‘Anyone wanna go lie in the bath to break the heat?’ A gay guy friend and I squirm naked into the cracked enamel tub, outdoors like true Australians, and one of the girls plucks sprigs of rosemary and chucks them in with us as the bath fills with cold water, so we feel like lamb being basted on a high summer day, thirty-three degrees at 4 p.m. The night’ll be long and close with clouds of insects but at least I’ll smell sweet – not that there’s anyone to get close enough to smell me. This is the first New Year’s I’ve spent single in five years; that feels like a significant thought but I don’t know why. Will I feel sad? Weird? Lonely?
‘Hubble bubble toil and trouble,’ the girl says as she stirs the rosemary into the water around us, encouraging the two of us to flop around the bath.
‘We should add rosemary to the punch,’ suggests my friend in the tub. ‘It smells so nice.’
‘We should just make more punch in here, then we’ll have enough for days,’ she says all gleeful, as if moved by genius.
‘I’m getting out before anyone decides to pour the champers in here; I’m not just a non-drinker, I don’t even like alcohol on my skin – so sticky.’ And I clamber out of the tub as people are squatting on beaches down south watching towers of smoke pour from their vanishing family homes.
Climate change anxiety it’s supposedly called. The way my mind circles back to that same point again and again. Just when I think it’s moving forward it veers off, and no matter which way it loops it ends up back there.
The pup comes running up, a little staffy with his cow print and pink nose, a gift to my friend from an infatuated backyard breeder at a gay club. (That’s the kind of thing that happens when you’re strikingly beautiful.) He’s puffing in the heat and so I throw him into the bath with the sprigs of rosemary and the squiggly black things – ‘Wait, what are they?’
‘They’re my Mauritian hairs, babe – I’m always moulting.’
‘Filthy gorgeous,’ I say, and he rubs his brown pecs in response.
Once the puppy’s damp through to the skin we take him out and roll him dry in the two-day-old hay left by the mower. He nips with needle teeth, oversized paws akimbo.
‘Wish I could be rolled by hands bigger than my body in a haystack. How nice would that be?’ I lie down in the grass to illustrate my point. Wish I could gather all my friends together too, have them all in this pocket of the world, sprinkled out from my pockets where I carry them with me always, watch them bloom and grow, revel in the joy they find in each other. ‘It’s thriving, doll,’ said one of my gay guy friends about that break-up vine that is climbing the wall of my living room, leaping from mantelpiece to painting to picture rail, a literal metaphor of my progress post relationship, and that’s how I want to see all my friends: thriving.
They’re scattered all over the world, though, and try as I might I’ll never be able to hold them all at once, a bouquet in my arms. They’re in my heart and mind, though, and sometimes I recite their names like a chant in my head to ward off sadness. There’s been a lot written on the chosen families of queers, how being rejected by their biological family often leads queers to seek out and form connections outside it. I don’t know if it is my queerness that has made me this way, but for me the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb. And ‘friend’ is a hallowed term in my mind, one I value more highly than ‘family’.
‘So are you a relationship anarchist then?’ a girl at the dog park asked me once.
‘Well, no, I wouldn’t say I was, because while I’m anti the hierarchy imposed by the state – you know: valuing familial and sexual relationships above all others – I wouldn’t say I was anti-hierarchical in general. My friends definitely come first. But maybe that’s reactionary … maybe if the state didn’t place so much emphasis on the others I wouldn’t feel I had to place so much emphasis on friendships; they could all be equal. Also, I’m too much of an emotional monogamist when it comes to romance to really practise relationship anarchy.’
As I said that her dog started humping my leg. She shooed him off, saying, ‘You’re a little poly dog, just like your mother!’
It was an interaction possible only in the inner west of Sydney; up here the dog would’ve got a smack on the nose and a ‘Get out of it!’ Up here you wouldn’t even be at a dog park, unless you lived in town. They run out their energy in the paddocks and sleep outside on the verandah, as all dirty dogs should. What’s an Australian country home without a wraparound verandah and a few kelpie–collie crosses barking at the end of a chain or coming out from under the house, shaking dust off their coats and scattering chooks who’d been bathing in a shaft of sun? Growing up here we went to parties in muddy strips between dairy farms, pumped music from car speakers, stepped over the carcass of a cow while sculling goon. Up here I got bullied at thirteen for being an ‘ugly lesbian’, and then when I came out at fifteen and my body started being seen as desirable to the same boys who had ruthlessly taunted me in my younger years, who started trying to pull me into cars at doofs, I was demeaned as a ‘fake lesbian slut’. Sure, suddenly I was of interest, but my identity was still something that I couldn’t assert, was theirs to define. I think of friends of mine who grew up in Sydney’s inner suburbs and went to expensive progressive schools, where there were gay couples in year seven and they had ‘wear it purple’ days to celebrate diversity, and how so many of them sleep with who they want and don’t define themselves as anything, saying, ‘I’m just me – I don’t need a label.’ And I wonder if they are blasé about labels because they were always accepted, whereas being gay at school in Coffs Harbour was not okay, and was in fact very weird, and I couldn’t wait to get to the big metropolis one day where there would be more people like me, where I would no longer be an outsider, and my concept of myself developed around my sexuality because my sexuality was seen as an issue, a topic, coz no one’s parents or teachers were gay. People would come up to me as we stood around the bonfire and say, ‘Are you that lesbo? So how do lesbians have sex?’ Then I’d make out with some other drunken girls and show my tits for half a can of Bundy and laugh as some town kid slipped in the mud and grabbed onto an electric fence for support.
My flawed home that I’ll allow no one but myself or another local to criticise! When a New Yorker makes a dig at it, compares it to the confederate South, my pussy dries up in protest, drier than the rocks in the riverbed in a drought, when the water goes underground and the eels clamber across to another swimming hole, the same sleek eels that twist around my legs when I skinny dip at night. In the background I hear Thelma Plum sing about her hometown, and I think about Thora and how I want to be a voice raised for it and from it. How often do we read over and over again about the same cities of the world, see the same streets again and again on the big screen? I want to see the latticed sky of stars, the Milky Way aglow, that hangs above a country road as you stumble home, ferns silvered with dust. I want the figs and the jacarandas and the blackbutts, and I want the story of how I ended up, labia stretched and plush, on an oil-slick bed – because, sure, men like Henry Miller have written excessively about whores, but to them we’re just a slit between legs incapable of valuable thought or real emotion. I want you to know that you may be able to squint up inside me and count the men I have slept with, like rings in a tree, a tracing of lines that coil up and through me till I’m pricked like the tallowwoods beneath which the cows graze, yet none of them have erased where I’m from or who I am.
‘What album is this?’ a friend asks and I’m drawn back into the now. The peak of the acid has definitely passed.
‘Better In Blak. Thelma Plum – she’s a Kamilaroi woman.’
‘Kamilaroi?’
‘You know, they’re Aboriginal people whose lands are inland northern New South Wales and southern Queensland. The Kid Laroi is one too; that’s where his name comes from.’
As I say that Thelma Plum references the 1967 census in her song and I think of how only then were Aboriginal Australians re
cognised as people, not flora or fauna, and how colonisers attempted to eradicate them from these arable lands and how even the name of the great river that all the others feed into, the Bellinger, is corrupted from the native name. A typo on a map, a white man’s mistake that changed an n to an r and no one cared coz they didn’t care for the people, so why would they worry about the language? Didn’t care for the country, either, and thus it burns now. Don’t think of it don’t think of it. Think of the cool of the Never Never River that winds its way past you now. It’s not the Rosewood River, the one you grew up beside, but they have the same sweet source and reach the sea at the same point and the same clouds shatter above them till they burst their banks at the same time and feed the valleys that feed you.
‘Should we go look for shrooms? There might be some down in that hollow past the creek where the sun can’t shrivel them up.’
Five of us wander down the hillside, crawl under a barbed-wire fence and slosh through a cattle wade. The creek is cool against my ankles, shaded by rainforest palms, and I take a small rock to suck the river water from, hold it in my mouth even after the sweetness has gone because it’s so smooth. We begin to scour the paddock as the cows creep closer, curious.
‘What do I look for? Are these white ones all right?’ A friend holds up a mushroom as big as her fist.
I garble an unintelligible answer before I remember to spit the rock out and try again. ‘Nah, not those. The ones we want have, like, a gold top, and if you split the stem when you’ve picked it there’s a faint blue tinge.’
‘I’ve never done this kind before, only blue meanies and that was so long ago, with Katie. Why didn’t she come by the way?’
‘She wasn’t up to being in a group at the moment – and also her parents wouldn’t let her come. They thought it would be too much for her and too much for us to take her on in the state she’s in since she relapsed.’
‘Oh, is she using heroin again?’
‘No – which is good, I guess, but I don’t know if this is any better: she’s messing with Tina now.’
‘Tina?’
‘Sweetie, you’re showing your straightness,’ another friend chimes in, teasing. ‘Tina is ice.’
‘You know I’m not straight – I’m just not that up with pop culture.’ She shrugs. ‘I thought RuPaul’s Drag Race was a show about cars up till a few months ago.’
‘Nothing to be ashamed of,’ I say. ‘And leave her alone, you know she’s practically a boomer! Anyway, yeah, Katie’s been on the pipe and her behaviour has been pretty erratic, even scary. Like, she ended up having a psychotic break. I’ve been super worried for her and I was hoping that coming and chilling with us for a few days would be nice for her – like, remind her that she has a normal life outside of rehab and NA – but we gotta respect her parents’ decision.’ ‘Also, maybe it isn’t the best thing for her to be around us when we’re taking drugs?’ he suggests.
‘Yeah, true. I guess I thought because we aren’t dabbling in things that are an issue for her – like we don’t have coke or xannies or heroin or meth – it’d be okay. But I think that’s coming from my own relationship with drugs: I can touch things I don’t have problems with and I’m fine, like, as long as I avoid alcohol and uppers I’m all right coz I can control myself with the things I take. But I guess what I’m beginning to realise is I can’t view her addiction through the lens of my own. Like, maybe she’s one of those addicts who have to stay fully sober for the rest of their life and need the structure that NA gives them, because with her it’s like if she has a drink she’ll want a xannie and then she’ll want to smoke meth, like they’re all tied together somehow.’
‘Do you reckon that comes from NA, though? Like, they put so much shame into people over being “clean” and “relapsing” that if they touch anything at all they feel like they’ve failed and may as well go the whole hog.’
‘Yeah, I do wonder if it’s counterproductive to link recovery to shame, but then maybe some people need that hard-line approach to keep them in check. Maybe shame is one of the few things controlling them. But, yeah, I don’t think it’s a particularly healthy outlook.’
‘It’s so sad for her and her family,’ she says. ‘Do you reckon she’ll be able to stay sober?’
‘Look, I don’t know.’ I shrug. ‘I think that maybe this struggle with addiction will last her whole life, and I need to stop being so invested and upset when she slips up coz it’s inevitable, it’s not going to be a straight road. And she said something to me the other day that made me think of it differently. She said, I wish my mental health problem wasn’t addiction, and I was like, fuck, true, she is grappling with such a different beast from me because, like, I just struggled with substance use as a way to self-medicate through times of bad mental health but she’s – oh, yay, here’s one!’
I pluck it out and hold it up and they both crowd around to look. ‘Where are the others? They need to see, too – oh, they’re over trying to take photos with the cows … Oi, guys, come over here and see this so you know what you’re looking for.’
‘That’s so hectic about Katie.’ She puts her hand on my arm and I rest my head on her shoulder in response, encircle her waist with my arms as we wait for the others, lean into the affection offered, shroom held like a cigarette between index and middle finger.
‘Yeah, it sucks. Also she did and said some pretty fucked things this time around, and it’s like at what point do you hold someone accountable and at what point do you just forgive coz they were obviously unwell?’
She turns and kisses me on the forehead and I remember that five years ago we used to make out and I wonder should we make out again tonight because it’s New Year’s and maybe it’s meant to have been her all along but no, we have such a beautiful friendship, look at where it’s come to when it started with a simple flirtation, and it’s fine to have moments of being attracted to your friends, it doesn’t mean you need to act on it, you can just appreciate that it’s there and will always be between you and doesn’t even need to be acknowledged and so I just give her a slight squeeze and lean a little more until –
‘If you lean any more weight on me I’m gonna fall over!’
‘Oh, let me be lazy, hold me up,’ I kid, but I step away.
‘What’s that over there?’ one of the others calls, sounding startled.
It’s a goanna, long-clawed with fetid breath, clambering slowly over a log, tongue flicking the air. ‘Give him a wide berth,’ I say. ‘Goannas’ll chase you and climb you like a tree, tear up your flesh.’
He’s come down out of the rainforest, fleeing the fires up on the mountain. There’ve been more pademelons hopping through the paddocks than I’ve ever seen before; they usually stick to the thick brush. And usually you only see the wild dog/dingo hybrids on their forays to slaughter the calves. Now it’s a menagerie, an exodus, the area crawling with displaced animals just as it does in flood time. In flood time bullrouts are washed downriver to the shallows, where they stab you with their poison spines. Flood time may wash some unwitting dairy cows out to sea, their bloated carcasses polluting the surf, but the platypuses are prepared for it, their burrows built above the rising water levels. They all know about flood time, but what do they know of fire time? This forest isn’t meant to burn, not like this. I’ve seen photos of parrots, their feathered bodies of red and blue and pink and green, dead on the ground, choked by the fumes even as they tried to fly away, just as koalas curled in the tops of trees fell and burnt when the smoke became too thick. The genocide never finished here; colonialism still kills and now it’s part of a wider mass extinction.
Do they know we did this? Do they hate us? Don’t think of it. There’s nothing I can do to stop it right now. There’s maybe nothing I can do to stop it ever. The power lies in the corporations that drain the country and the politicians who are ambivalent towards anything except profit. It’s a new year beginning and what a cursed beginning it is, the last months of 2019 marked by skies b
etter suited to dystopic sci-fi films than the world I want to wake up in. I’m here with my friends, though, think of that. My home is still safe. I’m not bound by a romantic relationship. These are all things to be grateful for.
The sun drops behind the hill as we trample back up to the house, pull sheepskins out onto the verandah so we can lie on them and lean into our comedown, fern fronds tickling our ankles that dangle off the deck. My head is on the lap of one friend and another friend is using my thighs for a cushion. A drink is poured and a drink is spilt and a joint is rolled and a joint is smoked, and this seems to repeat itself endlessly, like the call and response of the whipbirds on the fire trail, our voices sighing and creaking in laughter like the branches of the blackbutts in the wind, our bodies entwined like the structures the satin bowerbirds weave in an attempt to draw a mate and propagate, so the next generation will live on in the same privet hedges and banksia bushes they did, and isn’t that what we want too, for our next generation to live on as we have? I know I want my children to be able to whale watch, sip honeysuckle from its source and be pierced by coloured coral. More than that, though, I want the earth to survive us; would trade all of humankind for the earth in a heartbeat. God doesn’t barter, though. Does the devil? Please, hear my prayer.
wednesday
THE TARMAC JARS MY SHINS AS I STRIDE PAST THE ART gallery and a couple of brush turkeys scatter into the mulch. These shoes aren’t made for fast walking, they’re heeled and impractical, and the white cockatoos on the fence of the botanical gardens jeer at me as they throw down shredded fruit. I know, I know, I’d be better off barefoot like you guys are, but I’ve got a booking to get to and I can’t show up with my soles black from the city pavements. I’m budget enough as it is; gotta make sure I always park far enough away from the job that the client doesn’t see my old car, which would ruin the illusion of me being a high-class escort worth $600 an hour. I can get away with a bare face and nails because I market myself as a wholesome girl next door, come straight from a swim not a shopping spree, but the fact I get around by bus or a dodgy 90s car doesn’t need to be disclosed. Let them think I Uber it or, even better, taxi it and pay with $50 notes like I did when I was twenty and did a brief stint at an escort agency. The smell of Chloé still takes me back to 5 a.m. in the back of a cab, streetlights glancing in the windows and mascara grit in my eyes, rolling out of bed only to fall asleep in my Gender Studies lectures, double life concealed beneath my floral dresses.
Nothing But My Body Page 8
