Cobargo. Saturday, 11.15pm
My self-inflating mattress is also self-deflating. What goes up, must come down: Newton’s law of gravity. I can feel the Earth beneath the mattress. Not only the Earth, but each twig, stone, grass clump, hoofprint and ant poo on it. It’s imprinting on my skin.
My back has become a detailed three-dmensional geophysical map of a square metre of the Cobargo showground. Roll me over and I’m a flesh-coloured parrallel universe to the one below. If ants took DMT they would end up here, trekking through a strange place weirdly familiar, but with moles and scars.
Not far from me is another inflatable mattress. It belongs to my comedy partner. He’s not here. Maybe I could do a quick swap… I reach out and touch it. It too has deflated.
Outside, the Cobargo Folk Festival rumbles on, but I’m too tired to party with it. But, despite the blanket-that-used-to-be-a-mattress, I feel happy. Why? We had a good gig.
For me, the stage is therapy. There, I’m here and now. There, my head is no longer filled with the awful consequences of dickheads with power. There, the past disappears, the present is all-engrossing, and the future a cold beer.
For 50 minutes, I inhabit a space where reality is just people and me. That’s all. No phones or televisions. No tortuous mutilation of language by an insincere politician feigning sincerity. No worrying about ageing, death, deadlines or tinnitus. No anxious reactions to pings, rings, dings or chimes. No fears of a future of fascism, famine and fire.
For 50 minutes, it’s just my comedy partner and me having a chat to the people in front of us, creating something special, something human (and something silly, of course) just for me, him and them. It may not be the greatest art in the world, but it is art. Art is humans talking to each other. And art is all we have…
Or maybe I just love adrenalin.
Not only is my self-inflating mattress deflated, the tent is on a slope. The skin on my back is stuck like velcro to the geographic corrugations of the deflated mattress, but the bulk of me, a slave to Newton’s gravity, is sliding slowly down, like a glacier, grinding past my spine, towards the tent wall. It feels weird, my shoulders near my ears, my belly near my knees. I’m pinned, like a fat wingless butterfly, to the sloping floor of the tent.
I’m happy sure, but I’m sure sore, so I rip myself off the mattress into a sitting position. I feel the micro-geographic indentations in my back slowly morph back into the smooth slouch of normality.
Wrapping on a sarong, I emerge from the canvas pouch into the floodlit festival night. Around me is a retirement of large motorhomes and expander caravans belonging to festival punters and better paid artists. This afternoon, I laughed at them. Now, I’m envious.
I sit on the little camping chair. My comedy partner returns from wandering the festival. I open a bottle of Nature’s Harvest shiraz and pour us a wine each.
‘It was a good show tonight,’ he says, his eyes telling me he’s happy too.
“‘Yeah, it was,’ I say, and we touch plastic cups noiselessly, and drain them.
We are good mates, he and I. You have to be, two big blokes sharing a tent. And a stage. Love is what makes the art; all art.
He lives closer to this gig than me. He drove; I flew. So he brought the tent and the mattresses.
‘How’s the mattress?’ he asks.
‘You’ll need another one of these,’ I say, refilling his plastic cup.
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