After the Blues

by Kathy Lette

  A spunk chart with piccies of favourite men was pinned up behind the bathroom door. In random order were Sam Neill, Sean Penn, Spike Milligan, The Mean Machine, Michael Hutchence, Garibaldi, Lord Byron, Bill Murray and Bette Midler (the only woman, all five agreed, who could make them turn).

  By the stove was the Kneecapping Top Ten – various fascists and landlords, but most of them were married men who wouldn’t leave their wives.

  ‘I gather none of you is doing any animal husbandry tonight? I haven’t sat on arctic porcelain all afternoon.’ Julia was perched on a kitchen chair, fastidiously clipping her toenails, a little tipsy from having partied all day. ‘That’s the only way I ever know if either of your revolting blokes is in the house – if the toilet seat’s up.’

  Kerrie, bottle-blonde and just back from a day’s baking on the nudist beach, rolled her eyes, turned to Soula and said, in a tone of forced airiness, ‘How is Wayne?’

  ‘Oh, fantastic! Tops … But now Mum and Dad are trying to pair me off with Costa. He’s a total soccer-head … How’s Russell?’ Soula reciprocated.

  ‘Oh, excellent. As romantic as ever!’ Kerrie said, nodding.

  Both young women stared dismally at the nail clippings Julia was collecting on the TV guide. It was Saturday night. ‘Did your new bloke come over last night?’ Julia probed.

  ‘What? Oh, yes. We were quite noisy, so just as well you all came home late,’ Debbie lied. ‘What about you, Julia? You haven’t dated a bloke for ages,’ she pointed out.

  ‘Boys bore me. I’m waiting for a real man. Right now work is the love of my life. Where’s Ro tonight?’

  ‘At a fondue dinner party apparently, with a visiting Pommy film director.’ Kerrie shuddered.

  ‘So, what’s your new man like?’ Soula asked.

  ‘Not married,’ Debbie said, pointedly. ‘Behind every successful man may be a wife, but under every successful man is a mistress … Otherwise known as a mattress. I’m off to meet him now, actually. That’s the trouble with falling in love with a married man. They can rarely get out on a Saturday night, but you can never go out just in case they can,’ she said. She tugged her miniskirt down below her knicker line and fluffed up her breasts beneath her boob tube. ‘Okay, I’m going dancing. I’ll leave you tragics to it.’

  The front door gave an exuberant thud and silence fell over the room.

  ‘Celery?’ Kerrie said abruptly, thrusting a plate of wilting greens towards Julia.

  ‘Dunno why you both bother with men.’ Julia, who had begun the afternoon at a drunken book launch for anarchist poets, topped up her friends’ glasses. ‘It’d be much easier just to masturbate.’

  ‘Is that what you do? Of course.’ Kerrie’s face, caked in an organic avocado face mask, had a gangrenous pallor. ‘That’s what you believe in, isn’t it? Sex with someone “ideologically sound”.’

  ‘Lay off, Kerrie. You’re embarrassing.’ Soula was rubbing a Silkymit over her legs. ‘You don’t, do you Jules?’ she said, disappearing in a cloud of white powder.

  ‘Wanking does have its good points, Soula,’ Kerrie said through a mouthful of vegetable matter. ‘You don’t have to shave your legs or de-pube first.’ Kerrie revelled in being scandalous. She didn’t just lampoon sacred cows, she milked them dry, then barbecued them.

  Soula held both legs out in front of her to check she hadn’t whittled one leg thinner than the other. ‘Anyway, I reckon men don’t respect a woman who’s too shopsoiled,’ she said as if possessed of some secret inner knowledge. Kerrie and Julia stared at her in stupefaction. Along with the girl-eating roaches and rising damp, Soula had been inherited when they moved into the house in a typical game of musical tenants.

  ‘God, Soula,’ Kerrie pronounced, munching a carrot as she slathered on fake tan. ‘Why don’t you shut up and go squeeze a blackhead or something.’

  ‘No need to be rude, Kerrie. You’ve desensitised yourself, did you know that?’ Julia spoke slowly and emphatically, in time with her clipping. A bit of toenail shrapnel ricocheted across the room. ‘You’ve become just like a man.’

  Soula turned on the television to drown them both out.

  ‘Me! I’m not like men. You are – leaning up against the bar with your Front-Row-Forward-Feminist mates … All with cropped hair and boilersuits, swearing and beer-swilling and back-slapping and called each other “mate”.’ Kerrie’s facial exertions cracked the green contours of her mask.

  Soula turned up the volume on the TV.

  ‘Well,’ Julia retorted, ‘you’re no better than your schoolfriend Frieda who services the whole bloody football team. You think promiscuity is feminism. Only for men, it’s any orifice in a storm. Blokes’ll screw anything – including warm pies or tethered, reasonably domesticated livestock.’

  Soula let out a desolate sob. ‘Stop it! I can’t stand the fighting. I might as well be living at home!’

  Kerrie and Julia swapped exasperated grimaces.

  ‘Come on,’ Kerrie relented. ‘It’s not all that bad. You might be a wimp, Soula, but at least you’re not ugly and fat. Look at that.’ She lifted the hem of her dress and pinched a roll of thigh between finger and thumb.

  ‘It’s called skin,’ Julia admonished. ‘You need it to bend and sit with.’

  ‘I can do better than that.’ Soula snivelled, dropping her floral shorts and striking a similar pose. ‘Look at that!’

  ‘But yours doesn’t go all wrinkly and squelchy when you squeeze it,’ Kerrie said triumphantly. ‘Look!’

  ‘At least,’ proclaimed Soula, gulping her glass of wine, ‘neither of you is ugly and hairy and has to worry about VHL.’

  ‘You think you’re ugly …’ Kerrie began, then paused, perplexed. ‘VHL?’

  Soula ran a finger along the lacy edge of her bikini pants. ‘Visible Hair Line,’ she whimpered.

  Kerrie inspected the groin of her inebriated girlfriend. ‘Wow! Neck-to-knee pubes. You know how scientists reckon there’s a missing link between primates and modern man?’ she joked. ‘Well, it’s you!’

  Soula’s face fell.

  ‘Come on,’ Kerrie comforted. ‘You’re Greek, for God’s sake! Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘At least you don’t have big tits,’ Julia said brightly. ‘You can pass the pencil test.’

  ‘The what?’ Kerrie watched as Julia unhooked her bra, unthreaded her arms through the straps and flung the bra on the floor. Lifting up her T-shirt, she placed a pencil in the cleft beneath her bosoms. It sat there. Clenched in the crevice.

  ‘The Dreaded Droop,’ she sighed, her usual self-righteousness diluted by female camaraderie and the wine cask.

  ‘Gimme.’ Kerrie tried it. The pencil slid to the carpet. Julia shot her friend a look of jealous admiration.

  ‘At least you’ve got tits. Look.’ Soula hitched up her T-shirt. ‘Mozzie bites.’

  ‘More than a mouthful,’ Kerrie declared, ‘is a waste.’

  All three collapsed in front of MTV, where a groin-thrusting group were shrieking about carnal ecstasy.

  ‘Who needs men anyway?’ Julia proclaimed. ‘What with AIDS, more and more people are turning to abstinence.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I’m allergic to all diets,’ Kerrie muttered, tossing aside her half-gnawed celery stick. ‘I betcha scientists discover one day that celery was fattening all along.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Soula said rapturously as she crossed to the kitchen. ‘I read this article in Cleo and apparently you can sort of translate emotional reactions like nervous breakdowns, aggro and tanties and stuff, into calories burned.’ She shovelled a slab of Sara Lee into her mouth. ‘The more miserable we get the more calories we’re losing!’

  ‘I should be anorexic then,’ Kerrie said, stacking a tray with pecan pie, lamingtons, a carton of ice-cream, three spoons and a packet of Tim Tams.

  ‘It’s disgraceful that we worry about such superficialities.’ Julie deposited her toenail clippings in the kitchen tidy. ‘Not being “beautiful” has forced us
to develop other assets – brains, personality, charm …’

  ‘Modesty,’ Kerrie added through a mouthful of carbohydrates.

  ‘Yeah,’ Soula said with animation, ‘Wayne reckons that beauty shines from within. That your, you know, inner aura, like, seeps through?’

  Kerrie and Julia nodded encouragingly while rolling their eyes at each other at the mention of Wayne.

  ‘Anyway,’ mumbled Kerrie, eking out the enjoyment of her Tim Tam by slowly licking the chocolate cream layer. ‘None of us is overweight. We’re just …’ She shrugged. ‘Under height.’

  ‘Besides, being fat, hairy and ugly are great qualifiers. I mean,’ Julia slurred, ‘who’d be interested in a man if he wouldn’t be interested if you were fat, hairy or ugly?’

  ‘Yeah. I don’t know why we let ourselves get so fussed about men.’ Kerrie had begun to pluck her eyebrows using a magnified hand mirror. ‘All they ever do is burp and fart.’

  ‘It’s Mexican that sets Wayne off,’ Soula giggled. ‘And he always drops them in the car!’

  The three friends snorted.

  ‘And you know what else? He makes me, like, lie down in the back seat in case anyone from school sees us.’

  ‘You think that’s bad. D’ya know what Russell said to me the other night? “Do you mind not coming when I’m coming, I find it distracting … I’ll tell you when I’m about to come and you just hold really still.”’

  ‘You’re joking!’ Julia and Soula exclaimed.

  ‘Nah. Deadset … So there I was, clinging to the sheet, straining for the cue, when suddenly it hit me that, shit, if my presence was distracting, then who was he imagining was on the end of his dick … Cindy Crawford? Michelle Pfeiffer? Or worse … Margaret Thatcher?! Russell sucks.’ Kerrie ground the words out as she texta’d his name onto the Kneecapping Top Ten. ‘I’m sick of being treated like shit. I’m going to piss him off and let something tall, dark and handsome happen to me. And I’ll be calling the shots. You bet! Things have changed. We won’t be done over like our poor old mums. We don’t have to lie back and think of England!’ Kerrie was now stomping round the room, fist in the air.

  ‘Exactly,’ Julia said approvingly. ‘It’s better to have loved and lost … than to spend your Saturday nights pining for a married man.’ Aretha Franklin’s feminist anthem ‘Respect’ was now blasting from the record player.

  ‘Yeah. I’m going to like lay it on the line with that sleaze-schmucko Wayne. He either leaves home and marries me, or I’ll dump him.’ She now texta’d Wayne’s name onto the Kneecapping Top Ten list.

  ‘We’ll have their balls for breakfast!’ Julia enthused.

  ‘We’ll trample on the pissants!’ Kerrie stamped her foot.

  ‘Men. Who needs ’em!’ Soula cheered.

  A knock echoed down the hallway. The three women froze. Kerrie and Soula leaped to their feet as if stung. Kerrie chipped at her face mask. Soula dusted off her legs. Kerrie buried the biscuits behind a pillow on the lounge. Soula flicked the elastic out of her hair and ruffled it into a nonchalant ‘I-don’t-care-about-my-hair’ look. Kerrie smeared Russell’s still-wet name off the Kneecapping Top Ten. Soula followed suit then groped, terror-stricken, beneath her armpits. Julia surveyed the bedlam, dumbfounded.

  ‘It’s Wayne!’

  ‘It’s Russell!’

  ‘Shit!’ the two girls chorused. ‘Stall him, Jules! Stall him!’ Kerrie bolted towards the bathroom, bowling Soula out of the way. ‘Where’s my diaphragm?’

  ‘Shit,’ Soula shrieked, ‘I have to shave my pits!’ She printed down the hallway after Kerrie.

  Julia looked at the deflated wine cask. ‘Yeah,’ she muttered. ‘Sure things have changed! Now we girls just lie back and think of Canberra …’

  Plutonium in the porridge

  There’s a man drought. All the men are either married or gay. And the rest have a three-grunt vocabulary: ‘nah’, ‘dunno’ and ‘ergh’. Apart from the occasional Pommy poet passing through town, there is nobody. Nothing. Zilch.

  It’s slim pickings for Ro and her female mates. Kerrie has resorted to her boss. He’s married, of course. (It’s called sleeping your way to the bottom.) Deb seems to have developed a hub-cap biter streak. (She’s going out with a guy for his car, an A-grade journo with a Maserati.) Soula’s desperate to get married and be draped over a man’s arm, looking decorative and demure. Julia is thinking of going lezzo. (Ro thinks about it too, but she’s just not into tits and clits.) Even worse, Kerrie and Debbie had found out their old schoolfriend Frieda was having close encounters of the rape kind with an entire footy team. Compared to masturbation or a meat injection from some macho bloke, even a Pommy bath-dodger can seem pretty exotic.

  But there are not enough Poms to go round. When they lob into Sydney on a book promotion, or a co-production location scout, or for BBC documentaries on Down Under, Ro and her girlfriends share them. After all, they are the Stick Sisters, and this an R-rated ration. Giggling, the girls drink gin and tonics and compare Keats poems each man quoted in the cot and how they all exclaimed over the hip-skimming line of your tans. There is one rule: do not fall in love.

  It is the start of a sweltering summer when Julia calls. ‘Ro … I just interviewed a Pom, film director, sexy … ish.’ Her judgement is summary. ‘Except for the socks and the –’ she swallows hard ‘– sandals.

  Melvyn is a hearty, rogue elephant of a man, with a beard, crinkly eyes, a pipe and leather-patched elbows. He tells Ro he is distantly related to Captain Cook. He calls her darling. My love. My dear. He tells her that she’s very beautiful and on the side of the angels. He tells her that if they’d lived in Roman times, they’d go along to the temple of a goddess to give thanks. ‘Probably to Diana of the Ephesians, the goddess for whom Saint Paul declared his hatred in the New Testament, because she liked lovers.’ He organises a Graham Greene–like dead letter drop. It is a nineteenth-century courtship. Rowena imagines their love letters going for a vast amount at a London auction. She corresponds with pen instead of word processor. Tractor-feed computer A4 just wouldn’t look as good beneath glass at the Victoria and Albert.

  ‘I’m going to England. Do my back, would ya?’

  Ro’s friends swap censorious glances from behind their sunglasses.

  ‘Ro, how can you seriously consider living in a country whose sole contribution to the cuisine of the world is a cucumber sandwich?’ Julia takes off her bikini top, pummels the sand into a pillow and spreads her towel, then herself, onto this makeshift mattress. ‘Make Melvyn come here.’

  ‘Ambre Solaire …?’ Soula extracts the bottle from Kerrie’s hands. ‘Is that strong enough?’ she asks, slathering Ro’s shoulder-blades in sunscreen.

  ‘He can’t. He’s a film producer. He says he has to live on the “front line”.’

  Kerrie flops onto the wheezing li-lo she’s just inflated. ‘England’s so polluted, and within Russia’s missile range. You really want plutonium in your porridge?’

  Soula peels down her speedos and then sunbakes with a round corn pad on each pale nipple. ‘How married is he?’

  ‘Sprogs,’ Ro confesses. ‘But the marriage is dead. They’re just going through the motions. He’ll move in with me and we’ll work together and …’

  ‘Married men,’ the air valve hisses asthmatically as Kerrie squirms into a new position, ‘have a history of staying married.’

  ‘Yeah,’ confirms Soula, bitterly. ‘You should know, Kerrie.’

  ‘By the way, Soula, corn pads are to kill corns,’ Kerrie retorts angrily. ‘Your nipples might fall off.’

  Ro’s friends lecture her on the collective Stick Sister mythology, listing the hordes of Aussie girls who have had their hearts broken in the Northern Hemisphere.

  ‘It’s the country Poms fall in love with here. The hedonism, the heat, the classlessness, our rapport with nature …’ Julia rummages in her bag then surrounds all five girls in a force field of insect repellent. Kerrie secretly hopes it will also ward off
the busload of Japanese tourists pouring onto the beach. Sweltering in suits and ties, they cluster at the water’s edge, the ladies’ high heels embedded in the soggy sand. ‘The way we accept people from all cultures, just as they are …’

  ‘Bulk Nips, ten o’clock!’ Kerrie moans.

  The girls wheel as one to see a Japanese couple with a camera approach to ask if they can take a photo of Julia’s well-endowed mammaries.

  ‘Jeez, it’s the second Japanese invasion of the Pacific, only this time they are armed with nine-calibre Kodaks,’ Kerrie laughs. Her speedos rolled down to her hips, she throws a bare arm round a startled Nippon. He scurries crab-like back to his bus.

  ‘The bloody brain drain to London is over,’ Julia exclaims. You watch sunburn blotches develop with the speed of a Polaroid print along Kerrie’s buttocks and peer dubiously over your sizzling shoulder. ‘Sydney is as cosmopolitan as anywhere else in the world,’ Julia insists. ‘We’re just as sophisticated …’

  ‘Fuck, I wish I spoke Frog … are you sure about the protection factor of this, Soula?’ Kerrie scrutinises then reads aloud the small print. ‘“Crème après soleil”. What does that mean?’

  It is decided that Ro is not going to England. Her Stick Sisters decree that Poms are sexually repressed – they always want you to wear suspenders and be spanked. They’re not only allergic to baths but also tight-arsed – as in, they only shout if there’s a shark.

  ‘Yes,’ Deb concludes, ‘they basically hide their money under the soap.’

  By the time Ro and the girls all roll over, coat cream on knees, nipples and necks, and wriggle and rearrange the sand, the sun is disappearing behind a wad of thick grey cloud.