It’s Clover between us: Imaginary interactions with Clover Moore

Or: L’espirit de l’escalier

Based on a true story.

Clover Moore came to my door. She gave me a pamphlet about her vision for the future of Sydney, wore a badge with her own name on it and was shorter in person than I expected. My fingers were covered in olive oil because I was cooking a nonspecific pasta sauce, or I would have certainly shaken her hand. She was with an entourage of (if I remember correctly) at least four other Clover-badged campaign assistants; one to knock on doors and three to presumably stop people like me from making out with Clover herself, who also stood at the safe distance of a metre from the front step. People remind me that she is married. I remind them that I have no shame when it comes to gay-seeming local politicians who prioritise environmentally sound transport options; that is a moral exception (sexception) that even my girlfriend understands. If the campaign entourage were absent, like if Clover had sent them to have an ice cream break while she doorknocked just a couple of houses herself, you know, because we can all imagine her pulling something pretty neat like that, she would have been a lot closer to my face (a metre closer) as I wished her good luck and told her that my housemates would be very jealous of the visit.

“Oh, so you’re the only one home?” she might have responded.

“Yes actually, but what about you? I would have expected for you to have a few people along, in respect of your considerable local celebrity.” In real life, managing to come out with this phrasing off the cuff and in despite of sincere nervousness would cause me to feel very impressive.

“You flatter me. Although, actually, I do have some people with me. They’re eating ice cream at the moment, but I am vegan,” she would add, if she were, “and I don’t so much care for sorbet, so I am alone for the next twenty minutes.”

“No way, I am also vegan!”

“Wow, does that mean you also ride a bicycle?”

“We call them bikes, but yes I do – this is my bike right here,” I would say, gesturing to the slick looking yellow road bike in the hallway, or perhaps it would be a chrome 80s BMX.

“Oh, that looks like a smooth ride,” or “is that vintage?” she would say, depending.

“I just finished fixing it up. You’re welcome to come in and have a closer look – wait, what am I saying. I’m sure you’ve still got a lot of doors to knock on, I should let you get going...”

“Well yes,” she would say, with some hesitation, “yes, I suppose.”

“Unless I could offer you a cup of tea?”

“Well, why not? Thankyou, I do like to stay in touch with the residents, after all.”

“Great! Please, come in. I’ll put on the kettle.”

Clover and I would listen to Jethro Tull on vinyl. She would comment on the surprisingly delicate flavour of the chamomile tea we were sipping, I would inform her that I had added a few extra ingredients, grown in styrofoam containers out the back, and we would talk about creative strategies for sustainable living in small-scale domestic urban environments. We might discuss the critical need to ensure that such concerns are dealt with responsibly in the political sphere, and find ourselves lightheartedly saying the words “think locally” at the same time. We would laugh, our eyes would meet, and, for a brief moment, the two of us would gaze into each other, communicating a silent longing. Clover would place her teacup down on the coffee table and look away.

“Clover. If you don’t mind my saying so, I’ve thought about all of this happening before. The circumstantial meeting, the tea, the Jethro Tull, even. I think of you often, in fact, and not only because pictures of your face currently flank all major roads in Ultimo. There could be something here – I know you see it,” I would entreat.

“You sweet thing,” she would begin slowly, her eyes still fixed on the coffee table. “Of course I see it – but I know you’ve only got a crush on me because I’m gay-seeming and I have prioritised environmental transport options. You only love me for my policies, not for the woman behind them. Besides, I’m married. And I have to think of the city. It’s coming up to an election, and if rumour got out that I was somehow involved with a digital native…”

“Oh, Clover, you’re right. That is precisely what I love about you; your dedication to this fine town. You must know that I understand. Although, we do have a few more minutes before your associates will start to wonder where you are – perhaps we could just sit here on the couch together and watch the video clip for Telephone?”

“I think I would like that. I think I would like that very much.”

A cockroach in your corduroys is horrifying. There is an obvious initial feeling of revulsion, coupled with and augmented by the distressing tactile grossness of insect spasm vs. leg flesh. After you have raced into your bedroom and stripped, you decide that from now on it has to be skin tight pants forever - which is sad, particularly if you like to have pockets that are big enough to fit an entire bottle of wine. More problematically, you begin to think about yourself as a terrain, and about your nutritional value relative to the backyard compost, and finally about how this is all wrong; neither the compost nor your corduroys were ever meant for this. The compost heap is meant to convert food waste into plant food which is eventually more food for humans. For humans only! Corduroy is meant to be a durable denim alternative of fluctuating trendiness. Cockroaches were nowhere in the pamphlet.

This distressing contemplation of your body as a potential adventure zone for something that shits in the sink plagues you for hours, and makes it hard to go to sleep. You decide to play guitar for a while to unwind, but in the backyard where you normally enjoy the night-time rock-outs are the compost and the cockroaches. You are driven to the front stoop so you can smoke at the same time as you stroke the strings and try to find mournful chords but for some stupid fucking reason your neighbor has a life of his own and that life has intersected with yours at the point at which he wants to go to sleep because it’s actually 1:30am. You finish your cigarette and try reading a Wikipedia article to get some perspective. You discover that cockroaches have been on earth since the Carboniferous period, up to around 300 million years ago. This basically blows your mind. You feel no more or less important than everything in the history of life ever, which has all been a terrain of sorts, and has all been crawled all over. You forgive the cockroach, and, when you do finally sleep, you dream a nice dream about being a corduroy mountain that can walk around.

This Heat

It’s tragic, that moment when you realise that a frozen tomato is not the rush of nutritious refreshment you were hoping for, but, rather, pretty fucking weird. Sasha is undergoing such a realisation, the hardened cells of its constitution fracturing around his gums, the skin sticking to the sides of his mouth like a terrible kiss. The freezer is still open, revealing the other options he could have chosen. This was the new thing this summer; frozen everything, relying on chilled pabulum to moderate the thermostat in a house with no air-conditioning. “We’re saving the planet,” was the optimistic catch-cry; an attempt to mitigate the sweltering misery of forty degree days and also of certain depressing environmental realities. Sasha swallows, grimaces, feels disappointed but then suddenly very aware of his own entitlement, and forces himself to remember that it took millions of years of evolution and the honing of agrarian practice to produce this consistently under-appreciated sustainer of life, not to mention $4.99/kg at Woolworths. He then thinks about the entire experience as though it were an unobserved art installation – he has decided that basically everything is, if you think about it in the right way – and both the sensation of the tomato and the inflated market price seem quite reasonable.

“This heat,” his housemate announces gravely, descending the stairs in a singlet and underwear, pulling the kitchen window all the way open. Sasha shuts the freezer. He has had his head half inside it for a few minutes, justifying it as part of the installation, with mental reference to a recent internet meme. “Are you trying to air condition your face, Sash?”

“No, we are saving the planet. Hey, I don’t think there’s a breeze, that window does nothing.”

“We could try watching Titanic,” she says, only half ironically.

“1912, what a world. No internet, no gay rights. You should try a franana, Bell, they’re like ice cream, it’s fucked.”

“No goatsee, no global warming. I already had a frectarine this morning.”

“Maybe. We could download it.”

They sit on the couch for twenty minutes discussing further temperature mediating options such as going to a museum or a swimming pool, but decide each time that the initial effort of conforming to a socially acceptable level of non-nakedness and catching a bus somewhere would defeat any foreseeable future comfort-gain. They also decide that Titanic is a pretty lame movie and way too long. Sasha googles other iceberg related films while Bell begins to ponder their inaction with respect to a more general lethargy. Within the next few weeks my brain will have vegetated to the point where little circular slices of it can be used for tightening my tired eyes, she thinks to herself, and decides this is something she can probably write on her blog. She wonders what it would actually take for her to do anything right now, and what that thing is anyway that makes her do anything, ever. The thing that somehow manages to carry her to University, 21^st parties and the café on the corner rather than the café down the street. Because of the job prospects, because of the necessity of others, because of the siphon, of course. She comes to the familiar conclusion that things happen when they happen because they do, and that if you think about it in the right way then it’s not actually as tautological as it sounds.

Sasha decides they should watch The Day After Tomorrow because it’s escapist and neither of them have seen it, and Bell agrees because Jake Gyllenhaal is “a babe”. As they watch, Sasha tries to think about global environmental disaster as though it is an unobserved art installation, to moderate success. Bell rationalises that total ecological collapse must also happen, because it does, in the same way as everything else. She sighs like you sigh at the news; exhausted. They both hold frozen bananas against their heads.