The Pain, My Mother, Sir Tiffy, Cyber Boy & Me

by Michael Gerard Bauer

  What I got was …

  ‘Oh, Maggie, it was so lovely! So beautiful and relaxing. We had such a gorgeous day. You know, you really should have come. You would have loved it.’ Plus a constant drone of, ‘Danny this’ and ‘Danny that’.

  I decided that it was time I found out more about The Pain. Know your enemy and all that. When Mum sat down at the kitchen table with the coffee I’d brewed up for her, I made my move.

  ‘So … how did you two meet anyway?’

  Mum set her mug back down on the table.

  ‘Actually … Danny and I first met on a professional basis, about six months ago, but then I didn’t bump into him again socially until a few weeks back. I was doing some shopping in my lunch break and he was doing the same. We recognised each other and had a coffee together and at the end he asked if I’d be interested in maybe going to the pictures with him sometime.’

  ‘And you said yes? Just like that?’

  It seemed a reasonable enough question to me, but judging from the rolling eyes, I’m not sure everyone agreed.

  ‘No, Maggie, don’t be silly. First I consulted the high priests and the soothsayers, after which I had a local witch doctor foretell my future by slaughtering a chicken and reading its entrails, and then, and only then, when all the signs were positive and all the stars in the heavens properly aligned, did I finally give my consent.’

  I returned the rolled eyes with interest.

  ‘Mrs Warwick says sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.’

  My mother struck a ridiculous kung-fu karate pose.

  ‘Except in the hands of the Master!’

  ‘Mum, seriously, you shouldn’t try to be funny. It’s just embarrassing. I’m telling you this for your own good.’

  ‘Nonsense. You’re just jealous.’

  ‘Of course I am. I’d just love to be able to humiliate myself the way you do. Anyway, fine, whatever. But what did you mean when you said you first met six months ago … professionally?’

  Mum pushed herself back in her chair and studied me.

  ‘Can I just enquire at this point if I’m going to be charged with anything here, detective? Maybe my lawyer should be present.’

  I shook my head at her.

  ‘Mum, remember what I just said about trying to be funny?’

  ‘Fine. Then if you must know, we met at his place of work. I suppose you might say that an acquaintance of mine brought us together.’

  So, an acquaintance of my mother’s was responsible for bringing The Pain into my life, hey. Now we were getting somewhere. Well, that acquaintance had a lot to answer for!

  ‘An acquaintance? Anyone I know?’

  ‘I should think so.’

  ‘Really? Who?’

  Mum breathed in. She pressed her lips together and lowered her eyes before breathing out an answer.

  ‘It was you, Maggie.’

  Me? Not only was that clearly ridiculous, it was also straight-out impossible. I’d never seen The Pain before in my life. I would definitely remember him if I had. Was this supposed to be some kind of sick joke?

  ‘That’s stupid,’ I told her.

  ‘But true, sweetie. Danny works at St Vincent’s Hospital. He’s a nurse.’

  She looked at me and waited.

  ‘Sometimes he does shifts in the … Emergency Department.’

  Raised eyebrows now.

  ‘St Vincent’s Hospital Emergency Department? The beginning of the year? Ringing any bells with you?’

  It certainly was. Figurative Language Warning! A loud, ugly death knell was clanging and shuddering away in my chest. Or more like a reverse death knell actually. Because instead of ringing out the dead, it was calling things back to life that I really wished would remain well and truly buried.

  Mum reached across the table and placed her hand on mine.

  ‘Danny was on duty in Emergency … that night we had to bring you in.’

  I was feeling ill. Actual sick-up-in-the-mouth ill. The Pain had just barged his way into my personal life. My very personal, personal life.

  ‘He was there? But … but I don’t remember him.’

  Mum sent a sad, crooked smile my way.

  ‘Do you remember much of anything from that night, sweetie?’

  I considered that statement for a moment.

  Hmmmm. Yes. Excellent point.

  9

  A wacky, heartwarming, laughter-packed comedy romp

  Remember that pothole the size of the Grand Canyon I told you had swallowed my ‘finding a friend’ goal along with my reputation? Brace yourself, because it’s about to reappear for another gulp.

  Now, I would really love to be able to say that my unscheduled visit to the Emergency Ward was the result of something classy like a burst appendix, a rare, contagious, tropical disease, a venomous snake bite or possibly even extreme diarrhoea.

  But unfortunately I can’t.

  To explain what happened, I need to take you back to the start of the year. It was a time when things were really beginning to look up for me. I was slowly rediscovering the old Maggie Butt and, like I said before, there were some promising signs that Goal 1: Make at least one good friend at St Brenda’s might actually be achievable. The most promising sign of all was that along with Jazzmin Mellors I’d been invited to a sleepover at Courtney Summers’ house!

  It would be nice to think that the main reason I was asked to join Courtney and Jazzmin was because they had begun to see the real me and had liked what they saw. But it probably had more to do with the fact that my mother (who was desperate to increase my circle of close friends to something approaching any number above zilch) shared tuckshop duty days with Mrs Summers. I’m pretty sure Mum must have poured her heart out to Mrs S about me and my friendless state over a tray of salad rolls. I’m also pretty sure that Mrs Summers then found some way to bribe Courtney to include me in her tight little friendship group with Jazzmin.

  But however I got to be there, now that I was in, I wanted to make the most of it. I was secretly hoping that after the three of us had spent the night hanging out together, talking, laughing, watching movies and eating junk food, maybe we would end up becoming proper BFFs and not just be PFFs (Pretend Friends For-now).

  But as much as I hate to disappoint you, that didn’t happen. Mainly because the sleepover came with a couple of surprises for which I was woefully unprepared.

  The first surprise came with the second movie that Courtney and Jazzmin chose for us to watch. It was called The Kid and Me. The blurb described it as ‘a wacky, heartwarming and laughter-packed comedy romp’. But that’s not why they picked it. They picked it because Robby Spears was in it. You might know him. He’s that guy from the boy band In Your Dreams who also does a bit of acting. His part in The Kid and Me was pretty small, but Jazzmin and Courtney didn’t mind. They still screamed and moaned every time he appeared. (Particularly if his shirt didn’t appear with him.) I joined in too. But you know, just to be polite.

  But it wasn’t Robby Spears who provided the surprise in the movie for me. It was one of the other actors. One that I knew only too well. Or once thought I did.

  His name was Jason Davenport.

  You probably know him too. Tall. Not bad looking. Late thirties. Yeah, him. The reasonably successful, pretty well-known actor guy. Then here’s a little surprise for you. Acting is not Jason Davenport’s only claim to fame. He also happens to be my biological father.

  Yes, it’s true. Way back when he was a twenty-two-year-old wannabe on the set of some television commercial, Jason Davenport met a twenty-year-old trainee make-up artist called Jacquie Butt (heard that surname somewhere before?) and after a whirlwind romance they were married within a year. And then, just four short months after that, a healthy, bouncing baby girl was born. (Only four months? It’s a miracle!) They named her Marguerite. Maggie for short.

  Yay me!

  So you see, I was actually Maggie Davenport for most of my life. However, when my parents divorced Mum went bac
k to her maiden name, and in a brave show of support I (figuratively) embraced my inner Butt and joined her.

  And why did my father leave us, just three days after my eleventh birthday? Well, he gets no points for originality from me, because he did the old cliché thing of running off with his leading lady. Or, if you’d prefer my mother’s description, he ran off with ‘an artificial, over-enhanced, vacuum-headed, bimbo staaaaaaaaaaarlet’. (Are you starting to figure out why Mum and I are involved in ‘discussions’ about me choosing subjects that have anything to do with acting and movies?)

  Looking back, I don’t really remember any big fights before my father left. I don’t recall angry words or tears or sobbing or slammed doors or things being thrown about and broken. The opposite, in fact. I remember less talking, less laughing and less of my father, because he was away for longer and longer periods on various film shoots and theatre performances. Maybe Mum shielded me from the bad stuff. Or maybe I was too busy being mostly happy Maggie Davenport to even notice.

  My father lives in Los Angeles now. I haven’t seen him (except on a screen) for nearly two years. But every birthday I do get a card and some money to buy a present for myself, so there you go. Oh, and just to keep you up to date with the gossip, Jason Davenport has since moved on from the staaaaaaaaaaarlet. A couple of times, in fact, if you believe the celebrity magazines.

  I won’t try to kid you. It was bad when my father left. A million emotions were running through me. Just your basic feelings of loss, confusion, shock, guilt, betrayal, sorrow, despair, bitterness, anger, resentment, emptiness and fear, all wrapped up in a kind of hurt like someone is trying to scrape your insides out with a rusty shovel.

  I thought I’d bundled up all those feelings and memories and tossed them like a bag of garbage well outside the walls of Castle Butt. I certainly didn’t expect that a stupid, wacky, heartwarming and laughter-packed comedy romp would go and bring them all rushing back.

  SURPRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIISE!

  Not that I blame Courtney or Jazzmin at all for what happened. Apart from breaking Maggie Butt’s First Rule of Movie Selection, which is ‘Never choose a movie with the word wacky in the blurb,’ they did nothing wrong. They didn’t know that Jason Davenport was my father. It wasn’t something Mum and I ever shared around. So I sat through the whole wacky thing without once letting on I was related to one of the people on the screen. Which might have been bearable if it had been some bonehead action film.

  But it wasn’t.

  The Kid and Me was all about this not-so-wacky single guy (played by my father) whose life is totally falling apart when a wacky sixteen-year-old girl arrives on his doorstep with her wacky, homeless friend (Robby Spears! Squeeeeeeeeeeeee!) claiming to be his wacky long-lost illegitimate daughter. Turns out she is. How wacky is that? Of course before we find that out for sure, the three of them have to go through all these wacky adventures until finally, in an amazing and totally unpredictable wacky plot twist, the wacky daughter magically changes her not-so-wacky father’s life for the better (I know!) and so they all end up living together wackily ever after. (I KNOW!). It was a full-throttle wacky-a-thon from start to finish.

  If I had to rate it, I’d say it probably just limped over the line into the ‘it could be worse, but I’m just not sure how’ category. But one scene in particular really got to me. It was near the end where my real father tells his pretend daughter how much he loves her and how ‘special’ she is to him and how he will ‘always be there’ for her and how ‘there is no power in the entire universe’ strong enough to ever tear them apart. Cheesy stuff I know, but credit where credit is due as they say. My father was surprisingly convincing in his role. He really did sound like a dad who meant every single word he said to his daughter.

  Just like he did when he used to say the same kind of things to me.

  And that’s what I couldn’t stop thinking about, even when the stupid movie had finished and the credits were rolling. Which is probably why the rest of the night turned into a giant luge run and went rapidly downhill.

  However, in my defence, I’d just like to point out that if it hadn’t been for that first surprise of the evening, I’m sure I would have handled the second surprise much better.

  Although it’s kind of hard to imagine how I could have possibly handled it any worse.

  10

  The pothole that ate Goal 1

  That second surprise of the evening occurred later in Courtney’s room. It was the magical appearance from Jazzmin’s sleeping bag of a brand new bottle of vodka. Taa Daa!

  Judging by the terrified look on Courtney’s face, I think she might have been even more surprised than me. According to Jazzmin she’d ‘borrowed’ it so sneakily from her father’s apparently vast supplies that he would never notice it ‘in a squillion years’ and she suggested that Courtney should ‘stop being such a wimp!’.

  I still believe that under normal circumstances I might have declined the alcohol altogether (which is what Courtney did) or maybe, just to be part of the fun, had one or two teensy pretend drinks, giggled a bit and gone to bed. But my viewing of The Kid and Me had left me feeling quite a bit drown-my-sorrowsy, so I sort of got an itsy-bitsy bit carried away.

  And of course when I say ‘itsy-bitsy bit’ I mean ‘totally’.

  And when I say ‘carried away’ I mean both figuratively (forgive me, Sister Evangelista!) and I regret to say, literally.

  Despite (mainly) Courtney’s, and (eventually) Jazzmin’s, best efforts to stop me, this is roughly how I think my drinking schedule progressed that night.

  Drink 1. A tiny dribble of vodka drowned in an ocean of orange juice.

  Drinks 2 & 3. Increasingly generous dashes of vodka with medium to high levels of orange juice contamination.

  Drink 4. Equal opportunity vodka and orange!

  Drink 5. Vodka – SUPER-SIZED. (Warning: may contain traces of orange juice.)

  Drink 6. The new VODKA ZERO. 100% vodka; 0% brains.

  It was somewhere during drink six that a number of highly unusual and quite surreal things occurred. First off, my head started behaving like a massive lead weight balancing on top of a floppy rubber stalk. Then the room converted into an enormous washing machine stuck on spin cycle, which was quickly followed by the floor leaping up at my face and someone shooting me in the forehead. The whole bizarre episode concluded with a simultaneous total solar and lunar eclipse.

  On the other hand, all of that might just be a confusing mix of heavy-handed similes and over-the-top metaphors that I probably should have warned you about, and what might have actually happened is this: I got completely blotto, became disorientated and dizzy, fell face first off my stool and cracked my forehead on the corner of Courtney’s desk on the way to ending up a floppy, crumpled heap on the floor. Where I might have spent the night … if it hadn’t been for the blood.

  Apparently there was quite a lot of it. ‘A big, red tsunami’ of blood. (Courtney’s metaphor, not mine!) Then, they tell me, everything zapped into hyper-drive. Courtney and Jazzmin screamed. Courtney’s parents came running. My mother and an ambulance were summoned. And soon everyone was hurtling their way to the Emergency Department of St Vincent’s Hospital, where my memories range from extremely vague and bizarre to totally non-existent.

  One thing I do know, however, is that I cleverly avoided the unpleasant scenario of having to have my stomach pumped (gross!) by creating the even more unpleasant scenario of transforming into a human fountain and projectile-vomiting a lethal swill of vodka, orange juice, ice-cream, chips, M & Ms and assorted junk food all over everything and everyone in close proximity.

  Consider that stomach well and truly pumped, baby!

  The only good piece of news to come out of the night was that my injury wasn’t serious. Apparently foreheads are very enthusiastic bleeders, so head cuts often look much worse than they actually are. Mine only required three stitches and left just a tiny scar on my hairline.

&
nbsp; But I got scarred in other even more painful ways.

  For example, Jazzmin thought it would be a good idea to share highlights of the night on the internet (thankfully without photos) while at the same time somehow neglecting to mention that she was the one who brought along the vodka in the first place. Naturally everyone just assumed that bringing alcohol to a sleepover and getting totally wasted was just the sort of thing that the sulky, withdrawn, irritable, anti-social, product-of-a-broken-home, pissed-off-at-the-world, don’t-want-to-be-here, zero-personality new kid would do.

  So there you have it. The pothole that ate Goal 1.

  And if that wasn’t already depressing enough, now I’d learned that The Pain had been present to witness every gruesome detail of my humiliation up close and personal.

  Oh joy.

  11

  Cyber Boy

  Back at school the following week I had more pressing concerns than The Pain’s unexpected and unwanted intrusion into my embarrassing private life. There was the increasingly disastrous state of my THREE SPECIFIC AND REALISTIC GOALS to attend to.

  With Goal 1: Make at least one good friend at St Brenda’s now completely undermined by the Sleepover Spew Fest from Hell, and Goal 3: Get an overall A for English in the process of being annihilated by the Sister-minator, I needed to concentrate my efforts on Goal 2: Find a partner for the Year Ten Graduation Dance.

  How hard could it be, right? I mean who wouldn’t want to go to a dance with that sulky, withdrawn, irritable, anti-social, product-of-a-broken-home, pissed-off-at-the-world, don’t-want-to-be-here, zero-personality, vodka-regurgitating psycho Maggie Butt?

  For some reason, great hordes of eager applicants hadn’t been beating a path to my door. So, with time dwindling, I knew a more proactive approach was required. I had dreams of being a film director, didn’t I? It was time to take charge of my story and cast my very own real-life leading man!