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we’ll die.”

“Why?”

“Because you need food in order to survive.”

“What’s survive?”

“To live, and not to die, OK? Now daddy’s busy. I’ll be late for work.”

“What happens if you die?”

“You go to heaven.”

“What’s heaven?”

“That’s where God lives.”

“What’s god?”

“He’s the creator of the whole world. Look Leonard, we’ll have to talk about this later, OK? I have to go.”

“Why don’t you just go to the bank and get money?”

My Ruling Council at this stage of my life had my eyes, ears, mouth and hands feverishly collecting data on the outside world. My role was the go-between. If the Council wanted to send a signal out in order to gather information, I was the messenger.

This is what I was doing standing shoulder to shoulder with my fellow pupils at the urinals pissing up the wall. This was the UN of young nations and my Council needed to know where we stood in the pecking order.

We now know we are in the middle. Ordinary, not exceptional. All the other pecking order validation tests we participated in – such as school-yard games, athletics, swimming competitions, team sports, academic achievement – confirmed our ranking among the mediocrity.

In hindsight this was a good place to be – one of the pack. Free of the expectations that go with leadership and high achievement – Donald who could reach the roof – and the taunts and ridicule dumped on the losers and the freaks – poor Frankie who couldn’t make it above the porcelain.

Having established our place in the pack, my role as foreign minister was to form alliances among our peers. This I did. First it was with Billy and then Johnny. We formed a little gang and we would play together every day. We even formed our own secret club when we found a beautiful hiding place inside the thick Cyprus hedge that surrounded the convent. This was strictly out of bounds. So we would freeze, petrified with fear whenever we heard the jingling of Rosary beads, signaling an approaching nun. To be discovered would guarantee us a lashing with Sister Agnus’ dreaded big, black strap.

Our club was called CUB, which stood for Carlton United Breweries. But we weren’t named after the brewery. We were named after their gold bottle tops, which we would collect as treasure and horde in our clubhouse inside the hedge about a metre from the nuns’ letterbox.

Long-term memories are formed by strong emotions. The reason I can recall this moment in my life so vividly is because of the emotional rush we would get when a nun came out of the convent and walked down the pathway to the letterbox to collect the mail.

Watching her approach, unaware of our presence, would send our hearts racing with fear.

So there we were, three independent cell nations that had formed an alliance so strong that we could communicate even without our foreign ministers. We would sit rigid staring into each others’ eyes exchanging strong emotions without speaking – in fact without even breathing. Once the nun had returned to the convent we would be exhilarated. If we were in a cave, no doubt, we would be scrawling crude pictures of nuns on the wall.

Soon this united nations received a new member – Paul.

Paul never quite fitted in. Perhaps it was because we were a united nations of mediocrity and there was a lot about Paul that was not mediocre. For one he could get his stream a lot higher up the wall than we could. He was very athletic – he could run like a gazelle. He was a better student that us and he was doted on by his parents to the point that he was spoilt rotten. He was their only son and he wanted for nothing. Going to parties at Paul’s house was like getting a free pass to Disneyland for us. He had every toy you could imagine.

Paul’s burning desire to be part of our united nations dictated his role. He became the feature of the game we loved to play most – “hide on Holly”, as his surname was Holland.

So whenever he wasn’t paying attention our eyes would meet with a knowing stare and we would quietly sneak away and hide. When he realized we had vanished yet again he would come bounding after us on his long legs like a newborn calf looking for his mother.

We tried this trick on each other, but it never worked. If it was one of us, we would just get deeply offended and sulk away for the rest of the day. So Paul was always It.

I remember having something important to tell him one morning. He would get on the same bus as me. I was the first on with my brothers and sisters and he got on about halfway and then Billy got on after that.

Sitting up the front of the bus I was surprised when the driver went straight passed Paul’s house without even slowing down. I asked him why Paul wasn’t coming to school to day.

One of my fellow students, a girl, answered for him. “Paul’s dead,” she said in a matter-of-fact kind of way. “He had a stomach ache and had to go for an operation, but they didn’t realize that he had a weak heart and he died under the anesthetic.”

I remember thinking: “Oh, really? Okay, I guess I’ll have to tell him tomorrow.”

This was when the nation of Leonard first encountered death and it was all at sea. As foreign minister, I was getting nothing useful from the Ruling Council on this one.

Oh, yes, I’d been told all about death. The nuns were very precise on the subject.

I was told about where you go when you die – heaven, hell, and the waiting room in the middle if you didn’t actually qualify for either, purgatory.

I was told about the ruler of the afterlife, God, the currency they used there, grace, and what you needed to do to earn or lose that currency. We learned the grace value of mortal sins and venial sins and how priests could hand this stuff out in the confessional like bank tellers.

To me learning about the afterlife was just like learning about Argentina in Social Studies, or my times tables. Only for some reason, unlike Argentina, everyone seemed to be afraid of going to Afterlife.

So when I went into the church alone one playtime and stood next to Paul’s coffin, which was sitting closed on a stand in front of the altar waiting for his pending funeral, I didn’t feel sad. I felt immensely proud. My friend Paul was brave enough to go all by himself to a place that even adults were afraid of. I couldn’t wait for him to get back and tell me all about it.

I never cried for Paul, but I’m certainly crying as I write this now.

That’s the thing about my Ruling Council, it often issues directives that can have a profound effect on foreign affairs, without even notifying me, the foreign minister. It forces me to adlib my way out of potentially embarrassing situations. Suddenly being overcome by emotion is one recurring example. I can be calmly telling a story and then suddenly I burst into tears and can hardly speak. If I’m at a funeral or writing about a school friend who died suddenly, then this is not such a problem for me as foreign minister because this is quite appropriate.

However, it can happen when I’m overwhelmed by happiness or even when I’m just trying to explain to my children the importance of Bob Dylan to our generation. This can be more difficult to explain.

The Ruling Council can also throw up some stupid decisions that can really cause me to have to think fast to avoid embarrassment. For example, pissing up the wall. At Immaculate Conception this was pretty-much a routine activity. Every time there were two or more of us standing side by side we would try to show off by going up the wall.

But later, at secondary school, this was not possible. If ever I found myself standing next to someone else at the urinal, my Ruling Council would refuse to allow my stream to start – I couldn’t wee. As foreign minister this was highly embarrassing, because there was no explanation. If I was there first and someone joined me I would pretend that I had just finished and go away. But if we came in together this wasn’t possible. He would start and I would just stand there like an idiot. I would plead with my member to release the stream, but I’d get nothing until the other guy had finished and left. It was humiliating because I’m sure he was conscious of what was going on. I should have realized back then that I was not in charge of myself.

But just being aware of my self delusion has allowed me to elevated my position as foreign minister into a cabinet post. I now have a seat on the Ruling Council. I can even veto decisions in my area of foreign affairs that I don’t think are appropriate – such as turning off the urine stream for reasons of self consciousness. Once I reached the stage in life where I was more comfortable with who I am, this problem went away. At first it took a conscience effort on my part. I would literally tell myself to stop being so stupid and the piss would flow.

I now have a seat on my Ruling Council.

Chapter 10

Communication

Communication is the essence of everything we know and everything we do. The Internet has created a revolution in communications. Databases, Google, Wikipedia, MySpace, YouTube, etc presents us with so much information that you would expect humans in the digital world to be more informed, more in touch and more aware than we have ever been in history. But it hasn't worked out that way.

In his book Crowded Lives, Australian politician Lindsay Tanner points out how technology is eroding human relationships. "Our closest and deepest relationships are being eroded by a rising tide of wider personal interactions, and by isolating involvement with individual technologies. Our crowded lives are cluttered with contact but diminishing in connection."

Emails and SMS text messages are replacing conversations. So much of the communications on the internet is based on language, yet, as I mentioned earlier, language is only a very small part of our communications spectrum. As we become more and more reliant on this small part of the spectrum more and more of our communications go to waste. We are losing our ability to listen. The modern, digital human is going deaf. We are deaf to the language of our inner ruling council, and we are deaf to the language of our world.

Everything is talking to us, but unless it is talking English, or using pictures and flashing lights, we can’t hear most of the messages.

Yesterday I had to have one of our horses, Harcha, destroyed, put down, euthanized, put to sleep – whatever I call it, the fact is it was time for the cellular Nation of Harcha to come to an end.

As I walked towards her with a final meal of horse feed called Gumnuts – she loved Gumnuts – she made it clear by her whinning and body language that she was really looking forward to them.

But there were also other messages telling me this was the time for an end. Her almost skeletal constitution, the arthritis in her legs, coupled with the Stringhalt that made it almost impossible for her to walk to the fence in anticipation of the food, signaled that it would not be long before she would fall down and not be able to get up again.

Most of the cells that made up Harcha when she was a steeple-chaser, or when she went on to win ribbons show jumping at gymkhanas, or safely taking my daughters over jumps at pony club were by now gone. But Harcha was still here. The fact that her body language changed dramatically to anxiety when Leigh the vet arrived, made it clear her memories were there too.

Whenever Leigh came to see her, it was usually to patch her up for some horrific injury she had acquired or to give her injections. Even though his car had changed, she recognized him from a distance. Something in the language of his gait, his demeanor, his overalls, the fact he was carrying a bag, sent signals that her ruling council immediately recognized as a warning that this was not going to be pleasant.

The anticipated pleasure of a feed of Gumnuts was not enough to get Harcha to walk 10 metres to the fence, but the vision of Leigh approaching was more than enough to get her to walk in the opposite direction.

As I led her down the hill to where Theo the tractor operator was completing her grave it was the quickest walk I had seen her take in a long time – all because Leigh was walking behind. Her ruling council had overruled the neurons reporting pain from arthritis and those from the nervous systems reporting difficulty coordinating the back legs because of the Stringhalt and ordered them all to do their best to get moving.

The final walk was necessary because of the conversation Theo had with the land when he arrived. He could tell by the lay of the land that the top of the hill would be far too rocky to dig a horse’s grave. The best place was down the back near the dam. The fact that the dam was there told him the ground was OK to dig. So he was using his eyes to listen to the landscape in order to find the ideal place.

Leonard McDonnell

The Edge Media Pty Ltd