The photograph of the dead kangaroo is to Australia’s Black Summer what Napalm Girl was to the Vietnam War. It’s too painful to look at, but you can’t not.

The animal is cartoonish and macabre. Her lips pull back in a grin-grimace. Her forelegs hang over a strand of fencing wire like someone chatting to the neighbour at the garden gate.

Her skin is roasted to a blackened crust, with floral pink flesh bursting through where it has cracked in places. Fatty chest tissue has melted over a wire strand like candle wax, fusing together the organic and the inorganic.

The wire looks untouched.

The kangaroo is trapped in charred rictus against the metal strands that blocked her flight from one of the many wildfires that tore through the Australian bushland in the summer of 2019 and 2020. She was one of about 3 billion animals — three billion — that were burned alive, hurt, or left homeless that season.

Seeing her, the mirror neurons in my brain fire like a gas works. What were her last conscious moments like? The sparking, roaring, ravenous, blistering membrane of flames and heat and wind; the explosion of adrenalin rocketing her forward; the unseen fencing strands blocking her flight; the panic; the madness. The sweet-sour in her nose as her hair shrivels and ignites. Each nerve ending lighting like the fuse on a firecracker. The pain fizzing along every nerve fibre, each one delivering a message of misery that explodes in unison in her brain.

How long before the mercy of unconsciousness arrives?

What of the slower suffering of her kin elsewhere in the woods? What of the creatures left to crawl through the smouldering wasteland — some injured, some not — deranged with thirst and hunger.

The daily social media infinity-scroll gives a reprieve when the algorithm delivers the moment when a koala bear waddles up to a fire fighter, grips his outstretched water bottle between both paws, and drinks straight from the neck of the bottle.

Glug, glug, glug, glug, glug…

What about all the creatures that didn’t make it to water, whose suffering didn't happen because there wasn’t a smartphone to bear witness, and turn it into an Instagram-able moment?

‘What are you afraid of?’ Mark the New Therapist asks during one of our first emergency sessions three years later, when things fall apart.

I fear he thinks I’ve lost touch with reality. Maybe he thinks I’m psychotic, that I’ve conjured a climate collapse story that is so hyperbolic, so extreme, but that it’s a smokescreen for my actual state of mind: that I want an excuse to choose early retirement from the pain of being human in a world going mad.

‘I’m not afraid of dying, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.’

A Woody Allen joke.

‘I don’t mind being dead,’ I say. That’s simply an eternal dreamless sleep.

‘It’s the suffering that comes before death. All the animals and plants and people who are going to die terrifying, horrific deaths. There’s nothing we can do about it. There’s too much pain and it’s not going to stop.’

I can’t look. I can’t not look. After 20 years of doing this — of being a small voice in the community trying to raise the alarm about climate ‘change’ — I don’t know if I have the stomach for it anymore.

Truth-bomb

The daily news cycle is a fire-hose of footage from Australia’s Black Summer, and its worse than a madman’s depiction of hell. A photograph from New South Wales struggles to capture the scale of the fire front, a lava flow pouring across the full breadth of the horizon. A fire truck in the foreground is the size of a dinky toy; its ladders, matchsticks; the water hoses as thin as dental floss.

Run, you want to yell at the fire crew, go! Get out of there!

A dash cam video captures another emergency vehicle’s flight through a Dante-ian inferno. The truck bounces over a dirt road. The crew’s voices over the shortwave radio are a morse code of panicked dots and dashes. Embers crash overhead. Eucalyptus trees, tall as skyscrapers all around them, liquify. A conflagration of fluid glass.

How can they still be alive? How will they escape? Will they floor it through the closing aperture in the road ahead? What lies beyond, more molten forest? Will they try a frantic ten-point-turn and hightail it back the way they came?

Then come the stories of the aftermath. A clip shot from the belly of a chopper as it thuds over the skeletal forest canopy, tree crowns charred and still puffing smoke, while the crew drops bags of carrots and spuds onto the ground below in the hope that some starving animals might happen upon the provisions. The ruins of a homestead, the family car gutted in what was once a driveway, and a few lines of text suggesting that there are human remains cowering somewhere inside. An interview with parents telling of the hours submerged up to their noses in a farm dam, their children clinging to their sides, hoping to survive the night.

This is the year where we can no longer deny that the weather is weirding everywhere.

California is also ablaze. A wedding photographer breaks the mould during a gig on a Sonoma Valley wine estate. The young couple, standing amongst the tame lines of vineyards, aren’t turned towards each other, gazing longingly into their love story. They’re shoulder-to-shoulder, squared off to the camera, eyes unreadable above the masks that protect them against invisible particles in the air. The sky is eerie and a dust-ball sun hints of the hell and damned fury beyond our field of view — beyond the physical horizon in that valley, and beyond the time horizon of our collective tomorrow.

The world is burning up.

Alaska, Siberia, and Amazonia are also tinderboxes that have now caught alight.

Temperatures smash historic records in Europe, the UK, and Australia. In India, 1,900 people die in the stronger-than-normal monsoon. In the US, 673 lives are lost beneath the weight of Hurricane Doria. Drought throttles countries across South America. A drone shot captures a circle of giraffe carcasses mummified in the heat, a few of the untold casualties of a horror drought across the arid parts of southern Africa.

The Guardian newspaper reports that extreme weather events cause $100 billion of damage around the world that year. The numbers are so big, they don’t scale to what the everyday brain can register.

Science writing 101: put a face to the numbers. You’ll reach people not through their heads with clinical facts, we’ve been saying, but through their hearts with human stories. 2019 gives us the faces and stories in spades, both human and other-than-human. Newsrooms are finally starting to pay attention.

For so long, the climate story has been tucked away on the nice-to-have environmental pages in the back of the paper — a kind of charity spend on the hippy stories if there’s some small change left over after newsroom resources have been spent on the ‘apex’ beats, like politics, economics, and even sport. But some news desks are hitting the panic button, running the catastrophe headlines front-page and above the fold.

For years science writers have been raging against the fact that the news media hasn’t paid this story enough attention, that journalists have failed in their role as the Fourth Estate. Journalism is a load-bearing wall in a healthy democracy, I’ve ranted in endless column inches. We’re supposed to hold government accountable, stoke up an active citizenry, and keep society informed about the forces shaping our lives. But this one — the biggest story of our times, about forces that are driving us to extinction — still gets treated as an add-on to the news agenda. Many newsrooms — the business pages in particular — keep regurgitating the same old story, the one that crows about the successes of limitless growth. They simply cheerlead the businesses and governments that play by the rules of the limitless growth game, not questioning the rules of the game itself. They’re still lauding the profit-makers, the expanding oilfields, the bullish GDPs, praising the speed of growth, but ignoring the pollution that’s coming from it.

Now, in 2019, headline writers get a chance to put their wordsmithing talents towards showing how badly we might be careening away from a stable climate. They start using words straight from the Book of Revelations.

Although even these might soon become dull with overuse. There are only so many times you can call these scenes apocalyptic before the word loses its sucker-punch. Apocalyptic is right, though. This is a hell worthy of biblical adjectives.

When Cyclone Idai smashes into the African east coast, flattening the Mozambican city of Beira and wiping out 90 percent of its infrastructure in another record-breaking extreme event, I get the scent of a story. A bunch of researchers are designing early warning systems that better integrate short-term weather forecasts into emergency response preparedness so that communities like this can ready themselves more effectively ahead of incoming climate shocks like Idai. When I call some of the people on the ground, who are testing the system there, the conversations are short and hurried, because there’s too much going on. Another cyclone is on its way and there are something like 1.3 million Mozambicans needing emergency humanitarian aid. Transport routes are so badly damaged that getting food and medical supplies into Beira and then distributed to communities on the ground is a logistical challenge of wartime proportions. Not much of this makes it into news feeds, because there are so few journalists on the ground in this part of the world.

In the heat of the disaster response, there’s one glaring omission in the little news reporting and analysis that is happening. It’s the same silence that deafens the coverage of the extreme events everywhere in formerly colonised countries.

Who is responsible for the damage caused by this cyclone, and who pays for the cleanup?

When Beira has mopped up the mess, it will have to decide what comes next. Does the city rebuild here, or does everyone make a break for it and relocate further inland to safe, higher ground? Who coordinates this? Most of all, who will foot the bill?

This cyclone isn’t the Mozambican people’s fault. The country’s already crippled tax base should not have to cough up to repair the damage. Global North countries set a match to the kindling generations earlier, fanning the flames of industrial growth that were modest at first, but which have now grown into a bonfire that is beyond anyone’s control. Cyclones like Idai, and Kenneth which came hot on its heels, are a certainty for coastal cities like Beira, come what may. Beira should move inland, but how the hell does the country pay for it when they’re one of the poorest regions on the globe, through no fault of their own?

Day Zero

By 2019, Cape Town has narrowly dodged its own bullet. After a three-year drought that gave us a moment of international fame, the rains are finally back and we almost weep with collective relief.

‘Day Zero’: this was our tagline for an emergency water management plan that was going to kick into play should our dams run down to a puddle. The municipality was going to turn off the taps to suburban homes and non-essential businesses. We’d have had to queue at communal water distribution points for a daily rationing of 25l of water per person. Just enough for the basics: drinking, cooking, cleaning ourselves, flushing away our daily bowel movements.

We held our breath, watching a daily online dashboard of the city’s water stocks dropping lower and lower as tightening water restrictions began hitting small businesses like car washes and restaurants.

Protests flared up in townships and slums. Cape Town’s poorest have been fetching water from communal taps for years, living in a Groundhog Day of barely enough water and sometimes zero sanitation, and now the rich were whining about the prospect of doing the same. While the poorest still toil under a generations-long service delivery backlog, the rich were buying their way out of the inconvenience of a failing municipal grid, spending thousands to sink private boreholes into their back yards. The super-rich were spending their small change to buy their way around water price hikes and steep fines, so they could continue soaking their lawns and topping up their swimming pools with water that should have been for other people to drink.

All those fidgety thoughts about what’d happen if the water really did run out. What happens if water shortages grind the economy to a halt? What happens when hungry people lose their jobs and get hungrier?

The government anticipated this, warning us that the military was on standby to keep the peace.

I’d begun researching dry toilet solutions for apartments in high-density suburbs as a short-term solution. It didn’t bear thinking about toilets not working.

But what if this happened again, and again?

My retirement savings, modest as they are, are tied up in a flat in a suburb where the property bubble was already bursting. If Cape Town lost its water supply, the city would wither to little more than a seaside holiday village, the funds to support me in my old age with it.

What to do, what to do? Should I sell the property and move this modest investment offshore? Do I sell now, or in five years’ time? Or 10? But what if global financial markets collapse, and the money, switcheroo-ed from bricks-and-mortar into zeros-and-ones in the digital cloud, evaporates? I’d be penniless and homeless.

Decision paralysis. How on Earth do we plan for a future so uncertain, so chaotic?

1.5°C

For years, scientists have been telling us to limit the globe’s average temperature increase to between 1.5°C and 2°C, relative to pre-industrial times. It’s a rough estimate of where they think we can keep the climate system safe-ish-ly similar to the conditions that our ‘civilisation’ emerged in during the previous 12,000 years.

It’s a moonshot goal, given our pollution is increasing and we’re headed for a 3°C or more increase, but we have to aim for something, right?

Changes at this speed — within a human lifetime — will bring about what writer David Wallace-Wells calls an uninhabitable Earth. Few species or societies will be able to adapt and evolve fast enough to be fit to survive this new planetary state. Author John Vaillant calls it clima incognita, the unknown climate.

In 2018, the United Nations IPCC Special Report Global Warming of 1.5°C tells us we've got about a decade in which to level off our carbon pollution, a target set for 2030. Then we have to get to net-zero by mid-century, where the amount of pollution we’re pumping into the atmosphere is balanced out by the amount we’re mopping up through the hard work of forests, grasslands, savannahs and ocean carbon sinks.

The disconnect between what we have to achieve and the reality on the ground is enough to melt anyone’s brain.

Five and 10

1972: the year that I was born, and a relatable pin-drop on the timeline of a story that unfolds over scales that are unfathomable to most of us.

It’s a half-a-lifetime yardstick against which to measure our species’ advancements on matters such as development, progress, and planetary ruin.

In these five short decades, our society has dumped more carbon pollution into the atmosphere than in all the preceding decades of industrialisation. Progressive economists have been warning us all this time that we can’t keep on consuming, and growing, and polluting like this. And yet here we are.

Somewhere in this messy time, it occurs to me that I’ve been alive for 50 years. That I’ve spent 20 or so of those trying to add my voice to the growing number of others who hope to shout loudly enough to raise the alarm. But the situation isn’t getting better. It’s only getting worse. Much, much worse.

Now the world’s best scientists are saying we have 10 years to slow this disaster before we begin sliding down into an abyss of suffering.

One decade; 10 birthdays; 130 full moons.

Detonation day

The moment comes late one night while I’m decompressing on my stoep after a panel discussion in town with an audience of about 30.

We’ve had a fiery exchange about how urgent the situation is, and how we have to act now. The evening is a rallying cry. There’s no silver bullet solution, I say. Each one of us needs to understand how the system works and where we fit into it and have leverage. Then we need to leverage the fuck out of it!

It’s the usual suspects tonight — we’re the choir, singing to each other — and as we disband, we feel temporarily buoyed.

When I flop into the chair on my stoep to settle my brain before bed, the night is balmy and somnambulant. The meniscus of a quarter moon hovers at a point near midnight.

That’s when the freight train hits.

It’s too late. It’s actually too late.

Earlier in the year, scientists reporting from the high Arctic were saying that the rate of ice and permafrost thawing in their study sites is happening decades ahead of schedule. Once-frozen permafrost is turning to slurry, belching out volleys of methane that have been locked away in the ice for millions of years. Methane is a potent climate-warming gas. It is short-lived, only staying in the atmosphere for ten or so years, but while its there it’s like rocket fuel to global heating.

Explosive methane release from Artic thawing, like this, is one of the lethal tipping points that scientists have been warning us about, a process that will lurch us out of our climate’s stable state, and into a negative feedback loop of warming that will spin the planet into climate meltdown.

It’s a point of no return, and we may have just reached it.

It’s game over.

Head-knowledge sets into an embodied numbness. It’s as if the top of my head explodes but with a mind-expanding calm. As if in a dream state, I slip out of the front gate and onto the pavement, floating through the neighbourhood towards the high street. A few late-night taxis hum past. A chip packet stirs to life in the wake of a car, summersaults down the street and bangs its head on the asphalt a few times. The traffic lights cycle through their colours for no-one in particular. Red neon lettering glows above the local curry joint, which is dark inside, the chairs upturned on the tables for the night.

It’s as lonely as an Edward Hopper canvas.

It’s all gone.

All of it. Gone.

Psychologists in end-of-life care call it the existential slap. That moment when you’re catapulted out of denial and stare your mortality square in the face. This is it. This is it.

My generation might not die of old age or natural causes.

What of the youngsters coming after us?

When the dawn comes the next day, the numbness burns off like mist in the morning sun. Gravity has tripled its hold, and my bed won’t release me. The day’s deadlines don’t seem quite so pressing.

It’s like having a brain concussion. You know you need medical help, but you don’t know how to get it.

The phone rattles. A colleague. She picks up something’s off. By that afternoon, I’m back on my old therapist’s couch after a long leave of absence.

‘If you find out you’ve got terminal cancer, and you know that the battle is lost,’ I put to her, ‘if you know that the next few years will be suffering and more suffering, for yourself and for everyone else, human and non-human, do you choose the chemo? Or do you let the disease run wild and be done with it? It doesn’t matter what choice you make, chemo or no chemo, it’s going to be brutal and lonely, and the outcome is inevitable.’

Between us, the therapist and I cobble together a plan. I throw myself into a fever of writing. I have to do something, right? A new angle begins to feature in some of the stories: the mental health implications as people confront the reality of life in a collapsing climate.

This is the new frontline of one of the climate story’s under-reported health impacts. The mental breakdown from the trauma of surviving acute climate stress, like losing your home to a wildfire, or a loved one to a heart attack during a heatwave, or surviving being swept away in floodwaters, or the trauma of being driven to migrate to a foreign neighbourhood because yours has become politically too unstable.

Then there’s the mental collapse for those living with the chronic anxiety of seeing the world turn to flames and your future incinerating before your eyes.

Mental health medics begin warning us of what we will see coming down the pike: depression, self-harm, domestic violence, substance misuse, deaths of despair, intentional early departure.

The biggest human burden

The problem with being alive and conscious, is that we know that one day we won’t be.

I once heard a man with end-stage cancer speaking about his approaching death. His voice was calm, the cadence of his words gentle and measured. His equanimity was comforting.

‘We all know we’re going to die,’ he said, ‘I just have a rough time and date.’

What do we do with the time we have left, whether or not we know our departure slot?

Rain of fire

When the satirical movie Don’t Look Up comes out in 2021, it uses the imagery of Earth colliding with an asteroid as an analogue for climate collapse. Scientists have got wind of a giant space rock on a collision course with Earth, its storyline goes, and they’ve worked out the exact time of impact. It’ll be tickets. It’s an extinction-level event, no question.

The film is farcical, true to the blunt-force style of satire, in which a few plucky individuals are trying to warn a maddeningly indifferent society that the end is nigh.

The asteroid metaphor had been orbiting in climate circles for a while already, well before it made it onto the big screen.

A few years earlier, a group of colleagues got together for a thought experiment, to tease out exactly this scenario. What if we knew we only had ten more years before a meteor impact annihilated Earth? If we knew we only had a decade left, how would we live our lives?

I jotted down a few bullet points while we talked.

‘I’d stop writing books,’ I put to the collective. ‘The lead time is too long and we need to get new ideas circulating in the public discourse quickly. I’d focus my writing effort on fast turnover journalism. Besides, books like these don’t get more than two or three thousand readers, so that’s not much use.’

I’d also manage my finances differently, planning for a mid-term savings peak rather than the kind of old age my parents have reached. No more traditional retirement planning.

‘I’d also spend more time on the mountain. And I’d spend more time with close friends.’

Isn’t this how we should live every day, though, we ponder?

The asteroid analogy and the ten-year window become a lode star, keeping me focused on how to live each day fully, meaningfully, responsibly.

Although by the time Don’t Look Up comes out, the metaphor has pupated into something else for me. The idea of the asteroid collision is useful, but too simplistic. It suggests a single-impact event at some point in a remote future. In that scenario, does it matter if we choose to look up right now, or in a few years’ time, or not at all? We’ll deal with tomorrow, tomorrow.

A better metaphor is that we’re hurtling into the path of a field of space debris. The deeper we get into the cloud, the more we’re going to have meteors hitting our atmosphere and burning up, bringing a rain of fire down on our heads. Each meteor will have its own impact site, each its own blast radius. Unlike the asteroid, we can’t predict exactly when each space rock will hit, or where it will land, or what the detonation zone will be.

2019 is the year I realise that we are already spinning into the path of the cloud of space rocks. Day Zero was a meteor strike. Beira was a meteor strike. The Black Summer fires and the dead kangaroo, more meteor strikes. All the fires and floods and heatwaves and droughts — some days-long events, some spanning years — all meteor strikes, each with their own localised devastation.

It has already begun, I realise, and it’s going to accelerate.

Retirement strategy

Ben and I are oddballs, which might be why we fit together so well.

Our work is a vocation rather than a job, he as a restitution mediator, me in climate storytelling. We’re loners and introverts. By my telling of things, we live together, but in two different places — sometimes at his place, sometimes at mine, often apart. We share a wanderlust. We travel well together, particularly on rough road trips into the desert. We also thrive on the solo excursions when our work takes us off on our own paths. He likes to cook, I like to eat. Our after-hours wardrobes have become unexpectedly colourful, thanks to a later-in-life discovery of psychedelics. We even look similar: cropped boyish haircuts; square faces; short, stocky frames; Hobbit feet.

Neither of us is interested in marriage, something we consider an outdated institution for people like us. We don’t want to co-habit, and I’m not interested in grand gestures of commitment. For me, commitment means living each day with the intention to make decisions and act in ways that are nurturing of each of us as individuals, and for us as a couple. Some days I get it right, many days I don’t, but it’s the showing up and the intention that counts, I keep saying. Ben doesn’t need to verbalise his position; he lives it out one delicious meal at a time.

When we meet — me in my early 40s, him in his early 50s — we both have enough flying time behind us that we seem able to keep the plane steady, even through turbulence, without too many nose-dives.

Even oddballs have to have retirement plans, though.

We both have aging parents whose pension shortfall is no fault of their own. They’re products of their time: couples who didn’t play the long-term double-income savings game. There’s a dodgy investor and some institutional fraud that whittled away at their savings. Then a global market crash just as they make their big withdrawal, dwindling their savings further.

Without our monthly cash contributions, our parents would, quite literally, go hungry.

Both of us realise we’re headed in the same direction. Ben’s financial adviser says it’s time to panic. I don’t speak with one, because I know there isn’t much I can do to make up the shortfall.

In my circle of friends, around the privacy of the dinner table when the wine bottles are nearing empty and our tongues unguarded, we half-jest about what retirement means in a capitalist system when we can’t work anymore. The intentional departure. The modern version of the Inuit practice of allowing the elderly to be taken by exposure on an ice floe.

The arrival of the Deep Adaptation paper forces our retirement planning in a way that no financial adviser could.

Prof Jem Bendell at the University of Cumbria’s Institute for Leadership and Sustainability in the UK breaks academic protocol by self-publishing a door-stopper essay in which he lays out his case for why he sees near-term societal failure due to climate collapse as inevitable. His view is a little outside of the Overton Window – the range of ideas that are tolerated within public discourse – and he argues that this message is so urgent that it needs to bypass the gatekeepers of peer review that have stopped the paper from getting out into the village square until now.

The collapse is coming, and fast, he says. We need to brace for impact.

I share the paper with Ben. It’s long and chilling, but sums up some of the things we’ve been circling around in our conversations: what does our future look like here in Cape Town? How should we live, where should we live, and what do we do if the city gets hit by more Day Zero-scale droughts? What about the political instability in a city with such huge divides between rich and poor? What of the country’s national competence: corruption, a failing electricity grid dragging the economy down, a precarious democratic state?

A segment on the evening news one day gives the perspective of four Australian climate scientists. Each talks about how they are preparing for climate collapse. One says her family’s resilience strategy is to have multiple languages, multiple passports, and transferable skills.

I add to her list: ‘… and liquid assets’.

We need to be mobile, I tell Ben. When that meteor appears in the sky above our neighbourhood, we need to be able to get the hell out of dodge. Ben does his maths: climate resilience + retirement plan = Australia. His kids are there. There’s a social safety net. The place is politically stable.

I’ll go with him, right? Of course…?

My assets aren’t liquid, though, so Ben’s decision breaks my paralysis. I call the estate agent and put a ‘for sale’ sign up outside my flat, although I’m still on the fence.

We don’t have a departure date or a concrete plan, but Ben starts thinking about what comes next: what furniture to sell, when to end the lease on his flat, where to get a shipping container.

I’m still doing my own maths.

By February 2019, as the year slides into second gear, the two sides of the ledger don’t balance for me. South Africa is my home. This is where my friends are, my family, my cats, my work. This is where I belong, and this is where I’m needed. In our obtuse conversations, maybe I’ve heard what I wanted to hear, but I’m sure that if I decide to stay, Ben will too.

I tell him my position. I have to stay. It’s an uncomfortable impasse that lasts for weeks, but I’m sure we'll figure it out.

We don’t. Our life together comes undone over a simple dinner of roast chicken and leafy salad.

If he’s going, and I’m staying, I put to him by way of throwing down the gauntlet that night, why even stay together between now and when he leaves? We might as well end it now.

It’s a rhetorical question, but before the school rush hour traffic has picked up the next morning, he’s wheeling his suitcase out the door.

My mind plays tricks on me. This new Ben is unrecognisable. An interloper has stolen his skin and zipped itself up inside it. There’s an alien walking amongst us in a Ben-shaped onesie. It looks like him, it talks like him, it sounds like him, but it’s not him. The skin it’s wearing is misshapen enough to break the disguise.

I need to drown out the noise in my head. I pick up an old habit I’ve barely touched in 20 years. I reckon smoking is a safer coping mechanism than booze, given the family history. Overnight, I go from zero to half-a-pack-a-day. By the time it’s a straight-jacket addiction again, I figure that quitting isn’t the most pressing thing to fret about right now.

Ben and I barely see each other in the six months that follow. The few exchanges we have are a war zone of confusion, anger, and shock, which carpet-bomb whatever goodwill we might have salvaged from the debris. By September, he’s gone.

This is what climate scientists call maladaptation — the unintended and not-so-good outcome of an adaptation response that was supposed to buffer against climate shocks.

Ben has his own story. By my reading of it, we’re a casualty of a climate resilience strategy gone wrong.

‘Look up!’

There’s a basket of toys-slash-sweeties at the checkout at my local grocer. They’re chunky plastic syringes filled with what looks like it might be chocolate syrup. The promise is that the kid gets to play nurse for a bit, and shoot up with sugar.

They’re at a five-year-old’s eye level, the last display at the end of the aisle of temptation. These salesmen know their stuff: the nag factor, the tired parent, a kid’s dopamine drive screaming for a fix. It’s a slam-dunk sale.

It’s quite maddening.

This is where single-use plastic — a by-product of the fossil fuel industry — meets the single-use sugar-fix. Both are the evil twins of powerful profit-taking empires. Both are global polluters. One is dumping plastics into the environment: the plastic dispenser will outlive the kid who plays with it once by multiple lifetimes. The other is dumping nutritional pollution into our bodies: think of hunger, or diabetes and obesity as being like an oil spill on a beach. Both are produced by bullies that have profited off a system that allows them to churn out waste, pocketing the profits and leaving us and the environment to carry the costs.

There’s nothing wholesome in this toy-sweet, not in its packaging, nor its contents, and the hedonic pleasure it gives the kid will burn off as fast as the sugar rush.

If the situation weren’t so dire, it’d be easy to let all these little infractions pass, but the toy-sugar-syringe thingimiebob is a good analogue for the mess we’re in: every needless hit of plastic or sugar dumps a few more grams of carbon pollution into the fast-filling atmospheric space, hurtling us faster and deeper into the path of the meteor cloud.

This toy is going to give the five-year-old fleeting pleasure now, but at the cost of a stable climate when she’s 15, and 25, and 55.

‘Look up!’ I want to roar across the grocery store.

‘Look up! You have to LOOK UP! This is CRIMINAL! These corporations are predators, using our kids for profit, and torching our home. We have to stop this madness! LOOK UP!’

But the cashier can’t do much to stop the forces that are flooding our system with plastic-sugar pollution. The store manager can’t do much either. They’re both tiny cogs in a giant machine. Besides, a rant like this could well get me marched off the premises.

Can’t have that. This is where I buy my smokes.

So, I screw down the lid on the pressure cooker, and the steam builds.

Calm before the storm

A few days before Christmas in 2019, the World Health Organization gets wind of a handful of mysterious pneumonia cases in the Chinese city of Wuhan, cause unknown. The news cycle picks up on it, but I give this a passing glance. I can’t tear my attention away from Australia’s burning kangaroos and koalas.

Sproing!

If I did a standup routine about this shit-show, I’d kick it off with saying that 2019 was the year that shocked my hair curly.

My hair does go curly in 2019, in the same way that Ernest Hemingway said we go bankrupt: gradually, and then suddenly.

Sam, the hair stylist, first notices something afoot during a routine short-back-and-sides sesh.

‘Look at this!’ Her fingers stretch out a single coil from somewhere around the neckline and release it.

Sproing…

The whole nape is a mess of shock-absorber rings.

In September, though, the ‘suddenly' bit happens. I can’t say whether or not the change has been creeping up for days and is lost in the noise of sloppy grooming, but one morning the stuff in the mirror is not the material I’ve been working with for the past 40-odd years.

… ?

I put a comb through the bed-messed down.

…!?

A halo of frizz.

I give it a good dousing with water, and let it air dry.

Staring back at me is… me but with a Ronald McDonald skull cap.

I tilt my chin this way to get a better view, and then that. No, no good. I gyroscope my phone around my head, clicking for a 180-degree aerial view. The crown angle says it all: ringlets, tight as if they’d been set with perm curlers.

Imagine you’ve had a clean jawline all your life, and one day you wake with a five o’clock shadow?

The TEDx talk archives probably have the best before-and-afters. In a 2012 talk, the person on the stage has her trademark pixie cut, hair strands straight as a die; December 2019, same person, same platform, similar length hair, but she’s part pro, part party clown.

Google says that this can happen — straight hair curling up, curly hair straightening — and it’s usually to do with hormone change at adolescence or midlife. My gynae says she’s never heard of this as a symptom of — shudder — The Change.

I don’t know it yet, but here be a fire-breathing dragon of a whole other kind.

The Last Supper

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.

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.’

Chapter 3…