by Helen Razer
I did manage to expunge the John damage with Gerard. Actually, it took just one session during which Gerard smoked and said, ‘He sounds like a bit of a fuckwit,’ in slightly different ways. He did encourage me to try to take something good from the dead friendship and then immediately apologised for this upbeat suggestion. ‘Look. I have all these new clients who seem to want positive thinking exercises,’ he explained.
I thought that John had given me two good reminders. The first was to take better care of my genital health. The second was that I was not paid to argue politics.
After years of writing sales tripe and several months of writing nothing profitable at all, I decided that I would like to be paid to argue politics. I found some work with some papers. It didn’t make me wealthy, but it did permit me to bang on about Marx and demanded that I did so with some recourse to a fucking clue.
I remained, of course, a miserable abhorrence. I cried and engaged in obsessive behaviours and began to run irrationally long distances and rarely bothered to eat.
‘This is what I have to deal with now,’ I said in her shed, which was finally emptied.
24
One new sleeping garment
Ines is magnificent. No, really. I know I tend to mistreat adjectives and have mistreated them for several chapters—this, I believe, is the result of several years composing lies for discount advertising firms. But be assured, this adjective is judiciously applied.
If you met Ines or saw her even from a distance, as you are bound to if you visit a fashionable Melbourne bar, you would say, ‘Razer really got it right for once. Ines is actually magnificent.’
It was now early autumn and I had known Ines a little for a long time before we met that night on Spring Street. For years, we had been invited to the same places by the same homosexuals who introduced us at least a dozen times with ‘I just know you two whores will adore each other!’
On the second or third of these occasions, she retorted, ‘You know, I really don’t think we will.’ On the fourth or fifth, Ines, a famous Top, had said, ‘No, incorrect. Two doms don’t make a right.’
She may have been misled about my power preference, which is, as I think I have amply explained, submissive. Nonetheless, this misunderstanding led to a funny line. She was full of funny lines and she was also very glamorous. As an envious sort of person, I could only tolerate this combination of glamour and comedy in the dead. No magnificent woman had any business cracking it like Dorothy Parker while I was still alive.
I had resented Ines’s beauty, her shoes and her basically mystic arse. She had taught her arse to wiggle independent of gravity, space and time. When she walks across a room—and she does this often—her arse keeps a rhythm of its own. I suspect her of slightly shaving the heel of one of her shoes, as Marilyn Monroe once did. And I know that any reference to this well-documented wiggle is risky. But go to a fashionable Melbourne bar and wait for Ines’s superior shake to confuse you into buying all of her evening’s shiraz. You’ll see that the comparison is fair.
We’d never liked each other. Not one jot. I’d like to tell you this was because we were just two alpha bitches who were too evenly matched. But I have to tell you it was because I was jealous and unhappy that I was not as free as Ines. I was, as a result, always unpleasant when we met.
Quite justifiably, she would not have consented to meet me again now if I hadn’t written first to apologise that I’d been such a vile heifer. She replied, ‘Darling, I never knew you could be such a ma-a-a-rvellous sap.’
Ines had the sort of fastidious commitment to camp expression that permits her moments of unusual sincerity. This is the ma-a-a-rvellous thing about truly quality camp. If you routinely treat life with a pair of disposable gloves on and refuse to take too much of it too seriously, every so often you can touch it deeply. A life lived in artifice means you can more easily be emotionally naked, sort of thing.
Ines is actually naked often. She is banned from Facebook weekly for her full-frontal display. There is never a time when she is not involved in an ardent correspondence with Silicon Valley wherein she holds that her nudity is not true nudity but a ma-a-a-rvellous performance of femininity, and one that is not intended to offend but simply to lift people’s spirits. Which it does, particularly in her series of naked portraits taken at a Gilbert & George retrospective, where she, somehow, managed to escape arrest while dry humping the artists’ most valuable canvas.
When you meet her, the first thing she will tell you, sotto voce, is, ‘Darling. I was raised by drag queens.’ Plenty of profoundly camp people say this to explain their outfits, but in Ines’s case it happens to be true. When she was quite young, she found work in a brothel that was managed by a particularly maternal drag queen.
There she studied both the trade of the sex worker and advanced camp living. I think this glitz preserved the sweetness of the little girl in her because she was able to hold my hand when we met for the first time as allies and say, ‘I know how you are feeling. Like you’ll never feel the sun on your skin.’ Which is pretty spot on, as we dumped people know.
Ines has a lisp—of course she does—so the noise she actually made was more like, ‘the thun on your thkin’. The slight and persistent shift from everyday elocution only served to make the sincere things she said sound even more sincere.
Ines is magnificent.
We were able to talk at length about the queer shame of a break-up. When I mentioned to Ines how so many progressive people seemed particularly affronted that I had let a same-sex relationship fail, she said she knew exactly what I meant.
‘When I ended things with that last long-term lunatic, everybody was saying, “What a shame, what a shame.” As though it were my legal fucking obligation to remain in a pit of despair with an unfashionable lesbian who was cruel and vindictive and more full of drugs than a pharmacy,’ she said.
‘Everybody who is not one’s mother is deeply disappointed,’ I said.
‘Do you know what I ab-so-lute-ly loathe?’ she asked.
‘People who don’t look at your arse when you waggle it across the room?’
‘Oooh. Cheeky. Well, obviously that. Who are these people and can we get them some government spectacles? No. Apart from those Magoos who will never know the pleasure of my ma-a-a-rvellous trunk due to social injustice, it’s my mother who I loathe. For several reasons, which start but do not end with the theft of my childhood, but the one I mean now is for how thrilled she always is when she learns I have slept with a man.’
Some conservative folks are happy when a lez lady goes back on solids. And then, of course, the reverse with feminist friends, even and especially the straight ones, who seemed disturbed by my quest to locate a penis and then almost happy that the penis that I had managed to locate was attached to someone who had treated me cruelly. It was all very I Told You So.
‘Everyone disapproves. Of everything, generally. Is it any wonder that everyone here is dressed so poorly, what with all that disapproval getting in the way of good costume? And I am sorry to say, dear, that you’re one of those bad dressers. As you’ve plainly been on the ma-a-a-rvellous eat-nothing-but-your-own-bitter-tears divorce diet, this is a waste of a waist.’
Ines always has somewhere else to be and tonight she was preparing for some act of high-end nudity on the north side of the river. But we both agreed it had been a lovely evening and she said, ‘If you promise to dress better next time, I will probably kiss you.’
The following day, I received a gift with uncommon wrapping. In a box that had been—I don’t know the word, you’d have to ask Ines—appliquéd (?) with quotes from Dotty Parker, there was a lovely dress.
‘My Dear and Unfashionable Friend,’ said the note:
Here’s a little something I designed. You can wear it when next we meet or you can save it for a man you have first carefully assessed for his dress-removing aptitude. Don’t wear it for a disapproving lesbian. She’ll never understand. Whatever you do and however you dr
ess, please, you dizzy bitch, try to remember that Marxism is fine in a lover but kindness is much better. Gros Bisous!
Forty-one down.
Thirty-nine to go.
One new friend, who I treasure.
25
Some months, six kilograms of kindness
I have spent more time with Eleven the cat than any other being. As I sat at my desk and wrote rotten things for money, there he was. As I returned late at night from the hospital where my ex was moving to a paralysing diagnosis, there he was. As I lay on the floor crying about counterfeit love and listening for the sound of something real in my stupid, big girl sobs, there he was.
Eleven was made from stripes and from sweetness. He was unique and aggressively affectionate. He reminded me for ten years of the possibility of mutual kindness.
Eleven had seemed off his game that summer. By March, he was off his food. I attributed this to the loss of his other human. Then, when I visited the vet, I found that it was down to something even more unmanageable. My little guy had a stomach cancer.
When I first met him at the shelter—when he was not called Eleven but ‘Surrender from Scoresby’—he was an adult cat so eager to love that he knocked me over with the force of his snout. He loved to ram things that way.
There are behavioural explanations for this snout rubbing performed by cats, which is properly known as ‘bunting’. None describes the gratitude I felt when the little guy seemed to stop just short of injuring me with his kindness.
You may think I’m a mad cat lady who ascribes human emotion to a face biologically unable to convey anything more nuanced than hunger or fear, but that’s just because you haven’t looked into those sofa-green eyes. They showed me kindness.
They saved me and sustained me and helped me know that love is not always a fake. They made me believe I could see a flicker of it in a human. If it had not been for Eleven, I would have been doomed to miss this look of love. I would probably have mistaken it for indigestion.
If someone was ever able to love me to an Eleven standard, I knew what to look for.
The vet answered all my questions and assured me that this tumour had nothing to do with barbecue chicken. He was a kind and rational man. His evidence-based approach was matched with great sensitivity. He and I and the pathology lab made the decision to kill Eleven. And we made it with kindness.
Because kindness is the only thing that matters, I reluctantly allowed as my cat died in my arms.
Don’t tell the Marxists I said that.
But you can totally tell your cat.
26
They never really leave, do they?
I was cold and I was lonely and my cat was fucking dead. I had missed out on the opportunity to partake of Ines’s naked magnificence because I had been crying for my dead cat.
Also, the six dates I’d endured after that were sad bullshit—I’d struck a run of others also recovering from a midlife break-up. Also, the walnut tree had died, and I had heard the ex was happy and in love.
On the upside, I had (a) read and understood most of Capital Volume 1, (b) retained my girlish break-up figure and (c) run a marathon, albeit at geriatric pace.
On balance, I was tolerably miserable. I was yet to feel sun on my skin, but confident that winter could not kill me.
I said to myself that I did not mourn my youth. I looked in the mirror and sometimes managed to make myself feel grateful to have lived long enough to acquire such dull skin. I flossed my teeth, I washed my sheets, and I exchanged my time and thought for money.
I believed that I had become patient and moderate and slow. I was a slow, moderate, patient lady who had no need to run. Except when in training for some midlife runners’ event.
I cannot be sure what it was about Date 53 that restored a sense of speed. It’s not as though he were fast at all.
Although he was quite a bit younger than me and had much longer legs, he was awfully deliberate and slow. I noticed when I met him how careful he was about everything. He paid for our coffee carefully. He returned the change to his wallet carefully. He carefully offered his services free-of-charge as a careful proofreader for my sometimes reckless work.
‘You know, I really do enjoy your cranky pinko bleating, but I think it might be improved if you learn how to use the semicolon. I make this offer purely as a self-interested reader,’ he said, and then he smiled.
If he hadn’t had eyes bluer and more cheerful than a box of laundry detergent, I might have felt insulted. If he hadn’t spoken these words in a soft but ovary-shaking baritone, I might have said, ‘Fuck you, I know how to use a semicolon.’
Then again, if he hadn’t been six foot five and handsome and an old-school Marxist curiously besotted with the utterance of grammatically spotless sentences, I wouldn’t have had one of my high-speed tantrums about nothing. Which was, in this case, about the fact that he hadn’t walked me home after such a nice, long time together. Even though I had explicitly insisted that he mustn’t.
And I wouldn’t have belted him with three days of angry emails, none of which make any sense to me now, but all of which contained, as he later pointed out, one correctly placed semicolon.
We continued to meet and I continued to pick fights that had as their topic some imaginary mortification or, when I couldn’t find a conversational fault line big enough to take a shit in, the fact, the terrible fact, that eleven years had elapsed between our birthdates.
One day, I met him at the movies. I arrived to see him sitting on a couch. He said that he was not untroubled by my faithful fifteen minutes of lateness. He said that he was truly tired of waiting. He said that he did not care to wait any longer.
I said that he would not wait again.
And, you know, I would go into detail. I would tell you that I am now content and sane and that I have truly ‘grown’. But who needs that hopeful flapdoodle? Only liars and cheats. What you need is just one mild truth: you’ll never get over your fucking divorce. But you will learn to do things differently.
In the end, Cheap Gerard was right.
