The Anti-Cool Girl (5 page)

Let me tell you something: nothing will ever terrify a bunch of kids more than telling them they're standing in front of a dead body, only to have that dead body make a sound. For all their tough talk and gangster bravado, I've never seen twenty-five kids run away faster than they did when my dead dad started moaning in the dirt.

He was alive, obviously. Very, very drunk, but alive.

Rhiannon and I turned around and ran back up to the house. I was silent, she was hysterical. She told Mum, who called an ambulance. When it arrived, it felt like every human being in north-west Sydney came to watch the spectacle. As two paramedics walked him to the gurney, a kid came running out of the bush with a plastic bag. It was Dad's stuff.

The kids, a lot less terrified now that it was just some drunk guy and not a zombie, chased the ambulance as it drove up the hill and out of our compound, and once it had disappeared into the distance, everyone just kind of dispersed and went back to
what they had been doing. The excitement was over; the man in the dirt was gone.

I went to the bathroom, put my head over the toilet, and pushed every last toxic butterfly out of my stomach.

My sister got to marry Jesus and I didn't.

Just like all the other boys in Smurf Village, he liked her and not me. And I have to say, given his alleged noble qualities, I was a little surprised that he turned out to be just another guy who ignored the smart, awkward girl and went straight for the beautiful one. (Also, I would end up having a very brief period in my early twenties, right after my freckles faded, and just before I gained a lot of weight, in which I was considered quite attractive. So suck on that, Jesus.)

Rhiannon's proposal came about rather quickly, as far as rushed romances go. I'm not sure if you could call it an
arranged
marriage, but my mum certainly facilitated the proceedings. Basically, one day she decided that we were Mormons. I'm not sure exactly how it happened, but I like to think Mum looked at the eager, sensibly dressed young men holding their Bibles who had just knocked on our door, shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘Yeah. Alright.'

A few months later Rhiannon was put in a white dress, shoved down the aisle and dunked under water, thus cementing her love connection with the big man himself.

As usual, I watched from the sidelines, not surprised that yet another man had chosen her over me. I was probably about seven, which would have put her at about ten, and even then I knew there was a huge disparity in our looks. She had gorgeous olive skin and those wide-set alien eyes that were becoming popular in the early '90s thanks to the likes of Kate Moss. I inherited my dad's Irish skin, was covered in dark freckles and my eyes were small, grey and unremarkable. I wasn't unfortunate-looking by any means – in fact, I was quite pretty – but nobody was stopping me in the street asking me to do Kmart commercials.

Rhiannon was constantly stopped in the street and asked to do Kmart commercials.

But despite the fact Rhiannon's looks were something everybody around us constantly felt the need to point out (‘She's just so beautiful! She's going places! She's going to be famous! She and Rosie look nothing alike!'), I don't think I realised just how significant the difference was between us until the contest. The child-modelling contest I entered, which Rhiannon proceeded to win.

That was the exact moment I realised I was the Doug Pitt to my sister's Brad.

Nothing can quite prepare you for the trauma that comes with entering a modelling contest, only to have your sister win it. That was the day I figured out that no amount of smarts would ever matter as much as a pretty face. And considering I had been born with the smarts and the average face, I was pissed.

It happened at the ‘Some Kids Are Beautiful and Some Kids Are Not' modelling competition at Macquarie Shopping Centre. (Okay, so I can't actually remember what it was called but that title pretty much captures the essence of it.)

I desperately wanted to enter. There was a temporary studio set up in the middle of the mall, and you got to bring two outfits and pretend to be famous for half an hour while a teenage ‘casting agent' pretended to know how to use a camera. Then they forced your mum to pay exorbitant amounts of money for photos with a faux-cloud background.

Since I had always assumed I would win an Oscar by the time I was ten (obviously for playing the lead role in one of my many works-in-progress, or Atreyu's girlfriend in the sequel to
The NeverEnding Story),
the kind of star treatment offered by this totally legitimate modelling operation seemed right up my alley.

Naturally, I would be discovered at ‘the studio' (literally three cubicle walls and a curtain) and this would get the Hollywood ball rolling. I think for a kid who lived in a housing commission complex also known as ‘The Ghetto', it was a pretty standard escapist scenario.

I was
so
excited on the day. I tried to look as close to Mariah Carey à la ‘Dreamlover' as I could, and brought my favourite tracksuit for the outfit change (I thought it would show off my ‘fun/sporty' side – important for demonstrating range).

I had my precious $90 fee (a birthday present) in a little envelope that I handed over to the lady/photographer/only person who worked there, while my mum and sister waited outside.

‘Oh, so it's just Rosie getting photos done today?' the lady/my ticket to Hollywood asked as she stared longingly at Rhiannon's perfect face. My sister had only come because she thought the whole thing was hilarious, and I was a massive dweeb who deserved to be ridiculed (which was almost certainly true). She didn't have any intention of actually being involved, which seemed to disappoint the photographer a great deal.

She kept asking me if my sister had done any modelling, and I had a bad feeling about where the whole thing was headed.

But I persevered, damn it. I was determined to make this woman see what I had to offer. I posed for about eighty-seven photos while sitting on an upside-down bucket (obviously also holding a giant sunflower, because this was the '90s), then I changed into my sporty four-coloured tracksuit, which had a different colour for each of my arms and legs, because I thought it was important to prove I had personal style.

I worked it, hard. I was like my own stage mother, and I could feel a win in my bones.

Then Rhiannon had to go and ruin everything with her
perfection.

When we came out of the studio, the lady whispered something to my mum, who whispered something to my sister. Rhiannon rolled her eyes, shrugged and followed my ticket to Hollywood back inside.

I may have been young, but I was astute enough to know that I was being looked over, and not very subtly. I barged through the door (again, literally just a curtain) to see Rhiannon standing in the front of the camera, face entirely unimpressed, getting a photo taken. The lady (who was now looking less and less like my ticket to Hollywood), then thanked my mum profusely for
letting
her take a photo of my beautiful older sister. For free. My ninety bucks stayed firmly in the cash register.

A few weeks later, I had all but forgotten my modelling efforts. I was happily playing Nintendo
(Duck Hunt,
for those in the know) when my mum got a phone call. She looked at me, panicked. Then she gestured quietly to Rhiannon that she needed to speak with her in private.

I should have seen it coming.

She had won. My sister had won the modelling competition. From
one
shot of her looking directly into the camera, barely smiling, Rhiannon had won the whole damn thing.

And the bitch didn't even care. I think she was more amused by the fact she had managed to win a contest she hadn't even
entered, rather than excited by the fact she had won. She already knew she was beautiful, people told her all the time, so . . . big deal, right?

I, on the other hand, was pissed. I cried at the injustice of it. What a waste of a birthday present. I couldn't believe my four-coloured tracksuit hadn't got me over the line. But it was finally clear to me that day: she was Brad, I was Doug. She was Kim, I was Khloe. She was Gisele, I was whatever Gisele's sister is called.

So, a year later, when Jesus decided he wanted to marry her and not me, I was disappointed, but hardly surprised. That's just how life goes for the Dougs and Khloes among us. Your sister ends up with Yeezus, and you end up with a crack-addicted basketballer.

We had never really been religious. I was meant to be baptised Catholic to make my dad's family happy (I think they were worried I would end up in baby-limbo if some idiot in the neighbourhood hadn't vaccinated their kids and I caught something and carked it). But Mum's concern for my eternal soul must have been minimal, because she never quite got around to having my head blessed by a priest who could definitely be trusted around children. So I wandered the earth for my first few years completely unprotected, blissfully unaware that I was essentially a godless devil child.

Then the Mormons came knocking, and everything changed.

Suddenly it became vitally important that our souls be saved. We were subjected to weekly sessions at some place called a ‘church', where we were sent to a room with other kids to colour in cartoon pictures of some dude called Noah. His obsessive need for everything to be done in pairs made me gravely concerned for his mental health, but when I helpfully pointed this out I was rudely dismissed and told to concentrate on the love I have for Jesus. That was their answer to everything: ‘Think about the love you have for Jesus.'

Meanwhile, Mum was next door with the adults, wearing a floor-length skirt and participating in some kind of intensive singing group. She started carrying around a Bible and highlighting parts of it at random, then proudly showing her newfound highlighting skills to the men who turned up to our house each week on pushbikes.

After spending a few months colouring in and thinking about the love we had for Jesus, everyone started talking about ‘Rhiannon's Special Day', in which she was going to become ‘even closer' to Jesus. Then my mum took her shopping for a fancy white dress, and I knew what that meant: the bitch had snagged another one. Jesus had fallen in love with my sister.

The wedding day arrived, and Rhiannon was showered with attention. Lots of conservatively dressed adults kept pinching her cheeks and congratulating her. Then they would pat me on the head and say, ‘Awww, don't worry. Your time will come.'

Always the fucking bridesmaid.

As someone with a vast knowledge of weddings (based on my time spent watching Disney movies), I considered the ceremony quite unorthodox. The groom was a no-show, for one thing. He sent some random in his place, who stood with Rhiannon in a giant spa bath. Then, once the vows were exchanged, Jesus's proxy dunked Rhiannon's head under water. I couldn't believe what I was seeing – instead of a ring, she got dunked. At this point I realised that maybe I hadn't missed out on that much. If marrying Jesus just meant ruining your pretty new wedding dress in a giant Jesus bath, then I could live without a proposal. Although it did mean that Rhiannon was now spiritually protected, and I was still a godless devil child. But at least my clothes were dry. The grass is always greener I guess.

Things went fine with Jesus for a while. We got dressed up every week and went to the church place. I tried to do what I could for Noah's OCD and my mum kept singing with the grown-ups next door. We all continued to dress very, very sensibly.

But then, in what seemed to have become a familiar pattern with the men Mum brought into our lives, everything ended quite suddenly. We started staying home on weekends. My mum stopped wearing floor-length skirts. And when two clean-cut young gentlemen with Bibles came knocking at the door to see how Mum's highlighting was going, she shut it in their faces. And locked it.

That was when I knew Rhiannon's marriage to Jesus was over.

I never quite understood what had happened. With the benefit of hindsight, I'd say it probably had something to do with the rules about not drinking alcohol and my mum really, really liking wine. Whatever the reason, it was over.

First Scott the Taxi Driver, then John the Navy Man. And now, Jesus. All in and out of our lives like a flash. But giving up Mormonism meant my mum could go and get pissed at the El Rancho again, and that was where her next epic romance – and marriage – would have its humble, white-jeaned beginning.

Rehab is a lot like camp. That's what I tell people whenever they ask, and they often ask because I've been so many times.

The catch, of course, is that I didn't go to rehab as a patient; I went as the daughter of a patient. And rehab only feels like camp when you're a kid without an addiction problem. I'm pretty sure for everyone else, rehab feels a lot less like camp and a lot more like a place where someone is forcing you to deal with your addiction problem.

It surprises people when they hear that kids are allowed to live in rehab with their parents. I suppose it's probably difficult to picture a twitchy heroin addict asking a ten-year-old to pass the salt at dinner. Like when you see that video of the fat Indonesian baby smoking; something about the visual just doesn't seem right.

But it does happen, and after staying in a bunch of centres (all with deceptively lovely sounding names like ‘Odyssey
House' or ‘Karralika') I always thought the same thing: For kids, rehab is a lot like camp. And it never stops your parents from drinking.

Our journey into rehab didn't start until after Mum had seemingly created the perfect life for us. She'd found the next man who was going to save us, and it was a time when everything should have been falling into place. Instead, thanks to her affinity for a good chilled box of wine, everything started falling out of place very quickly. The man, who was now part of an ever-increasing list, was Joe the Removalist.

Joe was the quintessential Aussie bloke. He worked a tough job, loved having a cold one after work and watched Rugby League on weekends. His goals in life were pretty simple: wife, kids and just enough money to buy a house with a backyard. Oh, and if he was really fortunate, and worked his arse off, he hoped to one day make a sacred pilgrimage to Graceland – the home of his hero and the only man he liked more than Slim Dusty: Elvis Presley.

Even his life choices had been simple; he became a removalist because he loved trucks, and even today, in his late forties, he still gets excited by a shiny sixteen-wheeler. Joe is honestly like the real-life version of Darryl Kerrigan from
The Castle:
simple, lovely and lovable.

Which is why it's kind of unfortunate that my mum happened to him.

Mum met Joe at the El Rancho, the classiest joint in town outside of the Macquarie food court. (Of course, there was always the Black Stump, but a restaurant with steaks that good was the kind of place you only went to for a proposal.) He was twenty-one and had no idea what was about to hit him.

Mum was around six years older than he was, staggeringly beautiful, and had two little daughters, which basically meant he was getting a ready-made family. He couldn't resist.

I loved him. I would go to work with him on weekends, carrying a single lamp to the truck while he and other burly men seemed to pick up refrigerators with one hand. He started coming to our house at Smurf Village, always in his Stubbies and work boots, and would cook us steak and vegies for dinner – tomato sauce the only seasoning. He made life feel normal. Simple. And within just a few months, he and Mum were engaged.

The wedding was a stunning piece of Aussie lower-class perfection. If there was ever an indicator of what our life was going to be like with Joe the Removalist as our patriarch, that wedding was it.

My mum's dress was homemade by a woman who lived on our street, and was designed to look just like the most fashion-forward dress of the time: Lady Di's. It was a glorious white taffeta explosion, with two puff sleeves on her shoulders that could have very easily hidden a massive quantity of Class A drugs. (I have no idea what ‘Class A' means, but it feels like
nowadays whenever you talk about drugs, you're always meant to say ‘Class A'.)

Rhiannon and I, as flower girls, wore dresses that matched Mum's, but in a dusty pink colour that made me feel like I was betraying everything I had so valiantly stood for when I kicked that fairy-diarrhoea monstrosity out of my fourth birthday party. I was forced to wear pearl earrings and flowers in my hair, and there is not one photo from the entire day in which I'm not sulking about looking so ridiculous.

The wedding was held in the local Catholic Church, and Joe's fifteen thousand Catholic siblings attended, along with Mum's adopted parents and brothers. It felt like we were part of a real-life, proper family, doing a real-life, proper family thing.

The reception was in a brightly lit function hall on the side of a busy main road, so the ambience was obviously just gorgeous. All the regular things happened: they cut a cake, had a first dance, Joe pulled a garter off Mum's leg with his teeth, my North Shore grandparents tried to get through it without looking overly horrified. And at the end of the night, Mum and Joe were filmed walking out of the hall and into their lives together, which unfortunately at this location meant heading straight towards a busy intersection.

Because romance.

Mum soon had an ‘It's only been six months since the wedding, wink,' baby, whom I immediately hated. After seven
years of being the youngest, I found having a newborn in the house a very difficult and unnecessary adjustment. It also was the first time in my life I realised I had very few maternal skills and/or interests. Rhiannon would fawn over Tayla, feed her, play with her and love her. The one time I was asked to watch her, I got distracted by TV and let her roll off the couch and faceplant on the carpet. I like to think when it comes to TV versus babies, my priorities were in order from a very young age.

Soon we moved out of Smurf Village and into a very fancy private rental, which was pretty much the biggest and most exciting deal in Smurf Village since the day my dad was found almost dead in the bush. You see, people don't just leave Housing Commission. Leaving Houso for a private rental is basically the equivalent of Princess Mary leaving Tasmania to become ruler of Denmark. They practically threw us a ticker-tape parade as we drove out of the compound. We moved to West Ryde, which is literally about five minutes from Smurf Village, but that didn't matter. We might as well have moved to a high-rise in Dubai. We had
gotten out.

No more ‘quick-licks', no more messed-up kids drowning baby rabbits, no more mentally disabled guy trying to tempt us into his house with Kit Kats. We were private renters now, my friend. Living the dream.

But not even the dream could make Mum happy. And just like with every man who came before him, it didn't take
long for her to realise that Joe was not going to be an effective medicine.

She and Joe both drank a lot. Her drink of choice was wine, usually in a box. His was beer, usually in a stubby holder. But it didn't make a difference what they drank; after a while, everything just seemed to end in a slurred argument anyway.

Sometimes Rhiannon and I would come home to nobody in the house. Other nights Joe would take off, drunk and furious, then Mum would take off, drunk and furious, and Rhiannon and I would be at home, not drunk, not furious, and wondering what the hell to do with a baby.

For the first time ever, my mum was the one filling my body with toxic butterflies.

And that's when the rehab trips started. First it was shorter trips in smaller halfway houses, and because Rhiannon, Tayla and I were so young, and Mum was ‘making a genuine effort' to help herself, we were allowed to live with her whenever she went. But every time the rehab was over and we would come home, she'd head straight to the fridge and fill her glass from a chilled box of wine.

So, the trips started to become longer, and we would stay in larger, more permanent facilities. Rhiannon and I would make friends, start at new schools (trying to explain to the kids what it meant when the principal said to your new teacher, ‘We've got another one from the bloody rehab').

I knew the Serenity Prayer by heart and I wasn't even eight years old, and I had started to think that ‘accepting the things I cannot change' referred to the fact that rehab would never change anything.

But then came Karralika. The place that would definitely stop Mum going to the fridge and then disappearing for days. The place that would stop her wanting to drink from a chilled box of wine. The place that would definitely change everything. We were told that we were going to live there for months – however long it would take – to get Mum better.

And it was definitely a nice place. Karralika was a rehab centre located in Canberra, which, even though I'd lived in fifty different places since being born, and despite being the capital of my country, was somewhere I'd never actually been. It consisted of a bunch of bungalows that families could live in together, with a massive yard and a volleyball net, and the whole thing was in the middle of pretty luscious bushland, so there would be plenty of places for us to sneak off and play.

Straight away I was dubious that it was going to be different from any other rehab (which by now I considered something my mum just did when she wanted a break). Things were the same at Karralika as they had been at every facility we'd lived at. You wake up in the morning and go to breakfast in a big shared dining hall. Then all the kids get driven to school or day care in a minivan. I had no idea what the adults did while
we were out for the day, but I assumed it had something to do with talking about how much they liked wine. After school, the kids would mostly just play together while our parents did more talking about how much they liked the various things they liked that they weren't supposed to like. Then there'd be dinner in the dining hall, after which our parents would have more meetings and we would do homework, which usually just meant watching TV in some rec room. Then, before bed, there'd be ‘supper', where you got a biscuit, and Milo and milk in a plastic cup.

Just like camp.

Rhiannon and I always liked being friends with the other kids at rehab, because they were the only kids we ever got to meet whose parents seemed worse than ours. There was a kind of hierarchy among us based on what our mums or dads were in for. Heroin was top of the list, and the most impressive, and wine was the bottom. Trust our mum to be addicted to the lamest thing available. But really, being at the bottom of the addiction list just meant Rhiannon, Tayla and I were pretty much the luckiest kids there.

All the kids felt lucky to be there really, because living in rehab was the only time we ever got to see our parents consistently sober. It was the most stable and unafraid we had ever felt. Living in rehab was the only time I got to make it through entire days without feeling the toxic butterflies.

I felt more of a sense of belonging around those kids than I had around any others. I think because, even though the oldest of us was only twelve (that was Harley – he could put a condom in his nose and make it come out his mouth, and it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen), we all really respected each other. For what we had been through, for what we were going through and for what we all secretly knew we would probably keep going through after we left. I don't think at that age we even knew what ‘respect' meant, but there was a sense of solidarity and empathy between us that I don't think can be described as anything else.

And although I'd had my doubts about Karralika being any different from any other place we stayed, there actually was one major development while we were there. It had nothing to do with Mum; she would start drinking the day we left. No, the thing that was different when we went to Karralika was me.

In a turn of events that would shock me and leave Rhiannon completely baffled, in Canberra, I was considered cool.
Cool!
It had nothing to do with me; I was still my usual, clueless, bungling self. But Canberra was like this alternate universe where the cool standards were so low, I was basically like a rock star the minute we crossed the border.

I immediately realised something was up on our first day of school. I was only in Year 4, but I'd been to so many schools by that point, I knew exactly how to play my first day. Things
were different for me than they were for Rhiannon. She would just walk into a classroom and the kids would realise they were in the presence of a better human. Not unlike how I imagine it is for Oprah every time she walks into a room. Rhiannon didn't make friends – friends just immediately appeared at her side. By the end of the day, all the girls would be wearing their hair like hers and all the boys would be obsessed. It would take her exactly one day and zero effort to become Queen Bee.

I, on the other hand, had to tackle things very differently. I would walk into a classroom and the kids would realise they were in the presence of an average human. I knew I was going to be low on the ladder, so my best strategy was to try and at least avoid being the very bottom rung. I would generally start with a scan of the room for potential friends. I had to play this carefully – it was a very delicate balancing act. I couldn't go after the total weirdos, but I also had no chance with the cool kids, so I had to try and find the ones who seemed in my league but were also nondescript enough that they didn't get bullied. Sometimes I managed this and sometimes I didn't. At one school I misjudged and headed straight for the cool girls; by the end of the day I was playing the dog in their game of ‘house'. At another school I experimented with going it alone, but that was just as much of a mistake. School is like prison – lone drifters are weak and vulnerable to attacks. You need some kind of crew as a buffer.

So, with many lessons from many schools already learned, and having accepted that I would never own a crowd like Rhiannon, I walked into my new Canberra classroom ready to get to work.

What happened next confused and frightened me. I didn't have to make friends – friends immediately appeared by my side. And not the rejects, I'm talking long-blonde hair, probably-all-called-Tiffany cool girls. Everyone kept telling me they liked my hair and my pencil case. There was practically a fistfight when the teacher asked who wanted to be my desk buddy. At recess, I had girls following me around. By lunch, word got out that the coolest and cutest boy in class had an Official Crush on me. In the afternoon, I answered one question correctly and a rumour began to spread that I was some kind of child genius. Waiting to be picked up at the end of the day, I was surrounded by girls wanting to invite me to whatever it was that people did in Canberra. Rhiannon looked perplexed. She'd obviously already taken over her class, but to see me in the same position was a foreign and unsettling experience for both of us.