I still wanted to be an actor. Or a writer. But those dreams were beginning to fray around the edges. That’s what happened when you got too close to the sun. You burned. People needed their houses cleaned and their clothes ironed. I didn’t have to line up in some cattle call to audition for a cleaning job and I wasn’t given the work based on my looks. I’d been journaling like a crazy woman late into the nights, filling one notepad after another, because the writing down of all the bullshit that was my life eased the frustration just a little bit. But I missed acting. I missed the people I had met in that world. I had only ever had a few jobs here and there. I was on the periphery of the industry, and yet it had been so exciting in those days before kids when I’d really thought I had a chance.
I still had an agent. She believed in me. But I hadn’t been to an audition in ages. I’d had exactly one since the break-up. Just one! Shirley Pearce had sent me to Mullinars Casting Consultants and I had done a reading and screen test with the drop-dead dreamboat Simon Baker Denny. He’d been cast as some kind of football jock and I was auditioning for the role of a single mother trying to chat him up in a bar. Life imitating art and all that! I’d never watched the guy on television and never would unless he did a guest spot on Ren and Stimpy or Rugrats or Play School, but his face was always splashed on TV Week covers and on posters in the newsagency. He was impossibly gorgeous and, at the end of my audition, still in character, I had spontaneously leaned forwards and kissed him. He had reeled back, a little horrified.
‘That wasn’t in the script,’ the director had coughed.
‘I was ad-lipping.’ I had laughed, feeling like an idiot. But the joke backfired and I didn’t get that job.
Teetering on a stool, cleaning a pantry, I thought about that audition, still fresh in my brain, and wondered if all my goals of acting were done and dusted.
Cleaning houses was just pocket money. It was really degrading sometimes that I got paid so little, but I was very much trapped. The boys got sick often. They were kids and they picked up all manner of lurgies and bugs from other kids at school and day-care. I had no one else to look after them. I didn’t have a car. I didn’t even have the money to go for a learner’s licence even though I was trying to challenge my driving phobia by seriously considering that route. The cleaning was just keeping me afloat – but it was barely afloat really: more half-submerged-and-about-to-fucking-drown afloat.
Ben coughed from the other room. When the boys needed to come along to work with me, they were always well behaved and content to just draw, colour in and watch television in the ‘nice houses’.
‘I’m hungry,’ Ben called loudly.
I clambered down from my chair, found some nice fresh bread and threw together a salad sandwich. The other benefit of my work was that the clients always told me to help myself to lunch. It felt good to give Ben a good-quality meal.
‘Eat it on the deck so you don’t drop crumbs.’ I smiled and headed back up into the plentiful pantry to dream.
The fact that Ben was eating was a good sign – it meant he was getting better. That meant no doctor visit and more money for food.
Bobby, a secretary to some lawyer or architect or something, reckoned that cleaning houses must have been about the worst job on the planet, but the truth was that sometimes I found it meditative. And as I’ve said, it wasn’t really dirty work because the clients all lived in houses that made my place look like a shanty in New Delhi. Bobby also told me that the Buddhists consider cleaning for rich people to be super karmic or some such. That was heartening because at that point in my life I was beginning to wonder if I hadn’t been Adolf Hitler in a past life as I’d been reaping some pretty shitty karma. I didn’t mind cleaning and spending every night at home watching cartoons and playing board games. But it wasn’t looking like I was going to be doing anything other than that, any time soon. My life, if I was to be honest, was boring, lean and frugal and it just felt like I was a rat running on a very small treadmill.
I was lonely too. It was one thing to pour every emotional fibre of my being into my boys but little children don’t give a lot back other than cuddles. I wanted someone to listen to me when I was feeling sad. I couldn’t burden the boys with that. It wasn’t their job to counsel me or listen to my problems. I had nothing much to look forward to either – it wasn’t as though anything was going to change. I was just existing and I was feeling very afraid that flatness would sink deeper down and then, once I got just a little bit submerged, Bad Nikki might materialise to torment me. I didn’t want that. She was a right awful bitch and to be avoided at all costs.
The morning unfolded in a blitz of vacuuming, dusting and wiping away toothpaste smears from bathroom mirrors. After bleaching the underbellies of all the coffee cups, rearranging the towels in the linen press and feeding the neurotic fluffy pooch downstairs his goose-liver pâté, I tidied up Ben’s pencils into his ‘Biker Mice’ pencil-case.
‘Come on, love. We’ve got to catch the bus.’
Ben’s forehead was still a little warm and his green eyes were glassy.
‘How’re you feeling, hon?’
He gave a small shrug.
I was packing away the colourful pages, impressed by his artwork, when I noticed a nasty series of scratches on the edge of the wooden coffee table. Peering closer, I could see that they were freshly engraved letters: F.U.C.K.
I sucked in a tornado of breath and exhaled one loud word and it came out like it was in slow motion in a horror movie.
‘Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeen!’
His head dropped and he couldn’t look at my face.
‘Did you do this? Did you do this?’
Nothing.
‘Dear God. Holy fuck!’
His head snapped up and his eyes glared accusingly. ‘You said the word too.’ He smiled, sinister as a lizard.
I was suddenly afraid I was in a horror movie. Who was this kid? Where was my sweet little Ben? ‘Ben. I can’t believe this. Why would you do this?’
‘It’s just a funny word. I learned it at school.’
I had never smacked my kids but this was about as close to it as I’d ever come. I was shaking with rage and terror. It was a nightmare. It had to be. That table must have been worth thousands. Or maybe hundreds. I didn’t know, but I was damn sure I wouldn’t find a replacement at Vinnies! I was seeing black spots that looked like bullet holes. My brain was throbbing. ‘There is nothing funny about this at all! Oh God, I’ll lose my job. You are in so much trouble!’
I ran back to the kitchen and looked around for furniture polish. Anything. There was a goddamn supermarket aisle’s worth of cleaning products in the laundry but nothing that would do the trick. I raced back to the coffee table and began rummaging through Ben’s pencil-case, looking for a brown pencil that might match the colour of the wood. I tried one and then another, finally settling on the darkest shade, and proceeded to colour in the word FUCK while my son watched on awkwardly.
‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘I was bored and angry.’
‘What have you got to be angry about?’ I asked. ‘I’m the angry one here!’
‘I don’t want to visit Dad in Darwin.’
I stopped and looked up at him. His little eyebrows were furrowed and he was chewing on his bottom lip. The glassy eyes were even glassier.
‘Why not, darling? You’ll have a great time. Your grandma and grandpa will be there too and your uncle. Darwin! It will be so exciting.’
‘It’s full of crocodiles. My teacher said there are heaps of crocodiles up there.’
‘Not in the city, and not at Grandma’s house. They have a lovely place with a pool and a sauna. You’ll have a ball.’
‘But I’ll miss you,’ he said tearily.
Gulp. ‘I’ll miss you too. But it’s only for one week and Daddy misses you so much all the time. It would break his heart if you didn’t go. Be a big st
rong boy. Toby needs you to look after him as well.’
I was trying to be brave myself, not letting Ben see my own fears and trepidations about sending them so far north for the upcoming school holiday to tropical Billy and his wonderful new life. They’d be travelling with only an airline chaperone and it would be the first time they’d been so far away from me. I felt dizzy and nauseated thinking about it. So I tried hard not to.
Ben nodded slowly. ‘If you’re sure there’s no crocodiles in the pool.’
‘No crocodiles. I lived in Darwin for six months once and I never saw a crocodile in the city. Only at the Crocodile Farm. All locked up. I even ate a crocodile burger there.’
‘No crocodiles.’
‘I promise,’ I said and stepped over to bend down and wrap my arms around his skinny little body.
We stood there for a while just listening to each other’s breathing and then I went back and inspected the botch job on the coffee table. It was less noticeable but still pretty bloody obvious. I knew I should have left a note but I just clung to the unrealistically absurd hope that neither Hollywood wife nor her dodgy husband would notice.
As we reached the front door, Ben went a deathly shade of white, paused and then let out the motherload of vomit all over the back of the door. I watched the foul regurgitated salad-sandwich-gastric-soup drip to the floor. It came out like an exorcist hydrant.
We were sure as hell not going to catch the two-forty bus. I sighed like a deflating hot air balloon and rolled with it. What else could I do? I wanted to scream and cry. I wanted to run away from the vomit and the FUCK engraving and never ever go back to that perfect palace of expensive everything.
But I took another deep breath, blinking at the revolting stench, and I bent down and put my hands on my little boy’s shoulders and patted his sweaty blond head.
‘Poor Benji-Boy. Let’s get you cleaned up, hey? And a little glass of lemonade. I brought a spare T-shirt. It’s in your backpack.’
Another half an hour, a bucket of soapy water, an entire spray-can of Glen 20 and we were finally on our way. It was a good thing Toby’s kindergarten was a long day-care centre. And the medical centre at Bondi was open late that night as well. I was fairly certain. Thirty bucks was not going to stretch far if we needed to fill a prescription, but No Frills lemonade ice-blocks were cheap. I just hoped to heck I didn’t get the bug as well because if I started chucking up and couldn’t work, we’d starve to death, or have the electricity cut off again, or the phone. One day, I figured, I’d laugh about it. But not that day. Not that day.
I caught the 400 bus back from the airport, the pain of uncried tears catching like a fishhook in the back of my throat. This was the first time I’d put my little boys on a plane by themselves. They did have an airline chaperone with them, so they were not really alone, but I felt desperately alone and terrified, filled with premonitions of doom. What if the plane fell out of the sky? What if Bill kidnapped them? What if they did get eaten by a crocodile? Darwin was a very long way away. I had never been so far from my children. I reprimanded myself and when I got home I rang Bobby to have a sook.
‘The children are going to have a fantastic holiday,’ she cajoled.
‘They’ll miss me,’ I moaned.
‘No they won’t.’
‘What if they get sick or hurt?’
‘They’ll be surrounded by a family that loves them,’ she sighed impatiently. ‘They’ll be fine.’
‘I’m going to be so lonely,’ I said, which was closer to the truth. ‘The house will be so quiet.’
‘So, let’s go out then and make some noise,’ she purred.
‘OK then,’ I said. It did not take much to convince me. ‘Let’s do that.’
Bobby and I hit Springfields, a seedy den of iniquity huddled like a sick junkie in a narrow alleyway of Kings Cross, at about ten o’clock. I knew the place well. It used to be called the Manzil Room and I’d had a bar tab there years earlier that never got paid because the management changed and the tabs got lost in the process. The long narrow venue was a favourite haunt of rockstars old and new. During my infamous late teens, during the wild eighties, the famous and infamous snorted lines of cocaine on the tables there, as if the end of the world was approaching. A band usually played down the far end and the bar was always ten deep with patrons juggling drinks above their heads. An alcoholic mosh-pit.
‘Isn’t this better than sulking at home and going through all your baby-photo albums?’ Bobby asked.
I nodded. It was a good crowd that night. A dingy band howled like a storm up through the building and out into the night. The toilets were full of white powder and the patrons all looked like vampires with comical talcum-tipped noses.
We shuffled into a padded booth and I let Bobby go hunting for drinks. I saw a few faces I hadn’t seen for a while – it was my old scene from when I was with Billy, and a lot of his friends still haunted the place. I tapped my boots on the sticky carpet and let the chunky music creep through the furniture into my veins. I could have gone a line of coke that night but I had been good for so long, so many years, that I didn’t want to fall back into that trap. It was too expensive on so many different levels. Since Bill had been gone I hadn’t been going out much. It was nice to be in the thick of it again. I felt young and alive instead of a jaded washed-up matronly woman, middle-aged before my time.
Bobby and I slurped down some overpriced cocktails. The bar was famous for its drink the Illusion. After a few it could be called the Delusion. I could only afford one and then I knew I would have to revert to the standard house bubbly.
‘Ben rang me this afternoon to let me know he and Toby arrived safely,’ I yelled into Bobby’s ear and she nodded with understanding and mouthed, That’s nice.
Springfields reminded me of a womb. It was dark and moist and fecund with strange creatures. It was a visceral and primal place where sex and mind-altering substances merged us all into a living Salvador Dali painting.
I said hello to Roxy, a walking-talking groupie from the eighties – a woman of some renown. Her reputation was as impressive as her gargantuan chest. Blonde fairy floss haloed her face, a palette of raccoon-dark eyes and blood-red lipstick. Leopard-skin uniform. She was the uncrowned leader of a group of ladies known as the Mole Patrol. She purred against my cheek and asked me where I had been hiding.
‘I’m a respectable single mother these days, Roxy.’ I nodded, trying not to cry as I remembered how far away my children were.
‘This place is cool. So dingy. So slummy.’ Bobby grinned, grabbing my arm and squeezing. ‘I love it!’
I loved it too because it was reminding me that I was young. I’d almost forgotten.
It was a good crowd and I was feeling my nerve-endings firing up for a good night.
I sipped my drink slowly as club prices were prohibitively expensive. I had to pace myself. Even though I was feeling like partying hard, and even though I had no kids at home, not even in the same state, I was still all they had as far as a mother went and I didn’t want to end up trashed in a back alley with a serial killer – and if I started snorting cocaine, that’s where it was all likely to end.
‘They’re going to the Crocodile Farm tomorrow,’ I shouted over the music at Bobby.
‘I don’t care,’ she mouthed back, because the music was just too ear-burstingly loud. ‘Shut up about the kids, OK!’ and she did some hand movement like she was erasing them from my brain.
I gave an embarrassed shrug and looked around at the punters, trying not to think of my sons being thousands and thousands of kilometres away from me.
Two men came over to our booth.
‘Can we sit here?’
‘Sure.’ I nodded. Seating space was hard to find. I barely got the word out when I realised who the men were. Both musos: one from Cold Chisel and the other from Midnight Oil. That was some rock ’n’ roll r
oyalty for you. The long-dead embers of my rockstar obsessions started sparking again like little red flares in my knickers.
We chatted and drank and flirted like consensual grown-ups do in a dingy bar. A couple of very young girls, unsteady as newborn deer, tried to crash our party, so Hot Chisel pretended we were together to get rid of them and I played along quite happily. In front of them we discussed our imaginary children and behaved like an old married couple and it was pretty damn sexy and I was beginning to imagine that being married to him could be a whole lot of fun. Mrs Hot Chisel. It had a nice ring to it. He was so charismatic, with an electro-magnetic field buzzing about him. Yup. I was a bit star struck. And he was a bit shy. A bit goofy. It was cute.
Bobby and I went to the bathroom together, as girls are wont to do.
‘Oh my God,’ I gushed. ‘Do you know who those guys are?’
‘No.’ She laughed. ‘A couple of desperados?’
I filled her in but she didn’t have much clue. Neither band had been huge in Israel during her youth so she showed very little interest.
I became so engaged in conversation with the Chisel after the band took a break, making way for less thunderous music from the speakers, that I slowed down on the booze-fest. I checked my watch and it was two o’clock. I hadn’t been up that late for years. I felt like a naughty schoolgirl out on the town after curfew. The whole place stank of sweat and stale alcohol. The flirty eye dance shifted up a notch as his hand rested on my thigh and our heads got closer and closer and I wanted to lean forwards and kiss him and then, just when I thought we might actually lock lips, Bobby lurched up on wobbly legs.
‘I need to go home. I’m done.’
Hot Chisel and I shared a look that said we were being parted prematurely. There was frantic disappointment zapping between us. We were two dogs who’d been playing a mating ritual game and Bobby had just thrown a bucket of cold water over us. I, for one, was feeling a bit ripped off.
Madness, Mayhem and Motherhood Page 9
