The Overthinkers

by Lisa Portolan

  I found Maddison’s number, would I text her? Could I? It was reckless. But then she had made a giant admission that afternoon. She had let me see into her realness.

  It was so empty in there. Like space, space, space, left ventricle.

  It felt nice. I could climb in there ... and it would be quiet.

  Fuck that. I texted her:

  I miss you. Can I come around?

  It was true.

  I waited a moment. My heart pounding in my chest. So fast. No response.

  I sat down for a second on the lounge and inspected the egg-like bruise which was starting to form on my leg.

  How long did I need to wait? How long?

  It’d been long enough.

  I snatched up the phone and dialled Dan’s number. Three rings and the bitch answered.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him.

  “Nothing.”

  “Do you want to do nothing together?”

  Long pause, like he was considering his options. He didn’t like being around me, I knew that much. But he knew I had stuff on me.

  I didn’t like being around him either.

  “Fine,” he sighed.

  I just didn’t want to be alone.

  I hung up, ran the palm of my hand over my head and left.

  As I closed the door behind me, I was conscious I was leaving my mobile behind on the couch.

  She wouldn’t answer me.

  It was easier to ignore that way.

  “I didn’t think you’d make it,” he said and William Street hummed in the background. I sipped some water.

  I smiled even though I was nervous. We were sitting on his balcony overlooking the Coke sign. I was still reeling from the Luca situation – naturally instead of processing my emotions, I turned away to the next shiny thing.

  Tonight’s man’s name escaped my thoughts – but I could remember he was a public servant, and he had represented Australia in the Olympics for archery. His pics caught my eyes straight away online. Light brown eyes, full face, large rugby build and brilliant white smile. I couldn’t believe he responded let alone invited me over, and that I was going to hook-up with an Olympian.

  I was expecting to see a handsome full face, but at his door I was greeted by someone who was well passed his prime. His face had hollowed out, and his skin had thinned from too much time in the sun. His teeth had yellowed, his large frame was disproportionately puffy on top, but gave way to rod-like sticks for legs. It was clear that years of drugs were wearing him down, and I was still deciding whether or not I wanted to go down this path.

  Public servant guy was pouring drinks for us. “Do you want a puff now?”

  I could hear the anticipation in his voice.

  “I’d love another water.”

  “Oh, no worries.” He was disappointed, but I wanted to stall.

  I had done other drugs before, various poisons had gone into my body. But the worst stories I had heard from friends were of ice. I heard stories of people losing themselves chasing a euphoria that they would never feel again. Hamish flitted through my mind.

  Online public servant man said he was keen for puff play, and I lied and said so was I, so that I could spend time with at least someone. Perhaps that’s why he had chatted to me in the first place.

  But I regretted that chat, and now indecisiveness was setting in. Should I? Shouldn’t I?

  It beat spending another night at home alone thinking about ways I could throw myself down a set of stairs, or step in front of a bus. Hanging out with a mildly attractive guy (if you looked at him from the right angle, with the right lighting) and potentially smoking a pipe didn’t seem so bad.

  Luckily the public servant guy had a Doberman, which trotted over to me and begged for attention. I wouldn’t mind just hanging out with the dog, he was affectionate and had kind eyes – I scratched his head. Fuck! How was I going to get myself out of this situation!

  Public servant man sat down next to me. He pulled out his charred pipe, set it down on the table, and gently filled it with small crystals before heating it up.

  “How often do you do this?” I asked.

  “Not too often, maybe once a fortnight.”

  “Does it feel good?”

  “Why do you think I do it?” he smiled before bringing the end of the pipe to his mouth, and taking a big breath in.

  He leant back and exhaled out. He offered it to me and I pushed it back.

  “You go,” as I sat back.

  “I thought you said you were keen?”

  “I am, just not right now.”

  “Come here.”

  He rubbed his hand on my shoulder, and brought me in to hug. It felt warm, comforting to be encased in his arms.

  I had been in the Luca down-hill spiral for a while now. That morning when I had stormed out of his home, I’d told him not to contact me, but I hadn’t actually expected that he wouldn’t contact me. Surely, he should have sent me a series of snivelling or apologetic messages? Surely, he would try to get me back?

  But he hadn’t.

  Not a single word. To the point where I had started to think my phone wasn’t working. Bad service in the terrace in Paddington? Had I paid my last phone bill? Was there something actually wrong with my mobile’s hardware? I had made Benji call me ... oh, approximately 50 times to check it was all still working.

  And it was – all still working. Against my better judgement, instead of dealing with my shit, I defaulted to my usual habit of replacing one bad situation with another. It may not be the best decision, but I had someone keeping me company, I felt wanted. That was good enough.

  “I’ve got some G in the living room if you want to start with that?” Public servant guy continued.

  It still made me a bit uncomfortable, that he was so insistent.

  “I quite like the canoodling at the moment,” I said.

  He chuckled, and pulled me in again. We stayed there longer, kissing, hugging, rubbing. He took another puff, and I could see his hold on reality slip further out of his mind. He looked relieved.

  I had no idea what public servant guy had going on in his life, but who was I to judge how he dealt with it? I wondered what Luca was doing tonight, was he with someone else? Luca, Luca, Luca. I wanted to stop thinking about him, I wanted him out. How long had he been sleeping with other guys? How much had he lied to me? Where did it all go wrong? What did I do wrong? Fuck this.

  The public servant man was blissed out, I shook him slightly until he opened his eyes. He smiled at me, his eyes weren’t focussed, and his pupils had dilated to change his eyes from golden brown to black.

  “Where’s the G?”

  He pointed to his coffee table.

  I pushed the food around on my plate. Haphazardly severing pieces of the steak, and then sending them on a direction. Usually to the very edge. This was a trick I’d learnt over time. If you ordered food and went through the motions – cutting pieces, adding condiments, and moving things around, nobody really noticed that you weren’t eating. Nobody cared enough. Usually they had gone through a couple of glasses of vino, and were in a parallel universe – which just involved themselves.

  This was no exception.

  Mum sat across from me, slashing the air with her ceramic teeth as she laughed raucously, a glass of chardonnay clutched in her hand. She had a new boyfriend, his name was Steve, and he owned the local chicken shop. Mum had insisted that she introduce me to him. She always did this with new boyfriends. I wasn’t sure why. But I was quite certain it wasn’t because she was seeking my approval, or trying to create a “family.” I guessed that it was likely a commitment milestone of sorts, if they met the daughter, they were “serious.”

  They weren’t “serious.” I had met hundreds of Steves. Maybe not hundreds, but close. Like I said, Mum was always in the throes of a new relationship and they didn’t last for long.

  They tended to all be cut from the same cloth. The Steves. Tradesmen, or small business owners, sometimes
technicians, they weren’t exactly “university educated” folk, and they were partial to making the odd racial or sexist faux pas. They kind of all looked the same too – white, a little rubicund in the face, not overly ripped but usually in reasonable shape, and wearing “sensible” enough clothes. Jeans and a shirt – or jeans and a t-shirt. Mum was a bogan, but she trended towards upper-class-bogan, and so were the men she dated.

  They had been talking about the cruise they were planning on taking next year to Noumea, when Mum had asked if Noumea was in Australia. They had both laughed like this was hilarious. Steve had said she wasn’t particularly clever, and no, Noumea was not in Australia, and then they had laughed again. She’d said that she would need to check her passport, because she probably needed a new one. Followed by more laughter.

  Then Steve had noticed that I wasn’t laughing and he’d chewed a couple of times with a slightly startled expression like he was unsure as to how I had resisted his comic charm.

  “Do you drive?” He’d suddenly asked me – quite out of the blue.

  “No,” I responded.

  Mum looked at me expectantly – like she wanted to make sure that I would impress Steve. She looked anxious. She knew I wouldn’t, nor would I try.

  “Really?!” He seemed utterly shocked, like I’d revealed that I was an astronaut with a planned mission to the moon.

  I nodded, and continued pushing the food around.

  “When I was your age – that’s all I wanted. To drive around in my own car.”

  I bit back my responses in the vein of, way to dream big, and offered him a tight-lipped smile instead.

  “I live close to the city, so I don’t need to. I get around in Ubers or the bus,” I said instead.

  “How did you get here tonight?” He was utterly perplexed by my nonchalance in relation to the driving question – but indeed how had I gotten there tonight? How had I hot-footed it to the Janali RSL that night for dinner with my mum, and her new squeeze?

  “I caught the train,” I supplied. Two trains to be exact.

  He looked like he had eaten something sour.

  “Nup!” He suddenly declared, like this was not at all right. “You need to get yourself a car!”

  Mum looked disturbed, like she knew that the conversation was heading south. I had seen this expression many times before. She didn’t want me to stuff things up for her. My ways were strange to her and to people like her. Actually, they might be strange to a lot of people.

  “She’s very smart and creative – this one is. She’s off at university studying,” Mum supplied. Christ, she had these statements on rote – ready to be served out like the steak and three veg at this establishment.

  “Well ... You know what I think,” Steve began, looking down at his plate, which no longer had any food residue – unlike mine. You know, I didn’t care what Steve thought, but I knew I was going to find out nonetheless. “I think the school of life is the most important place for learning. Leave her at some university for too long and she’ll turn into ... into ...” He searched for the word, beady eyes opened wide, as though he might discern it from a distance.

  “A radical? A feminist?” I provided instead. Like those were my problems. I felt Mum’s heel dig into my foot under the table, but I avoided her furious gaze.

  “Exactly! A feminist – one of those girls that won’t change their name when they get married!” He flung his hand in the air, like this was the worst thing imaginable.

  I didn’t respond, just continued pushing that food around.

  “Of course she will!” Mum supplied with a flourish. Like evidence of any sort of radical feminism had to be dealt with immediately and vanquished. The thing was, I was probably all of those things, radical and a feminist. But Steve and Mum didn’t have to worry about me changing (or not changing) my name when I got married, because I would never get married. I’d had enough evidence that men were fairly ridiculous, sometimes benign, and sometimes not-benign at all. I’d also had enough evidence that women who searched for men to love, were also fairly ridiculous, sometimes benign, and sometimes not-benign as well.

  I stared at my Mum’s French polished nails now. A talisman of sorts. Of my youth. Of not fitting in – anywhere. Of wanting to get out. It was strange – when I was in this place, where I’d grown up, I felt it clawing me back. Like if I spent another hour here, I’d run out and have acrylic nails fashioned, and a hair rug like my mother’s – or accept someone’s subservient and often vicious attempts at affection. It brought me back to shame.

  I sat back now, and smiled tight lipped again. They were waiting for me to say something – but I didn’t say a word. Just that I was finished when the waitress collected my dish, and that I should head home soon, and that it was lovely to meet Steve.

  Mum seemed relieved that I had been dull and colourless that evening. That my only omission had been the “radical feminist” suggestion. She said that I might want to join them in Noumea next year, although I knew she would hate that, and that the relationship wouldn’t last until the Noumea trip.

  She didn’t say that she thought I looked thin. She didn’t ask me anything really, at all.

  She kissed me on the cheek with her signature coral lipstick from Lancome and sent me on my way towards the train station.

  Later, standing at Jannali train station alongside some junkie in the darkness – I scrolled through Instagram images vapidly. Leo was having rosé all day with some twink wearing a Fedora (Who was that even? His standards were starting to plummet.), Hamish was at some party looking rough, and the rest, there they were with their immaculate smiles, and their immaculate fucking lives. I wondered what they would think if I uploaded an image from Jannali trainstation, “Throwing back some cold ones with Mum’s new bf at the RSL,” the caption would read. They probably wouldn’t be surprised. They knew who I was really - a bogan social climber, who wasn’t good enough to make it otherwise.

  I typed in Benji’s handle instead – he never uploaded anything. He didn’t hang out on social desperately like the rest of us who were pretending to be someone. The last image he had uploaded was one with his parents from weeks ago. I’d seen them before in his images. His mum was some celebrity academic who wore linen, and big silver jewellery. She had his eyes. His dad was a news-reader, who wore round glasses, and one of those grins that said, “Do you know who I am?” They were the perfect little family.

  Yep, Benji didn’t really understand dysfunction. Not of the Jannali train-station variety.

  The air smelt of marijuana and despondency.

  I waited for my train. It occurred to me I was always waiting for something. And I didn’t think it was actually going to arrive. I’d be constantly stuck in this state of limbo – unaccepted.

  “Stand tall, keep your core on, and try not to get the arrow on the wall this time, it’s cheaper for me to replace the door.”

  What the fuck?

  The sun was out, god knows what day it was, and I found myself readying myself for battle with a door, already victim to three arrows. The doberman was dangerously close to the firing line – I dropped my weapon out of shock.

  “Why did you do that? You were doing so well!”

  Still dazed, I knelt down to the floor. Also naked. Catching my awkward body in the mirror opposite. I suddenly felt the urge to vomit. But I couldn’t move – my arms were stuck like that, in that freeze frame.

  I had blacked in and out of the night. How long had we been going on for? I searched for my last memory. But it was a jumble up there now in my head, and the anxiety was scrambling the remnants of that evening even further. I snatched brief recollections: the awful taste of burnt rubber, dancing on the balcony, awkward sex ... and then ... and then there was nothing else. But clearly, I had been fully operative that entire time.

  Learning archery.

  I heard him take a picture in the background on his phone, my head swivelled back in that direction. His phone was pointed towards me. The picture w
as of me.

  This was incredibly awkward, and absurd. I had not been in my own head for at least 12 hours, I was off, but now I was back.

  Laid bare for him to see.

  “Can you delete that?

  “It was just a bit of fun!”

  The wave of self-loathing hit hard, this was a new low. How could you let yourself go like this? How embarrassing, how disgusting of you. A tear ran down my face, followed by another and then a stream. Who are you? And what are you doing?

  It kept going for a couple of moments, until I heard public servant man say in the background,

  “Sorry I’ll delete the picture. You should probably go.”

  I’d been sitting out on the balcony smoking, but I was tired of going unobserved. I wanted some company. I wondered if Leo was up. He had been in bed for over a week now. Like he was still getting up to go to the bathroom and have something to eat, but nothing else. He’d been calling in sick at the gym too.

  He wasn’t in a good place.

  Something had happened with the mysterious Luca. The one that I’d never gotten to meet, for whatever reason. The whole affair had been shrouded in some sort of haze of secrecy. Then there had been a wave of self-destruction, and now he had dropped off into darkness. I should do something about it. I should ask him if he is ok – but I found it hard to surface the words. Leo and I rarely had those conversations. You know, the one’s where we were open about our lives. He would confide in me sometimes, but I could tell even those moments were superficial. Surface level. And that served me fine. That was a hateful thing to think, especially of one of your closest friends, but I just couldn’t take on the burden. I couldn’t offer any consolation.

  As I headed into my room I toyed with the idea of texting Benji and asking him if he could help. Maybe Leo had already confided in Benji. But, I couldn’t imagine that being the case. Leo didn’t want to reveal how messed up he was to anyone – and most definitely not to the beautiful and faultless Benji. He would fear his judgment.

  Still it was hard to tell whether an intervention was required here. But who was I to intervene? I needed my own interruption. My own arbitration. Could the broken really help the broken?