by Michele Lee
‘So, a guy?’
‘Jesus, the Backpacker had come from England. You know he’s not just any guy.’
‘Well, I can’t keep up with you.’
‘I could draw a diagram of all the guys in my life.’
‘I don’t want a diagram. I want you to come along to my things. My housewarming last year. You didn’t come to that. Even Husband was there. But you were off somewhere, pissed.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
So I tell her I’ll change. I’ll be better, reliable. Less pissed. I don’t drink very often and you can’t drink at all on the Botox Diet – I’m now on the Botox Diet, by the way. Instead of reading the introductory Gramsci text a colleague had lent me, I chose to read New Weekly on the plane ride back from Auckland (and Jackie Winchester, who can paraphrase a definition of dialectical materialism without taking a breath, had assured me that Gramsci was a conservative Marxist revisionist anyway). To get Botox-fresh skin without actually injecting chemicals into their foreheads, the starlets are saying ‘yes!’ to their personal chefs exclusively cooking with organic foods and saying ‘no thank you!’ to beer, even all the free ones they get at parties because they’ll be saying ‘no’ to parties, and ‘no’ to excuses for not doing the exercise regimes that their personal trainers have prescribed for them.
‘That one. That one,’ Goose says.
She’s standing behind me and pointing to tracks in my iTunes. We’re compiling a playlist of happy crappy pop music and that is exactly and exclusively the sort of music that I own. She’d like a CD to take home.
I don’t think we’ve made up, though.
Goose and I have fought before. The last time it was also about boys – I was lacking patience for her analyses of relationship dilemmas and she was lacking patience to hear mine, even though I don’t so much have analyses of dilemmas, mainly just anecdotes with bawdy, graphic punch lines. I get exasperated combing over the minutiae of her text messages whereas I think she sees me as having solved the problem if I’ve given up the prize.
Like Guy-normous, Goose doesn’t stay the night. And she doesn’t text or call me the next day. Fuzzy, my housemate, shrugs at me on Sunday morning.
‘Well, what do you expect me to say?’
She unpeels her whites from the compacted ball of clothes in our rented washing machine in the outdoor laundry. She’s doing her weekend house chores.
‘I know you,’ she tells me. ‘I’ve seen you do this. You rush into things and in a month’s time, what? You move on.’
‘No, no,’ I say. ‘I liked Jackie Winchester.’
‘If you liked him then why do you act the way you do?’ she fumes. ‘Little Miss Everything’s Casual. You’re going to Vietnam soon. You can’t get serious about anything.’
‘It’s Laos, I’m going to Laos.’
‘Whatever.’
‘They’re two different countries, Fuzzy. I did go to Vietnam earlier this year. Maybe you’re getting confused because of that.’
‘Whatever! I don’t feel sorry for you. You know I love you but I see you do this all the time. If you don’t take yourself seriously, how do you expect a guy to?’
‘It was different with this one. We clicked. I liked him.’
‘And this Jackie Winchester probably liked you but got scared off. Think about it. You meet them on the internet because you’re a writer, you like new experiences, Miss Pinky. I’ve seen you. You’re confident. You walk around naked, over in that warehouse.’
‘That was an art gallery,’ I point out. ‘And that was in the context of performing in a play.’
She rolls her eyes. In general, she prefers not to intellectualise. ‘My point is, sis-tah, these men you meet, they’re not like you. These are lonely men.’
‘He’s got friends. His two best mates are in Melbourne.’
‘I’m not saying he doesn’t have friends. What I’m saying is, these men – forget about whether they’re on the internet or not – all men, when they reach out for company, even in the most innocent way, it means more. They don’t have a bunch of girlfriends to turn to when they’re lonely, not like women. It’s different for men. So when they find you, Miss Pinky, Miss Naked-on-Stage, they’re even happier. But not you. You’re a man-eater.’
We trail into the house. Fuzzy goes into her bedroom. The concave onion in the roof, with its ornate art deco detailing, hangs above her head as a massive halo helmet. I suppose this isn’t the right time to tell her about my man boycott. Or about the guy I met last night at the Napier at a friend’s farewell drinks. This guy’s younger. Twenty-three.
The Cub.
Here is my lair, my den of man-eating, no longer to be mine in five weeks when I go away to Laos. I bring home men, toss them into my lair, and eat them on my thousand-dollar mattress, which is the most expensive thing I own after my degree and my graduate certificate and my diploma, all currently misplaced, hiding somewhere with my open-when-you’re-thirty letter.
My lair is actually two combined rooms. The room at the back is a carnal dungeon with my bed in it and the front room has my laptop in it, atop my wide desk. This is where I do my writing, and where I prowl the internet for lonely victims. I’m not sure on which I spend more time. Over in the corner is a decoupaged vanity desk. Several paintings and sentimental oddities hang above it. A lone Asian woman stands at the centre of one picture. Her black hair is neatly bobbed and her slim body sheathed in a fitted cerise cheongsam. She has her back turned to us. Her arms are placidly folded behind her and she hides a slim cane in one hand. Whoever might stand in front of her doesn’t know that she wields a stick and that she might strike.
Later that day I encounter Fuzzy outside my lair.
She grins. I do too. The weekend’s nearly over but she thinks I’m still up to no good.
‘I’m going to miss you, Miss Pinky,’ she says.
‘I’m going to miss you too, Miss Fuzzy.’ I check to see if any other housemates are within earshot. Then I add, ‘I’ll miss you the most. I’ve loved living with you.’
‘How long has it been?’
‘Well,’ I say, counting back the years in my head. ‘I’ve been here –’
‘Don’t worry about how long you’ve been here, it’s the same, isn’t it, for you and me? How long have we been here?’
‘We’ve lived together for nearly five years.’
Oh Miss Fuzzy! My feisty Seychellois-Arab! An unusual ethnic mix and an unlikely match to my no-good self. Colonicfriendly, spray-tan friendly, with almost blue-white bleached teeth, Fuzzy is not the kind of girl who’d avoid reading Gramsci to deign to read New Weekly. Yet she’s the person I’ve had my longest relationship with, us two housemates, us two sis-tahs. I know ‘man-eater’ is a gentler way to say ‘big old slut’ and I know ‘big old slut’ isn’t always meant to be malicious – sometimes that’s the first term that springs to mind. I get it, that the ongoing concern has a narrow vocabulary.
I could do some work today. It’s Monday and I’m at my desk, there’s a document with standard text for use in the publications I’m editing – disclaimers, contact lists, disability accessibility statements and so on. I’ve been meaning to update this document before I go away. I could go to the next floor and pester Husband and see what calls he’s had this morning, what time he’s rostered on for lunch, if he feels like sharing a leftover salad I brought in.
I could draw a diagram. For Goose, for any others affected by my man-eating. It’d be a diagram like the periodic chart, the one I memorised when I was fifteen and taking chemistry with Mrs Kathekakis. In my chart, I’d give every boy in it his own set of electrons and neutrons and distinctive chemical properties.
Fuzzy’s chart would be more like the student enrolment list for the international faculty she works in: Russian, Lebanese, Saudi, Colombian, Italian, Egyptian.
She’s not into white guys in or out of the workplace. She thinks they just don’t get it. White guys are the lacklustre students she shudders at, laconic
and wry men, made lazy because of their self-entitlement. Unlike the humble Ahmeds and the Vlads in Fuzzy’s faculty, coloured men who selflessly excel in their courses and never put themselves before their mum, dad, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles, half-aunts and half-uncles, cousins, their cousins’ kids, their cousins’ kids’ cousins: everyone back home paying for their tuition.
I’m more like the white guys I fuck. I don’t get it either, I operate solo, I pay my own way. I call home every three months. I don’t speak Hmong when I do. I speak Aussie. All my friends do too. Like Goose. Fair-headed, raised on pale foods – bread, milk and potatoes – in white coastal towns.
The Cub is white.
‘How come you don’t know where Melbourne Town Hall is?’ I ask him. It’s midweek now, the sun has set, and we are walking in the dull dusk to a wine bar called Cabinet. It’s our first date.
‘Ah. I live in Richmond and I used to live in St Kilda. I haven’t explored the city. There’s no real social need. For that reason, the northern suburbs I haven’t explored. Northcote, yes, where I’ve also lived. I’m actually from Brisbane. Well, actually, a place called Coffs Harbour. Actually, a country town outside of it. You heard of Grafton?’
‘Yep. I’m from Canberra. Places up north aren’t foreign to me.’
‘Well, picture Grafton but not Grafton. I’m from a small country town near it, Glenreagh. But then I moved to Brisbane when I was seventeen. A couple of years ago I came down to Melbourne. It sounds sort of clichéd, but I fell in love with Melbourne. I moved here two weeks after.’
‘And now look at you, a hipster cliché.’
‘But this is a recent thing. I only started getting into fashion about eighteen months ago. Before that, I even wore straight-leg jeans.’
After Cabinet we move on to the Toff – it’s still winter and September is peeking at us from the far-off future of next week. There’s a booth free, we slip in, decadently claiming the whole space for ourselves. We’re drinking whisky now, like two old mates reuniting, comparing backaches and kindred complaints about the way things are, and how they’ve changed right before us. We’ve lost the awkward niceties that the first hour of conversation demands. We’ve equipped ourselves with each other’s professional history, we’ve gauged each other’s Melburnian-ness, and now we forage with strong opinions through each other’s relationship CVs.
‘Don’t you think that’s, well, passive? Passive-aggressive?’ the Cub says.
‘That’s one way of seeing it, yes. But I was aiming for being assertive. He was here in April and it was business as usual between us. But ever since he got back to London, he’s been … well, we haven’t talked as much as we used to. Which I appreciate sounds insignificant. But to put it into perspective, the Backpacker and I stayed in fairly constant contact over the last four years, in and out of relationships.’
‘So why would you delete him?’
‘Stop asking me these very good questions, Cub.’
‘Hey, I’m not meaning to attack you. It’s just, well, the same thing’s happened to me. Getting cut off. Does he know that you’ve deleted him?’
‘No.’
‘Then I’d have to say it’s passive.’
‘I suppose I could just email the Backpacker and ask him what’s going on.’
‘You haven’t already done that?’
‘No. Because of this Jackie Winchester fellow I was obsessing over.’
The Cub nods, taking it in. I suppose it must seem like petty nonsense.
I say, ‘I could be conciliatory, I guess. I’m going to London.’
‘When?’
‘After Laos.’
‘That’s so awesome. I’d love to go overseas.’
I saw the Backpacker in London, his natural habitat, when I visited in 2007. I was staying with my friend Heels, a friend from university, and on my first day there she and I had crawled through her favourite bars and now we waited for the Backpacker in a bar in Hoxton. She’d been in London since uni had ended and just the other week she had unexpectedly broken up with her partner, a man she thought she’d grow old with who, as it turned out, was a fabulous liar. So we drank in commiseration and incredulity at the magnitude of his lies. Heels was on an agreed wavelength with me about the perils and pleasures of men. So as we drank, we were a mash-up of girl-talking, chest-puffing and whisky-tumbler grumbling.
He arrived, the Backpacker. He was still as tall and slim as I remembered him, and he still had jangly joints like those of a marionette. When we’d been together, he’d been innocuous and playful but at times also brutally sensitive; he was a sweet mix of contradictions and idiosyncrasies that I’d delighted in while we were together, like a dope stuck in the chamber of a kaleidoscope, its wondrous panels constantly shifting above and all around. His hands were stuffed in his pockets; he was wearing a plain T-shirt. He grinned at me. My puffing and grumbling ebbed away.
In London, talking boys with Heels, amongst thousand-year-old castle turrets, I felt so far away from home and from Melbourne’s young buildings. I could have welcomed a second year as Husband’s girlfriend when I came back, but I didn’t; we broke up.
The Cub tells me about his Swedish ex-girlfriend.
‘She was a cougar, like you,’ he says. He nods knowingly, as if I might know her from the cougar club. The Cub is six years my junior.
He met Lady Sweden at the hostel in St Kilda, and they dated for eight tumultuous months. Then she went home. Later he evolved out of his straight-leg jeans and fell in love with the Cubette, who was also from the country but, like the Cub, was an effortless city convert. They broke up three times, twice at her behest. He gave up, in love but defeated.
I feel a pang for him, for the agony of their happily-ever-after denied by some sort of quarter-life existential yearning and some sort of depression plague – everyone in Melbourne is depressed, we’re hankering for art or money or a meaning eternally out of our grasp, and it’s still winter and it’s still too cold to sit outside and admire our pretty grid of a depressive, young city.
‘We’re like snakes biting at each other’s arses,’ I say. ‘We’re all trying to get over someone who’s getting over someone else.’
Here’s me, here’s the Cub, here’s this loop. It’s a ring of snakes and we’re in it, limbless, all connected mouth to tail, in an endless coil. I don’t know exactly where I am, who’s stuffed in between my lips. Husband. The Backpacker. Or it might be Jackie Winchester. Neurotic, medicated, an intellect in fashion high-tops who’s not a lover anymore, just a friend now. With him I waited. I checked. No emails. Or brief ones only, like this one from last night explaining why it was best that we stop entertaining each other with private jokes.
– I don’t know if it’s me or if I’m still working through my Elyssia issues.
He couldn’t help how he felt. I got it. Often I can’t help myself, or help how I feel, regardless of who it hurts.
I don’t mean to talk about former men so quickly and so avidly but I always open my big mouth and spit out everything inside. It’s worse when I have an audience. Look at him, the Cub. A newly inculcated fashionista with a jersey scarf looped around his neck.
It’s 3 a.m. The Toff is closed. The Lounge hums and glows at us from across Swanston Street. Yuck. We don’t want to go there. We’re too cool. That upstairs cavern is like a divey uni bar and the downstairs room is too dingy to be the cocktail bar it’s pretending to be.
We walk the streets.
Around the corner, on Lonsdale Street, the Cub points at the sign above a stairway. The Esco Bar. It’s the place for indie kids to be on Friday nights. I imagine designer hipster mosh pits but the Cub says it’s actually dingy, dingier than the Lounge, but it’s where he picks up girls who are as consciously prettified as him.
‘I had to get circumcised because I’d torn the foreskin having sex. With the Cubette. The doctor said it was fine, that it’d heal. Then my dick grew. You see it can still do that when you’re a cub. Yeah, up
until you’re, ah, about twenty-four. But because it grew, the foreskin wasn’t healing properly. I had to get circumcised.’
‘That’s good, isn’t it? That it grew. Now you’ve got a twoinch dick, right?’
He smiles. ‘Oh, only one inch.’
We wander into Chinatown, under a bright arch and down Little Bourke back towards the Toff, having almost walked in a complete circle. The street lights glimmer but nothing is open save perhaps for the Supper Inn. The Cub and I aren’t after congee. We stand still.
‘Why don’t we make this domestic?’ I say.
We catch a taxi to his place in Richmond. In his twoman share-house I can see clues of the other housemate. I detect another cub lives here: I smell pot; the dishes in the kitchen are dirtied from dinner. Pasta, maybe. The small bar fridge holds a jar of half-used passata and some meat pies. The bathroom sink is coated in a film sticky with stubs of someone’s shorn-off facial hair. Behind the sink is a washing machine, its cover sticky too.
The Cub changes into pyjamas, for some reason, and before I have time to contemplate why, he pushes me down onto his bed and presses on top of me. Through his Peter Alexander pyjama pants, I can feel him hard against me. I don’t think that’s one inch.
‘Oh God,’ I groan dramatically. ‘Now we’re going to have sex, I’m going to have to be a cougar and I’ll have to be way more sexually competent than you.’
‘Shut up, cougar.’
My jumper comes off. So too my scuffed calf-high boots, the Robin Hood ones I bought when I first got to Melbourne. I was a student and I had no money but I longed for these boots, and so they were mine. I was twenty-three. Twenty-fucking-three.
I want to join the cougar club.
Thursdays are my non-office days. When I’m not staying up until the wee hours having sex with cubs, I get up early and reserve the day for my unpaid work and my poorly paid work: playwriting!
I’ve set aside this Thursday for going into Northcote to the youth theatre company I used to work for. I’m doing a belated handover – although I haven’t worked with the theatre company for months, I’m here explaining how the database works and giving marketing advice about the big project at the end of the year, a production about faith and diversity in Melbourne, made with and by young people.
