At the moment you can find me in the brochure for the Ampersand Spring/Summer collection. In each photo, which is printed on matte paper with an Instagram wash, I am posing next to this year’s male Ampersand ambassador, who is wearing the same outfit as me with minor modifications. We manage to finesse vague, casual expressions, as if it’s only natural that we would be wearing identical outfits while socialising in a sun-lit sharehouse full of sensible bookshelves and creamy stationery. Ursula and Graeme wear Penny-Farthing shirt ($59.95), Eagle Eye necktie ($29.95) and Greyhound pinstripe shorts ($69.95).
A ubiquitous feature of every Ampersand shoot is a Scrabble board—not the newest release of the game, but some dustier version with wooden racks, faded squares, letter tiles yellowed like old teeth. They spell high-value words like SUTURES and ECHELON and CITADEL. Ursula and Graeme are obviously intelligent and very fashionable, very expensively educated people.
It’s not often that I think deeply about Rsu. This culture is awash with enough stories of malevolent twins and vengeful doppelgangers. But maybe, even secretly, I’ve always been waiting for some trace of my sister to erupt; an extra tooth, perhaps, or a severed nerve sparking. It doesn’t have to be malevolent. Like the way people look for final messages from deceased loved ones. Signs of persistence.
Did Rsu ever have a consciousness?
I’ve recently become addicted to playing Scrabble against myself. Whenever this blank document stumps me I walk over to my bed, where I’ve laid out the board, and shuffle the tiles on the active player’s stand. I have memorized the entirety of the two- and three-letter words accepted under both the British and US rules. It’s actually not difficult to play Scrabble against yourself. Most of the time you’ll find that one player gets all the expensive letters, like the Q and the Z and the X, and the other player gets tedious all-vowel combinations, and will never thrive. All the potential, stolen by chance, not unlike Rsu. But that’s what happens when you look back over a particular span of time, and decide to think of it as a span of time, of the events belonging together: everything becomes a metaphor for your biggest hang-up.
Last time Penny was in my car she switched out my mix CD for an audiobook of Grimm fairytales. The reason she listens to these audiobooks isn’t because of the stories, but because she really likes the guy who’s reading them. His name is Tim Spiegel and it’s not that his voice is sexy exactly, or textured with age, but it possesses a kind of melodic orderliness. Like—if it’s possible—a voice that is buoyant and sad at the same time; a balloon drifting off in the sky.
When I tell people I’m an artist they get concerned. Suddenly they are fully conscious of their role as taxpayers. Suddenly I’m a parasite. I should tell them that I know a thing or two about parasites.
Sometimes if I can be bothered I show them the Ampersand catalogue. This can go in two directions—one, it can be impressive and glamorous. My worth as a human is verified in print. People respect things that make cash. Two: it simply increases their disdain. Like I’m delusional, high on my own youth. Like a kind adult never whispered gently in my ear that I won’t be young forever.
Here’s the extent of my commitment to modelling: a few chance jobs scattered throughout my adolescence. Perhaps you once perused a brochure for a new housing estate, and there I was, riding a bicycle on a path around an artificial lake. Or maybe you once read a names-changed-to-protect-privacy magazine article about health disorders and teen suicide, and the stock image accompanying the column featured the back of my head, staring into a grimy school toilet mirror blurred by pain and Photoshop. Or perhaps you received an orientation day information pack for a university in your state, and there I was, sitting on a costly green lawn in front of a clock tower with four or five other would-be school leavers, my inclusion in the photo, with my non-threatening brownness, signifying the campus’s commitment to diversity and multiculturalism. There are many girls in binders, like me, who aren’t intent on becoming the next Gemma Miranda whatever. It is simply that there are countless billboards, catalogues, magazine spreads, empty photo frames—a whole advertising universe that needs to be populated by sweet young saleable faces. Scratch that: sweet young saleable diverse faces.
Oh Tim Spiegel, the way your voice curls is sometimes just the most endearing thing. I wonder if you get shit from people about reading audiobooks for a living. I wonder whether you still live with your parents, or if people ask you when you’re going to get a real job, or if they lecture you about how your voice won’t stay the same forever.
Some plucky arts worker has scraped up enough funding to put on a sizeable exhibition in Perth, called 30/30, which features thirty Australian artists under the age of 30. Penny got in it, and so did I. Penny, with her mobiles; me, with my ink drawings. I’ve decided to go all-out for this exhibition. I’m going to create the largest and wankiest installation that I can conceive.
That’s the other thing about me. I don’t know if I really believe that I’m wanky. Sometimes I get so absorbed in making art, and I know exactly what the art explores and I can explain it without resorting to all that my practice engages in a dialectical interrogation of the discursive limits of lofty tertiary education crap. But sometimes—and I wonder if my friends would admit to this too—you just sort of pull back a bit, like there’s a camera inside your head that pans outwards and outwards, and you think... what is this? What am I doing? Am I really exploring this concept or that concept, or am I really just making whatever the fuck I want?
Penny and I are op-shop-hopping; she’s on the lookout for mobile fodder, I’m on the lookout for blankets and old chairs for the 30/30 installation. Tim Spiegel is telling the story of Little Red Riding Hood. ‘“What big teeth you have,”’ Tim Spiegel says for Little Red Riding Hood. ‘“All the better to eat you with, my dear!”’ Tim Spiegel says for the Wolf. ‘And with that,’ Tim Spiegel concludes, ‘the wolf leapt from the bed and devoured Little Red Riding Hood in one vicious mouthful.’
Penny says that she’d love Tim Spiegel to devour her in one vicious mouthful. I tell her not to defile my car with her intimate fantasies. ‘AG,’ I could say: an expression of annoyance, remorse, or surprise, but also a colloquial shortening of ‘agriculture’, as in ‘ag college’. Several of the two-letter words accepted in Scrabble are interjections of dismay, astonishment, hesitation, distress. So many nuanced emotions in the simple arrangement of two letters. ‘AH,’ said Little Red Riding Hood as she was swallowed alive. ‘UR,’ said the Wolf as he awoke with a belly full of stones. ‘OH,’ said my mother when the ultrasound revealed, in its oracular chalk, Rsu quietly growing on my neck.
Someone recognizes me at Cellar Door. A rosy-cheeked waitress with a straight brown fringe. She’s wearing the Ginger Schnapps chequered shirt ($42.95) from the AdShell poster in Forest Chase and the Cherry Sundae Unicorn pin badge ($30) from page three of the Ampersand Spring/Summer brochure.
‘Aren’t you the girl from the Ampersand ads?’ she asks.
‘I’ve done some work for Ampersand, yeah.’
‘Oh wow! It’s like my favorite store.’
‘Thanks,’ I say. As if I could really take credit for the work of bloodless Ampersand designers, extracting the season’s threads from blueprints of wartime clothing; the factory workers gunning away at their sewing machines, relentless as punchclocks. The salesgirl making small talk as she flattens the base of a thick brown carry bag, her lanyard swinging, as if she too is price-tagged. Perhaps I, as well, help to produce Ampersand clothing, by wearing it on my person, by submitting to the camera flash.
‘It’s so weird to see you in real life,’ the waitress says. And with that she whisks away our table number, the Three of Hearts, and retreats behind the counter.
Real life, I think to myself, as Penny goes back to explaining her latest techno-woe. ‘Here, I’ll show you what I mean,’ she says, taking out her Seed.fon. ‘See?’ She swipes across the menu and back again. The applications whip onscreen and away like unwanted clothes
on a sales rack.
‘See?’ Penny says. ‘There’s a lag.’
‘Oh,’ I say, twisting my voice. She keeps demonstrating the lag, but I’m not seeing it.
‘It used to be instant.’
‘Yeah.’
Penny locks the phone and slides it back into her handbag. ‘Ugh. It’s still under warranty. I’ll have to call up about it.’
‘Good luck.’
Penny extracts a long packet of sugar from the ceramic holder in the center of the table. The paper of the packet is made from an atypically glossy stock, like the packaging of an Apple device; it is almost a shame when Penny crookedly beheads it and tips the sugar into her coffee.
The phrase keeps on returning, see you in real life, like a persistently misdelivered parcel. Penny emerges from her coffee. ‘Hey so, tonight after Richard’s, Jess is having a thing at hers. Want to go to that?’
Richard: a guy two grad classes below ours, whose body of work consists entirely of slogans typeset in Helvetica. He has a show opening tonight. Jess: a jewelry designer who specializes in video game–themed earrings and lives in a tattered house on the outskirts of Northbridge with perpetually absent housemates. ‘Of course,’ I say to Penny.
Perhaps when I look back on these days—whatever I will retrospectively define as ‘these days’, my youth or my twenties or just this vanishing year—my brain will reorganize the moments into a series of violent segues. How exactly did I get from Cellar Door, to Richard’s show, to right now, driving through Northbridge humming with too much cider, while Penny continually skips the CD backwards so that Tim Spiegel is saying one vicious mouth—one vicious mouth—one vicious mouthful all the way down William Street, while the two girls in the back, friends of Richard’s tipsy on the table wine served at the exhibition, toss through the blankets I scoured from seven different op-shops and shriek with laughter, as the traffic lights seem to tilt at every corner, lurching like sights in a theme park ride... day to afternoon to night, fading between each other like some timed gradation, a screensaver, until I’m squeezing my car into a parking space, staggering through Jess’s flamingoed front yard, to Jess herself, opening the flywire, two hoop earrings dangling from each lobe. One orange, one blue.
Jess’s laptop is jacked into a speaker in the lounge room, and although the songs sound as if iTunes is on shuffle, I know that she has actually spent all afternoon curating this playlist. An uneven circle of people sit on the carpet, including one guy who I’m glad not to know, dropping trivial facts about every song. There are more people outside smoking, flicking their butts into a giant flower pot half filled with blackened rain water. Abandoned bottles cluster in every corner and windowsill. Penny and I hover in the lounge room, impressed at the party-likeness of this party. It’s like the work of a really conscientious set dresser.
‘Actually that instrument right there is a glockenspiel,’ the music trivia guy says.
The other people in the circle are aggressively opening up side conversations to get away from him. ‘The thing is it’s only called tandem cycling when the riders are seated one behind the other,’ a girl in a Janelle Monáe T-shirt says. ‘When the riders are side-by-side it’s called a sociable.’
‘What? I’ve never seen a tandem bike where the riders are next to each other.’
‘Like I said, it’s not called a tandem bike, it’s called a sociable.’
‘That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.’
‘I’m serious. Look, just LOOK AT THIS.’ She summons Wikipedia on her Seed.fon. ‘Shit, my phone’s getting so fucking slow.’
‘Mine too!’ cries Penny, injecting us both into the circle.
Jump cut. Two hours later. I drift between two different conversations that are happening simultaneously in the adjoining kitchen and in the lounge room. In the kitchen Jess is delivering an impromptu tutorial on how to open beer bottles using the edge of a table. In the lounge room Penny and the girl in the Janelle Monáe T-shirt are debating the ending of Inception. ‘OF COURSE IT WAS ALL A DREAM,’ yells Penny, her bottle of Rogers perilously inclined.
The music trivia guy’s facts are getting sloppy. He keeps confusing Regina Spektor with Fiona Apple. There is a successful ping! from the kitchen and a round of applause. I am fixated on a mobile that Penny made last year for her solo show—which Jess must have purchased—which hangs from the light fixture, a bird’s nest of cutlery. It’s like we have our own private economy; everyone buys everyone else’s work.
‘The totems aren’t for finding out if you’re in a dream,’ the girl in the Janelle Monáe T-shirt says. ‘They’re just good for finding out if you’re in someone else’s dream.’ She whips out her phone. ‘Here, I’ll prove it. Oh look, hey you, YOU, stop talking—here’s that picture of the sociable I was trying to show you earlier.’
‘What?’
‘The sociable, dammit! It’s real! See here?’
The group in the kitchen move on to other bottle-opening strategies. Above the little folding table where Jess and her invisible housemates eat breakfast, I spot a piece from Jess’s short-lived watercolor phase. It’s a painting of duelling Kirbies in Super Smash Bros. Brawl—pink, round, fat with threatening cuteness. One of the Kirbies has his mouth open, a black hole, about to suck the other Kirby in. Scrawled underneath are the words: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN KIRBY SWALLOWS KIRBY?
I think that I am turning pink like Kirby. There are three ciders billowing inside me, inflating like a hot-air balloon inside my stomach. The girl in the Janelle Monáe T-shirt passes around her phone to anyone who cares—I see the pictures of sociables, in which a man and a woman—always, a man and a woman—ride what looks like some kind of bicycle hydra, clutching their separate handlebars, pedalling on their separate pedals, smiling like fools.
Jump cut. Two hours. The music trivia guy is mercifully passed out. A group has taken off for a teetering walk to the twenty-four-hour McDonald’s but the room still feels full. Something about having a headache makes everything seem far too close. Jess is asking everybody if they have seen her orange portal. ‘Where is it? Where is my orange portal?’ she says, clutching her left ear lobe as if the hole might close over very soon, using her free hand to overturn cushions. I begin to suspect the playlist is repeating itself. I hear a glockenspiel, cheeky as déjà vu.
The girl in the Janelle Monáe T-shirt is curled up next to me, cycling through random Wikipedia articles on her phone and whispering their titles. ‘List of the United States Senators from Maine,’ she says. ‘European Society of Paediatric and Neonatal Intensive Care. Max Müller (cross-country skier). H.R. Kwai (author). Dendritic filopodia. Miami Psychic.’
Penny is also deep in telephonic communion, in the corner, her Seed.fon pressed to her ear. She is sobbing. Every fifteen seconds she peels the phone off her face and dabs the touchscreen. I want to go over there and ask what’s wrong but that Kirby-feeling has infected my whole body. I feel like my limbs are small and inadequate, lacking the proper digits. There’s no way I’m driving home. Penny keeps on sobbing. I have never known a drunk crier like her.
‘List of Pikkoro and the Multipurpose Octopus episodes,’ the girl in the Janelle Monáe T-shirt whispers. ‘Donald Bradman’s batting technique.’
I float over to Penny’s corner, watch her dab the touchscreen. She seems to be pressing the number five. ‘Penny,’ I say, trying to hold her slippery face. ‘What are you doing?’
She sniffs, wipes her knuckles across her nose. ‘Listen,’ she says, brandishing her phone at my ear. ‘Listen.’
I take the phone, which is spotted with fingerprints and feverishly warm. I press it to my ear—
Thank you for calling technical support for your Seed device. Please keep your model number at hand so that we may best help you with your enquiry.
—and I listen to Tim Spiegel, like a gentle firelight, leading me through the telephonic darkness. Penny continues to sob, and even I am overcome with something, like the sun is rising at my back.
His guiding voice: melodious, benevolent.
If you are experiencing technical problems with your Seed.fon, please press one.
If you are experiencing technical problems with your Seed.nb or Seed.tab, please press two.
For problems relating to other Seed devices, please press three.
To speak to an operator, press four.
To hear these options again, press five.
AUF, a useful and peculiar three-letter word, is an obsolete synonym for ‘changeling’. Sometimes, the term ‘changeling’ refers to a human child who is taken away by magical creatures, but it may also refer to the false child left in the real one’s place. Stories of children swapped for other children recur across the centuries, to explain away sick children, or children born with deformities and disorders. The idea is that there is some real child, sequestered elsewhere, and the newborn is some kind of imposter. There is something miserable about that notion. Newborns, who are exactly who they are, too feeble to protest to their dismayed parents—no, I am real. I am your real child.
Perhaps when my mother first saw me and Rsu, a slippery chimera that emerged from the incision on her stomach, we registered as some swap gone wrong, a faulty transaction. Who was the real child?
There is only one photograph of us, the one which was printed in all the newspapers. I was never allowed to see it, and I’ve never attempted to find it myself. What I have seen, instead, is a yellowed clipping of the ‘after’ picture—Ursula, in singular form. The real child. The one who will pass as the real child.
Perhaps the reason the word ‘changeling’ is not employed consistently to describe either the real child or the false child is because you can never really be certain which is which. For surely Rsu could have been the real child, and I the false child who supplanted her. At some crucial, secret stage of our becoming, I could have been the parasite, and Rsu the autosite.
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