THE SEYMOUR MONKEY CHRONICLES - 1998

Vienna stank of horseshit and Amsterdam smelt like a urinal. There ended the travelogue. The cab driver shut the fuck up.

I thumbed through the cheesy postcards I had written but failed to send. Obliterating her name with heavy strokes of blue biro ink till the pen nib tore through to the Parisian skylines and alpine meadows on the other side. After a month sharing a bed with a corpse in pink pyjamas she was finally dead to me. I melted into the vinyl car seat pondering the etiquette of recovering lent CD’s from hostile ex lovers.

Vienna had indeed seemed infested with horse drawn carriages parked like the starters on the grid in Monte Carlo. Negotiate one herd and around the next corner would be a new batch, tails in the air carpet-bombing the cobblestones. Similarly I had found Amsterdam gutters, trees, walls and phone boxes repeatedly marked by tomcats spraying reconstituted Heineken. Memories of ancient basilica’s and grand canals were outshone by more moody reflections involving equine alimentary tracts and traces of urea. On return I was in no mood for idle chit-chat - If the cabbie had wanted a cheery anecdote, he should chatted up some Kon Tiki whore.

I watched the rain cry across the windscreen bouncing off bug carcasses.  The wiper burst into life smearing green guts across the glass like it was Vegemite on toast. The cab driver turned up the doof on the CD player, dropped a gear and drifted the Commodore up onto the motorway in a squeal of rubber. I didn’t flinch. He could have slammed the car into a light pole and I would have continued looking blankly out the window. My eyes screamed - Fuck off, I’m reflecting! Allow me this one indulgence.

Alitalia Airlines to London, via Bangkok and Rome - Hosties in Milan fashion parading in the aisles like catwalks as cigarette smoke wafted back through the feeble curtain that served as the demarcation between the faggers and the fagged off. The last airline on the planet to ban in flight smoking chugged on oblivious - A silver Pterodactyl straight from the Jurassic, ahead of me wafts of smoke twirled in circles from cigarette hands conducting imaginary orchestras.

I had been en-route to a showdown with a malignancy as terminal as the cancer that had so recently cut down my father - Something that I was still struggling to come to terms with, both the event itself, and my cowardly reaction to it.  The black vomit and his skeleton eyes had terrified me. Too easily I retreated back into the comfort offered by the cannabis cloud.
Stoner apathy had become a surrogate for my real relationship, a neglected affair whose spark had withered to little more than pity. I was oblivious to the distance that had grown between us. I embraced the weed. She fucked the first guy who showed an interest. Her silence screamed and the sarcasm dripped from her tongue like saliva from a dog’s over fetched tennis ball on a summer’s day.

We carried on the charade for the sake of a European holiday we had planned for twelve months. Now dreary and drab Heathrow furnishings greeted me - Blue and green, the colour swatch of lost hope. I fought the gloom. I searched at the arrival gate for a friendly smile. I found a condescending smirk.  I had arrived in London.