Heartbeat com[m]a

The other day my heart ceased up but my brain was alive.

I was sick of being told how to breathe mid-sentence. So when we had a five minute discussion on whether menu should be followed by a comma or a semi colon because no pause just wasn’t working, I said a quiet fuck you under my breath and later that night bundled up my dying imagination and made away on an escaping thought while my heart lay deathly still and cold from missing a familiar thrum.

I always become Jewish when I’m on the run.

Like Anne Frank.

And so, heavy with a deep sense of loss from leaving behind a dysfunctional heart and a significant chunk of Europe in the 30ies among other things, my bundle and I fled past people and places, skirting at the edges of memories like thieves, to arrive at a familiar scene.

My aunt’s old house in a hostile neighbourhood where people hung their children’s bums off balcony walls and flung turds into enemy houses over messy water wars.

There I arrived at the door of a friend’s studio-plus-house dressed in a white blouse and green sari. I’d never wear white with that green. Never. So I already knew something was wrong.

As soon as the door opened, there he was. Duck. Sitting squat in a shocking shirt of clumsy pink flowers with deep brown shadows, while some people I didn’t like sat around and made small talk with him. He didn’t even look up to acknowledge me. Just sniggered with everyone as I passed them by to go to the balcony, because I had business there.

Turns out, after a long journey I wanted to take a dump and the best place for a pot, as we all know, is an open air balcony because then you can pretend to your house guests that you’re just going out for a smoke and no one will ever suspect that you need to lose a load, except of course vicious neighbours.

There I was, dodging intrusive neighbourly stares by artfully draping my sari around the pot so that it looked like I was squatting for pleasure and no other reason, when I noticed Shane Warne and a few of his buddies draw up in a car to move into the house next door.

A pressing sense of unease not entirely unconnected to my exposed bum wormed its way into my belly as I watched this scene unfold. Shane Warne and his band of boys were loud and unruly, their energy infecting the air so rapidly that soon the whole neighbourhood looked like it was going to explode into world war three in which atomised faecal matter vaporised us off the earth – ashes to ashes, shit to shit. Meanwhile the house guests were deciding on an orgy of some sort. But Duck, ever hesitant Duck. I could sense he wanted to say something on the lines of an apology as I struggled to clean my bottom discreetly, when someone gave me farkin’ CPR.