Acknowledgments

by Becky Lucas

  4th of June

  3.50 pm: Did a big poopy shit in my underpants. God it’s everywhere. Running down my leg oh no.

  13th of July

  7.30 pm: Not again! What is wrong with my bum? So much poo. Dear god. My ass.

  4th of August

  8 am: I’m a dumb cunt.

  The next couple of weeks nearly killed us as we watched him surreptitiously write his diary entries, not realising we were all breathlessly waiting for him to find ours.

  A few weeks later, Heather came to school and told us her dad finally came across the diary entries we’d written. She said he’d come into the lounge room and asked them when they’d found the diary. When they told him, he stood up and wordlessly left the house. That had been a few days ago, and Heather’s dad still hadn’t come back.

  Heather didn’t seem that concerned. She said he was probably staying at his mum’s place.

  Then, that Friday afternoon, he’d apparently walked through the door with a bit more colour in his face and a spring in his step, ready to accept a few apologies from the kids.

  Michael briefly looked up from his Game Boy and said, ‘Gay shirt,’ which, according to Heather, caused her mum to spit out her wine from laughter.

  Thank you to Heather’s dad for the reminder that you should never write anything down that you don’t want to be read. It’s not worth it.

  Ros

  Stand-up comedy can be terrifying. When I’m nervous or scared, I don’t really like to talk to people I don’t know before a show, yet that’s exclusively what happens. It’s bizarre – you’re about to do this thing that for most people would be their worst nightmare, but you’re also expected to have light playful banter with whomever is around, lest you be labelled rude by a venue manager in regional Queensland.

  When you are doing shows away from home, there’s usually someone who comes and picks you up from your hotel or wherever you’re staying to take you to the venue, which is very nice of the organisers and all, but the last thing you feel like doing before performing onstage is making polite chitchat with some driver you’ll never see again. I’m sure they don’t want to talk to me either. Most of the time I feel like we’re both just sitting there, wearily passing the conversational baton back and forth, secretly yearning for silence.

  In Perth, I got chatting to this driver who was a gruff old man, and I liked him immediately. I’ve always liked men who aren’t concerned with how they come across to others, because it feels like they’re not trying to hide anything. Whenever there’s a documentary about a serial killer, there’s usually a scene with their mum, sitting in a faded floral lounge chair, tearfully explaining that she doesn’t know how any of this happened, that her son wouldn’t even hurt a fly, and I’ve always thought, Well, maybe that’s because he was exhausted from murdering women. That’s why nothing makes me feel safer than a guy who, when faced with a crackling brown cockroach, proceeds to squash it dead with his shoe.

  In my industry, I constantly see the nice guy who shares all the right articles and parrots the safe popular opinion come undone every time, because of course they do. Let’s not forget that one of the nicest, cleanest comedians was Bill Cosby. When someone is so obsessed with seeming like a good person who never puts a foot wrong, I can’t help but wonder why. To me, a person who seems so intent on seeming nice all of the time is obviously insecure in their goodness and perhaps, deep down, even a bit scared of their own thoughts. A little insider tip: a lot of the people you see in the public eye who consistently say the right things are actually the ones to look out for.

  As I was sitting there enjoying this curmudgeonly man’s conversation, I happened to glance down and see that he had a Southern Cross tattoo on his leg. Goddamit, I thought.

  Then I saw he was watching me look at his leg. He paused for a moment, then said, ‘It’s not like that, like, what you’re . . . thinking it is.’

  I asked him what he meant.

  He explained that when he was younger, the Southern Cross tattoo wasn’t a symbol of nationalism, nor had it had any racist connotations. He told me he got it when he was travelling overseas with a group of hippies, to whom the tattoo was merely a representation of the collection of stars found in the Southern Hemisphere sky, which reminded them of home when they were so far away. He told me that back when he was young, if you had one of these tattoos, it was actually a sign that you were progressive, that you saw all of humanity as one living under the same stars. To be honest, it sounded pretty lame to me, though I was pleased I hadn’t wasted good conversation on an old racist.

  I thought how much it must have sucked for him to be sitting there with a Southern Cross tattoo, watching the Cronulla riots and sensing what his tattoo would come to represent. Who knows what we’re all sporting these days that might get co-opted by a racist movement. It could be anything, really – maybe my grandkid will be thumbing through a photo album and shriek at the sight of me and my friends wearing Kathmandu jackets. ‘You don’t understand, we all had one, it was colder then,’ I’ll protest through my (fingers crossed) drug haze.

  It did make me feel better about having not once being trendy or ahead of my time; as I’ve mentioned somewhere in this book, it’s always taken me longer than most to get with the program. I mean, I am only now just considering a bucket hat.

  Being ahead of your time seems hard. Sylvia Plath was, and she ended up sticking her head in an oven. I have a friend whose dad started an online environmental store in 1997, which flopped. He went on to own a business that made customised jigsaw puzzles based on photographs that you could order as gifts for friends and family. Neither of these businesses took off, because the public simply wasn’t ready for them at the time. What’s worse, you don’t get credit for having done it first – only if you make it work. Had he started these businesses ten or twenty years later, he’d probably be a multi-millionaire by now.

  I often think about Galileo and his discovery that the Earth revolves around the Sun rather than the other way around, which resulted in the church accusing him of heresy and jailing him for a large portion of his adult life. It must be quite lonely to be ahead of the curve; it’s like loving an obscure TV show that no one else has heard of and with whom there’s no one to talk to about it. Poor Galileo would have attended dinner parties with people who still happily believed the Sun revolved around the Earth and he would have spent hours chewing their ear off, trying to get them to listen to him, ignoring the pointed glances they were giving to their friend nearby in a plea to save them. It’s not fun to be the person who knows more than everyone else, yet there is pressure to be original and to stand out and to be the first. So where does that leave us? With a bunch of people who all sort of know the same thing, but a few of them are wearing cool hats.

  I worked at a law firm when I was eighteen or maybe nineteen – what’s the difference, anything before twenty-five doesn’t matter. Besides comedy, every other job I’ve had I’ve either been fired from or just found myself being slowly phased out by management. I’m quite bad at understanding how things work; I really do believe I’m missing some of the basic skills in life, but what those skills are exactly, I’m not sure.

  Every task they gave me at the law firm I was unable to understand or complete satisfactorily, to a degree where I shocked even myself. I was known for doing photocopies the wrong way around before crucial court appearances, filing things away so they were unable to be found later, leaking personal information to clients over the phone, and I believe at one point I implied one of the partners looked a lot older than her age.

  My saving grace was Ros the legal secretary, who was this small older lady that wore the most darling outfits. She had big, beautiful, sad eyes, but if you didn’t know her son had died, you wouldn’t call them sad, just beautiful. I was supposed to be helping her, but she figured out pretty early on that I wasn’t really up to the task. She liked me nonetheless. She would tell me things about her life in a very composed way and, mid-st
ory, gently point out something I’d bungled without making me feel bad about it.

  One afternoon, as I was counting down the minutes until I could leave, there was a knock on the office door. Ros went to answer it, something that I now realise probably fell more into my job description. In came one of the local homeless men, Paul, who would sell pencils and little butterfly clips he made himself to nearby businesses, and who one summer gave me a fantastic tip about drinking celery juice to keep cool.

  Paul bustled in past Ros, opened his suitcase where he kept his wares and ran through his usual spiel, outlining the cost of each pencil and what packages would be the best value. Paul always had a healthy amount of saliva on his face, so while he delivered this quite wet sales pitch, we both stood politely out of spray’s reach until he ran out of steam.

  Ros then declared enthusiastically that she’d like two boxes of pencils, handed him a twenty-dollar note and he at once began busying himself with his latest purchase order. Once the transaction was complete, Ros walked him back to the front door, as she would any client or visitor, and thanked him for the lovely pencils. In that moment, it all just got too much for him and he burst into a huge smile and gave her a big sloppy kiss on the cheek.

  I had stayed back in the reception, hidden behind the door frame so she didn’t know I could see them. I watched as she stood there with saliva all over her dainty little cheek and wished him a nice day. Once he’d left, she closed the door with a smile, reached into her pocket, took out her handkerchief and wiped Paul’s spit off her face.

  I know what she did shouldn’t be that groundbreaking, but it was to me. I knew if he had kissed me like that, I would have instinctively wiped my face immediately, and there would have been a part of me that thought that was okay because he was homeless and probably wouldn’t notice, and even if he did, who really cared.

  I told my dad about Ros and what I’d seen her do.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘it’s okay to take the bits from people that you like and incorporate them into your own personality. Nobody’s original, it’s all been done before, so you might as well give up trying to be unique and instead just learn from others and take on the behaviours that seem like they’re working.’ He shrugged, seemingly completely unaware how radical this advice was.

  This went against everything Western culture seems to tell us about individuality. Every advertisement for clothing or makeup is about ‘finding the real you’, reinvention, showing others you aren’t afraid to stand out or go against the grain. But, really, there is so much beauty and knowledge to be gleaned from the people and ideas that already populate our communities.

  For me, one of the hardest pills I have had to swallow is that every cliché or truism I had rejected when I was younger as being reductive or obvious or ‘not original’ has more or less ended up being the perfect way to encapsulate nearly every experience I’ve ever had.

  When you’re younger, you can’t believe a simple expression like ‘Be careful what you wish for’ could ever hold within its words the life lessons you are on a quest for. But these little sayings do – that’s why they are still around thousands of years later.

  I suppose these sayings came about because people got sick of having to tell an entire story every time they wanted to pass on a life lesson, so they summed up the lesson into a simple cliché that could be passed down to people in a matter of seconds, in an attempt to help others not make the same mistakes they did. But personally, I have continued to ignore the lessons told to me in clichés, until I have bitterly experienced for myself why that cliché is actually true. (Ironically, this is summed up in another cliché: I had to ‘learn the hard way’.)

  The idea that all the wisdom I eventually amassed after years of agony can be summed up in phrases people get tattooed on their bodies after drinking six cans of rum and Coke has the effect of making me feel small and insignificant. But lately I’ve started to realise that it shouldn’t make me feel that way. If anything, I should see these little wisdom gems as incredible examples of how human beings want to share the ways they’ve learnt how to minimise human suffering.

  When you think about it, clichés are actually the vocalisations of a shared collective consciousness.

  Actually, I think that sentence would make a pretty cool tattoo.

  So thank you to Ros for a small lesson in what it means to really treat someone with dignity and compassion. I took that part of you and tried my best to make it mine.

  Nick Wiley

  The first time I was properly broken up with was at age seventeen by a boy named Nick Wiley. Even before he dumped me, I had sensed he didn’t want to be with me anymore, so I’d been dodging his calls for days. I figured that he couldn’t break up with me if he never got the chance to talk to me! So when he finally got through to me and asked if I would come over, I knew deep down what was about to happen. Still, there was a large part of me that was in denial, so I did my hair and makeup anyway and tried to pretend that maybe he did just want to hang out. With hope in my heart, I walked to his house.

  I had been in love with Nick since I was five years old and, after a lifetime of pining over him, I was never completely comfortable in his presence. He was the son of one of my mum’s musician friends, two years older than me, and I only ever got to see him once or twice a year when our parents would get together. By the time I was a teenager, I was constantly in a state of either ‘about to see Nick’ or ‘having just seen Nick’. Every free moment was spent thinking about him, to the point that most of the things I did and learnt were in part motivated by wanting him to find out what I’d done or learnt. It’s embarrassing how many hobbies I’ve taken up simply on the off-chance a boy I like might see me doing it well and love me for it. The most cringeworthy example being the year I took up and was, like, into fire-twirling.

  When I was younger, the crush I had on Nick was more innocent. I used to get nervous around him, but when I wasn’t in his presence I forgot to think about him. It was when I was thirteen and he kissed me in a dark room that started everything – for me, that is. I can say with complete confidence that he wouldn’t have thought about that kiss again for the rest of his life.

  For the next couple of years, I spent a lot of my time lying in the sun with my head resting on my forearms, staring into the grass and imagining what it would be like to be with Nick. We’d have imaginary conversations where I would dazzle him with my intelligence and wit, because in these scenarios it was always me doing the talking, which goes to show how much being in love with someone is really mostly about you rather than them.

  I had never felt these feelings of obsession about someone who I was actually around every now and then. Every time I’d see him, I couldn’t wait to get home to my bed so I could remember everything he’d said and every interaction we’d had. I’d replay them in my head over and over again, until my brain did that thing it does where the memory alters itself ever so slightly (yes, now that I think about it, his hand did brush up against mine on purpose). Content with my delusion, I’d fall asleep.

  My main reason for wanting a phone at age fourteen was so I could text him, but my mum was against me having one, so I had to get creative. I ended up concocting an elaborate scenario where I genuinely locked myself out of the house for hours on end and made it seem like it was my mum’s fault for not being able to communicate the location of the spare key.

  ‘It’s just a safety issue – anything could have happened to me locked out of the house for so long,’ I explained to her, my powers of manipulation already fairly strong by that age. ‘Things like this could be avoided if you let me have a phone.’

  Once I got the phone, I feverishly sent Nick a very relaxed message on MSN Messenger, letting him know I had a phone now and that he should ‘shoot me his number’ – just one of those casual expressions we use to disguise psychotic behaviour. Like the time an ex-boyfriend waited until my roommates had left, broke into my house and trapped me in the bathroom threatening
to kill me, before my mum thankfully pulled up to the house in her little Holden Barina to take me to lunch. The ex-boyfriend then sent me a message days later, apologising for ‘rocking up unannounced’. In general, I think the expression ‘rocking up unannounced’ should be reserved for when a man turns up to a party uninvited with a carton of beer on his shoulder, not a break-and-enter.

  Once I had my phone and access to Nick, I found myself in text exchanges with him that lasted days. I’d agonise over my replies and read way too much into the things he said – though, to be fair, his messages often did verge on flirtatious. I’ve heard so many people say that women shouldn’t waste time on men who clearly aren’t into us, but, honestly, what a treat to be seventeen, on the precipice of euphoric love, and completely vulnerable. One day I’ll be seventy-eight and wishing that I could muster up the energy to message a boy for hours.

  I generally agree with the sentiment that life is short and you shouldn’t stress out about someone who probably won’t matter to you in the future. But I also believe that a huge part of love and dating is the wasted time. The stress of composing a text and waiting for a reply, the giddiness of receiving one back, the not-knowing where it’s all going to go – none of it feels like a waste to me. Eventually you will settle down or you won’t, and that’s cool either way, but regardless, the passion and neurosis and gut-wrenching feeling of texting with someone you’re obsessed with is part of the fun. Often, being with them in real life is a complete let-down. So I say enjoy the texting, and know that even if you do end up wasting your time, you still got to experience the best part of love: the anticipation.