The Anti-Cool Girl

by Rosie Waterland

  But we had fun together. Most of the kids who lived there had seen, or were still seeing, some messed-up stuff in their short, little lives, and playing Home 44 until ten o’clock at night made us feel normal.

  Mitchell and Marcus lived across the street. Their dad was a heroin addict who only turned up occasionally, and their mum beat the absolute shit out of them for the most bizarre reasons, like closing the door too loudly or knocking over a pot plant.

  There was a Guatemalan family next door, who I could have sworn had about twenty-seven people living in that one tiny house. Nina was our age, and when we walked to Macquarie, her parents couldn’t even afford to give her money for a soft serve.

  Tim lived a few houses down from us, and the police were at his place all the time. When our rabbit had babies, we gave him two of them, and he drowned them both in his pool.

  Then, of course, there was Leslie, the weird girl who smelled like cheese and lived in the Houso apartments, which was the only thing worse than living in a blue Lego house. I went to her apartment once, motivated mostly by a sense of curiosity and the promise of dinner. When her mum dropped a plate of half-defrosted fish fingers in front of us and went back to watching Wheel of Fortune, I was mortified. I felt like I needed to stage some kind of intervention. I wanted to put my hand on hers and ask if there was anything I could do, and maybe gently hint at the cheese odour situation. Then she said we should go to her bedroom and act out the sex scenes from Days of Our Lives.

  Yep. Every kid at Smurf Village had obviously seen some messed-up stuff.

  I tried to focus on those sad, defrosted fish fingers while sitting on top of Ayers Rock. I was hoping they would conjure up some kind of sympathy in me that would enable me to get through this so-called quick lick. ‘She’s so much worse off than you!’ I was telling myself. ‘You are such a generous spirit for doing this. And you’ll get to hang out with Rhiannon for the rest of the day!’

  I took a deep breath, reached down, pulled my undies aside and gave the go-ahead. ‘Do it,’ I said, suddenly remembering that sometimes my fanny smelled bad and praying this wasn’t one of those times. ‘Just do it.’

  Leslie bent down, gave me a quick lick, and that was it. The whole thing lasted less than a second. Leslie burst into hysterical laughter. I immediately looked to Rhiannon for approval. She had demanded I do the thing and I had done the thing! I was sure this would gain me some respect, at least for the day.

  ‘Oh my god,’ Rhiannon said in disbelief. ‘I can’t believe you did it. Ewwww! I can’t believe you did it!’ She got up, sprinted down the side of Ayers Rock and headed straight to Nina’s house, no doubt to spread the word that I had spread my legs.

  That was not how I had anticipated the operation turning out. I pushed Leslie over, told her she smelled like cheese and went back to my room to plan my next Oscars speech. This one was going to be fucking good.

  By about six o’clock that evening, Mum knew everything, and she was not impressed. She may have been living in the Ghetto, but she grew up on the North Shore, damn it, and this was not how children were supposed to behave. She didn’t like the little boy who had drowned our rabbits in the pool, and she definitely now had a problem with the girl who had licked my fanny. She considered us fish out of water, like a reverse Beverly Hillbillies, and we were obviously better people than this.

  It didn’t help that every so often my adopted grandparents would come to visit, turning up in their fancy car, looking horrified and politely refusing to make contact with any foreign surface. But they would never stay long, and when they left, as much as my mum didn’t want to believe it, they would take the North Shore with them.

  We did belong at Smurf Village. We were part of Lego Land. We lived in the Ghetto.

  And nothing made that more obvious than when my dad started to show up.

  Your friends will find a dead body in the bush, and it will be your dad.

  ‘There’s a dead guy! A dead guy!’

  We all stopped what we were doing immediately. It doesn’t matter how well you’re doing in your game of Pog, when someone says there’s a dead guy in the park, you drop what you’re doing and you pay attention.

  It was a weekend at Smurf Village, which meant the shoeless child gangs were out in force. We pretty much spent days off school just roaming around, teasing people who lived in the apartments and playing whatever Rhiannon had dictated was the cool thing to be playing that week.

  Ayers Rock had finally been removed and replaced with a park, which meant most kids hung out down there and snuck into the bush that ran alongside it. But Rhiannon had decided on Pog that day, so I was sitting with her in our driveway, along with Nina, who didn’t own any Pogs but took whatever chance she could get to escape a house filled with twenty-seven Guatemalan relatives.

  Since Rhiannon had unusually allowed me to participate in her game in a way that – so far – had nothing to do with torturing me and/or decimating my dignity, I obviously proceeded to self-destruct in a spectacular fashion. I was always so desperate to play with the cool kids, but once I got there, I had very little concept of how to keep my shit together.

  I started trying to convince the girls to help me produce a play I was writing about homeless kids, who survive by stealing cups of noodles from the supermarket. I would obviously be the star, playing a beautiful and brilliant Olympic-trained gymnast who had run away from home because her stepmother was jealous of her starring role on Saved by the Bell. I would also play any other role that had any kind of dramatic arc or involved any kind of acting talent. I basically just needed the girls to be warm bodies that I could bounce breathtaking monologues off.

  And just as Rhiannon was starting to question whether getting her hands on my Pog collection was worth having to be in my immediate vicinity for an extended period, we started hearing the screams coming from the park.

  A bunch of kids came running out of the bush, their hysteria gathering momentum as they got closer to the street.

  ‘We saw it! We poked it! There’s a dead guy in his undies!’

  Kids started coming out of nooks and crannies all over the place. This was big news. Some believed it, some didn’t, but all of them wanted to at least look. I mean, it was a dead guy. This may have been the Ghetto, but even kids like us hadn’t seen anything like that. It was too good to miss, and it was decided that we would all head down together.

  Rhiannon and I exchanged a knowing glance. We both immediately suspected it was him. I had that sick feeling in my stomach that I got whenever he was around. It was like my sixth sense for dysfunctionality, and right now it was telling me what none of the other kids knew: my dad was the dead guy in the bush they were poking with sticks.

  Everyone ran excitedly towards him. Rhiannon and I walked slowly behind, both taking advantage of the short time we had left in which it could still be someone else. We didn’t talk to each other. We didn’t look at each other. We just walked silently across the park, following the sounds of the barefoot child gang, screaming like they were in a haunted funhouse.

  My stomach got worse the closer we got. By the time we caught up with the gaggle of kids, their excitement had reached fever pitch, and my stomach had turned to poison in my body, a poison made of unrelenting toxic butterflies. My sixth sense never lied; I knew it had to be him.

  Rhiannon and I pushed through the crowd and looked down at the exciting attraction in front of us.

  The man was on his back in the dirt. He was wearing only underwear and a filthy white t-shirt. No shoes. No possessions. His skin was glowing red from having been roasted in the sun for what looked like hours. His eyes were closed and his body was still.

  As the kids around us squealed and giggled and dared each other to touch it, the universe for Rhiannon and me shrank to include only us. I swallowed and looked at her, trying not to vomit, the toxic butterflies threatening to crack my body wide open. She looked back at me, tears in her eyes and panic on her face.

  The univers
e out there was one where we frustrated each other and fought with each other. She couldn’t stand my clueless quest to fit in (which, for some reason, had involved way too many toilet mishaps), and I couldn’t understand her reluctance to accept me, or her unwillingness to try reading as a recreational activity.

  But in this universe, in this moment, we were in sync. As we stood there and locked on each other’s eyes, everything around us was a blur, and we understood each other better and loved each other more than anyone else ever would.

  My sixth sense had been right. The man in the dirt was our dad.

  I wasn’t surprised that I had known. I’d had plenty of time to hone the unique sense that caused me to vomit whenever he was nearby. Dad had started turning up at Smurf Village not long after we’d moved in.

  One morning I woke up before everyone else and headed down to the kitchen, hoping to hack into the chocolate part of the Neapolitan ice-cream before anyone noticed. I’m sorry, but why does Neapolitan ice-cream even exist? If I can find one person who eats the strawberry part and leaves the vanilla and chocolate parts, then I can guarantee you I’ve found the person responsible for whatever murders are currently unsolved in your town.

  Just as I was getting to the kitchen, I saw a human-shaped lump stumble over the back fence and fall to the ground with an undignified thud. My stomach churned. I stood at the back door and watched as he lay on the ground, the open bottle of scotch he had somehow managed to hold onto while jumping the fence now leaking all over him. When he realised the bottle had emptied, he started trying to scoop the spilled liquid from his body into his mouth, while simultaneously trying (and failing) to get up off the ground. It was like watching a turtle stuck on its back, if the turtle had a drinking problem and was scaring the shit out of his six-year-old daughter.

  I abandoned the ice-cream plan, went back to my room and pretended I was still asleep.

  Another time I was playing the star in my youth group’s nativity play. ‘The Star’ was a part I had invented when some other bitch beat me to the role of Mary. I basically just had to hold up a star made of yellow cardboard for the entire play, but I insisted I do it in the middle of the stage, standing on a chair, while wearing enough glittered clothing to make Liza Minnelli think I was tacky. I was sure it was going to be the defining moment of my acting career so far, and probably launch me as a wunderkind prodigy in the local North Ryde theatre scene. Instead, right before the show, someone in the crowd told me a man was walking around saying he was Rosanna’s dad. I threw up, and spent all my time on stage trying to spot a stumbling drunk man in the audience.

  My life started to revolve around hoping he wouldn’t show up where I was, and throwing up whenever he did. ‘Rosanna, there’s a man here who says he’s your dad. Um, does he drink a lot, sweetie?’ was the kind of sentence that sent my body into total lockdown. My stomach would drop, the toxic butterflies coursing through every inch of my veins. My brain would swirl and my breathing would slow, until my body was no longer made of blood, but millions of poisonous pairs of wings. Then my stomach would make an executive decision on behalf of my brain, which by that point had usually decided it couldn’t deal and was going to sit this one out. The toxic butterflies would be very suddenly and very forcefully ejected. Which really just means I would vomit, violently. Usually all over myself, but often on whichever unfortunate person happened to be standing in my pretty impressive projectile range.

  My dad was unpredictable because he had nowhere to go. He didn’t live in Sydney, so when he was there, he would just wander around, drunk and hoping to run into Rhiannon or me. Home for him was actually still in Tumut, exactly where my mum had left him a couple of years before. After she stopped bankrolling his life with her body, he was forced to move in with his dad, who was also an alcoholic. Theirs was a very sad scotch-soaked bachelor pad, and their shared life was like a Chuck Lorre sitcom directed by Lars von Trier.

  Since Tumut is hours from Sydney, I honestly don’t know how he got to North Ryde each time. But I do know that unless my mum let him stay with us, he was essentially homeless while he was there.

  The few times she did give him a chance, he took it and soaked it in so much alcohol-fuelled disaster that it became harder and harder for her to offer him a place to stay. He would forget he had taken Rhiannon and me places, and leave us waiting for hours to be picked up. He would collapse in the middle of busy streets, take us to the pub and forget we were there, get on the wrong buses and end up stranded on the outskirts of Sydney in the middle of the night. Just your general, incredibly dysfunctional, alcoholic dad kind of stuff.

  All of it was pretty difficult for two girls under ten to deal with (there really is not a lot you can do when your dad insists that you jaywalk through busy traffic, then proceeds to pass out halfway across the road), but for me, none of it brought on the toxic butterflies like the shoplifting.

  My dad did not like using money to pay for things. It probably had something to do with the fact he generally didn’t have money to pay for things. But it wasn’t just about desperation or lack of funds with him. I really think he just took a weird Winona-like pleasure in the act itself, and would pick up the most bizarre, nonsensical objects just for the sake of it. I can’t count the number of times he was escorted out of shopping centres by security, Rhiannon and I following behind with our heads down, only to find he’d taken a pair of teddy bear glasses, or the buttons off a shirt. And he did get caught, every time. Because the only thing worse than being a shoplifter is being a terrible shoplifter, and the only thing worse than being a terrible shoplifter is being a terrible shoplifter who is also drunk.

  I didn’t quite understand his considerable lack of talent as a thief, until I saw him, barely able to stand, shoving a shirt inside his pants. We were shopping in Wagga Wagga for the day, my sister and I left to wander around with Dad while our grandpa went to do whatever it is that grandpas do (I honestly don’t know . . . getting fitted for beige pants?). We walked past a store and Dad saw a shirt that he liked. He stumbled inside, pulling me along with him. Rhiannon, who seemed to sense that something illegal was about to go down, made herself scarce, so as not to be implicated in any criminal proceedings. But alas, I was still young and naïve, and not entirely aware of my father’s career as the world’s worst criminal.

  He took the shirt off the rack and started to stuff it inside his pants. I’m not sure if he thought he was being incognito, but he reeked of alcohol, was having trouble balancing and had two little girls with him who looked terrified, so he was pretty much in the spotlight from the second he walked in the store. This was not the stealth operation I think he thought it was.

  Feeling the toxic butterflies about to explode out of my mouth in the form of breakfast, I tried my best to give my dad an alibi, or at least some kind of reasonable motive. I looked around the store and said, as loud as I could, ‘So, you’re just holding on to that shirt so when we come back later to buy it, nobody will have taken it, right?’

  He looked at me, a little stunned, like his skills were so incredible he couldn’t believe that I had just seen him stuff a shirt down his pants.

  ‘Um . . . yeah, Sannie. That’s it. I don’t want anyone to take it,’ he said. Then we quickly left the store, Rhiannon being careful not to walk alongside us until she could be sure she was no longer near the crime scene.

  Next stop was the pub, where Dad bought a much needed beer and Rhiannon and I shared a pink lemonade. We needed to wait for Grandpa to finish his important Wagga business (again, I don’t know . . . shopping for World War II books?), and it was just as we were sitting patiently in the beer garden that a man came over to our table and started aggressively taking our picture.

  ‘Thief! Thief!’ he screamed, aiming the camera in our faces. Dad was too dazed to comprehend what the hell was going on, but I knew: his Wagga crime spree had not gone to plan.

  Everyone in the pub was looking at us, and this guy just wouldn’t stop. He was the owner of
the store Dad had taken the shirt from, and he was furious. He kept yelling at us and taking our picture until the police arrived. I’ve always wondered what happened to that roll of film. What do you do with twenty-six photos of a confused-looking man and two little girls crying? I threw up, and Dad was put in the back of a paddy wagon. This was well before mobile phones existed outside of movies, so I have no idea how they found Grandpa, but they did. The last thing I remember is sitting in the front of the wagon, looking back through the peephole at Dad, nothing but a sad, black outline in the back of a police van.

  Mum did what she could for Dad when he randomly turned up at Smurf Village, drunk and with nowhere to go. One morning I woke to find him sleeping on a mattress on the floor of my room, with Mum sitting next to him, stroking his face and crying, begging him not to die. I threw up in my bed. After that, she would usually leave blankets out for him and let him stay in the garage, as long as he promised to be gone before we woke up, because, ‘Rosanna gets so stressed.’

  But I always knew when he was around. It was my sixth sense. Barely out of kindergarten, my Dad-radar was a finely tuned machine. I could determine how close he was by a mere rumble in my belly. The fluttering of a thousand poisonous wings would always tell me, and at that moment, they were telling me that he was dead. Which is why I was surprised when he moaned. As Rhiannon and I were standing there, frozen, looking down at our dead dad in the dirt, he moaned.

  Let me tell you something: nothing will ever terrify a bunch of kids more than telling them they’re standing in front of a dead body, only to have that dead body make a sound. For all their tough talk and gangster bravado, I’ve never seen twenty-five kids run away faster than they did when my dead dad started moaning in the dirt.

  He was alive, obviously. Very, very drunk, but alive.

  Rhiannon and I turned around and ran back up to the house. I was silent, she was hysterical. She told Mum, who called an ambulance. When it arrived, it felt like every human being in north-west Sydney came to watch the spectacle. As two paramedics walked him to the gurney, a kid came running out of the bush with a plastic bag. It was Dad’s stuff.