By Alexander Gordon-Smith

“We need some more drinks.”
“How much have we had to drink today?”
“We had those beers, then that bottle of Jim and then the bottle of Jack’s. You coming for a drive?”
Yes. of course I’m going for a drive. I’m so intoxicated that I can’t walk straight. On the way to the bottle shop my friend and I have an argument. My mind rebels against reason, I can’t articulate the argument and I shut off… And then I jump out of the moving vehicle.  I have no idea what I am doing. I run to the river, put my back against a tree and start weeping into my arms.
I am in the strangest place in the world. I cannot control my emotions, my thinking or my balance. It’s night time, around 11ish, during winter. I rise and walk down Linear Park, I gaze down looking for metal objects, to no avail. I wander through the suburbs and pull the top of a letterbox off and run back to the river.  For the next twenty minutes I slash at my wrists – nothing much happens so I walk to the hospital. They tell me that all the cuts are superficial, that my blood alcohol was .26 four hours after I finished drinking and that I need to talk to a psychiatrist. I give the quack the usual story. He tells me that I had alcohol psychosis. I learn nothing.
I don’t remember why we were on Hindley Street. I think we wanted to go to an op shop. It was a Sunday, around midday. It was deserted, no pedestrians at all in sight, but a film crew about 100 – 200 metres away. The op shop was closed so we walked up toward McDonalds. Out of nowhere, it seemed, came this woman on a motorised scooter and a young boy, around eleven or twelve. The woman wasn’t old, in her forties. She was fat yet not obese. It appeared as the whole reason for the scooter was simply laziness. The boy was fat. He was walking, seemingly independent of the woman, with a chocolate ice-cream. He had the ice cream all over his face, right up to the apples of his cheeks. The woman was aimlessly driving all over the walkway and into random stores with wheelchair access and then out again. I honestly felt as though we had stepped into limbo, and that these apparitions were demons representing the deadly sins of greed and sloth.
Same place on a Saturday night, the sidewalks are a cesspool of vomit, cigarette butts and spit. Armies of fluoro tattoos are strutting up and down pretending that steroids are numbing their brain, five bourbons deep, thinking they are gods. Girls that think they are women are dressed to limit imagination, laughing hysterically after the two jager bombs that were bought for them have hit. People have managed to perfect the vomit dump whilst walking without breaking a stride. I’ve been drinking. I am drunk. Yet I am looking at these people with disgust.
I’ve walked from home toward the Garden, escaping the fences and engine sounds. We’re policing tonight, two opposing universes are about to collide and we must do everything in our power to keep the fabric of reality from tearing into pieces. Or drink overpriced beers. The roadie consisted of wild turkey and red bull, bad proportions. It was horrendous. The Garden is still and quiet, like the eye of a storm.

By Emma Jones

The void. The black hole. The abyss. The Bermuda Triangle. Call it what you will, every communal tearoom has one. It’s always there, humming ominously. It will keep your perishables below room temperature. And it will inevitably, inescapably absorb your painstakingly pre-packed lunch into its unfathomable depths.
Any workplace tearoom or high school common room will have its own repertoire of cautionary tales about the fridge. It’s a strange place. A graveyard of ancient relics, things so old and liquefied that nobody has the courage to remove them: apples that bear resemblance to prunes, bottles of salad dressing approaching their tenth birthdays, and a mysterious package bearing the name of that lady from accounts who went on maternity leave two years ago and never came back.
The fridge isn’t just a resting place for elderly edibles, though. It’s like a time warp. Things that disappeared long ago will materialise spontaneously in various states of decay. On more than one occasion, I have injudiciously deposited my leftovers in the fridge before hitting the grindstone, only to find that, come lunchtime, they’ve vanished without a trace. Months later, some unwitting innocent will probably find the shrivelled remains of my chicken wrap in the vegetable crisper whilst hunting for butter.
Naturally, when sharing a refrigerator with a group of other hungry people, one of the biggest issues at hand is food theft. I must admit, I have, on occasion, been tempted – but the potential social alienation that would result from being caught chowing down on someone else’s wedding cake leftovers in the back corner of the staff room is usually pretty good for counteracting said temptation.
Nevertheless, food theft is both frequent and unavoidable, and to prevent the horror of opening the fridge to find an empty container where my spag bol used to be, I’ve dabbled here and there in a little softcore theft prevention. But when the threatening post-its and the accusatory group emails fail, it’s time to bring in more drastic measures.
In high school, we had the infamous Year Twelve Food Thief, an anonymous waif who had made a habit of rummaging through our common room kitchen and feasting on the best bits of our lunches. The front office had a compensation scheme in place, whereby the missing food item was recorded in a ledger and replaced with something deemed to be of equal value from the tuckshop (needless to say, far more food was reported stolen than any teenager could realistically consume). This, however, was not enough. We were hungry. Hungry for our stolen snackfoods, and hungry for justice. One girl took the law into her own hands, and, creating the stuff of legend, deployed the decoy casserole. Quite simply, she put some rice in a takeaway container with some surprisingly edible-looking dog food, and put it in the refrigerator with the rest of our lunches. To our collective glee, it was missing come lunchtime, and effectively put an end to all the culinary looting and plundering. The decoy casserole achieved cult status, even though, in the end, we never found out who the Food Thief was. But I often think about this unnamed kitchen klepto, and the idea of the decoy has floated around in the back of my mind since. Maybe I’ll use it someday. Maybe I won’t. The fact remains, human intervention is just no match for the mysterious power of the tearoom fridge. Whatever you put in there is fair game. It becomes public property, and as a result, is there for the taking. And if a Food Thief doesn’t take it, the abyss will…

By Kikonde Mwatela

It took us a long time to get to the destination. The place wasn’t far from where I lived, but it was a chore getting into Kibera’s ‘Laini Saba’ on a Sunday morning. Kibera has the dishonour of being Africa’s largest slum housing what some say is up to a million people. A million very busy people. Neighbouring Kibera are Nairobi’s middle-class suburbs including ‘Magiwa Estate,’ where I was raised.
On this particular Sunday, many years ago, my parents allowed my siblings and I the opportunity to accompany our house-help or ‘Auntie’ to the church she loved to attend. The place itself was dusty much like the rest of the shanties around, and the church itself was built with iron sheets. Inside was crowded and hot. The preacher was wonderfully contradictory, some points of his sermon so lively and others sombre. It was a masterful manipulation of language, both verbal and non-verbal.
During the ’sadaka’ (offertories) the music began to play with the drums picking up with every chorus. The choir was flawless and the harmonies were obviously practised but so effortlessly executed. From the pews at the back, a group of dancers began a sort of dance-march to the front picking up the humble offerings of attendees. Everyone in the church was singing at this point. The band members were swaying along with the dancers and I noticed that so too was the preacher.
Soon, it was time to go home. It had not been an entirely new experience for me, I had witnessed such fanfare in churches in the rural areas where I have my roots. It was not odd for me because of the sometimes eccentric nature of my parents and my upbringing, but I would soon come to realise how much my perceptions of that experience seemed contrary to conventional wisdom. Life with its constant exposure to the so called ‘real’ world has made this experience in retrospect seem strange.
The idea that there could be such an accommodating relationship between two different classes living side by side is viewed as unnatural by political observers both at home and internationally. The general impression given particularly by Western media to African problems is, among other things, to define a narrative that easily corroborates their own postulates regarding Africa’s problems. The class war is an appealing narrative generally pitting a paternalistic ‘educated’ class against the poorest. A narrative that feeds the international poverty movements that never run out of style. But rarely do many of these narrators attempt to understand that these relationships are complicated: for example, the help who took me to church on that Sunday was my Aunt by blood, being my mother’s cousin. The relationships between the classes may be enforced by economic needs, but the dynamics of those relations are almost always deeper. The driver, cook or house-help in Kenya is very likely a relative or from the same village as their employer.
Such relationships are then not only about need or want, but also by a desire for loyalty and trust on both sides.
The second assumption is that people who live in such circumstances are often miserable. Of course misery is ever-present in such circumstances, but joy too is there. What many people may lack in material terms, they may always find in friendships, faith and communality. It’s a factor rarely captured in either international or local discussions. Strangely enough, back in Kenya, we have a saying “The state of a casket can only be known by the dead”. Only the poor can know poverty.