The Night my Bum Dropped

by Gretel Killeen

  It is possible, of course, that such experiences were not ‘love’ at all, as it’s been a little difficult to know what ‘love’ actually is, ever since it became the name of a brand of adult diaper. But no matter what we call these love-type experiences, they do not ultimately vanquish the emptiness or make the ache inside me disappear. (This doesn’t mean, however, that I will stop looking for love because couples who find it do seem happy – despite the fact that with time their brains often appear to fuse and each person becomes incapable of independent thought, friendship or dress sense.)

  Mind you, it would probably help if I could pick a good bloke in the first place. Unfortunately I’ve always been attracted to bad blokes, the ‘trouble makers’ and the ‘ne’er-do-wells’, the narcissists and the sociopaths. Although, to my credit, I did also try to date a highly regarded philanthropist and plastic surgeon a few years ago, but it didn’t go too well. To be honest, I actually thought it was progressing fabulously until we’d finished our fourth dinner date and he appeared to be staring lovingly into my eyes.

  ‘Oh, my goodness,’ he suddenly gasped. ‘Do you mind if I take a photo to remember this evening?’

  ‘Of course not. I’ll just run to the loo and fix my makeup.’

  ‘No need,’ he replied. ‘I don’t want a picture of your actual face, I just want a picture of your nose.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Your nose. It’s amazing. Have you had anything done to it?’

  ‘Oh,’ I replied, immensely flattered. ‘You mean like plastic surgery?’

  ‘No, I mean like you haven’t had it broken many times as a child, or had skin grafted from it, or had a bad coke habit that caused your nostrils to completely collapse?’

  ‘… No.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ he murmured to himself enthusiastically and then began to direct me as he took photos of my proboscis. ‘Left side, right side, nose down, nose up.’ Finally he stopped and took a look at the shots he’d taken.

  ‘Well, that’s disappointing,’ he said, as I hoped he’d suddenly seen that my nose was perfectly fine and that it had just been a fluke of the restaurant lighting that made me look like the Elephant Man.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ I asked.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ he replied. ‘I’ve just realised that absolutely no one at work is going to believe that I didn’t use Photoshop to make your nose look this bad.’

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Yes, I’m devastated. These photos were going to be the highlight of the evening. I feel depressed. I need to go straight home and ring my mummy. Can you pick up the tab?’

  I’m Already in a Threesome

  As a single woman it’s hard enough to find a bloke who you like and a bloke who likes you, but when you’re already part of a threesome (i.e. the mother of two kids), you have to add two more factors to the equation. The bloke has to also like your kids, but most importantly your kids have to like the bloke, and the only way this will occur is if the children can look at him and see a direct personal benefit. Which ultimately means that, depending on the age and passions of your kids, the bloke must always bring lots of presents and resemble either Donald Trump’s wallet or Donald Duck.

  Should the man not possess such qualities, then he has absolutely no chance whatsoever of being embraced into the fold. Children are particularly territorial and programmed to ensure their own survival, and they will therefore do anything to defeat a lurking suitor whom they imagine might draw attention from themselves. They will have tantrums in his presence, hit him, ignore him, be entirely obstreperous, vomit in his car, refuse to sleep at night, refer to him as ‘dickwit’, ‘butt-wipe’, ‘arsehole’ or ‘shit-for-brains’, or even worse they may call him Daddy.

  So the reality of the situation is that anyone my children have allowed me to spend time with is by and large someone whom they have determined I wouldn’t want to spend time with anyway.

  A Friend in Need

  My friends tell me alternately that if I really do want to find love, I should:

  start dressing to impress (as opposed to what I apparently do now, which is ‘dress to depress’).

  flirt more. This is true. I do need to do this. When someone looks at me seductively, I currently respond with an aggressive scowl. I do this in the belief that men will find my expression both challenging and arousing … but apparently I just look like I’m choking on a fur ball.

  lose weight. Apparently we women should be very body-conscious because ‘no man can look at any woman, from a Playboy Bunny to Mother Theresa, without wondering what she’d look like with no clothes on’.

  try not to let everyone know that I’m single (because ‘lonely hearts attract perverts’.)

  remember that my definition of love is different to a man’s because men think that love is an erection.

  get a tattoo (because men think that women with tattoos are ‘sexual goers’).

  get a ute (because ‘a man likes to drive a ute and pretend that he’s a farmer’).

  get good at sex. (I used to try to be good at sex but I find it hard to get over a genuine fear that when I’m tongue-kissing someone I’m accidentally going to suffocate and kill them. Plus, during foreplay, I never know what to do with a bloke’s manhood, and have been known to seriously consider holding it firmly in my right hand and singing karaoke hits into it.)

  A Bitter Old Bag

  I realise I’m sounding a little bit post-desperate here, but the fact is that I’ve been without Mr Right for such a long time that I’ve been forced to do much of what he would have done were he here. I’ve become financially independent, I’ve raised two children, I laugh at my own jokes, I take myself to the movies, I can fix the cock on the dishwasher and I can start the car with a hairclip. So the essential problem really is that I’ve become the guy I thought I would marry.

  I’ve had to evolve. I couldn’t have spent the last twenty years ringing Police Rescue every time a light globe needed changing. But the problem with evolving is that you expand your skills to satisfy your needs – in fact, you expand to fill the available space – and one day you realise there actually isn’t much room left for a bloke and you have very few reasons to hook up with one, unless he’s rich, has no relatives or friends and is terminally ill.

  One of the other by-products of evolving, otherwise known as aging, is that you also get a little wiser, or at least get so stupid that you think you’re wiser when in fact you may be simply making snap decisions because if you don’t do things quickly, you’ll be dead. This ‘snap decision’ thing can be beneficial, in that you learn to save time by judging books by their covers, but it can also be detrimental because sometimes a great cover is the only good thing about a book. The same applies to men, who are similar to books in that they can be expensive, disappointing and also quite thick. So in summary, at the ripe old age of forty-five, my wisdom so far has taught me to say no to a man wearing crisp white runners with jeans, Cuban heels or a moustache, and it has taught me not to spend a minute more of my time with a man who says ‘Oh, that’s funny’ instead of actually laughing.

  Such wisdom hasn’t come easily. When I was young I spent an entire summer at the local swimming hole in love with a bloke who would often stare at me with a faraway look in his eye. It was only years later when I casually questioned him on this ‘look’ that he revealed he wasn’t dreaming of me at all and was actually just urinating in the water.

  I don’t know how I managed to attract males like this. I spent my childhood trying to be the perfect girlfriend! I spent years and years before even kissing a boy just practising tongue-pashing on a Lifesaver. And yet the first boy I ever kissed obviously hadn’t practised at all because it was just like swallowing a whipper snipper.

  I did meet one guy who seemed nice, or at least I thought he seemed nice, but our relationship was short-lived as he said hello to me in a taxi rank and then tripped on the kerb and got run over.

  But other than him, or p
erhaps including him, I can honestly say that most of the blokes I’ve gone out with have had absolutely nothing reportedly outstanding going for them at all. Perhaps, like many women, I like to start with as blank a male canvas as possible so that I can then create whatever fictional character I desire. I will bestow upon him qualities that he simply doesn’t possess, and gloss over any negative traits that he does. If I come across any nasty characteristics that can’t be disguised, then I paint them a different colour and imagine they’re fabulous. For example: he confides that, for the benefit of his colon, he poos by squatting with his feet on the toilet seat. ‘Oh,’ think I. ‘If he manages to care for his colon that much, imagine how much he’ll care for me!’

  But then as time passes one naturally goes through the metaphorical rain and sleet of the relationship and the paint washes off and the real person is revealed and you barely recognise them from the creature you created, and everything they say is suddenly stupid, and somehow even their fingernails seem repulsive, and the way that they chew drives you insane and the droop of their shoulders infuriates you, and suddenly the sex is completely inadequate even though they’ve lost weight since you changed their diet (and everyone knows that when a man loses weight his penis somehow gets longer).

  So you break up and endeavour to learn from the experience, and from then on you try really hard, with the help of your friends, not to bestow charming qualities on strangers you barely know and instead judge them only for who they are and not who they could be, and all of a sudden very few men make the grade at all. In fact, none do, so you lower your standards a little and at the suggestion of your friends date an apparently successful banking bloke who everyone says is ‘an incredible catch’ but behind closed doors turns out to be such a bore that the most imaginative act you see him perform is changing the TV channel to a random station without first checking what’s on the program.

  So you move on from that man, while further cementing your deep, deep belief that the relationship failure is all your fault and there’s something wrong with you, because everyone else seems to be able to find a partner so what makes you think you’re so special that you deserve someone better! In fact, for a brief moment you seriously consider dating the drunk, homeless man in the street who tells you that he really finds you attractive because he ‘has a penchant for women with huge arses and really little tits’.

  Actually, I wonder whether he’d want me even more now that my bum has flopped?

  My Friend Malvin

  My friend Malvin says that I’m too picky. But I should point out that Malvin knows nothing about the subject of love because he thinks that love is a blowjob.

  ‘Who are you looking to go out with? Jesus?’ he asks.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I reply. ‘Of course I’m not looking to go out with the Son of God.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because,’ I say, ‘everyone knows that the son of a hugely successful man is never as amazing as his father … or “our father”, as the case may be.’

  A woman, whose name I don’t know but who lives in our building, tells me that I should be more willing to compromise. I’ve never actually asked for her opinion on my relationship status. I’ve occasionally asked her whether she would mind not parking in my parking space, but never, ‘Hey, stranger lady, how do you think I could nab a bloke?’ Nevertheless she obviously feels that I should compromise, and compromise is a thing she clearly knows a thing or two about if we can judge anything by her husband who has all the charisma of a damp Chux Super-wipe but apparently cooks a very nice duck a l’orange and also does the washing up afterwards.

  But quite frankly my philosophy is ‘never take the advice of anyone whose life you don’t respect’, and I find it hard to respect this woman who has also gleefully told me that even though she earns significantly more than her husband, he will not permit her to spend money on anything that’s not on sale. Hence the reason why last week I found her sitting in her car, in my parking space, armed with a red Texta, writing fictitious markdowns on the price tags of clothing that she’d already purchased.

  And on top of all this, I don’t want to compromise because my other philosophy is purely and simply that, ‘Men are like shoes and if they don’t fit, they don’t fit.’ So don’t sit there wondering why they don’t fit, just keep looking for a pair that does.

  N.B. Since writing the above paragraphs I understand that the woman has now split from her husband. Apparently he was a passive-aggressive, while she on the other hand was an aggressive-passive. Anyway, he went on to write a book about their experience called Life is a Life-Changing Experience. And she went on television to read extracts out loud and when she’d finished each page she ate it.

  But, as I said, I don’t believe that love will make this ache in my heart go away anyway, which is lucky as I’m not likely to get a bloke because I avoid most men. I avoid men who are wealthy because excessive wealth may be a sign of insanity (you don’t see squirrels preparing for hibernation by hoarding more nuts than they could ever consume in their lifetime, do you?), and I avoid men who are good-looking (because they’ve never needed to develop a character), and I avoid men who are young (because they make you look old), and I avoid men who are old (because you don’t want to be their unpaid nurse), and I avoid men who are my own age because there’s got to be something wrong with a guy who is still single in his forties! (So why is a girl still single in her forties? Well, obviously because she’s just too fabulous!)

  So yes, I’ve rendered the man obsolete. Which means I may now be ‘serially single’ (formerly known as an ‘Old Maid’ or a ‘Spinster’) and this is not good because single girls never get invited to couples dinner parties, so they never have the lowdown on which garage door is the most reliable or which outlet is best for purchasing men’s boat shoes.

  Death and Being Single

  Occasionally something will happen that’ll make you feel glad that you’re not part of a couple. For example, I read about a woman who met her soulmate in her mid-forties and they married and lived in what everyone thought was wedded bliss for the next two years until they went for a bush walk and she pushed him off the cliff. So the good thing about being single is that you can’t murder your partner.

  But then again couples do get each other’s property if they die, and they also get conjugal visits if one of them ends up in jail, which means that, should you happen to end up in jail for one reason or another, your partner could hide luxury goods in their private parts when they come to visit and give them to you in the seclusion of the jail’s sex caravan, and you could then sell the goods to fellow inmates and become rich and powerful within the institution and this would mean that you wouldn’t have to become the Tough Chick’s Bitch. And this would have to be seen as a plus for coupledom.

  N.B. When I refer to hiding ‘luxury goods’ in private parts, I am, of course, not referring to home entertainment systems or cars.

  The pros and cons of coupledom aside, this doesn’t mean that I will ever find someone to love. I listen to The Love Song Hour where people ring the radio show and wait on hold for hours and hours just to dedicate diva ballads to their loved one’s boobs. I listen to every call and wonder how long those celebrated relationships will last. I wonder whether I’ll ever have anyone to dedicate a love song to. I wonder whether anyone will ever dedicate a love song to me. When I was nine a boy rang me up and sang a song to me but that was possibly more a cry for help because the words were, ‘Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, think I’ll go eat worms.’

  But of course I will keep the love option open. In fact, maybe love will enter my life any second now, with my hair post-sleep resting vertically like a cockatoo crest as I sit here typing at a friend’s kitchen table at dawn, drinking my fourth cup of cold tea and wearing my grandma’s family heirloom (a pair of underpants that could double as a parachute). Yes, maybe love will enter at any second because they say that love comes when you least expect it, and that would be ab
out now …

  Okay, so love didn’t enter the room.

  Please Call Me Madam

  After leaving my TV job, being bombarded by the ‘weekus horribilis’, having my bum drop and seeking unhelpful help, I was then advised by the proverbial One and All (i.e. friends, their friends and their relatives) that the best thing for me to do was to take ‘a well-deserved break’. But my self-esteem was so low that the only thing in my life that I could imagine was well deserved was my ‘weekus horribilis’.

  I guess this low self-esteem is predictable because I come from a long line of ‘low self-esteemers’. For example, no matter how sick we are my family doesn’t go to the doctor for fear of wasting the doctor’s precious time. So low is our self-esteem, in fact, that my mother has been known to say thank you to a Council Officer who takes time out of his busy day to write her a parking ticket. We may not be much fun to have around, but if you were on the Titanic with members of my family you’d be guaranteed, as a by-product of our low self-esteem, to be given our places on the lifeboats … even if you were already dead.

  So, it was fundamentally genetic, but as the days passed following the ‘weekus horribilis’, my self-esteemlessness spread like a ladder in one’s pantihose to also become fear and paranoia. Despite having been gainfully employed from the age of ten (selling our secondhand fruit door to door, in a middle-class suburban form of begging), I somehow rapidly began to imagine that I might never work again. In fact, after about three days of being ‘gainfully unemployed’, I started to panic that not only would I never, ever get another job, but that I would have to live in a tent on a median strip. I wondered whether I should go back to uni and finish that degree I’d dropped out of some twenty-five years earlier. I wondered whether I should contact any old boyfriend who was still single, marry him, buy him life insurance, kill him and live on the lam. I wondered whether I should begin to fulfil my lifelong dream of owning a brothel.