The Night my Bum Dropped

by Gretel Killeen

  10

  I sit in the cab with its hard vinyl seats and am nevertheless quite comfortable.

  I realise, to my horror, that my mum was right, and I will never need a cushion again.

  Up, Up and Away

  In the cab to the airport I’m overwhelmed by a pounding headache. It fees like a hangover but I haven’t been drinking, so I wonder whether I may have become dehydrated through eating too much salty soy sauce with lunch. I ring my mother for comfort and she tells me that I possibly have some sort of brain tumour.

  I arrive at the airport and we’re called to get on the plane. It’s the first call but the announcer says it’s the ‘final call’, so everyone rushes up to wait for another thirty minutes at the gate. The man standing next to me wants to chat and be my friend but he’s really old and I’m at the age when you shouldn’t have friends who are older than yourself because they’ll more than likely die before you and leave you feeling abandoned.

  ‘You know, I haven’t been on a plane for fifteen years,’ he says.

  ‘Why not?’ I ask with politeness but no warmth.

  ‘Oh, you know,’ he replies. ‘You get married, you have kids, you get poor.’

  ‘Oh, my goodness,’ I say. ‘That sounds depressing.’

  ‘Well, depression is the new black,’ he replies.

  The man then stops talking and appears to fall into some kind of ‘stand-up’ coma and so I eavesdrop on the conversations of other people in the queue. I hear about a woman who tried to sue God because the rain ruined her wedding day. And I hear about a man in an American prison who allowed himself to fall from God’s good and true path and therefore tried to sue himself.

  We continue to wait to board the plane. I look around me and try to decide who I’ll eat first should the plane crash on a desert island. No one knows why the plane is late but the paranoid amongst us have assumed that it’s some sort of bomb and we’re all going to die. The optimists, on the other hand, are simply hoping that the time delay will push our flight into a ‘meal bracket’, as opposed to a plastic snack served in a cardboard box.

  I get on the plane. I politely say hello to the guy sitting on my right. He looks about nine years old so I ask him whether he’s on school holidays and he says no, he’s the backup airline pilot.

  We’re then held up again while a family look for their seats. I’m stunned that some people on a plane, with numbers on their boarding passes and numbers on the seats, just cannot work out where they’re supposed to sit. How can these people do anything in life? I’m shocked by the question of how this family can function, how they can pay their bills and drive a car and remember which night is garbage night. I’m astounded that this family doesn’t seem to understand how the numerical seating system works. I’m even more gobsmacked when it turns out that I am accidentally sitting in one of their seats.

  I have clearly learnt to stop thinking. The time with Fluffy has been well spent. But I’m cautious to look into my heart to see whether the ache has disappeared.

  Moments Later

  The safety drill is being demonstrated by a flight attendant standing right in front of me so I feel obliged to diligently watch her. I feel like the kid in the front row of the classroom, trying to act like I’m really interested so the teacher will give me better marks. I wonder whether paying attention will mean that the flight attendant saves me first if there’s a plane crash. I hope so because no one else around me is even looking at the safety demonstration and they’re all embarrassedly pretending that they’ve found something much more urgent to look at on the back of the tray table that’s latched to the seat in front of them. I bet if they did a comprehension test after one of these demonstrations, not a single passenger on this plane would know what to do if we crashed. Then again, should there be an accident, maybe it’s wiser to spend the final hour of your life really making the most of every moment, intrigued by the back of a latched tray table, rather than foolishly getting your hopes up for survival.

  We haven’t taken off yet but I’m starting to hate flying. The man to my left says he hates it too as he checks under his seat for the life jacket. He says he checks under the seat on every flight he takes to make sure the jacket is there, and he tells me it’s amazing the number of times that it isn’t. He thinks they should make another travelling class below economy and it could be called ‘Jacketless’ and would be ten per cent more than the economy fare. But if there’s a crash in which it would have been appropriate to find a jacket under your seat, then the entire price of the ticket should be refunded … to the beneficiaries of the will.

  We’re sitting in economy. I wonder whether people in business class get a better-quality life jacket.

  I think about plane crashes.

  I think about death.

  I think about life.

  I can feel the ache in my heart once more.

  My Heart Attack

  Oh no! I haven’t cured the ache at all. My time with Fluffy, learning to stop thinking, was my last chance to fix the ache and find a new me before returning to the workforce.

  So, according to my original goal, I’m not ready to take this job! Yet the job means money, the job means security. In an email sent to me overnight my potential boss told me that I could ‘do the work on my ear’. He said that the position was as good as mine and all I had to do was sign the contract. And now I’m sitting on the plane, on the way to meet him, so the deal is pretty well done.

  I’m scared to do the interview. I’m scared to get the job. I’m scared of myself.

  I want to cure this achy-breaky heart before we take off and fly and I land at a meeting where I accept a job that perpetuates the same old me. I want to distract myself by talking to the man next to me. I want to ask whether he travels a lot but it sounds like such a dumb pick-up line.

  ‘So,’ he says, interrupting my thoughts. ‘Do you travel a lot?’

  ‘Um, quite a bit. And you?’

  ‘Yes, I travel quite a bit too.’

  Having finished our chat, the man hogs the armrest, so I casually tell him that I have a contagious skin disease. The man then curls his entire body into a ball, closes his eyes and seems to fall asleep, which is a bugger because I need to pass him to go to the loo. I wait a bit, stare out the window, adjust my legs, wriggle, then stare at my neighbour and try as hard as I can to will him to open his eyes, like I’m trying to make a fork bend with my mind. I contemplate just climbing over him to skip to the loo but am worried that my desperation, combined with the pathetic pelvic-floor muscles I possess after giving birth twice, might not be quite up to such an advanced physical movement.

  I wonder whether you can wee in airsick bags. I try to distract myself. I unravel my plastic-wrapped airplane headphones, plug them in and listen to one of my favourite bands, U2, whom I possibly only like because the name is so inclusive.

  The pilot interrupts with an announcement that there’s a technical problem with the plane and our takeoff will therefore be slightly delayed. ‘Please feel free to move about the cabin,’ he says. The announcement has woken the man beside me so he allows me to pass and I go to the bathroom and then return to my seat where I plan to have a little snooze.

  I wonder what I’ll dream about as I doze. I want to dream that the ache goes away. Last night I dreamt I was cleaning out the fridge and lo and behold early this morning I did clean out the fridge. So maybe dreams really can come true.

  There’s a lot of noise in the cabin. I have no earplugs, just the headphones which actually hurt, so I stick my fingers in my ears and then dream I have two fingers stuck in my ears.

  Wow

  When I wake the plane is still on the tarmac. Turns out we’ve been sitting here for over two hours. I’ve missed my meeting. The flight has been cancelled. I’m no longer in the running for the job.

  Wow. Today was going to be the first day of the rest of my life, but now it’s going to have to be tomorrow.

  But then again, maybe today was always in
tended to be the last day of my old life. Maybe not making the interview is a very good thing. I sit on the plane while everyone gets off. I listen to the conversations as my fellow non-travellers disembark.

  ‘Don’t you just hate people in their thirties?’

  ‘I’m hungry.’

  ‘She had an affair … but even the divorce judge said he understood why.’

  ‘Why is dental floss flavoured? Are we meant to eat it?’

  ‘He was trying to get my attention by doing things like sucking snot from his nose down into his mouth and then swallowing it with a sort of grunt.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake. Can someone tell that fat bitch up front to bloody well hurry up?’

  ‘Every time I ask him to do something for me at work he replies, “Do you want fries with that?” ’

  ‘Anyway, she’s now suing him for fraud and sexual misconduct … or was it conducting sexual fraud?’

  ‘I knew a woman who sued her husband’s penis for fraud and misrepresentation.’

  ‘Jesus! Did you just fart?’

  I listen, unfazed, because very little human behaviour actually comes as a shock when you’ve dated a man who can only get aroused when he has a beret on his head and his scrotum tied in a hairnet.

  I get off the plane. I join the cab queue and I’m allocated a cab to catch home. At first glance the taxi cab appears to have no driver. Then I realise the cab does have a driver but he’s actually incredibly short. He’s so short that I don’t see him get out of the cab to open my door and when I take a step back my saggy bum accidentally sits on him. I immediately determine to leave him a big tip. Then I get in the cab and the vacant sign stays up!

  As I sit in the cab I decide not to tell my mother about the big tip for the little guy because she’ll say that I just did it because I want to buy a friend and that I wouldn’t have to do things like tip taxi drivers if I’d spent my early childhood developing a personality instead of showing my front bottom to the little boy next door.

  I can feel the ache again. It’s a double ache now, because it’s the original ache plus another layer caused by the disappointment of thinking I’d found a solution to the ache but actually found nothing at all.

  I wonder whether I should talk to the cab driver about the ache in my heart, but he seems to need all of his concentration just to see over the wheel.

  I realise that I’ve run out of people to ask for advice.

  I feel quite alone.

  Maybe this ache is loneliness!

  Maybe everyone is lonely.

  But then again, maybe I’m the only one.

  Oh, God … I just made myself feel even lonelier!

  The cab driver turns the radio up louder. I wonder whether he can hear my thoughts and whether they’re driving him insane. He asks me if the radio is up too loud. He has an extraordinarily deep voice. The man is a miracle. He’s like a cross between Paul Robeson and an elf. I find myself wondering how big his penis is.

  On the radio a woman has just begun to tell a story. I think she says it’s a religious fable, but I can’t be sure because when she first started speaking I was still thinking about my elf’s big penis. Then the cab driver turns the radio up louder, because he clearly can hear my thoughts, so I focus on the story.

  ‘An elder was dying,’ the woman says. ‘He was a religious leader amongst the community. All of his life had been devoted to fulfilling expectations. His congregation surrounded him as he took his final breaths.

  ‘ “You must be excited to meet our maker,” his closest friend said.

  ‘ “No, I am scared,” the dying man replied.

  ‘ “But why are you scared? You have done everything that was asked of you in this life.”

  ‘ “I’m scared because I have committed the greatest sin that there is, for I have not lived my life being truly myself.” ’

  As the story ends I realise that if not leading your life wholeheartedly as yourself is truly a sin, then I have committed this sin too. And I suddenly also realise that this ache I have carried is about loneliness, but perhaps it’s not about missing someone else’s company. Perhaps it’s about missing my own.

  Maybe the person that I’m missing is the person that I was born to be, with a complete soul and a complete self, uncorrupted by the expectations of others, and therefore untainted with inadequacy or inferiority. Maybe the answer to ending this ache can’t come from someone else because maybe living other people’s values systems is precisely what’s caused this ache in the first place. Maybe the ache really is a broken heart after all, because I’ve spent my whole life mourning the loss of me.

  On the cab radio news we hear that a woman has held her breath for three and a half minutes. She says that we all underestimate our strength and abilities and she’s taught herself to breathe through her ears.

  I contemplate making the ear breather my new guru. And then I pull myself together and I resolve to be my own guru and to simply live the life that I was born to live. And I resolve to start now, right here, right now … as soon as I’ve finished making my bum look smaller by extending the crack with an eyebrow pencil.

  To be continued …

  I have a few acknowledgements to make:

  Some of the lines appearing here have been painfully extracted from my previous books, articles and stand-up.

  Much of the material appearing in the vicinity of the subtitle ‘I am a Camel’ (pages 122–127) appeared previously in an article written by me and published in the Australian Women’s Weekly, February 2008.

  Bits and pieces regarding Tadpole have also appeared in an article written by me a long time ago and published somewhere but I don’t remember where or when.

  * The figure of ‘eleven’ siblings is fictional.

  * My mum is a very good and honourable person, much nicer than me and very attractive. (P.S. Hello, Mum.)

  * I do not have fifty-two brothers and sisters.

  * Sarah is not her real name. I had to change it in case she got angry.

  * Gretel is not my real name.

  * Plagiarised from a million things Gretel has written because it is such good and practical advice.

  * I love my father very much and he is an extremely fine Irish dancer.

  * I do not have one million siblings.

  * Gretel is not my real name.

  * Remember, Gretel is not my real name.

  * This figure regarding the number of my siblings is only approximate.

  * I can neither confirm nor deny that I am really Number Six.

  * Tadpole is fictitious – my real daughter is perfect, and a cross between a goddess and a munchkin.

  * Gretel is not my real name and I don’t know anyone who goes by that name either.