After the Blues

by Kathy Lette

  The engagement party

  At engagement parties you eat meat pies and pav. High heels embedded in the soggy paspalum, you stand in the shivering cluster round the punch. Dads dole out beer from two garbage cans brimming with slowly melting ice. Boys scrum boisterously for a tinnie. Mums pass out glasses of Blue Nun while girls compare rings and scrutinise your hand. ‘Has he asked ya yet?’

  Assure yourself that your friends are only getting married because it makes it easier to get a deposit for a block of land at Menai. They should make their wedding vows in real estate agencies. To have and to sharehold. To honour and repay. Till repayments do us part …

  The girls’ night out

  Meet your friends at Choy’s Chinese BYO for a joint twenty-first birthday – girls’ night out. You are best friends. Some since schooldays, when you were a surfie chick. Others from various jobs. Some you’ve collected from inner-city house shares or music festivals or holidays. You’ve squeezed each other’s blackheads. Compared cellulite. Told each other you looked thin when you didn’t. Lied about bad root perms. Advised each other to tint brown bits black and black bits blonde and where to put the pink and orange streaks through the middle to make it look more ‘natural’. You’ve straggled behind in public to check for period spotting. You’ve compared contraceptive techniques. You’ve reassured each other that your men were either ‘total sleaze-schmuckos’ or ‘hot-to-trot spunkrats’, depending. None of you has an 18-carat fiancé.

  Order exotic cocktails with umbrellas sticking out the top. As the night wears on, it becomes harder and harder to memorise orders. ‘Two Kahlúas, one Fluffy Duck, three Harvey Wallbangers, two Leg Openers … um.’ Tell your friends that if you ever do get married, your fiancé will have the shower tea, and you’ll have the bucks party – because he likes cooking and you like men.

  ‘So, Debbie’s A-grade journo boyfriend turned out to be gay, did she tell you?’ Kerrie says, patting her latest root perm. (‘Best root I’ve had all week,’ she joked.) God, Deb, you’re anorexic,’ she thrusts the peanut bowl at you. ‘The last time I saw anything that thin there was toothpaste in it.’

  They all laugh. You’ve been boyfriend-less for so long now it’s hard to ignore that their smiles drip with kind condescension.

  ‘Oh, didn’t I tell you? I’m now seeing the sax player from INXS,’ I say neutrally.

  ‘Wow! A real sax symbol,’ Kerrie exclaims, impressed.

  If I admitted to my girlfriends that I was hooking up with Garry again, they’d insist I leave my brain to medical science as it’s clearly never been used. ‘How’s Russell?’ I ask, to change the subject.

  ‘Oh! Fab. He’s leaving his wife any minute now and we’re moving into his apartment at Kirribilli.’ Kerrie gets her eyebrows styled, works in television and has tried every diet from the Grapefruit, to the Beverly Hills, to the High Sexuality Low Cal, to the Carbohydrate Only. ‘Imagine it, girls. A His and Hers Harbour View!’

  Ro rolls her eyes. ‘Yeah, I dumped the Pommy playwright because of his excruciating puns and love of spanking. I don’t like to be beaten – not even at Scrabble.’ Having tried hippie-tripping, punk, psychoanalysis, EST, merchant banking, Zen, Englishmen and rebirthing, Ro is now into radical celibacy, which she extols.

  Julia, smelling of chlorine and garlic, announces that her new love might drop by later. Julia wears no make-up, always meets her journalistic deadlines, girl-cotts products from South Africa and is the Grown-Up amongst you.

  You all turn on her, horrified. ‘Jules. We agreed. It’s a girls’ night out!’

  ‘She is a girl.’

  Cheryl pants up the stairs, full of apologies, too late for the prawn cutlets. Cheryl is blonde and bronzed and is dating a top banker-wanker. It’s true love – she’d drink the water out of his jacuzzi.

  ‘I’ve been sitting outside in his car for heaps. Didn’t want him to know I couldn’t find the friggin’ doorhandle.’ We all look at her, puzzled. ‘Well, then he’d suss it was my first time in a Ferrari!’

  The rest of you swap appalled glances. Kerrie orders Cheryl a side serving of brains. ‘You need all the help you can get, Chez.’

  Soula announces that Wayne is finally leaving his wife and that they’ll be moving in together.

  Kerrie bristles. ‘God, it must be great having such little tits, Soula – clothes must hang so well.’

  Soula adjusts her Sportsgirl cotton top and slumps in the corner like a brown paper parcel. No one else pays any attention, as Kerrie is the Navratilova of the backhanded compliment.

  Head off on a pub crawl round The Rocks. In the next bar Cheryl speculates on the potential lesbians in your touch footy team. ‘You can tell by their short nails. Heaps better for lezzo lovemaking apparently.’ She giggles.

  Manicured fingers curl self-consciously round glasses of Bacardi and Coke. Eyes fidget.

  Cheryl is perplexed by the stern silence. ‘Look, I hate to spread gossip, but, well, what else can I do with it?’

  ‘I bet that’s not all you’re spreading.’ Kerrie glares as she stubs out her cigarette.

  As the girlie gang move out into the beer garden, I quickly deliver diversionary school reminiscences. The day Sarah accidentally set fire to the science block. The time we hid the boys’ bags on the roof of the auditorium. The dance night when Kerrie laid the student teacher on the oval.

  Cheryl reports that she’s seen Frieda, the infamous footy freak at the supermarket. ‘Single mother. Young kid. Tracey got up the duff too, by the way. She’s got a three-year-old now – the father also buggered off and left her.’

  There is a collective sigh of sadness. ‘How can a dad do that to his kid?’ Kerrie scolds.

  Julia proposes a toast. ‘May none of you ever be trapped into a career of caressing and kid-and-work-juggling.’

  ‘Ah-men,’ you all chorus.

  ‘God, we used to look up to Tracey heaps, remember?’ Cheryl sighs. ‘She was so much cooler than us. A real rager. And so spunky.’

  ‘Yeah’, says Kerrie. ‘And now she’s nothing more than a sperm spittoon. Like Frieda.’

  Vow never to settle down and have kiddies. Never, ever, ever.

  The strip

  Queue with the tennis club parties and hens’ night celebrants at Jamison Street. Peer at the poster advertising the male stripper. ‘Our husbands think we’re playing bingo,’ confesses Charlene from the Mortdale Mothers’ Club. High heels paw the club carpet. ‘My Harry reckons it’s disgustin’ to look at other blokes’ things.’

  Undeterred, you and your friends stampede through the entrance.

  In leather jockstrap and studded dog collar, Flesh Gordon bounds on stage. Leg-cocking and gyrating, he is like a poodle let off the leash.

  ‘Oh God,’ shrieks Soula, her terminals rising. ‘He’s a dead ringer for our plumber. That guy from Macquarie Fields!’

  ‘God, if I wasn’t celibate, he could fiddle with my waterworks and plumb my depths any time!’ Ro squeals.

  ‘But he’s only about that big,’ hisses a disappointed Cheryl, extending her pinky in demonstration.

  You put on your glasses to get a better view. ‘Well I don’t think we’re making “small talk”,’ you joke.

  Waiting at the bar, you feel bored by the surrounding conversation from other customers. Conceptual infrastructures. Designer lettuce. Short-term interest rates. Wish you could continue the philosophical discussion begun on Saturday at the local cricket match. After the game a seven-year-old girl had confided to you that there were two Gods. ‘God in and God out,’ she’d informed your knee cap matter-of-factly. Laugh at the memory. The snooze alarm suddenly goes off on your biological clock. Wonder if you could just have the kids, without settling down …? Feel anxious. Pre-natal, no, pre-conception depression sets in – talk about getting in before the rush! On the way back to the table with a tray of drinks you pass Flesh Gordon, who is now prowling through the female audience.

  ‘But Julia, what about the biological urge?’
you ask your feminist friend, sitting back down and handing round pina coladas and Kahlúas.

  Julia squirms. ‘I’m a career woman, Deb. I don’t have a biological urge to spend all my spare time stopping some miniature delinquent from shoving the guinea pig down the dunny.’

  ‘You want kids one day, don’t you Cheryl? You love kids.’

  ‘Get real! I’m broke. The friggin’ tooth fairy probably takes bankcard by now.’

  ‘Come on. Don’t you want to get pregnant one day, Ro? You like to try everything.’

  ‘Yeah, but I’m not a space cadet.’ She tucks a tip down the jocks of the moustachioed waiter. ‘I mean, what if it grew up into a car salesman?’

  A communal gasp of horror fills the table.

  ‘Or worse.’ Julia cringes into her whiskey. ‘A National Party supporter!’

  ‘Yeah, who cares about an embryo’s sex?’ Kerrie stands up. She has developed a severe list towards starboard. ‘What I want is an ultrasound which detects his or her future profession. Plus some other vital info. Like … will it clean up its room? Is it ever going to vote for Joh Bjelke-Petersen?’ Watch her tack tipsily towards the toilets. ‘Anyone wanna come blow a number?’

  ‘I dunno,’ you waver, ‘maybe motherhood really does fulfil you? You know. As a woman.’

  The girls gawp at me as one. But before they can cross-examine me further about my maternal instincts, the male stripper rubs cat-like against me, confiscates my glasses and deposits them down his leather pouch. You’re blindfolded and told to retrieve them with your teeth. The use-by date on the disco tune has definitely expired. You suddenly feel ancient, mouldy, geriatric. Fear that, in the dark, your secret white spencer will be glowing fluorescent through your glam silk top. Feeling about as aroused as you do at the dentist, and finding your way by braille, you descend into the subterranean claustrophobia of his jockstrap to retrieve your glasses.

  ‘That’s s’posed to make you feel all woman too,’ Julia rebukes triumphantly, whipping off my blindfold as your fellow patrons whoop.

  ‘And what about the bloody pain of childbirth?’ Ro protests, her nails jammed between her teeth in mock agony. ‘I need a Mogadon to go to the dentist. Just for fluoride.’

  ‘Apparently the first shit afterwards is heaps worse than the actual childbirth.’ Cheryl grimaces in mock agony as she re-applies her lippy.

  ‘I was “support person”,’ Julia lectures, wolfing nuts, ‘for a friend of mine from the women’s film co-op. When the doctor was sewing her up after the episiotomy, she told him to just keep on sewing.’ The collective crossing of legs is audible. ‘She didn’t want anything going in, or coming out of there ever again.’

  ‘Shit,’ commiserates Kerrie, back from the toilets, her bloodshot eyes widening, ‘and those women are tough. I mean, they roll their own tampons.’

  ‘Not only that, but for the rest of your life, you’ve got to do,’ Julia lowers her voice conspiratorially, ‘pelvic floor exercises.’

  Your ears wag with horrified fascination as Julia goes into a graphic description of how the vaginal muscles must be contracted into a vice-like grip, then relaxed, one hundred times, morning and night and at boring moments. Apparently women are always at it. This gives a whole new dimension to loo queues and bus stops. A few moments later, as you wait in line outside the Ladies’, flickering away internally like a fluorescent light on the blink, you search the other female faces, trying to discern who else is giving a quick job to her G spot. No, you tell yourself, no settling down and having kiddies. Never, ever, ever.

  Soula follows you into the toilets. ‘Maybe you’re right, Deb,’ she hazards, ‘maybe we’ll just all end up lonely …’

  But you’ve now steeled yourself against sentimentality. Tell her yes, that it’s hard not to pity all those childless couples floating on Sydney Harbour on Sundays, anaesthetising their sadness with Dom Pérignon and pâté.

  She now talks to you from the next cubicle. ‘I mean, maybe we’ll miss out on heaps of joy and stuff.’

  ‘Yes, just think of all the walkathons you won’t have to sponsor. Monopoly games you won’t have to play. The Mayfairs and Park Lanes you won’t be beaten to … No,’ tell her firmly. ‘No kids. Never, ever, ever.’

  Swagger back to the table. Tell your friends that the cognoscenti might be big on Leboyer but you’ve decided to be an advocate of unnatural childbirth – the only way you can be talked into parenthood is if you can have daily epidurals from the moment of conception till the child reaches twenty. Your friends back-pat approvingly and all pledge never to settle down and have kiddies. Never, ever, ever.

  The music crescendos. Flesh Gordon’s buttock cheeks quiver like custard. He pulls the final string. Exposure with composure. Watch his genitalia execute a series of gymnastic feats. It whirls lasso-like, then stretches and contracts like a piece of hat elastic. A pelvic push-up or two, and it’s all over. The audience gaze at each other. ‘Gawd,’ says a mum from the Cabramatta tennis club, ‘it sure beats bingo.’

  Stripping off to emotional undies

  Buy a supply of CC’s, potato chips, Nörgen-Vaaz ice-cream, beer and McDonald’s burgers. Scale the gates of the Botanic Gardens. Do handstands, cartwheels and Lady Di impersonations. Count your lovers, memories lapsing at double digits. Compare the size of men’s cocks and laugh hysterically at stupid jokes explaining the rationale for the creation of man – dildos can’t put out the garbage …

  Sprawl under the silver moon. It sits in the corner of the sky like a toenail clipping. You decide that, what with Julia’s big breasts hurting when she runs, period cramps and childbirth, God is definitely a bloke. No. You won’t be tricked by biology into ruining your life. No settling down and having kiddies. Never, ever, ever. Mouche wouldn’t go sprogging. Since her Sushi Sister days, and no doubt in order to cause maximum embarrassment to her politician father, she’s worked for the PLO and the IRA, and now she was back home in Canberra, to really annoy her atheist dad she’d joined a nunnery – so definitely no kids.

  Make a groggy reconnaissance of your body. Your tongue feels furry, as though covered in downy moss – ‘I have down syndrome,’ you drunkenly quip … Hang on … That’s not funny. Sober up suddenly. Think to yourself that as the years blink by on the digital biological clock, the chances of having a handicapped child increase. Your snooze alarm suddenly goes off again on your biological clock. Share your panicked thoughts with the girls.

  ‘Deb, you’re twenty,’ Julia wearily admonishes. ‘No need to get Mongoloid fever just yet,’ she says sarcastically.

  Lights blink a mysterious Morse code on the dark water of the harbour – remorse code for you. Mentally pack your diaphragm permanently in cornflour. ‘Maybe we could all just have one kid each?’ you suggest.

  ‘Impossible.’ Julia crushes your proposal. ‘What if it’s Oedipal?’

  Tell her you’ll have two.

  ‘What if they fight?’

  Tell her three.

  ‘Oh yes, then a fourth to avoid the third child syndrome.’

  ‘But youngest children are spoilt rotten,’ Ro slurs intoxicatedly. ‘Which means having a sixth, seventh, eighth …’

  ‘Besides,’ Kerrie articulates slowly as though you’re lip reading, ‘you’ll bore your friends to death. Nothing double-glazes my brain faster than all that talk about creche waiting lists and early signs of genius.’

  Julia pontificates about statistics proving that the twenties are the most exciting and stimulating time of a woman’s life. ‘Don’t ruin the best years of your life with marriage and babies,’ she shouts with inebriated fervour. ‘We’re in our prime, girls!’

  Vomit up your burger and beer.

  They put your momentary child-craving aberration down to PMD: Post McDonald’s Depression. ‘Why would we want to settle down and have kiddies when we’re all so successful, happy and fulfilled!’

  You slouch forlornly on the damp grass and stare up at the stars.

  ‘What’s up?’ Kerr
ie interrogates. ‘Did you get out of the wrong side of somebody’s bed this morning?’

  Confess that you’ve never met INXS. ‘I don’t even know the sax player.’

  Soula sobs that in the staff room Wayne acts as though he’s never laid eyes on her.

  ‘Let alone laid you,’ Kerrie adds.

  ‘He’s never leaving his wife.’ Soula comes clean that she’s decided to marry her father’s friend’s son, ‘a real Dapto dog from the old country’.

  ‘Fuck it.’ Kerrie explodes into a volley of sneezes. The heater for her waterbed has broken down again. During the recent, unseasonal cold snap she’s been forced to go to bed wearing skivvy, gloves and balaclava. ‘Russell is moving to LA with his wife and family,’ she confesses. ‘Let’s just say there turned out to be a draught in his “open” marriage.’

  Julia is by now well lubricated and also full of remorse. She divulges that she’s nothing more than a ballbreaker. ‘It wasn’t love with Billy. He was just cunt-struck and I was slumming it. I’m the reason Billy’s back inside. And why I’m gonna try it with girls from now on. I’m a screw-up with blokes.’

  Cheryl kicks off her shoes. ‘My wanker banker never even turned up. There was no Ferrari. I caught the bus here.’ She admits to making up the lunches on harbour launches and the literary discussions at Berowra Waters. ‘Turns out, the reason he was so sensitive and attractive is ’cause he bites pillows,’ she whimpers. ‘He’s a bloody pillow biter.’ Tears leave a black trail through her blusher, leading into the corners of her mouth. ‘A receiver of swollen goods. Just like Debbie’s journo bloke.’

  Ro extricates herself from her lotus position. ‘The Pom dumped me,’ she admits. ‘I flew all the way to London to find out he’s married and that he sees Australia as a recessive gene – we’re just the Irish of the Pacific, apparently.’ She admits that she’s now replaced her sexual urges with aerobics, EST and marathon swimming … and is now more healthy, enlightened and chlorinatedly bored than ever. ‘My kingdom for a cock!’