by Fiona Wright
When the couple goes inside to pay for their meal, the boy pulls off his clothes and starts pissing in the middle of the garden.
My friend’s daughter has a pet guinea pig, the colour of caramel, as she likes to describe it, and when I see it for the first time, I’m surprised by how big it is, how solid-looking. The rabbit won’t let me come close, but scurries under furniture the moment it sees me move. I think he’s scared of me because I’m big, I say, and my friend’s daughter looks at me with the full force of her five-year-old disdain: Aunty Fi, you’re actually a little bit small.
Walking across campus I pass a dark-haired woman in a black jumper that says, in cursive script, je suis petite. I want to grab her and say don’t be petite, be grande but then I realise I’m wearing a t-shirt that I bought in Cotton On Kids.
A sign in a shop window on King Street: PLEASE MANAGE YOUR CHILDREN.
I’m taking part in a clinical trial run by my university, and in a strange and awful coincidence, held in the very room that used to be my office; when I worked here, I was at my sickest, etiolated and emaciated and sucking back bottles of Diet Pepsi as I tried and failed to concentrate on the page-proofs spread across my desk. One of the women in the group, soft-skinned and incredibly young, begins crying, I’m a fat person and I can’t help it. I’m a fat person, a disgusting fat person and my arms, my stomach, everything about my body is wrong. She is beautiful, with long lashes, chocolatey eyes and two-toned outfits that always match exactly, and she is gentle and generous and kind (she says things like, there are so many hectic things that happen in your life, and, it just kills me). Something like this always happens, has happened always, in all of the groups I’ve attended. I’ve never thought that I was ugly, I know I cannot understand.
Later, another woman, older, and visibly gaunt, tells a story about walking through a shopping centre in her cowboy boots, the boots that always make her feel sexy, and then catching a glimpse of herself in a shop window. I looked like a grasshopper in wafflestompers, she says.
I drive to Parramatta to tutor journalism students on a morning when my ribs feel like they’re knitting together inside my chest and I cannot figure out why I feel this pressurised. I start my second tutorial fifteen minutes late because I’m hit with a sudden fist of panic and have to lock myself in a toilet cubicle, sitting on the folded-down toilet lid with my knees tucked up and my hands at the base of my throat, forcing myself to breathe. This breathlessness, this panic, happens three more times this day and cumulatively I’m left exhausted and shaky and furtively wide-eyed.
I force myself to read at a poetry launch that night, even though I know that if I were physically this sick I would let myself stay home. I don’t talk much before the proceedings and I’m the last person to read; afterwards, someone from the audience asks me to sign his copy of the journal being launched and says, you are a sparkler, and I smile and thank him; another man approaches and says, I’ve come here from Slovenia, Slovenia is the only country in the world with L-O-V-E in it, and I smile again because I am a woman and I still think I should be nice.
I walk home in the dark, with my whole body taut and twanging, and when I lie down on my bed I realise I’ve been scratching my left hand, without noticing, the whole way. I’ve torn the skin, though it’s not bleeding, and I’m terrified. I’ve never done this before.
My aunt keeps offering me old tupperware and glass platters from my grandmother’s house, saying, it’s retro, it’s very retro. I’m helping, although not well, pack up the house a few weeks after her death, her good death, swift and surrounded by family; I feel superfluous, but know I’m needed, somehow, for this ritual. The wardrobes and cupboards of my grandparents’ house are stacked meticulously with unused crockery and gadgetry, all of it still packed within its boxes. My aunt offers me a vertical grill, a thing I didn’t even know existed; she says, it’s like a toaster for your meat. Why anyone would toast a steak is well beyond my comprehension.
One of Alex’s friends tries to goad me into having a tequila shot on Saturday night, after a show at the Enmore Theatre. I have a rule, I say, I am too short to shoot. His response is to suggest we do it proportionally – to figure out equivalents based on body weight – and we calculate that he is just under four times my size. I’m still not interested, so he escalates – if I have two shots, he’ll have eight, proportionally. Something in me is excited by this idea, thrilled, really, but Alex eyes me sideways with his better judgement and his friend is drunk enough already to be easily distracted, so we slip away before he can remember his genuinely terrible idea.
I wash some of my canvas tote bags, because they’re grubby at the bottom, flecked with broken-off nubs of broccoli and papery slivers of onion skin. They wrinkle as they dry, despite the care I took in stretching them as I pegged them out along the line. I want to iron them, but I don’t want to be the kind of woman who irons tote bags.
Alex lives directly opposite a primary school, on one of the old main roads that winds through the inner west. Some mornings, when I stay there and we sleep late, I wake to the sound of the school bell, which is not a bell, but a piercing electronic alarm that sounds like a fire siren. Some mornings, this is followed by an announcement over the loudspeaker; and one morning, the announcement crackles, Fiona, come to the principal’s office, Fiona, to the principal’s office, I bolt upright straight from sleep with my heart squeezing in my throat.
The scratches on my hand keep happening, I know I must be making them but never notice until the red welts appear there; they harden into thin, yellow scabs that, ironically, itch like crazy as they heal. Alex takes my right hand during the night one night and pulls it towards him, away from where I had been scraping at my skin. The next day I visit a cheap manicurist on King Street inexplicably called USA Nails. I feel guilty, but I ask the woman who attends to me to cut my nails down to the quick and file them smooth, and I’m thrilled this time to have outsmarted my own mind. When my best friend Laura asks about the damage on my hand a few days later, I tell her I’ve been gardening but can’t decide if she believes me.
I need to vacuum my room but I hate the noise the vacuum cleaner makes. I read once that sensitivity to loud noises is common in the undernourished, and I believe it: I threw out my electric toothbrush because it was too noisy in my skull, have a friend from treatment who wears earphones in the gym, not to play music, but to cancel out the noise from her surrounds. One day, I say to my housemate, someone will invent a vacuum cleaner that doesn’t suck, and it takes me several seconds to realise why he’s laughing so wholeheartedly.
I lead a writing workshop early one Saturday, and walk to the venue, tucked away behind Circular Quay, all the way from Newtown. I love walking like this, especially on mornings like this, bitingly chill but warm in the sun, even as I know my body can’t afford the hour-long exercise. There are so few people out that it seems like the city is still and new and mine alone and I feel my muscles working, each alive. When I arrive at the building, the coordinator goes to shake my hand and I say my hands are cold as death, I shouldn’t touch you. She laughs and says, I’m tough, try me, and so I do and she leaps back and hisses, Jesus Christ, you weren’t kidding, were you?
I ask the group to write about a memory and the place where it occurred; afterwards, one of the participants asks how many people wrote about something painful, and every member of the group raises a hand. I say I think it’s harder, sometimes, to write about the things that make us happy, that joy is so large and expansive an emotion that it’s often more difficult to confront or attempt to contain. Later, as I’m walking back along the city’s spine, I wonder precisely what kind of person it is who is afraid of the largeness of joy.
A few weeks later, I’m sitting in the same café where I met with my newly single friend – and a man who looks uncannily like him, just older, and a bit scragglier, sits at the next table with his pig-tailed daughter. I think she must be four or five – she’s in her school uniform, but the shorts a
re so long on her, the backpack so comically large that she looks like she’s playing dress-ups, the way most kindergarteners do. She shows me a patch on her inner elbow where she’d had a needle, explains that her bravery levels have hit this high, gesturing at the middle of her chest. With the next needle, she explains, her bravery levels will be as high as her neck, and then her nose, and then she’ll almost be full up. I act suitably impressed, and she runs back to her table to stir marshmallows into her hot chocolate and chatter away with her father, who even shares some mannerisms – a raised eyebrow when he smiles, a way of pushing his glasses back up his nose – with my friend. I can’t look away from this, the way this man and girl are so intently enclosed in their own world, their self-sufficient joy. It’s only later that I wonder what might make someone so small need so many injections, and this hits me in the stomach, hard.
I run into my friend Hugh in the tearoom at uni; he shuffles over to the couch I’m sitting on and groans as he bends to join me. He says he has herniated a disc in his spine, that he did it lifting weights, and I can’t help but laugh – Hugh’s research is about masculinity, and its continual slippages between toughness and shame; I tell him he has an auto-ethnographic injury and we both chuckle at how clever we are. Hugh says it only hurts when he walks or drives or does anything but sit still and I’m struck, suddenly, about how poorly I would cope with such restriction, how important to me movement, any movement, is – how I walk in order to think and decompress and hinge myself, how many problems in my writing, too, unravel as I move. I walk too much for somebody so prone to losing weight. I walk when I am anxious, I walk when it would be easier to catch a bus or train. It’s not helping, my doctors all say. Except it is.
I’m writing at my desk one morning, and it’s one of those times that the process, as it so rarely does, feels joyous and easy, as if the right words are exactly where I need them for a change. My window faces the street – in every house I’ve lived in I’ve set up my desk to do this, so I can watch the people walking past, the light shifting, across the day. Two young men in bright green shirts walk to my door, and when I don’t immediately respond to the doorbell, one of them waves at me through the window, a big-toothed smile on his face. I open the door, and they’re selling subscriptions to a meal delivery service, one that sends you the ingredients to cook your own healthy, varied and convenient dinners – everything but the chef! one of them says. I tell them I’m not interested, and he asks why, and because he has interrupted my writing and because I’m not feeling particularly well this day, I give him the full list of foods that I cannot and otherwise will not eat and I don’t think either young man was especially prepared to hear it.
I walk past a mannequin in a shop window, headless, dressed in a jumper that says BAD NERD. I consider buying it, but I’m not sure if I’m a bad nerd or a good nerd or another kind of nerd entirely.
A friend has birthday drinks at a pub in Marrickville opposite a park, mostly because it’s so dog-friendly that it has a separate, weekly members’ draw for dogs (it’s a gimmick, but I love it) and in the hour that precedes it, the back courtyard fills with animals and their owners, and its how I wish that every public space could be. I go to the bar, and as I’m ordering a man slides in beside me, grinning; he says, I’m so glad I came this far west, hey, the city is dead these days. I tell him this place is significantly easterly from the one from which I come and, unlistening, he says, you know what I love about it here? I love that you can sneak outside and do some coke and no-one gives a fuck, hey. It’s 3:30, on a Sunday afternoon.
I’m sick in a café one morning, it comes on quickly, and I leap out of my seat and to the bathroom without any warning. I’m rattled, because this happened the night before too, and I can’t help but get scared when I throw up sequentially, I know I’ll feel it in my body, a haziness, later in the day. When I’m back at the table, Alex slides around to sit beside me and squeezes my shoulder as I explain that I’m afraid. When I get back home, he texts me, I WISH I KNEW MORE WAYS TO HELP YOU THROUGH THIS and this kindness makes me cry. I’m still so unprepared for kindness. Still unbelieving.
BACK TO CRONULLA
On the first properly cold day of winter last year I went back to Cronulla – an hour’s drive from where I now live, thirty minutes from my family home. It took me a while to remember how long it had been since I was last here, but I realised, eventually, that it was when my sister-in-law had a birthday lunch at a restaurant next to North Cronulla beach, when she’d been almost unbearably pregnant with my eldest, now seven-year-old, niece. She’d had a difficult pregnancy, with morning sickness that lasted the full nine months, and I remember the two of us getting very excited, towards the end, during a conversation in which we listed foods that were good to throw up – bananas, ice-cream, noodles – and those that were awful – curries, sourdough, kale, squid. Her body was suddenly acting in the way that mine had been, by that stage, for seven or eight years, although for much more common, easily understood, and temporary reasons. (You’re a pair of sickos, my brother had said.) There was a thin rain slicing from a low sky, and the huge palms that line Gerrale Street were sheened and glossy in the wet. I met my family in the RSL, which is perched on the crest of a hill and built almost entirely out of windows, looking out over the sea. It was even longer since I’d been inside this building: I used to visit in my early twenties, when the place had swirling multi-coloured carpet and served fluorescent-green cocktails in bulbous glasses called Stoinkas, derived from the local slang – let’s get stoinkered, ay? – as well as the inevitable Sex on the Beach. My friends and I would knock them back until the sun set, then walk up to the main street, along roads that, broadly curving, followed the line of the ocean so that we never really lost sight of the beach or the clusters of teenagers scattered across it, drinking out of paper bags, stumbling and letting out sharp bursts of laughter, even though it was barely 6 p.m. In the plaza we’d order pizzas that I wouldn’t eat and Smirnoff Ices that I’d drink instead. We’d eventually fall asleep on the lounge room floor of someone’s parents’ house in Woolooware or Sans Souci. The RSL has been renovated since – it now has dark wooden beams and pale cane chairs, craft beers and rosé behind the bar. As my family and I left, we passed my primary school music teacher signing in by the door.
My brother had booked a lunch in an Italian restaurant on the beach to celebrate our parents’ wedding anniversary, their fortieth. In the weeks beforehand, he had explained the choice of restaurant to me: it’s a place he had been to recently, with two of his friends, who told him that food is their hobby – they travel, interstate and overseas, especially to eat at famous restaurants, in the same way that skiers might travel to Switzerland or Japan to try out famous snowfields, or a film buff might travel to LA – and I love this idea, the joy in it. They’d had a lovely meal, my brother explained, and it had all been share plates, which generally does make it easier for me, as I’m not faced with a huge meal on a huge plate, all of my own. When we arrived there, we couldn’t decide on which dishes to order, so left the selection to the restaurant staff – and I did my best to stay calm as course after course of beautifully plated dishes came our way.
There was a plate of bresaola, salami and pickles, a tartare, a creamy burrata and tomato dish. A huge plate of gnocchi in a truffled sauce, rigatoni with a ragu that fell to pieces on the fork. An enormous veal schnitzel, almost twice as wide as I am, then two whole baked snappers, their eyes creepily opaque, tiny teeth clenched. The pasta was handmade, the gnocchi softer and fluffier than any I’d eaten before. It was beautiful food, truly and terribly wonderful – because for once I actually felt like I was missing out. I was cautious with my meal, aware that any of these dishes might make me throw up, and eventually something did. I left the three-hour-long lunch feeling hungry, and wound tight with anxiety and disappointment. My oldest niece, bored at one point with the meal, had asked her mother, why are we eating so much food for lunch? and all the adults had chuckled, ou
t of the mouths of babes! But oh, I wanted to say, I know exactly what you mean.
I drove my parents back to Menai, before I continued on to the inner west, and by the time I hit the motorway I was in tears. It was exhaustion, it was the unfairness of my illness, it was irrational and I knew that, especially as I normally don’t get rattled like this anymore. I’m normally able to shrug off my discomfort, to flush away the fact of my illness alongside its material evidence. It wasn’t until a few days later that I realised exactly what it was that felt so awful and irreconcilable to me that day: not only had it been five years since I had last been in Cronulla, but it had been four years, almost exactly, since I had last eaten in an Italian restaurant – for my mother’s sixtieth birthday – and it hadn’t gotten easier at all.
And at the same time, in the intervening time, so much had changed outside of me. Cronulla was physically different, the RSL unrecognisable from the image of it I still carried within me, a high-end restaurant suddenly perched where the Hog’s Breath Café used to be, and serving handmade pasta, raw steak, truffles. I felt like I’d Rip-van-Winkled through what I’d been hearing about, vaguely, as ‘Australia’s food revolution’, or ‘the MasterChef effect’ on our vast and sprawling suburbs, but also that I’d looked away as a place, so important to my childhood and adolescence, had grown and changed, as all places inevitably do. Cronulla had become glossier, denser with apartment blocks and units – the suburb somehow, I realised, more urbane. I think we measure, in part and often unconsciously, urbanity through food, through the spread of café culture and night-time dining, of cuisines inspired by, but not too mundanely faithful to, cosmopolitan influences, the timely uptake of fashionable ingredients and fit-outs. (This kind of eating Ghassan Hage has referred to as ‘multiculturalism without migrants’, although, writing in 1997, he sited it in Newtown, where I now live, rather than in these outer suburbs.)