After the Blues

by Kathy Lette

  ‘Um …’ Bewildered, I glanced at Mouche. ‘It’s a bit of a perk really.’

  ‘Eveline’s going through her finding-herself stage.’ He paused in front of the mirror to re-drape his hair over his bald patch. ‘I was young once, you know.’ I accepted this revelation calmly. ‘I went high at university,’ he said reasonably. ‘Used to really get on my face in fact …’

  ‘Off! Off! Dad, it’s off your face,’ Mouche screeched from the bed.

  ‘Being anti-establishment and rebellious … it’s all a part of growing up. But it’s time to get your act together. You’re twenty-four.’

  ‘Twenty-four?’ I mouthed at her in amazement. I had no idea she was that old

  ‘It’s getting embarrassing.’ The MMM dispensed a few synthetic smiles and handed her a hundred-dollar bill. Then, with his little flotilla of brownnosers bobbing around him, he cruised down the hall, into the lift and left in his Commonwealth Getaway Car.

  I looked at Mouche, dumbfounded.

  ‘Shit. Well, I may as well be parentless. Don’t look at me like that.’ She grimaced. ‘Sure! He’d give me anything. But I live on a shoestring. Just like you. Well, don’t I?’

  I looked at the money he’d left on the steel cabinet. I thought of the new clothes she sometimes arrived home wearing. The mysterious money for mics, a snare drum for Aussie, taxis, tea out. I thought of how her Australian nasally rasp occasionally lapsed disconcertingly into polished tones. You could positively hear the vocal Brasso. Now it all became clear. The odd crossed ‘t’ and ‘-ing’ and ‘h’ were the residue of growing up rich. ‘You live on a Gucci shoestring, Eveline.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I pissed him off, didn’t I? Dad’s such a wanker.’

  ‘You know what? There’s nothing wankier than sitting around calling everybody a wanker.’ As I ran down the white corridor, I saw the sign on the fish tank now read, appropriately, ‘Do not disturb’.

  And so I did the most drastic thing I’d ever done. I committed suicide. The first job was making bathplugs in a factory. It wasn’t the noise that killed me, but the Repetitive Strain Injury to the brain. The second job was proofreading the telephone book, wading through all those names that sounded like gastric complaints. Next I was hired as a buxom wench in the Argyle Tavern, and fired the same day because I wasn’t. Then Max got me a job taking ‘Fantasy Phone Calls’. Being the herpes and AIDS-obsessed 80s, business was booming. Long-distance sex was suddenly so popular. You can’t dial a disease, right?

  ‘American Express number?’ I asked clinically. ‘Name? Address?’ With all the details catalogued, all you had to do was have an asthma attack down an anonymous earhole and occasionally say stuff like ‘What are you wearing?’

  ‘Oh …’ squeaked a male voice over the line, ‘I’m wearing me blue singlet … but, but …’ there was an embarrassed croak, ‘that’s all.’

  ‘Well, I’m wearing …’ I glanced down at my sloppy joe, grubby shorts and sock-less, battered Reeboks, ‘leather peekaboo bondage gear, fishnets and stilettos, and,’ I added, rolling my eyes at Max who, with a phone cradled between shoulder and chin, was cutting his toenails. ‘I feel really horny.’

  Fantasy phone sex headquarters was an ordinary-looking terrace in Pyrmont. Plastered around the lounge room were pictures of groin-thrusting, nude male bodies. ‘Mood setters,’ the sleazy male manager called them. There was a bedroom set aside for long, super deluxe, super expensive, or bondage calls. But the rest of us were dotted around the living room or in the kitchen, taking five-to ten-minute phone calls from lonely blokes. On automatic erotic pilot, the women, mostly local housewives and students, could talk dirty while simultaneously polishing their silver, shaving their legs, darning socks, painting nails, ironing and, for the mums who lived nearby, dicing carrots for that evening’s minestrone.

  Max and I opted to do our ironing, as we didn’t have such luxuries in the squat. ‘My mouth is moving down towards your hard cock …’ I whispered hoarsely, then sprayed out a jet of Fabulon onto the frilled neck of Max’s shirt. Max mouthed to me, did I want milk in my cuppa? I nodded, stifling a yawn as I reached my asthmatic crescendo. Leaning down into our washing basket, I caught my reflection in the hallway mirror. My dishevelled hair was knotted into a bunch at the back of my neck. My legs hosted three days’ worth of stubble and there was an ingrown hair festering at knee level. I was two tone – albino on the front and scarlet on the back, from where I’d fallen asleep on the beach. The voice on the end of the phone gasped for me to keep going. ‘Please, love …’ he whined. ‘What are you doing now?’ I suddenly felt sick. A case of Call-Us Interruptus. What was I doing here? Life wasn’t too short to be subtle. I smoothed my hair out of my face. ‘I’m doing the ironing,’ I confessed.

  With still no sign of Mouche I got a permanent job. Yes. I finally found my illustrious niche in the workplace – dogsbody. I was a gofer in an advertising agency. These were the Beautiful People. The men were all salon-tanned and the women wore two-inch long acrylic talons. I spent most of my time wondering how they changed tampons without committing seppuku. The whole office was busy running things past each other, blue-skying ideas and asking one another where they were coming from. (The Eastern suburbs, regrettably.) They had secret meetings to discuss what sort of tissue strength was required to prevent sneeze spray landing on neighbours’ earlobes and the texture people preferred on their arseholes. By brownnosing the nerds who worked in the travel agency next door they got the pick of all the international courier jobs too. So, to make matters worse, these trendoids were always place-dropping.

  It was a wonderfully challenging vocation. I made the decaffeinated coffees, shopped for their unsalted peanut butter, whole-wheat sandwiches and dental floss, fed car meters and collected their courier assignments. No wonder I was suffering severe Mouche withdrawal. Max found out that she was staying with her father in Canberra. It was during my fourth week without her that Aussie sauntered into the advertising office. Seeing him again was like stepping onto an old bit of used chewing gum. He cringed at my super-gloss, high-tech surroundings.

  ‘Pretty fuckin’ posh. How’s Mouche?’

  ‘What’s it to you?’ I tried the verbal equivalent of scraping him off the sole of my shoe.

  ‘You haven’t heard from her either, then!’ he deduced triumphantly.

  ‘Your attitude to women is Neanderthal. In fact, if your attitude had arms they’d be hairy and dragging along on the ground.’ I was getting flustered.

  ‘Look, I never said my feminist consciousness was fucking evolved. It’s evolve-fucking-ing! It’s an ongoing thing, right?’

  I filed the latest research dossier, which proved conclusively that strength was more important than texture when selecting toilet tissue. It had cost them eighty-six thousand dollars to find out that people did not like their fingers tearing through.

  ‘We need her for the band,’ he snapped. ‘Now I’ve sussed who her old man is, well, think of the publicity. Plus she’s so fuckin’ good. But the silly drongo’s just yawned in the face of every talent scout in Sydney. But I reckon if you threw a tanty or two she’d do it. She’s got a real soft spot for you.’ He hawked, stretched the phlegm between his tongue and teeth then dragged the snot backwards up his throat. I waited for his technological-refugee-child-of-the-recession routine. ‘She’s had everything. On a fuckin’ platter. I’m a child of the recession. A technological refugee.’

  ‘Look … I’ve given up the music world,’ I told him.

  ‘She won’t fuckin’ well do it without you.’

  ‘From now on the only thing I want to tune in is a telly, not a guitar.’

  ‘You don’t realise the sort of promo flak and stuff we could put out …’

  The ad agency subscribed to every Australian newspaper and magazine publication. Back copies were piled precariously behind us. Aussie scrambled to the top of the Heralds, flicked through today’s edition, wrenched out a page, jumped back down and shoved the paper in my face.
Mouche’s dad was pictured on the steps of Parliament House proclaiming he spoke on behalf of the Cabinet in declaring his support for the Prime Minister’s view that marijuana should not be legalised.

  As I slammed the drawers of the filing cabinet, I told Aussie where I kept him filed – under D for deadshit. And cross-referenced under C for chauvinistic creep-features.

  ‘Pretty fuckin’ weird, eh, Mouche getting picked up by the cops, don’t you think?’

  ‘Nah …’ I stammered.

  ‘I mean, nobody knew we were practising at the Tin Sheds. Nobody but us and her … and you. The cops said it was a tip-off. Do you know what they do to dobbers … inside? Flush their heads down the dunny.’ He flung his great simian arm around my neck and breathed garlic into my face. ‘But relax, Deb. If ya help get Mouche to perform with my band, I’ll forget all about who dobbed her in … But if not? J’have any idea what she’d do to you if she found out?’

  I ran like the billyo all the way to Martin Place train station. The grotty underground smelled like an unmade bed. What I suffered from, but had never diagnosed, was botch-ulism – I botched absolutely everything. My high executive heel (I was on stiletto P-plates now) snapped off on the top of the escalator. I was in a hairy situation. If I confessed, Mouche would give me the arse. If I didn’t, I’d have to talk her into singing with the Roaches and then I had no grounds to stop her from seeing that drug-peddling low-life boyfriends of hers.

  It had got cold. Pausing by the Kings Cross fountain, I absent-mindedly investigated a lump in my coat pocket. ‘Personal’ it read. ‘Courier Documents’. I’d forgotten to deliver them to the selected staff executive. I inserted my finger in the envelope slit and took out the ticket and itinerary. ‘New York’, it read. ‘One Way’.

  ‘Imagine it!’ I gabbled to Max. ‘LA, New York. Then maybe on to London, Paris, Rome …’

  ‘Great,’ he said despondently. ‘Have a Peter Stuyvesant for me when you get there.’

  I put my arm around him. We were in the laundromat, watching our washing go round. ‘It’ll be the first thing I’ve ever done, you know, off my own bat. Hey! Why don’tcha come over to the States with me?’

  ‘Sure.’ He shrugged. ‘I’ll never make it anywhere. I’m a reject. Look,’ he added, chopping his hand back and forth into the gap below his knee, ‘no reflexes. Legally, I’m dead.’

  ‘Max, you’re wonderful.’ I kissed his pimply forehead. ‘You’ve just got to learn to stop building down your hopes.’

  My toes itched in the showers as I mentally ticked off my list. Passport, yes. Visa, yes. I imagined the tinea tentacles growing up my leg and wished like mad for a pair of thongs. I’d waited till the office was out on their macrobiotic bean-sprout break, rang the travel agency and, pretending to be a Fabulously Famous Toilet Paper Advertiser, accepted the NY courier assignment and gave my name and passport details. Over the last few months, with no rent to pay, I had actually taken my mother’s advice and saved a nice little nest egg. She hadn’t said anything about not hatching it.

  ‘G’day,’ came a voice through the steam. I peered through the mist. It was Mouche, standing there starkers. ‘Got to report to my parole officer later,’ she volunteered. ‘So it’s SSS Day – shower, shit and a shave.’ Each nozzle was in action so she manoeuvred in under my cold jet-stream. (It cost money for a warm shower and I was economising.) I was so surprised to see her that the bottle of shampoo slid from my hand and spilled its pale blue, anti-dandruff contents over our feet.

  ‘How … how are ya?’ My stomach was doing calisthenics. ‘I heard you went to stay with your dad for a while. Didja have a good rest?’

  ‘There aren’t that many other options in the nation’s capital.’

  Mouche scooped up a little of the blue gunk into her palm and started to rub it into my scalp. ‘Living in Canberra is a contradiction in terms. My dad has a file on me. I looked in his personal filing cabinet at work one day, under E. There I was, sandwiched in between Chernobyl and Financial Summit. All my kindergarten drawings, report cards, psychiatry reports, police record, Girl Guide badges … I’ve missed you. Heaps.’ She was staring at me. ‘Deb?’

  Honestly, I’m warped. I’m the only person I know who talks behind her own back. Within minutes I was blurting out the whole sordid story. About me dobbing Aussie in and Aussie’s ultimatum, and then I ended up saying that she was better off without me.

  Mouche lathered up one armpit in silence, retrieved a discarded razor from the garbo and carved her way through the foam. ‘I’ve gone off men,’ she paused to bang the razor-head on the shower floor. ‘As a genre.’

  ‘Bullshit! You’re sexually incontinent. What are you going to do instead?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Well. There are worse things than celibacy.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she sighed, ‘like hepatitis and death.’

  ‘What about innocent schoolboys?’ I suggested.

  ‘Jailbait,’ she said dismissively. The two women opposite collected their toiletries and left before their hot showers had run out. Mouche turned on both abandoned nozzles full bore and we dived under the jets. As she thawed, she smiled at me. ‘There’s always lesbianism!’ The remaining showerers glanced at her suspiciously.

  ‘You can’t just become lesbian. You make it sound like taking up macramé!’

  ‘Well, it is only a slip of the tongue,’ she said.

  Laughing, she started making plans for new songs – a blues number called ‘Let’s Take the Men out of Mensa’, then segued into a reggae piece on AIDS, followed by a Brunette Spiritual called ‘Nobody Knows the Stubble I’ve Seen’.

  I told her then about the courier’s job.

  She silently lathered up her other pit. ‘Yeah, well, I’ve been thinking of pissing off OS for eons. My old man said he’d give me a ticket.’

  ‘What about Aussie? You’re gonna give him the flick pass?’

  ‘He’s a bad egg,’ she said with feeling.

  And so was Mouche, I decided then. Maybe once we were in New York, I could crack her open, sort of separate her personality and just use her rich, golden yellow bits and discard the rest … ‘But there’ll be other Aussies. I know you. You think that even a dickhead man is better than no man. And one man is never quite as fulfilling at two.’

  ‘A new pact, okay? To never let a penis come between us. I promise. And to prove it, I won’t see Aussie again.’

  ‘Ever?’

  She flicked a seaweed strand of hair from my face. ‘Ever.’

  Coiled by giant feather boas of steam, we talked and talked until we’d used up the hot water in all the empty showers. ‘In New York, they have psychic massage and all night delis and Woody Allen and –’ Mouche had her old man’s car parked on a double yellow line outside. It was something sporty with a sunroof. ‘Wow!’ I gushed. ‘The sort of car in which you can fart with full confidence!’

  On the way home to our squat, Mouche detoured into the Redfern Mall. She pulled up in the handicapped parking spot.

  ‘You’re disabled?’

  ‘Period cramp.’ She winked to me and limped into Coles New World. She returned shortly to present me with a new pair of gym boots, some red stockings, a whole packet of Caramello Koalas and a cleavage … well, a Wonderbra that pushed up your tiny pillows of flesh and made them pout over the top of your T-shirt. ‘Jeez,’ she sighed, ‘only twenty shoplifting days left till Chrissie.’

  I began to sing the bars to a song we’d started months before but abandoned when we’d run out of rhymes. ‘You’re just the buckle on his belt …’

  ‘All you ever do is hang around …’ she chorused as we crossed Cleveland Street. ‘You’re just the buckle on his belt …’

  ‘What are you going to do when his pants fall down?’

  She looked at me and laughed, then slung her arm around my neck. Aussie had nothing over me now, the nerd brain.

  That night, to celebrate our reunion, Max, Mouche and I made gingerbread men – men with
big rounded rumps, floury penises and globules of testes. The gas at our squat had been disconnected again so the local Italian cafe, Bill and Toni’s, baked them for us in their oven. Max declared he would get his passport too. ‘Then when you’re Fabulously Famous and own your own New York nightclub, you can fly me over as your personal cheese-on-toast-cooker.’ While the gingerbread browned, Bill offered us free ‘lemictons’ and Tony made ‘cups of chino’.

  I packed essentials only – baritone, ukulele, Édith Piaf autobiography, rhyming dictionary, Vegemite hamper, and tap-dancing shoes.

  It was my seventeenth birthday. Mouche gave me a copy of New York on $25 a Day, which was much more than we had budgeted for. And I had a package to collect at the post office. In lieu of a cake, I chomped into the last of the gingerbread testes. They were stale and soggy. I pretended they were Aussie’s.

  ‘Cooee … Anyone home?’ It was Catherine from the parole office. She was kind, voted Labor and often arrived with breakfast on home visits. ‘Where’s Mouche?’ she inquired. ‘I know it’s her last appointment but she didn’t turn up at my office.’

  I hurtled down the hall and up the stairs. In our bedroom I got out the cornflour packet where Mouche kept her diaphragm. I poked my finger down into the cornflour, wriggled it around, then poured out the whole packet onto the bedspread.

  I then sprinted all the way to the Tin Sheds. Students were printing feminist posters promoting the most effective form of personal hygiene protection – hand grenades. The poet who was addicted to cough medicine was crashed out across a car bonnet. Aussie emerged from the dunnies, a towel knotted round his waist. He saw me and chucked the slimiest ear-to-ear sneer.