Waxing nostalgic: Duck rice.

I grew up very simply.

No, no, I mean very simply. The other people who say it; they lie. It was a two room flat in Block 48, Lower Delta Road. Living room, one bedroom, a kitchen of sorts and what I suppose can literally be called a shithole.

Other people seem to be able to remember stuff from their childhood very vividly. I have but the vaguest of recollections. I suspect it's something to do with my unconscious suppressing it so I could grow up normally. There are some bits and pieces I do recall, though.

- Someone very carefully shat in the corner of the staircase landing right below my flat. And hey, in that sort of neighbourhood, no one's going to clean up other people's shit. So it was that I would observe with detached amusement, the decomposition of that pile of shit as I went down the stairs each day on my way to school. It eventually ended up a brown stain on the concrete. I suspect it's still there.

- We had these old-school windows, the wooden panels with ventilation flaps, back then. And a sort of window ledge. The bright, curious boy I was back then was delighted to find a balloon someone had dropped onto the ledge, one day. Not that we were that badly off that we couldn't afford balloons, but it wasn't something we'd have gone out to buy otherwise, you see. So I had a good time with it, filling it with water, blowing it up, etc. It was a very special balloon. Mainly because it was a used condom.

- The storms, ah the storms. I do like rain, and these days, the rain just isn't quite the same. Maybe it's the whole "everything is bigger when you're a kid" thing, but the storms back then were lovely, fuck-off huge affairs. The wind would actually howl, and slap the dinky wooden windows back and forth. There was once when the area below flooded a little, too. Curse you, modern-day drainage systems. Floods were fun.

- That shithole was a real primitive affair. We didn't even have tiles - the floor was sort of...bare, brown rock. It was fun, though. When I took baths, I would shut the zinc door, latch it, and sort of play inside. We used this huge pot that was ceramic I think, with dragon designs etched into the sides. Hee hee toilet dragons. I would spend an hour or two in there each time, seeing as it was the only private space I could get, really. Then my father beat the living shit out of me, accusing me of playing with the shampoo while I was in there and wasting it. I didn't, really. I just played with little toys and such. But he didn't stop hitting till I admitted it. Not that he did for a long time after I did.

My father's quite a fuckup, yes. He's marginally better now, but let's not let this degenerate into an angsty-son rant. Because it would seem like I'm looking for pity, when I neither need nor want it. -looks pointedly at Mr Ancob-


Just the other day, I went back to the area for the first time since we moved away from there. The first time in over ten years, I think. One of those really chancy things, because I ended up in the area sort of by accident, and would have moved on immediately when my girlfriend arrived, except we really just wanted to kill some time. She parked, and we both stepped out out the car, and back into my childhood.

Wah drama ah. No, really. I was filled with quite the sense of wonder, walking by the shops at the bottom of the blocks. A lot of the ones I remembered were gone. Those that remained just...stirred me. Faces long buried in the recesses of my mind bustled about doing things, some virtually unchanged. "Good gods, he's still here!", I would exclaim, vague blobs of memory beaten by brute force into vividity. I pranced about the place, pointing out this and marvelling at that.

The girlfriend, she nodded and smiled.

Quite a bit of the area had changed, though. The gah'men very good to us, so they build new things and make the area nice nice. Where the hell had this multi-storey carpark come from, for example? It was a carpark just about enough for twenty cars, back then. Heck, it even made sense. While of course a lot of the residents might have owned cars, living in this area, what are the odds, eh?

I waddled about, a little disoriented from the heady mixture of suddenly-too-familiar places nestled in the trappings of change. And then we walked past the food centre, that love affair of grease and...well, grease. Oh gosh, could that stall still be there? It has to be. Please?

I looked for it. Strained. Craned.

And then I smelled it.

A long-forgotten article I read said the sense of smell is quite often taken for granted, and very overlooked. If you go deaf, communication is a problem. If you lose your sight, gods, that's just a fate I wouldn't wish on anybody. But if you can't smell shit, hey, cry me a river. It was found, however, that patients suffering from long-term severe amnesia would sometimes make a spontaneous full recovery when a familiar smell is brought to them. A grandmother's perfume, for example. Or the armpit your father used to bury your face in when you were a kid.

I smelled it, and it all came back. There it was, that roast meat stall with duck to er, end all ducks. That didn't make sense, did it? I'm trying to say his duck was very good. But it's duck. A bit difficult to wax poetic on. Let's see...what rhymes with duck...

Oh. Never mind.

Just about the only treat I would get back then was on my birthday, when a whole half of a roasted duck would be bought (might have been a full duck, but I doubt it) along with a cake and such. My mother would make little jellies and I would blow the candles out on the cake and eat myself stupid. That meat was the best in the world.

Yes, I was a fat kid. Yes, I love my mother, very much. My father, however, was a usele...

So, about that stall. Not only was his meat really good, on the rare occasions when I was brought to eat out there, I would watch with rapt fascination as he chopped up the meat. He had it down to an art. When an order was placed, he'd take up the cleaver, and start rhythmically tokking the front and end point of the knife edge on the wooden board at a rate of about two toks a second. Then, he'd move the meat in, and it would get really fun watching him smack into the meat between toks. A clean cut, every time. For each order, it would be:

Toktok toktok THWACK toktoktok THWACK toktoktok THWACKTHWACKTHWACK scrape scrape PIAK Ok thank you two dollar please.

You'd hear the sounds a mile off. And on busy weekend afternoons, it would just be a whole day of toks. And he'd pause every so often to wipe the beaded sweat off his forehead with that towel around his neck, never once losing the rhythm. When this man chopped the roasted meat, you knew that piece of meat he was cutting up for you was the most important thing ever to him right then.

And he was there. Same plain white shirt, same crooked smile. Same hair too, if a little greyer. I place an order and tell him how I'd lived there more than ten years ago, growing up with his roasted duck. His eyes widen - has he really been carving meat for that long? Gosh, time flies doesn't it, he says with genuine surprise.


It was the best damned meat I'd tasted in over ten years.