by Kathy Lette
‘My God.’ The near-to-rotten vegies squelched as they hit the linoleum. ‘Come on.’ I stabbed my arms back inside my raincoat sleeves. ‘How long will it take us to get to the hospital?’
‘I can’t get involved.’
‘Why not?’
‘You wouldn’t understand.’
We looked at each other. The rain was pelting down. It was one of those flash floods when all of Sydney turns into a large green sponge. I raided Max’s dope emergency fund in the toilet cistern, ran to the nearest red phone and jumped the bedraggled queue. ‘Welcome to RSL Taxis,’ the electronic voice said. ‘All lines are busy now …’ The membrane of the sky had split open. Everything was grey. The muzak in my ear whined, ‘Come on everyone get happy.’
At the hospital I held Max’s hand all night and wondered why Mouche had abandoned our friend in his hour of need.
The next night I rummaged through the chaos of our room and found the parcel of material we’d got in exchange for the sleazy shop owner copping a feel of my friend. I ripped open the package. Rather than being dazzled by the sensational silks we’d selected, I winced in disappointment. There was only some boring off-white cotton. Old fart face had duped us. I cut the cloth clumsily and tried to create two cocktail frocks. The zippers bulged with bumps like abscesses. Facings faced out instead of in. I sewed the hem to the side seam, ending up with a crutch full of armholes. Still, we had our first costumes.
After we’d tried them on, giggling and sashaying about on the pavement outside the squat for the delectation of passing pedestrians, Mouche then had a light browse through my blackhead collection. Seated on the ground between her legs, I let her scour my shoulders by torchlight.
‘About the benefit gig …’ I began. ‘It’s this Friday, Mouche. Don’t forget. We’re on after the Drag Queens and The Whitlams … Ouch!’ Her nails dug into my flesh and I flinched away from her. ‘That’s a freckle!’ I looked up to see Aussie there, eavesdropping as he poured more tea from the pot.
‘Doan forget you’re performing for Elton John’s manager Friday night.’ A dollop of tea leaves slipped into Aussie’s chipped cup. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Don’tchas have a strainer?’
‘There’s enough strain round here already.’ Mouche’s crimson mouth snapped.
The next day our Sushi Sisters rehearsal at the Town Hall was half-hearted. I slumped into a state of rejection for the rest of the week – not exactly a brown study. I mean, I still made jokes and stuff. It was more sort of … beige. I spent my only money dyeing my hair red to cheer myself up.
That Friday night, with my hem sticky-taped and neckline safety-pinned, I waited backstage for Mouche to turn up. ‘Love Mum and the Urgent Ring Me’s’ had to go on in our place. Followed by ‘Ms Cactus and the Pricks’.
The benefit organiser was a Front Row Forward Feminist. She clamped my arm in a vice-like grip. ‘You’ll have to do it solo, Dim Sim.’
Two caricatured, fishnetted ‘Sushi Sisters’ peered mockingly out between the big bold legs of the poster’s lettering. ‘It’s Sushi,’ I said. ‘The Sushi Sisters. And I can’t perform solo!’
‘You’re advertised. If you don’t get out there, I’m gonna rip your arms off, stuff ’em up your arse, kickstart cha and ride ya all the way up George Street.’
The benefit was for a Women’s Support Group. She then prodded me out onto the stage. Wobbling on my op-shop stilettos – I needed little L-plates for each heel – I made my way over to the mic. How pointless it had been going to the hairdresser for a red dye. What I needed was a shop which did Personality Perms and Brain Waves. I looked out into the throbbing slit of darkness. The band played the intro but my mouth dried. No kidding. It was like the Simpson Desert in there. My lips turned into Dunlop tyres, then deflated. I tried to wrap them round the first words of ‘Panel Van Bob’ … The first words of ‘… anel … an … ob’. I needed new lips. An asphyxiating medley of abuse welled up from the hall. The crowd began the staccato chant for the next band. ‘Shower … Scene … From … Psycho … Shower Scene from Psycho.’
Fleeing the stage, I admitted that without Mouche I was, as Max would say, about as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike.
Cockroach Conspiracy’s pub gig was at a club called Selina’s. Aussie, Moose, Sumphead and Turbo Tongue were thrashing away at groin level on their guitars. (Headbangers call it ‘having a bad case of thrash’.) I wished rock and rollers would just come out about it and design guitars in the shape of penises. The Cockies’ music was aggro and tortured. Early Valium Rock. They moved as if dancing barefoot on bindi-eyes. In the break, Mouche emerged from backstage. The crowd was like a greasy cobweb. By the time I reached the table, Aussie was collecting a fiver from each band member for the Ugly Girl Competition.
‘Okay, lob back here in an hour from now. The guy with the ugliest chick wins.’
‘What if ya don’t score?’ asked Sumphead. ‘Any refund?’
‘Mate. This is the local RSPCA. This place is full of desperate dogs. Speaking of which …’ Aussie rolled his eyes at me. ‘Hey, Deb. Did you know that you’re covered in bruises?’ He turned to his mates. ‘From where guys have prodded her with forty-foot poles!’
As his mates chuckled at my expense, I looked at him with loathing. Mouche was licking the lip of a roll-your-own.
‘We’re s’posed to be feminists, right? Then why do women always give up their friends for some stupid bloke?’ I demanded of her.
She inserted the cigarette in her mouth. ‘Aussie’s my type.’
‘Oh … you mean, he breathes.’ I flopped into the chair next to her. ‘Shit, Mouche! Couldn’t you be more original? It’s the total female cliché. The worse he treats you, the more you like him. Pathetic.’
Mouche was edgy, drumming a jerky rhythm on the table with her crimson talons. ‘I suppose –’ she puffed out a cumulus formation ‘– I have an animal fetish.’
I looked at her despairingly. Why couldn’t she just collect goldfish or guinea pigs like other pet-lovers?
A permed and perfumed cluster of giggling girls wove their way across the dancefloor towards the toilets. Arms linked together, they appeared like a long, high-heeled caterpillar.
‘Shit, fellas!’ Moose exclaimed. ‘We’ve cracked it. A hens’ night. They’ll be hot to trot!’ The boys leered after them. Aussie’s attitude to sex was so romantic – if it moves and it’s warm, then fuck it and count the legs afterwards.
‘Trouble with an Ugly Girl Comp …’ Turbo Tongue drawled, ‘after a few drinks, they all look good.’
Aussie prodded Mouche’s thigh. ‘Booze, babe, is a chick’s greatest cosmetic.’ The boys laughed, then lumbered up from the table with Aussie. ‘Nothin’ better than beer goggles.’
Mouche just let her technicolour hair flop over her face as she drained his Foster’s.
‘Why don’t you dump him, Mouche? He’s a total fuckwit.’ I strained to see behind her hairy curtain. With bristled tufts and gelled bits, her hair looked like a headache feels.
She shrugged. ‘He gives me a wide-on,’ she said.
Checking that the Aussie-scumbag wasn’t watching me, I sneaked into the ladies’ loo. The girls on their hens’ night were creaming and preening and applying blusher centre chest, to camouflage undernourished cleavages. I gave them a few survival tips on how to handle the boys and told them about the competition.
By the time I left the toilets, the next band, ‘The Woolloomooloosers’, had taken the stage. They were well into their second song when Sumphead mooched back to the boys’ table. ‘She rejected me!’
‘Which one?’ asked Aussie. Sumphead crooked his finger in the direction of a plump-ish blond girl sipping a Kahlúa and milk. ‘Bullshit, mate! Anyone could get her. God! She’s so fat, you’ll have to roll her in flour to find the wet spot!’
‘Toxic shock time,’ pronounced Turbo Tongue. ‘She’s too fat to find her fanny. Fart!’ he called out to her. ‘Give us a clue.’
Aussie waited till the
object of their derision had danced quite close to our table, then swaggered towards her. ‘Hi babe. Hey, how ’bout a sixty-eighter!’
She raised her eyebrows quizzically. ‘Pardon?’
‘Go down on me,’ he said suavely, ‘and I’ll owe you one.’
She sort of smiled, then turned him into the Living Milkshake.
Looking up from his Kahlúa-saturated clothes, Aussie caught her winking gratefully at me. His face became feverish with rage. ‘You warned her, Deb, didn’t you? You fish-faced moll!’
‘We’re going,’ I told Aussie, taking hold of Mouche’s arm ‘We don’t need you, ferret face.’
But Mouche jerked away from me.
‘Oh, don’t you?’ Aussie interjected triumphantly.
The dancing crowd convulsed around us. I tried to haul Mouche to her feet. ‘Fuck off!’ she snapped. In the ensuing tug of war, her bag was hurtled to the carpet, spilling its guts across the floor. There amongst the mess I spotted little plastic jewellery bags chocker with white powder, mysterious miniature alfoil packages and a syringe. I recoiled in astonishment. In the music world, barbiturates are easier to get than Big Macs. But for speed, you needed a dealer.
‘Where did she get that fit?’
Aussie opened his hands and shrugged.
‘You’re dealing to Max too, aren’t you? Yeah, well, Mouche doesn’t need drugs and she doesn’t need you. She hates your guts,’ I said feebly. Mouche, realising her drugs had spilled onto the floor, leaped as if she’d been electrocuted then scrambled around on the filthy carpet.
‘I show her a good enough time.’ He raised his voice for the boys’ benefit. ‘If you don’t believe me, just chuck her undies against the wall and see if they stick.’
The boys chortled. I hated him. I told him that if ignorance is bliss, then he must be permanently euphoric. I told him that behind every great woman is a man who tried to stop her. I told him he was jealous and that’s why he didn’t let Mouche do my benefit gig.
‘The drugs didn’t jump up and bite her in the arm, arsehole!’ He hissed at me.
‘Don’t blame him,’ Mouche snapped. ‘I’m ripped to the eyeballs. And my throat’s fucked. Thank God Elton’s manager didn’t turn up, ’cause I couldn’t have sung anyway.’
‘Why are you doing drugs?!’ I bleated. ‘Especially after what happened to Max.’
‘You’re such a fucking squarehead,’ my best friend informed me.
It was true. I didn’t like drugs. Since those magic mushies at Byron, the only drug I did was the occasional Codral.
‘The fuckin’ fact is Mouche doesn’t need you. Why don’tcha go back to the land of Hills hoists and Sara Lee cakes.’
‘Mouche?’ My whole body felt like your mouth feels at the dentist after a filling.
‘You know,’ Aussie addressed me once more, ‘you’d make a really good kindergarten teacher.’
The one moral code passed onto each generation of Australians since the convict days is never to dob. To die before dobbing.
So many kids were carking it from overdoses that the cops had set up a drug hotline for anonymous dobbers. I went to the red phone and rang the number. I gave Aussie’s name. And the Chippendale address of the Tin Sheds, where the band rehearsed. Then, stomach turning, I ran back to the squat, hung my head over the toilet and talked to God on the big white telephone.
Max was rehabilitating in the lounge room. After the accidental overdose was pumped from his stomach, the doctors had diagnosed a touch of the old heppo and kept him in quarantine for a few more weeks. Weird synthesiser music oozed out of his Sony Walkman. Sitting cross-legged, in all black and behind dark glasses, he looked like a tubercular bantam. Friends and neighbours queued up on the carpet to pay homage to their punk hero. Personally, I was hard-pressed to think of anything more unglamorous than getting a piece of rubber hosepipe shoved down your cakehole and vomit pumped out, but hey.
Mouche decided we should hold a wake for Max, because he nearly did die. We made him a mock ‘suicide kit’ – a cardboard box containing razors, aspirins, a can of Coke, glue for sniffing, a skimpy piece of rope with a noose on the end and a box of matches for lighting gas ovens – oh, and a university entrance application and an army recruitment pamphlet, for slower suicides. Hauling the couch out onto the pavement, we waved to the peak-hour traffic and drank toasts of cask wine to all the ‘straights’, people who worked nine to five, parents, married couples, uni students …
Mouche was nice to me but I could see I was making her irritable. She treated me like a mild case of tinea.
Even though spring had sprung I was depressed.
‘Smile,’ Max said. ‘The world could be worse.’
I did … And it was. A few days later, Aussie came to tell us that the cops had arrested Mouche.
‘Some arsehole dog gave us up to the pigs,’ he growled. ‘They raided the Tin Sheds. Mouche crashed there last night. They found a quarter of speed, some fits, some smoko. Took me fuckin’ good bong! You know the stainless steel one? Mouche freaked out to the shithouse. The pigs peaked. Diagnosed her as hysterical. Bunged her into the psych clinic. St Vinnie’s. Bastards!’
There aren’t many things worse than getting your best friend arrested. One is remembering in the middle of a root that you’ve still got a tampon in. Another is losing a limb down the food disposal unit. But only just. I sat in the hospital waiting room in a sweat of self-loathing. The muzak was nauseating. No doubt in hell they just play endless muzak-ed renditions of Air Supply and John Denver.
Through the glass windows I could see pyjama-clad inmates circling each other like sad fish in a dank aquarium. The orderly paused every hour or so to hang up different signs on the fish tank. ‘Nil by mouth’ he now exchanged for ‘Bed rest’. Mouche was already a neglected minor. Now she’d be maladjusted as well. The whole episode was bound to give her deep psychological scarring that would surface in years to come. At lunchtime, the orderly parked his pill trolley and re-diagnosed the inmates of the aquarium, advocating nurses to ‘Push liquids’ or ‘Restrict diet’.
I was practically curled into a foetal ball with cringing remorse. Mouche’s future demise would be all my fault. Spray-painting graffiti on Central railway tunnel and lying to cake shops that we ran a hostel and busking illegally were just the beginning of her slide into criminality. Next it would be fraud, arson, terrorism!
Flicking through a dog-eared copy of Cleo in the waiting room, I came across the concluding episode of Roxanne with the hungry thighs. I read on ravenously … But all her daredevil problems were solved by simply marrying a Prince Credit Card Charming with a blow wave. On the page opposite was an ‘Are You Plugged into Life?’ questionnaire. I wasn’t. My score on ‘How Good a Friend are You?’ was 0–2. Why had I done it? I mean, why manufacture situations that will make you feel guilty? What with the hole in the ozone layer made by my spray deodorant, the vegies and chops I left on my dinner plate despite the starving millions, the time I kissed that bloke in the dark and didn’t tell him about the cold sore … a girl feels guilty enough already, right?
The next test revealed that I had a low sexual IQ. It was true. Sixteen-and-a-half and not only had my breasts not got their act together yet, but I still had blackheads. While Mouche conducted anatomical orienteering courses for alternative erogenous zones (between the toes, interior of nostrils, upper eyelid), I only ever did it in the missionary. Only once had I found myself contorted into a Japanese erotic love position with Garry, and then I worried about the chiropractor’s bill. It was time to face facts. I had had a complete personality bypass.
When the nurses finally allowed me to see Mouche she was lying all pale against the pillow.
‘Madeira cake, that’s what they fed me on for two days. Madeira cake and Mandrax.’ There was a chart at the foot of the bed, with a blue Himalayan mountain range pencilled across it.
‘I’ve had a personality bypass,’ I confessed.
‘What’s more …’ She was cold
and coming down and not listening, ‘the whole hospital’s full of women. Shit. It’s like Tampon Towers.’
The room was overheated. I was sweating. Now I knew what a chook must feel like in a microwave. ‘Mouche, there’s something I have to tell you …’
Mouche was restless, rolling from one side to the other. But before I could confess, the door swung inwards. I was bustled away from the bed. What do you call a group of doctors? A brace? A clutch? A gaggle, judging by the way they grovelled for the attention of the man in the suit who was with them. Talk about gravel rash of the knees.
He was an MMM (Middle-aged Married Man) with, no doubt, pinstriped morals to match. I could positively smell the doses of pool chlorine and see the manicured lawns of his mansion. He was the sort of wet conservative who thinks the Western suburbs is just Double Bay without the view. In other words, a typical Dividend Bludger – the type Mouche loathed. His face was vaguely familiar. But we weren’t up on current affairs in the squats. Not just because Mouche had banned newspapers. We were a television generation without a telly.
The MMM hurled his briefcase so that it thudded into the armchair next to mine. ‘Eveline!’ he said.
I gasped. ‘What?’
‘Dad,’ she replied.
I gasped again.
‘When are you going to grow up? Do you realise what this would do to me if it got out in the papers?’
‘Dry up, Dad,’ she said simply.
‘What’s more, I’m getting sick of rescuing you.’
Mouche then told her father to get fucked. I froze.
‘I thought you’d have grown out of this Bohemian stage by now. When are you going to go to university? I could organise any uni in the country. I could buy you a little inner-city terrace. And then you could be a someone.’
A nurse brought us in some Madeira cake and coffee. Mouche’s dad paced the room. He didn’t really walk, he sort of cruised, his hands on his belt buckle as though it was the steering wheel of a large P&O ocean liner. He berthed beside me briefly. ‘You must be Eveline’s new friend,’ he said to me. ‘You live in that intriguing little squat of hers too, I suppose? Do you see it as a statement against the landlord class?’
