You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead

by Hardy, Marieke

  ‘This is going to sound stupid . . .’ she starts off with an apologetic chuckle, then launches into the real purpose for her making contact.

  She wants answers to a long ago conundrum, and she has come to me. This will not go well. The doors of my memory are closing in the most terrifying of ways, slamming shut with clanging finality behind me like the credits of Get Smart. There are gaping holes where there should be anecdotes and pain and remorse. The lines between truth and fiction are so smeared I sometimes can’t remember if I was actually friends with the Goonies or whether they were just characters in a movie.

  I argue with an old male friend about whether we slept together or not when we were teenagers. He insists we didn’t. I insist we did. He laughs, appalled.

  ‘You think I wouldn’t remember if we’d had sex?’ he bellows so loudly that a nearby mother places protective palms over her fascinated child’s ears.

  I run into ex-beaus, offer them friendly, hail-fellow-well-met smiles, and can’t understand why they coolly dismiss me and walk away. I must have done something dreadful. Lord knows I’m capable of it. But what? I can’t remember. I have blocked it from my mind and replaced it with something pop-culture-ish and fatuous like the name of the lead singer from Soul Asylum (Dave Pirner) or various Beastie Boys lyrics. It’s as though there’s no room for important memories when there’s so much vapid information clamouring to be let in. ‘Bad break-ups? Infidelity? Hurtful arguments? We won’t be needing those anymore,’ I imagine my brain deciding with cheery insistence, like an efficient mother preparing for a garage sale. ‘Let’s just memorise the names of Gwyneth Paltrow’s ex-boyfriends in order instead!’

  Over coffee one day, Gen mentions a Japanese restaurant in the city we’d visited a while ago. I don’t remember it.

  ‘Oh, you know,’ she says with a bored insistence. ‘It’s that noisy place in the laneway where we had that fight.’

  Fight? Gen is one of my dearest friends. We have minor irritations with each other, emotional scuffles solved hours later with a texting pun-war and wine-soaked embrace at Joe’s Shoe Store. We don’t fight.

  ‘What fight?’

  She looks at me as if I am joking. I half smile back at her, suspecting like any decent dementia sufferer that I’m being played for a fool.

  ‘Ha! There was no fight,’ I say triumphantly. ‘You’re making it up!’

  Gen looks even more aghast now. My smile fades.

  ‘Marieke, there was a fight. You got really mad at me and we practically didn’t speak for two months.’

  I don’t think she’s joking. But then I can’t believe she’s serious. I have utterly no recollection of this event and am convinced that I would remember something as important as fighting with a best pal and cutting off communication for eight weeks. Perhaps Gen has gone insane and this is the first warning signal.

  ‘You really don’t remember that? It was huge. We never not speak.’

  ‘I know!’

  There’s an explanation required now. Something so drastic should not be forgotten. This is an important mark on our friendship. It is a hurt we should be able to call on lest it ever occur again. That I have obviously pressed on in life without giving it a second thought says a lot about my shallow personality.

  ‘I’ve probably pushed it from my mind,’ I make up on the spot, ‘because it takes me to a dark place.’

  Gen is unconvinced.

  ‘I just find it strange. That you would forget something like that.’

  ‘Gen,’ I try to catch her eye now. My tone drops to a confidential hum. ‘I think there’s something really wrong. With my memory.’

  When my spelling starts going too I know I’m in trouble. I find myself staring in bewilderment at my mobile telephone, too stubborn and confused and proud to use predictive text (‘I prefer doing my own spelling,’ I regularly and loftily inform uninterested friends), and wondering exactly when it was I forgot how to spell the word ‘grateful’.

  It’s probably the liquor and the music festivals. I glumly recall the year I staggered around Meredith at nine in the morning offering people free shots of vodka and think another precious memory down the drain. My primary-school friend Megan Bennett also once threw a cricket ball in my face at full speed, something she swears to this day was an accident but I suspect was merely revenge for scribbling on her Puffin Club membership certificate. Perhaps that’s responsible too. Bit by bit I am erasing all the elements of my past that make up my story. By the time I am eighty I’ll have nothing left but New Weekly crossword clues and a habit of politely asking people if they perhaps know what my name might be.

  I sense a future where I’m perched at one of those bus stops they set up at old people’s homes so Alzheimers sufferers have a hobby outside of smearing their bedroom walls with shit and calling their daughter ‘Douglas’. Far from being worrying, I find something intensely comforting about the prospect. What happens when you are wrapped up in the space where memory can no longer reach you? Does it feel safe and blank and fuzzy like that moment where a Valium kicks in and everything around you turns to dust?

  Susan tells me she remembers a time, not long after high school, where she hadn’t heard from me for a while and called up wanting to say hello.

  ‘And you wouldn’t speak to me. You told me you didn’t want to be friends anymore. And I just wanted . . . well, I guess I just wanted to know why,’ she asks quietly. ‘I know it sounds dumb, but it’s been sitting with me for all this time. Did I do something wrong?’

  Horrified doesn’t even come close. She is speaking of a significant moment in our friendship—the end of our friendship—and I can’t remember. I have no idea what she’s talking about. I have coloured that moment of our past over with vague ideas of separate high schools and growing apart. I have reinvented our demise to suit my nefarious purposes. Worst of all, I have attempted to absolve myself of any responsibility over callously hurting the feelings of someone I once adored.

  ‘Oh that,’ I try out, laughing shakily. ‘Really? That was . . . god, it was so long ago.’

  ‘I know. It was just so . . . sudden. I thought I must have done something terrible to make you so upset.’

  ‘No no no no,’ I insist. ‘It was nothing like that.’

  ‘Then what?’

  I pause. What would be worse? Making something up? Or telling her that I’d thoughtlessly erased the entire episode and was sorry she’d wasted so much time worrying about it?

  ‘I’m . . . kind of in the middle of something at work right now,’ I lie. ‘Can I give you a call back?’

  I don’t ever phone Susan back. I do exactly as I did to her in 1988 and disappear into the ether. The shame is too great. This petulant, self-absorbed slice of time I carelessly flung away has remained with her for twenty years. I feel like a war criminal, a thief. I think of her, happy with children and occasionally puzzling over why I never responded to her plea for help.

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

  Her friend request is still lingering on Facebook. I am too bitterly ashamed to befriend her, and too laden with guilt to turn her away. After a small amount of detective work I find Joey Dee on Facebook too. He looks old and happy and is still making music. His Myspace page showcases him singing a cover of Marvin Gaye’s ‘Sexual Healing’.

  I’m so sorry, Susan. I wanted to solve your mystery. But I have too many of my own. There’s something wrong with my memory. I’m sorry, Susan. I’m sorry.

  From: ****@bigpond.com

  Subject: Re: Okay, so

  Date: 20 November 2010 4:23:58 PM

  To: Marieke Hardy

  Oh Marieke,

  I love all the memories, even the ones we’d rather forget (despite the gist of the piece).

  I’m not sure which bits are part of your poetic licence . . . I mean, you don’t really feel that bad, do you? I would hate to think that you have felt so poorly.

  Was I sad w
hen we went our separate ways? Yes. Did I hate you for it? No, not at all. I knew in my heart that I hadn’t done anything wrong. I guessed that it was simply the way life goes. High school happens. People grow and change.

  If it makes you feel any better, I too turned my back on someone I loved at a poignant time in my life . . . It’s a coping mechanism with bad ethics.

  All in all, I thank you for responding so honestly. It’s more than I could have hoped for. Now go and accept the bloody friend request and be done with it!

  You can see my cherub and I’ll see

  God knows what!!

  Take care old friend,

  Suddenly Sincerely Sue

  Down the hatch

  It was a letter forwarded on from the kindly folk at the ABC, the address of the book show crossed out (several times, by the looks of things, as though the envelope had bothered varying departments before finding its way to Brunswick) and mine eventually added. PLEASE FORWARD TO. No return address. But the loopy scrawl commanding my attention, shouting my name in biro, should have been a warning. If penmanship were given names like fonts, this one would have been called Lunatic 2.0.

  There should be a sticker placed on the correspondence of all lunatics. Open with caution, it might read. Contents may include one or all of the following: 1. Death threat. 2. Question regarding validity of parentage. 3. Kind suggestion that if you don’t ‘like’ a particular subject you ‘go back’ to ‘where you came from’, or 4. Faeces. On the internet it is possible to politely sidestep the hate-fuelled rantings of people who would rather see you dead. A website entitled ‘Marieke Hardy Has a Face Like a Big Cunt.net.au’ is a title that may ring vague alarm bells, as is anything run by the Westboro Baptist Church. If you don’t wish to read a dissertation on why your prose once made someone castrate themselves, don’t seek it out. In the case of those more brash among the online community who ‘@’ you directly on Twitter—the equivalent of drunkenly shirt-fronting somebody at a party and screaming ‘AND I DON’T MUCH CARE FOR YOUR TIE EITHER’—there’s still a ‘block user’ function. In short: for the most part, it’s possible to go about your life happily ignorant that many people in the world think you are a douchebag.

  As I opened the letter, a pamphlet fell from the envelope and onto the floor. I ignored it for the moment.

  The letter began:

  Miss Hardy.

  It was a pompous, knowing start, addressing me as though I were a schoolgirl staring down at my scuffed Bata Scouts and regretting that blissful previous hour exchanging saliva with Scott Webster in the toilet block.

  I have been watching you on the television for months now and have come to one obvious conclusion. There is a consistency in the subject matter you discuss on the First Tuesday Book Club and if your co-presenters Jennifer Byrne and Jason Steger are too afraid to tell you, I am not.You have the eyes and demeanour of a professional alcoholic. The first step is admitting you have a problem and, Marieke Hardy, as a regular viewer of the show I must inform you IT IS TIME FOR YOU TO TAKE THAT STEP.

  I picked up the pamphlet that had fallen to the floor. It was for AA.

  This was somewhat of a blow, like being told ‘you’re not fooling anyone with that stupid haircut, you know. We can still see your forehead.’ I chewed the thought over for a moment, feeling it in my mouth.

  A complete stranger thinks I am a drunk.

  It was no more odd than a complete stranger thinking I was a Communist or a lesbian, both charges having been laid against me in previous unrelated missives from other friendly neighbourhood lunatics. Once I had seen a severely anorexic girl at the Fitzroy pool. All eyes were upon her as she strolled around, glass-cut clavicle jutting from her bathers. I wanted desperately to gently take her aside and point out that people weren’t whispering about her because she was glamorous. They were whispering because they were worried about her. Because she looked obviously sick. Because she wasn’t hiding her demons like the rest of us were, under the veneer of behaving like functioning human beings.

  I wondered for a moment if I was the girl at the Fitzroy pool and my lunatic friend with the loopy writing was me. This thought was soon easily dismissed as I read further and saw his closing paragraph regarding the digital signal of the ABC News 24 channel trying to eat his brain. He was, as originally suspected, a nutjob. My secret life as a heavy drinker could continue unabated.

  It’s not overtly fashionable, particularly flying in the face of all those startling commercials where unfortunate lads and lasses imbibe one too many alcopops and crash spectacularly through a variety of glass objects, but I really am a huge fan of drinking. I like thinking about it, I like listening to songs about it, and I like reading about it.

  If my life of drinking was ever charted for the purposes of medical science it would look as follows: one big pointy triangle for the teenage years of rocket fuel and vomit, a gentle downward slope for the late teens and early twenties, and then an upwards trajectory around the mid-twenties which plateaus, a steady-as-she-goes prairie plain, for over ten years. Moving from a mid-twenties drunk into a mid-thirties drunk is a career choice not everybody likes to make. If you are friends with musicians the line between hedonism and problem drinking is blurred, probably because you are drunk and can’t focus properly. You surround yourself with drunks, you read their writing, you fall in love with them. Nobody grows up thinking they’re going to be drawn to the one man in the room slouched on a barstool spilling gin on his waistcoat, it just happens. One day you’re kissing posters of Pseudo Echo before you go to bed, the next you’re piggybacking your boyfriend out of Yah-Yah’s at 4 am pleading with him to please stop calling the DJ ‘donkey cock’ as it’s only causing grief.

  My illustrious career with the bottle began with the person my mother used to refer to somewhat hopefully as ‘your naughty friend’, Lisa Jenkins, implying that without Lisa’s influence I would probably have spent my downtime crossstitching and nursing sick orphans. In my mother’s mind, Lisa led me astray, beckoning wickedly from the dark corners of teenage immorality. In truth, we were as dangerously unhinged as each other and would spend various evenings placing ourselves in the sort of situations usually re-enacted on Crime Stoppers prior to the sobering sentence ‘and young Margaret’s body was sadly never found’. Lisa’s room was on the second storey of her parents’ house, so her nightly escapes involved a high-tech rope and pulley system. We encouraged each other dreadfully, comrades in pre-pubescent debauchery. We lost our virginities around the same time to older boys and were frequently separated on school camps ‘for the benefit of all concerned’.

  Lisa had a penchant for trouble, and liquor, and was possessed of the sort of cockeyed grin usually found on pickpockets, or 1980s Hollywood bad boys the Brat Pack. Her hands were rough and papery. We babysat the children of her neighbours and hunted out their booze and pornography like bloodhounds. We were obsessed with pornography, which was fairly common for private schoolgirls at the age of thirteen if St Trinian’s is anything to go by. My great aunt had died five years earlier and left to my family her vast collection of books, at least five of which were intensely pornographic. They were hidden—badly—on the top shelf, amongst Kitty Kelley biographies and There Goes Whatsisname: The memoirs of Noel Ferrier. One of my favourites involved a young lass who should probably have known better getting involved with a circus troupe and spending the ensuing one hundred and seventy pages being ravished by midgets and bearded ladies.

  Lisa and I were deeply titillated by this, and decided to write an erotic novel of our own. Considering the only significant thing we did outside of school hours was ride the bus, we called it Sex Bus. The plot involved a number of hapless commuters boarding without adequate fare or concession card and having to pay their way with sexual favours. Since neither Lisa nor I had been penetrated at that point, most of the sex involved vague descriptions like ‘then he did her up the fanny’ and ‘his ralph stood to attention’, the latter of which we had directly copied from Jud
y Blume’s Forever. We photocopied Sex Bus and handed it out to wide-eyed year sevens on the Balwyn line, an act that these days would likely have us arrested for child pornography. Sex Bus grew so popular with a particular group of year nine boys we had to run a reprint in the library, which was a huge career achievement at that point.

  Lisa’s alcoholic specialty was a potent rocket fuel she concocted from ‘anything my parents won’t miss from the liquor cabinet’. Since the overwhelming aroma was aniseed there was a fair chance her mother and father weren’t huge fans of Sambuca. She would mix and measure with the dexterity of a mad scientist, pouring the final product into a Big Red tomato sauce bottle that I’m fairly certain hadn’t been rinsed properly. The end result was something that tasted like a combination of licorice, ketchup, petrol and AIDS. We drank it with gusto.

  As a teenager there is no finer way to spend an evening than sitting in a local park taking delicate sips from a tomato sauce bottle and then vomiting into the lap of school heartthrob Stephen Lord, which presumably is why I partook in such activities more often than was healthy. With whispers Lisa and I would steal away from our homes and climb into waiting taxis, picking up helpless boys from Box Hill and Balwyn, Camberwell and Kew. Our lips would be sticky with liqueur. I tapped on more dark bedroom windows than I’d care to remember, swaying unsteadily in the moonlit driveway and waiting for Stephen or Ashley or Harvey or Clinton to slide out, one Stussy-clad leg after the other. There was no sex, not right away, just hours of whirling, gravity-free gloriousness, the freedom that came with another potent sip.

  My first real hangover came courtesy of naughty Lisa Jenkins, too. Another night on rocket fuel, some park or other, some party, some hot, strange, illicit kisses with a boy from the rowing squad up against a dirty wall. It was the night before my family was due to go on an overseas trip and I climbed back into my bedroom window with a head full of slosh and the kind of rolling seasickness common to passengers on the Manly ferry. I made it to the bathroom—just—though the toilet itself seemed infuriatingly out of reach, so I simply vomited a lush combination of spaghetti and rocket fuel all over the floor. Mindful that my still sleeping parents weren’t to know of my nocturnal activities, I mopped the whole revolting mess up with tissues, emitting pained little sobs throughout. In photographs from that first day of travel I am with my family, sitting at a New Zealand airport, face the colour of asphalt. There is dried spaghetti on my t-shirt. I look, fittingly, like a teenage drunk.