Welcome to Story Club

by Zoe Norton Lodge

  And then the convention kicked off. Over five hundred Warhammer enthusiasts from across the globe. Only three of us women. At least the bathroom wasn’t crowded.

  In the first round I was paired with a very large man from Texas. He looked over my models. ‘Is this your army? Did you borrow it? Who painted it?’

  ‘This is my army. I painted it.’

  ‘This guy here, they stopped making this model back in 2003.’

  ‘I know. I purchased him prior to 2003. I’ve been playing for a –’

  ‘You here with your boyfriend or something?’

  ‘No, I am here with Warren: we’re mates.’

  He then proceeded to point out many of the simple aspects of the game. I’d never encountered this before. Generally, my opponents at an international tournament would presume I’d know what a deployment zone was or what the assault phase entails or how many sides were on a d6. And then it clicked: Warhammer was being mansplained to me! For the first time in my life, a man was presuming I was ignorant of nuances he thought were complex. I was a little bit delighted and I responded in the only way I knew – by fucking destroying him at Warhammer.

  And I saw in his eyes great shame. And it made me sad, because I remembered being at a Warhammer tournament and being paired with ‘The Girl’. I remember feeling that if I lost to her it would be shameful. That I would be mocked by other men. That my status would be lowered and perhaps my virility would be questioned. What a stupid, stupid feeling.

  The rest of the day proceeded without incident. I chalked up another win against an Eldar army and a loss to some Tyranids . . . I know these words mean nothing to you.

  One thing that’s not widely publicised is that hormonally transitioning your body can have an effect on your senses. People sometimes say that women are more sensitive than men and I, personally, did experience a shift in my emotional sensitivity. But I also experienced shifts in my physical senses. I am more ticklish, and my nose has become much more sensitive to smells. It’s not that things smell different, it’s just that the smells affect me more. When I was hormonally male I would smell a flower and say, ‘Mmm yes that’s a flower it smells pleasant,’ but the first time I noticed smelling flowers after being on hormones for a while I was actually emotionally moved. ‘Oh my god, flowers are beautiful, they’re giving me feelings. This is why girls like flowers.’

  Day two of the tournament was the equal and opposite of the flower thing: four hundred and ninety-seven men and boys crowded into a convention hall for a second full day of nerdery yields a particular odour. It’s an odour I wasn’t unfamiliar with but, unlike before when my reaction would have been, ‘Oh this is a smelly room,’ my reaction was more, ‘What the fuck is this smell? It is thick. Like I could reach out and take it in my hands. It oozes in the air. A foul putrescence.’ I gagged. Basically, boys, fucking stink and nerds, fucking stink. And nerd boys, you fucking stink the worst. Get some deodorant that is not Lynx Africa – that only makes it worse.

  Day two saw two more wins and a loss which, unfortunately, put me out of reach of the finals on day three.

  That night a bunch of us went out to dinner and drinks. I wore heels, cause, fuck it . . . Vegas. As the night ticked on we settled into the bar, recounting stories of the battles we’d fought over the previous two days, and I discovered . . . in the middle of that conversation . . . a hand on my leg. The hand of someone I’d known for a while, someone I’d met, years before . . . someone who’d known me as a guy . . . someone who knew I was a lesbian . . . someone who knew I wasn’t available. And, again, there was a small part of me that was delighted that I was experiencing some kind of female rite of passage. But a bigger part of me was confused, and another part was scared and violated, but there was another part of me that understood. Just to be clear it wasn’t Carl or Warren. They’re both fucking gentlemen. But for the second time on that trip I gained another insight into my previous habitus. The entitlement, the ignorance, the shame . . .

  And, upon returning to Sydney, I reflected on my first overseas trip as a woman and thought to myself, Misogyny – that’s probably gunna be just as much of a problem as the transphobia, eh?

  PHIL SPENCER

  Phil is a writer, performer and arts dogsbody who has performed in lounge rooms across Sydney, fringe festivals across Australia and in shitty rooms above pubs the world over. Originally from the UK, Phil grew up in Oxfordshire (the rough bit) and spent many years living and working in the city of Glasgow (the posh bit). He now lives in Sydney with his wife and two children, where he makes comedy, theatre and stories for radio. Phil is the Artistic Associate at the Griffin Theatre in Kings Cross and co-festival director for the annual Bondi Feast. Phil has been shortlisted for the Philip Parsons Playwright Award not once, not twice, but thrice (but still hasn’t won it – he’s pretty sure it’s rigged).

  ‘Waiting for Lester’ copyright © Phil Spencer 2018

  Waiting for Lester

  by PHIL SPENCER

  This story was originally performed at the event Fools Rush In

  As a result of poorer than expected A-level results and a compulsive fondness for the Scottish pop band Belle and Sebastian, I spent my formative years in the city of Glasgow.

  While living in Glasgow, I spent a degree’s worth of time staging unforgettable student productions of cutting-edge contemporary theatre work, which, as a general rule, involved me and my classmates wearing white singlets and chanting the word ‘fennel’ as we drew a chalk circle around the audience – because they were complicit – though complicit in what exactly I was never quite sure.

  Now it is fair to say that I had an uncomplicated relationship with the arts – I unashamedly believed that coming in to contact with creativity had the unequivocal power to change people’s lives for the better. I honestly, truly, believed that to be true.

  Also I was skint most of the time, so when a friend of a friend of a friend offered me a job as a drama workshop leader I immediately said yes without asking too many questions / any questions whatsoever.

  I didn’t need to listen as they explained what the ‘roles and responsibilities’ were and that it was going to be a ‘challenging working environment’ – I heard ‘five hundred pounds’, and yes thank you very much that sounds fine to me.

  And so a week later I head into the city centre for day one of the job. I arrive at a dilapidated brownstone tenement building that looked like a Victorian borstal, because that is exactly what it had been.

  I step over cigarette butts and squeeze past a dozen bedraggled gentlemen huddled in the doorway. The men are chatting and chain smoking and doing that spitting thing where the spit shoots out in a jet through the gaps in between your two front teeth. Lovely.

  The tracksuits collectively scowl at me as I head into the building and I ascend the stairs. I flash them a smile and clutch my rucksack, and I hear one of the men mumble, ‘Ya Baw Bag.’

  And for those of you who don’t speak Gaelic, ‘Ya Baw Bag’ roughly translates to ‘You, sir, are a ball bag.’

  But I ignore it and I hope that maybe it’s just someone with Tourette’s.

  I mean I really, really hope that that man has Tourette’s.

  Which I’ll admit is an odd thing to wish onto another human, but the alternative didn’t bear thinking about.

  A woman called Lorna greets me at the top of the stairs with a Glasgow smile. As in she’s grinning – not a Glasgow smile, like when someone slices open your cheeks with a razor. No, no Lorna just had a lovely smile and she was Glaswegian.

  Lorna has a jovial tone but rattles through information at a jaw-jangling speed – she explains that all of the service users here at the charity are experiencing homelessness and most have a recent history of substance abuse, plus there are myriad mental health issues to contend with and two guys who’ve only recently got out of Barlinnie on good behaviour bonds.

  Lorna explains that I have twelve weeks of classes ahead and that my group will be performing a
play at the end of it in a big conference centre up the road.

  It’s all very exciting, she says, as she leads me into a small dank classroom filled with Dickensian floorboards and ten troubled souls.

  And then she flashes me that smile and without so much as a cup of tea she nudges me into the room then turns and leaves me.

  And I stand there facing a small room of big men.

  I nod and drop my bag and say, ‘Hey guys, I’m Phil. Why don’t we start with a game of Zip Zap Boing; now has anyone ever played Zip Zap Boing before?’

  The men stare blankly back at me.

  ‘Is it the one where some cunt closes his eyes and then every other cunt tries tee kick da fuck outta him?’

  ‘Ummm, no, that’s not Zip Zap Boing, Zip Zap Boing is . . . Well, never mind.’

  There’s a pause in the room and I hear a muffled voice say, ‘Shit. Fuck. Wank. Shit.’ and the room erupts into a giggle. Oh great! I think. As I look across at the Colin, the culprit. It turns out that Colin does have Tourette’s after all!

  Brilliant. That is the best news I’ve heard all day!

  And so despite the grizzled demeanour of Steve, Malcolm, Gazza, Mark, Mikey, Lester, Davey, Darren, Carl and Colin, it turns out after day one that they are dead set legends. That’s not to say I still didn’t think one of them might gut me like a fish on our lunch break, but I’m still here.

  After the first class, it was clear that Lorna was keen for us to make a play together that dealt with the themes surrounding homelessness and drug abuse – Lorna wanted us to tackle head-on the plights of these guys’ lives – Lorna wanted us to drag out a story of redemption for the stage. That is what Lorna wanted.

  But me, not so much.

  You’ve got to understand that some of these men had lived lives that made Requiem for a Dream look like Bridget Jones’s Diary. I mean it’s all well and good to ask these people to drag up their personal histories, but who was I to deal with the psychological repercussions of sharing these damaged memories?

  So, instead of pretending I was a counsellor, I quickly decided we would put on a play. My favourite play: Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. A play about two blokes, waiting for another bloke who, famously, never turns up.

  Now, I am a tragic Godot fan; I’ve read it maybe fifty times and I try to crowbar quotes from the play into many everyday situations that, for the most part, simply do not call for such smug twattery.

  For a while I wanted the immortal line from the play nothing to be done tattooed onto my arm. But I quickly realised that ‘theatre tatts’ weren’t really a thing, so instead I bought a T-shirt with Samuel Beckett’s face on it. I know, still cool.

  Also, not long ago I went to see the Sydney Theatre Company’s production starring Richard Roxburgh off the tellie. And, this is true, the night I went, I got there really early and, as I was walking past stage door, Richard Roxburgh was stood there on the street, in costume, but with an overcoat on, and he was clutching his phone and looking down the street. As I passed him I smiled and said, ‘He doesn’t turn up, mate,’ at which Roxburgh gleefully smiled back at me and said, ‘Fuck off.’

  Now it might sound a bit wank, staging an existentialist drama from the mid 1940s with these guys, but they read it once and immediately saw the play for what it was: a story about two lost souls, down on their luck and shooting the shit. And there’s the bit where a fat man turns up with a freak on a leash. What’s not to like?

  And so for the next twelve weeks we did scene work, swapping roles, learning lines, and I watched as a group of shy, socially marginalised men dressed up and ate turnips and slapsticked around and wrestled with some of life’s most troubling questions. It was glorious.

  It’s not to say that the twelve weeks wasn’t without its trials and tribulations – I was crippled by a vomit-inducing fear before every class that I really was in way over my head.

  Gazza turned up to deliver Lucky’s monologue one morning, smacked oot his nut – and although he gave a terrifyingly convincing performance we had to send him away to get actual help for his very real addiction to heroin.

  Lester barely spoke. Mark lit a small trashcan fire. And one morning Malcolm turned up with more blood than you’d ideally like to have coming out of your ear. But all in all, the rehearsals went pretty well.

  And so the big day rolled around and I insisted that the guys travel to the venue in character and in costume because I’m dedicated to the craft – and they, in the nicest possible way, told me te get te fuck.

  When the show begins, the lights hit the moon we’d made out of tin foil and cardboard, and the curtains pull back to reveal the tree, which was a large pot plant Davey had ‘borrowed’ from his baw bag brother. And there are about eighty people in the audience at the conference centre.

  And when Colin bowls onto the stage and mutters those immortal lines, ‘Beat me? Certainly they beat me. The cunts,’ the audience erupts into cheers and I am not sure if it’s possible for a twenty-two-year-old to have paternal feelings towards a group of men in their mid-to-late forties but if it is, I do.

  And the show is a great success. Now I’m not saying that my cast is better than Richard Roxburgh – but they are. They definitely are.

  After the performance there are waves of applause and cheers and wolf whistling and it is utterly astounding. After I’ve calmed the cast down and explained that yes, we can do another show at some point but that, no, there isn’t a Waiting for Godot 2. We’re in the green room and the meek, mild-mannered Lester, who has barely said two words throughout, stands on a chair and proclaims that making this show has given him the confidence he needs to follow his own passion for writing and that he is working on a book of poems.

  Lester’s face is imprinted on my brain to this day. Still now, I can close my eyes and see his face – dark brown hair, green eyes and a small gap between his two front teeth. And if ever I feel shitty or hopeless or lost at sea about the business of making art, I just remember Lester’s face and I remember that maybe there really is ‘something to be done’.

  I recently returned to Glasgow for a friend’s wedding, which would have been almost seven years after our triumphant production.

  So I was walking along the street and I saw Lester’s face and it was on the front cover of a newspaper. And I recognised him immediately and my first thought was – his book, maybe Lester had finished his book of poems.

  Turns out, Lester had not written a book, but Lester had brutally murdered his landlord.

  And so, since August last year, the face I see in my mind’s eye whenever I have an artistic crisis is that of a man who strangled another man and then buried him in the communal garden. Which is, and I think even Sam Beckett would agree, whatever way you look at it, less than ideal.

  JACQUELINE MALEY

  A columnist and senior writer for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age newspapers, Jacqueline writes about politics, people and social affairs. She has also worked on staff at The Guardian in London and the Australian Financial Review, as well as contributing to numerous other publications, including Gourmet Traveller and Marie Claire. In 2016, she won the Kennedy Award for Outstanding Columnist. She lives in Sydney with her daughter, and the niggling feeling that she should have finished her book by now.

  ‘Rock Stars’ copyright © Jacqueline Maley 2018

  Rock Stars

  by JACQUELINE MALEY

  This story was originally performed at the event Let it Go

  It was late 2001 when I left my English boyfriend in London and moved to Dublin, where I had already decided I was going to live a romantic and solitary existence without him, but because I was a coward, I hadn’t technically told him that yet. I thought moving countries might do the job for me, but he was one of those boyfriends who loves you a lot, and he regarded distance as a challenge, not a deal breaker.

  He was blond, kind, and he adored me – and obviously, as a twenty-four-year-old self-loathing idiot, I found all those qualities
repulsive.

  I had a second-hand copy of Ulysses and a yen for freedom. I was ready to reconnect with my Irish roots. My English boyfriend was not part of the plan. As the family lore went, my great-grandmother had been evicted from her County Kerry hovel around the beginning of last century, and so I felt a strong urge to travel back to the Emerald Isle so I too could experience rental insecurity.

  A few weeks before I got on the plane, my English boyfriend started talking about employment opportunities for himself in Dublin. I cursed his dogged loyalty, not to mention the increasingly globalised nature of professional employment.

  ‘I think it’s important to have space in a relationship,’ I said, like a weasel. That only caused him to look at me with yet more love. So I said, cruelly: ‘Don’t they hate the English in Ireland?’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘I think they have let that all go now.’

  Fast forward several months and I’d broken up with him from Ireland via email – which was a nascent technology in the early noughties but already a boon for the morally weak.

  I landed a job at a law firm where I prepared briefs on interesting defamation cases and ate full roast dinners in the cafeteria every day. There were always many potato varietals and I wanted to try them all. I was happy. The best case we defended was a defamation suit from Sinead O’Connor’s ex-husband, a journalist called John Waters.

  We also represented the music legend Morrissey in a small matter over an Irish property he owned called Braidville.

  Morrissey’s instructions, such as they were, grew increasingly disordered until one day we received a fax that just said RIP Braidville in spidery handwriting that signified either madness or intoxication, possibly both, and we never heard from him again. But his music made a lot more sense to me after that.