Deaths I have outsmarted
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 17: Staying Alive
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Andrew Belk
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Sometimes, my sister seemed to be beckoning it, and I would steer well clear of her. Down the back, away from the house, she would lay out a bath towel and sunbake. When she turned, the sun would bounce off her baby oil, and I would glance up from my game.
The way she reclined so deliberately under that sky annoyed me. She knew it stalked us from above. On the drive to and from town, she would point out the possible hiding places. A cave. Another cave. The train tunnel under the road. After tea, she would rush for news updates. Together, we counted down the days and calculated impact probabilities. Sometimes it would get too much for us, we would freak ourselves out.
I resented it, this shit-stirring of fate. If it was headed straight for us, there was no point drawing attention to ourselves. The fear we had built was constant, and at these times – when she abandoned our terror to work on her tan – I watched the sky for both of us. At school, the others were only vaguely interested in Skylab and its fall from grace. While it threw me that none of them had lined up a cave or a rail tunnel, the zeal I developed with later apocalypses had not yet fermented, and it was okay for them to ignore my spaceship for their Star Wars toys.
I was harder on myself. This was a lead cup test.
Discovering that the ancient Romans had died slow, demented deaths after innocently drinking from lead pewter cups spun my ten-year-old world. I was unaware such trickiness was allowed to exist. That treachery could lurk in the everyday, and probably only be realised looking back from the future, startled me. While I was certain that if I were a Roman, I would not have been so stupid, outsmarting deaths like this would require vigilance and cunning. A nice deep cave, for instance.
My sister and I woke one morning to find that Skylab had spewed itself over Western Australia, and chunks were on their way to the stage of the 1979 Miss Universe contest in Perth. Perhaps, with guidance, this and the news the only casualty was a cow (a myth now writ Wikipedic) might have been enough to teach me the sky was not falling – even if it was. Before the space-dust had settled, though, my sister had moved on to bigger things, and my future as a paranoid bastard was cemented.
After a great misery for mankind an even greater approaches.
The great cycle of the centuries is renewed:
It will rain blood, milk, famine, war and disease.
In the sky will be seen a fire, dragging a tail of sparks
– Century 10, Quatrain 72
MY SISTER HITCHED THE THREE HUNDRED KILOMETRE round-trip to Sydney to buy the Prophecies of Nostradamus the morning after a "Two Hour Television Special Event" of the same name left us gutted and terrified. Between ads for Ardath special filters and Valiant Regals, we learned how the sixteenth century French philosopher had predicted the wars and disasters of the last four hundred years. Not only that – if you were smart enough you could use his writing to divine future calamity.
The Corgi paperback edition was a book of ranting and prognostication unmatched this side of a hotel bedside drawer. Its psychedelic cover featured Michele de Nostradame in profile, with light beams shooting from his eyes. A hammer and sickle, swastika, crescent moon and skull floated behind him in a starlit sky – the whole podge seemingly emerged from a time portal arcing between two palm trees. The English translation sat beside the French text and, twenty years later in Paris, when I didn't possess the language skills to order a latte and a croissant, if you wanted a side of horreurs extremes et vindications, I was your man.
By the time he wrote Prophecies in 1555, Nostradamus himself was most likely unhinged. Given that his first wife and two young children had died of the plague, and that the church tried to charge him with heresy, this is not unreasonable. While his writing had always been cryptic, his late works contained additional obfuscation to avoid further persecution. Most of his quatrains can mean whatever you want them to, and if you were having a dinner party, you would sit Nostradamus next to Rorschach and keep the wine coming.
For my sister and me, this ambiguity was perfect. Our paranoia was top-shelf manifest, and we believed we possessed a special gift of insight. It seemed we alone understood that when he wrote "when the fish that travels over both land and sea is cast up on to the shore by a great wave, its shape foreign, smooth and frightful ..." Nostradamus was prophesying the launch of a Russian nuclear missile from a submarine.
In this way, the dead poet guided us, terrified and skitty, through the '80s – a sterling decade for the end of the world. Together, we cross-referenced each emerging apocalypse with the sacred text to see how worried we should be. It seemed, if you were cunning and vigilant enough, that every catastrophe was clearly foretold, and we set about outsmarting the Disintegrative Planetary Alignment of 1981, the Giant Comet of 1982, the Alien Invasion of 1983, the Polar Axis Flip of 1984, and the Nuclear War of 1982, 1984, and 1986.
Of course, if any one of these had come true we would have been fucked. My sister and I never actually enacted a real plan of any kind. We did not learn bushcraft or hand-to-hand combat or how to make water out of urine with a tarp. Our obsessive self-induced terror didn't prepare us any better against the Russian nuke secretly aimed at BHP Newcastle, or the meat-harvesting Jesus Aliens, than the ignorance of the plebs gargling blissfully from their goblets. We just worried a lot. As if all the energy we expended being terrified was some kind of talisman.
It would take a further decade's apprenticeship before I graduated to Master Nutbag and stepped up to direct action. In the meantime, Nostradamus's predictions came to fail, and increasingly we left his words to the silverfish. By now my sister had left home and started a family. Again, perhaps with guidance, I could have been led to abandon my paranoid fantasies.