You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead

by Hardy, Marieke

  During sleepovers, late at night, we would lie awake and take turns making up stories about Joey Dee falling desperately in love with us and wanting to kiss us on our faces. We were at that beautifully innocent sexual precipice where we knew we wanted boys but we had no idea what to do with them once we got them. There was a vague idea of gentle hand-holding and butterflies in the stomach, but the thought of anything more erotic just produced confusing feelings like when we watched that Darth Vader ‘let’s do it on the moon’ scene in Revenge of the Nerds and went very quiet.

  Our sleepover stories would describe elaborate scenarios, story arcs and occasional meddling from jealous female members of the Team, but they always ended the same: with one of us wrapped firmly in Joey’s muscular arms, safe from the trials and tribulations of the world.

  ‘Joey saw you across the crowd at Luna Park,’ I would begin, whispering into the night, ‘and he knew he had to get with you.’

  I guess you could call it erotic fan fiction. But we were too young to understand exactly what that was. You should have seen us there, side-by-side in the darkness, clenched tight in separate sleeping bags. Our stories grew more and more fantastical—there were platinum records, weddings, immaculately conceived babies. The fan club was a natural extension of this, though we had of course no idea how to run such an organisation. As an only child I was adept at bossing people around and took it upon myself to bully schoolmates into paying the dollar joining fee.

  ‘What’s a Joey Dee?’ they would say. ‘Why am I giving you a dollar? If I give it to you do you promise to go away and leave me alone?’

  Susan and I rabidly collected names and money. We took no prisoners. Four-year-old cousins became members of The Official Joey Dee Fan Club. So did parents, uncles and long-suffering older siblings. Mrs Moy, the lollipop lady at our school who was part deaf and occasionally wet her pants whilst helping people cross the road, became a member. Certainly she may have been under the impression she was donating to the Red Cross, but that’s neither here nor there. We took her urine-scented dollar coin and we added it to the tissue box that served as our coffers. Joey Dee deserved commitment and two dedicated fan club co-presidents willing to lay down and die for him. We were made for this.

  His mother loved us.Why wouldn’t she? We validated her adoration for her son, turning up at Channel Ten Nunawading wearing homemade WE JOEY badges and falling apart in fits of frothing hysterics from within the depths of a startled family audience. Eventually we conned our way backstage and stood, breathless and flattened against the wall in case somebody noticed and threw us out. We watched with wide eyes as clothes racks of costumes trundled past, nudged each other when one of the dance instructors gave us a wink, and shared conspiratorial sick faces the moment the much-loathed Tim approached with a friendly grin and asked if we wanted him to sign anything.

  Courtney Compagnino was cuter than us, more talented than us, and a star of the show, so we made it a point to hate her guts too. ‘She’s so fat,’ we would say snidely from the comfort of our living-room chairs as Courtney’s bright little face hit the screens. ‘She’s a fat slut.’ We would cut the eyes out of her photographs and draw cartoonish oversized boobs in texta on her face in a technique that would these days likely be considered a criminal offence if employed by an older gentleman with perhaps too much time on his hands. This was a ten-year-old child we were tearing apart, although at eleven we could hardly be expected to behave as moral compasses. Courtney Compagnino was a girl who had unrestricted access to Joey Dee and was therefore the enemy. In our colourfully inventive sleepover stories she had so far been variously set alight, run over by a truck, and torn apart by wolves. Yet when we were introduced to her by a kindly stagehand, we were nothing short of fawning.

  ‘Oh, I love your hair,’ we cooed. ‘Do you use your own crimper or do they do it in makeup before the show?’

  Inch by inch, Saturday by Saturday, we moved closer to Joey Dee. Like the worst kind of suck-ups we giggled at the Assistant Director’s bad jokes, made cups of tea for the choreographers, and tolerated tedious drawn-out conversations with Tim. (‘So what did you guys think of my routines tonight? Did you have a fave?’) Throughout it all we’d catch glimpses of Joey, gliding from dressing room to green room, sharing private conversations with a friendly crew member, surreptitiously touching up his hair in a corridor mirror. Susan was the first to target Joey’s smiling, broad-faced mama, making a beeline and explaining in her gentle, polite way that we were his number one fans and would love to say hello.

  Joey’s mother eyed us with nothing short of unbridled delight.

  ‘Fan club?’ she exclaimed. ‘You two must come over to our place for a visit!’

  Well, I don’t recall if there was a tussle back at Susan’s house. I don’t recall if a date was made and she was busy or her strict father wouldn’t let her skip Greek school or if I simply just manipulated the whole thing so she couldn’t make it and I went alone because I am a selfish cur. It’s likely.

  There were tears. Mine were probably of the guilty variety. I felt bad for muscling Susan out of the arrangement, but it was obvious to me that I needed to be alone with Joey Dee. Susan and I were best friends, yes, but even best friends can be cumbersome when true love is on the cards. She knew me too well, could see clearly when I was embellishing stories to make myself look more impressive. She’d be able to cut me down halfway through an anecdote by cheerily reminding me that’s not how it happened at all and even utter the mortifying phrase all too common to my ears: ‘Marieke, you’re just showing off.’ The truth was, as a control freak I felt I knew how to do everything better than anyone else, and that included winning Joey Dee’s heart. I loved Susan to bits but I couldn’t bring myself to relinquish power. I told myself I would make up for it by inviting her to our wedding. She could be my main bridesmaid. We would name our child after her, even if it were a boy. On it went, this plodding, twisted internal monologue attempting to justify the fact that I’d essentially just shunted my favourite girlfriend out of the way so I could get my sticky paws on a pre-teen fantasy we’d created and craved for together.

  Susan, none the wiser—or maybe she was and just forgave me for it, which is even worse—made me promise to tell her every tiny detail, from the moment the front door opened and I was welcomed inside the hallowed portal of the Dee household, to the part where Joey and I hugged goodbye on the lawn and promised to be friends forever so long as I introduced him to my amazing friend Susan who sounded like great fun.

  ‘Everything,’ she implored with agonised wails. ‘Take notes.’

  The Dee family lived in Altona South, a suburb that in 1987 was a curious mixture of migrant McMansions, Vietnamese fruit markets and illegal street racing. Their house was big and broad and brown, a sprawling teacake with a beautifully manicured strip of lawn barricading the front. Joey’s mother answered the door and wiped her hands on a worn apron.

  ‘Here she is! Where’s your little friend with the glasses?’

  My heart was beating so loud it was in my ears. I could feel it throbbing through my lobes. It was like Innerspace meets Tap Dogs.

  ‘She . . . couldn’t make it.’ Hardy, you worm. You liar. You snake.

  ‘That’s a pity. Come in, darling.’

  Darling. I was family already.

  She led me in, past the obligatory gilt-edged entrance hall. The house was warm and buttery. I exhaled deeply. I had transferred my love of the exotic European abode neatly from Susan’s compact Hawthorn digs to Joey’s spacious Altona South residence. I pictured myself spending happy afternoons here eating liquor-soaked cake and swinging my legs at the dining table and sucking up to Joey’s parents in a toadying way. Joey’s father sat in a La-Z-Boy recliner wearing socks and velour slippers. He grunted at me upon introduction. I was bustled into the kitchen and offered a variety of comestibles, all of which I politely declined. I wanted to stay minty fresh.

  ‘JOEY! COME DOWNSTAIRS, YOU HAVE A VISITOR!’
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  Slouching downstairs in stockinged feet—by which of course I mean socks, not that he suddenly appeared in a stay-up fishnet and suspenders combo; it’s just that the word ‘socked’ looks insufferably stupid—and scowling heavily at the interruption to his afternoon’s Gameboy activities, he was shorter than I remembered. The lack of layered on pancake makeup made him seem pale and slightly sickly. A bristle of pre-pubescent moustache scattered across his upper lip like hair confetti. He wore Mambo boardshorts and had a carpet burn on one knee. He regarded me curiously, as though I was a long-forgotten thought he’d once entertained and hadn’t bothered to recall since.

  ‘Hey,’ he mumbled.

  I opened my mouth but nothing came out. The sound of the harness racing on the television provided a comforting cushion of background noise. There was a pause as we studied each other.

  ‘Go on then, Joe,’ his mother said encouragingly. ‘Take Marika up to your room.’

  I wasn’t going to correct her. People always got my name wrong and if my future mother-in-law wanted to refer to me as ‘Marika’ then I was happy to change it by deed poll. I would have changed it to ‘Fuckface’. I would have tattooed a picture of a donkey on my forehead and joined NAMBLA at that point, I would have done anything. I was here, I was in his house. It was happening. Oh, Joey Dee. Oh, Joe.

  Joey nodded the invitation and headed back up the stairs. I performed the obligatory ‘it’s a lovely house you have here, Mr Dee, Mrs Dee’ before meekly following. The corridor smelt of carpet-cleaning powder and ducted heating. Joey slammed from wall to wall as he walked, in that curious way that young boys have, and kicked open a door with a crude gold star stuck to the front.

  I sat on his bed (Where else would I sit? The desk? What was I going to do, take a letter? Oh god, this was too much) and watched politely as he shuffled around his bedroom, pointing out his belongings as though I had arrived from the Guinness Book of Records office and demanded to jot down an inventory.

  ‘So . . . this is my guitar. This is my Matchbox car collection. This is my invisible dog leash, I got it at the Royal Melbourne Show. See, it looks like you’re walking a dog but there’s no dog,’ he ventured as I nodded and pretended to show an interest.

  Wow, I thought. Famous people can be so down-to-earth.

  Clearly bored by my presence, he hummed tunelessly under his breath, staring for a long time at a gently fluttering mobile of an aeroplane on his ceiling, before turning suddenly to look at me.

  ‘Wanna watch me play drums?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  ‘I’m pretty good.’

  ‘I bet.’

  True to his word, Joey sat down at his drum kit and performed a seventeen minute drum solo. I studied his face as he played. I had pored over that face from every possible angle. I had wept over his photographs and crudely paused him, mid-song, so I could mournfully paw at his frozen, distorted features on the television.

  ‘Would you watch the fucking video properly?’ my mother would say, irritated by my pathetic mewling. ‘You’re leaving fingerprints on the screen.’

  And here he was, right in front of me, in the flesh. Concentrating as he bashed out some interminable rhythm. He just looked so . . . ordinary.

  I should be enjoying this, I thought with a quiet desperation. All these months of planning and pining and practising what I would say when he turned up on my porch with the rose and now I was sitting here with a trickle of Impulse Body Mist making its way from my hairless armpit to my waist and wondering just how long I could tolerate this nightmare before I called my mother and implored her to come and pick me up. I was intimidated. I was weirded out. Worst of all, I was bored.

  ‘Watch this,’ Joey commanded, before spinning one drumstick around and around in his fingers.

  Eventually after what seemed like hours of aimless banging he tired himself out and lurched from his drum kit. There was a tense silence as he mooched his way around his bedroom, looking for something to do. I sat on my hands and prayed for intervention. How does one make small talk with an idol, particularly one who so rapidly seems to have become a mere mortal? I knew all of his likes (Michael Jackson, playing drums, mum’s cooking) and dislikes (homework, mean people). I knew his star sign (Cancer) and his favourite colour (yellow). I was embarrassed about the fan club and confused by how different Joey Dee was in reality to the swoonworthy rose-carrier of our creation. I stood, ready to make polite noises about heading back home.

  And that’s when he lunged over and kissed me.

  We fell back onto his bed, Joey writhing clumsily in what was presumably the throes of childish passion and me frozen in a state of blind panic.

  ‘Kiss me!’ he whispered wetly into my forehead.

  The only kissing I had done so far was underwater with my neighbour Jono Andrews when we were both five and ‘practising breathing’. I had imagined softness and sweetness and the scent of freshly washed laundry. And yet here I was with the boy of my dreams licking at my face like an overexcited Labrador. He meant well—by which I mean he was being in no way rapey—and was giggling in a friendly, high-pitched fashion like Ben Mendelsohn in The Year My Voice Broke. I giggled too, hysterically—I was utterly terrified by this point—and playfully attempted to slip from his grasp.

  ‘Hee hee!’ I screamed shrilly. ‘Let’s probably not do that anymore!!!!’

  Joey got the message and slumped back on to his pillows, instantly bored again. It was obvious he had no idea of what use I may be to him. I was a poor conversationalist, I hadn’t appreciated his brilliant musicianship. And I wouldn’t even make the afternoon lively by indulging in a little light petting. Why I’d bothered to visit in the first place seemed utterly beyond him.

  There was a long and terse silence while I adjusted my Sportsgirl windcheater.

  ‘Well . . . I better do some drum practice.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Of course.’

  I made my way carefully down to the kitchen again and spent a not entirely comfortable forty minutes eating a tray of biscuits and listening to the distant sounds of Joey taking out his aggression on a presumably terrified snare drum. I was dazed. Mrs Dee seemed apologetic for her son’s pressing percussive schedule cutting our visit short.

  ‘Joe’s a busy boy,’ she said softly.

  ‘That’s okay, Mrs Dee! I’ve had a great time! Really! Thank you so much for having me!’ I managed brightly, hoping that my parents would show up before I started crying.

  Nobody could get anything out of me about my visit. My parents were surprised by my uncharacteristic silence, and couldn’t understand why I wasn’t in a hurry to see Susan. She, too, seemed hurt by my standoffishness. When I eventually saw her I played down the visit as ‘stupid’ and tried to encourage a cooling off from Joey Dee (‘I think I like River Phoenix better anyway’), which she found mystifying. It was the first real wedge driven between us, and it indelibly bruised us both.

  Despite our best intentions we ended up at different high schools and no matter how much we swore never to let that change things, it did. I fell in with a simpering crowd of private school hair flickers who bullied me mercilessly and Susan seemed to breeze through with new loud-talking Camberwell High classmates and invitations to pool parties. We called each other every night, and then a few times a week, and eventually only every now and then. I became ashamed of our childish love for Young Talent Time and wanted it to remain secret. I couldn’t admit the Joey Dee obsession to the sophisticated new set I was desperate to be accepted by. In the light of their eyes it seemed freakish. We were too old for such things. Susan became a problematic emblem of a past from which I was trying to wrestle myself free.

  On the rare occasions we saw each other I felt like she came from a distant planet I’d long ago visited and I would look at the face that I’d known and loved so well and her new, more adult, glasses and I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  ‘I wonder what Joey Dee would be up to these days,’ I’d try
out in a jokey voice, but it sounded as trite as I suspected it would and we both fell silent.

  Strange how I remember all these Young Talent Time adventures now. Fragments of them, anyway. The rest I piece together, or make up to suit whatever crowd I’m attempting to impress with tales of my childhood.

  ‘Did I ever tell you,’ I start, ‘about the time I ran a fan club for Joey Dee from Young Talent Time?’ and everybody obligingly screeches with mocking laughter.

  Susan became less and less a part of these retellings, and with passing years I edited her from our story altogether. Then twenty years on, the Facebook message arrives, and a jolt back to feeling everything anew.

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

  When I finally pluck up the courage to call her she has the sunny, tired, motherly voice of someone always interrupting a conversation with the words ‘for god’s sake put that down’ and tells me she’s so sorry to bother me.

  ‘I know you’re busy,’ she says. ‘I’ve read about you in the paper.’

  Hardly a comforting beginning. The last time I appeared in the paper I was being slapped across the wrist for daring to suggest that simpering Liberal politician Christopher Pyne was perhaps not the most likeable chap on the face of the earth.

  ‘Still making an unbridled idiot of myself,’ I rue aloud and she laughs, and it’s suddenly so familiar and two decades disappear in blessed moments. She calls herself ‘Sue’ these days, something I can’t get used to.We talk about Joey Dee (‘I hear he’s a hairdresser now,’ I enjoy telling her, listening to her scandalised gasps) and her parents (both well), her husband and her child.