After I hung up, I just stood there, in my pyjamas, on my balcony, holding my phone. My brain was racing as fast as it was frozen. I looked out over the park my apartment faced. The sky was grey and it was sprinkling rain; a slight howl in the wind shook the trees. I fixated on the dark Melbourne clouds above me, trying desperately to cling to the feeling that he was still around, even though my brain now knew he wasn’t. It was like trying to grab air with my fingers: I was reaching for something that I would never be able to hold. I was trying to force my mind into where it had been half an hour before, when everything was still the same. But my brain wouldn’t let me. Too big of a seismic shift had occurred. And now the clouds that I was staring at were clouds that existed in a world without Tony. How could that be? And how could I only have noticed the world’s emptiness now? Tony had died almost three days earlier. It had taken that long for the hospital to get in touch with people he knew in Austin, and for those people to get in touch with Tony’s family in Griffith.
I had been at high tea while Tony was lying in a morgue. He was only twenty-nine.
How had my soul not shattered the second his left this earth? Tony was the longest and most significant relationship I’d ever had with a person outside my family. How had I joked about The Sixth Sense with my niece and not even had an inkling that something was wrong? How had everything just . . . kept going? For three days?
Shit. My niece. I opened the balcony door and stepped back into the living room. Allira looked at me nervously from the couch.
‘Did you hear that?’ I asked.
She nodded.
‘Tony’s dead. Tony’s dead. He died. He had a seizure and he drowned. He’s dead.’ The words sounded so ridiculous coming out of my mouth. I didn’t know what to do. I suppose I needed to call people. My older sister, Rhiannon, should be first. Tony, in his brilliant ability to get along with anyone, was like the brother my three sisters and I had never had. He fit so seamlessly into our little family that it was like he had grown up with us. My sisters adored him. They probably liked him more than they liked me.
I dialled Rhi’s number. ‘Hey, bitch,’ she said jokingly, as she picked up the phone. It sounded busy on her end, like she was in a public place. She probably just figured I was calling to tell her how Allira was.
‘Hey, where are you?’ I asked. She was having brunch with her partner and their son, Allira’s little brother Mohammed.
‘What is it?’ she said, her tone shifting from the silly way she had answered the phone. She could tell something wasn’t right.
‘Um, Tony died,’ I said. It was the first time I’d ever told someone that a person had died. Whenever I watched people do it in the movies, it had always bothered me when they said someone was ‘dead’. Like, ‘I’m so sorry, Mrs Smith, your son is dead.’ I’d always imagined that if I ever had to break this kind of news to someone, I would say ‘died’ instead of ‘dead’. Dead was just so harsh. I mean, wow, have some empathy, movie people.
Maybe that was why I said it to Rhiannon the way I did. But honestly, I didn’t even think of the words before they came out of my mouth.
She started crying instantly, before she even said anything. I was surprised at how her body immediately responded so emotionally. I was jealous that she was brave enough to open that box. I still had the lid firmly on. Crying made it real. Plus I wasn’t sure that once I started, I’d be able to stop.
Rhiannon sat at a table in the middle of a crowded restaurant while I told her what happened. I asked her to call our younger sisters, Tayla and Isabella. I hung up. Next person.
Jacob. I had to call Jacob. If Tony had one part of my soul, Jacob had the other. He was another person I’d met on the first day of drama school, and, along with Tony, was one of the closest friends I’d ever had. He lived in Melbourne, but he travelled a lot for his very fancy job, so as I dialled his number, I was desperately hoping that he would be in town. He was.
Probably the most pragmatic and logical person I know, Jacob had a very different reaction to Rhiannon. He needed details, answers. It didn’t make sense to him, and he initially treated it like a problem that could be solved. He asked me what felt like a million questions, but eventually he heard in my voice that I was serious, and that’s when I heard his voice crack on the other end of the line.
‘I’m going to leave work as soon as I can and come to your house to help you make those calls.’
‘I think I’m going to get drunk,’ I said.
‘Yes. Smart. Numb everything. But wait for me. We can drink together. I love you. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’
Next up was Mia, the only adult friend I had who would know what to do in a situation like this. I was still on my balcony in my pyjamas. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.
Neither Mia nor myself are phone-talkers. Using the phone for talking seems so archaic to me. Also I’m terrified of it. From the moment my mum started making me book my own doctor’s appointments, I’ve had an irrational hatred of talking on the phone. I do it with close friends and family only, and even then only occasionally. My voicemail message says the following:
‘Hi. You’ve reached Rosie Waterland. I’m thirty, which means I’m too terrified to talk to people on the phone. So, if you’d like to get in touch, please send me a message or email me! That way, I can contact you in a way that doesn’t terrify me, and we don’t have to talk on the phone. Okay, thanks. Bye!’
So, for me to call Mia rather than text or email her was strange. She picked up immediately, light-hearted confusion in her voice. ‘Hello! Why are you calling me on the phone?’ she asked, laughing.
‘Hey, Mie.’
‘What’s wrong?’ Just like Rhiannon, her tone changed instantly.
‘Um . . . Tony died.’
‘What?’ Like Rhiannon again, I could tell Mia was crying already. How did they just cry like that? Why wasn’t I? How did they just, believe it?
I told her what happened, a story I was going to have to repeat at least thirty more times that day.
‘I don’t know what to do, Mia,’ I finally admitted. ‘I don’t know what people do. I . . . What am I supposed to do?’
She morphed into helpful mode. ‘Okay, well, first of all, is Jacob down there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Make sure he comes over. You need to be around people that knew Tony and loved him like you did. You also need to send Allira home. You can’t be worrying about taking care of her when you’re dealing with this. I can book a flight for you if you want?’
‘No, no, that’s okay, I can do it.’
‘Okay. Now, Rosie, you’re in shock, so you need to be careful about what you do this afternoon. Don’t walk near busy roads, don’t go to crowded places. Try not to cook anything. Your brain and body is all adrenalin right now – it won’t be working like usual.’
‘Mia. You know I never cook.’
We both laughed. We laughed. This day was bizarre.
After calling a few more people, I came inside from the balcony, looked at Allira and said, ‘Let’s walk to the shops.’ The shops were crowded, and you had to walk along a busy road to get to them. Sorry, Mia. But I just needed to be doing something. Anything. Also I needed to buy vodka, which I would definitely be drinking later. And Allira seemed to be feeling better after that stomach bug, so she would need some lunch. Shops. Walking. Lunch. Tony’s dead. This day was bizarre.
Jacob arrived early that evening.
‘What the fuck?’ I said, as I opened the door. ‘Seriously. What the fuck? What the fuck is going on?’
Allira went to my bedroom (the poor thing had no idea what to do), and Jacob and I sat, and drank, and talked about Tony. We talked about the night the three of us got drunk at his apartment in Kings Cross, then walked to the supermarket while hiding behind Jacob, who was wearing a giant cape we’d taken from the costume department at drama school. With Tony and me under the cape, it looked like Jacob had a massive arse, which, to three drunk 22-ye
ar-olds, was clearly the most hilarious thing we had ever experienced. We talked about the night the three of us went skinny-dipping in the ocean pool after watching one of our teachers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Coogee Beach. I jumped on Jacob’s back in the water, and he screamed as my pubes brushed up against him, while Tony watched from the sidelines, too body-conscious to fully strip down. Eventually, after Jacob and I promised to turn our backs, he pulled his clothes off and jumped into the water, spending the next ten minutes screaming as I chased him around the pool threatening to rub my pubes up against him as well. Later that night, hair still wet, we turned up at Club 77 and danced until 6am. It was just one drunken, fun night from ten years ago, and now it seemed like a sad and profound memory. All of a sudden, the night we went skinny-dipping had so much emotional weight to it. I couldn’t remember the colour of the cape at the supermarket, and it really bothered me. Silly details were now important ones. I wanted to remember everything, vividly.
We started making the calls. There was everybody from our year at drama school. The new friends he had made when he went back to drama school to study more. People he had worked with. The people he studied with in his media production degree at UTS. People I knew he had dated.
We started with those who were closest to him and worked our way down the list. Jacob and I took random turns – if he knew someone better he would make the call, and vice versa for me, although I felt obligated to make most of them.
Call after call after call after call. I came up with a sort of script in my head to follow.
‘Hi, it’s Rosie.’
‘Oh my gosh, Rosie! Hi! It’s been so long/so great to hear from you/can’t believe you’re calling me on an actual phone!’
‘I’m actually calling with some bad news: are you able to talk now? It’s about Tony. He died. There was an accident . . .’
I’d answer all their questions, tell them that I was starting a Facebook group message to keep everyone up-to-date with details about the funeral, and then I’d stay on the phone with them until they felt okay to hang up. Some people cried. Most were just shocked. Speechless, almost. Everybody asked how I was, but especially how his family was. Some people wanted to get off the phone immediately. Others wanted me to stay on the line while they sat in silence or sobbed.
There were people we had to track down overseas. People who were at work. People whose partners had to get them out of the shower.
Jacob and I just sat in my living room, making call after call after call after call. I was treating it like a job. I was numb to it. It felt like I was operating a grief conveyer belt.
After making all the calls to people who had a special connection with Tony, there were still countless others who needed to be told before they saw it on Facebook or Instagram. But after making at least thirty calls that night, repeating Tony’s death over and over and over and over, I couldn’t do it anymore. We needed to triage grief. Most important people to Tony first, with calls. Slightly less important people next. Slightly less important people than that, a written message or email. I asked Jacob to go through my phone and message the people who might want to know, but who I didn’t want to contact – ex-boyfriends and such.
Then came the calls to people who already knew. His friends in Austin, who’d not known where he was for twenty-four hours before having to identify his body and contact his family on the other side of the world. Tony’s sister, Sarina. His father, Pat. His mother, Mary, was too distraught to talk on the phone. Griffith was in mourning.
When it was close to midnight, we were done. We had contacted everyone we could think of to contact. We switched off the conveyer belt of grief.
Allira went home the next day, and Jacob spent the next few nights coming to my apartment after he finished work. We mainly just got drunk and watched funny movies, sporadically stopping to have long conversations about Tony. When his family were okay with it, I shared news of Tony’s death with my followers on social media. They had come to be fans of his too – he appeared in most of my photos and videos, I had written about him in my first book, and they’d all met him when they’d come to my events. He took everybody’s photos during my book signings, and would always secretly flip the person’s camera around and take a few selfies for them to randomly find in their photos. In the days after I revealed he had died, countless people sent me the selfies he had secretly taken on their phones. Every one of them made me laugh. It was so Tony.
I had asked my literary agent to cancel all my work commitments, so I was mainly spending my days numbing any and all possible feelings. I’d binge-watch TV all day, then get drunk at night. Some nights I was forcing myself to drink even if I didn’t feel like it – it just seemed to be the easiest way to self-medicate. I was giving in to dissociative behaviour – a coping mechanism I developed during traumatic times in my childhood. I basically had the ability to leave my brain – not unlike driving somewhere and then being unable to remember anything about the trip once you’ve arrived at your destination. Children with abusive childhoods very often fall into periods of dissociative behaviour when their brains feel like they need to shut down for their own safety. I spent years as an adult recognising and learning to manage that behaviour, but when Tony died, I fell right back into it. The pain was just too much, and my brain recognised the feeling of trauma, so it kicked into action. I could watch four hours of television and not remember a single thing I’d seen. I’d cut myself on the bottoms of my feet, and pick at the bleeding skin for hours, not realising I’d done anything or that any time had passed, until I went to walk and felt immense pain. I would count things, anything – lines in the floorboards, spots on the carpet, patterns in tiles. Then I’d look up and see that three hours had gone by. Someone who has grown up around abuse and trauma is very skilled at stepping out of their brain.
A few days after the death, I was sitting at home in the middle of the day, watching TV in my bedroom and letting time wash over me. Eventually I realised I was hungry, so I made a bowl of Rosie’s Chicken Soup and, the second it was ready, hurriedly brought it back to my room. My dark sanctuary. My blanket fort. I put the soup down on my bedside table and got into bed. I turned the TV on, then reached over to pick up the bowl. The bowl was boiling hot, and reflexively, I dropped it.
I dropped boiling hot soup all over myself. Or, more specifically, I dropped boiling hot soup all over the side of my bum. I immediately jumped out of bed and pulled my pants off, but it was too late – my skin was already starting to bubble. I ran into the bathroom and bent over comically under a cold shower, trying to get the water to hit only the burned skin and not the rest of my body on what was a freezing Melbourne winter’s day.
I didn’t bother cleaning up the soup. I didn’t care. I just put a towel down on top of the mess and got right back into bed, awkwardly lying on the one bum cheek that wasn’t burning in pain. I didn’t really mind the pain though. It was distracting, and not nearly as painful as thinking about what I didn’t want to think about. I fell asleep at one point, and when I woke up, the burn looked worse, not better, so I called Rhiannon.
‘Rosie, it sounds like you might get an infection. You really need to go to the doctor and get it dressed properly.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. I had no intention of going to the doctor.
‘Seriously, Rosie. If you don’t look after burns they can get really bad. Have you put anything on it?’
‘Well, there are too many blisters and I’m scared I’m going to pop them. Remember that time my back blistered up from that sunburn, and Grandpa popped them all when he gave me a hug? That hurt like a motherfucker. And it was gross. Stuff came out of them.’
‘Go to the doctor tomorrow, Rosie.’
I didn’t go to the doctor. But, by the next day, I was sufficiently worried enough about gangrene that I decided to call Jacob.
‘Hey, when you come over tonight, can you bring, like, some burn stuff?’
‘What do you mean “burn stuff”?’
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‘Well, I burned my bum with boiling hot soup, and now it’s all blistered up and Rhiannon says I should put burn stuff on it. And like, a bandage or something. Plus I’m scared I’ll get gangrene.’
Jacob arrived after work with a cream he’d bought and some Band-Aids, but when I pulled my pants down to show him the burn, he immediately decided we needed more.
‘Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. We’re going to the doctor. Right now.’
I really did not want to leave the house. I hadn’t showered or changed my clothes in days.
‘No! It’s fine! I just need you to put the cream on it because I can’t reach.’
‘Rosie. You need to dress that, properly. I didn’t realise it was so . . . big. We’re going to need bigger bandages. And I want to ask a doctor about infection.’
It was almost 8pm, so most doctors were closed, but I agreed to go to the chemist. I didn’t even change, I just put a coat on over my pyjamas. I showed the pharmacist my bum. She seemed shocked, and gave us about three different anti-bacterial creams and ointments and a bunch of bandages. Then we went home, and Jacob cleaned my bum. He rubbed anti-bacterial ointment on my bum. He rubbed soothing stuff on the blisters on my bum. Then he bandaged my bum with special burn bandages, made especially for bums.
Jacob was one of two people on the planet I would trust to clean my bum. The other person was Tony. Tony really believed in the ‘universe’. He believed in energy and spirits and everything having meaning and people moving on to some kind of higher realm after they die. I really wanted to believe that too. I wanted to believe that somewhere, Tony was laughing his head off, knowing that the only time I’d felt okay in the days since he died was knowing that there was someone besides him in my life who I could rely on to clean and bandage my bum.
Every Lie I've Ever Told Page 6