The Helen 100

by Helen Razer

  I turned my phone off so I could think through several stations. I thought about how things might have been better between the ex and me if we’d made time to communicate outside diplomatic channels. If we’d owned up to our different kinds of power instead of pretending that love could ever be democratic. If we’d either (a) attended a Japanese rope bondage workshop or (b) admitted that one of us was always in control of the money and the other was always in control of the love. If only we knew who was wearing which boots. If only we had been brutal and honest.

  And then I got bored, as others rightly did, with my tortured thinking and I just turned the damn phone on again so I could let the shit of life sort me out for a spell, rather than the more demanding reverse.

  John: Trust the conference is thrilling.

  Helen: Goodness, but there is nothing I love more than an inspirational speech with PowerPoint. Briefly. Do you mind if I learn your last name? Please feel at your ease in replying ‘no’.

  John: Not at all. I urge you to Google-stalk me and learn just how very dull I am. It’s John Blank.

  Helen: Oh, I don’t care at all to check your credentials. I’m just picking out names for our baby. I think it should be Sharon, even if male. Sharon Razer-Blank.

  John: Somehow Razer-Blank brings to mind press gangs on the Cornish coast of the 1800s.

  Helen: Look, I’m currently in professional company and you know you get me hot when you make historical reference to organised enslavement.

  John: As we know, it’s the origin story of every hot Australian male. How’s the food at the conference?

  Helen: I’m afraid I’ve signed a morning tea nondisclosure agreement and am obliged to remain silent on the matter of pinwheel sandwiches. Oh, goodness. I’ve already said too much. We’ll continue making our plans for little Sharon’s education at a Steiner school as soon as I am done with the secret snacks.

  John: Are they all gluten free? If so, be careful not to breastfeed. Sharon has an allergy to wheat. Poor little thing. I look forward to our discussion of her grain alternatives and alternative education. Next week, perhaps?

  I selected a winking emoji and then erased it. I was far too old for this sort of code and I could never be certain which of the colourful glyphs did not represent a penis. I supposed that all of them could stand in for the culture’s threshold symbol, depending on the conversation. Best not to send anything. Following my obscenities to Georges, I had decided to make the effort to clean my communication of ‘cock’. I mean, if you’ve just offended a dungeon master with your language, it’s probably time for some sort of Swiss finishing school.

  I returned to find Eleven in a tabby ball on top of the dry-cleaned khaki frock. ‘I am unmoving,’ he said, and multiplied his mass by gravity when I tried to lever him off. I lay down beside this dependable force and began an account of my afternoon. He said we was unmoved.

  16

  Two weeks, one overworked android

  Kay, with whom I had spoken by telephone, had attempted to contact me several times to talk about recovery. She eventually texted in ANGRY MAJUSCULE.

  Kay: FUCKING RAZER. YOU COCK. MY SPIRIT ANCESTOR SAYS I NEED TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT YOUR PROBLEMS. DON’T FUCK WITH MY SPIRIT ANCESTOR.

  Kay was an acquaintance with a bag of new-agey tricks and a great willingness to perform these whenever she felt there was a chance. When I had spoken with her a few days back, she had insisted she would come to my house to ‘smudge’ it of bad feeling.

  Smudging is a practice derived from America’s First Nation peoples and involves setting fire to a stick of dried sage, which doesn’t smell like the stuff you put on a beef roast at all. The sage, said Kay, would be lethal to bad divorce energy. It would also prove fatal to what little survived of my appetite.

  Kay had said that she was on her way and she’d pick me up from the train station—I’d returned from date number thirteen, which was with a guitarist I had known a bit for decades. I shan’t go into detail as this poor, dear lass, who I had always liked and even rather fancied, was in a worse state than me. Let it be said, however, that meth is not good for any person, save for psychotic kingpin, Tuco Salamanca.

  I was surprised Kay drove a Jeep Grand Cherokee. I really thought she’d be the hybrid type. I must have looked lost as I abseiled into the enormous vehicle because she said, ‘Hideous, isn’t it? Came free with the last reality gig I did on TV.’

  As promiscuous in her spiritual affiliations as I was hoping to be with my vagina, Kay believed in many things other than sage, including the power of Wiccan ritual, intricate conspiracies by major seed companies and the effectiveness of the Twelve Step program.

  ‘After we smudge, we’re going to have a really good talk about the program.’

  This sentence, which stands as the best harbinger of hippy tedium I’ve ever heard, was the one Kay uttered as she sped into my street.

  This was not the first time she’d recommended the twelve steps. They were important to her, and she firmly held that they could be important to everybody else.

  At a past interval, Kay had developed a heavy drinking habit and this gradually became an unbearable weight. It was when she, a person of some media prominence, appeared in a newspaper blind item that described her pissing during the dinner rush in the nitrogen bath of a then-popular chef while singing the hits of Rodgers and Hart (this was more- or-less true, although it was a lunch service, she pissed on a live southern rock lobster and was belting hits from Phantom) she determined to get ‘clean’.

  This, in my view, was a bit of a shame because what is lunch at high-end city restaurants if it does not include loud urinating celebrity patrons who are half woman, half pinot grigio and all ‘The Music of the Night’? I still found the story delightful and I was sad that anyone would consider it a case of ‘hitting bottom’.

  Still, I imagine it’s troubling to be unable to recall one’s fifty-dollar entrée that would later be lost to a toilet, so it is no real tragedy that Kay tried several different methods to clean her blood. She eventually found Alcoholics Anonymous to provide the best transfusion.

  Not to get too judgey (because, after all, who was I if not some wretched tart who couldn’t keep her relationship alive, her mouth civil or her vagina/anus filled), but Kay had seemed to form an addiction to the address of addictive patterns. She had spoken to me in the past about AA et al. with troubling reverence. The steps contained the cure and the explanation for everything. Or everything that couldn’t be set to rights with herbs and clairvoyance.

  Of course, twelve-stepping is a much healthier and cheaper thing to binge on than booze and surely all of us are creatures that consistently exchange our large anxieties for smaller models. We all try to downsize our worry. We try to trade big problems for slighter ones. This manageable, structured fear is at work when, say, we ignore a crushing deadline and decide to clean out our sock drawer instead.

  This is perhaps what my former partner had done when selecting my younger, less difficult replacement from a Facebook page. This is what we do when our relationships have turned to shit and we invite Kay into our homes to trade our break-up stink for a fog of sage.

  She produced some matches, a bag of salt and a mother-of-pearl shell from a bag that, she told me, was made by Nepalese women.

  ‘Set your intention,’ she said, and fished out an oblong wad of dried plant.

  ‘Um,’ I said.

  ‘Shit, Helen. What do you want me to smudge?’

  Kay had asked this as though I’d made a formal smudging request, which I had not. I didn’t know how to guide the matter and as someone who had lately become a fairly literal and childish listener, was quite confused when she asked again, ‘What do you want cleared by a smudging from this house?’

  I very much doubted that smudging was an accurately translated Native American term. I also doubted that ‘smudged’ or ‘cleared’ could be words used in close association.

  Surely smudging and clearing are, if not actual op
posites then at least vastly different verbs. ‘To smudge’ is not to clear but to obfuscate by smearing around, and who wants that? Even if we do accept this mistranslation and believe that smudging can provide clarity, what’s the point of clarity?

  All the ‘clarity’ of the past weeks had been unbearable. I just kept seeing unvarnished truths—I was a failed whore, I was a greenhorn pervert, I was a mean partner—and nearly every time I saw these things, I cried. I’d had more than enough clarity. I’d produced many smudges, not all of which could be removed by the drycleaner.

  ‘Tell me what you want.’

  At some point I hoped people would stop asking me that, and start telling me what I wanted. I had no clue.

  I refrained from telling Kay that the sage stick looked like Satan’s pubic hair. I determined to receive Kay’s pungent gift with hope. Why shouldn’t I? I reminded myself of all the money I had spent that first night on tele-shamanism from Reykjavik and reasoned that at least this afternoon of stinky bullshit was free of charge. So I told her what I probably wanted: my guilt gone from the kitchen, the worst memories of my partnership out of the bedroom, and the smell of Sandra’s twat exiled from the shed.

  Kay spread salt in several doorways, lit the devil’s merkin with the matches and set it in one shiny half of the former home of a deceased gastropod. ‘Mother Ocean, source of all life,’ she said. Which weren’t words that troubled me too much because they, in an evolutionary sense, could sort of be said to be true.

  ‘I call all the angels,’ Kay said as she moved in a clockwise—sorry, sunwise—direction. ‘I call the ancestors and the animal spirits and the Lord Jesus Christ.’

  As she cast her circle and assembled a group of divine beings a little too assorted to be able to settle their differences in my dirty house, I just gave in. A bunch of twigs had exactly as much power to clear/smudge ‘bad energy’ as one decided that they should, and I made a real effort to push the scientific Marx out of my mind (he would not approve of this mystic fetishism at all).

  But Marx was not the authority on everything. Kay was the authority on everything.

  By the time she was forty, Kay had attended most iterations of the Twelve Step program. Among those she had embraced were Love and Sex Addicts Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, Rageaholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous and Al-Anon, the support group for friends and family of alcoholics. It was this group Kay would advise me to attend.

  Actually, when I first told Kay about the Helen One Hundred—and, as we know, I couldn’t stop talking about everything to anyone who gave me half a shell back then—she said I should probably go to Love and Sex Addicts Anonymous as well.

  ‘You have a real problem with wanting to be loved,’ said Kay.

  I didn’t think it was a problem then. I still don’t.

  I told her, as she waved the herb sausage about the place, that one set of twelve steps would be sufficient. ‘If I have to be something, I’ll be the Former Partner of an Alcoholic,’ I said.

  I shouldn’t have said this. I shouldn’t have told Kay that my ex was an alcoholic again. I shouldn’t have even thought of my ex as an alcoholic. It was unfair. It was unkind. If I had suffered the pain and lived with knowledge of the course of a shitty, incurable disease, I might turn to drink, too. Heck, I might even start cheating, making assemblages and seeking the right to ‘grow’.

  I shouldn’t have said she was an alcoholic. But you just say stuff when you’re newly dumped. You say everything. You say, ‘Fuck my arse without a condom,’ ‘I am frightened of vaginas,’ or ‘Take your wart of a job and send it to the arse doctor, Brynlee.’

  Public Service Announcement: If you have been newly dumped, please watch out for this rotten tendency to Tell the Truth. Please. If you don’t, you might very well find yourself saying things like, ‘Sometimes I wake in a cold sweat screaming for death’—a sentence I had added to the ‘hobbies’ section of my internet dating profile that morning.

  (This truth, incidentally, did not produce a positive result. Some internet chap with a thing for pseudo-necrophilia saw it and messaged, ‘Great! We can pretend that you’re dead!’ He then offered to pop over, fill my bathtub with ice into which I would slide, and ten minutes later be lifted from fake dead so he could fake rape my fake corpse. Again, not to judge. But (a) this interaction didn’t even take place on the fetish site where it properly belonged and (b) NO.

  People don’t need to know everything about you, and you can’t expect them to react favourably when you tell them your unfortunate shit. (Although I will say that the unwelcome offer of fake rape of your fake corpse is hardly ever going to be your fault.)

  I know I said everything and I am now writing almost everything, but I am committing this dreadful account to print for your own damn good. Do as I say, and not as I did. I am your cautionary woman. You who are newly dumped need to learn to zip it, just like I didn’t. Because truth sets you free only as much as booze will. Which is to say, it feels great at the time, but you are guaranteed regret and pain after the falsely liberating indulgence.

  Truth. What a crock.

  Goodness how I talked in those post-separation weeks, and I say this as one who is a championship-league talker. I said everything to everyone even more often than I normally do. I told Kay about how I had jacked the ex’s Facebook account and learned of her several affairs, how I couldn’t stand the ex’s mispronunciation of several words but most especially ‘arbiter’, which she said as though it rhymed with ‘car biter’. I also told Kay how the ex and I had once taken a three-way vacation in New York with a libertarian Yale alumnus in a misguided effort towards DIY couples’ therapy.

  So she probably wasn’t all wrong to recommend the Love and Sex Addicts Anonymous group.

  Look. I shouldn’t have told Kay about this and I certainly shouldn’t be telling you, but I’ve started now and, as it perhaps seems unlikely to you that I will ever get nailed again, let me tell you about one time that I did.

  17

  Before she left, one diagnosis

  This whole three-way thing started five years ago, after the ex’s first CT scan.

  On that day, which I am unlikely to forget, the person who was then my partner had said, ‘I really don’t like the way the radiographer looked at me.’ Two hours later, the GP had said, ‘I really don’t like the look of this lesion on your right frontal lobe.’ Then the neurologist in the emergency ward said, ‘I really don’t like the idea of you going home tonight.’ She was admitted as a patient.

  We asked if it was really necessary. He said ‘yes’ and then the words ‘possible fatal seizure’, and I tried to pack her a useful case of things for hospital.

  ‘Why did you bring me napkin rings?’ she said from the bed when I’d returned.

  After she’d been in the hospital for a day, she needed a drink. I sprang her from the neurosurgery ward and took her to the pub for a beer. After just one, she failed her reflex exam. We had honestly thought that a drink would improve things.

  ‘Something is wrong, baby,’ she said.

  The doctors agreed. Something was wrong and the next week passed in serology and fear. There was a lumbar puncture, which despite the fact it hurt her like the dickens, is now a procedure I can never think of without affection.

  The neurologist, who was a big, young, goofy Czech chap, showed us the spinal tap needle and said, with a doofus grin, ‘Now, where do I put this again?’ She laughed. He asked her if she liked The Simpsons. When she said that she did, he yelled, ‘Hi everybody! I’m Doctor Nick!’, who is a Simpsons extra well known for provoking malpractice suits with his whacky medical mistakes. Our Czech then swung the comically enormous thing around, again announcing that he was Doctor Nick, and while she, the nurse who was pinning her down and I were all laughing hard, he stuck it in her back and drained her cerebral fluid. Like all good jokes, this one came at a risk.

  Other than that, it was a terrible week. It was the week I learned to pronounce terms
like ‘metastasis’, which sounds a bit like ‘Minneapolis’, and ‘cysticercosis’, which sounds almost exactly like ‘sister psychosis’, a mondegreen that now serves as the name for my imaginary feminist dubstep project. (My first fictitious release is called Schizoaffective Rimjob, in whose promotional image I appear naked but for a bite mask for the criminally insane.)

  It was a terrible week.

  It was the week that ended when they uttered one last term. She heard it. She didn’t cry. I jogged off to the family room where I crouched behind a broken gurney and howled.

  On the way home in the car, she said, ‘This is what I have to deal with now.’

  If you had seen her, you would have applauded. I loved her so much.

  As for my performance: the notices were pretty bad. I went back to work two days later and told a famous international actor I was interviewing to go and fuck himself. They talked about this ‘outrage’ in the newspaper and on TV, even though this was an actor who had been told, quite justifiably, to fuck himself a number of times. I guess it was a slow news week. I lost my job. The ex had lost so much more than that, but kept on acting beautifully.

  The next few years were interchangeably blank or false and always a bit airless. She travelled alone to Spain, Mauritius, Ireland, Uzbekistan, Finland, or wherever funds, now derived from a series of soul-fucking jobs I performed while grumbling, would allow her to travel.

  She started drinking a lot and I began to suspect that she wasn’t feeling serene or evolved at all. Through these years, she often said that she refused to be a victim, a patient, the effect of medical institutions. She had often said that she was writing her way out of this one and had me convinced of her literary transcendence. ‘I refuse to be an inspiration,’ she had said. It was inspiring. I was envious of the book her brave pain promised to produce.