by Kathy Lette
‘Just came round to ah, um … pick up some sheet music,’ I lied.
‘I’m not on my Patma,’ he called out after me.
‘You’re what?’
‘My Pat Malone. Jeezus. I’m not alone! She drops round most days. Oh.’ He smirked. ‘Didn’t you know?’
‘Bullshit.’ I pushed past him into the shed. The whole room was a mess of mattresses, mics, amp boxes. Mouche was lying supine behind the drum kit. She half-rose at my approach.
‘Now don’t get all shitty …’
I faced her, vowing to remain sophisticatedly detached, cool and cynical … ‘You wouldn’t know shit if you fell in it,’ I shrieked in a tone usually associated with the castrati.
‘Why don’tcha go back to the burbs,’ Aussie muttered, ‘where you belong.’
‘Can’t you see …?’ I wanted to ask her why she was an emotional bowerbird, collecting people that would make her blue. I groped for a way to tell her that Aussie was a representative of everything she hated about Australia – apathy, laziness, cynicism, mediocrity – but couldn’t find the right words. ‘Did you know that he smells his own farts?!’ I screamed in frustration. ‘Didja know that?’
Mouche twisted her dishevelled clothing back into place. ‘Don’t tell my old man, okay?’ The ladders in her fishnets meandered up her thighs. ‘He’d freak out to the shithouse if he knew I was here.’
‘Mouche, why do you always have to take the deviant route?’
‘More scenic, I guess.’ She shrugged. ‘Anyway, it’s no big deal, Deb.’ Every word skewered me. ‘Don’t be such a wanker. Besides, there’s no way I can ever just dump him, mate.’ She leaned her face close to mine. ‘He knows I pluck my nipples,’ she whispered, giggling.
I ran down City Road. Well, I didn’t really run, I sort of skied on the dog shit. Mouche always ranted against the tall poppy syndrome. But she was the one who did the tall, small and medium poppy scything. Instead of pouring fertiliser on the Sushi Sisters, she wanted to keep us potted, like creative bonsai.
At Central railway station everything was bleak and dirty. There seemed to be an inordinate number of derros, down-and-out punks and three-legged dogs about. Trudging through the tunnel, I told myself that there was a lesson to be learned from all of this. I just didn’t know what the fuck it was. All I knew for sure was that life wasn’t fair. It really is depressing to realise that there’s only one true democracy in the world – the Brady Bunch.
I went by the post office on the way home. There was a package waiting to be collected. I studied the scrawl. It was my father’s writing. Apart from rationing our phone calls and reusing matches, he had once prevented me from watching a black-and-white Marx Brothers movie, Duck Soup, on the colour set ’cause I was using ‘unnecessary components’. I turned the parcel over in my hands and shook it. Mum had only ever received one present from him. He’d rushed home from the supermarket and announced, ‘Honey, I’ve got something for you!’ The whole family had assembled, full of excitement, our gold-plated-and-hire-purchased hopes well and truly raised … it was a bowel cancer testing kit. A free sample.
I sat in the derros’ park in Taylor Square, knee-deep in drunks and drug addicts. The park was called ‘Fantasy Island’ by the cops. Anchoring myself, I opened my birthday package. It was a box of chocolates. Seconds. Slightly damaged. Admittedly half of them had melted, but it was a family-size box. The equivalent, for my dad, of a gift-wrapped Ferrari. There was a note inside. ‘Come home,’ it read. ‘Dad.’
And there were letters. Loads of them. From some commune up north. Saying sorry. Begging forgiveness. There was one from Garry too, from the Gold Coast, saying I meant more to him than the surf – which was saying a lot.
Between the tiers of confectionary were some HSC tech enrolment forms. I saw myself for a moment, at university, safe, contracepted, with long, conditioned hair and a clear complexion, with a boyfriend as permanent as my hennaed hairstyle. We’d do it in the missionary every night, his sperm routinely commuting to its cosy ovary destination … Studying the chart, I selected a coffee toffee. All I had to do was catch the southbound train back home. I bit into the chocolate – it was soft-centred.
The transvestites were queuing up to cash their dole cheques in the Commonwealth Bank opposite. Everything I’d done for the last year had been Mouche’s idea. Even running away to New York. It suddenly struck me that without Mouche, I was going to be just as miserable over there in New York as I was here. Only colder.
Under fluorescent lights in all the grotty rented rooms for miles around, women were checking penis tips for ulcers. Boys were cracking it down along the Tech wall. Buying boys was going down in price. The only item in Sydney not affected by inflation, ironically. The hustler outside the ‘Live Girls on Stage’ strip club was calling ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen, point your erection in this direction. Crack a fat or money back.’ The revolving restaurant on the top of Centrepoint Tower looked like the knob on a push-button toilet. I wanted to push it and watch all of Sydney flush out to sea.
I fingered the plane ticket in my pocket. Two old derros were locked in drunken debate on the park bench next to me. ‘Give us a fuck, Elsie. Go on. Be a love.’ Although mouldy Big Macs and sweet-and-sour containers were scattered all over the park, I noticed there was something missing. No cockroaches. This depressed the hell out of me. Trendy Paddington was a quarter of a mile away. The multi-legged little gourmets had all migrated up the hill. Well, wouldn’t you, if you had the choice between porridge or pâté? If all the roaches were up there, what were we doing here? Just what I needed, proof that cockies were a more intelligent life form. So cockroaches really would inherit the Earth, after all. I felt numb. You know that feeling you feel when you don’t?
‘Just a little fuck, Elsie, eh, for old time’s sake?’
‘Oh alright then, Eric. But don’t you wee in me.’
I rang the suicide hotline. It was engaged. I looked up at the blue Sydney skies, full of grey despair. ‘Beam me up, Mr Scotty.’
‘See ya, ya pillow biter.’ Max and I embraced warmly. I scanned the airport crowd. It was early yet. And Mouche was always late for everything. She had a seven-week menstrual cycle, a seventeen-minute egg in the mornings and had never made it in time to see a support band.
‘Do I look too daggy?’ Max said nervously, shrugging into his St Vincent de Paul coat.
‘Max, relax. You look great. Just think of all the little vinyls that have given up their lives for that coat. And don’t forget. No more building dungeons in the air, okay?’ I watched him walk through the departure gate. He turned to wave. ‘Condoms,’ I called out after him, heard him laugh and he was gone, courier documents tucked safely in his swag.
Just as well I wasn’t flying OS. I would’ve had to pay excess luggage on the bags under my eyes. I’d been up all night deciding what to do. Even though this time there was no mother in hot-hair-rollers pursuing me down the driveway, going to New York was just running away again. Besides, it had hit me some time around dawn, Australia was not the arsehole of the world. Tilt the globe and we were not down and under, but up and over. It was untrendy, but, well, I just wasn’t into Australophobia.
I walked through the automatic doors with a catalogue of options in my head. Maybe I’d win the Nobel Prize for my selfless work towards the eradication of bad, double-garage-band drummers? Maybe I’d drown in one of my own brainwaves? I paused to press the walk button with my bare finger. There was one thing I knew for sure. No longer was I going to be wimpy. ’Cause you know what happens when you’re middle-of-the-road? The Department of Main Roads will come along and paint a great white line right down the middle of you. My post-punk generation had got it wrong. I looked up at the sun straddling the morning sky. I would write to Mouche and tell her – optimism was not an eye disease.
You’ve got mail
Dear Deb,
So, I rang your house and your old man says you’ve split for good. I dunno where you are, which is killin
g me.
Look, clearly I took an IQ test and failed, right? But I love ya more than surfing through a perfect cylinder tube in an 8-foot swell. Please write and say you’ve forgiven me. Come and join me and we can soak up some sun and start again. In case this reaches you, write to me via the surf shop at Noosa.
Love Garry.
Garry, I thought about meeting up to have it out with you, but someone would just call the RSPCA and report it as a case of cruelty to dumb animals.
D.
In the package Mum had posted me there were many, many letters from my ex best friend, too. They were all along the lines of this one.
Darling, darling, darling Deb,
Please, please, please forgive me. Please please please forgive me. Please, please.
Please, please, please forgive me. Please please please forgive me. Please, please
Please, please, please forgive me. Please please please forgive me. Please, please
Please, please, please forgive me. Please please please forgive me. Please, please
Please, please, please forgive me. Please please please forgive me. Please, please
Please, please, please forgive me. Please please please forgive me. Please, please
Please, please, please forgive me. Please please please forgive me. Please, please
Please, please, please forgive me. Please please please forgive me. Please, please.
Your mortified, horrified, suicidal bestie.
I posted this back to her parents’ place.
To Whom It May Concern,
This is to certify that my ‘bestie’ and I are no longer pals … Why? Let’s just say that the hallucinatory drugs finally wore off. Which means I now know that she’s such a bitch, she can probably catch a Frisbee between her teeth. If she ever needs a job, she could sniff for drugs in airport luggage.
Debbie Vickers.
THE HIPPIE PHASE …
Vegetable magnetism
NEW SOUTH WALES POLICE MISSING PERSON REPORT
Missing person serial no.: 8621/32
Police bulletin: The North Coast of New South Wales has turned into a Missing Persons Bureau. Everyone is trying to find themselves.
Missing person: Sarah Day.
Age: 16 years
Height: 5’6”
Hair: Blondey brown.
Teeth: Natural
Complexion: Fair
Appearance: Caucasian
Distinguishing marks: Touch football scar, left knee. Small fin-chop right calf from surfing accident.
Last sighting: Hitchhiking up the North Coast.
1 January – Day one on the road to enlightenment, inner peace and harmony
Dear Diary,
Sitting on my haversack outside McDonald’s with the stray cat that adopted me after Debbie left. When I rang and told my mother that I was suffering from the oppression of Western conditioning, she thought I was talking about shampoo. With parents like that, is it any wonder that I’m spiritually malnourished? Why can’t my olds be separated, or in mid-life crisis, or discovering an Eastern religion like everybody else’s parents?
When I told my mum what had happened, that I’d accidentally slept with my best friend’s boyfriend, that Debbie wasn’t answering my letters and that the hippies I’d met waitressing in Byron said I needed to cleanse my aura on the commune in Nimbin, she’d driven up to Byron Bay to bring me home. I’d read her palm and explained that this was a fingerprint of her potential. All she wanted to know was whether or not she should go ahead and book her P&O cruise. ‘But Sarah, is it there, in my destiny?’ she kept saying, sarcastically. Let me tell you, they’ll be sorry when they’re reincarnated as a couple of cockroaches.
(Oh God, a Valiant-load of yobs are pulling in to the kerb. They look scary, but I do need a lift to Nimbin. I’ll lay a heavy trip on them and pretend I need a lift to a Women’s Only Trance Workshop and that I’m packing a cattle prod and a rape whistle … The ratbags sped off. They only stopped to throw out their burger wrappers, the unenlightened bastards.)
Anyway, the only thing my family gets a buzz out of is germs. My big sister puts her hand over her plate every time I pass the tomato sauce or marg or anything, in case a bit of bacteria does a kamikaze leap off my clothes onto her chop. I tried to influence their eating habits. Really, I did. I threw out the Sara Lee cakes and Corn Flakes. But you should have seen my big sis the morning her muesli was moving … Okay, there were a few weevils, but they would have been organic for God’s sake. I mean, I bought it at the health food shop. There was no need to chunder all over the breakfast table.
How can anyone ever attain spiritual enlightenment living in a family like mine? Let alone develop a third eye. My family has a third-eye infection.
(A 120 km/h rich bitch just waggled her 18-carat finger at me disapprovingly.)
When I refused to go back to Sydney with my mum, the olds tried to tell me that it’s a stage I’m going through. I hate it when grown-ups dump that on you. It’s totally ageist. Discriminating against someone for their age is just as prejudiced as race discrimination. Think my parents have gone senile.
(A hotted-up Holden just screeched to a halt down the road. Enlightenment, here I come! )
I’m back. As I lugged Cat and my haversack over to the car, gravel flew, tyres squealed and the bunch of thugs drove off hooting their horn and screaming with laughter. It’s such a drag to have to deal with people who haven’t been introduced to the non-structural, free-flowing, chun-gung-fu of their inner consciousness. It’s because I don’t want to be a member of the yobbo-teriat, like them, that I set out on my path to spiritual enlightenment, inner peace and harmony, and answered an ad in the Byron health food shop to take part in a low-impact, non-sexist, anti-materialist, personal growth–orientated, cosmic consciousness–raising commune. (Month’s rent in advance. Credit cards accepted.) Have a feeling I’m going to get a lift in this coal truck …
Think I’m clairvoyant. (I knew I was going to write that!) The truck driver has asked me to stop scribbling and talk to him about something riveting, or he’ll fall asleep. He is looking very red round the eyes and keeps sneezing. Probably eats meat. Will tell him about my family.
OMG. Have just had a close call with destiny. Within two sentences, he fell asleep and was swerving off the road. That’s how riveting my family is!
2 January
What with alter egos, ids, past lives, rising star signs and schizo personalities, there are about twenty-five people living on the commune. Everyone is mohair and very organic. You could plant seeds on them.
‘Sarah, we do not believe in ego, aggression, negativity, jealousy or ambition,’ Sundram asserted. He must be the tribal elder. He looks at least twenty-eight!
‘Me neither!’ I agreed to hurl all those emotions onto the compost heap. Then this circle of bodies in batiks and lap-laps enveloped me. Zultana asked my star sign. There was no way I was going to confess to being a jealous Scorpio with an egotistical Leo rising. (Couldn’t my mother get anything right? She could’ve held on a week or two for the sake of my personality.) Told them Aquarius. It’s not really fibbing. I just changed my astrological sign by Star Poll.
I was then instructed to share my inhibitions with the group. (My earrings had already been shared – the girls had stripped my overloaded lobes minutes after my arrival.) I looked at them blankly. ‘Um …’ Up until now I didn’t think I had any.
Camille readjusted the batik knotted round her pelvis. ‘You’re inhibited about being inhibited.’ She’s been crowned Soya Bean Queen for two years running. She seems too beautiful to be true. I keep glancing down for a stapled navel or a Playboy page number.
‘You’ve gotta get into, you know, your inner soap opera, Sarah,’ said Sky. She has three kids, pierced nipples and nose, and her legs are festering as her body expels city toxins. Shows how little I know. I thought they were tropical ulcers.
Spent the rest of the afternoon getting into some core contact, colonic cleansing
and a past life odyssey workshop. Sundram was once a Roman emperor, Camille, a Chinese princess. My cat turned out to have had many past soulmates and resides on a higher plane of crystal awareness than any of us. They renamed her Kublai Khat. Sadly, I couldn’t come up with any past lives. Even if I do, it’ll probably be a toilet cleaner. Oh well. Have so much to unravel and learn about myself! I had no idea I was so incredibly fascinating!!
P.S. Sundram says that in a few weeks I should be able to have my first ever primal scream! Wow. Or rather WOWWWWWWWW!
6 January
The sun is glaring down like a 100-watt globe and the wind is as hot as a hairdryer stuck on triple speed. Paterson’s curse and lantana cover the paddocks all around us. Everybody else is meditating.
The truth is, my meditation is not so much transcendental as accidental. You know, a numb state that overtakes me in bank or loo queues. Camille doesn’t seem to have any trouble slipping her brain into neutral. It’s not fair! Why can’t I be a vegetable like her? I know the way to spiritual enlightenment is through inner consciousness, but how can I concentrate on emptying my mind when emptying my mind is on my mind?
7 January
Sundram is the most enlightened, spiritually advanced and uninhibited person on the commune – he farts openly.
14 January
I think Sundram feels romantically inclined towards me. He keeps following me into the communal dunnies. The first time he said hello, I nearly fell in. Obviously I am the least enlightened, spiritually advanced and uninhibited person on the commune. But I find it very hard to reciprocate romantically when squatting over a ten-foot septic abyss. Sundram advised me just to go with the flow.
25 January
At first I reckoned the lack of food in the fridge was ’cause some cheapskate scabs were not putting in to the kitty. But it’s just that the hippie-trippers up here are heavily into spiritual nourishment. Like this afternoon, Sundram was drying a tray of marijuana in the oven. ‘Din-dins,’ he said, scooping up a rustling handful. ‘Why live real life …’ He dragged in the smoke with relish. ‘… when you can vegetate?
