a scoop of asphalt surrounded by the nascent cut and tumble of the city. A mosiacked spiral of hills draws shafts of blue-maze and squares of mica-glare. I step down the two, metal-grid steps into black fumes and bumping vehicles shuffling against each other in the crowded parking-pen. There are men all about. A concrete square patently insulated by men. Men in black-clothes; men smudged with exhaust in a grey cloying confusion; men with the same dagger eyes. Hugging a thought of hopeful invisibility, I glide into the bus-station. It reveals its core as merely an out-shed: a corrugated, shiny-iron room,- a shearers’ squat if I had seen it under my familiar, Aussie sun. Centrally, a crumpled man lies on several folding chairs, his brown shape a shadow silhouette behind the tall brass and glass hookah-pipe. Black-stains on the floor and the petulant smell of something night-smoked and dense penetrate the pores of my sinus-bed. I back off, retracting any enquiry for a guide to Amman into my chest. My nostrils ache for air high and wild, free of this morning draft of pollution. Spinning round and round, making circles away from excitable glances, slow motion turn-about checking my feet, I hope that I am reducing my prominent and forward fairness, my blond and blue-eyed complexion. By sucking in any prettiness, I retreat out of the cluster of vehicles and bodies, and walk across the road to the market-place. But the circling is stirring the pot and the stew is spiced by an ancient and pedantic cook. Those of Allah notice my strangeness, and intrusion. I am green and unfurled - a stem not a root. Covered by thick winter-clothing, which shows only a scant incline at my waist and so little of my breast, it is still too much for the exclusive-sect buying their vegetables. The grunting and slurring bumps me about. A man spits at my feet. As light, I turn again. The earth feels impregnated with disapproval. It ingests the anger and ridicule falling about me. I feel magma about my legs, a sucking to verdant fragility. The tremors are folding up the field of my westernised free-mind to dismember. Stopping, slowing my anxious temperature, I give myself a graceful pause, sucking at the insular air under my chin, I button up the collar of my jacket. Twitching under the coupling stares and watching some rats squabbling over stringy-sinew under a cracked and blood-blotched table of boards, I feel overexposed; my eyesight splintered by foreign light. Prehensile voices clutch at my hair. Fibres twist about my throat, distorting a trying-to-smile. I am the naked infidel and the meek and obliging veil of my personality is perforating into flailing tissue, desiccating in the sunlight. Death is about me – I can smell its sour weight in the air - an irrevocable presence immediate and visible - though I cannot identify who holds the knife. I can see I have given birth to this death-child in the early hours of the Jordanian dawn. I have carried the zygote in my belly for months - its gestation long and greedy - annihilating rapport with my new husband and the serenity and method of our domestic hum. I have left Peter: the good man, the good and patient man, who was willing to hold me in the middle of the night with his huge capable-hands, while I shook in a body and mind collapse. I was reassured I wouldn’t fall into the abyss beneath my heart. An indelible fear leaks out of my soul, pouring black, razor geometric demons. An immature sense denies the hellish vision but the spectres make me gasp for breath and I burp sulphur and salt. I am ignorantly following scent and colour to Egypt by land-pass through Jordan and Palestine. The protagonist whispering, is the dark-man in the sullen corner of every room, and I know, even as he is disguised as a wastrel, I will meet him. Standing at the seam of the market-place my inner resolve to return to a marked and illustrious historical-vision becomes ridiculous. The visceral cave-in gives me insight. I see that I have burnt all of my bridges and used the pylons as gaming sticks. There is no romance left. In this street-pocket the people remind me of a cage of bats hawking and hissing and battering at my skull with leathery-wings. I smell the dust and an acrid mix of urine and vegetable-decay. There is a raw hunk of mutton on a wooden-block which wipes against the back of my skirt. Moving through the tight spaces of the market walk-ways disturbs more and more settled flies. Wanting an escape, I see light and sustenance in the shapes of oranges. They are brilliant globes against the shifting black-cloths, and their leaves are still attached: little green flags, deep, emerald-green glyphs, leaves which send their oasis-scent deep into my nostrils. I grasp at the oranges with both hands, three at once, tickling them like jugglers’ balls and ask how much: ‘Khem faloose?’ A phonetic guess and I don’t understand the reply. I pay. A handful of coins and the vendor chooses, while all around the locals push and pull bargaining words. I don’t know the rhythm.