You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead (22 page)

Oh Marieke,
I love all the memories, even the ones we'd rather forget (despite the gist of the piece).

I'm not sure which bits are part of your poetic licence . . . I mean, you don't really feel that bad, do you? I would hate to think that you have felt so poorly.

Was I sad when we went our separate ways? Yes. Did I hate you for it? No, not at all. I knew in my heart that I hadn't done anything wrong. I guessed that it was simply the way life goes. High school happens. People grow and change.

If it makes you feel any better, I too turned my back on someone I loved at a poignant time in my life . . . It's a coping mechanism with bad ethics.

All in all, I thank you for responding so honestly. It's more than I could have hoped for. Now go and accept the bloody friend request and be done with it!

You can see my cherub and I'll see
God knows what!!

Take care old friend,
Suddenly Sincerely Sue

Down the hatch

It was a letter forwarded on from the kindly folk at the ABC, the address of the book show crossed out (several times, by the looks of things, as though the envelope had bothered varying departments before finding its way to Brunswick) and mine eventually added. PLEASE FORWARD TO. No return address. But the loopy scrawl commanding my attention, shouting my name in biro, should have been a warning. If penmanship were given names like fonts, this one would have been called Lunatic 2.0.

There should be a sticker placed on the correspondence of all lunatics.
Open with caution
, it might read.
Contents may
include one or all of the following: 1. Death threat. 2. Question
regarding validity of parentage. 3. Kind suggestion that if you don't
‘like' a particular subject you ‘go back' to ‘where you came from', or
4. Faeces
. On the internet it is possible to politely sidestep the hate-fuelled rantings of people who would rather see you dead. A website entitled ‘Marieke Hardy Has a Face Like a Big
Cunt.net.au
' is a title that may ring vague alarm bells, as is anything run by the Westboro Baptist Church. If you don't wish to read a dissertation on why your prose once made someone castrate themselves, don't seek it out. In the case of those more brash among the online community who ‘@' you directly on Twitter—the equivalent of drunkenly shirt-fronting somebody at a party and screaming ‘AND I DON'T MUCH CARE FOR YOUR TIE EITHER'—there's still a ‘block user' function. In short: for the most part, it's possible to go about your life happily ignorant that many people in the world think you are a douchebag.

As I opened the letter, a pamphlet fell from the envelope and onto the floor. I ignored it for the moment.

The letter began:

Miss Hardy.

It was a pompous, knowing start, addressing me as though I were a schoolgirl staring down at my scuffed Bata Scouts and regretting that blissful previous hour exchanging saliva with Scott Webster in the toilet block.

I have been watching you on the television for months now
and have come to one obvious conclusion. There is a consistency
in the subject matter you discuss on the First Tuesday Book
Club and if your co-presenters Jennifer Byrne and Jason Steger
are too afraid to tell you, I am not.You have the eyes and
demeanour of a professional alcoholic. The first step is admitting
you have a problem and, Marieke Hardy, as a regular viewer
of the show I must inform you IT IS TIME FOR YOU TO
TAKE THAT STEP.

I picked up the pamphlet that had fallen to the floor. It was for AA.

This was somewhat of a blow, like being told ‘you're not fooling anyone with that stupid haircut, you know. We can still see your forehead.' I chewed the thought over for a moment, feeling it in my mouth.

A complete stranger thinks I am a drunk.

It was no more odd than a complete stranger thinking I was a Communist or a lesbian, both charges having been laid against me in previous unrelated missives from other friendly neighbourhood lunatics. Once I had seen a severely anorexic girl at the Fitzroy pool. All eyes were upon her as she strolled around, glass-cut clavicle jutting from her bathers. I wanted desperately to gently take her aside and point out that people weren't whispering about her because she was glamorous. They were whispering because they were worried about her. Because she looked obviously sick. Because she wasn't hiding her demons like the rest of us were, under the veneer of behaving like functioning human beings.

I wondered for a moment if I was the girl at the Fitzroy pool and my lunatic friend with the loopy writing was me. This thought was soon easily dismissed as I read further and saw his closing paragraph regarding the digital signal of the ABC News 24 channel trying to eat his brain. He was, as originally suspected, a nutjob. My secret life as a heavy drinker could continue unabated.

It's not overtly fashionable, particularly flying in the face of all those startling commercials where unfortunate lads and lasses imbibe one too many alcopops and crash spectacularly through a variety of glass objects, but I really am a huge fan of drinking. I like thinking about it, I like listening to songs about it, and I like reading about it.

If my life of drinking was ever charted for the purposes of medical science it would look as follows: one big pointy triangle for the teenage years of rocket fuel and vomit, a gentle downward slope for the late teens and early twenties, and then an upwards trajectory around the mid-twenties which plateaus, a steady-as-she-goes prairie plain, for over ten years. Moving from a mid-twenties drunk into a mid-thirties drunk is a career choice not everybody likes to make. If you are friends with musicians the line between hedonism and problem drinking is blurred, probably because you are drunk and can't focus properly. You surround yourself with drunks, you read their writing, you fall in love with them. Nobody grows up thinking they're going to be drawn to the one man in the room slouched on a barstool spilling gin on his waistcoat, it just happens. One day you're kissing posters of Pseudo Echo before you go to bed, the next you're piggybacking your boyfriend out of Yah-Yah's at 4 am pleading with him to please stop calling the DJ ‘donkey cock' as it's only causing grief.

My illustrious career with the bottle began with the person my mother used to refer to somewhat hopefully as ‘your naughty friend', Lisa Jenkins, implying that without Lisa's influence I would probably have spent my downtime crossstitching and nursing sick orphans. In my mother's mind, Lisa led me astray, beckoning wickedly from the dark corners of teenage immorality. In truth, we were as dangerously unhinged as each other and would spend various evenings placing ourselves in the sort of situations usually re-enacted on
Crime Stoppers
prior to the sobering sentence ‘and young Margaret's body was sadly never found'. Lisa's room was on the second storey of her parents' house, so her nightly escapes involved a high-tech rope and pulley system. We encouraged each other dreadfully, comrades in pre-pubescent debauchery. We lost our virginities around the same time to older boys and were frequently separated on school camps ‘for the benefit of all concerned'.

Lisa had a penchant for trouble, and liquor, and was possessed of the sort of cockeyed grin usually found on pickpockets, or 1980s Hollywood bad boys the Brat Pack. Her hands were rough and papery. We babysat the children of her neighbours and hunted out their booze and pornography like bloodhounds. We were obsessed with pornography, which was fairly common for private schoolgirls at the age of thirteen if St Trinian's is anything to go by. My great aunt had died five years earlier and left to my family her vast collection of books, at least five of which were intensely pornographic. They were hidden—badly—on the top shelf, amongst Kitty Kelley biographies and
There Goes Whatsisname: The memoirs
of Noel Ferrier
. One of my favourites involved a young lass who should probably have known better getting involved with a circus troupe and spending the ensuing one hundred and seventy pages being ravished by midgets and bearded ladies.

Lisa and I were deeply titillated by this, and decided to write an erotic novel of our own. Considering the only significant thing we did outside of school hours was ride the bus, we called it
Sex Bus
. The plot involved a number of hapless commuters boarding without adequate fare or concession card and having to pay their way with sexual favours. Since neither Lisa nor I had been penetrated at that point, most of the sex involved vague descriptions like ‘then he did her up the fanny' and ‘his ralph stood to attention', the latter of which we had directly copied from Judy Blume's
Forever
. We photocopied
Sex Bus
and handed it out to wide-eyed year sevens on the Balwyn line, an act that these days would likely have us arrested for child pornography.
Sex Bus
grew so popular with a particular group of year nine boys we had to run a reprint in the library, which was a huge career achievement at that point.

Lisa's alcoholic specialty was a potent rocket fuel she concocted from ‘anything my parents won't miss from the liquor cabinet'. Since the overwhelming aroma was aniseed there was a fair chance her mother and father weren't huge fans of Sambuca. She would mix and measure with the dexterity of a mad scientist, pouring the final product into a Big Red tomato sauce bottle that I'm fairly certain hadn't been rinsed properly. The end result was something that tasted like a combination of licorice, ketchup, petrol and AIDS. We drank it with gusto.

As a teenager there is no finer way to spend an evening than sitting in a local park taking delicate sips from a tomato sauce bottle and then vomiting into the lap of school heartthrob Stephen Lord, which presumably is why I partook in such activities more often than was healthy. With whispers Lisa and I would steal away from our homes and climb into waiting taxis, picking up helpless boys from Box Hill and Balwyn, Camberwell and Kew. Our lips would be sticky with liqueur. I tapped on more dark bedroom windows than I'd care to remember, swaying unsteadily in the moonlit driveway and waiting for Stephen or Ashley or Harvey or Clinton to slide out, one Stussy-clad leg after the other. There was no sex, not right away, just hours of whirling, gravity-free gloriousness, the freedom that came with another potent sip.

My first real hangover came courtesy of naughty Lisa Jenkins, too. Another night on rocket fuel, some park or other, some party, some hot, strange, illicit kisses with a boy from the rowing squad up against a dirty wall. It was the night before my family was due to go on an overseas trip and I climbed back into my bedroom window with a head full of slosh and the kind of rolling seasickness common to passengers on the Manly ferry. I made it to the bathroom—just—though the toilet itself seemed infuriatingly out of reach, so I simply vomited a lush combination of spaghetti and rocket fuel all over the floor. Mindful that my still sleeping parents weren't to know of my nocturnal activities, I mopped the whole revolting mess up with tissues, emitting pained little sobs throughout. In photographs from that first day of travel I am with my family, sitting at a New Zealand airport, face the colour of asphalt. There is dried spaghetti on my t-shirt. I look, fittingly, like a teenage drunk.

As I grew older I fell in love with a variety of alcoholics, including Joel, who would carry a ‘traveller' at all times in a paper bag. I would open my front door and see him standing there, fresh off the Nicholson Street tram, holding a longneck of beer in one hand and a plastic shopping bag with books and toiletries in it in the other. He looked like a hobo who had just wandered off the street trying to bum loose change. If we went away to the country for the weekend and there was limited access to alcohol, he would panic. On the rare occasions he was sober he couldn't sleep and would just sit at the window and cry quietly, trying not to wake me.