Every Lie I've Ever Told

by Rosie Waterland

  He barely spoke to me for the rest of the night. I’ve never been so ashamed of something coming out of my body – and I once drunkenly puked up the first half of a kebab while I was still eating the second half. And I finished the second half.

  From that point on, I was too petrified to ever fart in front of him, which obviously meant I was then desperate to do it all the time.

  You know when you promise yourself you’re not going to eat sugar, and after forty-eight hours you’ve become so obsessed with sugar that you end up at a convenience store at 3am, pouring Skittles into a pink and green slushie? That was me, but with farts.

  I became obsessed with farting.

  I came up with a secret system, where I would hold it all in until I was sure he was asleep. Then I would reach down under the covers and spread my bum cheeks, so that the air could flow out without making any noise. It kind of sounded like a breathy, elegant ‘puh’. Sort of how you imagine Kate Middleton would fart.

  The only problem was, once I had silently let the farts out, there was nowhere for them to go. I had to keep them trapped under the covers for fear the smell would wake him up. And if one little pop made him wash his hands, I assumed twelve farts trapped under the doona would lead to some kind of heavy-duty hose-down situation in the front yard.

  So there I was, for months and months, waiting for him to fall asleep so I could spread my cheeks and set silent gas-balls free into the universe. Even in the middle of summer, I would keep the doona tightly clamped around my body – a bizarre little Dutch oven sweat lodge of shame.

  The plan’s one fatal flaw was revealed when he woke up one night and lifted the doona. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to be hit right in the face with that epic wall of gas. I think I saw tears in his eyes.

  He slept on the couch.

  After that, secret systems were out. If I was ever going to fart, just to be safe, it needed to be when he wasn’t within a ten-kilometre radius of my current location.

  I knew the relationship was doomed when I started to choose farting over him. Some nights I would avoid sleepovers just so I could stay home on my own and fart in peace. Without all the guilt. Without all his looks.

  I was essentially picking farts over orgasms. It was never going to work.

  So that’s what I need I suppose: a tech-savvy maid who understands that women sometimes need to fart. What a dream.

  And if I ever find someone like that, I definitely don’t have a wedding planned and ready to go, because there’s definitely no folder on my computer with wedding stuff in it. Just ‘Rosie’s Tax Invoices’.

  And probably some weird porn, because I totally googled ‘microwave popcorn foot tampon sex thing’.

  ‘Jacob,’ I said. ‘Jacob!’

  He was sleeping in a chair next to my hospital bed, having taken over from my friend Jamila, who had spent the first night with me.

  ‘Jacob!’

  ‘What? What’s wrong?’ he asked, pulling his eye mask off. He had bought it for me, but since I had brilliantly taken caffeine tablets in my attempt to sleep forever, the eye mask wasn’t exactly going to make a difference.

  ‘Have you noticed,’ I said, ‘that all the nurses here have really awesome Nikes?’

  The curtains were pulled around my bed, so all I’d been staring at for the last two hours were people’s shoes. My nausea was unbearable – the doctor said that was partly the pills, partly the vodka, and partly the drip I was now on to try and protect my liver. Not only was I exhausted, but I also wanted to sleep just to get some relief from the constant need to vomit. But sleep wasn’t going to happen, so I had been focussing on the shoes.

  ‘What?’ Jacob asked.

  ‘The nurses,’ I said. ‘It’s like they’re sponsored by Nike! All their shoes are so cool. I’m fairly certain there’s a social hierarchy here based on the shoes. The nurse who seems the coolest has the best ones, and nobody talks to the girl who’s wearing Crocs. I think she’s a social outcast. It’s not nice. I want to buy her a pair of Nikes. Do you think I should get a pair of Nikes? I do need a new pair of sneakers, and obviously Nikes are where it’s at. I’ve seen, like, four pairs here that I want to buy. Also, you can tell who the doctors are because they don’t wear sneakers. The doctors are the ones with nice shoes. Heels. I bet the nurses just look at them in their fancy heeled boots and think, “Yeah, that’d be nice,” like, shoes with heels is the ultimate sign that you’re not on your feet for eight hours straight, like the snobs, you know what I mean? Like, you can be the queen-bee nurse with the coolest Nikes, but you’re still not good enough for the snobby heels doctor group.’

  Jacob just stared at me. ‘What?’

  He was still recovering from the enema poo blast. We had both seen it hit the other side of the curtain and splash on to the floor. Jacob was horrified, but sitting behind me, he wasn’t sure if I had seen it at first, and he didn’t want to add to my nausea by telling me about it. So I just lay there, with my back to him, listening as the horrors of the enema poo unfolded, and he sat behind me, doing the same, neither of us realising the other was witnessing the nightmare also.

  Someone soon came and mopped up the . . . mess that was on the floor. But nobody did anything about the mess on the curtain. I lay there, waiting, thinking someone was going to come and fix it. Probably men in hazmat suits, who would rip the curtain down, lock it in a cement barrel and dump it wherever governments illegally hide toxic waste. The kind of place where the three-eyed fish from The Simpsons would come from. But nobody ever came. After about fifteen minutes, I turned around and saw Jacob just staring at the curtain in horror.

  ‘Holy Oprah. Do you think anyone is going to clean that?’ I asked.

  ‘I thought you were asleep!’ he said. ‘Were you awake for it? You were awake during the . . . event?’

  ‘Dude. I was watching the whole thing. If that curtain wasn’t pulled across, it would have sprayed all over us.’

  He laughed. I wanted to, but the nausea was too much.

  ‘Seriously though,’ he said. ‘The curtain. They better be sending someone to get rid of the fucking curtain.’

  Hours had gone by since that conversation, and while I was now focussed on the nurses’ Nikes, Jacob was still fixated on the curtain. Which, by the way, still had shit sprayed all over it. The man who’d had the enema was now gone, but his shit remained.

  I have never been the ringleader of a major crime operation.

  (I was. For one glorious month, I was.)

  It started small. A Kit Kat here. A sausage roll there. And it seemed so harmless at first; just a bit of cheeky fun. Then my ambition and greed revealed a seedy high-school underbelly that I did not have the nerves to handle. It only took four weeks for me to realise that I was not built for a life of sophisticated crime. Channel Nine was never going to make a highly rated TV miniseries about me (in which Rhonda from those insurance ads plays every female character, with a special cameo by Sam Neill to add gravitas). It turns out I was not destined to go down in Australian history as a glamorous Queen of Crime. But for one nail-biting month, I did make it to the very top of the ladder.

  At thirteen, I was a ‘canteen prefect’, which is really just a fancy way of saying ‘I am an unpaid canteen worker because the school cannot afford to make this a salaried job’.

  Basically, a few other students and I worked alongside parent volunteers at the canteen counter. It wasn’t a glamorous job, but it was one that provided you with a free lunch valued up to five dollars every time you did it, which in my case tended to be once or twice a week. I realised pretty quickly though, enterprising young lady that I was, that food and drink up to the value of five dollars was actually a pretty shitty deal, considering I was giving up my entire lunch hour to earn it. I would much rather have been sitting on the side of the oval, reading Dolly magazine and pretending to laugh at the questions other teenage girls had submitted to Dolly Doctor. (I say ‘pretending’ to laugh because obviously I did wha
t every other girl my age did: acted like the column was stupid while in public, then rushed home to devour it in private, because I had also wondered if that ingrown hair on my labia meant I was somehow pregnant with triplets. Even though I’d never had a period, let alone sex, I was still convinced I was going to end up on one of those TV specials about the clueless girl who thought she was just a bit constipated and unexpectedly gives birth forty-five minutes later.)

  The first couple of times I worked as a canteen prefect, I followed the rules and took people’s money and gave them their lunch of Fanta and Mars Bars, and everything was above board. Then, it dawned on me: why would I put the money in the cash register (which was literally just a shoebox in front of me) when I could put the money in my pocket instead? There were a couple of mums working on the canteen counter, along with a couple of students like me, and we each had our own high-tech shoebox cash register. But there was never more than five or six of us in total, and we had to serve a school with two thousand students who all wanted their meat pies and Wagon Wheels at the same time. It was more chaotic than any retail job I would go on to have in my university years. Working on the high-school canteen counter was like The Hunger Games mixed with Fight Club mixed with Boxing Day sales. Everyone was just trying to survive and nobody noticed what the hell anybody else was doing. Putting some sneaky change into my pocket would’ve been easy.

  But I was smart. I was organised. I was first in my grade in most of my subjects, and I spent my weekends doing homework and preparing for next week’s classes while reading history books that my mum had specially ordered for me. I was an insufferable overachiever (this was before I realised how much easier school is when you’re lazy), and if I was going to start pocketing sneaky cash while on canteen duty, there was no way I was going to half-arse it. I wasn’t just going to brazenly take money out of the shoebox cash register – I needed a system that would bring maximum profits but also gave me deniability should I get caught doing anything dodgy. Basically, I needed to create a profitable yet perfect crime. One in which I would make lots of money but never get caught.

  I cannot even tell you how much of a genius I thought I was for realising this. How nobody had yet managed to revolutionise theft in this way was beyond me. Steal stuff, but don’t get caught! It was clearly very simple as far as I was concerned. Anybody who’d ever been arrested was an idiot.

  Now, this was 1999, before everyone was allergic to gluten, nuts and sugar, so we supplied pretty standard Aussie school-lunch foods of the day: everything from meat pies and Zooper Doopers to chicken nuggets and wedges. All the colours on the fizzy drink spectrum, every chocolate bar and chip flavour known to man, and of course: Bubble o’ Bills. There was also usually some sad-looking homemade sandwiches covered in some even sadder-looking plastic wrap, but the overzealous parent volunteer who made those generally figured out pretty fast not to bother. Who’s going to buy egg salad on multigrain when they can have a Chiko Roll?

  And kids really wanted to eat this stuff back then (I still do, to be honest). There was no shortage of students wrestling to get to the front of the canteen line. There was also no shortage of students who tried to wrangle freebies out of me, and that is where I saw my in.

  I developed a system. I knew people wanted free stuff and I knew I wanted cash. I also knew that I had access to the free stuff and the cash. So, I made sure word slowly spread around to a few select individuals that if they came to me at the counter, they could give me a couple of dollars, order whatever they wanted (always valued at far, far more than a couple of dollars), and I would then give them everything they asked for and put their measly few coins in the shoebox. BUT (and here’s the genius part), I would also give them a huge amount of ‘change’, usually about ten bucks. Then, after lunch, as a fee for hooking them up, I would go and collect eighty per cent of the cash I had given them. So they got their money back, plus a massive lunch, and I pocketed at least $8.00 per person.

  This system meant that I wasn’t just brazenly taking money out of the shoebox and putting it in my pocket, which I was terrified would be noticed. I was taking people’s money, giving them food, then giving them change, which was exactly my job description. If the adult volunteers in charge ever looked up from their own shoeboxes and over at me to see what I was doing, everything would look completely normal. Just Rosie the good girl selflessly giving up her lunch hour as a canteen prefect.

  Then I’d collect my dirty money and me and my friends would go to the shops after school and make it rain with endless chips and gravy. THE PERFECT CRIME.

  I made sure to keep things very small at first. I assumed that if I kept the dollar amount low, nothing would ever be noticed. It’s not like there was any kind of inventory in this place – money was literally just thrown into a shoebox in exchange for junk food. The only way I would seem suspicious is if I handed in an empty box at the end of lunch. So I had about five people working for me. All friends who could be trusted. Collecting between eight and ten bucks from each of them meant I would get close to $50 every time I worked in the canteen. I was thirteen. I might as well have been a millionaire.

  To me, it felt like a victimless crime. Never mind that the school often didn’t have enough chairs in classrooms and an entire building riddled with asbestos became an abandoned place kids hooked up in because the school couldn’t afford to knock it down – I felt like I was taking from a wealthy corporation that surely didn’t need the money anyway. In fact, my taking money from them was probably a moral act, since I was spending it on far more worthy causes than them, with all their questioning whether evolution was a thing and making me participate in team sports. I was like Robin Hood, taking from the rich and giving to the poor (me), so I could spend the money on what the community desperately needed (food for my friends and other stuff that I really wanted for me).

  Also, at that stage, I just didn’t really feel like I owed the world anything. My dad had killed himself. My mum was an alcoholic. I kept getting shipped around to live with different people who weren’t that thrilled to have me there. I was in Year 8 and had already been to at least eleven schools. I never knew what horror show was waiting for me when I got home. The world owed me, not the other way around. Adults had been letting me down my entire life – taking some of their money was just my way of making sure I was being compensated for everything they’d put me through.

  But (luckily, I think, for the world at large, since I was clearly on my way to masterminding much larger Ocean’s 11-style crimes) fear and anxiety started to get the better of me as the scale of my canteen operation grew. I’ve often thought that’s the reason I never ended up living a life on the wrong side of the law, like so many other people who grew up with childhoods similar to mine. Given this early foray into shoebox coin theft, it seems I could have easily gone that way. But I didn’t feel guilt about the stealing; I was just a total coward. Breaking rules terrifies me, and I figured that out about two weeks into my life as a criminal.

  And even though I quickly went back to the right side of the law because I was scared and not because I felt like I was doing anything wrong, I still completely understand the logic behind behaving badly because you feel like the world hasn’t done you any favours. If all anybody’s ever done is let you down, and you can find an easier (usually illegal) way to get something that you want or need, why shouldn’t you take it? Why wouldn’t you take the easier way when your life has been so damn hard already? Can anyone really blame you for that?

  I grappled with those thoughts at thirteen, and I’d really like to say that I internally debated privilege and moral relativism and came to the conclusion that the world doesn’t owe you anything no matter how crappy a hand you’ve been dealt, and that you aren’t entitled to behave how you please just because you’ve built up some level of cosmic debt via a crappy childhood.

  I would like to say I had those thoughts, but I was not even close to being that smart at the time. (To be honest, I’m not entirely
certain I really understand what ‘moral relativism’ means today, but now I can say I discussed it in one of my books and damn it if that doesn’t sound impressive.)

  I didn’t decide to bring my crime ring to an end because I thought it was wrong, I decided to bring it to an end because I was scared shitless.

  Word spreads fast in high school – about as fast as hashtags spread today when somebody is being shamed by people on Twitter – and word of the dweeby girl who could hook you up at the canteen counter was fast becoming legend. I’d like to say it was my fault, but this one can only be blamed on my vagina. That hussy.

  A cute boy who I had a massive crush on, and who would never have talked to me otherwise, came to my line at the canteen one day, which had suspiciously grown a lot longer than the other lines. He told me what he wanted. I gave it to him. He gave me his money. I gave him his change. Then he just stood there.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, looking down at his pie (and sauce that I’d charged him ten cents extra for because when I wasn’t partaking in grand theft I was actually a stickler for the rules).

  ‘What?’ I said, momentarily snapped out of the trance his face had me under.

  ‘Well, it’s just that I thought that, you know, you gave out like . . . free stuff.’

  My eyes widened. ‘What! No!’ I said, laughing in an exaggerated manner for the FBI cameras that I was sure were planted all over the canteen. (Yes – I am fully aware we don’t have the FBI in Australia, but I was raised on television. I probably would have called 911 in an emergency and died as I waited for an ambulance that never came.)

  I leaned in close to him. ‘Not so loud,’ I said, feeling all kinds of tingles in my special place now that we were practically touching noses. ‘Okay. Just this once. What do you actually want?’