by Kathy Lette
The next day Mouche took me up to register at the dole office. ‘They’re bound to offer you something shitty,’ she said, and proceeded to coach me in ways not to get the job. 1. Wear daggy, filthy clothes. 2. Always arrive late. 3. Put ‘buts’ on the end of every sentence and speak with a rising inflection. 4. For ‘previous profession’, write poet, harpsichordist and/or platypus desexer (part-time). 5. When asked if you have any questions about the job, say yes, just one – When are your holidays? 6. Swear. A real fucking lot.
The clerk flicked through a file of pink cards. ‘Skills?’ Her condescending manner suggested that I’d failed Nose Picking Classes in kindy.
Skills? I pondered … Well, I could hit top C, get picked up hitchhiking by a man with an erection and not get raped, cook cheese on toast, ride a surfboard, skindive for abalone, rhyme difficult words … I was an apprentice fanny farter, with an okay vocabulary (except I spelt finetically. Inphuriating, huh?) and had a very finely tuned crap antenna. It wobbled most violently in the presence of brownnosers, school prefects, racists, real estate blokes, married men and … (The clerk tapped her lacquered talons on the tabletop) … and supercilious government clerks who suffered from ageism.
‘Skills? Ah … None.’ I confessed.
‘Age?’
‘Fifteen and three quarters.’
She then dealt me out a destiny. I read the card between her tailored nails. A chicken-gutting trainee in Zetland. ‘Beginning today.’ Mouche had dressed me in a moth-eaten, glittering miniskirt ensemble. The clerk peered at my flesh through the sequined portholes. ‘Don’t bother trying any tricks. They take all the dregs.’
Men are always saying they can count the number of times they’ve cried on the fingers of one hand. Well, I reckon women can count the number of times they’re really done their blocks. Most women, that is. Not Mouche. ‘Who do you think you are?’ she spat, lunging out of the chair next to me, snatching the card, ‘God?’
The clerk eyed us coldly then buzzed her next client. ‘Yes, actually.’
‘Yeah, well, we’re atheist.’ Mouche shredded the job card and stomped from the office, swearing. I followed her down Oxford Street.
‘Don’t they, you know, kick you off the dole, if you don’t take the job they offer … no matter how daggy it is?’
‘Those wankers expect us to be grateful for that kind of shit. Newspapers are always whingeing about the dole bludgers. Shit, it’s the dividend bludgers that are fucking the country.’
I fingered the few dollar coins I had in my pocket. ‘Mouche, I know being on the dole is like being on an insulin drip, but at least it sort of, you know … sustains life.’
‘Chicken gutting in a factory is just a slow form of suicide.’ She detoured through the post office, slamming the coin return buttons on the row of red phones. The last one discharged a twenty-cent piece. ‘Why kill time, when you can kill yourself?’ She pressed the coin into my palm. ‘We’ll survive,’ she said, and smiled. And then and there we made a pact never to surrender to bedpan-emptying or bank teller jobs.
And so our adventures began. We busked on street corners and snowdropped clothes from the backyard Hills hoists of trendy Paddington. (They say charity begins at home … just select your neighbourhood carefully.) For food we ate leftovers. It was a case of putting our mouths where our money was. Paddy’s Market fruit vendors gave us their bruised and battered cast-offs. But you had to eat those apples and bananas fast; they were just this side of mould. Still, we needed those daily doses of penicillin to keep the bacteria at bay.
Merchandise hurled itself off the backs of trucks in Woolloomooloo, and Max was always there to catch it. One week we lived on canned lentils, the next on tinned fruit and evaporated milk, while we wondered how to cook six dozen light bulbs. In cruel contrast to the interior, Max painted shelves of succulent food on the fridge door, as if by osmosis and the power of positive suggestion pastel apple pies and fluorescent watermelon would magically materialise inside.
There was the occasional meat pie purloined from the Matthew Talbot Hostel for Homeless Men, or a bowl of vegies and rice at the Hare Krishna Temple, although they flavoured their free meal with religious fervour. Experts had just deduced that an average serving of dog food contained half the recommended daily intake of protein and calcium for humans. The carpet in the squat, though over-grazed, had never been vacuumed and was bound to be full of nutritional value, so if life ever got really desperate we could always cut off slices of carpet and boil it up as sauce for our Pal meat chunks.
The rest of our dietary supplement we owed to Marie Antoinette. Pretending to be a representative of the Inner City Runaway Girls’ Hostel, Mouche persuaded the local cake shop to give us their unsold goods. At five thirty each day we’d cart off our warm, carbohydrate cargo of apple pies, chocolate eclairs, cream puffs, custard whirls and lamingtons. Pastries for brekky, lunch and tea were puffing us up and encrusting us in pimples. For a couple of starving waifs we started to look pretty fat and flabby.
Mouche and I ad-libbed life. I basked in her permanent spotlight. In David Jones, the ecstatic frozen mannequins sent us into spasms of laughter. Everything took on their waxen appearance. The world became a shop window of props in which we romped unheeded.
After a few hours of busking in the CBD, we’d recuperate in a Martin Place cafe. Over cappuccinos big enough to swim laps in we would draw up our One Day list. One day I would read all of Shakespeare. Mouche would learn the saxophone. One day I would write a novel. Mouche, a poem. She would buy a Steinway grand piano. I would buy an Olympic swimming pool. She was going to learn Japanese. I opted for tap-dancing. And we’d become a famous singing duo.
‘But not here,’ Mouche insisted fiercely. ‘Overseas. Australia’s so safe. Nothing ever happens here. There’s nothing to fight for. No edge.’ Cappuccino froth formed an albino moustache around her fleshy mouth. ‘Everybody who’s anybody has pissed off. Barry Humphries, Miles Franklin, Clive James, Christina Stead …’
‘Peter Allen,’ I piped up.
‘Bruce Beresford, Peter Weir, Germaine Greer …’
‘Germaine who?’
Mouche reckoned that the only difference between yoghurt and Australia was that yoghurt has its own culture. ‘Australia’s fucked.’ Office girls on their lunch breaks glared with disapproval and fascination at Mouche’s vinyl mini and leopard-print tights.
‘But the reason all the good people piss off must be because all the good people piss off,’ I ventured.
‘This country’s dead from the eyebrows up. We’re intellectual necrophiliacs for bloody well living here.’
‘We are?’ She coloured all my views; my mind was like litmus paper, soaking up her every opinion. ‘Well, we’d better piss off over to London and set up camp in Earl’s Court. It’s traditional.’
‘Nah. The Poms are dead too. But from the waist down. They’re so squeamish about sex.’
‘What about New York? In New York,’ I said, ‘they have bright green cocktails and caviar in the Russian Tea Room and dog owners have super-duper pooper scoopers and the beautiful people snort coke off each other’s naked bodies in Studio 54.’
‘No shit?’ she exclaimed.
And so New York it was. We added it to the top of our list.
We called ourselves the Sushi Sisters – because we sang about life in the raw. Uranium, war, rape, unemployment, porno, The Muddle Eat, President Ray-gun, toxic shock syndrome, sexism, terrorism … This recipe didn’t always go down well with the public’s mashed-potato-and-peas opinion palate. We leaped out of shopping malls and car parks at unsuspecting pedestrians, assaulting them with song. People either looked down their well-paid, private secretary noses at us, or laughed and hurled twenty-cent pieces into our hat.
The only pitfall in our scheme was the police. In Sydney, the crime capital of the country, you had to have a licence to sing.
One of life’s great mysteries is the way people grow into the opposite of their namesakes. Ha
ve you ever met a hopeful Faith? Joys are always suicidal. Charitys recycle tea bags. I tell you, if I ever have kids they’ll be christened ‘Ugly’, ‘Dumb’, ‘Yobbo’ or ‘Brutal, Uncaring Capitalist, Ratbag Carsalesman the Third’. Anyway, it turned out that bureaucrats suffer from the same syndrome. To get a busking licence, you have to apply to and audition before a civil servant … Only he wasn’t.
When we’d completed our performance for him, he tut-tutted in the most uncivil way. ‘Your act …’ He scratched at a tomato sauce splotch that had found permanent sanctuary on his paisley tie. ‘Is unpalatable to the public.’ He flourished a list of phone complaints his office had received about our risqué repertoire.
‘Wanker,’ Mouche hissed under her breath. He ordered us not to solicit money on the streets again and threatened that we would be arrested and prosecuted if we attempted to do so. ‘Fuckwit,’ Mouche snarled another subtle aside.
‘No, no,’ I promised him. ‘Never again.’
While we were enthralling a sandwich-nibbling throng in the Hyde Park sun later the same day with a little ditty about nuclear disarmament, I glimpsed the jackboots and dark glasses approaching.
‘Why Pritikin diet to look attractive?
Why be fit when you’re radioactive?
Unlike the movies, Earth has no sequel
Hey Mr Reagan! We’re all cremated equal!’
Mid-chorus we flipped onto our B-side repertoire of ‘Hey nonny no, three gypsies stood, in the wood far, lee la nonny no …’ But to no avail. We were both arrested.
‘You’re a real arsehole.’ Mouche squirmed out of the policeman’s grasp. ‘Only not as useful.’ And she kicked him in the shin.
‘Not your wisest move, ya little brat,’ the officer seethed.
The cop shop he dumped us in was the new one in Surry Hills with soundproof walls and no windows. Mouche demanded to make a call. I slumped in the holding area, steeling myself for prison life – multiple rapes, knife fights, a diet of baked beans and glue sniffing while sharing a cell with a psychopathic insomniac … But Mouche’s secret call did the trick. The arresting officer who escorted Mouche back to me also came bearing a plate of Iced VoVos. He was suddenly coconut-ice-nice and urged us to fill our pockets with ‘biccies’ before being released.
Back in Oxford Street Mouche sat down on the gutter and doled out our busking money into nineteen silver piles five coins high, with thirty-two brown cents left over. As I waited for the final count, I cross-examined her about the mysterious phone call. But she just shrugged. Mouche was like a used tube of toothpaste. Squeeze as hard as you could, you still wouldn’t get a drop out of her.
‘We’re rich,’ she laughed up at me. Passers-by responded with sideways glances of intrigue at Mouche’s technicolour hair. Lately her head looked like the cover of a heavy metal album – she nuked every optic nerve in sight.
‘But why didn’t the police confiscate the money – money we made illegally?’ We were deep in the heart of the gay part of town, known locally as Vaseline Valley, so I automatically pressed the ‘Walk’ button with my elbow.
‘Ooh … watch it,’ she mocked, ‘you might get AIDS of the funny bone.’
Embarrassed at being caught out, I tried to turn my akimbo thrust into a nonchalant lean. ‘What?’ I queried casually.
‘Let’s celebrate!’ she exclaimed, jumping up. ‘Chiko Rolls and two malted milkshakes.’ She crossed Oxford Street on the ‘Don’t Walk’ sign – and I followed.
And so we passed the rest of the summer. For my sixteenth birthday Mouche shoplifted me a pair of Reeboks, some Ray-Bans, a Bette Midler album and Édith Piaf’s autobiography. The Sushi Sisters developed a cult following and we got a permanent busking spot at Paddington Markets on Saturdays. Our run-ins with policemen when we busked on street corners made it into the papers. I was rapt to be in the public eye. Well, okay, it was only the gossip column of the Mirror – more like the public shut-eye – but Mouche freaked out. Even though I promised not to mimic the average music star’s behaviour and lose touch with reality, get a dependency on heroin, discover religion and contract elephantiasis of the ego, she didn’t want our names in print.
When the autumn rains came in, our profession washed out. But it wasn’t because of the wet that the rot set in. Mouche had warned me about the squat’s cockroaches, but not about the two-legged creatures that crawled into our bed.
I stirred from sleep and groped my hand over the sheet. ‘Mouche?’ She seemed suddenly to have gone very mohair. Mouche’s vodka-sodden voice was hot in my earhole. ‘Sshh, go back to sleep.’
The mattress fretted against the seagrass matting. I began to get motion sickness. The floorboards were so thin that I felt sure the friction would wear them away at any moment and we’d plummet into Max’s room below. The blankets pyramided and fell in time with the thrusts. This had the effect of bellows and sent bursts of freezing air over my goosepimpled body at regular intervals. Pretending to ignore this two-backed beast, I engaged in a heated argument with my pillow over whether or not we were having a supportive relationship. When the bedding deflated, he staggered to his feet.
‘Gotta take a leak.’ He took aim over the balcony. ‘Who the bloody hell’s that? I thought you went to the gig with The Mong?’
‘I did, but I pissed off to another gig with Sumphead. He’s Mong’s dealer’s brother’s band’s sax player. And in the queue for the loo, I met this one.’
‘Oh, a meaningful, old-fashioned courtship.’
‘You can bring someone home too if you want to,’ she offered magnanimously.
After Garry’s betrayal, my self-esteem had sunk limbo low. I clearly had the sort of face that would launch a thousand buses. Besides, this was the AIDS- and herpes-infected 80s. Even if a bloke was hot for me, there was no way I would get with him unless he came with a medical. And a reference. ‘Jesus!’ I turned over the pillow he’d been lying on. ‘You’ve no idea what he’s been up to,’ I lectured Mouche’s silhouette in the pre-dawn gloom. ‘Or, more to the point, what he’s been up.’
‘Handle it, Mum. Copulo Ergo Sum,’ she muttered.
I looked at her blankly. At my school they’d been more interested in the roots than the Latin. ‘Shit. I just hope you used a condom. Well … God … at least let me check your blokes out first.’
‘How?’ she chortled. ‘You mean, like a mark out of ten?’
‘Yeah. On the Richter Rooting Scale.’
‘Earth-moving?’
‘Yes, a rooting questionnaire. To complete before copulation. You know, do you sleep in the wet patch? Are you single …’
‘Are you an evolved male feminist?’ she added.
‘And a multiple choice question. You know, are you a) a sleaze-schmucko mushy romantic, b) a psychopathic rapist …’
‘c) a closet Catholic, d) kinky … Do you know the Broad’s Prayer?’
‘What’s that?’ I interrupted.
‘Give us this day our daily head …’
Her two-legged leftover returned from the balcony and hovered over the bed. Mouche cuddled against me and screwed up her face in indecision. ‘One?’
I appraised him in the half-light. ‘And a half.’ We laughed and laughed.
And so our pact was made, never to let a penis come between us. And, unlike the promise from my last bestie, this time I really, one hundred per cent believed her.
Over the autumn months Mouche sampled every sort of man on the menu. It was not a balanced diet. There were the men with ten-decibel snores. The men who wiped their snot on the side of the sheet (I’d find it enamelled onto the mattress in the morning). The men with sharp toenails and blunt brains. Some were total greaseballs – the Human Chips. Others had their torsos emblazoned with tattoos. Waking first in the morning, I’d read them from nipple to nipple. ‘Pussy eater’, boasted one. ‘Hate’, another. ‘Consume. Be Silent. Die,’ proclaimed a third. Worse than these walking billboards of bad taste were the silent farters. ‘Orphans’, we called them
, because they had no pop. They just stripped what little paint there was off the nearest wall.
But most embarrassing was not the act, but the encore. Even with my fingers in my ears I overheard every variation on the lovey-dovey, smoochie-goochie, open-wide-here-comes-the-choochoo-train, little lamb chop pukey pillow talk. ‘Tell me I’m the only one, babe.’ And she’d tell them. Mouche’s idea of fidelity was only having one man in bed at a time.
Or so I thought.
‘Look, couldn’t you piss off for a while, Deb, and give us some space?’ she asked one morning. She’d been re-aligning her spine in Houdini contortions with some bloke for most of the night.
While I was sulking over a cup of tea downstairs, Max swaggered in after an all-night escapade. (He ‘cracked it’ sometimes, up at the Cross – going with men for money.) I patted the plump belly of the teapot. ‘Cuppa?’
‘Yeah. Thanks.’ He pressed the warm cup I passed to him against his weary eye sockets. ‘I’m famished. Let’s go get some gourmet.’ We’d often do the rounds of the supermarkets. Demonstration ladies were always asking you to sample little delicacies impaled on toothpicks. If you went to enough supermarkets, you could eat quite well. It’s just that it took about forty baby prunes rolled in bacon to make up one decent mouthful.
When we made our bloated return that arvo, I was shocked to find last night’s leftover still there. He was sprawled in the lounge room, tattooing a complicated rhythm with chopsticks on the upended fruit boxes we used as furniture. Mouche introduced him as Aussie. He was a drummer with ‘Cockroach Conspiracy’. He was also wearing my Eurythmics T-shirt.
‘He’s wearing my Eurythmics T-shirt?’
‘I said he could.’
I chucked a hairy eyeball at both of them. ‘Yeah, well, don’t you sweat in it.’ I sulked. Whenever Mouche went too far she excused her behaviour by reminding you that she was adopted, a state ward, and a Neglected Welfare Minor.
