The Anti-Cool Girl

by Rosie Waterland

  So now there were four of us. Four girls with three different dads, all born to Lisa. Rhiannon was sixteen, I was thirteen, Tayla was six and Bella was two.

  We all lived together with Mum and Brian in the house he owned in the Blue Mountains, which, although falling apart, he owned. We lived in a house that we OWNED. On a street with no Houso families! We felt like queens. And the house was positioned at just the right spot on the mountain, so it had a view that stretched all the way to Sydney. I would look down over the lights while doing the dishes some nights (only after complaining for hours that forcing me to do the dishes was a crime on par with genocide) and think about how one day I was going to rule the city – striding around with my Oscar in hand and walking into restaurants where my ‘usual table’ was ready for me in the back.

  Then Brian would come and pour his stinky, dirty bong water into the sink and snap me right back to reality.

  Brian was actually great. A massive pot-smoker, yes, but he was the first of Mum’s many boyfriends who had made me feel like being smart was a good thing. It didn’t matter to him that I wasn’t cool or beautiful like Rhiannon, and he respected me for liking books and TV and would let me stay up late to watch Seinfeld. I liked him, a lot, but being Mum’s Richard Gere of the moment wasn’t easy, and I don’t think life with Lisa and three ready-made daughters plus their own daughter had been quite what he was expecting.

  It can’t have taken him long to realise that he couldn’t change her. She never stopped drinking and continued to take off at will. In the years since leaving the foster home and going to live with him and Mum, my sisters and I had been taken away and returned a few more times. I spent my first few years of high school wondering which family member I’d be shipped off to live with the next week, just hoping to make it through the weekend without Mum disappearing or getting hammered or attempting suicide for the twenty-ninth time. My friends understood that if I didn’t turn up at school for a few days, it probably just meant my mum had gotten really drunk and now I was staying with my uncle in Sydney, or with Brian’s family on the Central Coast, or with my grandma in Balmain, or with Whoever in Anyplace. Not knowing where anyone in our family was going to be from one day to the next had pretty much become the norm.

  But that was clearly not what Brian had thought he was signing on for when he met a pretty nurse called Lisa, who had ‘a bit of a drinking problem’ that she was working hard to fix so she could get her daughters back. Now he’d been living with Lisa for four years, and not only did she still drink heavily, but she kept losing her daughters like they were car keys. Not exactly the fairytale he’d had in mind.

  He resented her, she resented him, and they fought like nothing I had ever seen before. Our house was constantly filled with the sound of screaming. And the smell of more than a little pot-smoke. That house was literally a giant Dutch oven. I had to have been inadvertently stoned 90 percent of the time. Maybe that’s why I thought Friends was funny.

  It was an incredibly dysfunctional household, and one that I expected to implode at any moment. But I was in Year 9 and had just found out that my little sister had told everyone about my first period. An unstable home that smelled like pot and a bipolar, alcoholic mother were the least of my worries.

  The actual ‘first gush’ had taken place the night before. In my sleep, thank Oprah. Having your first period arrive during the night is like winning the menstrual lottery. I cannot describe the relief I felt when I realised it had happened in the privacy of my bed, and not while I was in the middle of eating a sandwich on the playground. You see, from about the age of nine, girls literally spend every waking hour knowing that at some point soon a massive amount of blood is going to start gushing out of their special place, but they have no idea when, and they have no idea where they’ll be. All you know is that a blood explosion is definitely coming, and you have no control over it. It’s like having a time bomb on your fanny, and that’s a lot of pressure for a young lady.

  So, although devastated that I now had to deal with my ‘monthly’, I was relieved that my undies had at least filled with blood for the first time in private.

  I sat on the toilet for about ten minutes, staring at my bloody knickers, not quite sure what to do. I knew what periods were – Mum had done the responsible thing a few years earlier, by sitting Rhiannon and I down on the couch, leaving a book in front of us called Every Girl and then promptly leaving the room. It was filled with lots of diagrams of naked bodies and the reproductive system and had been the catalyst for my fear of erupting with blood at any waking moment. Rhiannon and I both acted like we thought the book was hilarious, but would then catch each other reading its pages in earnest when we thought nobody was looking. Mum had done the same thing when pesky questions about where babies come from kept popping up. One day, a horrifying book called A Baby Is Born suddenly appeared in the living room. It was filled with graphic photos of hairy heads coming out of vaginas and women screaming in pain. All A Baby Is Born really taught me is that a baby is born because a woman must have done something awful in a past life.

  Anyway, I knew that I was going to need some kind of adult lady nappy called a ‘pad’. I also knew that I didn’t have access to a pad, or money to buy pads, so I was going to have to break the news to my mum that I had a) become a woman and b) ruined my mattress.

  I took my undies off and headed to her room. ‘Mum,’ I said, handing her my scrunched-up ball of blood knickers. ‘I think I’ve got that . . . thing.’

  She held the evidence in her hand and smiled. ‘Oh! Um, it’s okay, darling,’ she said, putting her arm around me. ‘We’ll take care of it. Why don’t you have a shower and I’ll put these in the wash, okay?’

  It was just as I was contemplating how to parlay this turn of events into a day off school, when Tayla, that adorable, rambunctious butterball whom I wanted to kill, came barging into the bedroom. ‘Put what in the wash? What’s that? What’s that red stuff? Are they Rosie’s undies? Why is there red stuff on Rosie’s undies?’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, Tayla,’ my mum snapped, pushing her out of the room. ‘It’s secret women’s business!’

  With that, I took a shower (and stayed in there a while, completely mesmerised by how much blood could be coming out of my body without resulting in immediate death). I was successful in scoring the day off school, so Tayla caught the bus on her own that day. There were some minor humiliations in the next few hours. Mum called Brian on his way home from a night nursing shift and asked him to buy me pads. ‘Hey Rosie,’ he said, as he threw the packet at me like it was a basketball. ‘Heads up!’ My mum’s boyfriend had just bought me maxi-pads – in bulk. I was truly a woman.

  There was no talk of tampons. In fact, I wouldn’t figure out how to use those things for at least a few years. But all things considered, the whole event had gone quite well. It had come during the night, I’d had the day off school and my mum said we could have Chinese for dinner.

  Then I got the phone call from my best friend.

  ‘So, um . . .’ she said, very hesitantly. ‘On the bus today, Tayla kind of told everyone why you were away.’

  ‘Yeah, so? I was just sick, who cares?’ I could feel a little panic rising in my chest.

  ‘Yeah. I know you got your period.’

  My stomach dropped as low as my blood-soaked vagina. ‘What?’

  ‘Well, everyone was asking Tayla where you were, and I think she didn’t really understand and she was really just trying to be helpful . . .’

  ‘What. Did. She. Say?’

  ‘She said: “There was red stuff on Rosie’s undies this morning, but you don’t want to know about secret women’s business.”’

  ‘And who did she say it to?’

  ‘Um. Everyone.’

  The next day, not only did I have to endure the indignity of walking around in public with an adult nappy in my pants for the first time, I had to deal with every person on the bus asking me how my ‘secret women’s business’ was
going. I ultimately didn’t take revenge on Tayla; I tried to take the high road by reminding myself that she was only in kindergarten, and knew not what she did. But I did secretly hope that when her time eventually came, she’d be in a very public place. Wearing white pants.

  As traumatic as it was to have everybody know about my secret women’s business, Tayla’s leaking the details of my first leak wasn’t the worst blood-related incident I would have to deal with that year. I suppose, given that Mum had chased her last husband around with a butcher’s knife, I should have been expecting her relationship with Brian to soon reach some kind of glorious, violent crescendo. Just like Scott the Taxi Driver, John the Navy Man and Joe the Removalist before him, Brian the Homeowner was reaching the end of his turn as Mum’s Richard Gere. And their final scene together was going to be memorable.

  I got the call on the night of the Sydney Olympics Opening Ceremony. Australia lost its collective mind during that time – there was not a surface in our country that wasn’t covered in some kind of green and yellow paint or a person who didn’t have a temporary Southern Cross tattoo. I had never really been a ‘sport’ person, but I was intrigued enough by my homeland’s mass hysteria that I wanted to at least see if we would embarrass ourselves during the games opener. I was personally hoping for some kind of disaster involving a giant inflatable kangaroo, or maybe even the misspelling of ‘g’day’.

  It was also, if I’m being perfectly honest, just something to do. Although I was a teenager by that point, things hadn’t really changed for me when it came to my cool factor, and watching TV at my friend’s house with her parents was the best I could hope for on a Friday night.

  Rhiannon and I had basically grown into more exaggerated versions of what we had been as kids. She was still effortlessly cool, and I was still the opposite of that. She had turned into a bit of a bad girl, still not giving a fuck what adults thought of her, whereas I entered story-writing competitions and finished my homework three days early just to make sure every adult on earth thought I was perfect. I didn’t understand her – adults had been rejecting us our whole lives! Why wouldn’t you do everything you could to impress them?

  Rhiannon and her friends would dress in tight skirts from Supré and stay out late smoking in the park, while I was at home in my PJs watching Robin Williams stand-up specials on TV and trying to do that Titanic sex-hand thing on my bedroom window. She would listen to Tupac on full blast, and burst out laughing when I would bang on the wall because I was trying to read. When Tupac died, she and her friends all sat around in their marijuana-leaf t-shirts, holding hands and crying. I just rolled my eyes and went back to thinking about how I could get cast on a TV show.

  The thing that impressed me most about Rhiannon, though, was that she had boyfriends. In fact, I was fairly certain she was even having s-e-x. I couldn’t even work out how to get a tampon into my vagina, let alone a penis. Even the idea of kissing a boy sent me into waves of panic. In about Year 7, I had developed a crush on a boy called Stephen, and I may or may not have practised kissing him on Tayla’s Baby Born (a disturbing image, I know, but it just had a more realistic mouth situation going on than my teddy did).

  Considering I wasn’t one of those cool girls who knew all the words to the talking part at the beginning of that ‘Never Ever’ song by All Saints, I assumed that me imagining Stephen’s face while I made out with my toys was as far as my crush was going to go. But then he gave me a note. Well, technically his friend passed my friend Melissa a note on his behalf and she then passed it to me, but that was just the way things worked in Year 7. It said:

  ‘Dear Roseanna, I like you. Will you go out with me? Stephen.’

  First of all, my name doesn’t have an ‘e’ in it, but I considered it a glorious poem on par with Shakespeare nonetheless. I had the chance to begin an epic romance with Stephen that would no doubt involve lots of hand-holding and lips-only kissing. And that made me panic.

  I was too embarrassed to admit that I liked him, because I’d only ever practised kissing on toys and had zero idea how to handle a real human face. So when Stephen’s friend asked me if I had got the note (while Stephen stood hopefully and painfully to the side), I said that I had but that I had thrown it away. Then I spent years thinking that if I had just gone for it, Stephen and I would have had one of the great romances of our time. Like Britney and Justin. Or Oprah and Gayle.

  It was certainly a situation that Rhiannon would have handled with a lot more grace. Or at least a lot more pashing. She just naturally understood certain parts of life that remained a mystery to me.

  Back at my exciting night in, the Opening Ceremony had just started when Rhiannon called me at my friend’s house. ‘Rosie. Something bad has happened! You need to go to the house and make sure Brian doesn’t smash the TV.’

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘The TV? Where are you?’

  ‘I’m at the hospital with Mum. Look, you’re at Alesha’s, right? Ask her mum to drive you home right now. You need to go inside and lock the door and don’t let anybody in. I have to go.’

  Then she hung up. My brain was still catching up with her first sentence and the conversation was already over. Mum. Hospital. Protect the TV. Protect the TV? Mum was in hospital? I had no idea which hospital, so I couldn’t call back. I just had to follow the instructions. Go home. Lock door. Protect the TV.

  Alesha’s mum dropped me off and didn’t ask any questions. The fact I constantly smelled like pot meant she understood things were a little different at my house, and was usually kind enough not to pry.

  I opened the front door to find an empty house that looked like a crime scene. There was blood everywhere. On the walls. On the carpet. It was like someone had taken a water pistol filled with red paint and shot up everything. Furniture was knocked over. Glass was smashed.

  Lock the door. Protect the TV. Lock the door. Protect the TV.

  Looking around the blood-soaked living room, I couldn’t understand why the TV was a top priority at that point. Something had clearly gone terribly wrong. I was worried that my mum was dead, and there was more blood in my house than I could expect to see in a lifetime of periods – who gave a fuck about the TV? For the first time in years, I started to feel the toxic butterflies take over my body again. I ran to the bathroom, and was about to vomit when I realised the bathroom was the worst of all. There was blood all over the toilet seat. There were puddles of it on the ground. Solid, coagulated bits that looked like grape jelly were stuck on the side of the bath. As with so many times before, I froze. I stood there in silence for a long time. I just didn’t know what to do.

  I couldn’t stop staring at all the blood, so I just started walking round and round the house, trying to imagine scenarios that would explain the massive volume of it. Part of me really hoped that Tayla was getting what she deserved, and not only had her first period come at six years of age, but it had obviously been the most epic period anyone had ever seen. Everyone would come home the next morning, and Tayla would be forced to wear a maxi-maxi-maxi-pad every day for the rest of her life. Then we’d all laugh and laugh that I had ever thought something bad had happened, and Rhiannon would say something about a band I’d never heard of, and I’d say something about a book she’d never heard of and everything would go back to normal.

  I sat on the couch for a while, in the empty house covered in blood. I figured ‘protecting the TV’ meant at least looking at it. But even I, only thirteen and possibly television’s biggest fan, couldn’t sit and watch a TV when there was blood on the wall behind it. I had my own TV in my room, and I just wanted to go in there and lock the door and watch the Opening Ceremony and pretend like the house was filled with people and not blood. So, I went to the kitchen, made myself a bowl of Rosie’s Chicken Soup and took it to my bedroom. Then I locked the door and watched the Opening Ceremony by myself, waiting for someone to come home.

  In the morning, Rhiannon finally arrived at the house and told me that during a fight with Brian, Mum had
kicked the glass cabinet and cut a tendon in her ankle, which was why blood had sprayed everywhere. It seemed like such an anti-climactic explanation. I had spent the night imagining beheadings and chainsaw accidents, and now I was being told it was just a cut on a foot. I was a little pissed off, to be honest. I had come home to a house covered in blood, locked myself in my room, petrified, and I didn’t even get an awesome story out of it? Something like, ‘I spent the night alone in a house full of blood because my mum sliced her left boob off after accidentally falling on an axe?’ No, I got ‘cut foot’.

  Apparently I had been instructed to rush home because the relationship was definitely over, and since Mum had paid a lot of money for the TV in the living room, she was worried that Brian would tip it over or something.

  I couldn’t believe I had spent the night alone in that house because Mum was worried the TV would get smashed.

  And what was the point of even owning a massive TV if we had nowhere to go? It was Brian’s house. He was Brian the Homeowner. If their relationship was over, then we would be the ones who would have to leave.

  Rhiannon, always independent, always so sure of herself, moved out on her own. Brian got custody of Isabella, and I went from having my youngest sister sneak into my bed to snuggle with me every night to not seeing her for another ten years.

  Tayla and I stayed with Mum, who, after finally finishing one of her longest shifts so far, would need to find her new Richard Gere. Fast.

  Your mum will decide she is a lesbian, and she’ll pick her new lover over you.

  To this day, I’m not sure if my mum is genuinely bisexual, or if her brief fling with a woman was all about the cash. I suppose that if, out of desperation, you can sell your body to a bald man in Wagga Wagga whose head is covered in coconut oil, then letting a lesbian lick your clit when times are tough would at least be a much more pleasurable walk in the park.

  And times were tough.