The Anti-Cool Girl (3 page)

My mum had hoped for a warm and loving woman who had always been desperately looking for the baby that was stolen from her. Instead, she found a woman who was cold, overly academic and very open about the fact she had wanted the adoption.

Kate had hoped for a strong, independent and driven feminist, hopefully at university and on her way to incredible things. Instead she found an unmarried twenty-year-old with a kid, a woman who liked to drink and do drugs and was living with an abusive alcoholic eleven years her senior.

Neither of them was particularly impressed with the other.

They tried having a relationship. Kate even found my mother an apartment and helped her escape my dad, a plan that fell to pieces when my dad moved in anyway and within days had threatened the landlord with a gun. As was his way.

Far from the relationship they had hoped for, mother and daughter continued to confound and exasperate each other.

Then, during a fight, Kate told my mother that if abortion had been available to her back in 1963, she would have taken that option.

It's a story I've heard my mum tell through drunken tears many times. As someone who wasn't even born when all this went down, I have the benefit and the curse of only being able to piece together a narrative from what I've been told by various characters who were part of the action. I don't know how angry the two of them were; I don't know if voices were raised. I don't know what kind of infuriating thing my mother had done to upset Kate, or if she had done anything at all. But I do know that Kate said it, and that it broke something in my mum that could never be repaired.

Forget being erased, now it was like Katherine had never existed at all.

My mum had hoped that finding her birth mother would melt away the feelings of loneliness and abandonment. Instead, she just felt the darkness cement itself in her body. A darkness that would lead to alcoholism, drugs, suicide attempt after suicide attempt, and eventually, in a bizarre ‘circle of life' type scenario, the state removal of her own children.

Her adopted and birth mothers had both given up on her. The loneliness she had been afraid of her whole life was now
a heavy reality in the pit of her stomach. So when my dad, the only person who had stuck around so far, suggested she try her hand at sex work to support the family, she did it.

After Dad had his little firearm run-in with the landlord, and unsuccessfully tried to be a drug dealer, we were stuck in hiding, living near his parents in Tumut, a small country town in the west of New South Wales. My mum decorated cakes and Easter eggs for the local bakery, but with two kids (I had conveniently made my appearance by this stage) and an abusive partner with drinking and drug habits to support, she needed a lot more than bakery-level money.

She looked in the paper and saw that there were some ‘places' in Wagga Wagga that she could go. Wagga was the closest thing Tumut had to a city. It was about an hour away, and where married Tumut couples went when they wanted a fancy night on the town. It was also a popular destination for long-haul truck drivers, who used it as a place to stop and get . . . some.

My mum hooked up with one of the local brothels and got to work. Just a few years earlier she had been getting in trouble for not polishing her school shoes.

I once asked her about the first time – about the first client she ever worked with. She said they were in a tiny motel room. He was short and bald, and asked her to rub coconut oil all over his shiny head as some kind of sick, slick foreplay. She said the oil stank, and as he was thrusting into her, it took everything she
had not to vomit. When it was over, she couldn't believe what she had done, and spent the whole night trying to wash the smell of the oil off her hands. Even though it was twenty-five years later, she still cried a little when she told me she would never, ever forget that smell.

But as awful as it was, she had children to feed, and a violent partner to keep liquored up. So every weekend, my mum would drive out to Wagga and make as much money as she could.

Then something in her clicked. She realised she was beautiful, and educated, and that working in a brothel for truck drivers in fucking Wagga was way below her league. She decided that if she was going to have to sell herself, she was going to be smart about it. So she moved back to Sydney and set herself up as a high-class escort.

With some financial independence, she was able to break things off with my dad. They fought over custody of us for a while, but it could be argued that in a fight between an unemployed alcoholic and a 22-year-old escort, there aren't really any winners.

We ended up with Mum, who had somehow ended up with Scott the Taxi Driver – the first of many men she hoped would save her. She had become excellent at using her very specific set of skills to work with men. Even after she stopped having sex for money, men would always be like a job in her life. A way to survive. Each man was a shift she had to get through, and one
day, if she worked hard enough, and played her cards just right, she'd finally be able to clock off. Scott the Taxi Driver was just her latest shift.

But I knew none of that at my fourth birthday party. I didn't know the very sad and bizarre sequence of events that had led to my mum sharing a bed with her ‘friend' Scott the Taxi Driver. I didn't know that when she got sick of sharing that bed, we would end up as far away as Hawaii. I didn't know that there would be many more embarrassing poo-related disasters in my life to come, and this party was just the start of my quest to impress the cool kids. All I knew was that I didn't want to be answering that damn question from a girl dressed as fairy diarrhoea. And even if I had wanted to explain my mother's sleeping arrangements, I didn't know how.

So, I looked her up and down, and making absolutely no attempt to hide the disdain on my face, I said, ‘Your disgusting dress is ruining my party. Please leave and come back as a Ninja Turtle.'

When you find yourself sitting on top of a dirt mound, waiting until nobody's looking so the girl from up the street can lick your special place, you really start to take stock of your life. Yes, I was only five, but I was definitely having some kind of serious existential crisis at that exact, confusing moment.

It was my need to impress that had got me into this mess, I knew that much. My need to impress my perfect, beautiful, calculating eight-year-old sister, who thought the whole thing was fucking hilarious.

Rhiannon was pretty horrendous to me. I was certain her behaviour qualified her for some kind of psychological program that tested her facial expressions when shown pictures of dead piglets. Let's just say she was walking a very fine line between future CEO and future serial killer. (She ended up a working single mum of two, which I think takes just as much precision and brutality as both those positions.)

She locked me in cupboards, convinced me Pennywise the Clown from Stephen King's
It
wanted to kill me, busted me when I tried to hide my wet underpants behind the washing machine. Standard big-sister stuff that I obviously assumed was happening only to me and would eventually be turned into an epic film focussing on my brave survival, which I would write, direct and star in.

I considered my relationship with her to be material for my moving yet witty Oscars speech, which would be called ‘pitch perfect' by the press. She considered her relationship with me as nothing but an opportunity for hilarious daily sadism.

And I worshipped her.

She was just so perfect, so cool. All the boys loved her, and all the girls wanted to be her. She was so beautiful and mean, and understood how to strike that elusive balance between treating people badly and having them desperately want to impress you. She was just instinctively popular – a skill I neither had nor understood.

She knew which clothes to pick out at Best and Less to make it look like she had stepped out of a Mariah Carey video (denim shorts, hat with a sunflower on it). She understood which songs on Rage were cool and which ones weren't. She liked New Kids on the Block when I was still taking my plastic Fisher Price record player with me to the bath.

Rhiannon knew that I wanted her to teach me how to be a cool kid. She also knew that as long as I didn't realise that
reading RL Stine's
Goosebumps
alone in my room was lame, I never would be. I was freckle-faced, desperate and clueless, and she had the power to get me to do whatever she wanted.

So when Leslie, the weird girl who lived in the apartments up the street, asked us if we dared her to lick one of our fannies, Rhiannon immediately replied, ‘Yes! Rosie does!'

And that was how she planned to torture me that day.

I gave her a look that sat somewhere between, ‘Please don't make me do this with the weird girl who always smells like cheese,' and, ‘But seriously, if I do this will you let me hang out with you for the rest of the day?'

I was the worst kind of desperado.

We spent some time haggling over terms. It would be one quick lick. I wouldn't have to take my undies off, only move them to the side. And we would do it on top of Ayers Rock, the giant dirt mound behind our house that was so high, nobody would be able to see what we were up to.

There was also a strict confidentiality clause. Once the deed was done, it was at Defcon 5–level secrecy. I had insisted on that terminology. I had no idea what it meant, but I'd heard it on TV, where it was always said by an army man and it always sounded serious. And I was the smartest of the three of us by far, which everybody knew, so they didn't question it.

What bothered me, though, was that nobody was questioning this Leslie chick. She had mentioned that she could do this weird
thing, Rhiannon's face had filled with glee and the operation was in full swing before I even had time to check if my current underwear had skidmarks.

I pulled Rhiannon aside and raised my concerns. Why did this girl want to do this? How did she even know that licking your fanny special place was a thing? Did we really want to trust someone who lived in the apartments and smelled like cheese?

‘Rosanna,' she said, rolling her eyes as if I'd just asked her to compete in a poetry competition with me (which I definitely hadn't just days earlier), ‘Just do it.'

I was so weak-willed that one eye-roll was literally all it took. Rhiannon was like some kind of cool magician. One strategic sigh from her could send you into a tailspin of popularity-questioning confusion. I had no choice. I had to do it. I had to let the cheese girl lick my special place.

So there I was, sitting on top of the dirt mound, stalling until the exact moment I had to move my undies aside. Rhiannon was sitting next to me, already hysterically laughing, and Leslie was crouched in front of me, trying to calmly convince me that none of this was a big deal.

Just a year earlier I had been living in Hawaii, thrilled that being in America meant I was one step closer to Hollywood. How had I ended up a Houso kid, with the cheese girl's face three inches from my vag?

My mind was questioning everything. My identity, the universe, why I still wasn't allowed to have showers instead of baths even though I was five and writing a screenplay.
How had I come to be in this place?

It was all because my mum had tried to pull off a Pretty Woman.

After living with Scott the Taxi Driver for a while, she decided the boob job he had gifted her was being wasted on her nursing gig, so she took those spectacular new implants and went back to charging dudes to touch them. Scott the Taxi Driver, the man she shared a bed with even though he was definitely just her friend, was no more.

John the Navy Man was one of Mum's clients, and the man she selected to be her Richard Gere. He was a US Navy sailor from Hawaii looking for some fun; instead, he found a beautiful call girl who he could rescue. And just like that, John the Navy Man married Mum, told her she could stop working that icky job and whisked her away to take care of her.

(Oh, and I'm sure she was the first call girl he ever went to see, and he
definitely
only did it out of peer pressure. Romance, fairytales etc etc.)

Before I knew what the hell was what, my sister and I were on a plane to Hawaii. We moved into a Navy compound and started school. I found a palm tree out the front that I could practise hitting with my Ninja Turtle sword. We made friends
and chased geckos and frogs around the backyard. My dad recorded all the cartoon theme songs off the Australian
Saturday Disney
and sent them to me on a tape, so I could set up an arena in the living room and practise my performance skills. I thought things were pretty damn great.

Then came talk of a transfer to Wisconsin, which my mother accurately deduced was not Hawaii. And just as quickly as we had come, we left. One day we just got on a plane and flew back to Sydney. We had only been in Honolulu for ten months.

I'm fairly certain my mum just wanted a holiday. We never saw John the Navy Man again, and my mum never sold her body again. Which meant we had no money, no man and no place to go.

It was time for us to become a Houso family.

I'm sure most Australian public housing is really quite lovely. But there can also be certain pockets that are cesspools of poverty, crime and a ridiculous amount of unprotected sex, which often results in lots of scary gangs made up of children without shoes.

In order to try and stop these cesspools from occurring, Houso homes were often built into regular neighbourhoods, as a kind of ‘regular people buffer' for those of us who couldn't be trusted when all lumped together. Diluting the problem, if you will.

We were not diluted with a regular neighbourhood.

My mum, Rhiannon and I were placed in Smurf Village, one of the only exclusively Houso neighbourhoods in New South Wales. Also called Lego Land (or sometimes the Ghetto), it had been named as such because all the houses were identical, connected and blue. The townhouses literally looked like giant blue Lego blocks that had been snapped together in long rows.

The Ghetto nickname was thrown around because the neighbourhood was also completely closed off. There was only one road in, and that road led to every corner of Smurf Village. It was like one of those gated communities that rich families live in on TV, except we didn't need a gate, because anybody who didn't live there was too scared to drive in anyway. And our houses certainly weren't as nice.

Smurf Village was gloriously located in North Ryde, with Macquarie Shopping Centre on one side and the El Rancho Bar and Bistro on the other.

After being lugged around to countless shitty homes in our short, little lives, everywhere from country New South Wales to Honolulu Navy compounds, Rhiannon and I felt like we had landed in a cosmopolitan paradise. I was relieved to finally be exposed to the culture that I felt like I deserved.

Macquarie Centre was like our Mecca. There was an iceskating rink, a McDonald's
and
a KFC, a Woolworths . . . even a play land made to look like an African safari. And if you were really lucky and it was a special occasion, your mum would buy
you a dress from Grace Bros instead of Big W, but you had to make sure you told everyone so they would know the difference. You also had to keep the tags on, which I didn't exactly understand, but I did notice that I usually only wore a Grace Bros dress once and then my mum took it away.

The El Rancho was the epitome of Smurf Village bogan class. There was a bar for the grown-ups and a bistro for the kids, and the men would put on their best white jeans and Maseur sandals if it was after 6pm. The sign out the front made it look like a Spanish resort, and pulling into that car park meant you were definitely getting chicken nuggets and chips for dinner. And the lemonade was always pink, because when you went to the El Rancho, you did things right.

Yep, Smurf Village was smack bang in the middle of North Ryde's cultural epicentre. I actually couldn't believe how many rungs up the ladder I had managed to climb. And being within walking distance of Macquarie and the El Rancho wasn't even the best part. The best part was that Smurf Village was overrun with kids. All kids our age, and all with parents whose concept of supervision was telling them to be home by dark, and not to talk to the mentally disabled guy who told us that if we came back to his house he would give us Kit Kats.

It was heavenly mayhem. We would run around in giant packs, chasing each other in epic games of Home 44, or climbing the massive pile of dirt and rubble that was apparently meant
to end up a park but would eventually just be christened Ayers Rock. Rhiannon and I were officially part of a gang of shoeless Houso kids, and it was all because our mum had made a failed attempt at pulling off a Pretty Woman.

People who drove past our compound on the way to Macquarie probably considered us trash, and the police who did the rounds in their cars each night shook their heads when we said we didn't know where our parents were.

But we had fun together. Most of the kids who lived there had seen, or were still seeing, some messed-up stuff in their short, little lives, and playing Home 44 until ten o'clock at night made us feel normal.

Mitchell and Marcus lived across the street. Their dad was a heroin addict who only turned up occasionally, and their mum beat the absolute shit out of them for the most bizarre reasons, like closing the door too loudly or knocking over a pot plant.

There was a Guatemalan family next door, who I could have sworn had about twenty-seven people living in that one tiny house. Nina was our age, and when we walked to Macquarie, her parents couldn't even afford to give her money for a soft serve.

Tim lived a few houses down from us, and the police were at his place all the time. When our rabbit had babies, we gave him two of them, and he drowned them both in his pool.

Then, of course, there was Leslie, the weird girl who smelled like cheese and lived in the Houso apartments, which was the
only thing worse than living in a blue Lego house. I went to her apartment once, motivated mostly by a sense of curiosity and the promise of dinner. When her mum dropped a plate of half-defrosted fish fingers in front of us and went back to watching
Wheel of Fortune,
I was mortified. I felt like I needed to stage some kind of intervention. I wanted to put my hand on hers and ask if there was anything I could do, and maybe gently hint at the cheese odour situation. Then she said we should go to her bedroom and act out the sex scenes from
Days of Our Lives.

Yep. Every kid at Smurf Village had obviously seen some messed-up stuff.

I tried to focus on those sad, defrosted fish fingers while sitting on top of Ayers Rock. I was hoping they would conjure up some kind of sympathy in me that would enable me to get through this so-called quick lick. ‘She's so much worse off than you!' I was telling myself. ‘You are such a generous spirit for doing this. And you'll get to hang out with Rhiannon for the rest of the day!'

I took a deep breath, reached down, pulled my undies aside and gave the go-ahead. ‘Do it,' I said, suddenly remembering that sometimes my fanny smelled bad and praying this wasn't one of those times.
‘Just do it.'

Leslie bent down, gave me a quick lick, and that was it. The whole thing lasted less than a second. Leslie burst into hysterical laughter. I immediately looked to Rhiannon for approval. She
had demanded I do the thing and I had done the thing! I was sure this would gain me some respect, at least for the day.

‘Oh my god,' Rhiannon said in disbelief. ‘I can't believe you did it. Ewwww! I can't believe you did it!' She got up, sprinted down the side of Ayers Rock and headed straight to Nina's house, no doubt to spread the word that I had spread my legs.

That was not how I had anticipated the operation turning out. I pushed Leslie over, told her she smelled like cheese and went back to my room to plan my next Oscars speech. This one was going to be fucking good.