Sarahribu

What are you doing for your birthday? I am genuinely interested, because I’m so torn at the moment whether to be prudent or to do something so that in the future I can use it as an anecdote at dinner parties.
While we’re sitting around, let me tell you about my fantasies. Not sexual, most of my sexual fantasies are uninspired and laconic. You could probably even call them brusque, functional. No, my sexuality is not the interesting part of my brain. It’s the holidays’ part that is the fantasies you want to hear about.

When I was twenty-one I almost blew my entire savings on a trip to Korea after exams. I was tired, my body felt like a worn out husk, a maize of ennui, if you will. The mixture of a final project about collapsing economies of the 90s, plus downtime habits of soap operas and a life long love story based on the potentiality of a life in a country I don’t know. I checked out, a stubby finger with a dissertation induced screen-tan hovering over the booking page and chickened out. Instead I got drunk and bought a jacket I never wearr. My vigour dwindled into rigor, exams and graduation passed as a blur. In retrospect the money came to use during the obligatory unemployable graduate period, where I flitted between family members to thoroughly wear out my welcome as the useless sponger only a bachelors degree can make a girl.

I was gifted with the storybook event that my graduation, the moment I had dreamed since I was a little girl detesting graphics and steaming in her sexual tension, coincided with my 22nd birthday. It’s the stuff epilogues of films are made of. I escaped the grasp of education, my seductive mistress, back to my adopted hometown, twisting from her grip, no longer special, mentally complete in accordance with state guidelines. My friends and I got drunk for two days and abused a DSLR camera in the summer sunshine, popping fresh cherries between our teeth. It was a beautiful birthday.
It should have been a turning point in my life, but I find it hard to reinvent myself in late June. The sunshine is so beautifully dappled; everyone joyous and half nude, the freckles on cute girls’ faces out to play. I’ve always been someone to reinvent herself when the seasons wane to coolness and the social skin sheds a little easier.
(The year before it, uncharacteristically for my birthday but par for the course for this damp isle, rained. We camped in a humid marquee in my back garden as the country flooded. Bouncy castles cancelled due to electrocution risk, which could possibly be ironic. Boys kissed, pizzas were made in awkwardness and couples who were not me fucked in the rain. I turned 21 under two feet of water.

All I remember from my 6th birthday was I was a pirate and fell in the courgette patch. I learnt that supermarkets lie to us, those fuckers are spiky.

My 10th birthday involved both the top floor and the lower basement of the world’s tallest hotel, and my best friend at the time forcing me to buy her a present with my birthday money. Three months later I confronted her, screaming histrionics outside of the year 6 classroom. I remain effortlessly classy and tediously belated.)

Since I became old enough to insist that my parents leave me alone on my most special of days I have stuck to the tried and true equation that Sexually Ambiguous Teens + Alcohol + Bouncy Castle = Unparalleled awesomeness not even Barney Stinson could aspire to.
I turn 23 in just under three months. Without the protective cocoon of my parents’ money and expansive garden I fear my bouncy castle dreams are gone, and so it comes back to holidays, and indulging. I like the idea of flying off to some tiny island somewhere, a bit of non-conventional fluff, wearing an indecent swimming costume and frolicking with non-venomous wildlife. How about a week on a half-forgotten Malaysian island eating more durian than any human could theoretically eat and getting ridiculously sunburnt, followed by a week drinking sugarcane juice in the monolithic shadow of my childhood? When I think of the Asia I grew up in the first thing I think of is fruit, because it bookends it nicely. When I was a pasty child I was unenthusiastic about our move until I was given a travel book, nothing sophisticated, I think it might have been a Rough Guide. I never could be bothered to read books if I could fake out of it through being cunning but I fixated on one picture of a smorgasbord of tropical fruit, the real stuff, mangosteen, jackfruit, rambutan and the queen, the sexually aggressive owner of my social decadence, the durian. This new life was no longer something I refused to think about, instead my eye-enlarged stomach focused on the orgy of tastes to explore and delight in.
(For my first birthday my parents love to tell me that they bought punnets of squashy-delicious summer fruit and watched with delight as I gorged myself stupid on it.)

I teeter on the seesaw of indecision over whether to have an empire themed party, because while the idea of a late Victorian themed party (where there can be cross dressing and gin) appeals, especially since I can make all the Raffles jokes I like and no one can stop me, the whole concept teeters on the edge of racist, which makes me have frothy bubbles of distaste. When it comes down to it, I could do all manner of sensible or outrageous things, not only with my personal public holiday but with my life en generalé, because the only thing that has the potential for stopping me is my own brain, spending habits and social conventions. Perhaps for once, the 27th of June will finally be the day to make a big change.

Everyone remembers the first moment of proper human disappointment. When Petite Agustine was a tiny child befitting her name, she lived in a small village (within easy commute from Paris), where her parents were very important people to do with the kind of important task that is very boring. Back then though, they were just Maman and Papa and Agustine, and they were mainly happy.

The village was perfect, the kind of place that is not seen anymore, either appropriated through the decades by commuters or suburbanites or aggressively maintained at its old level of twee with an iron fist. Back then the village was full of characters, but none were so noteworthy as Madame Touillard. She was a thickset woman as tall as a house, who both terrified and entranced all the tiny children, who whispered unimaginatively that she was a witch over their chocolate at break. She carried a large cockerel on her shoulder, which was the most magnificent beast Petite Agustine had seen in the whole of her short, uneventful life.

The first time she saw Madame Touillard in all of her glory it was a Wednesday and Agustine was out with her mother at the market when Madame Touillard swept past in a whirl of skirts and fresh feathers.
“Maman”, lisped Petite Agustine immediately, for she was disgustingly cute and remarkably astute. “Can I have a bird?”
“Why would you want a great dirty bird?” said Maman. “Do you want to grow up to be an old woman with no friends? Anyway, you have Guillaume. You cannot have a bird even if it wasn’t disgusting, because Guillaume would eat it. Which would make you guilty by association. Do you understand, Agustine? Of course you don’t. Why did Eric think that getting a kitten the same week we had a baby would be a good idea?”
Maman had a point, thought Agustine as Maman continued to talk at her, her babble fading into the grey mist of childhood memory. She had been ignoring Guillaume recently. So Agustine resolved to pull herself up by her socks and enjoy her cat and then maybe when Guillaume left home she could get a bird, and train it to sit on her shoulder and caw at people, and maybe take out the eyes of the her enemies. Yes, thought Agustine, it would definitely be worth waiting for her bird.

Later on, it was still a glorious Wednesday afternoon and Maman shooed a fractious Agustine and Guillaume off to play. They ambled amiably through the hazy countryside of the past and Agustine had, in the rush of the beautiful afternoon, forgotten all about her desire for a bird. She stumbled through long grass and kicked up explosions of late-summer dust in her own world, until she saw Guillaume fumbling in the abandoned animal holes with something, but by the time she reached him it was nothing but a delicate filigree of albumen strung around his dusty paws.

She rushed across the path and prodded Guillaume away with a decent amount of force, and bent down in an attempt to rescue what he had ruined. In her hands the remains of the egg were nothing more than a friable relic; it crumbled gooey-disgusting between her clumsy fingers in the echoing silence of her shocked dismay.

She turned and almost stepped on it – the identical brother of the egg-corpse in her hands, sitting untouched by the hateful cat. She slipped into her pocked wrapped in some of the dry grass, grabbed the cat and gripped him tightly all the way home, both grumbling audibly with annoyance.

Once she got home she paused, dropping grumbling Guillaume with a plop, she paused to think. Maman said she could not have a bird, but obviously the egg needed her. Agustine had done the heavily censored basics of life in class and so knew all about mummy-birds and daddy-bees. She climbed silently up the stairs and clicked open the door into her bedroom. After shredding some much hated items with her safety scissors and rescuing a box from the kitchen she had a perfectly serviceable incubator box. She tucked it under the radiator and basked in a job well done.

The box stayed her secret. Every day she would have a peek at it, and then after a few weeks she would leave little bits of food, in case the egg got hungry. But even tiny children know when something is wrong, and one day she decided to see whether the bird inside egg needed some help getting out. Maybe without a mummy bird nearby the baby would have cheerleading, no coaxing to come out into the beautiful, dangerous world. She carefully took it out, and lifting it out. It was so dainty, thin like good china and speckled like good bread. With a firm and decisive crack! she broke the shell, and it shattered to leave nothing more than a whisper of a life that never was. A perfectly empty shell, crumbling into powdered disappointment.

She took it in to Maman, tiny tears running down her tiny face, and Maman took one look at the desiccated shell and swept her up in her big arms, the last of the shell a smear across perfumed silk.

Petit Agustine went to bed early, morose, clutching Guillaume to her chest, so worn out she didn’t hear Maman slip out into the night.

By her breakfast setting in the morning was a pretty blue box. Maman was in the kitchen and so Agustine opened it to find a tiny, perfect chick sitting disgruntled in cotton wool. Maman poked her head round the door and smiled wide.

Agustine named the chick Boc-Boc and over time Agustine grew to be a willowy dark haired girl and Boc-Boc grew to be an almost perfectly sypherical mess of feathers, and they continued to be happy. At least, thought Agustine, if Boc-Boc should ever die, there were plenty more eggs in the fridge.