A Man Called Mr Flowers

When everyone in the house is crazy,
only the sane seem like fools. So it was
when the financial addiction spread
everywhere. Then everyone who was not taking
his daily dose of heroin or cocaine became
the fringe-dweller, the oddball, the brake
on progress, the party-pooper at the greatest
no-cash-down, how-to-spend-it shindig that
our planet has ever known. Debt piled on
debt everywhere: in households, corporations,
public finances and international deficits,
in magnitudes that had never been even
glimpsed in the most creative imaginations
before.
James Cumes.

There were so many troubled times and he had been so ashamed of some of the disasters
which had overtaken his life; that it was hard to remember that in fact many of the times were hysterically funny, that spilling out of clubs at dawn and perching on the top of buildings watching the sunrise had been fun. It was just that it ended so badly; and by badly he meant badly. The triumphant twists of story; the slow trudge of recovery; the flicker of naked flesh and the piercing of the mysteries; he meant good. He really had meant good. Richard had been the youngest, most handsome, most adorable of our crew; and he died before middle age had a chance to transform him. On the streets of London, behind towering solid buildings which held the secrets of centuries; here was our best time. We were all expat Australians, our little gang, partying in the bar at the London School of Economics; taking it for granted that we lived around the corner from the British museum and that we were essentially at the heart of the civilisation which had created our own country. At the heart physically, or geographically, perhaps, but not at the heart of the English: who couldn't have cared less whether we lived or died; not then, not now; as they clung to their little self-perceptions of superiority.

We didn't have working visas and worked out how to survive as best we could, picking up glasses; cleaning. It was working as a cleaner in London that forced on me the decision: I'm going to live or die by the typewriter; I'm not doing this shit anymore. I was already 30, a youthful 30, having never grown up; having embraced the role as eternal party boy and leader of the dance. If I had one regret when I sobered up it was that I hadn't been a better example to all those who joined us in the merry dance; always smashed, often drunk, feeling fabulous by midday and hanging by dusk, and they had pealed off one by one: dead. Brian Flowers as he claimed his name was this fabulously eccentric queen zipping around London in a bright red BMW convertable with his airdale sitting in the front seat.

We met through Blair; who had once been just another boy around the Cross but who had always been more ambitious, more determined to succeed, than the rest of us. For most of us: the tragic destiny was all we ever thought we would achieve; moments of drug fuelled intimacy in between the bouts in jail and the tragic ends; so many tragic ends. But Balir had gone to London and "married well"; and a little network of real estate queens meant the house and the boy Tony was very nice; and everything was substantial.

All I had was a beaten up typewriter and a trail of unpublished manuscripts and a long history of unpredictable chaos. And so it was that I came to meet Brian, who wore silver hair pieces and always had more money than made sense, flashing it around in the capital with no intention of returning home. I was looking for work and joined him in the schedule, dashing in and out of buildings spraying freshener furiously so the customers knew we had been and thought it had been cleaned, picking up the obvious and moving right along, block after block on a healthy contract. Somehow he had wangled the cleaning contract through Blair's network; and zipped around London with the buckets and mops poking out of the BMW's boot, the airdale imperial in the front seat, the roof down, even the subdued London light reflecting off his magnificent hair.

It was then, turning 30 with nothing to show for it but an unhappy relationship and volume after volume of unpublished probably unpublishable stories; the dream of being a writer in cruel ashes; with no property, no possessions beyond the clothes I was wearing, nothing in the bank account; that I decided the ignominy of these rotten jobs, in a culture which demeaned physical labour, was it, at an end. Too old for a sugar daddy, the rentboy days long gone; there was no other way forward but to pursue the written word, wherever it led. The freelance journalism escalated; and in some kind or unkind way that created its own path; the endless interviews, the deadlines; the jumbled chaos of selling onself, here at the moment when strange destinies turned on a point; here where life changed forever, for the better, he picked out a lower path beneath the failed dreams; for that most ancient of reasons, survival.

And Brian, who taught me all sorts of things in his mad queen way, was arrested and deported back to Australia, where he was wanted on robbery charges; and suddenly the reason for all that money became clear. I could never imagine him in Pentridge jail; and never saw him again; although I always expected he would reappear at some point. Various details filtered back to us: left to mop up the cleaning business. And everything fell to pieces. The red convertable BMW and the imperial airdale went to new homes. But what I wondered the most, more than anything, waking up in the middle of the night pestered by ridiculous thoughts, was: how the hell was he going to cope in jail with all those hairpieces; which one was he going to wear for which occassion, and would he rather be bashed than bald?

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/02/01/2151665.htm

The divisions in the federal Opposition over the planned formal apology to the Stolen Generations are intensifying.

When treasury spokesman Malcolm Turnbull was vying for the Liberal leadership last November, he was asked on ABC's Radio National his thoughts on apologising.

Mr Turnbull confirmed that he would support Labor in saying sorry and made his views clear about former prime minister John Howard's refusal to apologise.

"That was an error clearly, we should have said sorry then," he said. "Getting into semantics about regret versus sorry - that's a waste of time."

Now he says his position is unchanged and is canvassing it within the party.

"I'm talking to a lot of my colleagues about the issue, naturally, and we'll be having a further discussion about it next week," he said.

But Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson disagrees with him and is still refusing to support an apology, at least until he sees it in writing.

It is the wording of Labor's planned apology that has Dr Nelson and Indigenous affairs spokesman Tony Abbott reluctant to support it.

The apology will be made on February 13 and the Liberal Party plans to discuss the issue next week.