The Anti-Cool Girl

by Rosie Waterland

  He hurled himself onto the bed. I approached, not realising my naked body was only making the problem worse (you mean they can’t control when it moves?). ‘Put your freaking top back on!’ he yelled.

  ‘Just stay fucking calm!’ I yelled back, struggling with my jumper.

  We sat in silence for about thirty seconds, both staring down at his possibly-about-to-fall-off dick. Eventually, mercifully, as his boner went down, the killer condom loosened. As soon as it seemed safe, I reached down and yanked it off.

  It was the most intimate I had ever been with a penis.

  Clearly, we had experienced a false start, but that wasn’t going to stop us from trying again. (Not that day, obviously, the remainder of which I spent stroking his head while he lay in the foetal position.)

  It actually took a few more tries – I think the initial scare had caused me to close up shop. And when it finally did happen, it was kind of by accident. We were in the midst of another make-out session when it just . . . slipped in. It hurt, definitely, but I think eventually, it gets to a point where the desire to make contact outweighs the fear of having a massive foreign entity jammed inside you, so you just do it.

  I can’t even remember the rest. The first thing I do remember is going to the toilet and laughing hysterically because my wee came out like a floodgate had been opened. And not yet understanding that a woman needs some mystique about her, I came running back into the bedroom screaming, ‘I peed funny! I peed funny!’ A true class act.

  After that, Josh and I were basically at it like rabbits on ecstasy. We tried everything and we tried it every which way. In the few months before university started, we pretty much just went to each other’s houses and had sex. Sex, cuddles, movie, eat, sleep, repeat. It was heaven. He told me he loved me, and for the first time in my life, I started to have the disastrous thought that a boyfriend could fill the void that my lack of a proper family had left. Josh became my everything. He had a perfect family and lived in a perfect house with a four-wheel drive and a dog. His mum made spaghetti bolognaise and I played handball on the street with his brothers. ‘Well, this is it,’ I thought. ‘This is all I need. As long as I’m around Josh, I’ll be fine.’

  It was the first time I realised that I could use boyfriends like a drug. Why deal with that pesky depression slowly taking over your brain, when it disappears every time you snuggle into your boyfriend’s shoulder? Why bother learning to feel strong for yourself, when he can be strong for you?

  It was a dangerous attitude to have at seventeen, especially since my mental health was about to turn to fucking jelly. After a childhood of abandonment and three years at a school where my soul was ripped apart, I was dangerously close to a nervous breakdown. And instead of learning how to climb out of that hole for myself, I expected Josh to pull me out. At a time when I should have been learning to save myself, I appointed Josh my saviour. A really fucking unfair thing to do to a seventeen-year-old kid whose penis had recently been trapped in a tiny condom.

  But he did it. No questions asked. And after a few months of dating, the nervous breakdown hit. I had been at university for about a month, studying psychology, living in a tiny room by myself on campus, and everything was catching up with me. My dad. My mum. The violence, the moving, the abuse, the neglect, the death. The fact that I had left Tayla alone. What I had gone through at boarding school. My brain began to completely malfunction, and I was terrified. I had no idea what was happening to me. Instead of going to class, I would sit in my room alone all day and think about ways to kill myself. There were so many memories I couldn’t get out of my head. I’d be taking a shower and all of a sudden I’d remember the blood from the night of the Olympics Opening Ceremony. I’d be watching TV and my brain would be taken over with the sounds of my grandpa screaming as my dad beat him. I’d go to spread Vegemite on my toast and see the flash of the knife my mum plunged through Rhiannon’s and my bedroom door. I’d walk outside and hear people laughing, and become convinced that Wayne had tracked me down.

  If I wasn’t spending the day at Josh’s house, I would lie in bed in my tiny campus room, staring at the ceiling, trying to get my brain to stop thinking horrific thoughts. That’s the trouble with making a person your drug of choice – you can’t control when you get a dose. Believe me, I tried. I started to become more and more demanding of his time. He began missing a lot of class, just so he could be with me. I would call him in hysterics, not being able to explain what was wrong except that I couldn’t turn my brain off. I just wanted to turn my brain off. And Josh would come, as often as he could. He would take me to his house, where I would have dinner with his parents and seem normal and happy because I was all dosed up for the day. Then he’d drop me back at campus, the drug would wear off, and I’d be calling him within hours begging him to come back to me and make the thoughts stop.

  Of course, he couldn’t always be there. And that made me irrationally furious. I had spent a lifetime being abandoned, and now here was this boy, the boy I had chosen, the boy who said he loved me, and he couldn’t be there for me every time I asked? Whenever he told me that he was sorry but he had class, or he had to spend time with his friends or family, I got the same feeling I used to get when my mum didn’t come home.

  I had appointed Josh my saviour, my family, my drug. And even though it was spectacularly unfair (not to mention unhealthy for both of us), I expected him to be there for me, and felt let down every time he wasn’t. He had the entire weight of repairing the damage of my childhood resting on his shoulders, and that is too damn much for a teenager to deal with. He was the only one who could make the thoughts stop. He was the only one who could make me feel happy, however fleetingly.

  So, it’s not surprising that it was when Josh was busy one day that I decided to kill myself. It wasn’t specifically because I couldn’t see him but because he was my heroin, and when he wasn’t around, pain took over my entire body. When he wasn’t around, all that existed were memories and darkness.

  I wasn’t exactly sure how one kills oneself. I remember googling ‘suicide’ and being really annoyed when it just came back with a bunch of websites telling me not to go through with it. I knew I didn’t want it to hurt, because I’m a massive wuss and the idea of pain scared me. All I knew was that I wanted it to stop. All the memories. All the thoughts. All the pain. I wanted to go to sleep and never wake up. Eventually, after sifting through pages of search results with helplines and stories of redemption, I read somewhere that if you take a bunch of headache pills, you’ll just fall asleep and die. ‘Perfect,’ I thought. ‘That’s what I’ll do.’ That saved me from having to do something messy or painful, and it seemed easy. I couldn’t help but laugh that not only was I taking the ‘easy way out’, I wanted it to be the easiest easy way out.

  I walked to the local supermarket and bought the biggest box of paracetamol they had. I think there were forty-eight in there. I was about to head to the check-out when, for some reason, I decided that if I was just buying the paracetamol, the staff would assume I was up to something suss. I don’t know what I expected – maybe a SWAT team of mental-health professionals to suddenly surround me at the counter, telling me to step away from the headache tablets. I guess when you know you’re doing something major, your brain assumes that everybody else can tell. Not unlike when you’re trying to download music illegally at work. So, to throw the staff off the scent, I also bought a dustpan and brush and some mascara. I have believed every promise ever made to me by every new mascara ever released, and this one promised thickness and length, so I could hardly refuse. The dustpan and brush was just because it was something I’d been meaning to buy for a while, it was on sale and I could hardly pass up a bargain – impending suicide or not.

  Items successfully purchased without suspicion, I went back to my room, put on the new mascara (which was exactly the same as every other mascara I’d ever tried), and poured myself a big glass of water. I popped every single tablet out of the blister pack and put
them in a pile on my bed. Taking them one by one seemed a little over-dramatic, so I just picked them up in handfuls and swallowed them. After five handfuls, I was done. I had killed myself. I sat on the bed for a while, surprised at how easy it was. Now all I had to do was lie down and go to sleep. So that’s what I did.

  ‘Motherfucker.’ That’s the first thought that entered my mind when I woke up. ‘Motherfucking fuck tits.’ I was tired, and my head hurt (which seems unfair given I had taken forty-eight headache tablets), but I could definitely feel my body and it was definitely alive. I had failed at killing myself. I was the New Coke of suicide attempts.

  Assuming I hadn’t taken enough, I planned to get up and go and buy two boxes this time – and perhaps another mascara. Then I looked at my phone and realised I’d been asleep for something like twenty hours. I had a bunch of missed calls from Josh. A warm rush came over me. ‘Oh, that’s right,’ I thought. ‘Josh.’ If he could be my drug that day, I could put the suicide thing off for twenty-four hours. As long as I didn’t have to think the thoughts and remember the memories for a while, I’d be okay.

  I told Josh what I had done. He freaked out, but he didn’t leave. He made me admit to my uncle that I wasn’t handling university and needed to leave. My uncle sent me to a psychiatrist who explained that I had post-traumatic stress disorder, and was suffering the fairly common effects of a traumatic childhood like mine. I was put on medication and started going to weekly therapy. But still, I was only at the very beginning of a long journey to repair the damage my life so far had caused my brain. Going to therapy and taking a pill every day doesn’t automatically fix things. In fact, for me, things were going to get a lot fucking worse before they got any better. Especially after Josh and I finally broke up.

  We stayed together for almost three years after high school, and despite my getting treatment; he was still the strongest and most effective drug I had. Being with Josh meant I didn’t have to really try and deal with my problems, because the second I walked out of a therapy session, I could just walk straight into his arms and ignore every difficult thing I’d just talked about. We were in a bubble, and if I was ever going to get better, I needed it to burst.

  The break-up began as most first-love break-ups tend to do. We were young, it was the first serious relationship for both of us, and we were just growing apart. I was really only staying with him because of how he made me feel. He had become my only family, and I worried about how I’d handle life without him. He was really only staying with me out of a sense of duty. He knew he had become my only family, and he worried about how I’d handle life without him. We certainly still loved each other, but the love had changed. We would literally shit in front of each other in the bathroom. It was like we had taken one step too far towards ‘family’ and one step too far away from ‘romance’.

  We started to fight about lots of little things, ridiculous things. We were constantly bickering. So, it didn’t surprise me that after everything we’d been through together, the whole thing would implode over something so stupid. In the end, our relationship ended because of a bike.

  A bike was what finally pushed both of us over the edge.

  Allow me to explain. Josh still lived with his parents, which, given my desperation for a family, I loved. But he also couldn’t drive, and his parents lived about seven fucking kilometres from the train station. So getting to Josh’s house took a lot of effort.

  When we first got together and there was all the romance and sparkly heart feelings, he would do the round trip. He’d walk the seven kilometres to come and meet me, and then walk seven kilometres with me home. All so I wouldn’t have to walk to his place on my own. That’s true love.

  Then we started using the bike.

  We figured out that if we put footpegs on the back of his little brother’s bike, he could ride out to meet me in half the time, then I could just stand on the footpegs and hang on for dear life the whole way home.

  Two twenty-year-olds cramming on to a twelve-year-old boy’s bike because neither of us could drive. I forgot to mention that we were really fucking awesome.

  One night, after a particularly crappy day working in my particularly crappy retail job, I begged him to come and meet me with the bike. I wanted to see him, but I didn’t want to see him enough to walk seven kilometres after being on my feet for nine hours. He promised that if I came over, he would meet me – bike at the ready.

  I got to the station. He wasn’t there.

  I waited. And waited. And waited.

  Half an hour passed – half an hour that I spent thinking about every single annoying thing he had ever done. Half an hour that I spent fuming over the time he didn’t come to that dinner, the time he was late to that thing, the time he didn’t listen when I talked about that girl, the time he planned a night out when we were meant to see my friends.

  Then I started thinking about the bigger things – how he was so unmotivated, how he still lived with his parents, how he didn’t know what he wanted to do in life and WHERE IS HE AND WHY THE FUCK CAN’T HE DRIVE?

  It was right at the point my brain started thinking in capital letters that he arrived.

  He didn’t stand a chance.

  ‘Don’t even talk to me,’ I said. ‘Let’s just go.’

  It was when I went to get on the back of the bike that everything came crashing down.

  ‘Where are the footpegs?’ I asked, with a level of calm that shocked even me.

  ‘Oh . . . shit,’ he replied. The fear in his voice was obvious.

  We spent the next two hours on the side of the road arguing about our relationship under the guise of the bike. How could he forget the footpegs? Why was I overreacting about the footpegs? Why was he late? Why hadn’t I been clear about the time? Why did he always make me feel bad about being busy? Why did I always expect him to read my mind? How could he be so disorganised? Stop trying to change the subject, this is about the bike.

  Obviously, it wasn’t about the bike.

  We broke up three days later. After years of being focussed on playing our designated roles – him the saviour and me the saved, we hadn’t noticed that we actually didn’t have a lot in common. We actually really gave each other the shits on an epic scale, but the task of making sure I was okay meant we never really thought about it.

  We agreed to go our separate ways, and at first, it was mutual. We were sitting by the water at Darling Harbour, and we both hugged and cried and said our goodbyes.

  But two days later, I cracked. I wanted him back. I began to panic. I would listen to Missy Higgins for hours while snot-crying into a wine glass. I invented a fake MySpace profile so I could spy on him and see if he was out with any girls. I called him, relentlessly.

  But luckily, Josh stood firm. I think he knew better than I did that I only wanted him back because I was too scared to be alone. And despite begging him to take me back in an increasingly humiliating myriad of ways, he wouldn’t. He had finally realised that I wasn’t his responsibility, and he walked away.

  It was the greatest gift he could ever have given me. I needed to learn how to function emotionally on my own. I needed to realise that I had the strength to survive without a man to hide behind. It was going to take me a long time to learn – there would be another attempt at making a boy my drug and a stay in a mental institution before I really hit rock bottom – but Josh was the first one to push me into the deep end of the pool.

  And because I wasn’t quite ready, I reached out to the only flotation device I could think of besides him – actual drugs (the non-boyfriend kind), and lots of faceless, humiliating sex. I was at the beginning of my adult self-destruction.

  You will go to a very crappy drama school and do a very crappy naked scene.

  I knew that I would chicken out. I knew, all the way through the rehearsal, and all day before the first performance, that I wasn’t going to do it. As people were looking at me with ‘Geez, I couldn’t do what you’re doing’ faces, and friends were patt
ing me on the back wishing me luck, I already had an emergency pair of costume knickerbockers in my bag, because I knew there was no way I was going to go full-nude onstage in front of a theatre full of people.

  It was 2006, and I was in my second year at a very crappy drama school. It was the kind of drama school that you didn’t actually have to audition for – as long as you had the money to pay them, they would take you. It was in a few crappy rooms in a run-down office building in Surry Hills, but the school also rented a theatre right in the middle of Sydney city, which made us feel really legit. When other, proper drama students would ask us where our campus was, we’d sort of mumble something about Surry Hills before proclaiming, ‘But most of our classes are at the Pilgrim Theatre, you know, on Pitt Street?’ Something about the theatre being in the city made us feel like we weren’t wasting so much of our money. The kind of students who went there were the ones who’d been rejected from the proper schools – NIDA, WAAPA, VCA – but still had a lot of misplaced enthusiasm. I see some of them pop up in the occasional commercial now, bright-eyed and gung-ho, declaring that the latest Toyota has twelve months of free servicing. At first, it was the kind of thing that made you proud, but almost ten years after graduating, one commercial every two years just feels kind of sad.

  I ended up at the Australian Academy of Dramatic Art (abbreviated to AADA, probably in the hope that people might mistake it for NIDA) in 2005. After my disastrous, one-month stint at Sydney University, I spent the rest of the year working in retail, before deciding that all those Oscars speeches I’d practised in my room over the years should probably be given a chance to make it to the actual Oscars stage. I was right at the start of my treatment for PTSD, had just begun taking medication for depression and anxiety, and all I wanted was to do something fun. To be honest, I didn’t even try to audition for the proper schools. An audition process seemed way too daunting, and my confidence was shot after being verbally assassinated by Wayne for three years in private-school hell. That AADA wasn’t going to force me to audition was the reason I picked it.