stone fruit season

Work, time, and what it does to us.

fyi, i discuss bodies, sex and death in this piece

Thursday 3:49pm

It’s mid-afternoon and the sun is beating down as I walk to the store. I don’t know what I’m doing outside in 38 degree heat, a brutal northerly whipping at my face and clothes. I cling to the shade, trying to remember what I came out for: fruit, ice, fresh bread from the market. Is there anything else?

My brain is fried. I sleep terribly in weather like this, nights spent fitfully turning over, caught in restless dreams or nightmares. I started work again this week, and whatever initial excitement I had is already giving way to that familiar thought: why on earth is society structured so that we spend so much of our lives doing this?

Having someone so comprehensively own my time is chafing after so long away, when I could whittle my days down however I liked. But I need to live and, unfortunately, I don’t have a sugar daddy, mummy, or rich parents — so this is what I have to do.

I get home and we spend the rest of the afternoon cooking. It’s so hot and we’re both in the kitchen naked. Sweat beading as we stand over stoves, stirring pots and cutting veggies. Some friends are coming over later, and cooking for others is one of my favourite ways to show love. I feel in my element in the kitchen: music pumping, preparing for a dinner party. I find the process of cooking relaxing and incredibly mindful — reading recipes, sourcing ingredients, chopping, cutting, peeling, boiling, cooking, seasoning. It feels like art, watching it all come together.

As people start arriving, I’m overcome with a sudden outpouring of warmth. How wonderful it is to have friends. And to host and entertain them. It’s so magical to me that you can see the same people multiple times a week and still get excited, still feel overcome, to see them again. Bottles of wine are pulled out of bags and beer is put in the fridge.

We gorge on fresh cherries, watermelon, peaches, apricots, cheese, bread and oil! Stone fruit season is here, and we indulge in an orgy of fruit as we debrief our weeks.

As we serve ourselves dinner, conversation shifts to what life is like being back from travelling. I tell them that my first week back at work was weird, that getting your brain back into work gear is hard. I reflect that somewhere in my late 20s I realised the idea of a career — and devoting so much of your life to following one — seemed so stupid. It suddenly wasn’t something I wanted anymore.

I was conventionally successful, but rather than finding it meaningful, my interest in work had never been lower. I wanted, instead, to spend time with friends, lovers, mountains, family, reading, and pottering around in my little life.

I said that, personally, now, the thought that people devote so many of the best years of their lives to organisations that would fire them the moment they had to, without hesitation, feels sad to me. And I wanted to know if others felt the same.

My friend Lena said she can’t shake it. She’s a radio presenter, and even though she understands, intellectually, that a career is a sheen we put on capitalism to make us feel better about something we need to do, it hasn’t changed how it feels in her body. She thinks she was indoctrinated by 90s and 2000s pop culture, and that at her core her worth — particularly as a woman — is still bound up with her professional success.

“It’s brought me more stress and shame than you could ever imagine,” she lamented. “I wish I could shake it but I just fucking can’t.”

She has been on stress leave trying to figure all this out. But she still knows that, for her, having a prestigious career is core to how she measures success.

My friend Jake said he felt the same as Lena until recently. He was working for a global climate organisation, until he burned out and finally took a moment to stop and think about how much he was giving to it.

“Climate is so existential and I spent years thinking that if I didn’t give everything I had to it, that somehow climate disaster would be on me. It broke me. It genuinely did.”

He says he partly links it to the slick marketing campaigns run by universities to get us to pay thousands for degrees, telling us we will change the world.

I said that having a sense of purpose has been a kind of cheat code for motivating myself at work, and that I’m scared of how I’d function without it.

Another friend said she’s the same and that it’s just the bane of the ADHD brain.

It gets to the point of the night where everyone is a bit sluggish, full of drink and food. Where we’re talking across and over each other. Voices are raised, and then a lull enters the conversation, periods of silence lengthening as the night gets later. Before everyone leaves, I pull out my pièce de résistance: the apricot tart. Made from apricots in the backyard, it’s glistening and moist. It is perfect — the ideal nightcap before people disperse into the night.

Friday 6:58am

My watch starts vibrating and, reluctantly, I blink open my eyes. Sunlight is streaming in through the gaps in the blinds. How is it already another day? Why do I have to work? I lie there for a few moments, contemplating going back to sleep. It’s muggy and hot and the warm air feels like it’s pressing down on me.

I glance across at A, who is still fast asleep. She is tangled, naked above the sheets. I want to be where she is right now. She mumbles lightly, then turns over away from me.

My resentment at being awake immediately leaves me, and in this moment I am perfectly happy. Nothing is better than waking up beside someone you love and having those stolen moments of seeing them there, entirely unaware of your presence. Lost in sleep.

I push myself up and kiss her lightly on her butt, then trace my hands up her spine, kissing both her shoulder blades before rolling over.

“I love you,” she mumbles in her sleep as I ease out of bed.

Life has been coming at me fast since coming back. Starting a new job, catching up with everyone, friends having babies, sick parents, and this week a bunch of friends’ siblings being diagnosed with cancer.

I ride to meet a friend for coffee before work. His girlfriend’s sister has just been diagnosed with cancer and has only a few months to live. They can’t do anything about it. Everyone is devastated. She’s too young — but that is life, right? She has two kids under five years old and her husband is beside himself.

I tell him I wish there was something I could do. I mean it but feel so helpless. What can you offer someone in a time like this? We hug for so long people at the cafe start looking at us. At 9 I start feeling the incipient pressure of my time no longer being my own, and I tell him I love him and head off.

I ride to a different café and start working — a process of reading documents and flicking between Slack and email. Occasionally making calls and jumping on Zoom meetings. I sometimes imagine myself having to explain to a lineman from the 1900s, or a Soviet-era bureaucrat, what it is I do for work, and just how baffled they would be. I’m baffled too. I always struggle to explain just what it is I do.

Friday 3:55pm

I stand in the foyer of the building and slather myself in sunscreen — face, neck, arms, back of legs — before stepping out into the heat. I jump on my bike and by the time I’m at the store I’m already drenched in sweat. I grab a kombucha and a mango. At home, A is lying on the bed reading.

“I just got a text from Jake. He said the rave is over in the West tonight,” I tell her.

Some friends are going to a rave and I was going to go, but it’s a 45-minute Uber ride, in a warehouse in a pretty dodgy suburb, and I don’t know if I can be bothered going only to have the cops shut it down a few hours after getting there. I also don’t know if I’m in the headspace to rave — it’s been so hot for the past four days that I haven’t slept that well. I’m so bad at making decisions, so I hedge and say maybe. Future Clem’s problem.

In the meantime, I join A on the bed and she puts aside her book.

“You’re fucking soaked,” she tells me as she pulls off my shirt.

We lie there kissing in the heat for a while. I love tracing my hands over her skin, drawing imaginary lines between her moles. I point one out and tell her she should get it checked.

She tells me her back is sore from digging up a garden bed the other day and that I probably owe her a massage. I probably do. So I start massaging her shoulders. I grab some moisturiser and rub my hands gently over the knots up near her neck, before making my way down to her lower back. Her skin feels so soft and warm.

There is something about being present like this with someone that will always draw me out of my head. I start massaging her butt and she tells me I can never stop.

It’s an impossible demand, and eventually my hands get sore. I stop. She rolls over and pulls me down onto the bed.

It’s hot and I kiss her gently, but she pushes her body up against mine, kissing me firmly and biting my bottom lip.

“Dinner for two?” she asks, laughing.

I love sex in summer. There is something about the lighting and the intensity the heat brings. It’s heavy, like there’s extra electricity in the air. It’s also so easy to be naked with someone in a way that winter just isn’t.

She climbs on top of me and turns around, putting her ass in my face. She tastes like sweat — both salty and a little sweet — and I grab her hips and pull her toward me as I lick her. I go faster as my neck starts to ache. I have to use one of my arms to support myself until, with a shudder, she cums.

With real force she presses her butt down onto my face, entirely smothering and suffocating me: both nose and mouth. I worry that I’m about to be choked to death by a butt and just as I start to squirm, the moment passes, she relents and I can breathe again.

We go again and I grab her butt, pulling myself up closer to her. She cums again. After I do, we lie top to toe on the bed, until I turn around and pull her onto my chest. She lies there and I play with her hair as she tells me about why empires were in some way good. Her parents grew up in the mess of the breakdown of an empire and she tells me the most damaging time post empire is the creation of ethno states as everything fractures, with forced migration of people from their homes.

I check my phone and see that some friends are going to the pub, and I suggest we go there instead of the rave. It’s turning into one of those perfect summer nights — warm, humid, and no wind at all. The perfect night to sit outside in a beer garden with friends.

She says she wants to stay home and read. I make us dinner — baked sweet potato, cucumber salad, fresh tomato pasta.

Saturday 2:30pm

“I think one nation is really going to win big next election. I just saw my friends little sister who is queer and working class posting pauline hanson catchphrases about the shooting”

My friend sends me this as I am riding to a pub. The heatwave has broken and my spirits are soaring. I was excited to sit out back and watch some friends play jazz. But this immediately brings me back down to earth. I haven’t really tried to engage with Bondi at all, but even so, I can feel that something has changed dramatically.

Pauline Hanson is the head of the One Nation political party — an openly racist party that, even before the shooting, had been gaining in the polls. It’s what happens when life gets worse and the promises don’t come good: fascist parties scapegoat and whip people up into a frenzy.

We were talking about it at the pub last night. It was a horrendous thing to happen, but it’s scary thinking about how much this seems to have scrambled everyone’s brains. The right wing press want revenge. Politicians are promising to ban protests. New sweeping laws are giving more power to the surveillance state. Trauma requires a response, and this is probably a natural one for a country that’s grieving. But I do worry there are a lot of cynical political actors just waiting for a tragedy they can manipulate to serve their own political aims and play into their personal biases.

I’m so glad I am not on social media and can have some space from the endless noise that follows something like this — recriminations, hot takes, cold takes!

I’ve been thinking about a comment a friend made recently, about Kate Moss once saying that the nicest thing about coming of age in the 90s was that not everything was documented — you would be out at night and there was a sense of privacy, and people were more free to be themselves because there wasn’t the omnipresent recording of everything that happens now. At gigs, at parties, at birthdays, at tourist spots, everywhere, people are filming on their phones. And she said it has a policing effect on how people act.

And it struck me as so true! It is so rare these days to be in a space without someone recording. I remember at uni, when digital cameras suddenly became cheap enough that everyone could afford them. We would take them on nights out and come home with hundreds of terribly lit photos, date-and-time-stamped, as reminders. Eyes bloodshot, faces washed out by the flash.

It was intoxicating at the time. But it feels different now with video. Everything is content. Sometimes these days at gigs I wonder if people are there for the music, or there to show that they were there.

I mostly take for granted that wherever you are, people are going to be recording. But it doesn’t have to be that way, and I wonder how we can create spaces without phones.

I’ve been thinking about how I can live a more analogue life. Not as a form of romanticising the past (although I do often find I have a cultural nostalgia for the 90s and wish I had come of age then — rave culture, technology but before the smartphone, a genuinely burgeoning queer scene with more acceptance. I was born too late! Alas), but as a way of slowing my life down and being more intentional about what I consume. I bought a record player this week and am excited to start collecting records, and I recently got a bunch of magazine subscriptions.

I get to the pub slightly late and everyone is already there. I hate arriving first to anything, so I am always late. We crowd around a table in the backyard, watching our friends up on the stage. The sun is out and there is a genuine sense of celebration.

Christmas is almost here and it is a last hurrah before we all scatter over the country.

I’m not the biggest fan of jazz, but today, for whatever reason, there is nothing I would rather listen to. It is the perfect music for an afternoon session at the pub — it can grab your attention at times, then fade away as you get enmeshed in conversation.

We’re talking about conspiracy theories and how crazy billionaires are.

Our friend Z tells us that Elon Musk apparently broke his penis trying to make it bigger. Another friend says that Mark Zuckerberg is actually a robot from the future sent down here to corrupt our minds and destroy civilisation. I don’t know if either of these are true, but I am inclined to believe both.

The sun starts to set and I forget my jacket. I’m suddenly so excited to go home and read and not talk to anyone. I put on my favourite album of the moment — Ray of Light by Madonna — and jump on my bike. It’s music for movement; the looping electronic patterns propel me into the golden hour. Everyone is smiling. The heat has broken, and as I ride along the back streets I see people out watering their gardens, walking their dogs, kissing, laughing, and I remember that this is what life is about.

Sunday 11:33am

The storm front comes across as we are walking home from the market. It hits out of nowhere and within minutes we are utterly drenched. I love it! I couldn’t be happier in this moment. The bitumen has that acrid smell that comes from fresh rain on a hot, dry road, and the rain has brought out the crisp scent of the eucalyptus trees. Walking past our neighbour’s house with bark chips, the musty smell envelopes us.

I’m meeting friends in the afternoon to celebrate the solstice. The rain is too delicious to pass up, and I run the long way along the creek, arriving at their house dripping wet and begging to borrow some clothes. We drink peppermint tea and eat bread and olive oil and the most decadent halloumi salad.

One of my friends does a tarot pull for all of us. For an entire year, every time I had my cards read, I got The Tower. It was one of the hardest years of my life, and I can’t figure out whether it was external, or whether it was knowing that my foundations were going to be (and were) cracked and I internalised it. This time, I got the Three of Swords. A card about the need to recognise sorrow and hardship in order to grow. A good reminder that life is pain, after all.

By mid afternoon I am socially spent. I get a lift home and run a bath. I grab Leah Ypi’s new book, Indignity, spread some bath salts in the water, tell A she can join me if she wants, light some candles, and sink under the water.

Happy solstice everyone.