You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead

by Hardy, Marieke

  He ended up with someone even crazier than me and I briefly fell for a dreamboat with a mohawk who embodied calm and sunshine, and after some months of snarling and spitting at each other from a safe distance Matty and I decided it was best to drift apart and cease contact altogether. Occasionally I would look at his blog and read between the lines of all the long, poetic posts he published late at night. (‘We ate croissants and cheese, and drank red wine though it was barely 11 am. We felt very French.We were sophisticated. I told her we were two halves of a broken star.’) I wrote a story for The Age about our painful time at a music festival and he bombarded me with angry texts for an entire afternoon before calling a truce.

  ‘I guess you have the right,’ he conceded eventually, ‘to tell our story how you want.’

  There’s only so many times you can break your own heart with the helpless, fumbling, all-consuming humanness of sexuality before you realise that there’s something profoundly odd about the entire race itself.We seek out these pleasures of the flesh in such a sweet, confused, hypothetical fashion. I had wanted to live in the moment, and yet plunged into some sort of depraved and slightly comedic fantasy world instead.

  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.

  From: Marieke Hardy

  Subject: Travels

  Date: 9 November 2010 11:23:45 AM

  To: ****@gmail.com

  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

  From: ****@gmail.com

  Subject: Re: Re: Travels

  Date: 9 November 2010 2:15:59 PM

  To: Marieke Hardy

  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

  From: Marieke Hardy

  Subject: Re: Travels

  Date: 15 November 2010 3:41:18 PM

  To: ****@gmail.com

  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.

  From: ****@gmail.com

  Subject: Re: Travels

  Date: 15 November 2010 6:37:16 PM

  To: Marieke Hardy

  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 h
appens.’

  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 . . .

  Use of the phrases ‘big cheese’ and ‘cold feet’ in such close succession would indicate this letter was clearly written with toothpick in mouth whilst waiting for Big Moe and the boys to do a little bada bing with some violin cases or whatever it was gangsters from 1950s cinema got up to in their spare time when they weren’t slapping their ladyfriends meatily on the backside. If the Pettingill family is ever looking for a new matriarch they need search no further.

  I mean, really.

  Disappointedly,

  Marieke Hardy

  ‘I mean, really.’ I was twenty-two years old in 1998 and already sounding like the sort of stitched-up biddy who distrusts the coloureds ‘because they hum to themselves while they sew’. Nothing like rounding off the argument with a motherly tut to really make a large corporation sit up and take notice.

  Interestingly enough, far from writing me off as a complete nutjob who pays a worrying amount of attention to the intricacies of their television commercials, some poor soul at Uncle Tobys sat down and patiently dictated a response.

  Dear Ms Hardy,

  Thank you for contacting us in regard to one of our products . . .

  Now I’m no Nancy Drew, but I strongly suspect that the consumer relations department may have been phoning this one in. ‘One of our products’?? IT WAS THE WHITE WINGS CAKE COMMERCIAL AND YOU AND I BOTH KNOW IT UNCLE TOBY IF INDEED YOU ARE MY REAL UNCLE.

  . . . Uncle Tobys is a company that takes pride in the quality of our products and services and appreciate the time you have taken to contact us . . .

  . . . ‘particularly since the rest of your busy day must be filled with pressing appointments for biting the heads off pigeons at Flinders Street Station and standing outside the window of random restaurants drooling onto the glass and shrieking MISTER DONUT ATE MY SOUL at startled diners.’

  . . . and the interest you have taken in our company’s products
.

  It is only feedback from consumers that enables us to measure the ongoing and long-term quality of our products.

  Please accept our complimentary parcel of products for your enjoyment. We trust that you will continue to be a valued White Wings customer.

  Yours sincerely,

  Incomprehensible scribble

  CONSUMER RELATIONS DEPARTMENT

  And there it was, delivered by a likely wary courier (‘don’t make eye contact, and don’t let her touch your skin’): a cardboard box full of Uncle Tobys quality foodstuffs. Cynics among you may think that my sole reason for writing these deranged missives was to score free comestibles. It’s untrue. I swear it. Symptom of a strange and lonely headspace it may be, but letter-writing of that type is often driven by a burning passion to right a perceived wrong. Seeing that White Wings advertisement had stirred something significant and furious in me, the perception of an error that I felt needed to be immediately redressed. I didn’t want free muesli bars. I wanted them to change the commercial back to the way it was when I liked it.

  20.9.1998

  Sax International

  5/278 Ferntree Gully Road

  Notting Hill 3149

  To Whom It May Concern,

  This is just a short note to congratulate you on an excellent product. I came across your stay-on colourstick quite by accident . . . my local chemist didn’t stock Revlon, which I have used for some time . . .

  Bam! Take that, Sax International! I haven’t always been your bitch! That’s right, I sleep around! Heed my feelings!

  . . . and was told to give Sax a try. Since then, I have worn your lipstick out about three times . . .

  Three, no less. Obviously I felt I needed that extra outing to truly ensure the odds-on experiment had proven successful.

  . . . and each time have found it to be absolutely wonderful. For someone like me whose beauty routines are strictly low-maintenance . . .