Writing Exercises - Senses

Smell
You could almost see the stink lingering in puddles outside the main dorm in RAK.
The khaki bubbles popped and spread like craters on cooking pancakes as they released their eye watering fumes of pee. "I guess they didn't unlock for the toilet again last night..."

Taste
The taste of your tattoo against my tongue on that long summer morning, not so long ago

Sound
Metal against metal; the sound of the iron skeleton key rapping against the aluminium table with speed and force. Thwak thwak thwak thwak thwak!

Touch
The feel of the prison issue blanket against my skin. It was heavy with the grease of hundreds of bodies that had used it before me. I itched. After a week I could feel the irritation growing under the skin of my back. After two weeks my back had exploded in a mess of angry red pus filled spots. A Sri Lankan girl squeezed and bathed it for me.

Sight
The vision of Derek standing calm, almost nonchalant in the visiting courtyard, while to each side of him it was chaos. His stance almost an inversion of all those around him. They shouted, waved, gesticulated, jostled to be seen and heard by their visitors on the other side of the bars, many of whom were wilting and crying in the afternoon heat. He just stood still and stared into my eyes, searching out my heart, as I wilted and cried too.

Taste
The tiny salty black bubbles popped between my teeth and I looked over at mum with eyes that didn’t know whether to cry or laugh. The caviar was first class. I sipped from my glass of Dom and started to notice long forgotten senses waking up. The Champagne bubbles tickled my mouth and nose and washed the salty eggs down in one exquisite swallow. I had eaten prison food for two years. The only alcohol I'd drunk was a couple of capfuls of baby cologne. This was my very first taste of freedom.

Writing Exercises - Emotions

Love
There’s a lightness that comes with love. People talk about butterflies tickling their skin from the inside out, but doesn’t it all start in the head? It’s the brain that suddenly bursts with these long dormant hormones. It’s the neurones firing off with pleasure that create space where once there was longing. For me, the lightness means I can relax when he meets me at Schiphol Airport. Relaxing means a feverish afternoon of lovemaking in the tiny White House hotel in Amsterdam. The feverish afternoon becomes an affair born in security, surety and complete physical surrender. I had melted into my man and he into me. He said I love you Hyde. And I finally said I love you back.

Fear
It’s like a game of tetris. The ball of fire is suspended around my heart and drops down into my flaming belly pit. The moment it drops another forms, and drops, then another and another... There’s a tightness that runs from deep inside my brain and fingers its way through my body. It hurts. It’s like my soul is trying to tear through - to get away. But I need it here. I need to be alert, I’m straining to pick up a hint in their fast flowing Arabic, a hint that I’ll be ok, that it will all be over soon. But deeper down in the pit of fire is an emptiness that tells me it’s useless. A knowing that tells me the only place I'm going is back to jail.

Self loathing
You can tell the girls who actually have some legitimate reason for being in prison. The ‘what ifs’ and ‘what have I dones’ hang unspoken, like a weight slung across their shoulders as they move through the hours of each and every day. This ghostly appendage to the soul balances two buckets - one on either side - overflowing with regret and sadness. When you’re carrying the buckets, it usually means you’re going to be here a while. You’ll watch girls come, some with buckets, some just in transit; and you’ll watch girls go. That’s when your own buckets get heavier. How can you go? How can you even just make it ok? Sorry, I screwed up is not a currency accepted here. You are powerless to change events. In the end, you can only change yourself.

Joy
I look at the new text message and can’t help but smile. It felt like the roof opened up to the sun right there in Sexy Nails salon. A burst of pink spread across my cheeks then leaked all the way to my fingers and toes. I looked up, not looking anywhere because my eyes were glazed, just recalling his hands gently laying me back onto the bed. I see the sun tattooed on his solar plexis. Maybe that’s where the warmth is coming from. I want to reply but know now it’s ok. I don’t have to rush. He’s still there. And I’m still smiling.

So I craft my response while the Vietnamese lady paints hot pink wax between my legs.

The Passport

The sun was peeping over the dunes behind us, its low glow making dazzling halos on the sea grass dotted on the horizon.

There was laughter from somewhere up the beach and I watched as a trail of pixels caught up with the direction of my stare. The acid had settled in nicely; much like our cavorting posse of partygoers.

Thanks to the Fender Passport system the sand was bumping. Bass vibration shimmied up my legs and raised the hairs on my arms. It felt like every pore opened a little wider to take the music in - straight to the nerve endings. The perfect outdoor audio kit, the Passport comprised two speakers and an amp that clip together into one solid 20 kilo suitcase. All you need is your music source and a generator and you’ve got yourself a party. We had the speakers on tripod stands facing in towards the barasti hut. The psychedelic fabric fastened to two sides of the bamboo frame gave us walls of fractals within which to dance, while Ganesha made a dexterous salute to the sea from behind the DJ desk.

The boys were just wrapping up a two hour back to back set, mixing and mashing minidisc, DAT and vinyl into a journey through the darker corridors of psy-trance. Most of the tunes were fresh from India and Germany, heavy with layers of complicated beats and vocal samples over the traditional pounding four-four bassline. It was stomping music. It was twirling and contorting make-your-body-elastic music. It was not for the faint hearted music.

Evidently, because only the hard core remained. The rest of the party goers had come and gone in the night. Half the excitement is actually finding the party, negotiating sand dunes in the wilderness of a 10km stretch of beach. If you don’t have a four wheel drive, you better have a pre-arranged pick up plan. Quite often there was no phone signal, and even if there was, no one at the party is going to hear your call. There was lots of driving through the dunes with the windows down and constantly cutting the engine to listen out for the thud thud thud thud of the bass. >>>>

The laughter that had stirred me came from Aslam and Emil. A moment ago you could only see their outlines on the horizon, then it lifted its veil and illuminated their faces. They were speaking in Hindi, the sing-song timbre exaggerated by the twilight.

I don’t think I’d actually spoken a word for the last couple of hours.

Chained to my dreams

Dear Catherine,

I keep having this dream. The dream is always different, but the outcome is freakishly the same. I’m back there and I’m clean. Squeaky. No way I’m going to screw up this time. Derek is close by, but still out of reach. We’re in the same country at least. I’m going to a party. I’m not going to take drugs. But other people are. It’s absolutely not ok for me to have anything in my system. We all know that. One more strike and I’m out...

I never remember the detail of exactly how it happens, just the earth shattering moment when I’m stopped by the police and realise that they’ve got me again. As they’re taking me back to the station for a urine test I’m ready to tear my own heart out. My free life disappears before my eyes. How could I have slipped? I can’t tell my family. Better they think I’m dead. There are no more get out of jail cards left. The worse part is, I don’t even know whether I’m guilty or not. I feel guilty. I know they’re going to get a positive test out of me. But I don’t think I actually took anything. Or was it just one teeny tiny taste? That’s enough of course.

The next part of the dream could be anywhere. But I’m inside. Locked up. Sometimes some of the faces are the same. Sometimes I’m in a completely foreign prison, drawing only, I can imagine, on pictures in my mind from Sasha’s stories of Delhi prison, or the numerous books written by people like us. The despair is indescribable. Yet I never, ever see my parents in these dreams. Maybe it’s my mind’s way of protecting itself? Do you think my sub-conscious knows that’s territory too painful for even a dream?

I’m too ashamed to even call my lawyers.

The dreamscape chaos is mixed with a sense of déjà vu. It’s like that scene from Midnight Express when they’re walking circles chained to the wheel, sinking deeper into the maddening rut walked by their own feet. I know I’ve been here before. It’s all the same but different. I know it’s hopeless. I keep dreaming. I go to court. I stand clutching the bars watching bus loads of women released to carry on with their lives, knowing that will never be me, on that bus. I can actually feel the despondency gnawing away at my soul. It’s a sad, sad place I’m in and I’m slipping off the edge. Giving up...

Then there’s a sharp turn. It’s like a knife slices through the middle of the dream and changes its course from a point back in some premonitory corner of my mind. It’s as sudden and shocking as finding out I didn’t actually do it. Of course I didn’t do it. Who could be so crazy? And I’m walking out of the jail, heart beating faster as it settles back into my conscious body.

I know I’m awake and I cry.

Ramble

I know I want to end the book with the journey home - the beginning of a new, young life - but I have no idea what it's supposed to mean. There was something in Fiona's idea - telling the story from multiple perspectives...

There are the Emirates staff at the first class check in watching me approach in handcuffs. There were the fellow prisoners saying goodbye. It would be amazing if you cold focus up close on their faces and hear their internal monologues as each encountered this shell of a girl. Woman. Was I a girl or a woman at twenty six? Wow, there's a question all of its own.

I can see the shotias - Fowzia in particular watching me leave, and Major Sabah 'Will she be back? Third time's a charm.' That's where the nightmares come from, always that third time lurking, waiting to happen.

So this shell of a girl, she's empty, dry of tears, a grey, vaporous shadow of her former self, while all around, every pinpoint along the way, there are faces looming close, watching and passing judgement. What's it like to enter the world with this flag hanging over your head? Forever. There's a passport with an international drug peddling charge attached to it. A profile on interpol, a world wide web where a search of your name returns a digest of your personal history, etched into the screens of the future.

And there are the friends who've been let down. The family who will never look at you the same way, the secrets that exist to protect grandparents, the fear that prospective employers, clients, boyfriends and colleagues will one day ask the question...

What's it like to go back into the world? Where do you start?

Three beginnings - a writing exercise

Beginning One:

The key jerked us out of sleep. Rap rap rap rap rap. Then deeper. Thwack thwack thwack thwack thwack. “Yalla. Goomee. Eat.” Quickly. Get up. Breakfast. The beginning was no different to any other day. But we all knew the end would be.

Peeling my eyes open, my body started to register what day it was. The dread bubbled in my belly and quickly rose, pushing a little "Oh" from my lips as it fizzed and burned around my heart like poison. If it wasn't for the poison I'd be empty inside.

I looked over at Sasha, she was sitting, knees up, arms draped over the front of them with her head hanging between her legs. It’s the position you sit in when you think you’re going to be sick. I know how she feels.

Kate is right next to me, close enough to touch. I glance over my shoulder and she is laying straight as a plank, eyes focused on the fluorescent light above our heads. It looks like a black light – one of those dark UV tubes that make your teeth glow at a trance club in Amsterdam – but it’s actually a standard old white tube. Covered in flies. They’re still, settled, but before long, as we start to move and a little air circulates in the room, they’ll become active. There must be hundreds of them. Enough to completely cover a metre long tube. When they start buzzing around the room for the day, you can see that the tube is covered in fly shit.

Kate isn’t a morning person; she’s still laying here next to me, staring straight up. I’d go beyond saying Anna isn’t a morning person. She’s actually frightening in the morning. I’ve seen her bare her teeth, wolf like, and that’s just because Sasha told her she missed a patch when she was cleaning the floor.



Beginning Two:

The black fabric was the softest thing about today. I just held it for a while. It was cool too. A little sea of cool in the thick humidity of a middle eastern summer morning.

Standing with the abaya held to my body and feeling the slippery waves of rayon move and settle around me has a calming effect. My eyes are open, but by all appearances, nobody is home. On court day, the further you can get away from the truth, the safer you are. It’s like your own personal defence team steps in to fight the system. Suppress the nervous synapses that threaten to derail an already shaky defence built by a very expensive lawyer. We all deal with another day in the Shariah court differently, but there’s one emotion that’s as strong as the handcuffs that link us like a chain gang for the journey – it’s the sheer terror at what new evidence will unfold.



Beginning Three:

The girls at the Emirates first class check in counter had been on duty since midnight. It was 6am and they had two hours left in their shift and would soon start seeing passengers for EK 005 departing at 7:30am. Checking in the east bound Singapore flights was usually a breeze – mostly Western expats going home to Australia, and often, Emirates pilots and their families. They reapplied layers of pink lipstick within the sharp confines of red lipliner, they gossiped in Arabic about a colleague they suspected of moonlighting as a prostitute, they readjusted their shaylas, wrapping the black veils loosely around rich black hair, and they dismissed a lecherous Bahraini wanting to check in. His ticket was for Riyadh and it was economy. All in all, it was just another winter’s day in Dubai and the temperature was a gorgeous 21 degrees Celsius at 6am. The sky was wearing its perennial shade of smoky blue. And the palm trees lining the forecourt just outside the automatic doors were heavy with bunches of ripening caramel coloured dates.

Then two police women escorted a blonde girl in handcuffs through the automatic doors.

Lost in RAK

In September something happened to change the dynamic of our group. I was laying on the gravel outside, alone, daydreaming as always about D. About the future.

It was more a meditation than a daydream. Every single day for close to 2 years I did it – visualise the moment when I would walk out and walk right into his atmosphere. It was bright, buoyant; otherworldly. Almost heaven like. But that’s how things happened here - in my mind. In the scene we would fall into each other like our first time together and we would spend hours exploring the pain; the whys and hows, whos and whats we were never able to discuss in letters because they were always moderated by authorities. The same authorities who were building a prosecution case against us.

I did the meditation lying down, the precursor to sleep, either in the morning after counting, or in the evening, after counting. As soon as I and every other girl in the place had stood up and been accounted for. "Australi? Heidi?"
"Na'am."‘Yes, I’m here, not escaped. Yes, I tally with your tally.’ Then I would roll myself back into the dreamscape. Time to DreamEscape. Who would have thought that Reiki study as a young, green, confused expat brat, would find such a profoundly perfect outlet. Let’s levitate out of this one shall we?

Reiki is focus and feeling. I challenge anyone to prove otherwise. It’s also connection to the subject. That subject may be you, or it may be the person you are healing. Sometimes you and the person you are healing are the same, sometimes you are oceans apart. For me it was an act of visualisation, and it invariably invoked the same cast – me, D, my mum and dad. Whatever it was, it was my only way out. Different to the escape dreams, because they always required dhows and passports and beatings. And they ended where they started, waking up in this place. Reiki was the perfect escape. The resolution. But unlike the dreams, it would only come with intense and entirely conscious focus.

I would start with the orb of white light; a slow burner that sparked in my toes and made its way up my body like a probing masseuse. ‘Have I hit the spot? Are we connected? Should I go on or do we need to work harder here?’ Toes to legs to thighs to root chakra, taking it slower and deeper at the hungriest cells, dragging the warming healing buzz on invisible strings linking mind and body. My stomach and head needed the most work – the solar plexus and pituitary chakras – both were twisted, sluggish and tormented. On and up through the chest, throat, lips, nose, eyes and up to the crown of my skull, back down my neck and shoulders, then charging down my arms and out through my fingertips. The same routine every day, always leading to the same outcome. It was here, when the energy had explored every molecule, that I would allow the visualisation to occur. The reward. The reunion. It might have been fantasy, but it was well imagined: a coming together fitted out with location, wardrobe, words and people. The most important people. My parents, and D.

We had passed around a book called The Power of Positive Thinking; about people who had won lottery, cured cancer, or beat the impossible through visualisation, affirmations, and thinking ‘positive’. Unfortunately no one in the book could tell us exactly how long it would take to think your way out of jail.

Laying back in the steaming sun, watching a different reality in my mind, I passed hundreds of days. On the day of the eleventh of September, I was wearing my favourite kandora. It was soft white cotton with heavy embroidery around the sleeves, neck line and straight down the centre. A going away gift from a Sri Lankan girl, the dress was well worn, probably from her days as a housemaid. I was literally swimming in its Arabian proportions but it felt airy when I walked and there was something pure in the way it brushed against my skin. You could say it was spring floral that smattering of orange, yellow and pink flowers. And even though I constantly felt sweaty and dirty in this place, the smell of the freshly washed kandora as it slipped over my head had the power to change that.

The Bengali girl interrupted right near the end, D was lifting the hair off my shoulders with both hands, kissing my neck as he let go and it fell in a mess around our faces. “I love to see the sunlight in your hair...”
I was grabbed on the arm and pulled. “Yalla, yalla come. Quickly! Amerika! Amerika! Quickly come!” I had never seen her before. What does she want with me? There was something so spectacularly urgent in her voice that I moved in the direction she was pulling. To the television. There was an Indian girl sitting there alone. There was a building on fire. There was a plane. Oh fuck. There was a plane in the side of a building. There was an Indian girl, a Bengali girl, and an Australian girl.

I ran to get the others...

Which way is up?

There is a fairly basic school of thought here. Look where your feet are, look directly ahead of them, let your eyes follow a line across the floor and up any perpendicular object in your path, then keep following your eyes skyward until you establish the position of up.

It all works fine unless you are a) under water, struggling to find the surface amid a choking whitewash of bubbles, or b) in the middle of a philosophic maelstrom, struggling to make sense of your ‘direction’.

I guess the reason Eckhart Tolle was so successful with The Power of Now, was his concept empowered people to not actually think about their direction. “Sshh, just be” he said. “The direction will naturally follow.” Guess that’s also why the Dalai Lama is so popular; what with all that Buddism jazz. And while Eckhart gets first billing here, it in no way reflects my personal preference. The latter is Great for spreading his much deeper philosophy about being; the former is probably his number one plagiarist who lucked onto a marketing machine.

But how does this all help in the current conundrum? Don’t think about it, just be – while immaculate in theory because you have to do diddly squat – is not entirely realistic. I mean, I work in marketing. If I trained myself to not think ahead, I’d be out of a job. “Heidi, where’s that media plan?” “Oh, I figured it’s best not to think about it, if we just be the client will approve this ridiculously inflated budget and the media will book itself.” Yes I have days like that, but it’s never going to become standard operating procedure. Is it? So what about the alternative? The ‘putting it out to the universe’ theory?

Has anyone in the room tried to live by Norman Vincent Peale’s Power of Positive Thinking? Hands up all of you who have chanted positive affirmations every waking day of a particularly needy period? What about chanting those good old affirmations internally, for 700 days straight, driven by the god-awful fear of failing at what seems life’s simplest and most successful wishing game? Failure here is just preposterous. I mean, all those testimonials shouted success. And so easy! Just spend five minutes every day visualising winning the lottery, and get five bucks on the tenth scratchie. Half an hour mixed with a round of chemotherapy and you can beat cancer. Look in the mirror and tell it you deserve more, and, fuck me, the award wage goes up in your state. Who wouldn’t believe it? But let me tell you, this pathway to health, wealth and happiness is not without its horror stories. What happens when you miss a day? Not through any fault of your own, but your designated ‘positive’ time has been usurped. Like you get dragged to court unexpectedly. Or you can hear the girls in the next room being flogged senseless. You can’t very well continue can you? What about when there is simply not enough space to think because 12 Russian prostitutes, one prostitute’s son, and all their dramas and dilemmas have been dumped in your cell – a cell that once housed only you and your co-accused? Maybe if Norman had taught you about contingencies you would have made it. But throw any of these interruptions into the mix when you haven’t yet mastered the art of pause and resume on your supercharged, bound to succeed, reiki-slash-power-of­-positive-thinking combo routine, and I tell you, there is going to be some internal horror. Like ‘Shit, will this hiccup run interference with the broader plan? Will my departure from Positive Thinking impact the Grand Scheme of Things?’

Ok, I digress. But you’re seeing the psychological bridge right?

So if not thinking is out. And thinking is out. How else are you supposed to work out which way is up? Just do it, I suppose...Is that what you were going to say? Awesome.

Suffice to say, I’m still thinking. I’ll let you know when I get my bearings.

Stick to this advice

This image was the source of endless amusement in the Silly Season of Christmas 2009 so I thought it was time to resurrect it.

It may look like a crude MS Paint cartoon drafted by a jaded, whiskey soaked old journalist, but for me it is both beautiful and brilliant in its simplicity.

We could do well to learn a few tricks out of Stickman 2's book. Cut the bullshit and tell it like it really is once in a while. Here's an example:

Suitor: I'd like to sign up to be your German teacher. How about we catch up for a schnitzel next Thursday.
Heidi: How does 'Not in a million fucking years' sound?

In theory it's oh so easy. But I pulled out with the excuse that I had a rip snorting hangover. Pussy. It only delayed the inevitable.

So let's make a pact, you and I, to pull out the big truth guns every now and then.
Isn't that what all this new age sensitivity is supposed to be about?

February Fast - do you feel it

Went to dinner at a friend's house last night. An initimate group of some of my favourite people in the world. Took a couple of bottles of low alcohol wine because it seemed like a good idea. (yes, you read correctly.) When I arrived my friends were lolling on the lounge, there were hors deuvres on the table, and wine glasses scattered about. On stuff. Not in hands. I took a closer look. The wine glasses didn't have wine in them. This was big. What exactly did I walk in to here?
"Are you guys drinking water out of wine glasses?"
"Hmmmm." was the reply. Kinda like 'i acknowledge your question but I plead the fifth'.

I set about pouring myself a glass of wine. (Clearly I had not yet been lobotomised by this weird abstaining sect.) Like she had just disapparated from the lounge to my shadow, Fiona was right there behind me, reading the label over my shoulder "Is that that low alcohol stuff heidipants? Are you trying to be good or do you actually like it?"
"Hmmmm." was my response. I too, was afraid of the truth.

Dinner with sparkling mineral water revealed the chasm that truly exists between a lubricated saturday night dinner party and a monday night family detox dinner. We ate heathily. We sipped our drinks (me low alcohol wine, they ludicrously expensive mini bottles of italian fizzy water.) We shared the misery of sobriety.

We also rode the wave of possible failure. "Should I cave?" Steve posed, but we knew it was a rhetorical question. Withouth even so much as a 'hmmmmm' he picked himself up and worked through it. With another sip of water, a coffee, and a lemon lime and bitters. And then some herbal ecstasy.

Yes fuck. Can you believe it?
I had given up the fight for the night by then. Sod this drinking shit. Let's watch a movie and drink water. Then he pulls out a fucking herbal high. "as good on the dancefloor as it is on the couch" was the description on the back. I was now as confused as the herbal scientist who made the shit.

Well, I don't know what kind of party is in that brew, i was thinking, but he better be hoping for couch goodness because he's got more chance of harry potter popping in than he does of me getting my happy feet on right about now. Sober and all.

We watched a disney/pixar g rated animated feel good family number, then I pulled the plug. "How's that love drug going kids?"
"Hmmmm."
Oh, right I get it.

They did their little floaty thing back down the hallway as I walked to my car toting the left over wine and wondering why I had such a pounding headache. Why my friends have turned into mormons. And what is it with February? Let's hope this month gets old fast.