Banana Girl

by Michele Lee

  With and by – two important words in youth theatre. To the uninitiated it might mean nothing. To those of us on the inside, it means everything. We exist to empower young people through the performing arts – we serve their needs and their development.

  My old boss has finally replaced me with a young intern who’ll do the bulk of the marketing work. She’s actually been with the company from its start in many other volunteer incarnations: a member of the Board, the president, the vicepresident, a performer, an assistant technician, and almost always an audience member. Funnily enough, she has a lazy air about her as if she might be just as content laid out on a brown sofa with a laptop, a few boxed sets of HBO shows and a day’s worth of junk food. Yet, she’s unflappable about theatre. I count her in the minority of the general population.

  ‘Arts journalists aren’t going to be interested in how well we describe our company or about the process we’re using to make this show,’ I say. ‘That’s important for us to know. If we want to pitch this as an arts event, get into The Age or Real Time, we need to emphasise what the product is. That it’s a quality arts piece. Not a community development project.’

  The intern takes notes.

  ‘What’s the show about exactly, beyond the theme? What happens?’

  My ex-boss beams.

  ‘We’re still discovering that!’ she says. ‘The workshops are still evolving, we’re generating material. The essence is there, it’s in the stories of the young people! We haven’t started writing yet, that’s happening soon. We’ve made a decision to work with natural daylight.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well we need to be mindful about how the sun is setting in December so we’ll start the show around 8 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. The story will unfold as the sun sets.’

  ‘That beautiful but it’s not product. I really think we need to emphasise what is actually happening in the play, once the playwright figures that out. If the lighting is important, that’s great. But it needs to tie into what story is being told.’

  I did an Advertising degree, which I had some success in, and then a Management certificate, which I did very well in. When I want to, I can speak fairly fluent Corporatese. I’ve never spoken it in its native environment though, just in government jobs or community offices like this, where the one paid staff member, the intern and the ex part-time worker are pow-wowing around a circular plastic table, which is sandwiched between an unused fireplace, two Bunnings trestle tables and metal shelves packed full with boxes and paper and theatre debris. In the corner of the office are the computer desks, both with Macs on them. The only spare space in the office is in slim corridors around tables, offering a brief glimpse of the hidden carpet underneath.

  For lunch we go across to the pub. There’s more room there and $10 pub meals. I suppress a yawn and get the calamari salad. My ex-boss gets the pot pie.

  I steal a chip. She chuckles at me and asks me about Laos.

  ‘A part of me thinks the host organisation might not even come through,’ I say. ‘There’s not really an arts sector over there. I don’t even think he understands what it means to have a resident. I think he sees me as free labour. Which is fine but I’d still like to know what’s going on. The last time I sent him an email asking for a bit more of an idea of what I might be doing, he wrote back and said we’d talk about it when I get to Vientiane.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t matter!’ she says. ‘This is a very important opportunity for your practice. Even if things don’t work out with that organisation, being in Laos will be an invaluable environment. You’ll be able to shape your voice.’

  She studied at the Victorian College of Arts and was its inaugural Animateuring graduate in the early eighties. She also did the same Arts Management course that I did after I’d completed my Advertising degree, and she’s run several companies and projects, so she also gets my Corporatese, and the Bureaucratese I’ve since learnt in my new job. If she could speak smatterings of pidgin Hmong, we’d be equally multilingual. She doesn’t mind that I broke up with her and the company. She knows it was the right time for things to end. It wasn’t my longest relationship but it certainly was one where I felt understood in all my tongues.

  I call Husband. I mention my date last night with the Cub, he mentions Pole Dancer Naturopath Chick. And Tuesday, another girl he’s been seeing. He loves women, every one of us, as long as he can perve at all our bottoms and bumps from afar. But two at once, up close, two making demands on his bed is stressful. Tuesday has had to become a once-a-week dalliance but she’s not happy with that arrangement and he’s not happy with her being unhappy but still, he doesn’t want to see her often.

  ‘I should be more interested in Tuesday.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She works for The Monthly. She’s a writer, do you know that she writes short stories? She’s very good, you’d like her work.’

  ‘Has she been published somewhere that I can read?’

  ‘I forget where, she did tell me. Oh, and did I tell you, she lives with Acorn? You’ve met her, at a party. She runs that venue in Thornbury.’

  ‘I love that venue.’

  ‘I know. Tuesday’s so arty-farty, she values the arts, she lives with artists. She’s extremely intelligent, she’s incisive. And I value that. She enjoys debating with me, she’s good at it. She’s knowledgeable.’

  On the other hand, Pole Dancer Naturopath Chick isn’t any of these things: she rents a place in Doncaster, works in a health food store at Knox and believes in homeopathy.

  ‘God, that does sound appealing,’ I say. On top of being feisty and left-wing, Tuesday has voluptuous breasts and a thick bush of retro-style pubic hair.

  From the city, I catch the number 19 up Royal Parade and get off at the travel clinic in Parkville. The doctor I see can’t be more than a few years older than me. She feels familiar by virtue of being young and I can almost picture us swapping places, she still sporting her ponytail but her coat replaced by a backpack, and sweaty bottles of Asian beer in her hand rather than immunisation pamphlets.

  ‘All you’ll really need for Laos are the rabies injections. There are three, we can give you the first one today. As for other shots, I have good news. You can hold onto your money. It’s unlikely you’ll be bitten by a mosquito carrying Japanese encephalitis. That’s more of a risk in rural settings. You’re staying in Vientiane? For the bulk of your trip?’

  ‘I might visit family.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘A few days.’

  ‘Well, if you’re spending ninety per cent of your time in Vientiane then I wouldn’t recommend you get anything more than rabies injections. Unfortunately, as handy as it would be, we can’t guarantee that you won’t be bitten by a dog. There are dogs in the main city.’

  Rabid dogs.

  It sounds funny to hear, having never encountered a rabid dog in Australia, but I think of Laos and the matted dogs roaming the streets and I tend to agree.

  ‘This, however, won’t stop the onset of rabies,’ she tells me. ‘It just slows it down until they can get you to a proper facility where you can be treated with the vaccination.’

  I suppose if I get bitten, being less rabid is better than being very rabid.

  I don’t need the shots for typhoid or hep A and B. I got them last year when I went to Laos for the first time. She advises me to buy condoms though. There are no shots she can give me to ward off sex-related bugs; I’m too old now for the wart virus shot. There’s nothing she can give me to stop me getting pregnant. It’s too late to start going on the pill. If I could just tug on that ponytail of hers, unleash it, transplant her to a beachside bar, I’d girl-talk her, tell her about my special contraceptive: man boycott. When I get to Laos, I’m not going to have sex with anyone.

  Certainly no backpackers – they slip away from you, whether they’re Swedish cougars or Englishmen. And you’re left in Melbourne like a dope in a kaleidoscope, deleting them years later in a righteous frenzy.r />
  Or so you thought.

  – Hey Michele.

  It’s daytime there in the Backpacker’s London office where he works in a senior web job as a user experience designer. I haven’t heard from him in a while – hence the aggravated deletion – and while I had often been in front of my laptop ensconced in banter with Jackie Winchester, I had been available for other conversations.

  – Hey, I type back, surprised and also cautious.

  – I haven’t seen you online in a while.

  – I’ve been here.

  – I’ve been meaning to chat with you but I’ve been busy at work. I hope you’re well.

  – I am.

  – A woman of few words.

  – Just watching a film.

  – Oh. Sorry. Talk soon?

  – Yep.

  He logs off. His picture disappears. He was cute, I was a blowfish – a purple blowfish, a cartoon image which I’d picked for my avatar from Google’s bank of standard profile images. It would seem that when you make an aggravated delete on Googletalk, you no longer see that the person is logged on but they can still enjoy the privilege of seeing your availability. I’m not clever enough to figure out how to block him entirely. I shut off Googletalk.

  I meet Mr Mercedes in the money district of the CBD, blocks away from my work. We have managed to ingeniously align schedules, this time by meeting on a Friday lunch and in the city. He is a tie-clad, wheeling ‘n’ dealing professional and wears a suit that cost lots of money. I’m wearing a hooded jacket, which I got for $5.99 from Savers. The top stud button is bent out of shape but I often forget and attempt to snap it shut. I can wear clothing that allows me to fumble with studs because I’m not a legal advocate; I’m a writer, an editor, so I don’t need to go to the tribunal and thus I don’t need to dress for work conscious of any tribunal members. My lanyard dangles around my neck, at least, giving me some appearance of being an office minion and not just an urchin.

  ‘Is that what you wear to work?’ he says, eyebrow raised.

  ‘You bet, baby.’

  ‘You artists.’

  He calls me Miss Andrew Lloyd Webber, which is meant playfully but is also telling about how little we have in common and how little he knows of the Theatre Land I traverse. I don’t think he’s seen a theatre show in a warehouse-cum-art gallery with a naked chick flung out on a white plinth, mock-dead after having convulsed in the nude. Well, he’s seen the naked chick. We’ve fucked at my house, several times. We have convulsed.

  Mr Mercedes manages commercial property. He has secure access to office floors. Some are unleased.

  ‘Thanks so much for going to all this effort, Mr Mercedes. You really take care of your clients.’

  ‘Yes, I give them the best service I can.’

  We get the lift to Level Twelve. He swipes his pass to admit us. The floor has been stripped of walls and partitions. All that is left is drab carpet and an empty alcove where the photocopy room had been. We go in, keeping the lights switched off, and remaining obscured from anyone who might glance through their window from the adjacent building.

  Condoms go on the ground.

  Clothes too.

  I go up on a bench.

  He goes into my pussy, with his commercial-property-managing fingers.

  With Mr Mercedes, I say, ‘Yeah, fuck my pussy hard.’ Or, ‘I want you to come in my mouth, okay? Make sure you come in my mouth when you come.’ Or, ‘God, I love how you eat my pussy. Keep eating it. Please.’

  And he might say, ‘I won’t fuck you until you beg me to.’

  Or, ‘I’m gonna come so hard. I’m gonna fill your mouth up.’

  Or, ‘I love how you suck my cock. Keep sucking it. Get it all in.’

  So we have some things in common. But by the time we’re done in the shadowy recesses of Level Twelve, we’ve exhausted the conversation topics. We get dressed, and once again we look ostensibly antithetical. I pat him on the back. He kisses me and he heads towards Spencer Street, collar crisped and tie straightened. I rinse my mouth and step along the street in my canvas shoes, back to work.

  ‘I just had sex with someone,’ I say to Husband.

  ‘When?’

  ‘At lunch.’

  ‘What? With the Cub?’

  ‘Mr Mercedes. He manages property in the city. We went to one of his buildings.’

  ‘Who’s Mr Mercedes?’

  ‘Why are you asking me who he is? I just had daytime sex, that’s pretty fucking cool.’

  ‘Yeah but who is this guy?’

  ‘He’s from RedHotPie.’

  ‘Which one from RedHotPie?’

  ‘I started having sex with him a few months ago.’

  ‘Yes but which one? You fuck a lot of guys from RedHotPie.’

  ‘Hey, keep it down,’ I say. We’re in the staff kitchen. ‘Not so loud with the ‘you’ word and the ‘f ’ word.’

  ‘You fuck a lot of guys, Michele,’ he says patiently, quieter. ‘From sex websites.’

  ‘I’m only on one sex site. And maybe three or four guys, that’s all.’

  He nods, impressed, confused. ‘You’re not like other girls, you realise.’

  I do take breaks from it. It’s Sunday, I’ve stayed home this weekend.

  ‘So I stayed in last night, watched Footloose. Bloody Cub.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Fuzzy says.

  ‘I thought I was going to see him last night. Then at the last minute his cousin had a crisis. He had to go attend to that. I think that says a lot about his character, in a good way, but he also said he’d let me know what was happening and whether I’d still be catching up with him but he didn’t text me until this afternoon. Gen Y. So unreliable.’

  I expect Fuzzy to roll her eyes and scold me for already finding someone new within a fortnight to complain about. She doesn’t. She’s nervously gripping a big bag in front of her, and the size of it is dwarfing her small frame. In that bag is a box and inside that box, a new laptop.

  She bites her lip like a troubled teen. ‘The Russki bought it for me.’

  ‘What the fuck?’

  ‘This afternoon, we spent all day with each other. We walked into a Mac shop and he pointed at this and bought it. It cost seventeen hundred dollars.’

  ‘You’re not going out with him again, are you?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so.’

  ‘No, of course you’re not. The Russki, bless him, may have lots of good qualities but you broke up for good reasons. He can’t just come back and buy you a laptop and expect you to go out with him again.’

  ‘He doesn’t expect that. He said this was going to be my birthday gift anyway. He wanted to give it to me.’

  ‘Fine. Keep it.’

  ‘Should I?’

  ‘Then no. Give it back if it makes you feel guilty.’

  ‘Should I?’

  ‘Fuzzy. What’s the problem? The guy was abusive. Not violent, I know, but emotionally manipulative. Yes, it’s because he’s culturally different but let’s face it, you grew up in Australia, he grew up in Russia. He likes his women to be from a village.’

  ‘I know, I know. Can I borrow seventeen hundred dollars off you? I want to pay him for it.’

  ‘Fuck him. Just keep the laptop if you want it.’

  ‘I don’t know if I do.’

  ‘Then give it back.’

  ‘I’m confused.’

  Footloose is not so much a dance movie, as it turns out, but a drama about small-town bigotry. It stars younger John Lithgow and Sarah Jessica Parker and Kevin Bacon. In Footloose, the townsfolk have outlawed dancing. However, Kevin Bacon, the new kid from the city, is a great dancer and he knows how liberating dancing can be, if only the adults would permit it. When he’s feeling misunderstood, he drives manically to a vacant factory and instead of having sex in an alcove, or even having a wank, he erupts with spectacular dance moves. John Lithgow tries to stop Kevin Bacon from bringing back dance; John Lithgow is the local preacher and the voice of well-m
eaning morality. You see, dancing and related evils killed his son.

  I like Footloose, even if there aren’t as many dance sequences as I would have liked.

  I transfer $17,00 to Fuzzy’s bank account and I go to bed.

  I’ve been watching a lot of eighties films. My dramaturge suggested it so that I can familiarise myself with the language people used in the eighties. The short play I’m writing, along with three other young playwrights in the same project, is in response to the theme ‘1989’. I have to submit my play before I go to Laos. Then the company will put all four plays on in December and something affirming will be written up about the plays in this year’s annual report.

  I send my dramaturge my draft script and she arrives for our Saturday meeting with snacks and sparkling eyes, like a TV mum. She might very well be from an ad. She still acts, as well doing dramaturgy.

  We go into the kitchen and she points to the big bunch of flowers drooping their browning petals onto the table. ‘Ooh, who are these for?’

  ‘They were given to my housemate last week.’

  ‘Lucky girl.’

  ‘The same guy also gave her a laptop.’

  ‘A very lucky girl.’

  ‘I think there are strings attached to the laptop.’

  ‘And so there would be.’

  I’ve never had a man buy me flowers, let alone a laptop. Jackie Winchester did give me a plastic pirate eye-patch and a second-hand copy of Blood Meridian, which he bought for me while I was in Auckland. In the second-hand bookshop, I drifted into the non-fiction aisles and stared at the crinkly spines of John Stuart Mill treatises and wondered if I shouldn’t know more about utilitarianism. Jackie Winchester was quickly dismissive; he’d surpassed these ideological flirtations back in first year. The pirate eye-patch was given to me later that day, with a smile, like a prank. I haven’t worn it. My government job may permit urchinry but it’s not the place for pirate costumes. I am reading Blood Meridian, however. It’s the first time I’ve read Cormac McCarthy, and Jackie Winchester was right, I’d been missing out. To start with, I didn’t think there’d be so many ways in which to talk about murder and make it unsentimental yet poetic.