Banana Girl

by Michele Lee

  MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

  www.transitlounge.com.au

  Copyright © Michele Lee 2013

  First Published 2013

  Transit Lounge Publishing

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.

  This work is based on true events. However, some names of people and or places have been changed to protect those involved.

  Front cover image: Edmond 417

  Back cover image: Matty Fuller

  Cover and book design: Peter Lo

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing

  A cataloguing-in-publication entry is available from the

  National Library of Australia: http://catalogue.nla.gov.au

  978-1-921924-60-6 (e-book)

  With thanks to the friends,

  exes, lovers, family

  members and fifteen-year-old-selves

  in this book.

  When I was fifteen I wrote a letter to my thirty-year-old self. I’m twenty-nine now. I can’t remember what I wrote. Something about not being a virgin, about getting a good job?

  Where’s that letter?

  I picture it origamied into a compact rectangle and covered in blue ink doodles, containing a wish list of achievements for me aged thirty to have fulfilled.

  I can’t find it. It’s not in the box labelled ‘Letters’.

  Mum was my age when she fled Laos in the mid-seventies, in the aftermath of the Secret War. She reunited with Dad, who was already in Canberra and one of the few Hmong men studying in Australia on a Colombo Plan scholarship. She brought my brother Ee and my sister Mee safely with her. Ee was walking, a tottery knee-high child; Mee was younger and still needed to be carried, propped upon a jutted hip. Mum, hair down to her waist, was given second-hand polyester flares to keep her warm in the Canberra autumn. She winced, the hips splayed and the polyester pants split and the eyes reduced to slits. She squeezed me out in 1980. And squeezed again, again. More. Seven in total. The hair was chopped off and permed, and by the end of the eighties, she and Dad moved us out of the boxy commission house in inner-city Ainslie and into our own home in the burgeoning estate of Calwell. Mum and Dad have been in Duggan Street, Calwell ever since. The perm has straightened, the reedy eucalyptus saplings up and down Duggan Street have grown into solid, shady trees. Mum’s never written letters but she has started to go grey and she does buy the sort of blue-black supermarket hair dye that I’ve always thought gives a really false colour, like a wig.

  I’d like to write to the me of fifteen, to tell her about the me of almost thirty.

  I have short hair, it’s black but not blue-black like Mum’s, just black. It’s cut asymmetrically, swooping at the back to the right and hanging over an almost number zero undercut. This sort of retro punky haircut, part subversion and part irony, is the fashion for subversive and ironic people living in the hipster boroughs of the inner north of Melbourne. My specific borough is East Brunswick; I’m in a share-house bungalow with a sprawling concrete backyard and with three other not-yet-thirty-year-old women; I’m a close tram ride into the CBD and a short flight from Canberra. I’m a banana, modern and golden, slipped loose from the rest of the bunch and escaped down south.

  Splat.

  When I’m not inside my room laptopping, I’m dressed to be indifferently hip to the outside world without being slavish about it. I think. I think I’m non-slavishly indifferent. I weigh about sixty kilos. Okay. Sixty-two. I’m slim but I have big bones for an Asian girl. I go for jogs just in case I’m not indifferent and it’s my appetite for cakes and not the big bones giving me the weight. I’m a cake baker, a jogger by the Merri Creek, I’m a young playwright too but I make my real income from a part-time job with a government agency. I have $18 266 in savings and I get 5 per cent or so of interest every quarter. I’ve thought about putting a deposit on a house but the desire for a mortgage might just be a residual effect of having come from Canberra or it might actually me being fanciful, dreamy and oh-so Melburnian. I’m an imaginative person, I’m university educated, I vote the way you’d expect me to vote and I’m a member of the CPSU. On principle I remain a union member. I actually used to be in a socialist party but I left after three months, and by that time I’d broken rank and had sex with two socialists from two other parties. I have had four proper boyfriends – Subaru, Four Track, the Backpacker. And Husband. I’m single now, however, and ferociously so. Which is good because in six weeks I’ll be going to Laos to do a literature residency with all expenses paid by Asialink, and I won’t be coming back until next year.

  So.

  This is me in a matter of possibly revealing introductory details.

  Hello.

  I’m naked in a bed in Auckland and the reason I’m here is lying next to me. He’s naked too – it’s his bed, after all. He’s got mirrored sliding doors on his wardrobe, so when I turn my head I can see me with my black asymmetrical hair and golden banana skin, and I can see him, ginger hair and caramel skin, made all the more burnished courtesy of a self-tanning lotion. He asked me a few times if I thought he was vain for wanting to be subtly tanned. He likes to talk about his superficial preoccupations and be assured of his superficiality. He doesn’t need to be reminded that he has an IQ approaching 130.

  His name is Jackie Winchester.

  He’s thirty-two and he’s midway through a sociology PhD about an amateur basketball team in Auckland. He knows his Heideggers and his Hegels but he also loves sport unintellectually, and he used to play basketball. He has a few pairs of worn-out trainers beside his fashion high-tops.

  I tell him that I liked the singing and dancing of the Backstreet Boys at their Unbreakable concert last year.

  ‘I know they’re daggy but they were actually really good performers,’ I enthuse. ‘They sang and they danced. And they did it well. They didn’t lip-sync. And I really enjoyed the performance of ‘Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely’. It had this late-night poker theme. I bought it off iTunes as soon as I got home.’

  Jackie Winchester chuckles. He likes my pop culture indulgences. He’s from that anti-modernity school of thinking where all culture is good culture and all sociology theses should be equal. We don’t go into the prejudices of academia. Instead we fuck: we meld our flesh, contrasting our butterscotch hues. Afterwards, without me planning it, with him in fact dredging it up like some sort of shared undersea wreckage, a conversation about our respective emotional defects begins.

  ‘Maybe I don’t know how to do that,’ he says.

  ‘Making love?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I say. ‘It’s probably not normal, what I do.’

  I open my legs, I open my heart and sometimes I shut it afterwards, sometimes I don’t.

  ‘Maybe it’s not normal, what I do.’

  Maybe we’re on stage at the Melbourne Telstra Dome with Nick Carter, AJ McLean, Brian Littrell and Howie D sitting in choreographed poses of downcast and desolate loneliness, a smoky poker table in front of us. I don’t want to be shown the meaning of being lonely. I just want to make love with Jackie Winchester. Even if he’s from the internet, and Internetian men aren’t supposed to be the ones you fall for and go to New Zealand to visit, six weeks before you’re off to Laos. They’re the ones you pass the time with or the ones whose pictures you show your friends and then smirk at their audacity, or bravery, for daring to approach you.

  I found Jackie Winchester on the RSVP dating site and started emailing him earlier this year. We had sporadic correspondence, little hellos that bloomed into conversations and, while I wa
s enjoying them, withered: he’d drop off abruptly. He reappeared with vigour a few months later, and shortly afterwards we met. It was the beginning of winter, not so long ago, and he was in chilly Melbourne for a weekend to recover from a recent breakup with his ex, who with her blonde-haired magic had kept his correspondence with all other girls sporadic. And then with him single-mindedly and wholeheartedly hooked, she had jettisoned him. Again. He’d been her boyfriend last year; their first time together was a fabulous four-week mutual obsession in which they planned skiing trips to Colorado and then more achievable things like sharing a unit somewhere local in Sydney. He’d been living in Sydney at the time, doing the first year of his PhD. I don’t know if he was able to make love with Elyssia, last year or in their fleeting sequel, or even in his head on the honeymoon ski slopes and in shared onebedroom flats.

  Meeting me face-to-face in June gave him some reprieve from the second break-up.

  Reinvigorated, he asked me to come to Auckland. Then he reneged. Then he asked me again.

  I said:

  Okay so, if I do come:

  a)

  You don’t regard me as a desperado for flying over to see you just because you asked, reneged, asked again because I’m not a robot but I’m also not a desperado.

  b)

  I get to punch you if you go weird and think I’m all desperado for you because I’m coming and then resultantly you get turned off me, get repulsed, lose interest and send me guilt pancakes.

  c)

  I get to punch you if you get back with your ex in that time.

  d)

  There is a pooping rule that entails, hmm, I dunno, not too many ‘Are you pooping now?’ jokes when I need to do a poop. Possibly there is punching involved too. What do you think?

  He gave some points in response:

  1.

  13–17 august sounds pretty good to me. and remember, the new zealand dollar is worth like 12c australian, so you’ll (we’ll) be able to live like a king. or queen, but that sounds camp.

  2.

  it sounds like a nice way to shed some skin and re-emerge stink-free (old skin stinks).

  3.

  (see point a) ok, deal on the non-desperado-regarding condition. i don’t think of you like that in any way, shape or form. also, you’d be a terrible cowboy.

  4.

  (see point b) you get to punch me, agreed, in the unlikely condition that that happens. literally, in the face. in fact you can wreck my nose if you like, since i have the nose job a month later. let’s really test this fucking specialist’s so-called expertise.

  5.

  (see point c) ok, this is a ridiculous impossibility and, you know, if you feel like you need to have that condition for your own sanity then by all means regard it as yours, but i shall not justify it by agreeing to it.

  6.

  (see point d) i also have a pooping phobia, so we can agree that it shall not be spoken of, and music is to be played loudly whenever anyone goes into the bathroom, just in case. I HATE shit.

  I booked a flight.

  Our little hellos grew frequent and big, lasting for hours. A mutual obsession, he with his self-tanned superficiality and me with my ironic taste in boy band music.

  I’ve been here in Auckland for five days and I’ve had a good time. I found it easy to be with him and he’s told me he feels the same. He’s assured me that he has, and he’s apologised for feeling so worn out on my last day. It’s not me but it’s his drugs that have wiped him out: he’s been meaning to change the drugs, especially because his depression and anxiety were the main reasons Elyssia broke up with him. I don’t mind playing counsellor and talking about his mental health and about Elyssia because she’s still on his mind – of course, it’s a fresh wound – and every now and then he makes comparisons, to heal with spite. For my benefit he tells me that unlike mine, her blow job technique was much too shaft-centric.

  On the drive to Auckland Airport he makes an effort to avoid silence by forcing himself to have an enjoyable conversation with me. I try too to have an enjoyable conversation. I think we do an okay job at not being tedious. We arrive. There isn’t a multi-level car park to circle up vertically, not like there is at Tullamarine. There’s just street-level parking that gives you an unobstructed view of planes landing and taking off. It reminds me of Canberra Airport.

  We eat expensive triangles of pizza under harsh food court lighting. The Coronas are also expensive but I pay for everything. I don’t mind, I’m a rich Australian and the exorbitant price of the food provides a neutral topic for discussion.

  I notice there is a head-high sign slinking in and out of the food court explaining that there is construction happening at Auckland Airport. The sign tells us to be patient. These garish lights will be improved, flattering soft focus for all, because the airport owners are making everything better. Afterwards, airport-goers will be as happy as the people pictured in the signage.

  ‘I’m going to book my flight to Australia,’ Jackie Winchester says.

  ‘Cool,’ I say. ‘Do you need a place to stay when you get to Melbourne?’

  He’s moving back to Australia at the end of September, next month, dropping in first to Sydney to meet with his PhD supervisors. They’ll talk about his field work in Auckland and he’ll discuss the game of basketball in a vocabulary most basketballers never use. Then he’ll come to Melbourne for good and continue his final year of study.

  ‘No, I’ll stay with Floyd.’

  ‘Cool.’

  Outside the security gates of the departure lounge, I fill in my immigration form. I’m asked to give my place of residence in New Zealand. I rattle off Jackie Winchester’s address, aloud, from memory, as I write. I seem to have remembered it perfectly from when I filled in the arrival card five days ago.

  ‘Creepy!’ I joke.

  He laughs. We kiss goodbye.

  When I get home to East Brunswick, the distance allows me to be the audacious, or brave, one. I send him an email, I sink into that deeper territory. I know he’s got his ex issues and I have mine and I know that tonight wasn’t the most ideal conclusion to our much anticipated weekend together and I know that he and I haven’t known each other for very long but from what I do know, I know I haven’t felt the things I’ve felt for him in some time so I’m thinking, if he’s cool with it, what if maybe I give up casual fucking to make love to him and only him.

  So, uh, yeah.

  Maybe perhaps if it’s okay with him since he’s moving to Melbourne anyway, I might possibly kind of sort of want to see where it could possibly kind of sort of go with him when I get home next year maybe possibly perhaps no pressures.

  He doesn’t write back. For the whole night, for an Internetian who’s online every hour, a guy who’s just hosted me for five days and declared a preference for how I suck dick, he doesn’t write back.

  The next morning, at home, I check my laptop. And at work, by my computer, I wait. Wait. Check. Check. Nothing. It’s maybe sort of kind of possibly desperate to hawkishly monitor my inbox. At least I minimise my web browser, as if my forlorn Gmail’s not even there.

  ‘How was Auckland?’

  That’s Husband, now standing by my desk, grinning like a scheme-monger. That’s his coffee mug with a cheap Ming dynasty pattern and his morning latte in it. As well as being my ex, as well as being an actor and sharing in the successes and injustices of Theatre Land with me, as well as being my neighbour and living in a unit around the corner from my share-house, he’s also my colleague and a part-time public servant. He works here at the government agency too but in another floor giving telephone advice, often to people who like to be told that they’re right, that they’ll emerge from court or the tribunal or mediation the victor, regardless of the actual facts of the matter. Husband and I catch the number 96 tram in to work sometimes, home too. We catch breaks together, elevators; we eat lunch together and go for walks around the block. We eat dinner sometimes too. Sometimes, most times, he’s the person I s
ee the most in a day. That might be a whole other problem, me and Husband no longer on stage at the Telstra Dome but still on tour, dragging out our old hits.

  Like Jackie Winchester, Husband’s a Kiwi. It’s there in certain syllables.

  ‘Auckland was quiet,’ I say. ‘Even on a Saturday there’s hardly anyone in the main street. I was really surprised. I thought that Saturday was the day that people came out to be together as a community, shopping.’

  ‘Who cares about that? Give me dirt. Tell me more about Jackie Winchester.’

  ‘Why’d you ask about Auckland, then?’

  ‘Why would I want your opinion on Queen Street?’

  ‘What street?’

  ‘The main street in Auckland, Michele.’

  ‘Well, don’t ask me about Auckland, then, if you don’t want my opinion on it.’

  He grins. ‘How was yo’ man?’

  ‘He’s not my man.’

  ‘Yes he is. You went to Auckland.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean anything. I’ve met someone who’s even more emotionally retarded than me. I thought I was in kindergarten at Relationship School but Jackie Winchester is and I’m actually in Year Six.’

  I’m reasonably happy with my metaphor. I’m not so happy with the realisation it affords.

  Husband reads into my lament and my frowning face with an inverse optimism, knowing that I overreact and I underplay, usually at the wrong times. Consequently, he’s confident that post-Auckland I’m going to be Jackie Winchester’s girlfriend.

  ‘You’re in muv,’ Husband says triumphantly.

  ‘I’m not in muv,’ I protest.

  ‘Muv’ is a word Husband and I invented. It means ‘love’ but the sort of merrily-sinking-in-a-quagmire kind. The kind Husband and I once had.

  Muv is a good thing.

  I’m sure I’ve always wanted muv, even when I was fifteen and I hadn’t even had a boyfriend yet. I’m sure I wanted someone with whom I’d one day throw a white froufrou and sugared almonds and soft-focus-photos-in-laneways and honeymoon-in-Bali kind of party.