High Arousal
You’re in the queue at a suburban pharmacy. As you wait, you notice everything in the shop is arranged with unusual precision — not in general categories, but on specifically labelled shelves. The labels have been printed in large capitals and the shelf nearest you reads
CRACKED HEELS
WART TREATMENT
FUNGAL INFECTIONS
ATHLETE’S FOOT
Other shoppers will assume you’ve mushroomy toes, so you sidestep to a different till.
It’s been a glorious, almost flaming, autumn fortnight. The cat has followed reliable squares of sunshine from room to room, basking from ten until four. Washing has stiffened, if not dried, on the line. You’ve taken your fleece off during dog walks and tied it around your waist. Dust clings to the car.
This is the Wellington you recognise in May and not the churning gutters, the fatal flash floods, the dislodged hillsides and official warnings. But casual remarks about the weather now feel like tempting fate. We’re all still in shock about what happened to our city.
“It’s not an earthquake that will get us in the end,” you hear yourself telling a stranger in the dog park. “It’s the rain.”
You’re wearing a shirt with a frilled collar, straight blue jeans and plimsolls you panic-bought online during the state of emergency.
Somehow, you text Ness, I’m dressed like a midwestern pastor’s wife.
Late afternoon, and babies are being carried out of a cheerful wooden villa on Chaytor Street. Daycare is over and it’s time to go home. You stop at the traffic lights and watch their downy heads bobbing as their parents cross the road.
One mum radiates happiness at seeing her tiny son. She plays peekaboo with him in her arms, tugging his hood off and on.
You can’t hear their laughter from inside your car, but you imagine it.
Your son takes desultory bites from his banana and mentions his class had “consent education” today in PE. The Year 9 boys were shown a video, he says, explaining the conditions in which lawful, consensual intercourse may take place and those in which it may not. Both parties must be sober, enthusiastic, careful not to cause each other harm.
The video was “kind of cringe,” your son is saying. Instead of a penis, it showed an eggplant emoji. “And guess what they used for a vagina?”
You’re not immediately sure but if the answer is a fish, you’ll be writing to the headmaster.
“A taco!” he says, in triumph. “And a bum was a peach.”
He’ll return to the subject at dinner, raising his sister’s eyebrows.
“If you’re under sixteen, you’re not allowed to do a bunch of things,” he says. “Eggplant and eggplant. Eggplant and taco. And something else.” He trails off, losing interest.
Could it be eggplant and peach, you wonder? You’re not sure a peach plus a taco is a thing. No — there’ll be eggplant involved. Whenever there’s trouble, there usually is.
The dog groomer’s van pulls up outside your house. Every eight weeks your dog waits at the window, quivering with anticipation. When the gate swings open, he’ll fling himself around the garden in semaphores of joy, making jagged barks.
The handler won’t loop her leash around his neck until he’s calm. “It’s a good idea to practice this now, when he’s in high arousal,” she tells you. You both wait as he performs a double layout with a half-twist in the second flip and nails the landing.
“High arousal,” you repeat, really just to cover your embarrassment. “That’d be a good name for a band.”
It takes another few minutes of tumbling and yipping before it’s apparent that ‘sit’ won’t happen. She fixes the leash and walks him across the road to the van, sliding him neatly into his cage like a tray of buns.
The cat saunters over and watches with satisfaction as he’s driven away.
You text Emily a photo of a room with serene, café latte walls: I like this colour, which means I am finished, creatively.
Your Burmese cat is licking your wrist. Her eyes are half-closed and she’s narcotized by fulfilment. On some level, grooming you is scratching a deep itch in her. It’s not hygienic, but you let her.
Every living thing surely experiences this appealing kind of trance. Your dog, when he’s humping. Your son, practicing card shuffles. Your daughter, drawing while listening to music. It’s important not to interrupt these moments when a soul experiences flight, gliding on the warm thermals of pleasure.
You feel like this when you’re writing. Also, when you’re eating tinned plums.
You don’t believe in this coming Mother’s Day, thinking it a commercially driven, fake observance which reinforces gender roles.
Still, you think about buying yourself a present. Perfume, as you have none? For weeks you’ve been using your husband’s deodorant, offset by a cheap body-spray so synthetic even your teenager won’t use it. This means you’re walking around smelling like a pine forest, and avoiding naked flames.
What you’re likely to do instead is spend Mother’s Day staying at your mum’s, like you did the week before last. You both changed into pyjamas early in the evening and watched a crummy family drama on a streaming service. You were in bed by nine.
Earlier you walked the beach near her house. It was low tide and there were pink jellyfish everywhere, glassy and perfect, as if freshly turned from their moulds. The sand was flat, hard and curved into infinity.
Sometimes you walk this route alongside the imagined outlines of your kids as they were when tiny, tottering around with their spades. Or with your dad, though he was never well enough to visit this beach. It was his birthday this week. That morning you texted your mum, who sent you a photo of sunflowers in his vase at the cemetery. You video-called your brother. You lightly mentioned their grandad to your teenagers. They responded politely but to them, he’s faded from a person to an idea.
For you, six years on, he’s become a feeling.
There used to be dunes right here, where yellow triangles on poles mark the threshold of a marine reserve. One wild night a couple of years back, the grasses were ripped from the sand. Screaming winds and sideways rain undermined the folds and rumples of the beach, leaving it flat and bald overnight. It was disorienting, losing a familiar landmark within hours.
Dotterels nest on the other side of this estuary. They live in fragile scrapes of sand near these unstable banks. They don’t accept this new, unpredictable world and behave as if nothing has changed.
You were like that, once.
Hantavirus, you text Usha. That’s all I have to say.
You’re driving a group of teenagers across the city. You’ve learned it’s better to pretend you’re not in the car. They’ll do the same, until the moment they get out and thank you for the lift.
They’re talking about teachers. Then it’s school assemblies and chapel services. They agree how boring these are, then one says, “Some of those hymns are bangers, though. Shine Jesus Shine, come on.”
Don’t laugh. Don’t. You’re not here, remember?
You’ve made a terrible mistake and watched a random Facebook video of a hoof trimmer treating a cow. Now you’re being served dozens of these and feel mildly nauseated.
They follow the same format: a cow in various stages of consternation allows its hoof to be lifted in a hoist. The underside is caked in mud and shit. The trimmer sets to work with a curved tool, slicing off the keratin in strips, as easily as a knife through cheddar. The cow doesn’t feel it, and its hoof becomes whiter and sharply edged, which is satisfying. If only the videos stopped there.
Inevitably the trimmer exposes a dark patch of disease and before you can hit pause, a foul stream of effluvia gushes from the hoof. You can’t bring yourself to look away and need to see this thing to the end. He blasts the rotted cavity with a high-pressure jet of disinfectant, packs it with powdered medicine and binds this half of the hoof with tape. Then he glues a rubber shoe to the cow’s other digit and says something cheerful, like ‘I’ll be back in a week to see how she’s getting on’.
You close your laptop and get up, finding that you’re walking gingerly. For a good thirty seconds your brain thinks you have hooves.
It serves you right, honestly.
You’ve four minutes to make yourself presentable before bolting from the house to an appointment. You spend one of these brushing your teeth and the other three on hair removal.
You’ve entered the Tweezer Years.
Your daughter is going to a movie marathon at a friend’s place this weekend and needs to take a tin of baking.
“What would you like me to make?” you ask.
You both stand there, blinking at each other, thinking about the lumpen cakes, raw cookies and deranged cinnamon rolls you’ve been turning out lately. Let’s not even mention your Anzac Clusterfucks.
“Muffins?” she suggests. It’s not something you’re meant to respond to. It’s more like she’s testing the idea to imagine it’s possible, like Watson saying to Crick, “A double helix?”
Thank you
Hello to all friends of this newsletter, including new readers perhaps nudged here by the extremely generous Anna Fifield of Between Two Giants! It’s lovely to welcome you to Karori, Wellington; one of the world’s most distant suburbs, depending on your postcode. If you don’t like sudden movements or high drama, you’ve come to the right blog.
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God, sorry about the hoof story. It’s completely revolting.
God, I love you. You absolutely make my day. Thank you.
Always enjoy your posts Leah. What are the consent ed peeps thinking? My preschool grandchildren use correct anatomical terms for all body parts, penis and vulva included.