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  • Published: 22 October 2024
  • ISBN: 9781760890179
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $36.99

Squat

A week squatting at Kanye’s mansion

Extract

The sound of static – a quick stab – comes from somewhere. Freaked out, I look around. A white square is screwed to a blue wall. Could that be a speaker? It could also be an air vent.

A second stab of static.

Of course! The walkie-talkie.

I reach into my pocket. ‘Hello? Oh my God. Hey, it’s John here. How are you? Over. Can you hear me?’

‘Put the volume up. Over.’

I tell Antoinette I’m in a giant blue room and the lights are working in the wormhole, so there must be electricity.

‘Great news. Over.’

I make my way to the desk and leather chair, the only furnish­ings in the room, aside from the bucket collecting rainwater.

‘There’s all this mail,’ I tell Antoinette, shuffling through enve­lopes I find on the desk. ‘I’m trying to see when the last one’s stamped. December 2022. Water bill. Okay, now I’m going to see if there’s water.’

On the other side of this room from the wormhole, another archway. I step through and am dazzled by an industrial kitchen. Some of the light from the wormhole makes it all the way here. The kitchen is also blue, punctuated by silver appliances: multiple stoves and ovens, multiple fridges, multiple dishwashers. A pizza oven that could accommodate the world’s largest pepperoni pizza.

‘I’m walking through a very clean kitchen,’ I report. ‘Very clean stainless steel. I was really hoping it’d be a bit dustier.’

Dust would signal this kitchen has been abandoned for a while, which would grant me a sense of safety. Dust would be a sign that I’m alone in this mansion. But it isn’t dusty.

‘There’s some food here, too.’

Lining a shelf: bottles of cooking oil, jars of pasta and tins of chocolate milk. The pans hanging from the wall look like a planetary chart.

‘Okay, I’m going to turn the tap.’ I approach a sink, which is sized somewhere between a normal sink and a bathtub. ‘Oh no. That tap, no water. But, yeah, there’s definitely electricity. I’ll find another tap.’

I pop about all the sinks in this massive kitchen, twisting the taps. Nothing.

‘I’ll drive down the street,’ Antoinette says. ‘And see what the range is on this walkie-talkie.’

‘How far away are you now?’

‘I’m outside the compound.’

Her referring to the mansion as a compound makes me think: Kanye is eccentric and driven enough, he could conceivably assemble an army on the front grounds. And, now that the thought has taken me, he could train them in the woods behind the place. Yes, this man with grievances against the Jews could do that.

‘I’ll drive out,’ says Antoinette. ‘I’ll drive to the McDonald’s and give it a go.’

The box the walkie-talkies came in promised a range of thirty-five miles. Antoinette makes it half a mile, to the top of the road, before they stop functioning. Electric hissing overtakes her voice.

She drives back into range and we nut out a plan. She says she’ll return at six in the morning.

‘Over.’

‘Over.’

‘Over.’

An archway from the kitchen leads to a walk-in pantry, a room of its own, which, like everywhere else around here, is blue with an impossibly high ceiling. A ladder leans against a wall, which makes sense, because the highest pantry shelves are not far from that ceiling.

Flicking the light on, I’m awestruck by a spectrum of colours: over a hundred oversized jars of spices, each labelled. Aniseed Star, Cardamom Brown Pods, Nutmeg, Cinnamon Bark, Asafoetida (no clue what that is but it’s yellow), Juniper Berries, Sumac, Amchur, Annatto, Anardana, Byadgi Chile, Urfa Biber Chile, Korean Chili, Nigella Sativa, Sichuan Peppercorns, Galangal. On and on it goes, green, red, purple, orange. The jars are neatly arranged, evenly spaced. The vibrant colours are a respite from the madness of this mansion’s endless blue.

However, my calmness does not last. Turning my head, I catch something in my line of sight that startles me more than those eyes in the woods. One jar, and only one jar in the entire pantry, has its own shelf. There it sits on an otherwise empty bottom plank.

Saffron.


Squat John Safran

Australia's most intrepid Jew finds out just how precarious identity can be.

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