omen
voluntarily inflicting a certain level of insanity on myself, writing about that of which i am most ashamed, don't judge me, etc
‘Mark, your problem is actually that you’re too religious, you always think everything is a sign from the divine,’ Celia told me, tucking her black curls behind her ear. She’d always been the logical one. More interesting, more intense, straight-laced. She was more beautiful too, lithe and graceful. When I looked in the mirror, my bald head shone and my thick cheeks erased any shred of mystery. Celia got the looks. I got the superstition.
‘Is that the truth?’ I asked her, displeased with her characterisation of me as a chakra boy, knowing what she thought of astrology and the supernatural. We sat together, sprawled out on my yellow picnic blanket, snacking on the Woolies fruits she’d provided for our De Waal picnic. I’d been banned from snack duty the last time we’d tried to do a picnic together - Celia’s taste for sugar was no match for mine and she’d left early, feeling sick from the cupcakes and Chuckles I’d supplied. Earlier this morning at the beach, she’d taken great pains to remind me of our family history of diabetes, chiding me when I ordered my hot chocolate and added extra sugar. I loved her, so completely.
‘It is, Mark. I don’t always know that you live on the same plain as the rest of us. It’s like you took that semester of Classics and it reorganised the entire planet in your head.’
‘It did!’
‘Well there you go, you’re too superstitious about these things.’
‘I’m sorry, isn’t that what literature’s supposed to do for you? Reorganise your philosophies, change you, make you, unmake you?’ I grinned at her. Celia read very little fiction, and what fiction she did read consisted chiefly of the airport novellas our dad passed on to her after ripping through them on our family holidays. Celia lived in the real world, surrounded by her fellow researchers, her lab work colouring her daily life. She was the smartest person I knew, but when I tried to explain The Odyssey to her, she told me she could just get a ChatGPT summary and to try to chop the potatoes a little faster please.
‘I just think that you’ve rewired yourself a little too far, that’s all. It can’t be death and chaos, the will of the gods all the time.’
‘Why not? People don’t like to feel things these days, Cee! We’re obsessed with the blasé, we diminish everything. Sometimes a cat is a sign from above!‘
‘And sometimes you twist your logic into exactly the thing you need it to be.’ She looked up from the mango piece she’d been studying. ‘You’re never gonna get over him like this, you know?’
Her face was blank behind her dark sunglasses, revealing nothing. Her eyebrows raised slightly when she felt that I’d been looking at her too long, challenging me to disagree with her. I looked down at the mango piece she was holding, and back up to her forehead.
‘Do you think it’s really bad if I say that I don’t want to?’
Her eyebrows relaxed, and she grinned back at me now, popped the mango in her mouth, and leaned forwards to lie on her elbows, looking out at the jungle gym below us, the kids running round and around the slide.
‘I think that’s the most honest thing you’ve said all day.’
Celia knew that she was a kind of emergency contact when I’d hashed out my feelings with anyone else I could think of. This was the way it’d always been between us, hiding our thoughts and feelings until we’d truly figured them out, shy to test out our theories until we were quite sure we could defend them to each other. As a family, we were close, but we were guarded, and when Celia had introduced her first boyfriend at dinner twelve years ago, he’d come away wounded and shocked at the casual way we humiliated each other. It was a strange house in which to grow up, and whenever she and I had more than two glasses of wine together we’d try to figure out the myriad ways in which it had fucked us up. Love, to both of us, to all of us in the family maybe, was a game of acquisition and opposition. If I had a case I wanted to bring before Celia, I knew it had to be airtight, or she would pull it apart and spend weeks afterwards disdaining me for it.
She’d liked Luke from the start. Of course, it had taken months to introduce the two of them and it was my mother who initiated Celia’s suspicion that something was going on. Luke had moved into the second floor of my sixth floor apartment block, bringing with him the remains of a long-distance relationship, a new job at the shiny architecture firm in town and a renewed desire for friendship. We’d been friends before, of course, but only in the casual sense. We didn’t speak over the phone, at parties we gravitated towards other people and when he’d left the city three years ago, I hadn’t been invited to his farewell party. I didn’t know he was gone until six months into the new year. And now, here he was again, on my literal doorstep. That first night, I thought about the ways my life had changed since last I’d seen him, and I wondered how it would change now that he was here. I liked my solitude, I liked my privacy, and I’d spent much of the first part of that year on my own, alone in my apartment. I’d been depressed, but only casually, and enjoyed figuring out ways to fool everyone around me. Even Celia hadn’t figured it out, remarking only months later that I’d been a little distant.
I didn’t care about him in the beginning, which made it easy to spend a lot of time together. He told me about his work, and his commitment to eco-friendly architecture. He traveled often for work, which, Celia pointed out, sort of nullified the eco-friendliness of his architecture, and he cared about a lot of things that I’d never thought about. After three months of slow friendship, my mother began to wonder at the time we were spending together. And when my mother began to wonder about anything, she called Celia, who insisted we all get together for a drink.
‘You know, he was the only man in your life I ever met,’ she’d said earlier that morning leaning against the wall of Saunders beach in Seapoint. The sun had been beating down at ten already, and I could smell myself, the sweat mixing in with the sunblock Celia never forgot to pack. We’d raced into the water as soon as we arrived, the shock of the Atlantic anointing us, freezing the blood in our veins. We always tried for seven minutes, and we’d come close that morning, but I’d broken at the five minute mark, rushing back to the towels, my feet slowly beginning to feel again as they hit the hard, shelled sand.
‘He wasn’t a man in my life,’ I said, trying to frame the rocks and the ocean through the small window of my disposable camera. ‘Isn’t, a man in my life, I mean’.
‘Right. But he was though, right? Is, sorry.’
‘Do you know he hates Severance even though he’s never seen it?’
Celia glanced up at me then. ‘I’ve never seen Severance either. But you love it, don’t you?’
I glared at her. ‘You told me you were gonna start watching it.’ She shrugged, digging in her bag for the sunblock. ‘I can’t stop thinking about that,’ I said. ‘I feel like it means something bigger.‘
She giggled, massaging the sunblock on her legs now. ‘You think if a man doesn’t like Severance that suggests a kind of moral failing?’
‘No, I just mean the fact that he’s never seen it. When he told me that, I got so annoyed, like irrationally annoyed, you know? And I couldn’t figure out why, but then I saw him smiling at me, just like, shit-eating, you know, and I realised he was winding me up. He’s always doing that, he’s always figuring out exactly how to get under my skin and then, like gallumphing in that direction. And I’m so dumb, I fall for it every single time!’
Celia was watching me now, smiling gently.
‘He’s kind of like you in that sense, you know.’ I said.
She grinned. ‘So you actually just wanted a brother you could fuck?’
I threw my towel at her, laughing. ‘Ugh, no man! I mean, I don’t think so? Maybe? Like it felt like that sometimes you know, like he had me all figured out, and he could run circles around me. And you know that’s exactly the thing I need, to feel like I’m the dumb one in the relationship. But then he goes on and on about how Severance isn’t gonna end well, and that the streaming model has destroyed shows because they never end and they write them off a cliff and he won’t watch it unless he knows it’s gonna end well, and then I go home and I start thinking, you know, with a capital t, and I jump to all these conclusions in my head, like, of course he won’t start a show without knowing how it ends because he’s risk-averse and he’s so scared of so much in his life and so how would it ever work between us anyways? You know?’
‘So you’re a crazy person,‘ Celia lobbied back at me. ‘And it’s not like you’re so brave! It didn’t work anyways. Nothing happened. And it’s insane that you’re trying to make his theoretical distaste for a show about anything other than the show.’
‘You don’t think it suggests something deeper?‘
‘No, Mark, it doesn’t. You’ve always been like this - you always think that a news story from the other side of the world signals something deep and profound, you always think we’re on the brink of social and environmental collapse. Remember with that guy Henry? And you kept on talking about how he would send you these TikToks that you’d just seen and how that was a sign that you guys were made for each other? God, do you remember that road trip we took to Langebaan, and what you said to me in the car? That you felt like you’d met in a past life? Because of the TikToks? There is no universe, Mark. That was the algorithm, sorting you and assigning you into similar social categories, and pushing you steadily harder into those categories. Sometimes, I think…’ she lowered her sunglasses and looked at me directly now, thinking. ‘Sometimes I think you’ve put yourself so exactly at the center of the universe that you try to reorganise it in your image. But that’s not… You can’t do that. Life is a one to one ratio. I’m sorry, it just is. We can’t make up narratives in our head, and write scripts, and force people to play them out for us. If a guy doesn’t like Severance, that doesn’t mean anything deep or profound about his personality. It just doesn’t.’
She was right, of course, in the way that only Celia could be. And she’d had a habit of taking Luke’s side as well, ever since that first meeting, when we’d sucked on Chenin Blanc at Clarke’s and slowly thawed the ice between the three of us. I’d tried to play host and matchmaker, figuring out where to steer the conversation so the both of them would feel comfortable around each other, but it wasn’t necessary. I excused myself to go to the bathroom, and when I came back, I’d found them leaning in close together, whispering about something and giggling. He’d been like that with all of my friends, starting slow, tiny love affairs, ingratiating himself in my life. He was magnetic, and annoying, and in the beginning, was eager to be the butt of the joke, which made people like him quickly. One evening, after I’d confided in Celia about the crush, she told me she liked how we teased each other, that he never let me get away with anything.
The thing had bloomed, slowly, and then very quickly, as we became aware of how to articulate it, let it take up space between us. I began to memorise the texture of his couch, of the blanket he always tossed me when we watched films together. And what started as innocent, accidental brushing of legs became a pointed searching out for contact between us. He invited me to parties with friends, and I tried to make myself fit with them, happy to see him in his world. He remade me, building new interests, constructing a new sense of humour, placing a small part of himself inside of me, and letting it grow slowly. It felt completely natural to wake one Tuesday morning in the knowledge that I was a little bit in love with him.
‘So what do you think I should do?’ I asked Celia.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you can do anything.’
I watched as she rose and strode decidedly towards the ocean again, always determined, the hard gallumping walk of a woman who knew exactly what she was in the world, knew that people were watching her. I felt that way too sometimes. I’d always, felt, secretly, that the two of us were special. We liked to play a game sometimes when we were high where we wondered who was talking about us at that very moment. Celia in particular had often been the topic of the conversations of others - they came up to her at parties to tell her they’d seen what she’d posted on Instagram, they’d heard about her break-up, they’d noticed she’d started a new job. It wasn’t arrogant, we felt, to think of ourselves in this way. It was natural. There were some people in this life that were interesting and others that remained interested. Celia was always interesting, and my proximity to her made me so as well. The difference was that I’d remained steadily interested in the secrets of others as well, until I had my own secret to fill me up. Since Luke, I’d become less involved in the gossip of others, and had begun to filter out news only insofar as how I might relay it to him. I’d woken one morning, some months ago, from a vivid dream and immediately began to type it out on my phone for fear I would forget it and be unable to relay it to him. He hadn’t just changed my life, he’d begun to remake the very texture of my brain, a constant presence sitting there, a conduit of my ego in his shape. When I acted in ways of which I’d later be ashamed, it was his voice I heard in my head, admonishing me, encouraging me. The Severance thing had been deeper - I realised that he hadn’t seen me at all, didn’t care about the art that I cared about. I tried to be furious, but upon probing of the thing, the further sting was that I was to blame - I’d lied and pretended and fooled everyone into thinking I was easy-breezy, modern metrosexual man, when I was Prometheus, tied to the cliff, being eaten out by vultures. I’d felt rejected, that the real Luke did not match my head Luke. The shock of the cavernous distance between them had surprised me, jolted me awake. For months, I’d been courting a ghost, a figure of my imagination. I’d been courting a version of myself.
I became slowly aware that I hadn’t seen Celia’s head bob up in a while - she’d gone under the water just as a giant wave had engulfed the tidal pool, and it had been some time since she’d surfaced. I looked, and then I watched, and then I started searching for her, my heartrate creeping up. I looked down to see that I was on my feet and before realising I’d started to move towards the pool. I saw a smaller girl crying at the edge of the pool, and a pair of brothers laughing at how their clothes had been swept away by the wave. I didn’t cry out; I wasn’t the kind of person who cried out in public settings, but I could feel the anxiety in the pit of my stomach slowly rising, tasting it in my mouth. I asked the boys if they’d seen a young girl and they shook their heads. A group of older men had been watching me, and one of them said they’d seen her go under but hadn’t seen her resurface. I strode into the icy water, diving underneath to see if I could see anything, but came up to the surface feeling stupid. Of course I wouldn’t. I worked my way around the giant rock at the edge of the pool, but no sign of her. ‘Please,‘ I asked the men. ‘Please help me, I think my sister is gone.‘ They looked quizzically at each other and then, seeing I was serious, sprang into action. One of them ran to get a lifeguard while the other three clambered over the rocks to check if Celia had gone a different direction. I sat down on the edge of the pool, suddenly very cold and very afraid, and then I felt a shadow on my back.
‘What are you doing?‘
I whipped around, Celia’s long body towering over me. ‘What the fuck dude, I thought you drowned!‘
She looked down lazily at me, taking me in, sizing me up. She began to giggle, and then stuck out her hand, pulling me to my feet. ‘Okay,‘ she said.
Later, at De Waal Park, once she’d driven us haphazardly through the streets of Seapoint, her alternative jazz blasting from the car speakers, she asked me about the blog.
‘What about it?‘ I asked her. I knew what she meant, but this was another game we liked to play, daring each other to say the thing fully, pushing each other to see how far we could go.
She rolled her eyes, knowing that I knew, but knowing also that if she refused to play, I could use her refusal against her down the line. ‘Well he reads it, doesn’t he? He must know it’s all about him.’
‘Yeah… he reads it,’ I said slowly. I hesitated, willing her to fill the silence, not quite happy that she’d asked the question properly, but needing time also to formulate my answer.
‘Do you think it’s right what you’re doing? Like don’t you think it’s a little bit unkind, forcing him to deal with that? And obviously everyone knows you’re talking about him.’
There.
I smiled. ‘Anne Lamott says we own everything that happens to us, and that if people wanted you to say nice things about them, they should have behaved better,’ I said.
‘Come on Mark,‘ Celia rolled her eyes.
I sighed. I’d known it was coming, since this morning. Since I’d hit send on the last post actually.
‘What do you want me to say, Cee? Was I really that unkind?’
‘Could he really have behaved better?’ she countered.
I thought about it. I’d been thinking about it for a while. Nothing had happened between us. We’d laid underneath a blanket with our legs touching over the course of a couple of nights. That had been it - we would not feature in the Great Love Stories of Our Time. The thing between us, at least on paper, was flimsy at best and weightless at worst.
But I felt heavy in my body when I thought about it, which was every day. A good kind of heavy, a sort of tether to the Earth, a knowledge of something deep and ancient which pushed me forward and hard into the ground. He hadn’t behaved badly. We’d tried to figure something out, and when we’d come close, he’d been a little scared. How many times had I done the same? The wicked irony of it had been funny, in the nights when I hadn’t been walking around my apartment in a sort of devastated daze. And still, I could not bring myself to blame him - it felt like the universe punishing me for the sins of my past. It had to be this way, I had to understand what I’d done. And when I’d written about it all, he’d come out actually very small in the wash. Very kind, even. Celia was right, of course. In every moment of my life, I had placed myself at the center.
‘You weren’t unkind at all,’ she was saying, her black curls back in her face now. She reached into her bag for her phone to call up the blog, slowly scanning over the first couple of lines. ‘It was like 1000 words on how much you love him. What is he supposed to do with that?’
I blushed. A couple of people had messaged me to compliment me on the piece, and I’d felt buoyed, grateful that the whole thing had been productive, in the truest sense of the word - that a product could be formed from the heartache. But when I’d read it again, I’d felt the shame I knew I would; my heart had been sewn DEEPLY into my sleeve.
‘You know, I actually showed it to him before I posted it,’ I told Celia. ‘He got final cut.’ I’d gone over the week before, when I knew he was home and showed him the piece on my laptop. I sat on the couch, finishing off his dinner while he read it over on the bed. He’d chuckled a couple of times, and looked up at me every now and then, but I’d kept my gaze steadily forward, humiliated.
‘That’s not what happened,’ he said after a long time. ‘You’ve not been honest with them.’
I looked at him, then, surprised. ‘What do you mean? It is? That’s what I felt.’
‘No, you’ve made me seem like this Casanova, with all this charm and all these manly wiles, and that I somehow ensnared you. That’s not what it was.’
‘But you did ensnare me,’ I blurted out then. ‘That’s what happened.’
‘No Mark. It’s a really good piece, and I think you had to change some stuff so that the rhythms work, which they do, for the most part, but I don’t know why you want my permission because this isn’t about me. I’m very flattered by some of the stuff here, obviously, but you’ve written something that places you at the center, which I guess is what you obviously would have done, and made me something of a knight in shining armour to your damsel in distress. Except I’m also the villain? Like I said, it’s flattering, but if anything, you led me on.’
I blinked, then. Sometimes, with Luke, I felt the words dry up in my mouth and I could meet him only with silence. It stretched on between us, until I finally mustered an, ‘Oh?‘
‘Are you kidding me? You knew how I felt about you, from like June, dude! I saw that you knew! But you would go on and on about these men you were seeing, you made fun of me for like, being naïve, or whatever you said. You like, got off, on dangling yourself in front of me, and then placing yourself out of reach. I think…’ he faltered. Watching me, deciding if he should say it. He breathed in. ‘I think, sometimes, that you really believe in your identity as a victim and you can’t see how you are capable of hurting people. I can appreciate that I hurt you, that the way I handled the end wasn’t great. But maybe if you’d been even a little bit more forthcoming with me from the beginning, we wouldn’t have been in that position.’
I’d been stunned, the taste of the rice he’d made himself for dinner sitting heavy in my mouth. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Okay, sure, yeah, I can see that.’
He looked over at me, months of something maybe profound passing between us. I opened my mouth to say something else, but he shook his head, his eyebrows furrowed. He handed the laptop back to me, and took the bowl from my hand.
‘But yeah, really great piece,’ he said.
Before I could say all this to Celia, a loud bang off to the right made us jump, and we turned quickly to the direction of the noise. About 20 meters away from our picnic blanket, a grey Kia Picanto parked on the street outside of the park’s fence was slowly burning. The kids on the jungle gym stopped playing and rushed towards the fence to get a closer look, their parents quickly behind them. Phones whipped out and began to film the burning car, which radiated heat all the way back to us. As we watched, the fire began to grow and then there was another loud bang. Celia and I looked at each other, and then she leapt up and rushed to the fence, shouting to people to get back and to take their children away. She turned back to me and yelled at me to call the fire department, which I started to do before she took my phone and did it herself. The paint was peeling off in the heat now, and specks of it fell slowly to the ground beneath the car. An older man had taken up next to the fence, keeping the audience at bay, and when we heard the sirens of the fire truck, Celia slowly sat back down on the blanket, breathing heavily. We watched as three men, handsome, jumped out, unrolled their giant hose and began to water the car down, quickly disposing of the flames. They spoke to the people behind the fence, but no one claimed the car. And then they left.
Celia and I watched the blackened car in silence, the smell of the smoke still thick in the air.
‘What the fuck,’ I said.
‘It’s not an omen,’ Celia said.
She dropped me back at Sunninghill that night, after we’d shared a bottle of wine at Leo’s. I’d asked her then about things with Josh, and she’d giggled and told me it was okay, I didn’t need to pretend today had been about reciprocity and that she was happy to listen while I monologued. I told her thank you, and she laughed and rolled her eyes, and said whatever.
‘Are we doing gym on Sunday?‘ I asked.
‘Yeah, I’ll pick you up at 9,‘ she said, turning the key in the ignition.
‘I love you,’ I said.
‘Yeah, you too,‘ she grinned, before speeding off into the night.
I walked slowly up to the building, checking to see if the light was on in his apartment, as I always do. The light from the broken elevator shone into the lobby, and I began the long trek up to the sixth floor. I paused on the second floor, as I always do, and carried on upwards, all the way to my sixth floor home. As I walked through the open corridor, I checked over the balcony to see if his car was there, and ducked quickly behind the railing when I saw him get out of it, with someone else. I watched through the gap of the railing as the two of them laughed softly together, removing two bags of shopping from his boot. They walked slowly towards the building, disappearing from view as they rounded the corner to get to the side entrance.
I had a memory - in the first month I realised I was in love with him, we’d sat together on his couch, laughing at the cadences of a movie we were both disdaining. The words were halting then, alone in the room with him. I’d found it easier to be with him in relation to other people - I knew how to fashion myself for an audience. The air felt different with company, thicker, and the extra bodies released the pressure of this thing I’d built up in my head. That night, though, it had been easier, our attention turned, together, steadily away from each other, unable to look at the thing directly, unable to articulate it, hiding from each other. The movie’s pace had slowed and it had been a while since we’d spoken, our legs intertwined under the blanket, when two black birds had flown headfirst into his glass window. The noise shocked us, made my heart race, and when we looked over on to the balcony, we saw that one of the birds had been knocked out, while the other was hopping around on one leg, dazed.
‘Jesus Christ,‘ I said.
We watched the creatures in silence for a while, the dazed one pecking softly at the unconscious one.
‘Do you think he’s dead?‘ I asked.
Luke looked at me. ‘God, I hope not. I’ll have to get Lilia to throw it in the bin tomorrow.‘
‘Harsh,‘ I said.
The second bird, giving up, hopped slowly towards the edge of the balcony, shook himself off and then leapt into the sky. The first bird remained, still, on the floor. We did not speak of it again.
I shook the memory off, the warm January air sweet on my skin. I looked up over the view of Muizenberg, and went inside to my apartment.
chicken soup for the soul:
wowee people of earth! february, innit! thank you for making it this far, if indeed you did. sometimes a piece moves and flows out of you and sometimes it never quite bends in the shape that you want it to, which is how i feel about this one! but it’s okay! i didn’t anticipate how hard it would be to get back into the writing - it feels like i’m older and more annoyed now but also like i have all of these truths inside of me that don’t just fall out in the way that they used to. i like my secrets and i need to remember how to twist them into prose again! but she’s working on it, in between whipping the kids and going on truly horrible dates and watching THE-YATRE hunny! life is gewd!
hot boi of the week:
well, here we are, once again confronted with the beauty of the male form. this week was hard! i’m seeing a lot of fleeting beauty out there in the world, but not a lot of hotties online! and the hotties i am seeing are too close in proximity to air on my Public, Popular Blog! so what to do? abstain? never! we live in a culture of excess and there will always be more to eat when the plate comes from After the Movies, Inc!
my first hot boi of the week award goes to… all of my friends’ boyfriends! good job you guys! they are all really hot, and some of them are even nice! score!
my second hot boi of the week goes to…
gabriel basso! low-hanging fruit i know, and i don’t even think he’s THAT hot, but we are in dire straits. my story with gabriel basso is that about three times a year i decide to get intoxicated OFF my rocker and settle in to watch a show that can only be found on a streaming site (i.e. not very good). my most favourite horrible show to watch when i am deeply intoxicated is an iconic lil gem of a story called ‘the night agent‘ (season 2 now streaming on netflix!) it is so bad as to be nonsensical and the dialogue sounds like it was written by the grade nine student at [redacted] school who got, say it with me, SIX OUT OF FORTY-FIVE for their creative essay! in short, 10/10. he is also pretty hot and his body is MAGIC but really it’s his kind eyes (it’s always the kind eyes with me). if you have kind eyes and a taste for cinema, please do reach out! simply dying to have an intelligent conversation over a dlazof chenin! it’s still february!
sexy song of the week:
it was the privilege of my life to attend the sondheim concert in the park last sunday - i cried quite a lot and felt eternally grateful for the great big giant of a man he was. i hope he knows how much we love him, how much he has driven the culture and the conversation forward. to this day, i think there was no one who quite gets humans like he does. i LOVE him, can you tell? anyways, obviously if i am even thinking about sondheim then the sexy song of the week must go to him. and this week, i’ve been thinking about merrily we roll along which i don’t usually care about, but it just GOT me at the concert. more specifically a gawjuss lil ditty called ‘our time‘:
this video doesn’t entirely do it justice, but it does feature daniel radcliffe (of escape from pretoria fame!) and jonathan groff (gay)! i LOVEEE it you guys!
anyways, bye! i did not receive a single like on my last post (not that i care, not that i careeee) which is so comforting for a young hunk of a man such as myself! never mind that it truly takes one single millisecond to hit that button. never mind THAT! just say you hate me! i’ll riiiisee above it, for i know that’s how you’d want me to respond (okaayyy ‘wicked‘ reference!) happy oscars week! for me i think it should go to dune: part two or conclave even though it won’t! colman domingo what you did in sing sing can never be undone! and you’ll alwaysssss have that! and so will i! okay bye for real now my grade tens are gettin rowdy so i have to go teach them.
Finger-on-the-pulse writing, Murray!