Who am I?

..a
polished head emerging in a straight line from the type of neck generally owned
by South African rugby hookers or Gestapo torturers. Those tight rolls of flesh
extrude out of a too-tight collar and there is too much gold jewellery that
once characterized used car salesmen or proto-Mafiosi. His legs look like Christmas
hams and are so large that his legs are forced apart at a forty-five degree
angle
As the train nears the city it steadily fills with more and more waves of humanity,
where even a vague pleasantness of feature would stand out like Megan Gale in
a burns ward.
Each station has stolid lines of hopeful commuters waiting in quiet desperation
to join this Stygian ferry around the City Loop.
It does not seem possible that such an absence of attractiveness and joy could
be accidental. It must be part of a grand design where Caucasians are selectively
breeding to frighten all other ethnic groups off the planet. If, as someone
claimed, there is a correlation between good looks and intelligence, everyone
in the train carriage is somewhat below average.
The only scenario that historically fits is that white (and I use the term loosely)
Australia was populated by criminals and warders, an echelon of society not
noted for either brains or beauty.
The curse of beauty does not concern these people: they do not wake each morning
with the realisation that time will slowly dim their looks and that perfection
will slowly slide away by perceptible degrees each day. They will never know
that fleeting moment of physical perfection where people stop and stare at the
outrageous fortune that made them so attractive that strong men have to bite
the back of their hands to stop themselves moaning out loud. For these travellers
on the slow train of life it probably can only get better as age dims their
sight so they no longer get startled wondering why Quasimodo keeps staring at
them through the bathroom mirror.
Is this cruel? Does it somehow accord with Maggie Thatcher’s dictum that
anybody who is not driving to work at the age of forty has failed in this society?

As subjects for artist to draw they would be quite interesting, as physical
beauty is strangely disappointing to render with pen or pencil. It is the eccentricities
of the folds of flesh, the crags and outcrops of the skeleton, the bony knee
– even the varicose veins spread like tributaries of the Nile Delta across
the back of the calf – that attract the draughtsman’s interest.

But even here there is disappointment, as there is a strange inward self-containment
in these stolid figures. There is no bursting energy like Breughel’s peasants
or Reuben’s fleshy nudes. This human cargo is not engaged with life, it
is being sullenly transported, to somewhere where, if you were to gauge by their
faces, there was little prospect of happiness. They look betrayed and cautious,
wary of a politicians promise, as if their carriage might be turned into a cattle
truck on the next train to Dachau.
But many hands have wedding or engagement rings, so these people are not unloved
and not unloving. At night they must come home and somehow shake off the detritus
and pain of the day and hopefully look at the small joys of their lives – a
beer, a slice of pizza and three hours of Channel Ten. They look around at their
family and thank God that there are as plain as each other.
So what would happen if Audrey Hepburn in a Salvatore Ferragamo outfit stepped
onto a Melbourne suburban train? Would we all crumble in self pity, or would
we tear her limb from limb? Would all our illusions shatter and would we throw
ourselves in despair under the wheels?
We live in a world where everything is advertised by unnaturally good-looking
people, these freaks of nature who are as representative of the average human
as an Olympic athlete. Models are as unlikely as the Greek marble statues that
were representations of the Platonic ideal of beauty. The glossy pages have
George, Brad and Cate enjoin us to buy a Hermes scarf, a Chanel handbag, a Patek
Philippe watch and somehow be transformed into someone more desirable and attractive.
We aren’t, of course, and, at best, after some vast expenditure, we would
just be much poorer person wearing a Hermes scarf, carrying a Chanel handbag,
and wearing Patek Philippe watch.
It is a week later.
I am travelling on the train for possibly the three thousandth time into the
city. Audrey Hepburn, a radiant beauty who became a secular saint, will never
set foot on this train. Neither will Megan Gale nor George Clooney.
The train carries seven hundred individuals, and all their illusions, safely
towards the New Year, there to find a few moments of forgetting. Maybe someone
on this train will make that future better, because a better tomorrow is not
dependent on appearances but on action.
My daily companions on all the trains in every city in the world, all of us
average and really quite unattractive people, are the only hope that things
might change. It’s a slim hope, but if we don’t get off the train
it will arrive at the station that we never meant to go to.