You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead (15 page)

Nowhere in Brunswick was safe from my crying jags. I imagined that the people who lived in the surrounding streets would hear tiny painful grabs of my breakdown as I walked past.

‘—
verything is just shit
,' residents of Albert street caught in a passing wail of despair.

‘—
ing left to live for
,' others might have been treated to as they paused and looked up from their macramé or fixie bicycle. Occasionally I would walk into La Paloma and hand them my coffee cup and just indulge in a little cry while they were making my flat white. When I started crying at the chemist, Gabi gently suggested it might be time to get a roommate.

‘Maybe with someone around the house,' she said, ‘you won't feel like crying as much.'

Dan had been single for a long time and would occasionally Facebook message me with glum yearnings for ‘bookish girls with good vocabularies'. I would think,
Wait,
that's me
and a second later remember,
But that's Dan
, which essentially put the end to any further romantic musings about the situation. We had known each other for so long, periphery visitors to our respective friendship groups, that any sexy novelty had worn off an age ago. We were kindred souls in many ways, never content with our lot, fretting about relationship commitment and never quite managing to get it right. We careened from romantic fuckup to romantic fuckup, leaving a trail of misty-eyed and pissed off ex-suitors in our wake.

He was unbelievably handsome, with a peppery quiff and Clark Kent spectacles and pointy black 1960s boots. When he sang he sounded like a cup of tea with whisky in it and he made girls stir crazy. We wrote to each other late at night, lamenting our inability to move on from previous love affairs.

I mused:‘I guess the more you realise the sparsity of choice on offer, the more you hark back to times when you were truly happy and madly in love . . . and yearn for such feelings again. It really is a twisted way to live, and makes it very difficult to move forward. I suppose there has to be an acceptance that it's very rare to love as fiercely and all-consumingly as one does in their early to mid twenties.'

He had been drifting for three months without a house and needed somewhere to settle, to sort out his head and his heart and his career. I had a spare room and an idiotic new habit of crying in Video Ezy. Our friends urged us to take the leap—it made sense, it would be good for each of us, take us out of our self-absorbed, self-pitying cocoons and project us into a world of mirthsome, fresh-faced home sharing. In their minds we would spend evenings laughing gaily over Scrabble boards, teasingly flicking tea-towels during the washing up, and emerge in a month or so as completely tolerable human beings. Dan and I moving in together was a major emotional investment on behalf of our friends. Perhaps if we were entertaining each other in the privacy of our own home we'd be less likely to bore them into tedium with tales of our disastrous love lives next time we ran into them in a bar.

The house itself was a squat old chook, unconventional by Brunswick standards. It had once existed as two adjoining apartments and since been clumsily renovated. It spread out sideways, two bathrooms, two living areas, four tiny bedrooms. One room was painted Ken Done blue. The tiny bathrooms were tiled with cheap marble. I would joke about the extended space, telling visitors ‘my study is in the west wing. We keep the servants in the east.' The backyard was spectacularly overgrown with weeds, and during one Boxing Day party one of the guys from
Puppetry of the Penis
had decided on a whim to do me a favour by gathering them up and setting them on fire, which impressed the Moreland Fire Department no end when they turned up at 5 am with an industrial hose. At night you could hear the bogans at the Retreat Hotel singing along to bad country music and shouting hotly in pill-soaked ecstasy.

Dan and I planned a dinner to discuss whether moving in together was a fine idea or a recipe for disaster and were both nervous, selling ourselves as housemates like skittish dancers auditioning before a line of disapproving choreographers. ‘I cook a lot. I have this great Le Chasseur pot,' he said before he'd even sat down. ‘I'm in a fruit and vegetable co-op,' I countered, trying not to get guacamole all over the table. ‘I get a box of organic fruit and vegetables every Thursday.' We were inadvertently entering into a game of personality one-upmanship. Impressing upon the other what easy-breezy individuals we were to live with.

‘I go to the gym four times a week,' I said.

‘I'm a member of a swim squad,' Dan replied.

Topics also covered during this showcase meeting involved how generous we were, how totally not passive-aggressive we were, and how much we enjoyed ‘really getting things out in the open' when there was a minor domestic issue. In short, we were practically perfect people and the rest of the world would be out of their minds not to want to share a residence with us.

I hadn't had a housemate in twelve years. I'd lived alone or with partners, apart from one brief and hedonistic period living with Gabi during which time we did things like take baths together and ingest acid and spend the ensuing evening crammed in our wardrobes eating watermelon and thinking our shoes were alive. It had been unconventional, and for the most part very pleasant. I hadn't had to tiptoe around overtired circus performers, or pull dreadlocks from a blocked drain, or confront heroin addicted postal workers about stealing my beetroots. There had been petty arguments with boyfriends over fetid workboots left in the bedroom but those were usually sorted with a friendly arm-wrestle and time in bed.You couldn't sleep with housemates as a problem-solving measure, or you weren't supposed to. They were colleagues, people you nodded to politely in a corridor.

A friend years ago had lived with a pothead doctor named Raymond who one day started speaking in tongues before going apeshit and smashing everything in the house. He left in a rage, screaming that everybody in the building was a pornographer, before climbing into his car, driving to Canberra, and attempting to drive up the steps of Parliament House. My friend swore off sharing a residence with anybody ever again.

‘Housemates are the devil,' he told me solemnly. ‘And they will eat your soul. Live alone. Forever.'

It seemed like sound advice. But I had come to the point of looking at a new housemate like medicine. A dose of newness was a potential solution to what my mother was now referring to as ‘that crying palaver'.

After we had eaten, Dan raised the topic of the public way I chose to live my life. ‘All that online stuff . . . that's your business,' he said carefully. ‘But if I move in here and I want to, I don't know, sleep with the entire Swedish netball team on a whim or something . . . I don't want to wake up the next day and read about it on a blog.'

I promised him no, of course not, what he did in the privacy of his bedroom and studio was his business entirely and I would wait at least three days before posting it on music discussion board Mess + Noise, just joking, his filthy netball sexing secrets would be safe with me.

There was a warm and slightly gauche hug on the doorstep and we promised to think over the pros and cons of a share house arrangement before making any firm decisions. I waved him off into the night. He blinked a few times behind his exceptional spectacles and climbed into his Tarago and drove away.

Please god
, I thought.
If he moves in, don't let me get involved
with him
.

If Dan and I moved in together now and hooked up we would be the living embodiment of the last two people left at the party. We had once skirted around each other in a flirtatious fashion but never done anything about it, mostly because we were probably too busy sleeping with everybody else. In particularly drunken moments he might say something suggestive in a noisy bar, or I would make some bawdy reference to us one day getting married and moving to the country.Yet the impetus to go further, to lean in for the illicit kiss, or take up the lewd, teasing suggestion of a night full of fucking and perspiration, simply wasn't there. We would throw these double entendres out to each other and then grin, foolishly, as we watched them float harmlessly to the ground.

There was a sense of familiarity with Dan. Of getting older, of acceptance, of romantic regrets. We were both difficult people to be in relationships with—vain, moody, elusive and dissatisfied. I imagined the two of us curling up together in his bedroom and looking at each other's ageing bodies with a sort of grim acceptance.
I've fucked everything else up
, we would say to each other,
so I suppose you'll have to do
.

And I didn't want to fall for Dan if he moved in. It seemed like a tiresome and predictable outcome. Like everyone would expect that and find the inevitability inherently amusing. When I told my mother I was thinking of living with him she said, ‘Oh, like you could control yourself around
that
wonderful boy.' The two hopeless creatives, drawn together on a balmy summer night after cooking dinner in their underpants. Unable to resist the comfort of nearby flesh. We would be the joke, the patsies. While all of our friends lived their lives in stable partnerships, with children and mortgages, we would be the errant teenagers. Who couldn't make it work with anybody else so had settled—with shrugs, with embarrassed, knowing smiles—for each other.

There was also the misguided impetus of staying chaste for my ex-partner. When I had told him Dan might move in he had looked at me with knowing eyes.The girl who kissed that sad-eyed drummer, he would think. Like you could resist a domestic scenario with somebody like Dan. At your age. At his age. At your disgraced combined ages. I told myself that somehow I would—for once—resist the siren song of the troubadour, that I would wait for Tim, that I could just sit it out in a monk-like existence in my bedroom in Brunswick while he in turn sweated it out in our country house, trying to quit liquor, trying to pay his bills, trying to move on from me.

‘Goodnight, Dan!' I would say brightly and determinedly. ‘I'm going to bed now!'

I could do it. I
would
do it. I would leave him, handsome and bespectacled and smart and bookish and lonely, sitting in our living room, thinking of new songs to write and dreaming of a woman to love who wasn't me and I would be strong and close my bedroom door and not budge morally if he ever did that 3 am tentative knock and asked in a hoarse whisper if I were still awake.

Yet I knew it was the most difficult of moral tests. Your heart is broken, almost beyond repair. You know you should stay single for a while. It's time. You need to learn how to be on your own. You hope—kind of, sort of—that after some months, you and Tim will work things out, that he will realise with a start the terrible mistake he has made by walking out. What better way to challenge the boundaries of your resolve than moving an intensely attractive, creative, single and lost musician into your spare room? With any luck you will hear him singing. With any luck you will hear him having sex. With any luck you will accidentally see him naked. That shouldn't complicate your head at all.

Over our initial dinner, Dan had sensed my trepidation.

‘You needn't worry,' he'd laughed nervously. ‘I'm not a midnight rapist or anything.'

Still I fretted in advance, heinously. I looked at his Facebook photos for the first time in a long while and thought
what if
and
what would I do if
and berated myself for even entertaining such madness. We would be housemates, housemates in our mid-thirties with failed relationships and low self-esteem. I imagined us, in the dark, acting it all out. I had tasted it long before it was even served up.

My hope was that we would wear each other out with revolting homely behaviour before we got a chance to do anything even mildly sexy. I would hear him piss without that comforting lull of post-coital intimacy, he would see me in my writing outfit of tea-stained singlet and leggings. I wouldn't look good in the mornings. I would be a wife before I was a mistress.We would together kill off any potential. Our domestic habits would be the pesticide that protected the crops of our loins from flowering.

There was also the possibility, of course, that we would never be able to relax in this shared abode. When you live with somebody you're even slightly attracted to it's difficult to exhale, to ever truly stoop to your true potential as a lowbrow swamp-dweller. It's as though you need to be on your A-game at all times on the off chance a clothes pegging session in the backyard might lead to some sort of swooping,
From Here to Eternity
-type kiss.

I imagined us getting ourselves ready in our respective bedrooms.

‘Oh, good morning Dan,' I would exclaim with cheer, looking up from where I reclined casually on the couch reading the newspaper wearing a gold lamé gown and full '60s cat-eye liquid liner. ‘I didn't know you were up.'

At that point I was still obsessing over Tim. When he went on three-day benders and failed to return texts I would check into our dangerously still-linked bank account and retrace his steps.

‘He caught a sixteen dollar taxi in the early hours of Monday morning,' I told Gabi on the phone. ‘Where do you suppose he was
going
?'

I was no worse, really, than a stalker. Without urgent intervention there would likely soon come an evening where I drove back and forth past his house in an armoured tank until somebody called the police. If Dan moved in he might be able to crash tackle me to the ground next time I went to the front door eighteen times in a row ‘just to see if Tim's car is parked outside'.

The main issue was that I didn't trust myself. I'd had a revolting predilection for musicians since the age of sixteen and had dated one after another, picking them off like a game of rock 'n' roll Guess Who. When you're in your early twenties this seems like a relatively adorable character trait and you're able to pass yourself off as a kind of Kate Hudsonesque free spirit, though left untamed this sort of penchant eventually turns one into the sort of badly rouged disaster area who gamely appears at Enrique Iglesias concerts gyrating in the front row with pendulous breasts knocking gently together like an executive stress toy.