The Anti-Cool Girl (7 page)

But Mum didn't tell us any of that. When you're little and someone dies, you're just told that they ‘died' and you accept it without asking for further details. So, sitting there on that couch with Mum between us, that's what my older sister and I did.

I didn't know how to react. I looked over at Rhiannon for guidance. She had burst into tears, so I assumed that's what was expected of me. But I felt nothing. I couldn't do it, I just couldn't cry. Mum and Rhiannon were both hysterical, and I just sat there in silence, thinking about how now I would definitely win the costume contest at school, because how could you not give first prize to the kid whose dad had just died?

In fact, I went back to school the next day, and was probably more upset about not winning the costume contest with a dead dad on my side than I was about actually having a dead dad.

Mum has held my lack of emotion during this time against me for years. Whenever she's drunk and feeling overly dramatic, she'll wave a glass of wine in my face and yell, ‘You didn't even cry when your own father
died.
Rhiannon couldn't even get out of bed and you went back to school the
next day.'

And it's true. I was emotionless. After the funeral, I spent the wake doing twirls in the church hall because I liked the way my dress flared out like a flamenco dancer's. Everyone kept telling my mum that I was young and I didn't understand, but they were wrong. I did understand. My dad was dead. And I couldn't cry because all I felt was relief. I would never have to go and stay with him again. He would never give me toxic butterflies again. I would never vomit again when someone told me he was nearby.

I spent a long time trying to force myself into feeling something, by concentrating on the one happy memory I had with my dad. I figured if I could focus on that, I could hopefully squeeze out something resembling tears and ultimately get my mum off my back.

The memory involves a yellow chair.

For a while when I was little, every morning at about 4am, my dad and I would snuggle in a yellow armchair in front of the TV. It was more of a mustard-gold than yellow, but I was five,
and when you're five there are literally only seven colours that exist in the world, and to me this chair was yellow.

I'd found him there one morning when I wandered out of bed, and could immediately tell that something was different about him. His eyes didn't seem as glassy, and his breath not as pungent. He scooped me up in his arms and put me on his lap, not struggling at all with his balance. He made me a cheese and tomato sandwich with the crusts cut off, which I ate while we watched
Rage
together. Then I fell asleep, nuzzled into his chest, feeling something warm and comfortable in my body that was completely foreign to me when it came to my dad. It turns out that at 4am, my dad didn't give me the toxic butterflies.

I woke up later in the morning, still on the yellow armchair but now by myself, covered with a blanket. Dad had moved to the kitchen table, and I could tell straight away that our special time was over. He had his coffee mug next to him, which was always filled with scotch, and my stomach turned as the toxic butterflies once again started to flap their wings.

But nothing is more of a sponge than a kid desperate for their parents' love, so every morning from that point on, my body would rouse me at 4am like clockwork, and I would go and sit with my dad on the yellow armchair, soaking up as much of this fleeting version of him as I could get.

Of course, I know now that Dad was up at 4am because he couldn't make it through the night without needing a drink. My
body was waking up because it craved him; his was waking up because it craved scotch.

The cravings for the things we loved, however different, just put us together during a magic window in his day. At 4am, he had slept just enough that he'd sobered up a bit from the night before, and if I got out there before his first mug full of scotch kicked in for the day, I could take advantage of the magic window. I could talk to him, laugh with him, and eat a cheese and tomato sandwich with the crusts cut off. All while snuggling in the yellow armchair in front of the TV.

It's a nice memory, and I tried so hard to think about that chair whenever I felt like I didn't feel enough about my dad, like I wasn't upset enough or broken enough.

But that yellow armchair would be the chair that he would die in. I literally had one happy memory of my dad, and he died on it.
He died on it.

So when I think about going back to school the next day, when I think about doing twirls at his funeral, when I think about the fact I never cried, I just think of the chair.

And I don't feel anything.

I started making ‘Rosie's Chicken Soup' (patented, so hands off) not long after my dad died. It's a complex culinary masterpiece I developed for the nights when nobody would come home, and I realised if I wanted dinner I'd have to figure out this whole ‘cooking' thing for myself.

In a trend that would follow me into adulthood, I kept things simple. The recipe is as follows: boil water in saucepan. Put pasta into saucepan (any pasta will do; I like spirals, but it's up to you). Put powdered chicken stock into water (no specific amount, but if the water gets gluggy, you've gone too far). Wait for pasta to cook. Pour entire contents of saucepan into bowl. Eat.

It was basically my more sophisticated take on two-minute noodles, which although lovely as a treat, I didn't think were a dignified enough choice for dinner (oh, how times have changed). Rosie's Chicken Soup would be the start of my lifelong journey with preparing food, which now, along with
adding water to things, also includes placing various products in the microwave.

But back then, I was still just an eight-year-old cooking novice, waiting for an adult to come home and make me a goddamn steak.

Mum had pretty much lost her mind after Dad died. Although, given we'd already been in and out of rehab numerous times, it could be argued that she was losing it well before he sat in that yellow chair and never woke up. Her bipolar was, at the very least, a rubber band that had been stretched to its limit for a while, and Dad dying was the thing that finally made it snap. Even though she had married Joe the Removalist, had a new baby and we were all living in a fancy private rental in West Ryde, Dad's death broke her.

She started going to the fridge to fill up her glass from a chilled box of wine more and more often. Then the wine in the fridge must have run out, because soon she started leaving the house to fill her glass. And she must have had trouble finding wine elsewhere, because some nights she'd be out looking for so long that we'd wake up in the morning and she still wouldn't be home.

Then the fights began. Fight after fight after fight after fight. She and Joe the Removalist would scream at each other for hours, each getting progressively drunker as time went on. It could be fascinating to watch, actually, as there really is nothing more
bizarre than two inebriated people trying to have a coherent and measured argument (especially when they both refuse to put down their respective beverages). Drunk people arguing have no concept of proper debate etiquette, so things like voice volume and spatial awareness are never guaranteed.

This can sometimes make things exciting, like when I was once on a train in my early twenties and two lesbian junkies were having an epic lovers' quarrel in the seat behind me. From what I could gather, one of the ladies had found a series of messages on the other's phone –
sexy
messages. And this particular lady had not been the one to send those messages, so a very interesting debate about the rules of monogamy ensued, in which much slurred speech and tears were thrown about the carriage. I thought about adjudicating, but for the most part they seemed to be handling the discussion in a civilised, if not sleepy, manner.

Then, in an instant, things turned physical. One second I was listening to the cheater explain that she had been drunk when she ‘licked that bitch's cunt', and the next, there were two lesbian junkies wrestling on top of me, screaming about which cunts are allowed to be licked and which ones aren't when you're in a committed relationship (I think
‘Only mine, you bitch'
ended up being the general consensus).

The fight eventually rolled off me and onto the opposite chair (but not before squashing the cake I had with me – we still
ate it later, just sort of cutting around the bum imprints), and then things started to quieten down again. Voices were lowered. Tears were shed. Promises about cunt exclusivity were made. By the time I got off that train, I really felt like I had been on an epic journey of romance with those ladies. Whether they were drunk or high, or both (I suspect both), they managed to cover more spectrums on the emotional scale in twenty minutes than I think the average uptight adult would reach in their entire lifetime. It really was an impressive thing to behold.

But when it's your parents (or at least, your mum and your stepdad), and it's been going on for months, it's not so much exciting as it is exasperating. Watching two people who are meant to be taking care of you trying to explain why they hate each other after having had eleven drinks each . . . well, it tends to make it difficult to concentrate on the TV.

A few months after Dad died, it became obvious that things with Joe the Removalist were falling apart. I may not have hit double digits yet, but I had watched enough Ricki Lake to have a pretty good understanding of when a marriage was over. And this marriage, the one that had seen us escape Smurf Village and head to a fancy private rental, was teetering on the drunken edge. But what really clinched it, what really put an end to our brief happy family and launched the beginning of Rosie's Chicken Soup, was the night Mum got her hands on a butcher's knife.

It was late. Tayla, just a year old, was asleep in her room. Rhiannon and I, in the trusty bunk beds that frustratingly stopped me from masturbating at will, were meant to be asleep also, but the screaming had been going on for hours, and it did not sound like there would be an end to it soon. On top of that, when Joe the Removalist reached a certain level of drunk, he would start to play old Elvis records at a ridiculous volume. So not only would you be trying to sleep through slurred drunken insults, you'd have to contend with the accompanying soundtrack of ‘Love Me Tender'. It's an odd audio combination, and not one I would recommend right before bed.

To Rhiannon and me, it was frustrating more than anything else. When you know exactly how a night is going to pan out (lots of fighting, one or both of them leaving, making ourselves breakfast in the morning, waiting for someone to come home), it gets to the point where you just want it to hurry up and happen already so you can get some sleep. We get it: he's an idiot and you regret ever marrying him. She's a whore and you wish you'd never met. Curse the El Rancho (and its irresistible romantic lighting!) etc etc etc.

As I lay on the top bunk, I imagined storming out to the living room and finishing the argument for them. ‘Mum!' I would say, Ninja Turtle pyjamas doing nothing to assert my authority. ‘Joe thinks you're a whore, and would like you to kindly get out of his face so he can listen to Elvis in peace. Joe:
Mum hates you and wishes you were dead. She regrets the day she ever met you and thinks your Maseur sandals are ugly. Are we in agreement?'

They would look at me, shocked, but no doubt impressed by my ability to break down all the problems in their marriage so accurately and succinctly.

‘Good. Now kindly sign here so we can finalise this divorce and Rhiannon, Tayla and I
can get some damn sleep.'

I would then march back to bed, legal documents in hand (I'm sure I would figure out what to do with them later), and leave Mum and Joe the Removalist embarrassed that they needed an eight-year-old girl to tell them what should have been glaringly obvious from the moment Elvis first started playing at full blast: the marriage was over.

But that night, I didn't have time to go ahead with my conflict resolution fantasy. Before I had begun to even contemplate whether I would actually do it, I heard Joe scream. A terrified scream. Then I heard Mum laugh, and both of them started running towards our room.

I hung my head over the side of the top bunk and looked down at Rhiannon. Something bad was about to happen. Joe crashed through the door of our room, turned the main light on and closed the door behind him. Then he put his body up against the door and started screaming at us. ‘Move the bed!' he was saying. ‘Help me!'

Rhiannon and I stood in the middle of the room, unsure what the hell was going on. Just a minute earlier we had been under the covers, listening to the soothing sounds of a drunken argument by nightlight. Now we were standing in a starkly lit room, being ordered to move a bunk bed that to us might as well have weighed eleven tonnes.

Then the knife appeared under the door.

‘Joooe . . . Jooooe! Come out, Joey baby,' my mum chanted, as she tried to stab at his feet with the knife. Rhiannon started screaming. Joe was screaming. He was trying to hold the door closed just as hard as Mum was trying to force her way in. She kept stabbing at the door with the knife, laughing. The silver blade would disappear and then all of a sudden slip through a crack in the side.

‘Move the bed to the door. Now!' Joe was hysterical, and he couldn't keep holding the door not knowing where the knife would stick through next. But it was a giant fucking bunk bed, and there's no way Rhiannon and I were going to be able to slide that thing across the room. I had made it my life's mission to get out of PE by pretending I was seriously afraid of the risk of melanoma – there's no way I had the physical stamina required to move a bed. Rhiannon, with her tiny, perfect, delicate little model body was equally as inept.

The only option was for us to go and get help.

Rhiannon leapt into action. If I hadn't had her lead to follow, I would have just stood in the middle of the room, frozen and staring at the knife poking through the door until my mum knocked it down. But Rhiannon went into superhero mode.

‘The window,' she said, snapping me out of my trance and pulling me over to it. ‘We need to climb out, jump onto the balcony and go next door for help.'

Our bedroom window was two storeys high, with the balcony a couple of metres to the left and about a metre below. We would have to scale the side of the house, jump down onto the balcony and pray we didn't miss. Once there, it connected to the driveway, so we could safely escape and find someone to help Joe.

I looked at Rhiannon, petrified. But the determination on her face told me this was no time to argue, or to point out that she was a notoriously shitty climber. She went first. There were some bricks on the side of the house that stuck out a little further than the others, and she used those to stand on. But there was nothing to hold on to, so she just clung to the blinds from the window as long as she could, before letting go and hugging the side of the house as she made her way across to the balcony. She jumped, and she made it, so I followed. (Yes, I waited to see if she made it before I followed. It's called not being a dummy.)

Once free of the house, we climbed the fence into our neighbours' yard and bashed on the back door as hard as we could.

And that's all I remember. After that, everything goes black, and all I see when I close my eyes is the knife through the door.

I woke up the next morning in my own bed. Rhiannon was asleep on the bunk beneath me. For a second I hoped that I had dozed off while planning Mum and Joe's divorce, and all of it had just been a nightmare. I wandered out to the living room, hoping to see Mum feeding Tayla in her highchair and Joe watching TV. Hoping my mum would make me breakfast and give me a hug and ask me what I wanted to do that day.

But they weren't there. The TV
was
on, and Tayla
was
in her highchair, but she was being fed by a lady I didn't recognise. That didn't faze me so much – growing up with parents who like to drink means you often wake up to random adults taking care of you. These people – family, friends, neighbours – would generally look at you with pity then take you shopping and buy you something. So, while your parents hadn't come home and that was always a slight cause for concern, any bad feelings were generally outweighed by your new Polly Pocket.

The lady feeding Tayla that day said she was an old school friend of my mum's. ‘Something happened last night, sweetie. And your mum and dad just needed me to watch you for a while.'

‘He's not my dad,' I said, looking in disgust at what she had chosen to give Tayla for breakfast. It was toast with Vegemite and mashed banana. I wasn't thrilled about having a baby in the house, but even I felt sorry for Tayla and the fact that she had
zero autonomy over her body and was therefore being forced to eat the tragedy on the plate in front of her.

‘Do you want me to make you some breakfast?' the random asked, clearly misinterpreting the look on my face as some kind of desire.

‘Um, no.' I said, slowly backing out of the room. I almost considered that breakfast more of a crime than what had occurred the night before.

The butcher's knife incident was, sadly, the end of our time in the fancy private rental. Oh, and also the end of Mum's marriage to Joe the Removalist. Mum, Rhiannon, Tayla and I packed our things and moved back into a Houso house, although we were in a regular neighbourhood this time, rather than a Smurf Village-style ghetto (which meant we at least didn't have to worry about getting pregnant as soon as we hit puberty).

This was when I developed Rosie's Chicken Soup (again – patented, so hands off). It was nice to have the constant fighting over, although I have to admit I did kind of miss the Elvis. But living alone with Mum meant there was no longer a Joe buffer when she took off to find wine, so every time she left we were definitely going to be fending for ourselves.

One night, with Rhiannon at a friend's and Tayla with relatives, it was just me and Mum. Which meant that within about twenty minutes, it was just me. I killed a few hours watching TV, then, realising dinner was on my shoulders, came
up with the brilliant concept of Rosie's Chicken Soup. I burned half the pasta to the bottom of the saucepan, but managed to get a fairly enjoyable meal out of it nonetheless (a meal I continue to enjoy to this day, by the way).

It was at about 10pm that I started to get scared. I had seen Stephen King's
It
way too young, which basically guaranteed that any time I was alone I became convinced that a devil clown was going to try and rip my limbs off and eat my heart. I started to panic when it didn't look like Mum was coming home. With Rhiannon, I could handle it. But an entire night
by myself?
Forget it. I had to get out of there and save my limbs while I still had the chance.