Lovesome

by Sally Seltmann

  ‘Oh. What…what happens to you if you have it?’

  ‘You get incredibly bad pain with your period, like I’m talking horrifically bad. Imagine there are knives stabbing into your uterus for days at a time, every month. It’s a relentless, agonising feeling. That’s how it was for me anyway, because I had it really bad.’

  I hardly know anything about the female anatomy, let alone strange-sounding diseases. I’m so intrigued I can’t help but begin to ask one of the many questions that are welling up in my mind. ‘I knew Marilyn Monroe had a miscarriage, but—’

  Lucy abruptly cuts in. ‘But you didn’t know that one of the reasons she could never get to the studio on time was probably because she was lying in her bed in excruciating pain. You didn’t know that, did you, Joni!’

  I am once again in frightened mode. Lucy makes me feel like my lack of knowledge of Marilyn Monroe’s health problems is a crime for which I should be punished.

  ‘Seriously, I used to take a heavy combination of painkillers, and I’d still have no relief. I remember we were in the change rooms at school, getting ready to play a game of football, like…ah, you call it soccer, yeah, round ball?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So my team…we were in the change rooms, and I had such, such bad pain, I was sweating all over.’ Her eyes widen, and her speech quickens. ‘I was trying to stand up to find the teacher to tell her I wasn’t well enough to play, but I couldn’t get up. Then I started hearing all these echoing voices, bouncing back and forth against the tiled walls. Everything went blurry, and then bang!’

  Lucy claps her hands together on the bang, as though we’re sitting around a campfire and she’s delivering the dramatic punchline to a scary story. ‘My head hit the wooden seat, and I was out like a light. I ended up in hospital on morphine, and I thought I was dying.’

  ‘Fuck, that’s so intense.’

  ‘And then it got even worse.’ Lucy looks towards the kitchen, and I imagine she’s probably checking to see if Dave is listening in. He must be busy cleaning away, oblivious to what we’re talking about out here.

  So Lucy continues, turning down the volume. ‘Don’t forget this was me when I was sixteen.’ She moves closer towards me, and lowers her voice even further. ‘I was already sleeping around. Even though it hurt so much when I did it. I mean…I don’t really want to go into that.’

  ‘What…what do you mean—hurt?’

  ‘Your whole insides are screwed, so when you screw, it’s agony.’

  We both smile.

  ‘So do you still have all the pain now? You never—’

  Lucy cuts in sternly. ‘My endometriosis became so bad they had to schedule me in to have an operation so surgeons could remove some of the growths from my body.’

  ‘Growths?’

  ‘Well…’ She takes a deep breath. Have I shared too much personal information with Joni? Should I go on? These are the questions I think she is asking herself. She gazes out the back window and rests her eyes on Tiger-Lily, who’s curled up in the cane chair on the verandah. Then, she decides to go on.

  ‘Small parts of the lining of your uterus end up in other areas of your pelvis, and then they begin to bleed. A lot of the pain you experience is from your organs absorbing that blood. Isn’t that so sad and awful, for any girl. For any woman.’ Lucy adjusts the flower in her hair and runs her fingers under her breasts, as though she’s convincing herself that she’s extremely attractive and sexy, even though she’s had to live through what sounds like a horrifically unsexy time. In convincing herself, she also convinces me. She is stunning. Crazy, but overwhelmingly attractive.

  ‘I thought God was torturing me for being such a rebellious girl,’ she tells me. ‘For sleeping around—skipping class. I became so depressed.’ Lucy begins to turn around all the liquor bottles she’s placed back on the shelf, so the labels face the front. ‘And right before my operation I collapsed again. Maman called the ambulance and I was rushed into emergency. I remember bumping down the cobble-stoned streets of Montmartre in the back of the ambulance, the siren blaring as I drifted in and out of consciousness. Then the doctors discovered that my blood was thick with infection that had originated somewhere in my internal parts.’ She turns to face me, rubbing her hands over her pelvic area, then drops her arms. ‘It had spread throughout my entire body.’

  I move the piles of folded napkins to the side, and start polishing the cutlery. I look up at Lucy. I’m so blown away by the fact that she’s chosen to reveal all these intimate details to me.

  ‘And then came emergency surgery. I was like a sick puppet hanging from a string, out of it on morphine, and God knows what else. They wheeled me into the operating theatre, and I overheard the nurses saying there was a chance they would need to give me a full hysterectomy. Then a tall doctor in a white coat with black hair and silver glasses leaned over my face and said, “J’espère que tu ne comptes pas avoir d’enfants.”’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  Lucy slows down her speech, and translates the words: ‘I hope you’re not planning to have children.’

  She has stopped her cleaning and clearing and is now sitting on the bench, looking solemn. She pours herself some red wine, crosses her legs and holds the glass in her fine fingers. I realise I’m in awe of her. Her beauty, her darkness, her hard edge, and her tragic teenage health problems. I feel so honoured that she has brought me into her world. She’s beginning to feel more like a friend than my boss.

  She takes a sip of her wine, and says with an air of disgust, ‘I cannot get those heartless words out of my head. Of course I’d thought about having children! Of course I hoped to be a mother! When I was little, I’d always look for new babies in my street and I’d approach their mothers, asking them if I could look after their newborn babies. Joni, I adored children so much. It was all I wanted. My own baby.’

  I wasn’t expecting to hear this. Not from Lucy. I had no idea she was the type of woman who longed for children. ‘And…and then what happened?’

  ‘They took out my fucking uterus. And they had to take out both my ovaries as well.’ Lucy sculls her full glass of wine, and pours herself another. ‘You want one?’

  ‘What, a baby?’

  ‘No, a glass of wine.’ She smiles. ‘And a baby. You want one of those?’

  I hardly know how to answer. ‘Yeah, I’ll have a glass.’ I take a deep breath. ‘I…I can’t imagine having babies. I don’t even have a boyfriend. I mean, maybe. Maybe as I get older I’ll think about it. Probably. I can’t really tell, I’m only twenty-one.’

  ‘Oh, I knew I wanted one when I was five,’ Lucy admits, before taking another sip of her wine.

  ‘It must have been so hard for you.’

  ‘Joni, my worst nightmare had come true. I mean, out of all the things that could have gone wrong for me, this was by far the worst I could imagine.’

  She licks her lips, swinging her legs in time to Serge Gainsbourg’s ‘Bonnie and Clyde’.

  ‘I’ve accepted it all now,’ she says, looking at the floor. ‘But…but back then, I slowly started to spiral downwards. After I’d healed from the surgery, I went on to study a bachelor degree in history, but I had to drop out because I fell into a deep depression. I don’t think I had ever really dealt with how traumatic my health situation had been, and I was beginning to feel like life was not worth living if I couldn’t have a baby. Then I started hanging out with this maniac girl, Stephanie. And…I don’t know how it happened, but I ended up on the street, and I joined Stephanie and started working as a stripper in a dodgy club in Pigalle. I was pretty much homeless. Well, for a little while.’

  I don’t know what to say. It’s so much to take in.

  ‘I basically went through menopause when I was nineteen. Can you think of anything worse! A menopausal nineteen-year-old girl who is also pumped up with teenage hormones. I was a fucking mess, Joni. A mess.’

  ‘Why were you going through menopause? My mum’s just started going t
hrough that now.’

  ‘It’s what happens when you get your lady parts ripped out. Well—uterus and ovaries.’

  ‘Man, Lucy, that must have been such a difficult time for you.’

  ‘It was. The doctors said I was one of the youngest girls they’d operated on with endometriosis who had to have a full hysterectomy. It doesn’t usually happen to women until they’re in their twenties or thirties. But lucky me, hey,’ she says, sarcastically.

  ‘And wow, you were a stripper? What was that like?’ I am very drawn to this part of her story. It’s so B-grade movie, so Courtney Love.

  ‘Ah, that was…shall I say, rough going. Kind of fun, but so degrading. I’m so glad I finally cleaned myself up.’

  I pick up my wine with both hands, wrapping my fingers around the glass, resting my elbows on the table.

  ‘A few years later I got the job at the patisserie, and then I met Damian. He was the bright light in my life, I’m telling you. After a few years of him living with me in my apartment, he convinced me to move to Sydney with him. It worked for me, because I felt like settling in Sydney was a good way for me to leave my past behind me, and start anew.’

  I think about what Dave told me about Lucy’s parents both dying in a car accident when they came to visit her in Australia, but I don’t dare bring it up. What a tragic life she’s had! I suddenly feel so sympathetic towards her, excusing all her rude and irrational behaviour.

  ‘Anyway. That’s why Damian left me—because I could not have children.’

  ‘Did he know that before you got married, that you couldn’t get pregnant?’

  ‘That’s the other big mistake I made in my life. I didn’t tell him. I just said to him I was desperate to have a family with him, because I knew how much he wanted kids. He would not have married me had he known I was without a uterus. But I’m a compulsive liar, you know that.’

  That makes me wonder whether she’s lying or telling the truth now. And also, Damian would have eventually found out. What was she thinking?

  ‘And then I told Damian all about it, after we’d been trying for a baby for three years. I’d been pretending I still had my period, telling him it was so light, I hardly bled, and he believed me. That’s also when I found out he’d been having an affair for a long time. Then he walked out on me, and a few months later he was fucking a woman who worked in his office, and surprise, surprise, she got knocked up. Thank god I was already working here. If I didn’t have Harland, I would not have been able to go on.’

  Once again I don’t know what to say. I stand up and move the piles of folded napkins, placing them under the bench. Then Lucy says quietly, ‘I saw you watching us last night.’

  My face heats up, and I can tell I’ve gone bright red. My heart races, and I look down at the floor.

  ‘Dave and I have been together for quite a while now. We didn’t really want to tell any of you because…I don’t know, we thought it could interfere with work stuff.’

  I slowly build up the courage to speak. ‘I was just coming to get my backpack. I left it here last night. I…I didn’t come in because—’

  ‘It’s alright, Joni. You don’t have to explain yourself.’

  ‘What about you kissing Juliet the other night?’

  ‘That was just a bit of fun. And by the way, I’m not thirty-eight. I’m forty-three. Don’t tell anyone.’ She winks, and heads out of the Bar Room into the hallway.

  I sit down on my chair at the table again, leaning my shoulders on the chair back. I slowly exhale. What an amazing amount of information to process. I can’t wait to tell Annabelle all of this.

  13

  When Dave comes into the Bar Room to join us for a knock-off drink, I look at him in an entirely new way. I’m pretty sure he’s in his early twenties, like twenty-two or twenty-three. Actually, I’m certain he’s twenty-three, because he told me at the karaoke night at the Emerald a few months ago.

  Jesus, he’s dating a forty-three-year-old woman! Holy-bmoly! And he probably thinks Lucy’s only thirty-eight, because I clearly remember she told us all that on the same karaoke night. It was right after she’d sung an extraordinary rendition of ‘Like a Virgin’, while oblivious to the fact that I still was one. And after this evening’s confession—the compulsive liar one—I doubt very much that she has told Dave her true age.

  Maybe I’m too hung up on things like this. Does it really matter if your partner is almost twice your age? How weird—going to visit a baby boy in hospital when you’re twenty, thinking, You could be my future husband! Ah dear. Maybe I should start looking at older men? My probability of finding a boyfriend would increase. That would be a plus.

  Suddenly Juliet bursts into the Bar Room, cutting short my contemplation of seeking a boyfriend in his forties. ‘Done!’ she cries out in a high operatic sing-song.

  Weird. I thought she’d left already. Maybe Lucy sent her outside to clean the windows, or tidy up the firewood. Juliet’s unattractive hand with its bitten fingernails reaches for a wine glass on the top shelf. She helps herself to a bottle of sauvignon blanc from the bar fridge and, with a quick pour, fills her glass, splashing wine over the rim. At the same time, Lucy slips into the Bar Room from the hallway, carrying a saucer with a pile of cash on it, which must be from the last couple who were dining in Gatsby.

  ‘Large tip here, ladies,’ she announces. Her make-up is still flawless, her posture perfect. She draws attention to herself without even having to try. I smile at her tenderly, with a newly formed sense of fondness.

  Dave catches me doing this, and gives me a warm grin. I throw him a smile, feeling more at ease with the idea of him and Lucy being a couple. Then I begin to wonder if he heard Lucy’s and my whole conversation. I try to tell him telepathically: Don’t worry, her secrets are safe with me. Well, me and Annabelle.

  ‘Hey Joni, can I get you to do the till tonight?’ Lucy asks. ‘Sorry, my love, I just get a bit over it sometimes.’

  ‘No worries,’ I tell her. It’s another way in which she’s displaying her trust in me, allowing me to count her money at the end of the night.

  I walk up the hallway to where the gorgeous antique cash register sits on the sideboard. I pull down on the cold gold lever that sticks out the side. A ding sounds as the tray shoots out, stopping with a jolt and a jingle of the coins. I begin to count, and then I’m distracted by the sound of Simon saying, ‘Time for me to grab a beer.’

  I look over my shoulder, and see him walking slowly through the kitchen doorway into the Bar Room, untying his apron and running his wet pruney hands through his sweaty hair. Yuck! His Pearl Jam T-shirt is grease-stained and there are large sweat patches around the armpit area. He picks his nose with little to no effort at hiding it from everyone in the Bar Room, wiping his booger on his baggy skate pants. Ewww. Remind me to never, ever date a dish-hand. Climbing into bed with that stench! I bet Simon doesn’t wash his sheets for months. His pillowcase would stink like unwashed hair, and the gravy and grease he absorbs through his puffy wet hands in the sink all night. I bet his room smells like foot odour and BO.

  He turns towards me and notices that I’m watching him. I fabricate a friendly smile, which he seems to accept as genuine. I don’t know if he has much going on upstairs. Now I feel terrible. My judgemental thoughts are mellowed by the arrival of my default setting: sympathy. Possibly not my default setting at all times; tonight, though, after sitting through Lucy’s verbal memoir, my sympathy dial has been turned up. Not sexually. Not for Simon! Ahhh, gross!

  After counting the money, I pull up a chair at the staff table. My eyes follow Juliet’s path to the bar fridge. She refills her glass right up to the top, making the most of Lucy’s generous ‘as many drinks as you like’ rule for knock-offs, and then she plonks herself down next to Dave. After some surface-level small talk, she and Dave begin a Top Five Films to and fro.

  Dave starts with Delicatessen, one of my favourite French films, and I’m instantly reminded that Annabelle and I hired Reali
ty Bites on video, and that I need to get going so I can a) tell Annabelle all about Lucy, and b) start watching one of my own personal faves. I start gathering my things together, worried that I’ll overhear Juliet’s Top Five list, and that some of her favourite films will be the same as mine. If so, I’ll start questioning my own taste.

  I lift my green coat off the hook on the hatstand and place my hand on Dave’s shoulder in a friendly, non-flirty way. Dave and Lucy make a good couple, a good secret couple. I’m glad nothing ever happened between me and Dave. I love our friendship just the way it is, and things at Harland would have gone totally weird if we’d gotten together. As I pick up my backpack, I wonder when Dave and Lucy will tell the others about their romance. I don’t want to interfere with that. They’ll work it out, I’m sure.

  ‘Bye everyone,’ I say loudly, walking towards the back door.

  Lucy gives me a special farewell. ‘Bye Joni,’ she says. ‘So nice talking to you tonight. Have a great day tomorrow.’

  She kisses me once on each cheek, then I wave towards Simon and Juliet, not really caring if they see me.

  The cold air hits my face as soon as I open the back door. Such a stark contrast from the indoors to the outside—from Harland, with its warm glowing interior, to the quiet darkness of the garden path. Don’t see a ghost, don’t see a ghost, my inner voice repeats, as I descend the rickety wooden stairs. At the shed now, I hold onto the handlebars of my bike, and pull it away from Dave’s. I do up the top button on my green coat, take my gloves out of the pockets, and pull them on tightly. The side path is dimly lit by the honeyed glow that seeps through the curtains hanging in the window of the house next door. There’s no ghost loitering here. Perhaps it’s all to do with darkness—where there is light, there is no ghost.

  Once I’m out on the street, I climb onto my bike seat and slowly pedal down the centre of the bitumen. My mind is full to the brim with Lucy Bourdillon, Lucy Bourdillon. What a woman! Her life story is that of a character from a daytime soap. I feel so inspired to paint! What is it about complex females that makes me feel so alive, and capable of churning out hundreds of artworks? And what a turnaround for her to confide in me like that! I love her. Love her to bits. Poor thing, with all those health problems. And how crazy—her stripping and living on the street!