Anyway, Dad left the police force soon after he split up with Mum because the job was making him tired and run-down and cynical. After a short period when he just worked in the garden for about ten hours a day and was cranky all the time, he took a job with an old friend selling creepy-crawlies and pool supplies.
I was kind of glad about his career change. When I was a little kid, having a dad who was a cop was a social trump card, so much cooler than parents who were accountants or teachers or management consultants. But it never seemed to suit his personality and I could never quite picture him as a policeman. As I got older, I started to worry about his work as I realised what his job must have really been like: being called out to bar fights and shops that had been held up, and constantly dealing with people who were at the end of their tether. Sometimes when he worked late, I would stay up reading with my torch under the covers. I couldn’t sleep until he got back. He never knew that.
He works much better hours at the pool shop, and seems able to go off for a month-long holiday with June in their caravan whenever they feel like it. Every morning he makes deliveries of pool supplies before he goes into the shop, so he often brings home boxes of creepy-crawlies and chemicals and leaves them in the hall outside the kitchen so that our house stinks of chlorine. It’s something that makes me feel my life isn’t quite as normal as it should be.
There aren’t any pool supplies around the house at the moment, but there is a frightening amount of garbage from the nonstop PlayStation and bucket-bong sessions Heather and her latest bunch of random friends have been having over the past few weeks. I don’t know where she finds these people, but they sure know how to make a mess. There are piles of pizza boxes with congealed melted cheese inside, the sour stench of bong water in the lounge room, and the sink’s clogged with what looks like every single kitchen implement we have. In the hallway, there are enough empty beer bottles to suggest a recording session with The Pogues has recently taken place. They make a pretty impressive-sounding din when I empty them into the recycling bin on the street.
I wonder why I didn’t notice the mess before, why it hasn’t really bothered me. I guess when I came home to find them monopolising the living area, I just went to my room and turned up the music to block out all their nonsense. It’s always worked in the past.
Tim
It’s the big day today, we’re getting papers signed for Ned to become my legal guardian. It’s kind of crept up on me and I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about it. I’ve been living here a while, so it just feels like some formality to me but Ned’s pretty stoked about it and has got one of his mates to run the shop, giving him a rare day off. He comes into my room at 7 am with a bowl of cereal and a cup of coffee for me, which is dead nice of him.
‘How sweet is it, getting up at seven o’clock?’ he says.
‘It’s not that great.’
‘Beats getting up at five to open the shop.’
‘OK, I see your point.’
‘It’s just getting some papers signed, Tim, not a big deal,’ he says, though he’s pacing up and down my room like people do in cartoons when they’re nervous. I don’t think he’s ever come into my room before, which is cool. Everybody’s got to have their own space.
‘It’s just making it all official, making it proper, isn’t it?’ he goes on. ‘You can call me Uncle Ned if you like.’
‘That won’t be happening.’
‘Oh no, it’s alright, just call me what you want, I s’pose. We’ll go have a decent feed after — you know, celebrate a bit.’
I nod as I eat some of the already-soggy Coco Pops. And though I know I shouldn’t, I have a sip of the coffee. It’s absolutely piss weak, a caffeinated disaster. I’m not sure how he gets instant coffee to taste this bad, but there’s something he does that makes it taste like you’re licking an old spoon. He has an absolutely uncanny ability to cook even the simplest things really badly, something I unfortunately seem to have inherited.
‘OK, I’ll leave you to it, Tim,’ he says, lingering at the door, trying to find a cue to leave.
‘Hey, Ned,’ I say as he finally moves to go. He pauses just outside the doorframe. ‘Thanks. You know I appreciate everything you’re doing, right? I mean taking me in after Mum and Dad split. I might not say it, but … you know, I am grateful.’
He smiles, looks like he’s going to say something, then just gives me a serious nod and is off.
Mandy
So I’m, um, ah, looking for Tim on Facebook.
Let’s not call it stalking. Let’s just say it’s research.
I’m supposed to be filling out the application for the gopher job, but after writing some unsatisfying words about how I have a passion for music (which is true, but surely everyone writes that), I’ve become completely stumped by the first question in the application (Why are you the best person for this job?). So I’ve kind of taken a break from filling it out, and after an unproductive stretch of waiting for inspiration, which stubbornly refused to appear, I’ve drifted into this.
I don’t even know Tim’s last name, so researching him isn’t easy, especially because everybody in Sydney called Tim who comes up on the search engine seems to be some douchebag whose photo shows him with his shirt off and wearing fluoro-coloured boardies. Generally, the shirtless Tims aren’t even at a beach, but standing around with beers in somebody’s backyard. In fluoro-coloured boardies.
When I logged in, I noticed that Heather’s liked a Facebook page called ‘I chose a major I like and now I’ll probably live in a box’, which I think is a bit too close to the bone. She did a master’s thesis on feminist interpretations of the musical episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and now she works casually as a receptionist for her friend’s dad who’s a pathologist. Probably the closest she gets to a Buffy episode these days is collecting blood samples from strangers.
Anyway, I’m just about to give up my search for Tim, or so I tell myself, when I glimpse a tiny photo of him deep down on the list of profiles. He’s sitting on a trampoline playing an acoustic guitar, isn’t wearing boardies and, sadly, has his shirt on.
I click on the little picture and it shows me he has a private profile with eight hundred and eighty-seven friends. I don’t think I’ve even met eight hundred and eighty-seven people in my life, let alone befriended that many, even in a lame, online kind of way. He only has a few pages he likes: some local bands, who I assume are friends of his, and Bruce Springsteen, which I latch onto as proof we are star-crossed musical soulmates.
There’s not much more I can find out about him. I have stupidly fast internet, but nowhere to go. I’m met with locked profiles and closed doors. So I scroll through all his friends and it’s oddly depressing. He has lots and lots of girls in his friend list, many pouting and preening in selfies that I imagine being sent to his phone at all hours. I irrationally and randomly hate them all.
I hate Candy Collins for her improbably flirty (and possibly fake) name, Olivia K for her sexy honey-brown (though possibly fake) tan, and even someone called Sarah Taylor with her blandly non-threatening name and her profile picture of Babar the Elephant (who I love, by the way) just on the off-chance she might be ‘in a relationship with’ Tim. Those are four little words that could kill me. Facebook stalking is a surprisingly dangerous game.
Tim
‘You can make the greatest music in the world, but if nobody appreciates it, if nobody gets it, then what’s the point?’ I say. ‘It’s like playing with yourself.’
‘Playing with yourself!’ Sebastian literally rolls about laughing. He’s a little immature.
We’re sitting on the floor of my bedroom with Bree and Jane, and I’m playing them some new demos I’ve done and Sebastian’s rambling on about how I could improve the song, saying maybe I could get a drum machine to sit underneath the vocals and guitar.
We’ve had a lot of these conversations over the years, with various friends coming and going and way too many goon sacks being drunk. W
e inevitably start with me playing the latest tape demo I’ve done. It’s normally pretty lo-fi stuff. Filtering out the tape hiss is about the extent of my recording equipment’s capabilities, but these sessions are epic because we always end up talking all kinds of shit about music and life.
I explain to everybody my theory that there are no great poets any more because all the great poets are in rock ’n’ roll bands instead.
Seb counters with the theory that poets have died out due to natural selection because they can’t get laid.
‘You know what I hate when you see a band?’ Jane says. ‘I hate encores, you know? Like, everybody knows they’re not going to play their best song unless you clap them back onto the stage at the end. It’s so fake.’
‘I thought you liked encores because the band goes offstage for a minute and you can go take a piss without missing anything,’ Bree says.
Jane snorts at her.
I say that I think encores are the best part of a gig. To be more exact, it’s those few moments before the encore that are the best part, when everyone in the audience is united as one, wanting the last song so much you can physically feel the excitement building and building. I say that maybe it’s kind of fake when bands know they’re going to get an encore, but ages ago the encore was actually the band’s best song played a second time because the audience couldn’t get enough and didn’t want to go home.
‘That sounds boring as hell,’ Seb says. ‘Who wants to hear the same song twice?’
But I love the idea of second chances. And I hope I get back to the band competition and that Mandy is there again because our conversation was over too soon. I want another shot.
Mandy
The days are getting shorter. It’s starting to get grey earlier in the evenings and I still feel like I’ve done nothing all year. In January and February you can get away with doing nothing because it’s so hot and the sun fries your brain and drains your energy and you can easily spend a few long, lazy weeks lying on the beach or watching old movies on the couch with the AC blaring without feeling like too much of a bludger.
Even in March, Alice was just starting university and there were all these start-of-semester parties and inductions and I could kind of kid myself that it was still early in the year so it wasn’t a problem that I hadn’t made any plans for the coming months or saved up any money.
But now laziness has become a habit, a rut I can’t get out of. There’s only one thing that can cheer me up and that’s a visit to the secret swimming pool.
Ah yes, the secret swimming pool.
Alice and I came across it one magic afternoon when we tried to take a backstreet short cut to her house in Rozelle and we spied this amazing old swimming pool with marbled tiles around the sides and dusty gold leaves almost covering the surface of the water. Everyone in these pretty, cramped little suburbs has a fancy car, but barely anybody has a pool, so it was an unexpected find to say the least. A couple of nights later, we got drunk on Passion Pop on Alice’s front lawn and decided we’d set off and try to find it and sneak in. It’s down a back lane that comes off a narrow old street with a concealed entrance, so it’s easy to overlook. I like to think we’ve become the secret keepers of the pool, making semi-regular visits whenever we think we can get away with it. We’ve never seen the owners of the house or any sign of activity in there. We live in fear of getting caught. The place looks abandoned from the front, with mail piling up near the letterbox and wild vines sprawling over the front wall. You can see rusty long grass through the gates. I can’t help thinking of it as being owned by some kind of Miss Havisham character, rattling around the crumbling, ivy-covered mansion all by herself.
I ring Alice and she agrees it’s a warm enough night for a swim. We meet in a forgotten lane off Bridge Street, where a stray cat watches us with suspicion. Alice is on her bike and holds up an old copper flask with a tartan cover.
‘Whisky?’ I ask.
‘Better. Strawberries-and-cream tea.’
In a few minutes we’re there. We climb over the back fence and slip into the pool, making sure not to make too much noise. It’s a beautiful scene, with the moon full and bright overhead and the stillness of the surface almost surreal until I dive in. There’s a touch of iciness in the water and it’s so refreshing. I feel the water push against my lungs as I dive to the bottom.
I swim over to the underwater step you can sit on, and pour some tea into the cup that fits over the top of the flask. It smells sweet and beautiful, like a flower bed after rain.
The wind dances through the ghostly white branches and the tips of the trees, brushing up against the skinniest sticks like wires on a snare drum. I watch a copper-coloured leaf fall in slow motion onto the surface of the pool. Sometimes I wish all of life could be like this, moving forward at my own pace. No alarms, no surprises, getting used to things day by day, falling leaf by falling leaf.
Alice glides along on a floating beach chair, sipping her tea, and not for the first time I feel vaguely jealous of her. With her vintage swimsuit, porcelain skin and scattering of summer freckles, it looks like someone’s painted her and made her just a bit too beautiful to be real. Her skin’s so fair, I think, it’s unfair.
She tells me about the mad, exotic Russian czars and tragic heiresses and dastardly vodka barons that she studies in her history lessons and I tune out in a pleasant way. I love that she loves Russian history, but I can’t quite conjure up her enthusiasm for all that stuff.
I actually feel a little strange when she talks about her university classes. I think it makes me realise how bone lazy I was when I bitched out of going to uni, and how I have achieved nothing so far with my gap year.
‘You want to go to that band night again tomorrow?’ I ask Alice.
‘Huh?’ She seems a bit surprised to hear me talk, like she was off in some reverie of her own. ‘I suppose we could go, but I felt like a bit of a loser when my so-called friends barely spoke to us last time.’
‘Yeah, that was rude’ I say, but I pause a bit, giving away the fact I hardly remember that part of the evening.
‘Are we going for any particular reason?’ she asks.
‘Such as?’
‘I don’t know, to see some dishy musician-type who may be there?’
‘No, no, it’s just something to do.’
She looks at me doe-eyed. Then she shrugs. ‘OK, well, we do need something to do. Let’s do it.’
And with that, I feel a jolt of energy. Something so small as a chance to continue a fragmented conversation with a fascinating stranger has got me feeling tingly and secretive, strange and excited. And maybe just a bit scared.
Tim
Kiera and her friends want me to go down to the park with them after school, where they smoke and do skateboard tricks and glare at people and generally try to come across as some intimidating teenage gang, but I go straight home instead.
As soon as I walk in the door, I hear the familiar sound of Spirit jumping off his hammock and rattling around at the back of the house, eager to get out and run through the streets with me. And I see Ned with an unfamiliar, unreadable expression on his face as he talks on the phone.
‘It’s for you,’ he says, placing the receiver face down on the coffee table and turning away.
‘Another one of my girlfriends, is it?’
‘Tim, it’s Carol.’
‘Oh.’
I feel a piercing stab of nervousness, a second of unsteadiness. But I make sure it’s just a second.
‘Hello, Mum,’ I say into the phone. I feel guilty. I haven’t rung her as much as I should have since she moved to Queensland to live with her sister. She asks me about school, and I tell her about how I’m killing it in music class, how some kids in English almost had a fist fight today, but how I’m staying out of trouble. She tells me she’s proud and I ask how she’s getting on.
We chat for a while, but it feels weird talking like this, like I’m on my best behaviour, politely playing some
kind of show-and-tell game that I’m too old for. She doesn’t sound like herself, she sounds like some watered-down version, choosing her words carefully, not making jokes, telling me how her new supervisor is pretty decent, and how she and my aunt Louisa went down to the beach before work this morning and it was lovely.
‘I remember taking you to Bondi Beach when you were just a little kid,’ she says. ‘You loved it there.’
‘I don’t even remember that,’ I say. I don’t. It could be anyone’s memory. ‘I remember Bali though. That was a weird time.’
‘Tim, we’ve talked about this before, you should let that go, at least. Nothing happened there.’
‘I’m not real good at letting things go.’
‘I know, darling. But listen, I’ll be back with you really soon, back with you and Ned. Things are still just a bit confused right now.’
‘Yeah.’
‘I hope you’re being good to Ned, helping him out around the place. He’s done a really good thing taking you in.’
‘Ned’s alright, I guess,’ I say loudly, knowing he’s loitering in the next room and can hear me. But I don’t let her hear the knot in my throat as I say my goodbyes. Things are confused now, she’s right. And this didn’t make anything one bit clearer.
To clear my head, I go for a walk and end up at the Old Canterbury, where one of my mates, James, is a bartender. I’d been meaning to see if he knows Mandy.
James is a drummer in a post-rock band called Broken Horses, and has this cool little solo side project where he plays spooky drum rhythms over looped found sounds. I think it’s sold about seven copies, but it’s really cool and has been getting a bit of attention from blogs overseas. Drumming is obviously what he’s meant to do. When you see him doing most things, he has this slightly pathetic air of confusion about him, but when you see him drumming and he’s doing a million things at once and making it look easy, it seems to make perfect sense.
You’re the Kind of Girl I Write Songs About Page 4
