You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead (4 page)

I was over it. And aside from that, more than three visits with prostitutes probably qualifies you as a bona fide pervert and while I may be many things I'm pretty certain I'm not one. I just have a curiosity about human beings, my world, and musical theatre as a genre, and I'm fully determined the latter won't be getting me into any further trouble.

Hi Matty

Long time no anything. I see from your blog that you're overseas and playing music – I hope it's proving a fulfilling and creative experience.

This may seem a bit of a left-of-field email but I'll just plunge on regardless. I don't even know if this is still your address, so forgive me if I'm shouting into the ether.

I am writing a book at the moment, of autobiographical short stories. Given the fairly heady years we spent together, you will likely appear in a couple. I understand the Meredith story I wrote for The Age was fairly confronting for you, so I wanted to not only give you a heads-up well in advance, but also to give you the chance to respond to the pieces. I'm happy to print those responses and any exchanges we may have regarding potentially diverse rememberings of shared encounters. This may sit oddly with you, but I'm hoping that as a writer you appreciate the process. I know that we see the past through different eyes, but believe we both have a right to tell it in our own way.

Please don't fear that the pieces will be some sort of character assassination, either – for some reason I always end up as the worst behaved person in my stories.

Safe travels
Marieke

No problemo, ma'am. If I have a chance to respond, that'd be ace biscuits.

It's nice to hear from you, lovely. Let me know what you need and when.

Travelling and playing music is so beautiful I can't give it justice. I've discovered a society of gypsies, and I finally feel at home.

Portland, OR, is like a larger Daylesford. You'd seriously love it.

Okeypoke. Just stay in touch and let me know. I understand a lot more now. Last year's piece came at a particularly bad time for me. Now, like you, I am not afraid.

Hope you're all good, missb.

Oh, and I'm still a rude punner, so . . . Heady Years. hehe.

Okbye
x

Okay then, deep breaths . . .

I have no idea what you're going to make of this. I hope you find the funny bits funny, at the very least. As faintly absurd as this time was in our lives, there is something nice about looking back on it so fondly.

As previously stated, very open to your thoughts.

Enjoy your gypsy roamings.

m.

Hey ma'am, I'm sitting in

I'm sitting in a kitchen in Seattle. It's real strange here. Coldhearted. People don't talk to each other. I try and grin cheekily on the street, but I never know if I'm going to get stabbed or bought a coffee. Anyway. It's a funny place to read about all this.

I wasn't sure what you were going to write about. And, I guess, this may be the one time I see what our relationship meant to you. So, in a way, in a long, distant, way – as you might write – it saddens me. I was never a fist-fightin', whore-fuckin' troublemaker. I was in love at the time. I fed off and fed the energy that came out of the girl I fell madly, head over heels in love with. The girl that I naively thought felt the same. But that's okay. Please don't think this paragraph is written with anything other than a wistful sigh. There is no pain, anger or hurt. Just my truth.

I liked your piece. Factually, ah, bendy, but I liked it. And I see through your eyes in it. That's what I meant about the love thing. I never saw myself as trouble. I saw myself as devoted, and willing to try, though drink and hurt I did along the way. It's all good now. I wish I was more writey tonight, but I'm so head spun by being on a tour when I don't even really play music . . .

I'm so Bukowski every time you write of me. I'm going to take that as a compliment. And, I don't think anyone can read between the lines o' my blog. Ask Dave the Scot. I just may not be the person you remember. Or the person you think I am. That's a real shame to me. That you don't know me at all.

Anyways, thanks for asking and sharing. I have no problem whatsoever with this trip you're on. Do as you do. Write as you write. My only criticism, as a writer, would be, if you're going to share – then don't hold back. Because, it seems you want to share Marieke the caricature, when the soul of the Marieke that I knew, in dark, hard times, well, she was a real person. And a lovely one at that.

Much love, missb. Hope you find what it is you're looking for.

Matty x

The write stuff

In March 2010 my friend Michaela and I started a monthly literary salon called Women of Letters. It would be, we claimed grandly, ‘an homage to the lost art of letter-writing' (we knew it was correct to use the form ‘an' before a word starting with a silent ‘h' even though doing so in public usually resulted in being left alone at the bar) and bring together five women from various fields who would each pen and read aloud a letter about a topic of our choosing. During a twenty-minute interval, we would encourage our audience to write letters of their own to whomsoever they chose. We would scatter the venue with aerogrammes, postcards, pens, paper and envelopes. We would have a big wooden postbox. And we would provide real, honest-to-god stamps, so that attendees could actually post their letters and someone, somewhere would one day in the near future receive them in the mail.

Michaela and I debated a great deal over how the letter-writing part of the afternoon would work.

‘People get embarrassed about audience participation,' I pointed out. ‘They'll think we're stupid.'

We workshopped ways to get the crowd excited about the idea of not talking to their friends for twenty minutes and writing a cheery little note about where they were and what they'd been up to instead. It would be a hard sell. People liked to chat at intervals. They liked to lean back in their chair and exhale languidly and pick apart everything that had occurred in the first half of the show. They certainly wouldn't want to sit still and write letters.

‘We need to try it regardless,' replied my bespectacled conspirator, ‘and just see what happens.'

Against all odds it worked, and we have been dumb-lucky enough to spend our hobby time putting on regular events up and down the east coast of the country. These days the interval is almost my favourite part of the day, as our five readers file from the stage to the soundtrack of '60s pop records and I look out over the room and see three hundred or so heads bent over, focused on scribbling missives to faraway friends. More often than not I go home at day's end slightly drunk and clumsily upend the wooden postbox over my living room floor, spilling out all the words and secrets and enclosed notes in a dizzy jumble. I look at them for a long time and think about who might be receiving them and how they may shape a stranger's morning in some significant fashion. On Mondays I post them, stuffing everything into the big red postbox on Sydney Road in happy fistfuls.

That we have somehow created a position for ourselves as conduit, a bridge between a shy audience member and their mother, or ex-lover, or erstwhile primary school teacher (‘Dear Mrs Abercrombie, I hope you don't mind but I found your postal address on my iPhone . . .') is a wonderful feeling. It's doubtful we'll be receiving knighthoods from Australia Post but it's difficult not to feel as though you're part of something very special when you consider that at least one hundred people who may not have otherwise received a personal letter in their letterbox will now be doing so just because Michaela and I needed a public place to get drunk on a Sunday afternoon.

Perhaps it's because I was conceived back in the day when my father's only job was being a mascot for Australia Post airmail, but I love getting letters. Doesn't everybody? Saying you like receiving personal letters in the post is like stating that you rather enjoy breathing, or having ears on either side of your head: it's taken as a given, and not to be used as a quirky character trait to lure in members of the opposite sex on dating sites. Even seeing the spidery, in-my-day-we-sent-letters-via-donkey-and-wolfpack handwriting of an elderly relative can send a cheap frisson when indulging in a dressing-gowned visit to the front gate.

Because they do, letters, don't they? They exist in a tangible, rich way that their cheap, instant-gratification-grasping distant cousin emails can only dream of. There are too many vague, unfulfilled promises in emails, too much that passes us by in a manic rush of deleting and copying and pasting and BCC-ing. A letter is a long and leisurely afternoon lying naked on a picnic rug eating a Flake.

I once held a passionate discourse with a feline-eyed slice of wonderful via email. Outside of a brief and not unexciting handholding session in a country carpark, that was about as far as our romance progressed. Everything else was charted in breathless late-night paragraphs, pressing ‘send' and then waiting agonising hours for a response. I didn't have a mobile phone back then so we didn't text. He was in a relationship so I wasn't able to write postcards. Had I not printed out our correspondence in a tearful burst of sentimentality it all would have disappeared in the great hard-drive crash of 2004 and I would only have ever recalled his prose in vague fragments. And what a pity it would have been, to lose that sense of urgent subtext and collection of our beautiful, shared, misspent memory.

Letters make you wait. Letters make you patient. You can hold a letter in your hand, kiss it, inhale the tobacco aroma of its author. You can keep it in a shoebox. You can cry over it and smear the text with your salty emoting.

In the late 1990s, I went on what could only be called a letter-writing binge. I wrote to everybody. I wrote to Joan Kirner and Jeff Kennett and John Cain. I wrote a love letter to the now sadly deceased ABC journalist Paul Lyneham (who penned a handwritten response which included the rather bemused: ‘most viewers only write to complain so supportive comments like yours are highly valued'). I wrote to Bill Bryson and David Sedaris and Michael J Fox. I wrote hate mail to Aden Ridgeway and those three other Australian Democrat jerkoffs when they banded together and bloodlessly shunted the bright, brilliant Senator Natasha Stott Despoja. Some of the people I wrote to responded. Some didn't. A small handful very likely called the authorities who to this day I expect still have me on file.

I printed and kept these letters in a plastic ringbinder where they sat for over ten years. When during an idle moment Michaela asked me to think about topics for future Women of Letters events I remembered this folder and dug it out. I had a sense that back then I'd been a passionate, engaged, optimistic correspondent—a young freedom fighter, ready to bring forth change on a worldwide level. What I didn't understand was that I'd been a super pest, bordering on mildly autistic, with the frightening self-confidence of a heavily medicated Charlie Sheen. (‘I am on a drug, it's called Charlie Sheen. It's not available because if you try it once you will die, your face will melt off and your children will weep over your exploded body.')

15.7.1998

Dear Sir or Madam,
I am writing with regards to a recent White Wings commercial
involving two little girls sitting on a bench at school comparing
play lunches.

The original commercial involved one rather limp blonde
child singing the praises of her saccharine mother's view towards
cake products (‘My mother says this . . . my mother thinks
that . . .' etc), while our feisty heroine in pigtails rolls her eyes
before delivering the knock-out punchline . . . ‘So does mine—
but she's got a life.' . . .

Yes, this is really what it looks like at first glance: a letter to White Wings about one of their television advertisements. If you presumed these sorts of letters were written by tremblingly furious pensioners who only paused their lengthy diatribes to spoon a modest amount of cat food into their spit-flecked mouth, think again.

. . .This was such a great commercial, filled with sassiness and
attitude.Yet the company recently seems to have chickened
out, cutting the final line, leaving the two little saps agreeing
smilingly as they tuck into their White Wings cakes . . .

Cue incandescent rage.

. . . Why have you done this? You have taken all the life out of
your advertisement with one cut. Whoever the big cheese with
cold feet is, they should have their head examined . . .