Quipu by Damien Broderick Page A

dentist again. He was properly indignant that I should be back to see him so soon; his professional competence was affronted. We had stabbing and jabbing and drilling for many happy minutes before he discerned that the damned thing was nerve-free, dead as a stale fart. So he patched it up and warned me of the Five Danger Signs of Incipient Abscess.
    Is your pulse hammering as you learn these fascinating truths? Of such is the epic of my life composed. Perhaps I should after all produce a quipu of my own and fill it with these boredom-defying details.
    So I sit at my desk and read about Lenin, a subversive activity funded all unknowing by the nation’s leading capitalists. When the boss infrequently ghosts across the room I leap smartly about with a conciliatory smile and do his bidding. An example? Only too happy:
    On Thursday I was invited to rule 200 pages into squares with pencil and straight edge. Having failed to master the art of malingering, I cheated laterally, inventing the cardboard cut-out template. It blew the poor bugger’s mind when I completed the task some ten times faster than he’d anticipated, and he couldn’t be bothered contriving any further makework. I sat paranoically for the rest of the day reading Lenin’s insane life and waiting to get fired for redundancy. My God.
    As for the Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm: surely sex authorities have been maintaining for years that the twat proper is as sensitive as a frozen glove. (A telling figure of speech, I hear you cry.) After all, as Reader’s Digest articles assure us monthly, leading specialists relish nothing better than to perform all manner of drastic surgery to the inner vagina without resort to anaesthetics. Which just makes the mystery of female sexuality more obscure, of course. On the basis of my quite remarkably modest field research it seems undeniable that orgasms for ladies are more extended and intense, when they finally actually get around to happening, than for men, or me anyway. The clitoris is clearly rather crucial to the process. So you’d think female masturbation should be more popular than it is commonly held to be. Curious. Very curious.
    At the Gallaghers’ party yesterday I responded to the general gaiety as to a hammer gradually smashing my bones. Libby refused to be comforted. Mad Quintilla stayed away. The host was as repulsively obnoxious as he’s grown to be.
    I eventually took a tram to the Manchesters’ and slept there after a pleasant enough evening. Their several guests proved to have Advanced Opinions. Not an aspirin between us, we all pussyfooted around the hungover morning sharing mild expressions of comfort, rather than shouting and hunting.
    Don’t you dare commit suicide. Come over here and I’ll kiss it better. Space gone better close. Lots love babe.
    1970: apocalypse now
    JANUARY FIRST NINETEEN SEVENTY
     
    The clocks are being smashed.
    We are a generation in revolt. The old rhythms are breaking up, ocean froth before a tidal wave.
    Now is not then. The clocks are shuddering and shattering. This world of us is not the world of them.
    We are a generation in revolt against the sickly wistfulness of bullshit sentiment, against the evasions that stifle honesty and rage, against the dull gray smog of dull robot work and gray lifeless clothes on stiff dummy bones.
    And yes, indeed, we are in revolt against that one bright feverish flame at the center of the dull gray world we were born into, the lunatic nuclear flame that is waiting to burn us out.
    It is in the last ten years that we have become who we are.
    We are the generation walking cool on our own feet into the Seventies but we were formed by the Sixties. That ferocious decade which has just closed was the time when we found ourselves, created in our own bodies and our own styles a rhythm shaking the worn-out world.
    And it is the music of the Sixties that is our rhythm and our style, our voice, our voyage of discovery: us shaping ourselves.
    Where we