Have You Seen the Pirate?

By Penny Gurner

The street art paints a raven, I know that, but I can’t see it from here – just a blast of colour broken up by rusting autumn leaves. A stranger once told me Ravens represent the past, present, and future colliding in the moment you’re experiencing; the hologram unfolding. I look at the colours through tears as another relationship faces a reckoning. 

He caught my eye, just as “the Old Fairy” had with her snake-green eyes, “Pork Chop” the sex worker, and Cleopatra born again, the sexiest pole dancer you have ever seen. 

He had the chiselled face of a natural-born terminator, and a remote gaze. He saw a horizon other than the passing traffic: human or mechanical. He exuded power whether standing in the street as we passed him - or sitting on the wall in front of the hospital, watching nothing, feeling his own everything. I named him “the Pirate.”

I didn’t know it then but about ten years later he would become the father of my first-born child, and my memories would continue to trip back to seeing him there, a postcard sent from the future.

Dear self,

Why am I drawn to people who seem tossed down to earth with a pile of washing. They don’t know what’s theirs, and what’s not. 

Dear self, 

Because it’s ALL theirs – or yours - and like you, they know it. 

“Have you seen the Pirate?” I asked everyone more than once as we got the job done. I was in charge of teaching a new crew the choreography to tour, and the project was turning a little romantic. This meant parting ways with my significant other of three and a half years who was in fact the boss. This was happening, a storm walked through daily until it was done with itself. And as we walked to the studio re-arranging people like furniture, we passed the Pirate peering into other dimensions.

Years later, I’d asked for work and left the café feeling everything was going to be alright – but not just superficially, it was deeper than that. 

The Chef had said, “you shouldn’t be here but I’m glad you are.”  

It would take me a couple of months to realise that the whimsical Chef was my Pirate from the past.  He was so many levels in one person.  That could be put another way – and typically unfair. We’re all this, it’s just some people are “that” mirror.

Just prior to re-finding my pirate - I’d been living alone for a while and was ready for a change. I had an old friend who tended to appear out of nowhere. We were coffee buddies, but I knew he dabbled in a lot more than that commodity. 

Another friend said, “drug dealer, definitely.” 

And sure, a long white car followed me one day indicating that.  He asked me to receive some money for him once which he didn’t follow through on - thankfully. 

“Why are you happy being poor all the time?” he asked, and I let that pass as I didn’t want to hear any solutions he was hovering around suggesting.

But the need for change was pressing so I reached out to him to borrow some money. I wanted to find a house, some house-mates and live a less isolated life. I even put in an order for a house of creatives – people who were artistically interesting. 

And I found it. Positioned at the end of a cul-de-sac, it was an old stone cottage that seemed unrenovated from convict days. It was cliff-side to trees which masked a highway below, a strange super-imposition of nature and urbanity. Light would come and go around it, reflecting off the stone. There was not much of a kitchen, and I didn’t have much to fill it with. I didn’t see this as a vulnerability until it was too late.

The potential housemate was so nice. She radiated calm, centredness. I masked desperation for dollars by under-informing her about the “missing” elements like furniture and kitchen utensils. But perhaps she was a little desperate too because they didn’t have to say yes straight away. “They” included a boyfriend I hadn’t met before allowing him to move in.

“What’s wrong with you?” the coffee buddy asked, expecting to find his friend happy in her new home. 

My words couldn’t get out of my mouth properly. I now understood what the cliché “in the grip of fear” really means – it’s like your something’s fistful, and it’s shaking you silly.

And then Mr Violent, boyfriend of the “nice” girl tried to move his other girlfriend in as well. She was an art student, so you’d have to say I’d asked for it. She had a kind of reckless violence to her, like him. I was offended on behalf of the “nice” housemate, and managed to keep her from moving in, but she left her art in the lounge room one morning. The warm morning light bounced off the cottage walls and the piece; newspaper articles about whaling grafted onto stone. I leaned down towards it, intrigued. An actual sound I can’t describe began to whell up within me, engulfing me in the whales’ experience. Jumping back broke the connection but not the awe I felt, or the sudden resonance with people dramas being stick drawings to the big picture.

Despite the challenging housemates, sitting on the back stone step of the cottage in morning or evening light, looking at the game of hide and reveal, was tranquil. Pieces of homes peeked through the gentle green of the trees as the noise from the highway below boasted of chaos both proximal and remote. One summer evening I caught something with the upper peripheral of my eyes as it poised itself above me. I can remember looking at the pine tree and “the thing” at the same time, assessing the solidity of one against the unexpected silhouette of the other. Unexpected, but it was not unrecognised.  As it dropped down my central nervous system like the gush from a tap, I knew to keep my mind still. If my mind was still, it would have to move away, and it did. I’d read about these things, and now I’d seen one, another memory for that house.

Every few weeks there would be a fuss at the door that had nothing to do with me or anyone else who lived there. “The fuss” would include a loud engine, screeching breaks, running feet, and it would leave behind a chalk message – usually a date - on the front step. Once, I was at home when this was happening, standing in the hallway, watching a shadow-monster do his thing inside the frame of the door space. It was my chance – I could pull the curtain on this mystery – right now – today. But I didn’t. Would it make sense if I told you I have a fear of sharks, and a lot of respect for the hidden? Let it hide. 

Finally, Nice Girl left with her human aggressor. I’d seen this before, “nice” people with their balancing principle on the outside. I’d asked her to stay but she took her two blackened eyes and left looking like a panda bear. 

For things to be alright, I needed help. 

I walked the length of a street known for its Café barons, looking for work – and a new housemate.  That’s the day I found my pirate.

I was the waitress, and he was the chef. He was my balance on the outside. The story was that he made his money for chef school fighting in the railyards, bet on by underbelly royalty. Doesn’t have to be true, his fight is that of the individual, and there’s none harder than that.

 “You can see the violence in him,” said one of my cousins.

“You can see the depth in him,” said another cousin. 

He is the father of my daughter, and they are both remarkable, yawned the universe.

By Penny Gurner