Pants on Fire

by Maggie Alderson

  What was Billy playing at? Talk about hot-cold hot-cold. One minute he was kissing me, then he was running away laughing, then he was nearly ravishing me in a public place, then he was running away, then we were having a cosy breakfast, then he was running away. If he wasn’t so gorgeous I probably would have dismissed him as a kookalooka, but he was the perfect package. The full Town Like Alice fantasy. My parents would adore him. Even my brother would like him. My grandfather would be beside himself. He’d hated Rick—too urban. Couldn’t comprehend a man who didn’t like fishing. Billy was bound to like fishing, and shooting too. Perhaps we could divide our time between Australia and Scotland. Wouldn’t that be the perfect life? I wondered when he would call me again.

  But as I fell asleep, my mouth full of half-chewed crisps—or chips, as I was learning to call them—I realised what was odd about the moment with Rory at the door. I think he’d been about to ask me for my phone number. And I was slightly disappointed that he hadn’t.

  Chapter Four

  “OK, how about ‘Why Running Away from Heartache Never Works’?”

  “No, too depressing,” growled Glow’s editor, Maxine Thane. “It’s just a statement, it doesn’t offer a solution. Who’s going to buy a magazine that promises to make them depressed? Could you all think before you open your mouths, please? Liinda, this story was your idea, what have you got?”

  “Well, how about ‘You’ve Left Him, But You’re Still Carrying the Baggage’?”

  “Not bad, we’re getting somewhere—baggage is a good word and it’s quite funny, but it’s a bit clumsy. Have you got any ideas, Zoe?”

  “Er . . . ‘The Great Guy Who Got Away’?”

  “What? Pay attention, will you?” said Maxine, not a woman inclined to put tact before getting her point across. “I know you’re thinking about all the lunch you’re not going to eat, but ‘The Great Guy Who Got Away’ is another story entirely. Actually, it’s not a bad idea—make a note of it, Liinda. We could get single women in their late thirties to talk about the one guy they still think about. Put it on the list for the May issue. It would be cheap to do. We can ring all our friends and ask them. Now, what are we going to call this bloody man-baggage feature? Debbie?”

  Debbie was looking down at her manicured nails and hardly lifted her glossy blonde head towards Maxine to answer. She sighed deeply.

  “Oh, I don’t know. What’s it about? Dumping a man and not being over him? That’s never happened to me. I can’t imagine it. I just dump them and never give them another thought.”

  “Oh, you make me sick,” said Maxine. “I don’t know why I have you at these meetings. You might look like Grace Kelly, but I’ve met more intelligent handbags. Just sit there and look beautiful, darling, it might inspire somebody. OK, come on the rest of you, someone has an idea, surely?”

  Up until now I’d been gazing vacantly out of the window, mesmerised by the vivid blue sky. I turned back to the other four women in the room and sat up.

  “So what we’re really looking at here,” I said, “Is ‘Why a Perfectly Normal Person Might Move to the Other Side of the World to Get Over Some Stupid Man.’ Is that right?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well, funnily enough, I think I might be able to come up with some input on that—”

  But before I could finish I was interrupted by a very pale woman with an enormous tower of black hair piled up on her head like an out-of-control bird’s nest, with a large pink hibiscus flower that appeared to grow out of the middle of it. Liinda Vidovic.

  “How about ‘You’ve Left the Country, But Have You Really Left Him Behind’?” she said, determined that the editor’s attention stay on her and “her” story idea.

  “Mmm . . . That’s pretty good, but it’s a bit long,” Maxine replied.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” I said, turning towards Liinda. The bird’s nest swung around in irritation. “What about ‘You’ve Left Him, But Have You Left Him Behind’?”

  “That’s brilliant, Georgia,” said Maxine, smiling delightedly. “We’ve got it. Now you can all fuck off and leave me alone.”

  “And incidentally, the answer is yes,” I added. “I have left him behind. Thank you all for your interest.”

  It was a good line, but then it should have been, seeing as it came from my own painful experience, which Liinda, as predicted, had lifted wholesale as a coverline. Of course it was outrageous of her to use my heartbreak as a story idea—and I now realised she’d bought me lunch on my first day in the office expressly to get all the grisly details—but I was in such a good mood that morning, I was prepared to forgive anything. Plus, I quietly gloated, it was me who had come up with the final editor-pleasing line. That’ll learn here, I thought. Ms. Vidovic may have had the smartest mouth on Glow magazine for the past seven years, but now she had a little competition.

  I was in a particularly good mood because of the fabulous long weekend I’d just had, but I was also still generally high on the newness of living in Australia. Just walking along a street was thrilling. Going to the supermarket was an anthropological expedition. Everything had different brand names—I tried three brands of loo paper before I discovered that the Australian equivalent of Andrex was called Sorbent. I spent quite some time watching water going down the plughole to see if it really did go the other way. (It does—and I’d made a special point of watching it in England just before I left, so I would know the difference.)

  The birds were different. The sirens were different. The radio announced “golden oldies” I had never heard before. The news-readers were strangers. You went north towards the sun. A southerly wind was a really cold one. I bought a postcard that showed Australia was the same size as the whole of Europe, and another that showed the world with Australia at the top. “No longer down under” it said. Too right, mate, I thought.

  Sometimes I would be strolling along and the thought would literally stop me in my tracks. I’m in Australia. Australia. It thrilled me to the core. There I was on the other side of the world, as far away as I could be from Rick the Prick Robinson and his surgically enhanced sperm receptacles. From him and all the other weak-willied goons my homeland could come up with, under the heading of Men.

  I was yonks away from all the superannuated public-school boys who were terrified of a woman with a job and a libido. Miles from the working-class blokes who thought I was a snooty bitch the minute I opened my mouth. Twenty-four hours from the idiots who said, “Oh, you’re one of those feminists, are you?” because I ticked the “Ms.” box on forms.

  If Glow had a Mars edition, I might have taken a job on that, but for the time being Sydney was as far as I could go. And judging by the ones I’d met at Danny Green’s hat party, the men here seemed to be a whole lot more attractive than Martians.

  When we came out of the meeting I told Liinda I wanted a word with her in my office.

  “You are appalling,” I told her, shaking my head, but smiling. “You’re shameless. You just lifted a great segment of my life to make a coverline. Unbelievable. Do you do this to all your friends?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t they get mad at you?”

  The bird’s nest teetered dangerously as she nodded. “Yes, but they carry on telling me all about their love lives anyway, so I carry on using them for inspiration. They know the deal. I always change their names.”

  I couldn’t help laughing and she smiled back at me like a naughty child who knows they’ve got away with it.

  “Oh, that’s a relief. And who’s writing this story about leaving a country to leave a man, anyway?” I asked.

  “I’ve already written it.”

  “But you’ve never been out of Australia, have you?”

  She shrugged. “No, but I have a good imagination.”

  “Did you actually speak to anyone about what it’s like to change country?”

  “Yes. Three psychologists. And you. And my mother. She moved here from Croatia in the 1950s, so she knows what it’
s like to move country.”

  “You are a piece of work,” I told her, but I couldn’t help liking Liinda. She was so barefaced about her treachery. I knew I was going to be one of those friends who carried on telling her my secrets, because apart from anything else she was a good listener and I needed someone to talk to. I sorely missed my girlfriends back in London and even after two weeks I knew that the time difference made it impossible to communicate with them properly.

  If I rang them late at night for a good chat they were in the middle of their busy days and vice versa. I’d already received a couple of drunken phone calls in the morning at my desk. Even with emails it wasn’t the same. Because I was also realising that if they didn’t understand the context, my romantic tales just wouldn’t be the same. It was no good if I had to start out explaining who Danny Green was and what moleskin pants were. I needed someone who already understood the subtle nuances of Sydney life, which I was only just beginning to grasp myself. Like the vast gulf between living in Elizabeth Bay, where I lived, and in Paddington, where Billy lived, for example. Separated only by a busy road and a couple of parks, but different universes in terms of values and beliefs. One bohemian and sophisticated, but with a dark side, the other chic and sophisticated, but with a dull side.

  “Want to have lunch?” I heard myself ask her. I was burning to talk to someone about Billy’s weird behaviour.

  “Sure, I’ll take you to a Sydney landmark. Do you like Chinese food?”

  “Love it.”

  “Good. Because I only eat Chinese food.”

  I didn’t even bother to ask why. I knew she’d tell me.

  “Because you can smoke right through the meal.”

  BBQ King looked like a 1950s truckstop, all laminated tables and tatty lino. A jolly Chinese man barked, “Hello mate! Hello Riinda!” at us when we came in. Everyone in there knew Liinda. They didn’t even ask for her order, they just brought it. The chairs were red vinyl, the floor was sticky and the noodle soup I was slurping down was like nectar. Already on her third Diet Coke, Liinda picked at her plate of plain boiled chicken and plain boiled rice with one hand, holding a cigarette in her other.

  “I don’t normally ‘do lunch,’ you know,” she was telling me. “I like to eat alone, or there’s a great lunchtime NA meeting in Macquarie Street, so you’re very honoured.”

  “NA? Is that Narcotics Anonymous?”

  “Yes.”

  “How often do you go to NA meetings?”

  She took a long, deep drag on her cigarette. “Most days. I go to AA as well. And Codependents Anonymous. I have been known to do three meetings in a day.”

  “Crikey. That wouldn’t leave you much time for a social life.”

  “That’s the whole point. The last thing I want is a social life. Social lives in Sydney have drugs in them. As I’m sure you discovered on Sunday. How was it? Did you trash yourself?”

  “Yes. I trashed myself. And nearly my reputation as well.”

  Linda looked very interested in that idea. I let her stew for a bit while I took a mouthful of soup.

  “Tell.”

  “Do you know a guy called Billy Ryan?”

  “Yes. He’s a stockbroker. We had him as one of our 50 Most Eligible Bachelors one year. He’s not bad looking if you like men who look like Liberal Party campaign posters.”

  “What kind of reputation does he have?” I asked.

  “Don’t know. He’s more Deb-rett’s territory. Overprivileged Paddington pond life. He knew the guy she was engaged to who died, I think, so I don’t advise asking Debbie about him. I did try to get her to have some grief counselling when that happened but she started throwing stiletto shoes at my head. And when I left a few Codependents Anonymous brochures on her desk, she just threw them back onto mine. On fire. So I’ve left her to get over it her own way—hard drugs and casual sex. Was everybody totally shitfaced at the party?”

  “Yes. Totally blasted. I’ve never seen such an orgy of drink and drugs. Why do they do that?”

  Liinda shrugged. “Haven’t a clue. It’s just the way Sydney is. We all live in paradise and most of us can’t wait to get out of it as soon as possible. Me included. If I hadn’t woken up one morning in bed with two bikers I’d never seen before, in a room full of sawn-off shotguns, I’d still be behaving like that myself. Except I’d probably be dead.”

  I stopped with my chopsticks halfway to my mouth. The noodles fell back into the bowl with a plop.

  “When did that happen?”

  “Seven years ago. Just before I started at Glow. Maxine knows all about it. She saved my life, really. She might seem like a queen bitch but she has a really good heart. Her father was an alcoholic, like mine. I actually met her at Al Anon—it’s for adult children of alcoholics. She sponsored me and she gave me a job. I owe her a lot—that’s why I put up with her verbal abuse. That’s why I try so hard to give her the best possible coverlines and why I haven’t left Glow even though I’ve been offered lots of other jobs.”

  I paused to take it all in, giving up on the noodles and just sipping the delicious broth. Liinda pushed her plate away.

  “But why is Maxine so awful to Debbie?” I asked. “She had a terrible thing happen to her and Maxine was giving her such a hard time at the meeting this morning. I was really embarrassed.”

  “Maxine does it deliberately. She’s known Debbie all her life. They went to school together. Maxine’s family used to be even wealthier than Debbie’s but her pisspot father gambled and drank it all away and then killed himself. When she was twelve, Princess Maxine went from living in a huge house in Bellevue Hill to a two-bedroom unit in Bondi Junction. She could only stay on at her swanky girls’ school because she had a scholarship.”

  Liinda paused for dramatic effect.

  “Her genteel mother had to take in ironing. That’s why she comes over so tough and that’s why she hates seeing Debbie, who still has all her money and privilege, ruining herself over Drew’s death rather than working her way through it. I think Maxine’s hoping to shock Debbie into doing something about it. And then, of course, she’s fantastically jealous of Debbie’s beauty and money. It’s a mixture of both, I guess.”

  “Blimey,” I said. “I feel like I’ve walked onto the set of The Young and the Restless or whatever it’s called.”

  “Oh, that’s nothing. We’ve only just scratched the surface of what goes on in that place.”

  I used the spoon to slurp up a few noodles. Liinda took a couple more deep drags on her cigarette and then ashed it in her chicken. I had to ask her, I couldn’t help myself—it was that journalist’s curiosity again:

  “Liinda, I hope you don’t mind me asking, but how did you become a . . . er . . . junkie?” I hoped she wasn’t going to say it started with a white plate and a little fingerful of hoochy coochy, as Antony called it.

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “Yes, but only if you want to tell me.”

  “It’s not a pretty story, but I’ve told it so many times at meetings I don’t mind who I tell it to anymore. It might put you off your noodles, though.”

  I shrugged.

  “My father was an alcoholic,” she began. “He beat my mother. He beat my brother. He beat me. Then he left us, which broke our hearts. He wasn’t a bad man, but after they moved here from Croatia it never worked for him. He never learned to speak the language properly and felt frustrated and shut out. He thought he’d failed us, so he beat us. But he was still my daddy, you know?”

  I didn’t, but I tried to imagine it, nodding to encourage her.

  “It was terrible after he left, but we survived. We had no money but we had each other. Then my mother got a boyfriend. He was much worse than my father. He beat my mother and he raped me. Had enough yet?”

  I shook my head. “No. Tell me everything.”

  “OK. When I was fifteen I left home. I lived with one of the teachers from school right through my HSC and she was great. I graduated Dux of the school—
and in the top five per cent of the state. Then I went to uni. Happy ending, right? Wrong. Because then I got a boyfriend and the only example I had for how to choose boyfriends was my mother. Not a great example. Not a great boyfriend. He smoked a lot of pot. So I did too.”

  Liinda paused and lit another cigarette.

  “I’d never drunk alcohol because I’d seen what it could do to people,” she continued, blowing a long stream of smoke out through her nose. “But I thought pot was fine. For some people it is, but when you have an addictive personality nothing like that is a good idea.”

  I’d lost interest in my noodles and was just stirring them around in a daze while Liinda continued.

  “I smoked pot all the time. I stopped going to classes. I dropped out. Then my boyfriend got into heroin and so did I. First I smoked it. Then I started injecting. I didn’t even think about it. It was in me. I was going to get addicted to something. Look at me now. I’m still addicted to cigarettes, to Diet Coke, to going to NA meetings and to work. I’m addicted to astrology. I’m an addict. That’s what I am. It defines me. I’ve just learned to choose addictions that won’t destroy my life.”

  I felt sick. The happy, golden simplicity of my childhood made me feel guilty. Of course there were sad moments and difficult times, but compared to Liinda’s story my life had been a Disney script. The episode with Rick was a mere comic aside. I had tears in my eyes. I couldn’t say anything; I just grabbed her hand and squeezed it.

  “Don’t feel sad for me, Georgia,” she said. “I know it probably sounds like a horror story to you, but it’s my reality and I’ve learned to live with it. I’m really proud that I’ve risen above it. I didn’t talk to my mother for ten years, but now I do and I help her financially. My brother is doing fine and has two really sweet kids. I have a few good friends who love me, I’m good at my job and I’m not using drugs. And I’ve managed to help some of the people I’ve met at NA. That’s a good feeling.”