by Becky Lucas
Then once you’ve reached your destination there are the people who apparently want their bags more than everyone else, since they’ve decided to wait so close to the baggage carousel that no one else can reach or even see their bags coming around.
As easy as it is to get frustrated by people at the airport, it can be worth taking a moment to consider why they are there in the first place. Sometimes the reason you’re at the airport is a good one, like a fabulous overseas holiday. But sometimes it’s a bad one, like having to travel to a loved one’s funeral. I realised that the only way to get through airports without losing my mind is to try to imagine the inner lives of the people who recline their seats during a one-hour flight, because you never know if they’ve been up all night with their sick mum and this flight was their only chance to get a quick nap in before returning to work or family life.
So thank you to the people who block the baggage carousel at the airport. In order to free myself from the frustration you cause me, I’ve worked harder to treat people with compassion, and to see them as complex individuals rather than how I used to see them: as self-centred, khaki short–wearing Krispy Kreme consumers, whose only mission in life was to annoy me, the main protagonist of the airport, Becky Lucas.
Isabella
When I first moved to Sydney in 2013, at age twenty-four, I lived in an apartment block high above a busy road in the inner-city suburb that everyone lives in when they first move to Sydney.
Newtown is a bustling place where everyone has a septum piercing and cool hair, thinks everything they’re doing is terribly important, wears clothes that were obviously targeted to them on Instagram, and talks loudly and opinionatedly about things they don’t actually know that much about.
‘It’s like they’ve never even heard of restorative justice,’ a girl will say to her friend, having just learnt the term ‘restorative justice’.
I loved living there. At the time, I fit right in. But now that I’m older, it’s cringey to see the new generation of people you used to be like. They remind me of the dumb things I said at twenty-four, and who needs that?
I shared an apartment with my two friends Jaime and Simon, and my bedroom was on the side facing the busy street. The room also had a window shaped like a circle that was impossible to put a curtain over. My room, therefore, was impossibly bright and loud – two elements that I feel can really tip you into full-blown psychosis if endured for long enough.
What was good about Newtown, though, is that no matter how mental you appeared, there was always someone nearby to take the focus off you. Like the homeless man who wore steampunk goggles and would stand underneath my window, chanting about the dangers of gay people from 3 am to around 8 am. The worst thing about this was that his chants were quite catchy, and I’d regularly find myself in line for coffee in my very forward-thinking, progressive neighbourhood, singing his homophobic ear worms. Isn’t it funny what sticks with you? I could still recite some of it now, but I can’t remember a single conversation I ever had with my grandma.
I liked how I felt during those days of living there. I distinctly remember walking along the street with the sun on my face, feeling really happy for no apparent reason. I guess it was just because I was young and hopeful. I’m still hopeful now, but it’s a different type of hope when you’re older – you hope there’s parking at your destination, you hope you don’t randomly develop a gluten allergy. Life, once exciting and full of possibilities, becomes something you must navigate with as much ease as possible.
I walked a lot back then, mostly in the interest of finding money, which was needed to bridge the gap between the days when my Centrelink payment ran out and when the next payment went into my account. It sounds so pathetic, looking for money on the street, but I did quite often find some – at least fifty cents, which would be enough for a packet of ramen noodles. And if my roommates weren’t home, I could nick one of their tins of tuna to have with it, and coast off that until dinner.
It was while I lived in this place that I saw my first dead body. It happened after I’d come ambling back into the apartment, having snuck into an afternoon movie session at the Dendy cinema, which was very easy to do back then. My roommate Simon pointed out an ambulance tent that had been set up in the alley beside our building. I popped my head out of the window and, sure enough, there was a big white tent with ambulance officers standing there, all looking in different directions. There was a body-sized lump on the road, covered with a sheet, and a shoe lying not far away from the lump, which I assumed belonged to the person who was lying underneath the sheet.
That shoe stood out to me, because the first thing I thought was ‘I had that shoe’ – it was one of those basic black ballet flats you might buy from Novo, Payless or, should you be so lucky, Wittner. For a couple years there, girls my age persisted with these horrific little flats, despite the fact that we were constantly slipping out of them and having to put Band-Aids over our blisters. I’m always so pleased to see the younger generation of girls are smart enough to have figured out they can just wear Converse sneakers or literally anything else.
We didn’t know why there was a dead body on the ground outside our building but, I tell you what, there is nothing quite like it to lift you out of the malaise of being hungry and unemployed. At first, we thought it might have been a local who had overdosed, or a murder victim who had been unceremoniously dumped there.
Eventually, the sight of a white tent, a sheet-covered lump and a shoe got a bit dull, so we pulled our heads back in and turned on the television, taking turns to occasionally put our head out the window for a dead-body update. After several turns, I looked down to see, not a white tent, lump and shoe like I had so many times before, but the full confronting vision of the dead body of what looked like an older woman, though it was hard to know for sure. I guess bodies go flat when they fall from big heights. I had never thought about that before then.
Over the coming days, our intrigue turned to sadness and then back to curiosity. We wanted to find out more about her, but none of our neighbours had any information about what had happened or who she was.
As luck would have it, I bumped into the building’s real estate agent in the lift, who told me the full story. He said that the woman’s name was Isabella, and she had lived in the penthouse apartment with her husband, John, for twenty years. John had been an inventor who’d had some success in the 1980s with his designs, and so they were financially very comfortable. They were both seventy-nine years old and had no kids. They had been madly in love almost their entire lives and had barely spent a day apart, up until a few months ago when John had died. He had been working on a high-speed electric bike and, during a test drive, he lost control and rode the bike at full speed into a brick wall, suffering injuries that led to his death soon after.
In the following months, Isabella fell into a deep depression. Her community of friends did their best to take care of her, but they weren’t up to the task – not just emotionally but also physically. With no kids to help her with the things John used to take care of, and Isabella talking constantly of wanting to kill herself, the real estate agent convinced her to move into a retirement home where she could meet other people her age and attempt to enjoy her remaining years. He explained to her that the price she could get for her apartment would ensure a very comfortable existence in a home (and a tidy little commission for him too, I imagine).
The real estate agent told me he had been helping Isabella find somewhere suitable. They’d visited a few nursing homes and she was starting to come around to the idea and was even feeling optimistic about it all.
The day of the move, he had been helping her to pack up her things into boxes. I’ve personally never been able to get a real estate agent to even return my calls, but maybe he was just one of the good ones.
He told me that, as they were pulling away in the car, she had turned to him and said in a panicked voice that she’d forgotten something upstairs, something personal Jo
hn had given her. The real estate agent gave her the keys and said he’d wait downstairs in the car while she went up and did what she needed to do.
Isabella, I’m glad the first dead body I saw was yours, as you sounded really cool. And you may just have succeeded in making a real estate agent feel guilty, perhaps for the first time ever.
Emma
When I was sixteen, one of my best friends’ mum got married to an Englishman. He was an acceptable-enough guy, but I never fully connected with him. It could have had something to do with the fact that he played the clarinet, an instrument so boring I believe the human brain is unable to think about it for more than three seconds before shutting down, or because of the way he pronounced the word ‘yoghurt’. Either way, I remember feeling that the marriage could never be a long-term thing.
However, what did excite me was the prospect of an impending visit from his English daughter, who my best friend Amrita and I decided was going to be our new best friend. Her name was Emma and she was about two years older than us, which obviously meant she was pure perfection. We became obsessed with knowing everything about her even before we’d laid eyes on her.
The day she landed in Australia, I arrived breathless from my bike ride, clearly far too eager. As soon as I was introduced to her, I sensed her immediately recoil from me and that pretty much set the tone for the rest of her visit.
This girl, who we’d had such high hopes for, couldn’t have been less interested in us. She would wake up in the morning and fix herself a cup of tea and toast, then retire to her room where she would spend hours on the phone talking loudly with her friends back home. We’d listen by her door as she’d say, ‘Oh yeah . . . Yeah . . . Yeah, of course, absolutely! Oh my god, I know. I mean, I’m sorry if this sounds bad, but there’s a reason Australia is separated from the rest of the world.’ And then she’d laugh in this way that suggested she wasn’t actually sorry if she sounded bad.
Emma was the first person who I’d ever heard use the expression ‘Murphy’s Law’. She was always saying it. Someone would stub their toe on the bitumen and she’d lazily declare in her raspy British voice, ‘Well, it’s Murphy’s Law, isn’t it?’ I’d agree, even though I couldn’t figure out what it meant based on the way she was using the expression.
There is something hilarious about people using their native language incorrectly, especially British people, who went around the world insisting that everyone speak English. In 2013, my friend Anna, who was stoned at the time, confessed that she wasn’t quite sure that she knew what the word ‘sarcasm’ meant. I explained it as best I could and watched her face as it dawned on her that she may have been using the word incorrectly. She admitted to me that she had thought it meant saying mean things that are true but pretending you’re joking. I began mentally flicking back through all her ‘sarcastic comments’ and wanting to curl up into a ball and die.
Most of the time, Emma didn’t want anything to do with Amrita and me, but, occasionally, when the time difference meant her friends back home had gone to sleep, she’d get bored and give us a puff on her cigarette and show us messages that boys back in England had sent her.
Emma’s disdain for us was nothing personal; she mostly just had it in for Australia. Amrita and her mum and now stepdad lived up in the hinterland in an eco-house, which was designed in such a way that even though you were inside, you felt as though you were outside. Their house was full of bugs, geckos and other sorts of wildlife, and there was really nothing you could do to avoid it. It had a drop toilet, which meant that every week her mum would have to empty out a large bucket filled with urine and faeces that didn’t come from her. I was never fully comfortable with the idea of this, and I used to wonder whether the fact that she had to face the excrement of every person who crossed the threshold of her home meant she was choosier with her friends. If this made me feel squeamish, I could only imagine how Emma the English Rose felt about it all.
It all reached a climax one day. We were sitting around in the lounge room, discussing what to do that day, and Emma started complaining for the hundredth time about Australia and why it was so bad. She tearfully told us she didn’t want to go on a bushwalk; she didn’t want to go to the beach; and she was sick of the spiders, the midges and the geckos.
She asked her dad if she could go back to England earlier than they’d arranged.
He said no.
She started yelling at him about the unfair living conditions she was putting up with, about how they lived ‘like animals’. Back home, she said, she had her sheets cleaned almost daily! Ironed as well!
She said that she couldn’t help but think about the snakes. She was terrified, and how could her dad be okay with his daughter being scared every day of her life?
Her dad tried to calm her down, telling her that there were no snakes, which only set her off even more.
‘There are snakes! There are!’ she screamed. ‘How dare you tell me there aren’t snakes! We’re living in the fucking outback!’
It was absolutely not the outback, but I wasn’t about to pipe up.
The hysterics continued while we all watched on. I probably should have left, really. After a few moments, we noticed a fine dust starting to sprinkle down on her, lightly at first. Then, before we had time to process what was happening, there was a loud crack. We all looked up to see the ceiling above us starting to cave in and, from the exposed gap, a huge three-metre carpet snake fell and landed on Emma’s neck, then her lap, and eventually the floor, where it coiled up, no doubt pretty startled by what had just happened.
I don’t really remember what happened after that. I do recall there being a lot of screaming and crying on Emma’s part, and I think someone did say ‘Blimey’ at one point.
But at least Emma finally learnt what the expression ‘Murphy’s Law’ meant.
So thank you to Emma for showing me what Murphy’s Law meant in such an entertaining way. I’ll never forget it.
Heather’s dad
I don’t remember what my friend Heather’s dad did for a living, but if I were to say he was a door-to-door salesman, then I think that would get my point across. He constantly wore the expression of a man who was regularly told ‘no’.
Heather’s mum wanted to leave Heather’s dad, but could never fully commit to it. She’d leave on the weekend and then return on Tuesday to drink white wine on the couch. I once walked into their bedroom and saw him on his knees, giving his wife a Brazilian wax. Even at age fourteen, I knew that you would never ask a man you were truly in love with to do that.
Heather was incredible at making girls at school cry. She had this sneer that could have anyone in a heap from existential angst, questioning why they’d ever tried anything in their entire life when they were such a worthless worm. I still think about her sneer and whether she’s currently putting it to good use.
They were a funny lot, this family. There were four kids: Heather, Sacha, Michael and Stan. They all seemed like lab experiments gone wrong, with very thin translucent skin and weak chins. Children already have an incredible ability to sniff out someone’s insecurity, and these siblings were better than most. And the person they loved to torment the most was their dad. He just couldn’t get his kids to respect him. It was so bad that whoever was over at their house that day would often partake in the mockery as well. I didn’t want to gang up on Heather’s dad, but if everyone else was doing it, it was just easier to join in.
On Friday afternoons, there was a Samoan man who would sell fireworks to kids at the back of the school oval. Michael and Stan would buy some, head home and then tape their dad’s belongings to individual rockets and set them off. He’d come home, already defeated from work, to see one of his shoes sailing through the afternoon sky.
‘Come on, kids,’ he’d wearily mutter.
It got to be so much that Heather’s dad enlisted the help of a therapist, which was strange. No one had a therapist where I grew up. If you were upset, you either drank, silently fished of
f the jetty or developed stomach cancer over forty years of holding it all in (or all three). But off he went, every week, to see this therapist woman who I doubt could ever truly understand what these kids were capable of.
On a day when we were supposed to be at school but instead had chosen to lie on mattresses on the floor watching TV, Michael came into the lounge room, smiling and holding a notebook. It was a diary that was being kept by their dad, obviously as an exercise prescribed to him by his therapist.
A huge mistake.
We flicked through the pages like frenzied animals.
Tuesday 15th of April
4.30 pm: Asked Heather nicely if she would feed the cat while I was out, her response was ‘get fucked’.
10.40 pm: Sacha told me the dishes would be done before she went to bed. Guess who ended up doing them?
Wednesday 16th of April
3.40 pm: Asked Michael how school was and he farted at me.
Thursday 17th April
7.30 am: Dan popped a party popper in my face. Didn’t seem concerned for my safety in the slightest.
We gathered around the notebook like it was some kind of sacrosanct artefact that had been given to us by the gods of comedy. Then we realised what we had to do. We started making fake entries in the back half of the diary for him to eventually find. Things like:
