Notes on Damp
Listen to the accompanying soundscape for Anastasia Dale’s essay Notes on Damp, featured in Voiceworks #131 Strike. For the best experience, listen to the audio while you read.
It’s nighttime when it starts raining down the walls. My posters all get ruined, my photo from school camp. Ringlets of smoke curl in my window from outside. There is banging on the ceiling. The insides of strangers’ lives are so close we can touch. Mould creeps across like a rash.
Week to week, my parents do a dance with their landlords. I play the harmonica, which is silly because I haven’t had any lessons. Mum does a dance that looks like when we do high knees running on the oval. Her landlord does arabesques in circles around her. Dad dances the tango or something. I try to play ‘Smooth Operator’ on the harmonica for him and he smiles at me. He doesn’t even look at his landlord, who is leading.
The spiders in the shower at Dad’s place whisper that we never should have painted the walls. They tell me they will bite me as punishment. I say whatever and act like I don’t need to wash my hair, because that’s how you play it with spiders.
There are droplets forming on the ceiling of my room, so I kneel down at the foot of my bed to pray. I know that this is water torture from the great landlord in the sky. I ask for forgiveness. I ask that if forgiveness is impossible then could things be waived or deferred or reduced. I only ask because everything leaks. I only ask because I know nobody can hear me.
In the other room Mum is on the phone. There’s lots of silences and riddles and codes. The phone says, What can go through glass without breaking it? The phone says, What is something no one wants, but no one wants to lose? The phone says, What is always on its way but never arrives? Mum says, Light. Mum says, A lawsuit. Mum says, Tomorrow. The phone asks how many dependents she has in her care and if she is married.
The landlord nests grow cobwebs. [1] It’s swooping season, so I put cable ties on my helmet. In school we learn about brood parasites. Parasite parents plant their eggs in strangers’ nests. While the host raises the young, the parasite parents fly free and create more eggs. Sometimes they visit the nests they’ve parasitised, and if their egg has been rejected, they destroy the host’s nest and kill all the nestlings.
In the video we watch, some bird goes mad and ends up smashing her own eggs with her beak.
We’re in Coles and a voice crackles above, yelling. It belongs to a man named Cain, and he is able to see inside our fridge. Cain says there is a ‘tale of two cities’ in Australia and he is chasing the better one. Cain says that is how he will win. [2] On ground level, the checkout lady wears red. She tells us to get out quick. I look at our receipt, which is also red. The numbers keep changing and the receipt keeps apologising. I vomit all over the floor.
A brand-new female CEO appears. She is a car sale balloon figure, air running through her hollow limbs. She inflates up and up, looming over us. She crouches down to embrace me, but all I feel is plastic.
Feminism, she screams.
My salary is a win for you, too, she adds, even louder.
Then she places her huge red hands around the throat of the checkout lady and purrs, You’re not getting paid until you clean that up. [3]
Year to year, I play Goldilocks. Dad’s place is too cold in winter. Mum’s is too hot in summer. The couch we find on the side of the road is too lumpy and soft. The couch that takes hours to put together is too hard and small. My mattress is stained from the ceiling. My bedframe is propped together because the screws got stuck. I imagine a Heaven that’s just right, where we have our own investment properties and live near a Coles with a self-serve juicing station.
The place above Mum’s is for people on holiday, and I can hear everyone come home outside my window. When I’m older I watch my cigarette smoke tangle in the windows. It’s better when it’s mine. It’s mostly couples who rent above, and I can always hear their awkward conversation as they wind around the stairs. I hope they can smell my smoke and I hope it makes them never come back, speckling their lungs and polluting their clothes.
Dad says we might stop paying rent. I say, What? Dad starts: If enough of us— but a train goes by, and when the noise is over he can’t remember what we were talking about.
I go to a place with white walls and carpet underfoot. Ivy falls in braids outside the windows, and I see the same pattern etched on pale arms, thin legs. A girl wears rags and tells me, crying, that her family’s holiday home was damaged in the bushfires. A boy puts his hand on my shoulder, looks in my eyes, and tells me, I wish I could have such a firsthand experience with class. I think of telling him that actually he has, but my skin is burning where he touched me. Flames lick all around his skin.
I wonder if God is punishing them, burning them and their extra houses to the ground. But next week they are all unblemished, rebuilt.
People talk to me quite seriously, and quite often. They say, I have fallen in love with politics, it is my calling. They say, The bosses are stealing from us. They say, The divine right of kings never died, it was just rebranded as meritocracy. They say, Fuck the system, come to mine for drinks after the protest. Then, later, somewhere else, they snicker like cockroaches under floorboards, like rats in roofs. They talk about their careers and inheritances and sex and drugs and how techno is cool for now, but soon they’ll say yes when their parents ask them to the symphony. A couple with straight white teeth gets in a physical fight, maybe about whose parents have better taste. Their blood stains the cream-coloured hand-woven rug, which is sent off for cleaning.
This week it’s less of a dance. The landlord gets Mum in a headlock. The landlord squashes Mum’s nose into her face and uses so much pressure that she cannot speak. The landlord puts a cigarette out on Dad’s eye and tells me his depth perception is going to be way off now. Mum makes another phone call but she can’t answer the riddles in time, so they hang up. Dad gets told he could go into mediation.
Damp rests on innocence. That means Damp discloses innocence, but also, when it can, corrupts it. [4]
Dad used to tell me about kelp and about the powers of nature while we ate handfuls of mulberries. He used to tell me about the give and take, pointing to the tides and swells. He used to say landlords don’t stop with the land, they go up to space and under the sea. [5] I’d say stuff like, Hopefully they stay there. He used to laugh.
We are better able to enjoy fantasy as fantasy when it is not our own. [6]
It’s my birthday. We try to go out for dinner. We try to leave. We keep getting calls telling us we’re late, we’re late. Whenever we try to speak, the call drops from some tower in the sky and all we can hear is fragmented syllables. We stick our phones out the windows and yell into the purple winter. We yell and yell, and finally, we give up. Keys click in our door. A stream of men in suits brandish menus and meat cleavers. Rent increase notices are draped around our necks like napkins. They give us the landlord special no matter what we order.
- ^ ‘But the spectre of a peasant war hung over the nests of the landlords from the first March days.’
From Trotsky’s ‘The Peasantry’ in The History of the Russian Revolution, 1930. - ^ James Thompson, ‘The class divide shaping Coles new strategy,’ Financial Review, Jun 18, 2019.
- ^ Angus Thompson, ‘Coles threatens to withhold pay from workers over vomit clean-up ban,’ The Sydney Morning Herald, Oct 4, 2023.
- ^ Rephrased Sontag, Notes on Camp, 1964.
- ^ See Marx, ‘Rent of Land,’ in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 1932.
- ^ Sontag, Notes on Camp, 1964.
Notes on Damp by Anastasia Dale is one of many fantastic pieces featured in Voiceworks Issue #131 Strike. Click on the button above to grab a copy of the issue from our website.