The Anti-Cool Girl

by Rosie Waterland

  I braced myself for the new, shameful life I was about to enter, and walked into the living room.

  And . . . nothing. It was business as usual. Mum was feeding Tayla in her highchair, and Rhiannon was watching TV. Neither of them said anything to me as I came and sat down between them on the couch. I kept waiting for the humiliating bomb to drop, but it never did. To my shock and cautious confusion, Rhiannon kept her mouth shut. She couldn’t look me in the eye, but she kept her mouth shut.

  Something had happened. Some agreement had been made before I walked into the living room. If you can tell when people have just been talking about you, then you can definitely tell when they’ve just been talking about you and your vagina.

  My mother had somehow negotiated a vow of masturbatory silence, and I don’t think I’d ever loved her more than I did in that moment.

  The incident was never spoken of again – by her or Rhiannon – and she discreetly made sure I had the bedroom to myself at 4pm on weekdays from that point on.

  In fact, aside from warning me to always wipe from front to back and to scrub it properly in the shower, she pretty much left me to my own devices when it came to my special place. She didn’t make me feel ashamed and didn’t embarrass me with a talk about my ‘body’; she just let me figure things out for myself, in a healthy, private way. Which I did. Many, many times. I don’t think I actually saw one episode of Rugrats that year, but, thanks to Mum, I certainly took care of business.

  Your dad will finally die, and you’ll be relieved.

  When I was eight years old, I came to the sad realisation that I was never going to be one of those incredible kids on the news who manages to call the authorities in a time of crisis. Like those freak hero toddlers who can barely talk but somehow call an ambulance when their mum has an unexpected seizure. (And there’s always time pressure, like oil boiling on the stove that would have burned the whole house down if the kid hadn’t been so calm and brilliant and skilled with a phone.) There are even miracle dogs that have managed to alert the appropriate authorities when their owners are choking on their frozen meals for one.

  I was always so impressed by those feel-good, time-filler packages on the news, and assumed that if ever faced with the same kind of ‘it’s all up to you now’ scenario involving an incapacitated adult, I would handle the situation with skill and aplomb.

  So it was with a heavy heart that I was forced to accept I was not a freak hero toddler. I wasn’t even a miracle dog. Because when I was eight, I saw my grandpa fall over, I was the only person who could help, and I froze.

  There is something extremely unsettling about seeing an old person fall over. When a young person falls over it’s funny, if not a bit cringe-worthy. But when an old person falls over, it’s just sad. It makes even the most well adjusted among us look for some kind of way out. I know for certain, even if they don’t admit it, that there are many people on this earth who have suddenly pretended to be extremely interested in their fingernails when an old person stacks it in their vicinity.

  But even worse than being an adult trying to handle the social torture that is an old person falling over, is being a kid trying to handle the social torture that is an old person falling over. When you’re that young, you still think picking your nose in public is okay so long as you use the proper etiquette – you sure as hell don’t know the appropriate action to take when an elderly person does something very sad and embarrassing in front of you.

  I had hoped that when faced with a situation that could almost certainly end up with me being a hero on the local news, I would rise to the challenge. Instead, as my grandpa was flailing on the kitchen floor, I panicked and woke up my dad. That decision would result in my grandpa ending up in hospital, and my dad ending up in the morgue.

  It was school holidays, so Rhiannon and I had made our usual pilgrimage to Tumut. Other kids went to the Gold Coast; we went to hang out with two drunk guys in a town with no McDonald’s.

  Even though Dad lived with his father in what was essentially a pub disguised as a house, Mum continued to send us to stay there. It was like being sent to a scotch-soaked prison. We would spend our days watching Dad and Grandpa get uncontrollably drunk, praying they wouldn’t suggest going out in public. (The best we could hope for was getting through the week without having to walk down the street with someone who only had a fifty-fifty chance of staying upright.)

  Every holiday was essentially a run-out-the-clock situation. I would spend each trip trying to keep my toxic butterflies in check, counting down the days until I could go home and not be on the constant verge of nervous vomit.

  Now, because I was stuck in the kid equivalent of Leaving Las Vegas, my entire life became consumed by this new toy I had (which I’m ninety-nine percent sure my dad had stolen for me). It was a closed flower, but when you turned a key, it would slowly open and a fairy would rise out of the middle. I had seen it on TV for weeks, and dreamed about being the girl in the ad who says, ‘Magical!’ and, ‘Only you have the key!’ I think this dream was more about my desperation to be on TV than it was for the toy, but I wanted the damn flower-thing anyway.

  I would spend hours opening and closing it, imagining that I was the fairy – but the fairy was a famous singer and the flower was her stage. I couldn’t give a fuck about the magic; I was all about a successful career. I had decided pretty young that whatever I grew up to do, it would a) involve an Oscar and b) earn me enough money to buy a house so that I would never have to move again.

  The magic-lockable-flower-fairy-thing had also been a pretty good distraction for the week, which, when hanging out with my dad, was always desperately needed. It was the night before Rhiannon and I were going home, and that toy had successfully stopped me from wanting to nervous-vomit on more than one occasion. When Dad suggested we go fishing after he’d had seventeen drinks, I would just unlock the flower and imagine myself emerging onto a stage, the first ever person to be accepting an Oscar, Grammy, Emmy and Tony on the same night. (It didn’t need to make sense, it just needed to involve copious amounts of glory. My dad could barely stand up – a girl needs her escapism.)

  So there I was, on our last night in Tumut, sitting on the couch and enjoying picturing myself rising like a phoenix out of the flower, with enough money in my bank account to buy a house that I could live in forever. It was imaginative bliss.

  Then Grandpa fell over.

  I froze. Rhiannon and Dad had gone to bed, so I was the only one available to deal with this situation, and I was at a loss. My immediate instinct was to give Grandpa his privacy. To me, falling over was on par with shitting yourself in the embarrassment stakes, so I figured he would probably just want me to focus on my toy and pretend like I hadn’t seen anything. I was perfectly happy for him to get up, leave the room and have us never speak of the incident again.

  But then I realised he couldn’t get up, and that meant things were in a whole new league. Surely, as an eight-year-old with a serious escapism complex, the responsibility of helping this old man up off the kitchen floor couldn’t fall to me? What would the logistics of my lifting him even involve? I’d heard of mothers who had found the strength to lift cars to save their babies, but my love for Grandpa must have been compromised, because I was feeling no such strength. Then I realised I’d been sitting on my arse for thirty seconds while an old, frail man was struggling to get up off the floor. What kind of person was I? ‘Do something, Rosie!’ I kept saying to myself. ‘Help him!’

  But my brain had gone into complete meltdown. And I was still sitting on the couch, now contemplating my utter lack of usefulness in a crisis, as well as just generally as a human being, when he started to call out for help.

  My grandpa was lying on the floor in the kitchen, he couldn’t get up, and he was crying out for help.

  This was it. I knew this was the point where I had to move. But having now accepted that I was clearly not the person to offer any kind of assistance in an emergency situation, I did the only oth
er thing I could think of: I woke up my dad.

  I had no idea what chain of events I would set in motion. I was a little girl, it was late and my grandpa had fallen over. It was confronting, I was scared, and more than a little disappointed in myself for missing my chance to be a hero on the news. I just did what I thought was right.

  Dad woke up and saw me panicked. I explained what had happened, and he was furious. At first I assumed he was furious at me for not handling the situation myself. But then he told me to get into bed and he picked up a cricket bat from the corner of the room. That’s when I realised he wasn’t angry with me, he was angry with Grandpa.

  As he walked out of the room, cricket bat in hand, he told me not to be scared. Rhiannon woke up and started to cry, which seemed to make him even more furious. He said that he was going to fix it, that soon Grandpa wouldn’t be scaring us anymore.

  I realised immediately, toxic butterflies swarming my entire body, that I had made the wrong decision in getting my dad involved.

  But I didn’t say anything. I just got into the bed with Rhiannon like I was told, and lay there in silence as Dad walked down the hall with the cricket bat. I lay in there in silence and listened to Grandpa screaming as Dad beat him in the kitchen. I didn’t say a word when Rhiannon became hysterical. I didn’t say a word when Dad came back to bed and told us that he’d fixed the problem. I didn’t ask Dad why he was hurting Grandpa. I didn’t ask if he’d helped him get up. I didn’t say anything when Dad picked up the cricket bat, and went back to the kitchen, over and over and over again. I just lay there, petrified, in complete silence, as the abuse went on for hours.

  And all the way through, Dad kept coming back to the bedroom, acting like our hero. Acting like the cricket bat was his secret weapon, and that it would protect us from harm. Telling us that it was going to be okay, that he wouldn’t let Grandpa scare us anymore. The more we cried, the more determined he became to protect us. And the more determined he became, the faster he would disappear from our room with the cricket bat.

  Eventually, after hours of Dad going to and from the kitchen, Rhiannon and I realised that the only way to stop the attack was to stop crying, to stop showing that we were afraid, and to pretend that we were asleep. We weren’t hero toddlers. We weren’t miracle dogs. And that was the only plan we could think of – if Dad couldn’t see us crying, maybe he’d stop.

  So, as we lay in bed together, holding each other, listening to Grandpa’s shrieks of pain as the cricket bat made contact with his body again and again, Rhiannon and I closed our eyes tight, and tried to sleep.

  I was shocked when Grandpa joined us for breakfast the next morning. He walked slowly and was covered in bruises. He winced in pain as he sat down, and my dad looked up and casually said, ‘Geez, Dad, those are some nasty bruises. Did you fall out of bed last night?’

  Grandpa looked back at him, square in the eyes. ‘Yeah, Tony, I did. I fell out of bed.’

  Rhiannon and I exchanged a very brief glance, frightened that anything longer would blow the delicate ruse the four of us sitting at the table had decided to accept. Grandpa had fallen out of bed, and now it was the morning, and we were eating breakfast.

  I didn’t understand why my dad had been so cruel, or why he seemed to truly believe that Grandpa had fallen out of bed. I didn’t understand a lot of things about my dad, until years later when my grandpa, by then sober and living a happy and peaceful life, let slip one day that my dad had been diagnosed with juvenile schizophrenia.

  He told me that Dad had been an incredibly gifted student. Popular, smart, captain of the debate team, talented writer, topped the state in English more than once, blah, blah, blah. It basically sounded like he was one of those kids you want to punch in the face because they’re so good at everything.

  But apparently when he moved to Sydney to attend university, something in him snapped. He called his parents one day in a panic from a phone box, naked and wrapped in a bedsheet. They travelled from the country to pick him up, and he was noticeably different. Depressed, withdrawn, changed. A shadow of the former cheeky debate captain who had left for university. They took him to a bunch of doctors and he was diagnosed with juvenile schizophrenia.

  But he was never treated. He got the diagnosis and then . . . nothing. Juvenile schizophrenia explained Dad’s breakdown at university, and once they had that explanation, the family moved on.

  My grandpa didn’t seem to understand why I was so dumbfounded by this information. To him, the schizophrenia was one line in a story that he didn’t like to tell. He mentioned it like it was an unessential detail in our history – just something he had been told by a doctor one day.

  But to me, it was the only detail that mattered. If accurate, a diagnosis like that explained so much about my dad. It explained why he went from a promising student to a quivering naked mess in a phone box. It explained why he could never hold down a job, and why he started drinking and eventually stopped working completely. It explained the gun and the landlord and the bikies and the drugs. It explained why he filled entire pages of journals believing he was someone else. It explained why sometimes I would pick up the other phone while he was mid-conversation and find him talking to a dial tone.

  But most of all, if true, my dad’s having schizophrenia would explain the part of him that had always scared me most of all: his cruelty.

  He beat my mother constantly, often for bizarre and nonsensical reasons. Once, at the end of dinner at a friend’s house, he decided to steal a bunch of eggs from their fridge and hide them in his pockets. Upon finding some of them had broken by the time he got home, he took my mum’s head and repeatedly bashed it into a wall. He would hide cockroaches at the bottom of her coffee, or sneak speed into her food and laugh as her mood went into overdrive and she didn’t understand why. He would play mind games with Rhiannon and me, seeming to take pleasure in our devastated begging when he would accuse us of not loving him, or tell each of us that we were his favourite and the only daughter he cared about.

  If my dad had schizophrenia, it would explain all of that. And it would explain why he had spent hours hitting Grandpa with a cricket bat, just because he had fallen and couldn’t get up.

  It’s much easier to think of your dad as mentally unwell and not just a violent drunk. But I suppose on the night Dad was beating him, it didn’t make a difference to Grandpa what diagnosis he’d once been given.

  The day after Dad had ‘saved’ us with the cricket bat, Rhiannon and I went home. We nervously told Mum what had happened the night before, and she was horrified. She called Dad and told him that he was never, ever going to see us again. Grandpa was taken to hospital and Dad was left home alone, forced to face the fact that he had beat his own father, disgusted the woman he loved and terrified his daughters.

  When Mum told us we didn’t have to go to school one morning a few days later, I knew immediately that Dad was dead. She sat between Rhiannon and me on the couch, put her arms around us, and told us through heaving sobs that Dad had died. He had been found by a friend, sitting in the living room, covered in his own vomit. The phone was off the hook and there was an empty bottle of pills. Grandpa, still in hospital from his beating, had to go down to the morgue to identify the body. They both ended up on different floors of the same hospital, because my grandpa had fallen over and I had been too scared to help him get up.

  But Mum didn’t tell us any of that. When you’re little and someone dies, you’re just told that they ‘died’ and you accept it without asking for further details. So, sitting there on that couch with Mum between us, that’s what my older sister and I did.

  I didn’t know how to react. I looked over at Rhiannon for guidance. She had burst into tears, so I assumed that’s what was expected of me. But I felt nothing. I couldn’t do it, I just couldn’t cry. Mum and Rhiannon were both hysterical, and I just sat there in silence, thinking about how now I would definitely win the costume contest at school, because how could you not give first prize to
the kid whose dad had just died?

  In fact, I went back to school the next day, and was probably more upset about not winning the costume contest with a dead dad on my side than I was about actually having a dead dad.

  Mum has held my lack of emotion during this time against me for years. Whenever she’s drunk and feeling overly dramatic, she’ll wave a glass of wine in my face and yell, ‘You didn’t even cry when your own father died. Rhiannon couldn’t even get out of bed and you went back to school the next day.’

  And it’s true. I was emotionless. After the funeral, I spent the wake doing twirls in the church hall because I liked the way my dress flared out like a flamenco dancer’s. Everyone kept telling my mum that I was young and I didn’t understand, but they were wrong. I did understand. My dad was dead. And I couldn’t cry because all I felt was relief. I would never have to go and stay with him again. He would never give me toxic butterflies again. I would never vomit again when someone told me he was nearby.

  I spent a long time trying to force myself into feeling something, by concentrating on the one happy memory I had with my dad. I figured if I could focus on that, I could hopefully squeeze out something resembling tears and ultimately get my mum off my back.

  The memory involves a yellow chair.

  For a while when I was little, every morning at about 4am, my dad and I would snuggle in a yellow armchair in front of the TV. It was more of a mustard-gold than yellow, but I was five, and when you’re five there are literally only seven colours that exist in the world, and to me this chair was yellow.

  I’d found him there one morning when I wandered out of bed, and could immediately tell that something was different about him. His eyes didn’t seem as glassy, and his breath not as pungent. He scooped me up in his arms and put me on his lap, not struggling at all with his balance. He made me a cheese and tomato sandwich with the crusts cut off, which I ate while we watched Rage together. Then I fell asleep, nuzzled into his chest, feeling something warm and comfortable in my body that was completely foreign to me when it came to my dad. It turns out that at 4am, my dad didn’t give me the toxic butterflies.