| | | | | Janis Freegard | | | | | |
The Continuing Adventures Of Alice Spider: A Selection
Alice In The Eighties
I
I am a woman of the world, thinks Alice Spider and I belong in this city.
This morning a visitor arrives at her flat: Peter Benzedrine - an intelligent and generic young man and incipient junkie. Alice makes them each a cup of instant coffee, milk and one. Peter Benzedrine rambles on. Stop the Tour, Vote Labour, Save the Forests, Prevent the Exploitation of Women in Advertising. Alice stops listening, concentrates instead on his clear, grey eyes, curled lashes, bare neck. You're a good listener, says Peter Benzedrine. No Nukes, Education Cuts Don't Heal. An image flashes into Alice's mind; she sees him ashen, lifeless, the red splash of blood across his chest. Alice the Knife.
Sometimes she laughs, sometimes she cries, sometimes she just doesn't care.
II
1982. Start the year with a bong; deep inhalations with fun-loving companions, then it's away to socialise. A guy called Jake is driving. It's not his real name. The car is green. Another car heads straight towards them in slow motion and Gosh Dad Look. No-one panics, but they're all thinking this is the big D. Fortunately a few unanaesthetised cells are left in the brain of the guy called Jake but not really called Jake and in slow motion the green car goes up, up on to the pavement. The other car passes safely. What a cunning stunt, think Alice and her friends. Time to party. Make some new friends and forget their names. Oh wow.
III
Hash ash on the carpet, plastic glass in pieces on the floor. Party time on Saturday night. Citizen Band blares out from the stereo and the cask gets passed round. More bloody Blenheimer. Some –one spills beer down Alice's skirt. Someone's cigarette burns a hole in her black jacket with the red lining. Party time on Great North Road. She said she'd write a poem about the plastic glass in pieces on the floor. We were all in pieces on the floor.
IV
Alice Spider wears a studded black leather collar around her neck. Alice the Bitch.
V
Alice Spider is stoned again. She is watching a black-and-white TV set, but the two men on screen are wearing fluorescent pink shirts and red-and-blue striped trousers. Everyone is watching me, thinks Alice. Soon the police will come. Alice can feel her brain shrinking. Her hands are shaking. A knife pushes deeper and deeper into her back. I will never do this again, says Alice. Alice Spider is lying. Alice knows that somewhere she is laughing at a pink TV set, but she can't find it.
VII
Alice Spider wants to fly. Batty Alice. Alice the Bat. Alice wants to take the lift to the top of a very tall building and fly down. Euphoric bat– screams. Flat Alice Bat on the pavement. The ultimate climax.
Good night Alice. See you in the mourning.
Alice And The Wooter
Alice and her friends make a wooter. You make a wooter like this: first tie a bunch of plastic bags together with many knots, thus producing a long knotted string of plastic bags. You attach the string of plastic bags to a light fitting, or, if you're having a bonfire, to a long stick. If you're indoors, place a bucket of water underneath the long string of plastic bags.
Set fire to the end. When the flame gets to a knot, a hunk of burning plastic breaks away and falls into the bucket of water, or into the bonfire if you're having a bonfire, making a Woot! sound. It's best to do it when you're flatting, so you don't mess up your own home.
Alice In The Eighties Part 2: The Wellington
Years
I
Alice and her flatmates have a party. They acquire several long tubes of plastic rubbish bag material, before said tubes have been segmented into actual rubbish bag-sized sections. They attach one to the vacuum cleaner at the top of the stairs so that there is a permanently inflated tube of air snaking down the stairs and into the lounge. Other sheets of plastic are draped across doorways and over walls.
The party is gatecrashed by a group of punks. Alice watches a punk woman trying to persuade one of the guys she came with to tell her which of them fucked her the night before, when she was too far out of it to know what she was doing. She is saying, I just want to know which ones it was. He doesn't tell her.
II
Alice goes to see some bands in a club off Cuba Street. It's a good night, good dancing. Alice dances in front of the stage, on her own. She doesn't mind being the first up there. She wanders outside to find a toilet and while she is queuing, watches a woman wrapping a leather belt around her friend's arm; tapping for a vein. The friend is pregnant. She's saying, heroin's better for the baby than alcohol. Alice hopes she's right.
III
For a while, everyone lives in warehouses: spacious open-plan living where everyone can also be an artist/bone-carver/musician, including the ones with jobs in law firms. It is the height of cool. Alice does not live in a warehouse. She likes having a door she can close behind her.
Alice The Camel
Alice wakes up one morning. Her lover sings to her, Alice the Camel has two humps. It's an action song.
Alice And The Ring
Alice has painted lips and a gleam in her wicked eyes. Alice Spider has a ring of confidence.
Alice's needs are primal and she knows no shame. She knows how it feels to slide a hand over a bare thigh. She knows how to take. She knows how to give.
Alice Works
Alice applies for a job. Under the Interests section of her CV, she writes Fucking and Fighting.
These things happen at Alice's place of work: A man drops a still-flaming match into his rubbish bin, setting fire to it A woman gets drunk and falls off her chair A man keeps a stash of live ammunition under his desk.
Alice Eats Meat
For seven years, Alice is a vegetarian, a proper one. Not a vegetarian except for salami or a vegetarian except for gravy or a vegetarian except for the occasional oyster. Alice is a real vegetarian.
Then one day, on a flight to Sydney, Alice is of a mind to eat her airline steak. So she does.
After that, Alice notices that sparrows have started looking like mobile snacks. She suspects she has spent too long in the company of cats.
Alice Goes Visiting
Alice goes to Dunedin to visit friends. They decide they will all drive back to Wellington together. It is afternoon before they set off. They share a smoke or two to get into the holiday mood. On the way they stop off to look at the Moeraki Boulders, which prove even more impressive when chemically enhanced. Alice and the Merry Band are halfway to Christchurch before anyone notices that the handbrake has been on all the way. They reach Picton a few hours before the ferry. Two of them lie on the floor under blankets so they don't have to pay. It's a good trip.
Alice And The Angel
Alice's Guardian Angel shows up one day, all feathery and glowing. Piss off, says Alice. I can look after myself.
Alice Does It
Alice does it in the back seat of her flatmate's car, on the lawn outside a Ponsonby church and in a tent at Sweetwaters. She does it in the sand dunes at Castlepoint and under the trees in a National Park, with people walking nearby. She does it in a phone box, in the toilets at a nightclub, in the middle of Frank Kitts Park and on the floor of someone's office just as the cleaner walks in.
She does it out of love, out of desire, out of loneliness, out of friendship, out of curiosity.
She does it in the living room, in the bathroom, on the couch in someone else's living room, in the beds people share with their girlfriends when those girlfriends are out.
Alice thinks there's a lot to be said for variety.
Alice Spider Discovers French Surrealism
In the upper reaches of sanity, the snow has begun to fall. Great white clouds of fluffiness covering the unimaginable takahe and reaching us in our tussockland. In a hut on the hill, giant tuatara wrap themselves in polypropylene and coats made from plastic recycled in China. The sky has emptied. Now there is only the soft landing of doves that have escaped their gilded cages and fluttered down to earth. Heaven will be like this, thinks Alice.
For many years, we have found the knitting of cave-spiders disturbing, and the complacency of penguins at the edge of the world has sent us into a tailspin. It doesn't have to be this way, no. It could be lamplight in krill city and thunder in the ice– rink. Somebody, somewhere is eating a carnival.
Too late she wandered into that laboratory, wishing she had been taller, fitter, better at polo. Her eyes flashed in the eerie glow of the test-tube. Dada, she cried. Dada!
Alice Spider Has An Affair
Alice Spider has a secret affair. He buys her high-heeled boots and lingerie. He brings her bottles of bubbly (the good stuff) and Danish pastries.
They meet in hotel rooms.
Alice Spider And The Red Lurex Socks
I
Awake past midnight, Alice Spider lies alone in her bed wearing a pair of red lurex socks
III
On Sunday morning, Alice strides into Bodega, her red lurex socks encased in red patent leather boots. After the third latté and a promising astrological prediction from Stella Recamier in the Sunday Star Times, she begins to feel human again. She notices that she is the only person who has come to Bodega alone; the rest of the café is populated by couples silently sharing the newspaper and animated groups of young women communicating like crazy. Alice has her red lurex socks on. Alice the Invincible.
IV
Alice goes to a party in her red lurex socks. She finds she is able to dance all night.
V
Alice attaches suction pads to the soles of her red lurex socks so she can walk up the sides of buildings.
Alice and the Astroturf
Some weekends, Alice goes to the garden centre to look at the Astroturf. When she has looked, she drives home again.
Alice Spider goes shopping. She buys sixteen lava lamps, a Holden convertible stationwagon (well they should have made one) and three miles of Astroturf. Alice is driving herself to distraction.
Alice digs up her front lawn and replaces it with Astroturf. She plants tulip lights around the border. Alice sees that this is good.
Alice goes to a Wedding
I
Alice Spider goes to a wedding and has too much champagne. She dances with the groom, the bride, the best man and the groom's ex-wife's uncle. Then she totters outside for a bresh of freath air.
Didn't expect to see you here, says Peter Benzedrine, appearing from behind a joint and a rose bush. Aren't you the same Alice Spider who used to yell Don't do it! every time she saw a car with white crepe paper on the bonnet? Prerogative etc., sniffs Alice.
What happened to your principles? asks Peter Benzedrine, rolling up again. There was champagne, says Alice.
II
There's only so much happiness in the world to go around, says Alice. People who take drugs are using up more than their fair share, making life harder for the rest of us.
There was a kind of logic to what she said, but Peter Benzedrine knew there was something not quite right about it. Happiness is limitless, he countered. There's more than enough for everyone, all the time.
Then why are so many people living wretched and miserable lives, asks Alice. I blame the Buddhists.
She holds out her hand for the joint.
Double hypocrite, he says.
Taking what's mine by right, says Alice.
Shottie? he offers.
Why not, says Alice.
III
So. What are you doing these days, asks Alice.
Writing the great New Zealand novel, says Peter Benzedrine.
"Didn't Keri Hulme already do that," asks Alice.
Peter Benzedrine ignores her. It's no less than she expected.
It's set in London, he continues. Alice raises one eyebrow (she's been practising ever since she first saw Star Trek).
London is part of New Zealand, says Peter Benzedrine. Name one person you know who hasn't been to London. You can't be a real New Zealander until you've shared an overpriced and overcrowded London flat with ten other kiwis who know your best friend's brother from Eketahuna.
Alice Goes To A Nightclub
Alice goes to a nightclub. There are people on the dance floor who are young enough to be her sons or daughters and old enough for her to take home. Fortunately, Alice is too far off her face for this to be a sobering thought.
Alice Spider Sees Mountain-Woman
Alice Spider goes to the park and sees an old friend, a mountain of a woman. What do you see, Mountain-Woman? asks Alice. I see Blue forever, says Mountain-Woman. Blue above, Blue beyond, Blue as far as I can see. And what do you hear, Mountain-Woman? asks Alice. I hear people squabbling over crumbs while the rest of the cake rots, says Mountain-Woman. What do you want? asks Alice, I want people to stop asking me questions, says Mountain-Woman. Fair enough, says Alice, and she goes to the pub.
Alice And The Babies
Alice has never wanted children but now here she is producing all these babies, suddenly, every week a new one, filling her house. She wonders where she's going to put them all, soft and hairless as they are, and needing her. They just keep slipping out of her, in her sleep. Wake up on Monday mornings and there's another one, slippery and crying at the bottom of her bed. Occasionally twins.
She converts the living room into a baby dormitory: rows of little makeshift cots and squares of cut-up blankets.
The birthing stops after a few months at which Alice is hugely relieved. She's had to give up work to care for them all and isn't sure how many more she can afford. There seem to be about twenty or thirty of them altogether. It's hard to tell, as they've developed quite quickly and half of them are running about in the garden already, or getting under her feet in the kitchen. Unable to tell them apart, she hasn't bothered naming them. She feeds them all on pancakes — her specialty.
The older ones are talking already, in some strange language they have in common that excludes her. Alice wonders sometimes whether they're really hers.
Within the year, they're fully formed adults, but about a third of the size and rather more orange than most people. They play quite merrily in the garden together, coming in only for meals. She tries to teach them to say 'pancakes' but they either can't or won't. Instead, they bang on the table with spoons to let her know they're hungry.
They all leave home on the same day. Alice whips up pancakes for the very last time. She knows they won't be back. Then one by one they solemnly kiss her goodbye, tip their hats (she's made them one each out of empty pancake mixture boxes) and are out of her front door and away.
It's lonely without them, but she gets used to it.
Alice Ties The Knot
On holiday in Las Vegas, Alice is struck by the need to marry. She chooses a male impersonator called Vic, who wears her best snakeskin boots and fake sideburns for the occasion. The happy event occurs in a small chapel where confetti costs extra and a man dressed as Elvis sings Love Me Tender. After the kiss and the optional confetti, Alice and Vic part company. It's a pretty open kind of marriage.
Alice Spider Goes Swimming
One day, Alice goes for a swim in the sea. She swims out a long way, past the beach, past the island and into the open ocean. The sun warms the waves and Alice moves through them, simultaneously a part of them and skimming their surface. I am the sea, thinks Alice. I am waves, I am ocean, I am swimming. I can swim forever. So she does.
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