I thought I was doomed to work in that call centre forever, and I escaped it because of him. Every word I wrote, I wrote with his encouragement. Nobody supported or was more invested in my success than him.
And his support had no limits.
When I started at Mamamia, I was petrified. Petrified of everything. Of meeting new people, of being in an office where I had to socialise, of everybody discovering that my writing was actually terrible. Tony had to push me out the door every morning (always in an outfit he had chosen). When the editorial team would go out for drinks or dinner, he would come with me, as my social safety blanket, so I wouldn’t be crippled with shyness. If, as I quickly realised was inevitable when you write online, I was attacked on social media for an article I’d written, he was the first person on Twitter, blasting people for going after me and tweeting links to every piece I’d ever written, just to prove how brilliant he thought I was. He would log in to my Twitter and Facebook accounts for me, and delete nasty comments before I could see them and fall into a guaranteed despair spiral.
The very first time I did radio, Tony came with me to the studio and waited in the greenroom. Same with the first time I appeared on television. When my profile really started to take off, he was with me every step of the way. My followers reached into the thousands, then the tens of thousands, then over a hundred thousand, and where I felt afraid and unworthy, he never doubted that I deserved my success. He screamed and cried with me on the phone when I was offered a book deal, and he was the one to proudly sign the contract as a witness.
The book tour terrified me: the idea of having to meet people I didn’t know and talk to them and be ‘on’ and impress everyone who had come to see me. So Tony came to every single tour stop. It was eventually just assumed by my publishers that they would need to plan for two people whenever and wherever I was doing an event. We jokingly referred to Tony as my ‘Executive Brand Manager’, a fancy title he could put on his resume, since he had stopped working just to support me emotionally while my career soared.
I was asked if I wanted to write and tour a comedy show, and just a couple of years after rushing home from a call centre so I could hide in my room, just a couple of years after being confused and lost and feeling worthless, I said yes. I said yes to standing onstage by myself for an hour, entertaining people with stories I had written.
Tony listened to me rehearse in my bedroom, pointing a lamp in my direction so I could get used to the spotlight. Of course, he came to every show.
By that stage, the blow-up mattress was long gone. We had moved into a much nicer apartment and I had bought an actual couch. I was even making enough money that we could just buy Krispy Kremes and not try to scam freebies from the exhausted 7-Eleven guy. And it was all because of Tony. I may have written the words that people liked to read (much to my disbelief), but I would never have been able to write them in the first place if Tony hadn’t been there with me, pushing me, encouraging me, every step of the way.
After my comedy show, Tony decided to go to Austin, Texas, for a while. He had studied there for a semester completing his Masters degree in Media Arts and Production, and wanted to spend some time with the friends he had made there. It was perfect timing for us both, really; I had been offered the chance to develop my own TV show in Melbourne, so Tony leaving Sydney for a while felt like the perfect time for me to leave too. We decided that I’d move to Melbourne and get set up in an apartment while he went to Austin. When it was time to work on the show, he’d come back, move in with me, and we’d go on to win a million Emmys together. I couldn’t imagine making a show without him, not just because I needed him to hold my hand, but also because he was just so brilliant, both comically and creatively. He was probably the only person I knew who had more of an instinct for television than I did. It was our dream job, and we were going to do it together.
I hated moving to Melbourne on my own. Hated it. Not only was it the first time I’d been without Tony in a long time, but I was in a new state and didn’t have a lot of friends. Not for their lack of trying though: a lot of Melbourne people reached out to me when I first moved there. But without Tony to come with me while I socialised, my shyness meant I was too scared to go. I spent a lot of time in my apartment, only leaving for the occasional TV writing job, or to record a podcast, or to ride my bike through the park (I was trying very hard to fit in as a Melbourne hipster), but mostly I just stayed at home.
I was lonely. And I had underestimated how important the comfort and familiarity I had built for myself in Sydney was. After a childhood in which I attended more than twenty schools, lived in countless houses with different families, called more suburbs home than I could count, when I reached adulthood all I wanted was to stay in one place. And I did. I moved to Sydney’s inner-west when I was twenty and I never left. Not even to travel. Of course I wanted to see the world, and watched longingly as friends my age did so, but after the life I’d lived, once I was in control of it, all I wanted to do was stay put. And while Tony and I changed apartments a few times, I had been living in and around the inner-west for almost ten years when I moved to Melbourne. I had built a secure, familiar place for myself for the first time in my life, and I did not anticipate how much I would miss that.
But, as lonely as I felt, I pushed through, because I knew Tony was coming. I knew that when he arrived and moved in with me, we were going to take Melbourne by storm. (At least he would, while I quietly waved behind him.) I knew it was going to be brilliant once Tony arrived. He had helped me choose the apartment and was already planning how he would redecorate everything.
Things would be better when Tony came. I would be braver. Melbourne was going to be brilliant once Tony was holding my hand. I just had to hold out a few more months.
When the school holidays came around, I paid for my thirteen-year-old niece Allira to fly down and stay with me for a week. I figured I’d take her out, do a bunch of fun stuff, and feel a little bit connected to home for a while. I was getting over a bout of glandular fever, which I’d picked up after making out with a 21-year-old at a party earlier that year (hint: don’t make out with 21-year-olds), so I wasn’t feeling great, but having Allira around really cheered me up. Then, on her second day in Melbourne, she got a stomach bug. I’d taken her to high tea (which, frankly, she didn’t seem impressed enough with, considering how much I’d paid for it), and on the way home she went a very weird shade of pale. By six that night, we were both on the couch, miserable, watching TV and feeling like crap. I made her watch The Sixth Sense, which completely perplexed her. ‘Why is it, like, fuzzy?’ she asked, having never seen a film that wasn’t digital. ‘Is it really old or something?’
‘No!’ I said, offended. ‘I think it came out when I was in about Year 6. So I guess maybe twenty years ago.’
‘Rosie, that’s old,’ she said, not looking up from her phone. ‘It’s like the person who made it needs glasses.’
She had a point. When you watch a movie that hasn’t been adapted into the crisp, clear viewing experience we’ve become used to, it really does feel like the quality is defective in some way. I could understand why she kept calling it ‘fuzzy’.
She also found it incomprehensible. She thought the ending was dumb. (Her: ‘I’m sorry, but he must have tried to buy something at some point.’ Me: ‘SHUT UP WITH YOUR PESKY DETAILS!’)
Accepting that she was sufficiently unimpressed with my movie choice and would prefer to watch quality programming on her phone, I left her on the couch and went to bed.
I woke up late the next morning, and sat in bed, checking Facebook and Instagram as I always do before my feet even touch the ground for the day.
My head still foggy, I noticed a message from one of Tony’s cousins, Josephine. I read it, but felt like my just-awake brain had mixed it up, so I read it again. My heart started to beat faster. Well that can’t be right, I thought. Tony’s always been a hypochondriac. There’s been some mix-up, and the wrong message had made its wa
y to Griffith. Tony had mentioned a seizure to me a couple of weeks earlier – he was probably just in hospital. I messaged Josephine back, gave her my number and asked her to call me, running past Allira on the couch and onto the balcony, which was the only place I got strong enough reception to have a phone call.
My phone rang. I answered it.
‘Rosie, I’m so sorry. Tony passed away.’
I was really emotionally scarred by my abortion.
(Yeah, um, not really. Sorry.)
My face must have looked exactly how the over-achieving sperm inside me was making my stomach feel, because the nurse giving me my results didn’t even take a moment to assume that this was a life event I was thrilled about.
‘Oh. Um. Oh. I’m so sorry. It’s positive. You’re pregnant.’
When someone says ‘I’m sorry’ instead of ‘Congratulations’, you know that you are definitely too young to be pregnant.
I wanted to vomit. Not because I was terrified or shocked or anxious to find out that I was knocked up at twenty-one, but because whatever little swimmer had managed to successfully plow its way into me was now having some kind of epic spermgastro problem that could only be explained by it having eaten bad fish of some kind. Not only had my egg been infiltrated, it had been infiltrated by an obviously defective sperm with a stomach bug. And now all I wanted to do was vomit, all day, every day.
That’s how I knew, actually. I can remember the exact moment I knew I was pregnant. I could just feel something wrong in my body.
I was working in a cinema, and got a hot flush while sitting on the toilet. Then I was really suddenly hit with a wave of nausea like nothing I had ever felt before. It was the kind of nausea that takes away any sense of dignity that a person has – I literally took off my top and bra, lay down on the cold tiles of the bathroom floor with my pants around my ankles, just praying for the feeling to pass and being absolutely certain that no other person in the history of time had ever suffered like I was suffering in that exact moment.
I spent the next ten minutes throwing up pretty violently (this wasn’t ‘cough a little while a boy holds your hair back’ throwing up, this was heaving, ‘the blood vessels in your eyes burst’ kind of throwing up). It was graphic. Once I was done, I sat back on the toilet, a little worried to be honest, as I didn’t know if vaginal tinea was a thing but if you’re ever going to get it, it would definitely be after lying naked on the floor of a public cinema bathroom. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to compose myself. And as I sat there, entirely naked now except for my shoes, the words just flashed across my brain: YOU’RE PREGNANT.
Fuck.
I peed on a stick as soon as I finished work and the two blue lines immediately came into focus. Immediately. Like they were shoving the certainty in my face. They didn’t even give me the decency of some ambiguity.
Fuckity fuck shitburgers.
I threw up again, because the initial vomit had clearly only been some kind of vomit-welcoming ceremony, designed to introduce me to a new, vomit-focussed way of life. And from that moment on, the vomiting did not stop. It was all day, every day. That’s why I became convinced my egg had been fertilised by a defective sperm with a stomach bug. I was so nauseous I could barely stand upright. And then, a few days after peeing on that stick, I was still trying to hold in vom while sitting opposite the very concerned-looking nurse who had just taken my blood.
‘This isn’t something you wanted, is it?’ she said, appearing to be even more upset than me. I almost felt obligated to give her some kind of comforting hug.
‘Not really, no.’
We both sat there in silence for a second. I tried to decide if a 25-year-old nurse could answer my question about the possibility of a single sperm having gastro, but she seemed to be really emotionally affected by my test results, so I thought it best not to add to her stress.
‘Okay, so, um, thanks,’ I said, and left the tiny room.
Fucknugget.
I hobbled over to the doctor’s room. He reacted the same way as the nurse.
‘So, what are your plans?’ he asked.
‘Oh, abortion. Definitely,’ I quickly replied.
He nodded, and reached behind him for a pamphlet that was hidden behind a pile of other pamphlets – the pamphlets on show at the front clearly weren’t meant for slutty girls who had screwed up their lives.
He handed it to me, without speaking. It was for a place called the ‘Pre-Term Clinic’, also known as the ‘You Fucked Up So Bad The Doctor Hides This Pamphlet Behind The Other Pamphlets Clinic’.
‘So . . . Do I just . . . Can I just walk in or whatever? This afternoon?’ I asked.
I was clueless. As far as I was concerned, I was getting that thing taken out immediately. I didn’t like that my defence system had been compromised. Also I just really wanted to stop the vomit.
‘Well, you’re only at about four weeks, so you may have to wait a while yet. But make an appointment to discuss it with them.’
Wait a while yet? Say what now?
‘Why would I have to wait a while?’ I asked, panic rising along with more vom.
‘You really should speak to them about it,’ he snapped back. He really, really did not want to be talking about this with me.
I took my naughty girl pamphlet and left, dialling the ‘Pre-Term Clinic’ number before I was even out the door.
The clinic was less than a kilometre away, across the city, in an unassuming, nondescript building. It certainly wasn’t immediately obvious that it was an abortion clinic. There weren’t even any protesters, which, to be honest, I was mildly disappointed about. I really wanted to see someone holding up a graphic sign while singing Bible hymns through angry tears. I wanted to walk past them in defiance. But there were just a few office workers. A café. That’s about it, really. A perfectly normal city street.
The only sign that this was a ‘special’ kind of clinic was the prison-like locked security door. You couldn’t just walk into this place. You had to push a buzzer, after which someone would look at you through a camera and ask you to identify yourself over the intercom. If you had an appointment, they’d buzz you in to a locked glass area, where the staff at reception could get a look at you and decide if you were a legitimate woman in need or a crazy person holding up a graphic sign while singing Bible hymns through angry tears. If you passed the visual test, they unlocked the final door and let you through.
In my appointment, it was confirmed that I would indeed have to wait to get this thing out of me. The lovely yet nononsense female doctor told me I wasn’t ‘far enough along’ to get the termination done at that early stage. This was bizarre information to me. Not far enough along? I was supposed to let it get bigger? Allow the hostile take-over to continue?
Apparently, yes. I needed to be at least six weeks, but preferably eight, to guarantee that the ‘procedure’ would be successful.
I burst into tears. ‘That’s a month away!’ I cried. ‘I’m so sick and I’m throwing up more than I ever have in my life and I seriously think the sperm that broke through has gastro and I don’t know how it beat the others when it’s clearly defective and I can’t take this for another month seriously I can’t!’
‘We really don’t like to do it any earlier than that, I’m afraid,’ she replied, politely ignoring my near-hysterical babbling.
‘But what if it’s a bad sperm?’ I implored. ‘I seriously think a bad one got through. It is not normal to be this sick. It’s infecting me!’
She took a deep breath and smiled – the kind of polite smile that people give when it’s taking everything within the deepest depths of their soul to be patient with the idiot in front of them.
‘That’s just morning sickness,’ she said. ‘Nausea is totally normal during a pregnancy, especially at this early stage. It’s not really possible for a single sperm to . . . have gastro.’
She started rattling off something to do with ginger and lemonade and taking deep breaths, but I was
done listening. As she continued to talk about what the termination would involve, all I could think was how stupid I had been to let this happen. My grandmother, my mother and my older sister had all been pregnant before twenty-one, and I was so cocky in my belief that I would avoid going down that road. And now, not only had I failed to break the family curse of becoming a host body before twenty-one, I was also essentially homeless. And directionless. And I couldn’t afford to dye my regrowth. What a fuck-up.
After years of being sent back and forth between my alcoholic mother and a variety of different concerned adults willing to step in, I was finally removed from her care permanently at fourteen. My uncle Ben took me in, sent me to a very fancy boarding school and tried to give me some stability and consistency in what was left of my childhood. At twenty, though, that childhood was over, and he asked me to move out.
I didn’t really have anywhere to go, so I just sort of floated around for a while, staying on different couches. I spent half my time on my best friend Tony’s fold-out in Kings Cross, and the other half going between my older sister Rhiannon’s house and my mum’s house, both in Liverpool in Sydney’s west. I’d stopped going to drama school because I couldn’t afford the fees my uncle had been helping me with, so now I could basically be described as: Rosie, homeless cinema worker, cleaning up popcorn and busting guys getting secret hand jobs off their girlfriends during Fast and Furious movies.
I was hoping to work enough so that I could afford to move into a share-house close to the city, at which point I would reassess and try to actually do something with my life. I wanted to go to university, be a writer, maybe even put that time at drama school to use. But at that stage, I was living across three different couches and pulling clothes as needed out of the boxes I had stashed in my mum’s garage.
Every Lie I've Ever Told Page 4