The Last Dinner

Wikimedia image: The Last Supper, by Henry Holiday, 1909.  Panel in St. Chad's Church, Kirkby.

I discovered this, which I wrote in 2008 at the same time as the events described in China (I believe on that day)....

2007: what happened that year, to resolve, to get over, is going to take my life.

2008 Zhanjiang China

‘If you try to become famous from this, they will kill you,’ Chicken-bones said in the car as he drove back to my apartment on the last night we had dinner. He said it calmly, as though mentioning a forecast for rain or telling the time. The phrase should have upset me but it didn’t.

I was used to being interviewed in the car, especially on the way home. It was in the car that the most valuable information was sought, where my reactions to ideas or events were tested, and where I learnt most about the progress of this. Sometimes I must confess I only went to dinner for the ride home, to see what was up.

It was difficult to be angry with Chicken-bones. He was no more than a messenger, he looked after all the foreigners in Zhanjiang, to be sure they didn’t get into trouble, and it seemed he was a messenger for all sides to boot: in the car the harshest comments were made, at dinner things were motherly and particularly pro-China, and between the two, as we walked in and out of a restaurant, in the doorway and across the car park, he’d sometimes throw little comments my way I’ve always believed his truest feelings, for those comments were designed to help or contradicted the official line, and spies always talk most freely on the street or when moving, the surveillance weak spot. He admitted freely that his ethics were so-so and seemed to have no problem with the hidden agenda that must have formed a good deal of his human relationships.

Apart from being the messenger he was scrawny, how I’d come up with his name. It fit not because of his stature but because of his self-image, as from time to time he’d waffle on about how much stronger he was than he looked, how clever the Chinese were or how he was expert in bed. ‘The best lovers have imperfect eyesight and go bald in the end,’ he’d once told me, explaining the symptoms of high levels of testosterone, symptoms from which, coincidentally, he suffered. In my mind, the self-aggrandisement made his arms shrivel until they were so slim they risked being accidentally snapped off by a passing waiter and lost in the small jar of toothpicks compulsory on any Chinese restaurant table; it made him lose centimetres in height and he started a good foot below me; and it made his wispy hair recede further still from a decent cut. Sometimes as I looked across the table it seemed his suit, usually in elephant grey, was still on its coat hanger. I don’t suppose it would take much to kill me, I knew, but the chance of Chicken-bones leading the charge had to be zero. In his own right he could arouse no fear or loathing, or indeed any emotion at all with any strength to it. He was simply Chicken-bones.

The restaurants we frequented, his choice, were a vast fair of activity. Village girls in short-skirt waitress uniforms and immaculate hairdos rushed back and forth like Disneyland attendants, for as little as $100 per month, working ten to twelve hour days with just one day off. Others pushed trolleys stacked with little plates of food, the doughy balls the Chinese call bread, bony meat dishes or the rubbery brown and black discs of sickly sweet desserts. Older waitresses in serious suits paraded by, checking their apprentices and wielding special authority such as placing orders for fish dishes which must have varied day to day. Their salaries could rise to as much as $300 per month. There was the clash of crockery and rumble of conversation for applause, morning, noon and night.

That day he ordered chicken and fish rather than the usual dishes of eggplant beef and garlic pork. I usually stuck with those two because I liked them, and to avoid the minimum ten minute discussion between Chicken-bones and the waitress a change in order would have necessitated, for things to be perfect. I sometimes wondered if the phrase ‘Can I have?’ in Cantonese didn’t run on for several minutes. With the ordering done, and thankfully he’d taken the initiative to change dishes that last evening without consulting me, he looked seriously in my direction and said, ‘well this is it, the last dinner.’

The way he said it, I knew it meant something. As we washed our chopsticks and crockery with the first pour of tea, as is customary in China, he spelt it out because I hadn’t caught his meaning. ‘It’s a famous painting,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I laughed, ‘that’s right. Da Vinci’s The Last Dinner’.

‘In the painting,’ he said, ‘which one is Judas?’ It was a comment designed to shock me and, as messenger, I’m not even sure Chicken-bones understood. It was a comment from about two years earlier, when I was living in Nicaragua. It didn’t shock.

I’d stayed in Granada, Nicaragua for about five months waiting for Julie to finish work and arrive from Australia, so we could travel around the world together, and I was living in one of the grand old Spanish villas typical of the oldest city in Latin America. The house had two fine courtyards, a green parrot, two turtles and a lazy cat. It belonged to a delightful elderly Nicaraguan couple who’d taken to renting out rooms to fund their retirement. The husband was absolutely insistent his guests walk in the shade as they made their way along the street, and he used to stand in the front doorway calling ‘La sombre! La sombre!’, pointing to the shady side of the street in earnest, until you crossed over in compliance. ‘The shade! The Shade!’ The wife wove intricate culinary masterpieces with the help of a servant or two, beans and beef, salad, vegetables and fruit as you’ve never known them before, included in the rent.

The meals were so delicious I used to be disappointed if ever I were asked to eat out, and only did so begrudgingly. Sometimes I’d search for an excuse so I could eat at home instead. I was happy in those days as life was simple. I’d started out English teaching, what I did in China too, but after a few weeks I’d decided Nicaragua was cheap enough to devote myself to writing the book on South America instead, particularly as the teaching salary wasn’t even covering my expenses. I had no laptop so I used to go to internet cafes around town and do my best to write something worthwhile between power-shortages, in the matchbox-sized booths allotted to each machine that left my knees with bruises.

Over the dining table in the villa was a picture, The Last Dinner according to Chicken-bones, one of the many crucifixes, Virgin portraits and religious paintings that demarcated the domestic territory as very catholic indeed, decorations that reminded me a little of my grandmother’s house. There were others staying there, up to eight or so in the various bedrooms strung out around both courtyards, a constant stream of people from beyond Nicaragua’s borders, mostly Americans who needed to learn Spanish. In the day they’d attend their courses, and of course be home for dinner. One of them was Christine.

From New York state, Christine was a good few years younger than I, still in her early twenties and with a spectacular English vocabulary that made me want to give up writing each time we spoke. We got into the habit of pursuing obtuse and finicky philosophical discussions about any subject that came to us; some of the time we were serious but much was for fun. I remember in particular the lengthy discussions concerning the fundamental existentialist questions elaborated in Shakira’s song ‘Hips Don’t Lie’, repeatedly played on MTV at the time. We would speak until we couldn’t for laughter.

Christine was good looking, with curled brown locks that tumbled like a dryer beyond her shoulders. Natural curls like those were a rarity amongst Nicaraguan girls, and her light brown hair was considered blond by the Latino boys, both attributes making her extremely popular. She did charity work at a local orphanage as well as taught English. Intelligent, caring and attractive, it was a pleasant surprise to find she had flaws, or at least one: she’d make the occasional faux pas or slip up in her speech, and with her vocabulary consistently intimidating, I took great delight in those occasions. Sometimes I invented them, which she didn’t mind because against my will we’d become friends: actually it was her and I only, at least in the months I lived there, that our hosts the Nicaraguan couple had taken to calling their son and daughter.

One morning at breakfast she came to the table where I was already seated and looking at the painting behind me, said ‘Which one is J...?’ She stumbled slightly on the word, and I started laughing. ‘Which one is Jesus?’ I suggested, completing her sentence. It prompted a lengthy discussion, the pros and cons of each figure in the painting, in turn considered in relation to what features of a Messiah they had.

‘Do you think he might be the one in the middle, that everyone is looking at?’ I asked eventually.

‘Too obvious,’ Christine said, ‘Da Vinci was a Master and he would have been more subtle.’

Ultimately we’d agreed as the most likely candidate the plump fellow on the far right of the picture, who in our version of the painting wore a pink cape. We agreed to ask the other housemates, in a serious tone, and have a kind of vote, mostly to see their reaction at the stupidity of the question, to see how long it took for them to realise we were joking. Which one is Jesus?

What Christine had been meaning to say, before I’d completed her sentence for her, is ‘which one is Judas?’ Now it was being repeated, on the other side of the world after two years, by Chicken-bones the atheist, who barely would have known who Judas was and certainly didn’t care.

I knew I’d written something about Nicaragua in e-mails so it didn’t surprise the phrase should turn up later. The Australian authorities had taken significant interest in what I wrote.  My writing was never sufficiently conservative for their policing minds.

In fact it was quite pleasant Chicken-bones mentioned it because it reminded me of the good food lazy days of Nicaragua.

Later I would think about it more: as was usual multiple interpretations came to me. Was I supposed to be Judas, which would make sense if I was talking to a Christian fundamentalist, as had happened in Australia during 2007?  Or was Judas around me, a symbol of betrayal by one of the two principle branches of inquiry in China, the most likely sources, through either Chicken-bones or the girl? I didn’t appreciate an analogy that would place me as Jesus, but from a Machiavellian standpoint it made sense and I was already worried about it; that as I would be leaving China soon an attempt might be made, the several references to death aside, to frame me for something, as the Australian authorities had for rather many years seemed rather keen on doing. Was it the last dinner for that reason?

At dinner though, I didn’t think it over greatly, and by mid 2008 such things didn’t stress me anymore, as they had done a year earlier. Chicken-bones and I talked instead about religion in general terms and I told him what I thought: that the essence of the Christian religion is love and tolerance, what I liked about it but not always how it is preached. For Chicken-bones all religion was backward superstition, no more: his in-the-restaurant point of view.

The death threat in the car on the way home was preceded by three other notable statements. As we crossed the bridge over the small manmade lake that featured in the local park, Chicken-bones said ‘Australia’s security is not your concern,’ and halfway up the hill, before the death threat he’d said ‘the Australian government doesn’t support you,’ and a little further on, ‘if you go back to Australia it will be the same’. None of the comments made me flinch; as I said I got used to such things in 2007 and more particularly, they sounded like the last desperate cries of a child stamping around to get attention. The comments and not Chicken-bones did though make me angry.

To the first I’d replied, ‘Australia’s security is everybody’s business and what happens if there was ever some horrific terrorist attack in Australia. How could I just say, ‘yeah I knew ASIO was crap but I didn’t do anything about it.’ When it comes to terrorist attacks they have hardly a hope in hell of preventing one. To the second comment, about government support, I said, ‘well they’re going to wish they had,’ which was pure bluff and in any case I ultimately was a bit past caring: the Rudd government was at least immeasurably better than its Howard predecessor and since the election my life had become liveable again. To the third comment, that if I returned to Australia I would face more of the torture of 2007, I stayed silent.

When Chicken-bones gave the final warning, ‘if you try to be famous from this, they will kill you,’ it made me angrier still. I told him how I wished I’d stop being told to be a coward, that the world has enough cowards in it. I thought to add ‘and half of them seem to work for ASIO’, but I controlled the urge.

I thought, ‘and what the hell is this exactly?’ The investigation had been referred to as this before, when I was told the authorities had decided to leave my parents out of this. This was a many-year cock-up of monumental proportion that had nearly cost me my life a few times. This was born not of my actions but of the prejudices and shortcomings of others, taxpayer funded, by a lack of imagination and unaccountable policing. This was a future for the world of war and division and more of the simplistic nationalism that proved so deadly last century. This was racism and bigotry. It has never been fame I cared for. I never asked for this. My goal now is far simpler: I don’t think as human beings we should accept corruption or anything less than full human rights. And as an Australian I don’t think my country benefits from an unaccountable secret police agency.

And so I write.



But the world is not only about security or freedom of expression of course.  There are also random travel tales, cool people and well, english-by-association...

Arrival Argentina

(Image from wikimedia.  Attribution:  © Jorge Royan / http://www.royan.com.ar/ CC-BY-SA-3.0  )

2005 – Sydney, Australia

I was lucky. With a stroke of good fortune the bulky government agency where I worked had processed my redundancy in an incredible six weeks, a process that could easily have taken a year. My boss, the HR Department and the redundancy people had somehow coordinated  efforts and added a significant slice to my travel budget. Colleagues resented and admired the outcome and I was shocked it happened so fast. It could be I was bad at my job, but from my side the truth was lack of inspiration, pursuing a career that wasn’t a passion, and in a year of mass redundancy, the department may simply have been pleased to have one less disenchanted redundancy-eligible employee on their books.

In anticipation I’d applied for a little job in Bolivia and the day I signed for my prize Sydney seemed more Autumn-bright than usual, even if it meant working right to take off.

Ten days later I made my way to the specialist, an appointment hanging over my head for the two months since booked, a doctor’s words all that stood between me and South America. Initial signs were good, the specialist like a distant aunt you meet at funerals and politely peck on the cheek. It hardly seemed possible she could emanate much doom. Besides, all I had was a troublesome hernia probably caused at birth.

‘Well,’ she said, prodding the lump where my belly button used to be, ‘I can’t push your hernia back into your stomach. We’ll need to operate as soon as possible.’ Her benign-looking mouth had unexpectedly turned malignant.

‘That would be nice,’ I heard myself say, ‘but I leave for Bolivia in three days.’

She screwed her face, looked over the rim of her glasses and added dramatic pause. What followed were the usual medical care warnings and general mistrust of the developing world I expect from Sydney practitioners – did they have reputable doctors in Bolivia, were hospitals sterile, needles and blood transfusions clean? About the only thing she didn’t mention was the threat of salmonella from the hospital tray-dinner.

‘Post operation, how long before I could fly?’ I asked.

‘Eight weeks,’ she said gravely.

I wished I was talking to my own travelling GP, a Sydney exception who would have understood about airfares and adventure. Last time I’d spoken to him, en-route to Bangladesh, he’d said with a smile, ‘now there’s really no point in me telling you not to drink the local water is there?’

‘Not really, no.’ Not that there was a choice in that.  In Hatiya there is no other supply; and as it comes from deep tube wells, it is clean.

‘How long is the public waiting list?’ I asked, thinking of the operation. ‘Three and a half months,’ she replied with seriousness suggesting tragedy, but for me it was the solution. What would I do for three and half months in Sydney without a job? There’s no cure like travel.

‘Anything I can do to help? Anything I shouldn’t eat?’

‘The only thing is lose weight,’ she said sternly, advice seemingly often proffered but rarely followed. Losing weight is near impossible in Sydney but par for the course on the road, so in addition to inspiring my journey would be as therapeutic as an Estonian thermal mud bath – almost doctor’s orders if you looked at it the right way. I left the surgery with a ‘small but serious risk’, determined to focus on the ‘small’ and pack the packing and every other impossibility into the following forty-eight hours.

Suddenly I was biting plastic, unwrapping intensely packaged cheese, an airline cuisine standard. Incarcerated in my window seat I balanced food, attempting not to elbow the woman next to me as somewhere over the Pacific I dug into my chicken something lunch with a plastic knife. There had been little time for excitement, to start Spanish or be sure I had all essentials and the only decision left was what to have from the drinks trolley.

‘Coffee?’ I asked, smiling at the hostess.

‘You speak Spanish!’ exclaimed the Brazilian grandmother sitting next to me. She had carefully cropped hair, long ring-adorned fingers and a heavily made up face – she could have played mother bear in a Goldilocks performance. Apparently she also had a hearing problem, having heard the Spanish ‘café’ in place of my ‘coffee’, and I didn’t have the heart to shatter the illusion. ‘I only speak a little Spanish,’ I lied.

She wasn’t dissuaded, spoke more Spanish and I replied with a ‘si’. It worked, she laughed and I laughed politely in return, quickly adjusting my headset to kill conversation. I flipped open the book on Eva Peron I’d bought at Sydney Airport, together with the small Spanish phrasebook and vague memories from a Latin American politics course at uni, my sole preparation for Buenos Aires.

Some hours later when she spoke again thankfully she chose English. She was on her way from Ulladulla to Florianopolis to visit relatives. ‘It’s my first time in South America,’ I told her, ‘first stop Buenos Aires.’

‘Argentina is wonderful,’ she said, ‘world’s best beef.’

The beef could wait. My wallet was a more immediate concern, as the advantage of changing money into a useful currency like US dollars had slipped my mind, it would be Sunday on arrival and I had no place to stay. As it was my wallet featured a helpful sprinkling of Australian dollars, Brunei dollars and Malaysian ringgits from the last trip. Surely taxi drivers would jump at the chance to have their fares paid in various Western Pacific currencies and how could a Buenos Aires bus conductor turn me down?

‘How long since you’ve been back to Brazil?’ I asked, distraction from the international monetary crisis brewing in my pocket.

‘Ten years,’ she sighed, pausing in the midst of stowing her tray after another round of drinks.

‘You must be excited.’

‘Brazil is nice,’ she said soberly, ‘but there are so many problems – unemployment, crime, poverty. You should go if you can. You’ll like it. The women are beautiful, but I prefer Ulladulla.’

‘And somebody stole my porridge,’ I imagined her adding.

My mind wandered back to the wallet and I took solace remembering one Sunday evening years ago when I’d flown into Beirut with a total of five Australian dollars in cash. Things had worked out then. True, I’d spent a good thirty minutes bargaining the taxi driver down from US $50 to US $5 and true, the bargain had abruptly collapsed when I confessed my five dollars was actually Australian. I got on a city bus with no money but someone had sent Mohammed, the guy sitting next to me, to take pity, pay my fare and tell me where to get out to find a hotel that accepted credit card.

This time I had a Brazilian grandmother at my side and on my side. I had discovered I could speak a little Spanish as long as the person was essentially Portuguese-speaking and slightly hearing impaired. And there were still many hours to decide things, the Pacific pond larger than I imagined – ‘I’m just over the pond,’ I’d told friends – nineteen hours to the big BA.

I prefer to have minimal impressions of a destination pre-arrival, better to let a place do its thing unaided and unfiltered. I wouldn’t have bought the Evita book if it hadn’t all but jumped off the shelf of the bookstore by the departure gate. As for Bolivia, I’d seen internet pictures, the San Francisco steep streets of my new city La Paz, rows of unfinished brick hovels, steps, cobblestones, churches and dirt tumbling in delightful disarray through history and up hillsides. The city had the self-respect of a witches’ market, the country Inca heritage intrigue. At 3,600 metres above sea level, La Paz was on the edge of the world’s second largest high altitude plateau (after Tibet), the Altiplano that stretched from northern Argentina, through Bolivia and well into Peru.

The only image in which I featured was a stone room above a square, its window with paint-peeling green shutters – a small imaginary Andean space that had somehow nestled into my mind as make belief home. Bolivia had to be good and I tried to leave it at that, not that it was easy thanks to people around me. Bolivia is never news in Australia but, in the midst of political crisis, blockades and closed borders, it then was. Some of my friends, girlfriend in particular, were news-broadcast fearful, while I tried to limit my interest to deaths – just one reported and in the midst of a particularly severe protest, which I could avoid no? Blockades alone, piles of stone across a highway, might frustrate but just couldn’t scare and nothing seemed worse than what you read in a Bangladeshi newspaper on an average day, where murders command four lines of print: though in reality Bangladesh is a safe country.

Bolivia was still three weeks distant, the date for starting Bolivia job was flexible so I’d factored in a between-lives gap, discover Argentina, recover from Sydney and reconcile myself to being de facto South American. There was also a matter of flights to La Paz being $1000 dearer than to Buenos Aires.

As dawn arrived the Andes parted clouds, a theatrical opening to my new world. Behind us a feast of cloud flakes covered Chile and stretched into the western Pacific. To the east, in front, the sky was clear and Argentine.

The Brazilian grandmother befriended the couple from Fairfield in Sydney’s west who had tried to steal our seats back in Sydney on the grounds they had a baby. I never knew views were important to babies. I am not a parent. Not only had she befriended them, she’d told everything – my first time in South America, basic Spanish etc. They probably already knew my middle name.

Mrs Fairfield, of Argentine extraction, was getting nervous on my behalf – how would I deal with unscrupulous taxi drivers and find a decent hotel without Spanish? As she fretted the Andes gave way to those vast plains they call the Pampas, chocolate brown, endless and empty. I pictured cowboys, cattle and slow night guitar songs by firelight. Mrs Fairfield said she would call her friend, a reputable taxi driver, to pick me up, and I would stay at the Gran Something Hotel. I didn’t know then every second hotel in Buenos Aires is called the Gran Something, or I would have paid more attention to the ‘something’.

The Brazilian grandmother was excited with the arrangements she’d facilitated and made me swap seats so I could chat about Argentina with Mr Fairfield. There must have been a world problem solving kindness to her she felt at liberty to express in international airspace. ‘What can you tell me about BA?’ I asked Mr Fairfield.

‘Not much. It’s my first trip there,’ he said. We talked instead about the extension to their house, a baby bedroom.

When we landed everyone applauded and I found myself clapping along with Brazil and the Fairfields – surely my first bona fide South American cultural experience. It’s not regular to applaud uneventful landings in Sydney.  I was happy but nervous thanks to the Brazil-Fairfield society – BA could hardly be more daunting than New Delhi or Beirut, but who knew? Nerves and politeness resolved to follow the Brazil-Fairfield plan, until the sudden baby-bootie-change exercise that had to happen between the gate and immigration. Stuff it. I’d work it out.

The rest was easy. There was a Sunday-open exchange booth that accepted my antiquated traveller’s cheques and suddenly I had pesos to work with. I confidently told the bus driver, ‘the Gran Hotel please’. He rattled off a few Gran Hotel names and I used my ‘si’ as any would do. Confused, he ushered me onto the bus anyway.

As we zoomed towards the centre of BA I contemplated the central problem of modern air-travel – your first foreign destination inevitably has to be an unwieldy, time-gobbling, money-wasting big city. If I had my way intercontinental flights would link Sydney directly to rustic farming communities around the globe, to unpronounceable Saharan oases, tundra campsites and Pampas villages with cows and guitar songs. In the dunes, the tundra, the chocolate, people are friendlier, the culture raw and specific; in those places quickly establishing your foreign language skills is necessity and working your way up to a twelve and a half million strong metropolis like Buenos Aires would be simple. The problem is your average igloo community doesn’t have international aircraft landing facilities.

There were all manner of interesting neighbourhoods. I saw high-tower Tehran type places with rusty swing sets between the blocks, Florida condo complexes, neat as a pin, for the aspirationals, and crumbling poorer-Dhaka areas with dirt roads, rubbish heaps and impromptu soccer matches taking place on roadside strips (in Dhaka it might be cricket). Old men in black cowboy hats sat in suburban doorways, weathered signs announced small grocery stores and rusty utes piled with anything from vegetables to metal rods plied uneven streets. As we closed on the centre, Dhaka gave way to Paris – clean, leafy boulevards, six, seven, ten-storey art deco buildings and a poodle on a pink leash.

I got out somewhere central, no Gran Something in sight – it would have been expensive in any case. Utterly exhausted I stumbled into the nearest hotel, the Alcazar – too magical on the whole but anywhere with a bed at that point. Within minutes I was on my way to sleep in a small musty room on the other side of an ocean, overlooking a building site.

This piece was originally written in 2005 at a time when I used to change details about people to promote their privacy.





Plane journeys are often interesting.  Sometimes it's all about golf and papaya juice and sometimes there's not really a plane.  Perhaps it's better to consider metro dreaming instead.

Image from wikimedia, by Leando Kibisz

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