Stuff the two-adult-two-children model as the proper ‘family’. My boys and I completed the circle and we were not a broken family, or a part-family. We were whole and it was beautiful.
‘I did you a drawing too.’ Ben smiled and held out a sheet of paper covered in crayon, climbing up beside me. He was a brilliant little artist. I struggled to sit up and look at it. I had to laugh although it hurt like someone had just poked a skewer into my head.
‘See. Ear spiders.’ He beamed.
‘Yes.’ I nodded painfully, feeling my eardrum tickle. ‘Ear spiders.’
He’d drawn a person with hundreds of spiders spilling out of their ear. The person with the telltale reddish-brown mass of hair was clearly me.
‘Thank you, Ben.’ I laughed. ‘That’s great.’
What would be a perfect way to end a hard day? What would be the best way, the very best way, to end a shitty day of cleaning toilets and being touched up by some frottage fetishist on a crowded bus?
A cold beer on a deck overlooking the sea?
A glass of champagne and a platter of Belgian chocolates in an oak-panelled library?
A foot massage for a pair of feet that were like planks of pain?
Someone playing with my hair for an hour?
A dip in the ocean followed by fish and chips and a crisp bottle of something white?
I could quite happily have gone for any of the above that feverish Friday afternoon in November. They would all have been perfect ways to end a day of intense aural agony. I’d had to go to work because I was penniless, although I was still weak and woozy from three days of eardrum hell. If I were to see a doctor about my ear, I would need enough to buy the antibiotics he would indubitably prescribe. But instead, I came home to … no electricity.
With a sick, ulcerated belly-roll of sudden horror, I realised, black spots dancing before my eyes, that I had fallen behind on my electricity payment plan because the whole routine had been thrown into chaos when my ear started ballooning up as red and angry as a baboon’s butt and I’d rolled around in a bed full of my own sick sweat and missed a few days of work and cash. There was a little calling card on my door. Please pay immediately in full to arrange reconnection. In full was more than a whole week’s rent! In full I could not do.
Inside, I slammed the front door and told the kids to go and play with their toys. ‘There’s no television this afternoon because the electricity is broken.’
Groans came from Ben.
‘I want Rug Rats!’ Toby said, shoving out his bottom lip.
‘I’ll sort it,’ I said through blurred vision because my fever was escalating from stress and I was afraid I might suddenly blow a gasket out through the top of my skull.
I had an abrupt flash of terror and raced to the fridge to look inside. The freezer, which was usually like an impenetrable shelf of Antarctica that needed to be defrosted with a pick-axe, looked like someone had nuked the Abominable Snowman in there. I wanted to cry. A lump wedged in my throat and for the first time in days I wasn’t wondering if it was my prolapsed eardrum. I did cry. Silently. I swallowed painfully, shoving it away, drying my hot tears on my sleeve. I didn’t want the boys to know what had happened. The electricity was broken. That’s all they needed to know, not that it was all my own stupid fault.
The electricity company must have done their raid early in the morning because it was clear that the power had been off all day. The block of mince was still frozen in the middle but the fish fingers were floppy and went straight into the bin. I sniffed the milk. It still seemed OK. I frantically did some mental juggling, trying to reassess what I’d do for dinner. I was going to have to use what perishables had survived the day. I felt sick looking at the food that was not going to make it. As quickly as I had the thought that I could bundle it all up and take it down to Bobby’s house at the end of the road, I remembered that she was overseas. Her place was all locked up. She was visiting her family in Israel. I hadn’t seen my family for almost a year because I couldn’t even afford for us to go on the bus to Queensland. I was sick, sad and delirious, staring into a wet fridge, feeling like the End of Times was approaching. I could hear the hooves of the however-many horses were expected for the Apocalypse. They were barrelling down on me, closing in.
I didn’t have any work until the following Tuesday and I had thirty dollars to my name. Ironically that was the amount of the electricity instalment that I’d missed. I was about three of them behind and the outstanding bill was $162 all-up. I kicked the kitchen cupboard and hurt my toes. I didn’t care. I wanted to kick it again and put a hole in it but then I’d lose some of my bond. I should have called the electricity people and explained that I was sick. I had thought about it but then forgotten. Billy and I had done it before and they’d always stalled for us. You only had to ask. But I’d been sick. It was one of the few times I actually missed having a second adult brain around the place. Two memory banks were better than one. It was the knowledge that I could have prevented this disaster if I’d remembered to call them that frustrated me the most. Once the meter had been turned off, they needed to send out someone to manually turn the power back on and they were not going to do that unless I paid the damn bill. It was Friday. It was six days until my social security payment day and then, if I used some of the rent, I could maybe pay the bill, but the idea of six days without a hot shower or a cup of tea was daunting. If I did use the rent to pay the bill, that would leave me perilously close to being two weeks behind with the real estate, the dangerous edge where one more day would generate an automatic eviction notice and go on my permanent tenancy record.
Rather redundantly I flicked on the light switch. Nothing. The television lay quiet in the corner. We were completely reliant on electricity. Hot water. Everything.
I sighed. How could we eat? What would we eat? We couldn’t spend all weekend just munching on nothing burgers … imaginary food was taking game-playing too far … I needed some of the thirty dollars to pay for buses to get to a job on Tuesday … The kids could come with me and that would save taking them to kindy …
I was frantically trying to make a plan. I knew I had two candles in my bedroom that I’d bought to help me meditate but had never used because I had never meditated because I couldn’t stay still or silent for more than a few seconds. We could eat fruit and bread. I was falling into a panic, compounded by an obviously serious ear infection. I could hear hot blood pumping rhythmically from my ear into my brain, but I would not be able to buy medicine when all the food had just ended up in the rubbish bin. Priorities. Food before antibiotics. I was trying to breathe, trying to think straight, but it felt like a tidal wave was crashing over me. Was this what a panic attack felt like?
‘Let’s go to the beach,’ I announced almost maniacally, breaking into serial killer laughter, and the boys began jumping up and down noisily, clapping, and my poor brain felt like it was being beaten by pain like a timpani. I needed to get out of the unit to think. To breathe.
Sitting up to my waist in warm salty water in the kiddies’ rock pool at North Bondi Beach, I drank in the happy ambience and looked at all the beaming children, squealing and splashing. It was easy to forget everything there. The water had tempered my fever. I was breathing in clean, salty air, which was easing the pain that was threatening to split my head open like an exploded watermelon. I may have been dirt poor, lonely, frustrated and without electricity like I was living in some Neanderthal nightmare, but the beach had such a healing and calmative effect on me. So many times I had run away from the stifling depression of my Studley hovel to the sea. I knew I was so lucky that I could just walk to the end of my street and access this little dot of majesty on the planet. It was free. No entrance fee. No discounted family charge for two adults and two children. No cost per hour. No judgement. Not even a dress code, I noted, looking at some saggy bare breasts flapping around me.
After the kids
had finished in the little pool, we walked down along the hard wet sand to Bondi proper, where the flags marked out the safest spot for a swim. Hot lifeguards in small red Speedos manned the beach, ready to rescue anyone who got into trouble. ‘I’m in trouble!’ I wanted to shout to them. ‘But not the sort that you can save me from!’
I took another look over my sunglasses. Well, I thought lasciviously … maybe they could help me with something that might improve my mood.
We put down our shredded bath towels on the sand, because bona fide beach towels were a level of luxury I had not yet risen to. Ben and Toby began to build a sandcastle in the shallows while I took my body and threw it at a wave that punched me off my feet, and I thrilled at the power of it. I pushed through the swell and got out into the gentle rocking backwaters before diving beneath the Alka-Seltzer water to let the salt sting my skin.
I lay on my back, bobbing like driftwood, one eye still on the kids, and I thought of all my trials and tribulations and, just like in the song, I imagined them sinking in a gentle pool of sea. The lyrics actually said wine, which I would at that point have preferred, but I had no money for wine, so I just sank all those troubles into the sea. I imagined my worries were like evil jellyfish. I shut my eyes. The electricity disconnection. The shitty cleaning jobs. The no money. The depression. The non-stop bickering of the kids. The cockroaches. The public transport. The instant noodles. The aching sense of loneliness. Sleepless nights. Asking my folks for handouts. Borrowing money from Sam. I let them all sink away from me like heavy, disappearing jellyfish. All except that last one.
I didn’t want to do it. I felt like a single-celled amoeba loser whenever I had to borrow money from friends or my family, and it happened more times than I was comfortable with. Bobby was away, backpacking through the Middle East, a renegade trouble-seeking adventurer. Kate was also a friend who had a lot of money, but I had never asked her for a loan and didn’t want to start. She was still just sitting in the early margins of friendship.
I floated there, feeling the salt water flush about in my ear socket, stinging at the swollen red tennis ball in there. I felt like my whole life was a fragile raft I was clinging to and that this final straw of an electricity disconnection was fatally destabilising it.
That night, by eerie flickering candlelight, I called Sam to tell her about my plight.
Her familiar but slightly battered and tired voice greeted me on the other end of the phone.
‘There’s no hot water,’ I cried. ‘The kids had to have a cold shower. The food’s all turned into off-mush and I can’t afford more. If there’s a rock bottom, Sammy, I’m there! I feel … I feel … I almost feel like …’
I didn’t want to say it. I didn’t want to actually form the word, not even in my head. To put letters to that feeling and trap it into a word would make it just that little bit too real. I didn’t want to say it but I felt it. I’d never felt so bad, so worthless, so insignificant and pointless. I was blubbering down the phone line like someone recovering, unsuccessfully, from a brain trauma. I was making no sense whatsoever and couldn’t hear myself properly because my head was so gunked up with ear pus. I was dizzy with it as well, lying on the carpet in the hallway, still able to smell the cat-piss of tenancies past. My whole head was agony; I was in desperate need of painkillers, strong ones – ones intended for rhinoceroses.
Bad Nikki was back in my brain taunting me. Goddamnit, I wanted to scream at her. Get away from me. I hadn’t really heard from her since she’d visited me in the bath the night before I’d left Billy. The night in the bathtub with the razor. She wheedled her way into my brain from time to time. Not often. But when she did, she was brutal.
BAD NIKKI: You are useless. A waste of skin.
GOOD NIKKI: Come on, the kids need you. Don’t give that thought air; it’s never that bad.
BAD NIKKI: The kids don’t need you. You are the very last thing they need. You can’t even provide them with a warm bath.
GOOD NIKKI: This is a temporary setback. The sun will come out tomorrow.
BAD NIKKI: No, it won’t. That’s just a song.
Sam told me she had just paid all her bills and had nothing left.
‘I’ve got food,’ she said. ‘I can feed you, drop some noodles and stuff around to you, but I’m cash-strapped.’
Last chance at paying the damn bill dashed against the rocks. I rolled around on the bacterial carpet, hitting my forehead like a crazy person, wanting to jam a knitting needle into my ear to lance the bowling ball of poison in my head.
BAD NIKKI: You are just …
GOOD NIKKI: Go away! Leave me alone. I’ll ask Mum and Dad again for money.
BAD NIKKI: Hahahaha. And just confirm to them what a loser you are?
‘I’ve got a number for a charity place that will help you if you’re desperate,’ Sam told me.
‘I am desperate,’ I sob.
‘They send volunteers around to interview you and see how they can help.’
‘Really?’ I asked, snorting back great snotty hacks (and being sorry for sharing that noise down the phone line), sitting up, feeling a wave of hope.
‘Yup,’ she said. ‘That’s what they’re there for. To help.’
We sat by candlelight that night, on the floor, a little family playing Monopoly. I had found the board game in someone’s trash by the side of the road one morning before the garbage truck had come past, and was surprised that nearly all the bits were still there. I’d just cut up little cardboard squares and written Marylebone Station and Mayfair to make up the lost cards.
Toby was in charge of rolling the dice. Ben was the banker, with me helping him work out the money, although he was very good with numbers and I was quietly confident he’d do well when he started school after the summer holidays. Ben won. He may have cheated but I couldn’t figure out how. It was hard to see everything in the flickering candlelight. Toby cried and threw the board across the room because he hadn’t won.
We went to bed early. The candles didn’t flicker past eight.
‘It’s like living in the olden days.’ I smiled, tucking them in. ‘Back before electricity had been invented.’
‘Didn’t they have TV?’ Toby asked.
‘Nope.’ I laughed.
‘What did people do?’
‘Played musical instruments, sang, told stories, played games like we just did.’
There was a pensive silence.
‘Can we sleep with you tonight?’ Toby asked.
‘No, honey,’ I said gently. ‘I’ve got a bad ear and I’m sick and I don’t want you guys to catch it from me.’
‘It’s kind of fun having candles and playing and it being all dark and having no food except crunchy noodles,’ Ben said. ‘I feel sorry for the olden day people though with no TV.’
I pursed my lips in the dark, feeling bad. ‘It’s a game. Just so you can see what it was like for kids a hundred years ago,’ I explained feebly.
‘I wouldn’t want to do it forever though,’ Ben whispered. ‘It’s a bit boring. A bit bad.’
I couldn’t have agreed with him more. ‘Do you want me to sing you guys a song?’ I asked.
‘Um … no … it’s not that bad.’ Ben laughed.
And then we all laughed and my ear popped and suddenly it wasn’t all so horrible after all.
Saturday. It was raining outside again. Just a gentle pre-summer patter. It made the rest of the world a bit quieter, more sombre. A pair of elderly gentlemen from Vinnies came to visit us at lunchtime. I couldn’t offer them anything like coffee or tea. The kids were playing in their bunks, making a cubby house again with a sheet. I didn’t want them to hear me have to beg.
‘How can we help?’ the portly man asked as they both sat on the cheese-smelling couch.
I looked around. Where the hell was I going to start? Could I have a new life, please?
<
br /> ‘Um,’ I stammered and felt the tears bubbling up and I didn’t want them to. ‘I ummm … my electricity … it’s been cut off.’
And there they were. Tears. Lots of them. A whole waterfall of them. Niagara tears.
‘There, there, love,’ the man cooed. ‘Don’t cry, love. It’s OK. We can help pay that bill for you.’
I blinked and sniffed and looked at them. ‘But it’s a hundred and sixty dollars.’
‘That’s no problem,’ he said. ‘You give us the bill and we’ll fix it up. Did you lose any food? Perishables.’
I nodded, sniffing, eyes wide. The gratitude in my heart was overwhelming me and I couldn’t form words.
‘Well, here’s fifty dollars so that you can go and get the kids some fruit and maybe some fish and chips, hey?’ the skinny, wrinkled man said, pulling an actual fifty-dollar note from his wallet and holding it out to me.
‘Nice little fellows you’ve got,’ they said as I showed them back to the door after finally gushing my thanks and hugging them like long-lost grandfathers.
‘You’re doing your best, love. Keep it up, and if you ever need us again, just call,’ the smaller one said and gave me a friendly nod.
Those two men, volunteers, had single-handedly, or double-handedly as the case may be, made me feel like a real person again, a card-carrying member of the human race instead of a citizen of dipshitville. My self-esteem had been picked up off the ground and handed a compassionate tissue. I was so very grateful for that. And chips. Hot chips fix everything.
After they left, I gave a sigh, went to the boys and squeezed them, sobbing into their hair, pretending I was laughing. I couldn’t believe I had almost let Bad Nikki talk me into something so terrible. She’d been whispering some horrible things to me just the night before. Frightful, unspeakable things. But there was more goodness in this world than I realised. I just had to invite it in while simultaneously showing Bad Nikki the door.
Madness, Mayhem and Motherhood Page 6
