‘Stop it! Stop it!’ I shouted and wrestled Toby away, while he kicked and screamed, trying to soothe him. He had such a short fuse. ‘Of course you can call yourself Sonic.’
‘I want to be Mario.’ Ben was laughing like a hyena and had rolled off the bed and was kind of dancing on the spot. ‘No. NO! I want to be Optimus Prime. Yes! That’s it. Optimus Prime and Optimus Prime will kick your bum, Sonic, because you are just a wimpy little blue hedgehog. Why don’t you go and dig a hole to live in or something!’
‘Shut up!’ Toby squealed so high I thought all our eardrums would burst. The kid was a soprano opera star in the making.
‘Come on, come on,’ I soothed. ‘It’s OK. You can be whatever you want to be, Toby, but what job do you think you might want when you are a grown-up? Maybe make cartoons and games like Sonic?’
‘No. I just want to change my name to Sonic. That’s all. Or maybe make shoes.’
‘I want to be the first man to walk on Mars,’ Ben announced.
‘That’s pretty awesome.’ I smiled. ‘I think they want to do something like colonise Mars. Maybe in your lifetime. That would be cool for you to be an astronaut. I wanted to be an astronaut when I was your age.’
‘Really? Why didn’t you?’ Ben asked.
Hmmm. Why didn’t I?
I wanted to tell him that the reason I didn’t become an astronaut was because I was too much of a space cadet but, when I thought about it, I realised that a girl born in Australia on the Gold Coast in the sixties would only ever have been laughed at if she said she wanted to be an astronaut. I realised then I had never even voiced that dream aloud until Ben had asked me. I hadn’t because I just thought I’d be laughed at and ridiculed.
‘My marks weren’t good enough in Maths and Science.’ I shrugged. ‘Also there’s no space program that I’m aware of in Australia. I don’t think we have Australian astronauts. I don’t know. I think you’ll have to go to NASA in America.’
‘Cool.’ Ben nodded and sat back on the bed and began drawing a spaceship. ‘But what do you want to be now?’
I looked at him. Even he understood I still hadn’t really grown up.
‘I want to live in New York and write books and be in movies or even write movies. I want to win an Academy Award one day: isn’t that silly?’
‘No,’ he said quite seriously. ‘Other people win them. You make us watch it every time and it’s really boring, but the people look happy when they win. I think you’ll get one. If you really want one.’
I felt teary. I wished so much that my parents had just once responded like that when I told them I wanted to be an actor. I knew they were just looking out for me because acting is not a secure profession, but that didn’t mean it was impossible. Sometimes I think it’s OK to let kids enjoy their fantasies of grandeur without stamping a practical adult spin on them.
‘OK then, matey,’ I laughed and shook his little hand, ‘I’ll race you. First one to hit their target, Mars for you and an Oscar for me, buys the other one a sausage roll.’
‘With sauce.’
‘With sauce.’
I looked around at the spacious yet shabby digs and listened to the screech of traffic. My hands were dried and cracked from bleach. I stared across to the mirror on the dresser I’d found on the street with only one broken drawer and saw a very average-looking, pale, sad-eyed young woman there, and two shadowy little boys behind her, and I promised her I wouldn’t give up the dream.
‘How can you write a book or be in a movie?’ Toby asked. ‘Can you be in Sonic? Or in the Ninja Turtles?’
Ben started laughing again and I ended up taking them for a walk down to the park to run off the crazies. We found a little two-wheeler bike, abandoned with a FREE sign on it. It was just the right size for Toby so I spent the afternoon trying to teach him to balance on it and ride it down the quiet footpath that led to the park. After about three hours and two well-scraped knees, he was riding like the wind and even Ben was cheering for him.
‘Go Sonic!’ I yelled.
‘Wahooo … Sonic rules!’ he screamed as he whizzed by.
There were times when being a mother was the best thing in the world and that afternoon was one of those times. Bad Nikki hadn’t bothered me for a while, whispering into my brain that I was a failure. Every day I put one foot in front of the other. I didn’t feel like I was covering a great distance, but I wasn’t in a hurry. Life was bobbing along gently. Nicely.
‘Please come to the show,’ Ben pleaded.
I looked in my wallet and did some calculations. If I went to the school thing, I’d have to postpone the Bronte cleaning job. I needed to do it that day though, because the White Collar Criminals had moved to Byron Bay, without ever mentioning the FUCK engraving, so I was lean on cleaning jobs. (I figured they must never have actually sat in their formal living area, preferring the comfortable family room looking out over the back deck and pool. I dodged a major bullet there, though I may have denied my involvement anyway. Or perhaps they found it and blamed someone else or even each other. One of life’s enduring mysteries.)
Bobby was leaving to go trekking around the world again, but had lined me up an interview to be housekeeper for one of Kerry Packer’s children for the following day, and if I pulled that off I could let the other piddly little jobs go and it would be almost, well exactly, like having a proper job with a weekly paycheque and everything. I had exactly ten dollars in my wallet. And I needed bus fare for two days, which came to five dollars. High finance!
Ben’s little green eyes looked hopeful. His school had some musical act coming and the parents were invited as well. I always tried really hard to go to these things because otherwise the kids felt left out, but they were almost always boring and lame. Travelling drama troupes and reptile displays and musical drags. Getting there was extra hard too when there was only one parent. I’d noticed that many parents, even the divorced ones, took turns at these events at school. For me it was difficult because I had to juggle public transport, my tenuous timetable working for private households and already needed time to do all the parent–teacher interviews, the special nights for drama and award ceremonies, on top of these entertainment events that popped up from time to time. Even the other single mums mostly had grandparents who could share this stuff around, but in our family it was just me.
I was front row and centre when it came to parenting because Bill had gone AWOL. He was now living in Perth, which was the only city in the country that was further away from us than Darwin! He was still with his girlfriend – maybe she really was his happily ever after. Who’d a thunk it? The kids got a letter or card every now and again. They hadn’t seen him since that one-off trip to Darwin the previous year, and I could tell that he was becoming a shadow. They barely referred to him any more and so I stopped too, because I detected a barb or bristle of pain when I did. I think they were really feeling the abandonment, so I just got on with life and tried to be a mummy and daddy. I didn’t want them missing out on any love. It wasn’t their fault. Frankly, their father was a chalk painting on the footpath and it was starting to rain. Sad but true.
‘OK. I’ll come,’ I told Ben as I shoved the kids’ lunch boxes into their backpacks. I had exactly zero interest in seeing some travelling school performance but it would make Ben feel good that his mother had made the effort to turn up.
‘Keep your clothes on today, Tobes,’ I cautioned Toby.
‘It’s hot,’ he said, sticking out his bottom lip.
That was true. Summer was creeping up with a vengeance that year and Christmas holidays were just around the corner.
‘The kindy likes kids to wear clothes. The other kids don’t want to see your bum, OK?’
Toby was going through some kind of nudist stage and had spent the last few hot weeks stripping off. He was a weird kid. Quirky. I adored it. But the pants had to stay put in public!
<
br /> ‘My sock feels funny,’ he said and dropped to the floor, ripping off his shoe.
‘Argghhhh. Don’t do this now, Tobe. We’ve got to get you to preschool early because I’m going to school with Ben to see some fools singing songs.’
‘I hate this sock.’
‘It’s just a sock.’
‘It’s got this bit here …’
Toby and bloody socks! It was a thing.
I dropped Toby at Butterfly Gardens and promised to fix up the outstanding fees the following week, and then Ben and I hotfooted it on a bus back to Clovelly.
The school hall had a carpet of green-and-white-uniformed schoolchildren all sitting cross-legged, bouncing in anticipation; it was stiflingly hot and the fans just stirred the smell of small-child fart around the room. The stage at the front of the hall was a raised platform up two stairs. I sat next to Kate on a plastic chair, one of many framing the outer edges of the hall and filled with the bottoms of mothers. No dads as far as I could see. We were all watching four young men nervously fiddling with their instruments and amps. Miss Jones boomed her operatic voice through the hall, calling for quiet. Teachers all sounded the same, I decided. It was like any profession, I guessed: you ended up falling into a tribe that had its own dialect and accent – radio newsreaders were another example. My parents were both teachers and they even used that ‘teacher voice’ at home when I was growing up … there was something incredibly intimidating about it. I suppose that was the very point of the voice. The room fell to a hush with just a few sneezes and coughs to punctuate the suspense.
‘Hi everyone,’ the nerdy man in the banana-coloured skivvy called out to the audience. ‘I’m Greg and we’re the Wiggles. How are you all today?’
He got a variety of answers. Most of them positive.
Jesus, I thought, looking at them. Preppie boys, all nerdy and dorky. Like members of the Science Club dressed up as strands of DNA. The yellow one started singing as the band struck up a tune and something about him reminded me of my little brother, which zapped a jolt of homesickness through my belly. Preppie-banana brother-boy danced like a swinging desk ornament, jumping from one leg to the other. It was unnerving; I wondered if he wasn’t a bit uncoordinated and just had to keep the steps simple. He was kind of cute. Cute like that boy who can’t meet you in the eye and blushes when you smile at him. The one on the drums was grinning like an escaped lunatic. All of them were so happy it was like musical golden syrup.
‘They used to be the Cockroaches. You know, the rock band,’ Kate whispered in my ear.
I looked a little closer. Ah, so that’s where I’d seen the drummer and keyboard player before. Bill had done some roadie work for them once at the Chevron in Kings Cross. The Cockroaches were a nerdy band too – like a bunch of Mormons who ran on the spot a lot. They were all clearly from the school of minimalist choreography.
At first I cringed at the optimistic enthusiasm the musicians poured out, but the children were completely mesmerised. Hypnotised. They had the most radiant smiles spread across their faces. The four men were genuinely enjoying themselves and connecting with the school kiddies like I’d never seen before. By the fourth song, I had tears in my eyes. (To be fair, I often cried during Kleenex commercials and sad movies, and watching someone help an old lady across the road once brought tears to my eyes too.) I did not know what was happening to me but those damn Wiggles were making me an emotional mess. I was so overwhelmed by the sheer joy filling that hall. It was hard to describe it. These awkward-looking guys were the Beatles of the playground.
Pressing my thumbs into the corners of my nose, I tried to blink back a veil of soppy tears. The Wiggles were wonderful. The best band ever. They’d put a spell on me, and all the smiling kids, and the swooning mothers. These Wiggles guys were not nerdy. They were sexy. They were the sort of men you wanted to have babies with so they could sing and dance and be wonderful fathers. They were the fathers we all wished we’d had. The fathers we wished our children had! Wholesome and happy and not afraid to dress up in uber-dorky skivvies and sing fairly terrible songs. The one about the dinosaur was the worst, the absolute worst song I had ever heard, and yet it was so terrible it was great. And I thought I might have been feeling something in my lower belly every time Greg smiled that broad smile. The old groupie in me was stirring like some long-forgotten sleeping dragon, waking up, getting a head of steam. But instead of lusting over men in leather pants, with bare sinewy chests and eighties locks of lion’s manes, I had become a grown-up mummy-groupie, lusting over a bunch of uber-nerds in skivvies singing about hot fricking potatoes!
After the show, I sought out Ben to give him a hug.
‘Weren’t they great?’ I gushed, my cheeks feeling warm.
Ben nodded wildly. ‘Rad. They were rad. Thanks for coming, Mum.’
Miss Jones herded the children back to their classrooms and I snuck over to the stage, where the band was disassembling their equipment. I made for the singer, Greg. Tall, dark and just so very lovely. Like a musical magician.
‘Hi. That was fantastic. Thank you so much,’ I said like a pathetic, blushing fan.
‘Oh, thanks,’ he said, softly, humbly and so politely.
‘I, um … do you do shows for preschools? And how much do you charge?’
I thought this question was inspired. Much better than Hey, have you got a girlfriend? Do you want one? Meet me at the monkey bars near the sandpit in ten.
‘We charge five hundred a performance,’ he told me. ‘Here. Here’s my card.’
I took the yellow square of cardboard. Greg Page. And a phone number. The print had been stamped onto the paper.
‘My other son goes to a preschool in Randwick … I’ll talk to the directors and see if … you know,’ I babbled, awestruck. ‘You were great.’
‘Thanks, you’re very kind,’ he said but in my head I imagined that he actually said Thanks, you’re very hot.
Over the years as I watched the Wiggles go from school gigs to become the kings of kids’ entertainment on the international stage, I wasn’t surprised. They certainly had that certain something.
I pocketed the card and made my way out of the hall into the sunshine as Kate caught up with me.
‘You dirty devil. Groupying at the school concert!’
‘Yeah right.’ I laughed. ‘I’m not quite out of the slaughterhouse yet.’
‘Oh, still bleeding?’ she asked, referring to my cervical biopsy ordeal.
‘I did too much too soon and ended up having a haemorrhage …’ I shrugged. ‘Almost better now but you know … I’m not going to be inviting the Wiggles into my bed just yet.’
‘Oh gross. Too much,’ she said pulling a face.
‘Nah, I was just getting their business card to give to the folks at Toby’s kindy. They might be interested in hiring them for their Christmas party.’
‘Good idea.’ She nodded as she walked off waving, over towards her car. ‘You need a lift anywhere?’
‘No, I’m good!’
I knew Kate would be going out of her way to take me down to the beach and didn’t want to put her out; but, to be really honest, I turned down the lift because I didn’t feel like telling her I was cleaning a house. It still felt vaguely humiliating to admit to a woman my age who owned her own business that I scrubbed toilets for cash to make ends meet.
I was making my way out of the school gate, looking at my watch, trying to figure out if I should bus down the hill to my job or just walk, when a voice called my name.
‘Nikki! Wait up.’
At first I thought it was Kelly, the slick mother who had never actually followed through on the play-date for our kids, the one who’d McDonald’s-shamed me at Ben’s party earlier in the year, but I turned and saw that it was her sidekick, the one I affectionately referred to in my head as Girl George, flagging me down and power-walking my way.
<
br /> She looked a right mess, which was strangely comforting. As she got closer, I could see that the hair, dear God, the television commercial hair, was greasy, her face was devoid of make-up and her eyes were so bloodshot I wondered for a moment if she was stoned.
‘Nikki, sorry, hi, I just, sorry, you’re on your way somewhere, I just, oh forget it.’
I was intrigued. ‘Not really,’ I said slowly, shielding my eyes from the sun. ‘What can I do for you? George, isn’t it?’
‘Yup. I wondered if I could shout you a coffee somewhere and have a little chat?’
She sounded desperate. My level of intrigue became white-burning hot. ‘Um …’
‘I’ll pay,’ she said in a rush. ‘There’s a great café down at Bronte.’
‘Um … sure,’ I said slowly, while my mind raced ahead.
I had to go to Bronte anyway. And I was itching to find out what this was all about. Girl George wanting to have coffee with me? She and her mate Kelly had barely even looked my way since that first day. There was Ben’s birthday slapdown and neither of them had acknowledged me at Hugo’s fancy party. It was as if I had been invisible, so it was quite startling to have stumbled, mysteriously, into her field of vision.
‘OK.’
‘Come in my car,’ she said. ‘Because you don’t drive, do you? I’ve seen you at the bus stop a few times.’
‘Um, no I don’t.’
We drove to the beach in her Audi and I stared at her bony, sun-tanned hands on the steering wheel, gripping it for dear life.
‘I’ve just not really got anyone to talk to and …’
‘I thought you were friends with Kelly,’ I said coolly.
‘She’s … well …’ Girl George snatched a quick look at me. ‘She’s actually a complete—’
‘Bitch?’ I asked.
We both laughed loudly.
That was the icebreaker we needed. Over coffee, Girl George poured her heart out. Her husband had walked out on her and she was devastated. Her house was going on the market and her husband was suddenly claiming they were in financial trouble, and he beat her, and basically her life was in the toilet. He was even going to fight her for custody of their six-year-old daughter.
Madness, Mayhem and Motherhood Page 12
