Welcome to Story Club

by Zoe Norton Lodge

  Best ten dollars ever spent. Well, technically ten fifty because I also bought five single plastic cups so my friends could enjoy the fruity goodness if they got thirsty.

  It was a pity there were no ladies with us that night, because you never know your luck when you open a box of Coolabah’s finest – because as we all know . . .

  ‘Fruity Lexia makes you sexier.’

  The night was going well, and I was drinking up that sweet fruity goodness just as quick as you could say, ‘You’re an alcoholic and you don’t know it yet.’

  Being that the power to weight ratio of the wine was considerably higher than beer’s, I started to get fairly drunk fairly quickly.

  Time was no longer an uninterrupted linear experience, instead the next few hours occurred in flashes of clarity separated sometimes by seconds, and sometimes minutes.

  I was pouring a drink, some people I didn’t know arrived, someone started a bonfire on top of the park barbecue, I was peeing by a tree, the strange people left, someone was smashing beer bottles, the stereo ran out of batteries, suddenly it was time to go.

  As we turned to leave I was overcome with a flash of responsibility. We couldn’t possibly leave a roaring bonfire burning in a heavily wooded park, could we? It might start a bushfire. Sure, we might be angry at the world, but we didn’t want to burn it down tonight, did we?

  What was the best way to put that fire out?

  Despite there being a gently running creek right by the barbecue and probably more than one way to carry water from the creek to the barbecue, for some inexplicable drunken reason, I thought the best way to extinguish the sizeable fire was to kick it off the waist-height barbecue.

  Now it had been some time since I had practised that most ancient and sacred of all the franchised Suburban Korean Martial Arts, Taekwondo, and despite my third blue-belt ranking, my flexibility had lapsed in the seven years since I’d last strapped on the Gi.

  You see, in my mind, I’d kick over the flames, embers and still-burning wood, and upon scattering, the blaze would extinguish immediately and we’d all be able to leave – safe in the knowledge that our drinking park wouldn’t burn down.

  What actually happened was that I lifted my right leg and instead of a perfectly executed front kick, my heel barely cleared the edge of the barbecue, and, thanks to the Wimbledon-winning grip of the Dunlop Volley, my foot dragged forwards, slowing to a complete stop, leaving me now knee-deep in a waist-high bonfire.

  On removing my burning foot from the flames, I began to suspect something was wrong when I firstly saw my friends scatter, fleeing the burning embers I’d just kicked in their direction, but then just as quickly seeing them all turn around to try to stomp them out, as the park had indeed begun to burst into flames.

  There’s an old myth that the dinosaur known as the brontosaurus was so large that a pain signal in the tail could take up to nine seconds to travel to its brain. Now I’m no dinosaur, but it certainly took about that long for me to first recognise that I’d injured myself rather seriously.

  I don’t know if it was because I might have been on fire, or that somewhere in my brain there was the first aid instruction to ‘always put a fresh burn under cold running water’, but I stumbled drunkenly towards the nearby creek and kneeled down in the shallow water so that the cooling effect would have a chance to work on my burn.

  But let’s be fair: this was a creek in suburban Brisbane, not exactly the healing springs of Our Lady of Lourdes. This was dirty stormwater run-off, into which I had just dunked my blackened, burned and broken skin.

  We walked back to my mate Dave’s house, and I felt slowly increasing pain as the fruity numbness wore off.

  When we got there, I headed to the bathroom so I could properly wash the wound and get a good look at it.

  In the bright fluorescent light I’ll never forget the way my leg now appeared.

  Half of my leg was blackened flesh that came away in giant sheets like burned tracing paper as I washed it clean, while the other half of my leg was like toughened white leather, but cracked and bleeding.

  Now, being that I was eighteen and absolutely shitfaced, my first thought was, Ah she’ll be right, while I splashed on some Dettol as a countermeasure to the bacterial bath I’d given myself in the creek earlier.

  By the time I made my way out of the bathroom, everyone had passed out on the living-room floor, so I took my place between the coffee table and the TV and tried to just sleep it off.

  Funnily enough I couldn’t get to sleep, and after about an hour of increasing agony I bit the bullet and decided to head home to get help. I was still living with my mum and, as the mother of four boys who also happened to be an experienced doctor working for the military, she had pretty much seen everything that alcohol and testosterone could do to a male human’s decision-making process.

  So I pinballed my way down the corridor to her bedroom at home and gently whispered in my quiet voice, so as to wake her up gently. ‘Muuuuuuuum?’ ‘Muuuum?’ ‘Maaamyougottawakeup.’

  She blearily opened her eyes and I told her I’d had an accident and needed help. The sun was coming up by this stage so I went and stood by the bed to show her the damage.

  ‘Bloody hell, what have you gone and done to yourself?’ she mumbled.

  I told her the truth, thinking I was going to cop a massive serve and that she’d tell me to take care of it myself, but instead Mum told me to jump in the shower, wash it clean and meet her in the living room.

  By the time I’d walked out to the living room, Mum had assembled a makeshift burns-response unit from the bits and pieces she had lying around the house.

  Just as any tradesperson has bits and pieces from work lying around, with doctors it’s no different. Various bandages and dressings make their way back home, as do the salves, lotions and potions which are handy when you’ve four boys, all of teenage years, under one roof at the one time.

  Tragically, my youngest brother had been rather badly burned when he was a child, and was still using the special burn cream that you’re given to apply as an outpatient – and mercifully there was enough left in the tube stored in the fridge to cover the halfsquare-metre of flesh I’d managed to destroy.

  As I lay on my stomach on the couch, Mum informed me I’d given myself second- and third-degree burns. That’s right, I now looked like Freddy Kruger from the knee down – remember: ‘Fruity Lexia makes you sexier’.

  The burns were especially bad at the thinnest part of the skin which covered my Achilles tendon.

  As she slathered the blissfully cooling burn cream across my skin she told me, ‘Hmm. You’ll probably need a skin graft, but I couldn’t be bothered to go to the hospital now. You’ll need to sober up first, we’ll go in the morning.’

  We did have a problem though: the wound was so large that no dressing we had could possibly cover all of it. So my mum, the Great Dr Birute Magdalena Günsberg, did what she did best: she improvised.

  What she needed was some very large, clean, absorbent pads that would soak up the horrible sloughing and seeping that burn wounds tend to do when they are fresh.

  Luckily, she had just the thing.

  I don’t know if the boffins at Stayfree had burns victims in mind when designing their ultra-absorbent overnight maxi pads, but I am very grateful that they did either way – because on that morning, we needed four of them side by side to completely cover the burn.

  I went to bed to pass out, and awoke in pain a few hours later to head to hospital.

  It was touch and go for a few days, but thanks to my mum’s incredibly improvised first aid I ended up not needing a skin graft. It took a long time to heal, but thankfully I made a full recovery and have only minimal scarring to show for my one and only day auditioning for the rural fire service.

  It was not my last idiotic drunken injury by a long shot, nor was it the last time I’d cause my mum undue worry as she watched her second son attempt to destroy himself with alcohol night after night.
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  But thankfully, seven years, two months and twenty-three days ago I eventually did stop drinking.

  It didn’t stop me stupidly injuring myself, but it did stop a whole lot of other stupidity.

  CAIT HARRIS

  To summarise the blurb of Cait is to say that she is a writer, director and actor who loves to write and tell stories. Because joy-filled limbic resonance feels better, Cait is her happiest after Thanksgiving Dinner when everybody plays bloated charades and at Halloween when the excitement and wonder of childhood collectively returns for but a moment. She loves when, around Christmastime, certain adults place Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer noses on their vehicles, and also watching cockatoos anywhere, anytime, but especially when they perch on the heads of statues. She has an e-journal, The Sturgeon General Recommends Cait Harris, and is currently working on a memoir.

  ‘Don’t Leave’ copyright © Cait Harris 2018

  Don’t Leave

  by CAIT HARRIS

  This story was originally performed at the event Best Intentions

  The summer when I was eleven years old, my family returned to Santa Barbara after a three-year stint in my mom’s hometown of Sydney, Australia. I welcomed this fresh start, the chance to pronounce my Rs again, to say ‘fanny pack’ without being gravely misunderstood, but something had happened while I was away in that many of my friends’ parents were now divorced.

  One night, new to our home and without complete bed linen sets, I lay engulfed in my sleeping bag, secretly dunking Oreo cookies into a vat of Oreo icing. I had been busy worrying about starting a new school and about whether or not my teacher, Mr Camero, would turn out to be a child molester because he was a male, when I remembered moms and dads could break up. I swiftly shifted my focus to my parents’ marriage and scanned it in my mind’s eye for any cracks. Everything seemed OK – with the exception that my father occasionally slept in my brother’s bunk bed, and my mom could sometimes be found crying on the porch. But other than that – normal. I started to asphyxiate in the sleeping bag and so stuck my sticky face out like a gopher. From the kitchen came the sound of pots and pans being rattled around. And then my mom called one of the cake tins a ‘Fuck Face’. This did strike me as odd, as it had been my mother who had washed my mouth out with soap when I was six for telling her to fuck off. My mom didn’t swear. Not even when she stubbed her toe.

  The next morning, I was busy staring out the window with my binoculars. There had been what appeared to be a paedophile’s van parked on the street for three days now and suspiciously, overnight, it had crossed to the other side of the road. It was now facing my bedroom window. I noted this down in my Log Book as my mom stuck her head into my room. ‘Caitie, darl, could you please pick up Winky’s poop from the floor? It’s starting to fall down from the cracks in the ceiling.’ Winky was my pet rat who we had had to let go in the roof after he impregnated my other three female rats in their communal tank. I knew that I shouldn’t tell my mom to fuck off, so instead I said, ‘Mooooooom, I can’t right now, I’m really busy!’ I noted down the van’s licence plate in my Log Book. ‘Well that’s just great!’ my mom said, tears welling in her eyes. Then she walked out of the front door, got into her car and drove off down the street. This was very odd behaviour: my mom never stopped halfway through asking me to do something. I put down my binoculars and gingerly walked into my parents’ bedroom, opened my mother’s sock drawer and took out her diary. I knew it was very wrong to read someone’s innermost ponderings, but an invisible pull was at work and I proceeded to skim through the pages, breath held. And there, on page three, in pretty cursive handwriting, I read the following, I just don’t think I can take it any more. I want to run away. Leave them all behind. What – she wanted to run away and leave us all behind!? All the blood drained from my head and I felt sick. I urgently placed the diary back among the underwear and scrunchy socks and raced through the house, picking up as much rat shit as I could fit in my hand.

  I knew I should have been a better daughter! I knew I shouldn’t have eaten half of those Oreos, then glued the packet back together and tried to convince my mother that we had bought it that way at the store! Now she was going to leave me. And then I had a realisation.

  She could not leave me if I was already dead.

  Yes, I would stage my own death and then she would remember how much she loved me. But I had to do it very realistically and in time for when she arrived home.

  Five minutes later, the scene was set. I could feel the damp wood floor beneath my cheeks as water pooled around me and my mouth burned with the salted peanuts that dangled from my lips. I practised keeping my arm still as it lay outstretched like Michelangelo’s Adam, gently brushing against a power cord and power socket. Sadly for Mom, when she came upon me, she would realise with deep regret and grief that I had walked into the room casually enjoying some peanuts and a glass of water, then gone to plug in a lamp. As I had bent over to plug in the cord, the water I was holding had tipped out, electrocuting me.

  I heard a car pull into our driveway and I shut my eyes. The footsteps came in the front door and towards me and then they stopped. And then I heard, the crunch of a peanut. I opened my eyes and found my father, nibbling one off the floor. ‘Oh hi, Kiddo,’ Dad said. ‘Having a little nap?’

  That evening, I became my mother’s shadow, scared shitless she would leave before my next attempt. I followed her to the garbage cans, explaining that I wanted to know how she took out the trash. I went to the bathroom with her, noting what a nice place it was for girl-time. She drew the line at me sleeping in her bed as I had wet it on the past few occasions, but she did allow me to lay my sleeping bag out on the floor beside her.

  In the morning, to my deep relief, my mother was still safely in the house and baking, on better terms now with the cake tin. And I realised that I was ready to die again. A storm thundered outside as I moved through sheets of rain into our backyard and took my spot on the grass in front of the kitchen window. This wasn’t exactly abnormal for me as I often lay out in the rain in storms while reenacting my favourite part of Sense and Sensibility, where Marianne sprains her ankle and is saved by the fickle Willoughby. But this time it would be different. This time I would be lying face down in the grass, with my head in the mud, a bottle of laxatives that I had found in a neighbour’s trash can splayed out beside me. Twenty minutes in, as rain pelted the back of my head and muddy water crept its way into my orifices, I heard the back door open and footsteps approach. I shut my eyes. And then I heard it. Crunch, crunch, crunch. Was my dad eating the laxatives? I opened my eyes and saw my little puppy dog, Cobber, chowing down. Knowing he wasn’t allowed chocolate, I broke character and quickly sat up like any good mother would, and shoved my hand in his wet gob and extracted all the pills from his wet rubbery jaws. Another failed attempt.

  The following morning when I awoke I had eaten so many Oreos throughout the night as I checked to make sure Mom was still in her bed that when I exhaled the sleeping bag unzipped itself.

  A few hours later, my four-year-old cousin Sammy and I were in my bedroom playing neighbourhood watch when my mother stuck her head in. ‘Just popping to the store, guys!’

  I turned with my binoculars and saw that she was wearing her purple puffy coat – the purple puffy coat she took on extended vacations.

  ‘Are you sure you need to take your coat to the store?’ I said, trailing behind her to the car, where I peered in, looking for suitcases or wads of cash.

  ‘Yes, darl, it’s nippy. And Catie-matie, no more Oreos while I’m out, OK love? You’ve had enough. OK, bye guys, have fun!’ Mom flashed a smile and wave and then zipped off down the street.

  ‘Did she say, “OK, bye” as in, like, a “Goodbye-Bye”, do you think?’ I asked my little cousin, who looked up with great care and answered, ‘Oreos?’

  Twenty minutes later, with Cobber safely locked in the bathroom and my dad taking a nap face down somewhere, I lay draped over the dining room radiator with a but
cher’s knife propped in my armpit and ketchup smeared all over my chest and the floor.

  ‘Ready, Sammy?’ I asked my cousin, who nodded enthusiastically from her mark in the front doorway. And just as rehearsed, as the car pulled in and Mom walked through the front yard to the porch, Sammy ran up and just like a professional actress screamed, ‘Aunty Cath! Aunty Cath! Caitie’s dead!’ before taking a bite of her Oreo.

  Mom dropped her groceries and ran into the dining room, swooping down beside me. ‘Caitie!? Caitie!? Why does it smell like hamburgers?! Caitie!!’ She tried to hoist me up off the radiator and into her lap, but as she cupped my armpits I let out a giggle.

  ‘Why do you keep doing this?! You need to stop doing this!!’ Mom pleaded, her face all red. I guess she had been paying attention after all.

  Needing some space, Mom sent me down the street, to go play with her friend’s daughter, Lily.

  ‘I’m sorry I’ve been frowning, Lily,’ I said, as I tossed her a tennis ball. ‘I promise I’ll be happy in five seconds.’ I counted down from five and then plastered a grin on my face. ‘So Lily, what’s it like to have divorced parents?’

  Lily looked at me quizzically. ‘Well, you should know,’ she said, bouncing back the tennis ball.

  ‘What?!’ I said, frowning, and not apologising for it.

  ‘Well, my mom said your parents have been divorced for two months.’

  I ran home as fast as my chubby, Oreo-stuffed feet could take me, into the house, where my parents were chatting in the kitchen.

  ‘You’re divorced?!’ I squealed.

  My mom’s face softened, ‘Oh honey, we wanted to trial it out before we told your brother and you.’

  I grabbed the closest knife I could find, which was about the size of a cocktail sausage, and then ran into my bedroom, shut the door and locked it. I willed the knife against my vein as much as I could, the skin pressing up and down like a trampoline. Knock, knock, knock. ‘Caitie, darl? Please let me in, we love you very much.’ Mom cooed from the outside of the door.