You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead

by Hardy, Marieke

  But when did it start, when did it start? I saw my boyfriend look at his watch. He glanced up at me and shrugged. It was now nine-thirty. We had been there for over an hour, eating olives and talking to people about what they didn’t do for a living. This tortured exercise in June Dally-Watkins etiquette could only go on for so long.

  A couple in the smoking room had quite clearly flaunted the no drugs policy and were speaking to everybody who entered at high speed and volume, flitting from topic to topic like a pair of amphetamine-addled hummingbirds. One of them had a bloody nose, which he cheerfully wiped away without a second thought. I wondered if the security guard would step in at any point and request they move into the time out corner until they’d both had the chance to calm down. I didn’t blame them for wanting to alter reality. At that point I was so on edge I was tempted to ask them where they’d purchased their powders and if they’d mind ever so much sharing their stash around.

  We were lingering in the hallway, discussing in muted tones whether we should leave, when a small group burst through the front door. An Amazonian woman dressed in a trench coat led the way, followed by a smaller woman with cropped hair and spectacles, who looked oddly like the cartoon character Penfold from 1980s children’s TV series Danger Mouse. Behind them stood a rake-thin ghoulish man with a pencil moustache. They were a no-nonsense blast of energy, nodding a curt hello to Alan and without any further ado making their way downstairs. Everyone watched them go, stunned.

  ‘Ah,’ said Alan, pleased. ‘Anita’s here.’

  And then one of the young men we had spoken to previously crept up from downstairs. His excitement was palpable. He looked like Ginger Meggs having just been told he was about to have a one-on-one training session with Don Bradman.

  ‘It’s started!’ he squealed in a high-pitched, thrilled voice.

  Meggs was right: it had started. We edged our way down into the garage to find that the charming ‘Well, I find Earth First is best when really trying to get rid of stubborn stains’ middle-class dinner party from upstairs had turned into Sodom and Gomorrah. In the semi-darkness, we could see five bodies writhing on the satin bed. The amphetamine-fuelled couple from the smoking room did everything but shout ‘STACKS ON’, and flung themselves into the mix with abandon. A girl who looked like Lily Allen twirled shyly and slowly around the stripper’s pole while her proud boyfriend looked on. In the corner, just out of view, somebody was already making a spectacular amount of noise on the round bed. We edged our way towards it, stepping over the anarchy of flesh.

  ‘I do believe,’ I said in hushed, reverent tones to my boyfriend when our eyes adjusted, ‘that nice lady in the trench coat over there is being fisted.’

  There she was, spreadeagled on the bed, while her bespectacled companion held a sideways human rights rally up her vagina. She was emitting a series of wails and moans but nobody much looked as though they were enjoying themselves. They all wore expressions of intense concentration, as though studying for an upcoming fisting exam at the Vagina Academy. We stood to one side, staring in amazement, curious bystanders waiting for a bus that would never come.

  Everywhere around us people were starting to strip off with eager little panting noises. A man brushed past me and I felt his naked genitals sweep against my dress with a soft little swish. It was kill or be killed at this point. My boyfriend had a panicked ‘I need an adult’ look on his face. Everything about what was happening seemed so forced; twenty or so very ordinary people in a suburban garage suddenly acting on cue as though they were Traci Lords. Surely they couldn’t have all been feeling so sexy so fast. We’d only just finished our Jatz crackers. I felt the panic as the social niceties I adhered to slipped away. There was no point of reference for this.

  My boyfriend whispered to me. He looked unhappy.

  ‘Should we . . . ?’

  ‘Should we what? Leave? Join in the five-way currently taking place on the massage table?’

  He shrugged, not enjoying the moment any more than I.

  ‘Should we do something?’ he breathed eventually.

  We moved into a corner and started kissing, not really certain what else was expected of us. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to pretend that directly behind me a Roman orgy wasn’t taking place, which was difficult considering someone with a very high-pitched voice kept saying, ‘That’s the stuff, that’s the stuff ’ over and over again. I wondered, briefly, if Ginger Meggs had scored.

  A man appeared behind us. He tapped my boyfriend on the shoulder.

  ‘Do you mind if I . . . ?’

  It was as though he were cutting in on us at Lord and Lady Swarthington’s summer ball. I had half a mind to fan myself coquettishly and drop a hanky on the floor, though this would have been intensely difficult since I was dressed by this stage only in my underpants.

  I looked at my boyfriend. This was it, the chance to really take the step and be active participants in a swingers party. No longer curious bystanders. We didn’t know this man. We would never meet him again. And he was standing there expectantly, with an erection you could comfortably dangle a small child off. He was smiling pleasantly.

  ‘Take your time,’ he said, or his penis seemed to. ‘We’re all adults here.’

  As we left, we passed Alan. He was washing glasses in the kitchen and humming a little tune to himself. He turned when he heard us come up the stairs and looked pleased for the company.

  ‘Ah!’ he said brightly. ‘Can I top up your glasses?’

  ‘Actually, Alan . . . we were just leaving.’

  He looked disappointed.

  ‘Already?’

  ‘It’s not that it wasn’t a wonderful party. We’re just . . . tired.’

  Alan nodded in resignation. Perhaps he sensed that we might never come back, that we may join the ranks of those other fly-by-nighters, briefly adventurous pioneers more comfortable in the realm of the ordinary. He and Cara would play host to a revolving door of new faces, ever younger and more nervous than the last.

  He expressed curiosity as to what point proceedings had reached downstairs—I believe his words were ‘what’s shakin’ in the basement’—and when we told him about the woman being fisted his face fell.

  ‘Oh no,’ he wailed. ‘I have told her a thousand times . . .’

  We must have looked startled. He dried his hands on his apron and started rummaging beneath the sink as he explained his distress.

  ‘She’s a squirter,’ he said. ‘I mean, I’m all for people coming around and having their fun. That’s what we’re here for. But I say to her, “Anita, somebody has to clean that up, you know.” And it’s always me, isn’t it? It’s always old Alan, having to clean up the mess.’

  He seemed flustered and upset, pulling out from beneath the sink a couple of sponges and a bucket. We bid him farewell and he waved distractedly, his mind on other things. As we left we could hear the sound of music downstairs. The odd bellow rang out, but there were no sounds of joy. Nobody was laughing.

  The cab rounded the corner. I rested my head on my boyfriend’s shoulder and we talked sleepily about the night’s proceedings. Next month Alan and Cara would play host to a new batch of strangers and we would be returned to our pedestrian existence, smiling politely at the peccadilloes of the swing set. We knew we would never return.

  Behind us my old high school sat placid in the darkness. I didn’t look back.

  YTT

  I get the private message on Facebook, of course, of course. The technological town crier of my generation heralds news of births and mourns deaths and rings the bells of change to the point where a day without some kind of electronic revelation seems almost disappointing.

  ‘I’m hoping you may be able to solve one of the greatest mysteries of my lifetime so far.’

  This is an intriguing beginning to a message. No less significant is the fact it seems free from subsequent pleas for the transferring of money to Nigerian ‘benk’ accounts or the bone-chilling sentence ‘So that’s abou
t when I realised we had the same father.’

  The message is from a friend I was glued to long ago. The word ‘glued’ undervalues the semi-psychotic devotion of our friendship. Susan and I practically lived inside each other. We spent every day together from 1986 to 1988 with a love nothing less than religious. The friendships of prepubescence invite no lighthearted commitment. You embody each other’s skin. Physically you may look nothing alike but elderly relatives insist they can’t tell you apart, and you enter rooms clutching each other around the waist or neck with a fierce sense of ownership.

  ‘I’m hoping you may be able to solve one of the greatest mysteries of my lifetime so far.’

  Immediately I know I’ve done something wrong, been involved somehow. Was I part of some rape cover-up, standing around like a beer-swilling accomplice in The Accused ? ‘One of the greatest mysteries of my lifetime so far’ sounds deeply important.

  People like to make jokes about their forgetfulness. ‘I’m so darned . . . absent-minded!’ they exclaim with adorable shrugs, which can make memory loss sound very sweet and endearing though in my experience there’s very little endearing about standing bewilderedly in the middle of a living-room shouting ‘WHAT THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO BE DOING IN HERE??’ particularly if it’s the living room of a complete stranger and you have wandered in wild-eyed off the street like Robert Downey Jr.

  Yes, everybody sometimes forgets their keys, or the name of their boss’s wife (‘Oh god, I think I called her Sandra. Wasn’t Sandra the name of his second wife? I am totally getting fired on Monday’), or the easy-to-neglect fact that if you leave hot oil on the stove you will very probably burn your house down. A small amount of memory loss is normal. Spend an hour trying to remember where your car is parked at Chadstone Shopping Centre, fine. Sit up with a horrified gasp at 3 am realising that not only have you forgotten your mother’s birthday but you were supposed to bake the cake, understandable. A small amount of memory loss is daffy and darling and a defining character trait for girls who stick pencils in their hair or use phrases like ‘aw, baloney’.

  My memory loss ranges somewhere between ‘oh dear, I seem to have left the house without any pants on again’ and Mickey Rooney, a man who, if his fake Twitter account is to be believed, spends his downtime asking questions like ‘Why am I eating this cake? Why am I wearing a party hat? Why are people singing at me?’ and ‘What’s a volcano? Can I have two soft tacos? What’s a taco?’ Why anyone would look to me for answers requiring a delve down memory lane is beyond comprehension. And yet here she was, after twenty years, my Susan.

  In 1987 Susan was a lanky streak of bacon, with a neat bob she did up in a spiky, Pat Benatar-inspired ponytail, and awesome big round spectacles like that secretary character Janine used to wear in Ghostbusters. She was Greek, which meant when I was eleven I wanted to be Greek too. I craved the exotic oiliness of the culture, the salt and the religious icons and the shouty father figures who emitted comforting aromas of tobacco and ouzo. I even insisted my parents let me temporarily attend Susan’s weekend Greek school, where I spent a few entirely happy afternoons sitting in a corner smiling like an idiot and not knowing what the fuck anybody else was talking about. They eventually banned me from attending after I came home using the word malaka in its correct context but I was still allowed to spend many contented afternoons at Susan’s house listening to her parents arguing in their dense, prickly language. I fell in love with Susan because she was bright and funny and she didn’t find it weird that I thought Harriet the Spy was a real person.

  Together we posed awkwardly for home-made Dolly magazine modelling shots and told ourselves we were definitely prettier than Kate Fischer or Anneliese Seubert, not realising that we weren’t and never would be and it didn’t matter. We re-enacted the moody, soft-focus photographs we’d pored over around her parents’ swimming pool, wearing elastic headbands and Esprit leather jackets and high-waisted snow-wash denim.

  ‘You could be the next Alison Brahe . . . but, you know, a Greek version,’ I told Susan, privately hoping that this clearly overblown compliment would lead to equally lavish praise for me.

  It was around this time we discovered a television program called Young Talent Time, a music-driven Channel Ten series that would these days probably be pulled unceremoniously from air for promoting child rape or slave labour or something equally sinister. Each episode consisted of eight or nine milk-fed little poplettes dressed in lycra halternecks and ra-ra skirts butchering chart hits of the day (‘Celebrate’ by Kool & the Gang was a well-abused favourite) before gathering around ageing ’70s disc jockey John ‘call me Johnny, it’s not creepy in any way whatsoever’ Young and singing the Beatles song ‘All My Loving’ in what I suppose in some lesser-evolved countries would consider unison. The night ended when a random petrified child chosen from the audience looked down the barrel of a camera and shrieked ‘GOODNIGHT AUSTRALIA’ and the producers cut to a plastic model of a McDonald’s restaurant with a toy car parked out the front.

  I recently sat through an entire episode on YouTube and was appalled by how truly awful it all was. There was even someone on the show named ‘Bevan’.Yet in 1987 Susan and I saw none of YTT’s garish, plasticky hideousness, its shrill posturing or borderline uncomfortable song choices (‘When I Kissed The Teacher’?, ‘Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car’?). We were completely bewitched. Every Saturday night at 6 pm we would go into lockdown, sitting breathless and cross-legged in front of the television. Dutifully we would videotape each episode and then dissect it at length during the week (‘Why do you think Johnny introduced Juanita’s song but not Greg’s? Do you think maybe Greg is going to get sacked because he’s an albino with buck teeth?’) before applying ourselves to learning the dance routines by heart and performing them in the backyard with barefoot gusto, undeterred by the threat of bindies.

  This, in itself, is not an unusual experience for a young lady of my years. It’s fairly common these days to be at a party with peers and mention the words Young Talent Time only to find yourself three hours later in a heated group debate about whether Vince Del Tito was fucking Dannii ‘two I’s are better to see you with!’ Minogue or Natalie Miller. YTT was a Saturday night ritual for most Australian children and in that, I suppose, Susan and I were no different from anybody else. We did, however, take things a step further by starting an official fan club for one of the members.

  Let’s call him Joey Dee. Because that’s his name. Or maybe it isn’t, I don’t know, there was a confusing period where we were convinced he’d shortened it from something elaborately Italian ‘for showbiz reasons’. We spent hours and hours—and possibly hundreds of dollars—crammed into the phone booth on Tooronga Road going through all the possibilities in the White Pages and calling them up.

  ‘Hello, is that . . . Mrs Dimattina?’ I would say in a trembling voice. ‘Would . . . Joey possibly be at home?’

  To all the nice families with Italian surnames who received irritating phone calls from two giggling twits in the late 1980s: I apologise. Lord knows what we would have done if by some miracle of nature we’d chanced upon the real Joey Dee’s number and he’d come to the phone to say hello. Most likely we would have shrieked like Toni Childs gargling acid and hung up, which is how most phone calls to boys ended in 1987. If we had used our collective organisational powers for good instead of idiocy we could have probably done something worthwhile with our lives. As it was we mooned over this bright, gap-toothed, fairly average twelve-year-old boy with a mullet hairdo as though he was Christ himself.

  Joey Dee wasn’t what you’d call particularly memorable. Out of all the boys on the show—Vince, Bevan, Greg, Jamie, Johnny and the criminally dull Tim—I can recall no real reason we picked him as our own personal Jesus. He sang semi-decently and was proficient in a few basic Michael Jackson moves, a skill no doubt he’d picked up early on in life to counterbalance any schoolyard accusations of faggotry. He had a very sweet little diastema and a diligently maintained f
eathery mullet and lovely green eyes. He was average in every sense.

  The amount of projected fantasy character traits adolescent girls are able to slather upon innocent young boys is truly frightening. At twelve years of age, most boys are into burping, punching each other in the face, and delightedly finding new and inventive ways to touch their penises without anybody else noticing. More luck to them, I say. Yet in the minds of certain young ladies—particularly those who have spent perhaps a smidgen too long memorising weighty intellectual tomes such as Sweet Valley High—these boys are nothing short of poets. If they appear to stumble over their words, it is not because they are drooling lunkheads attempting to peer down our t-shirts. It is simply because they’re struggling to find the right sonnet with which to win our hearts. If they hock a sodden spitball directly into our faces when we mount the school bus of a morn, it’s not because they think such an act is amusing. They are simply shy bohemians, sad clowns letting their clumsy overtures of courtship speak the words they cannot say.

  Joey Dee never stood a chance. Simply through absorbing his chirpy exchanges with Johnny Young, his sparkly, highenergy performances, and every minute detail of his time on screen, we had pieced together a personality so far from reality it was almost obscene. Without ever speaking a word to him we had created a fictionalised robo-boy who catered emotionally to our every sweeping need. In our minds, Joey Dee was a quiet, polite young man with a penchant for softserve ice creams and holding hands. He disdained buffoonery and horseplay and could think of no greater way to spend an afternoon than curled up on the couch watching Labyrinth. After which he would learn all the song and dance routines with us and fall about laughing as we tried together to practice ‘Dance Magic Dance’ in front of the bedroom mirror. He would appear shyly on our porch, holding a dewy rose and murmuring the only sort of poetry we’d had access to thus far. Stock, Aitken and Waterman lyrics played a huge part in this. With big doe eyes fixed upon ours, he’d sigh the lyrics to ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ and ‘Love in the First Degree’.