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I had a conversation with my very Prussian grandmother when I was about 15 years old, during which she revealed to me that sometime in 1941 she discovered her father’s corpse in a field near their house.
‘He had gone to get some mushrooms for dinner’, she said, eyes rolling as if to say ‘and I had to find an alternative vegetable to use in my stew’ rather than ‘my poor father had a heart attack amidst the champignons’. ‘Oh my god’, I gasped in horror. ‘What did you do’? ‘I took him home, of course’, she replied whilst mashing up some old bread rolls to make pudding. ‘You carried him, all by yourself?’ I was terrified. ‘Of course not, you idiot’, she said. ‘I got a wheel barrow’.
For some reason I remembered this conversation last week, just as I woke up bathed in sunshine under the Daintree Rainforest canopy. There was no one else around, except for some hissing snakes, stampeding Cassowaries and chirping birds. Oh, and Adam. I had just swapped the fig leaf for a bikini (I’m allergic to everything in the cacti family).
A quick look around the bed and at my calves confirmed that yes, this was paradise, just before the eviction, and definitely before the arrival of the Gillette Venus. ‘It’s time for you to go out hunting’, I drawled at Adam. He shuddered at my meatlover’s morning breath. ‘Hunt for some coffee, maybe also kill a wild boar for some quality bacon. And don’t forget, I can’t have dairy’. Who knew Adam was a back-chatter. ‘Actually, coffee is made from beans which fall into the category of gathering which is a womenfolk’s task, so you better get your behind out of bed’, he said. I got up, fetched the hissing snake from outside, unleashed it at Adam and threw a few apples at his head during his losing battle with the reptile. ‘That’ll teach him about Knowledge of Good and Evil’, I thought. Yes, paradise collapsed when Adam burnt his fig leaves, became a little too impressed with what he found underneath, and started to get emancipated. And that’s when I remembered the story of my grandmother and her father’s corpse. Maybe it was time to stop complaining.
Really, I should be ashamed of myself, I thought later on as we snorkeled the reef, and in the car on the way to a romantic meal at a heavenly seafood restaurant. And the next day, when we were walking through dense rainforest to get to a swimming hole in a crocodile infested river.
We came across a father with 5 small children, crawling through the rainforest barefooted. ‘Come on, you sissy’, the father shouted at his three year old boy who had gotten lodged between some rocks crossing the river and was about to drown. ‘You’re not a baby anymore!’ My hair suddenly turned into a stiff updo and I was wearing pastel lipstick. ‘Is it the 50s?’ I asked Adam, staring in horror at the pleats in my rara skirt and at the emotionally incorrect father. My nylon stockings were killing me. What a silly outfit to wear when one is crawling through the mangroves!
The screaming father was now belittling his son for crying. ‘Yup, it’s definitely the fifties’, I said to Adam. ‘I want to leave. Take me to the future, where fathers stop hitting their children and take them to see the world as mothers sleep in, get a takeaway latte and go get pedicures’.
As I spoke, I could feel time shift again. Suddenly, my rara skirt turned into a linen sack. My bra popped, and my mammaries were instead strapped into some coarse bandaging device. ‘Do you want me to get a rifle?’ Adam brawled in a strange, unfamiliar voice, pointing at the father who was looking on as his boy was struggling with a crocodile. ‘I can take that bastard, anytime. Say the word and he’s a goner’. ‘Stop it!’ I screamed at Adam. ‘What’s with the stupid voice?’ I turned to the sky. ‘I don’t want to go further back in time!’ ‘I’ll get the rifle’, said Adam, scratching his crotch through his knickerbockers. ‘Woman, do you have a manly piece of stick for me to chew on?’
Just as I was about to push him into the river, a pretty lady in a dark blue dress fell out of the sky. ‘Mary?’ I whispered through my tears of fury. ‘Shhh’, she replied, rearranging her snappy fringe. ‘No need to draw attention to me. I’m only here to get some new slippers for my man. Now stop being such a whiny cow. Have you ever read the Bible? Men bugger everything up, women sort it out. The bit with the apple was just to turn the story around, in a reversed Ian McEwanesque plot twist. Not very creative’, she said.
‘I’m gonna kill me some wildlife because I’m so manly’, Adam rambled, inspecting his biceps.
‘I don’t think so, sister’, I replied to Mary, shushing Adam. ‘I know it’s all about suffering for you, but I’m over it. Now that men are able to form grammatically sound sentences and know how to use a Baby Bjorn, why should I go back to the older model? Don’t they have Sex and the City in heaven?’ Mary gave me a punishing look. ‘You better get over yourself’, she said, ‘or you’ll end up an old spinster, with no senile old man to purée food for when you’re old’. ‘Noooooo’, I screamed, throwing myself at Adam, who was just aiming his rifle at a squirrel baby, and shoved him into the crocodile infested river. ‘Crocodiles of Daintree’, I said. ‘Take this violent, stupid toilet of a man and give me back my gentle, violence-abhorring 21st century superman, who makes me my morning coffee, supports me generously as I try to be a writer and doodle away at my part time job, and always has an arm free to hug me when I get upset about my aforementioned life doodling. Who bravely listens to the delusional rantings of his very own 21st century supergirl. I want to wake up from this nightmare!’
Just as the crocodiles started their ritual tap dancing, I found myself back in bed, unattractively drooling into my pillow. I peaked through the mess of my morning hair and, hail Eve and Mary, there was my morning coffee on the bedside table. 21st century Adam had put it there. As I watched the godly buttocks of my lovely, comfortably metro-sexual, gentle, modern jungle man walk around in the kitchen making breakfast, I thought to myself, Eve, you never had it so good.
And later on, as I explained to 21st century Adam that Boeuf Bourguignon is not a playstation game, I thought, and he’s never had it this good either.
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