The last supper
A spread fit for queens, by Howick-based locavore and food activist Nikki Brighton.
Storytelling 101: show, don’t tell. Many people at the frontline of climate collapse talk about the mental toll they take from being confronted constantly by the realities of a collapsing climate, and the seeming societal indifference. I’ve often said that it creates an existential loneliness that can’t be soothed, even in the company of people. Here’s an excerpt from Invisible Ink, which shows what it’s like inside this unique kind of isolation. #influencers #generationgap #cocaine #chemo #climatecollapse #dontlookup
Our restaurant seating is a remake of the last supper: 12 or so of us stretched along a narrow table, leaning over each other to catch the eye of someone further along. It doesn’t have the same sense of foreboding, although it should.
Benoit’s just off the plane from France. His birthday surprise is a faux-vintage faux-fur party coat from all of us, and dinner at a swanky spot in town.
The place is up to the gills with Millennials and Gen-Ys who have sashayed off a boutique billboard. We’re feeling a bit like fossils from the Cretaceous — if you know what you’re looking at, we’re an impressive bunch; if you don’t, we’re about as exciting as gravel.
It’s been a while since we’ve hung out, and there’s a lot of catching up to do. Everyone’s paddling easily in the surf, but each of us is fighting against our own rip currents.
Victor’s financial adviser has done some number crunching and reckons if he wants to retire in the style to which he has become accustomed, he’s going to have to work his knuckles raw until he’s 93.
Vic says he might need to become accustomed to something a little less like this joint.
Benoit’s sister has been dancing with the Red Devil — one of the nastiest chemos — and it’s been touch-and-go after a serious post-mastectomy curveball. Jinty has had to bury a step brother, a sister-in-law, and a nephew in the course of a year. All of them gone, way too young and way too soon. The odds are impossibly cruel, and her words are still knotted up in shock. Dehlia’s shopping aisle vertigo spells are getting more tricksy. Darren has to rustle up a multi-million-dollar cost-cut on a copper mine refurb he’s overseeing, because commodity prices have nose-dived and the mine owner can’t foot the original bill.
We’re playing nicely in the waves, but we’re trying not to get our limbs tangled as we struggle against the undercurrents.
Victor breaks in with his usual panache.
‘So,’ he says, short of a drumroll. ‘I just met an ‘influencer’.’
He'd copped a ticket to a fancy-pants lunch with a bunch of mining sector corporates and there’s someone at the table who has nothing whatsoever to do with mining. She’s there because she has a million or so followers on a social media platform. In exchange for lunch, she’ll post pictures of herself at the restaurant, hanging with the mining dudes.
It’s not clear why her followers would be interested in the goings-on of a bunch of mining industry insiders, but there you go, this is the strange new world of advertising.
‘So I ask her what she’s trying to influence. And she’s like ‘What do you mean, what am I trying to influence?’’
‘Well, you know, what’s your cause? If you’ve got this platform to influence people, what are you using it for? Are you raising awareness around, I dunno, something like teenage pregnancy or…?’
‘Oh! No, no,’ she hoots, looking at him as though he has, in fact, crawled out of the fossil record. ‘It’s so I can travel around for free. I tell hotels and restaurants that I’ve got all these followers, and they let me stay for free, and I post pictures of myself in their places.’
Now we definitely feel like geological relics, so we steer back to things that are more familiar to our epoch.
Benoit tells us what it’s been like in Europe these past weeks. The place has been melting like a Dali painting, with temperatures smashing records across the continent. It looks as though Bordeaux may only have a few more harvests left before it becomes too hot for palatable wine. The Rhine has all but shrivelled, so much so that only the smaller barges can still ferry goods up and down this historic transport route for the summer. His brother-in-law’s thinking of moving the family somewhere safer, somewhere in Europe that’s less climate vulnerable. But where’s safe?
The elephant in the conversation: the fledglings amongst our group of friends, the teenagers who will be leaving the nest just as the world is catching fire. How on Earth do we protect them from this, apologise to them for it, live with ourselves as we hand them the baton of adulthood and a fiery hell-Earth.
My bladder has reached carrying capacity, though, so it’s off to the water closet.
One cubicle is occupied. The doorway to the other is blocked by two sleek 20-somethings who are comparing fashion bona fides and trading notes about who to keep an Insta-eye on for the best makeup tips.
I can’t tell if they’re heading into the loo, or out, but either way they’re stuck in transit.
I start a queue of one.
Chatter, chatter, chatter.
I wait.
Chatter, chatter, chatter.
They’re not budging.
Chatter, chatter, chatter.
I’m about to suggest that if they’re there for a bump — judging by the cadence of their speech, they might be — they could cut their lines out here on the basin counter, so that I can get to the porcelain. Would speed things up a bit?
I’m intrigued, though. Have they not noticed that someone else needs the loo, or are they simply unmoved? I’m an anthropologist perched on the banks of the generation gap, jotting down notes. Prehistoric fossil here, Millennials there.
Are they the influencers or the influenced?
Is this what Roger Waters sings about, that we’ve amused ourselves to death?
I want to scream into their bubble: ‘Look up! Look up! The meteors! The meteors! You have to look UP!’
But if I do, I’d have to fess up to my part in summoning in the rain of fire.
They might also think I’m batshit crazy — and they’d only be partly wrong — so I stay shtum.
Bathroom etiquette and the laws of physics are against me, though. There are only so many extra mills a bladder can take before it starts to bust a seam.
I cross my ankles and hop on one foot.
And just like that, it’s over. Without a glance, they pivot on their glossy heels and are out the door.
It’s three years since 2019 shocked my hair curly, and two since the World Health Organization placed us under temporary house arrest. The virus will never be done, the UN is finally telling us, but the pandemic is over. The prison doors are finally sliding open.
We still feel naked without our masks, though, and everything is a bit squiffy. Jinty calls it the Sleeping Beauty Syndrome. It’s as if we’ve woken from a long sleep and everything’s slightly strange. How do we reconcile with our new selves? How do we reemerge?
Back at the table, the wine bottles are emptying fast.
I’ve been off the booze for months — my menopause survival strategy, I tell everyone, to stop the ballooning weight and all that — but the truth is that my dicky nerves can’t cope with alcohol, and it gives me the chronic blues. It’s too high a price to pay for the momentary satisfaction of a mouthful of good Cabernet, no matter how well-aged in whatever kind of oak.
It means I’m not reading from the same sheet music as everyone else. My repertoire of talking points is limited to extreme this and catastrophic that. Not a great pairing for a breezy Friday night. I can’t keep inflicting my misery on these good people.
My throat clogs with unformed words.
The past three years have broken my brain. I’m throwing everything I have at the task of gluing it back together, but the last thing on the doctor’s prescription is the one thing you can’t get from a dispensing pharmacy. Get out of your head and out of your hermitage, Mark the New Therapist says. You have to reconnect with others.
The guy ropes that moor us together in conversation are our reciprocal exchange, but the grappling hooks on the ends of my efforts are barbed with anxiety.
If I can’t add to the chatter, I can at least look like I’m part of it. Body language speaks way louder than words, right? Tonight’s mindful intervention: edit the body language to better integrate into the group. That’s the plan.
I winch the sides of my mouth into a smile — fake it ’til you make it, yeah?
My head works like a deranged Bobblehead as I follow everyone’s banter, although the laughter may be a bit loud.
Darren, from the far end of the table: ’Leo! Why so glum!?’
Me: ‘…………’
I am Judas, exposed.
The smokers on the pavement outside open their huddle, and I shelter in its anonymity as the drizzle simmers electrically against the streetlights.
When this whole damn story finally went Chernobyl earlier in 2022, Mark the New Therapist was one of the first responders. Most of what we do in the months that follow is figure out how much of what’s going on in my head is real and how much is make-believe. The whole Plato’s cave conundrum: how much of what you’re seeing in the world is the shadow on the wall, and how much is the reality of the figure casting the shadow?
‘Have you seen the movie Don’t Look Up?’ I ask him during one of our first meetings.
He nods.
‘You know that scene at the end of the movie, where those people who tried to warn everyone about the asteroid are sitting around the table?’
Nods again.
It’s the last supper. They’re gathered for a final communion. It’s not about the food on their plates. They’re hardly touching the wine. They’re making small talk. Mostly, they’re not looking at the time.
They’re there because they want to be together in their last moments.
One or two of them take hands. The cutlery begins to tremble. The camera pans out. The asteroid is incoming, and it’s a fucking monster.
‘I feel as though I’m at that table,’ I tell Mark. ‘Only, I’m all alone.’