by Michele Lee
Goose gains the attention of the group. ‘Ladies, some quiet please. Can I introduce you to someone?’
There is encouraging nodding.
‘This is my good friend Michele. She was at Dali too.’
There are hellos, some waves. I wave back, smile too.
‘Now, I know, I know, it’s a bit of a shock to bring her here. But I wanted to be radical and, well, why not have two Aussie Asians at the same table?’
There is instant laughing.
Another woman is here at the table, the other banana. I smile at her. Brunswick Girls are not sanctimonious. They enjoy laughing at themselves. I laugh, I sit, and when asked, I offer background information. I hear a girl in front of me talk about organising a Sunday afternoon session at her house where her friends can sit around drinking beer. Brunswick Girls also enjoy drinking beers and on the other side of their G-string T-bars they might sport a petite beer gut.
Perhaps I’m a Brunswick Girl. I’ve got a pint of Asahi in my hand. Maybe sitting here, drinking in the company of like-minded girlfriends is true satisfaction.
I had a gang of girlfriends a long time ago, when I was in Year Seven at Calwell High School. I was the co-head of the gang, along with my best friend Pretty Polly. She lived in a spacious house in Mountain Circuit, Calwell. It reminded me of a large doll’s house – French doors, lace curtains, sorbet colours and airy rooms. Whereas my Mum furnished our home with mismatched second-hand furniture that she accepted indiscriminately from anyone throwing things out, Pretty Polly’s discerning mother did decoupage and littered the hood of the piano with lacquered heart-shaped trinket boxes. My father had begun his obsession with Thai soap operas and was spending each night like a hermit in his room with the video player on. Pretty Polly’s father kept out of view too, greeting me with short replies after a day at work in splattered T-shirts and Hard Yakkas. When he smiled, it was usually accompanied by two $5 notes. Pretty Polly and I wandered down to Calwell Shops for $5 Hawaiian pan pizzas from Pizza Haven.
A few years after I graduated from Calwell High School, I heard that a boy from my school had killed a man on New Year’s Eve. He beat up that man in Civic, central Canberra, and left that man to die. The boy, the killer, was Giblet, and he’d been in the year above me in high school. I shouldn’t emasculate him by referring to him as a ‘boy’ because he’s rightfully a man now. Not because he killed someone else, but because he’s thirty. I wonder if his boyish, Jason Priestley-like face – and it was boyish during high school, a decade off from drooping jowls – has hardened in Goulburn jail.
But before jail, before murder, my best friend Pretty Polly had a crush on Giblet – well, by now Pretty Polly and I were in year eight and I was fast becoming her former best friend. Unlike Pretty Polly, I felt awkward when it came to boys – noticing them, gossiping about them, gaining their attention, impressing them. I’d seen the gap opening up between Pretty Polly and me, regardless of how many half-truths I might tell Mum about where I was going after school and regardless of how much kirsch I might down on Friday night under the willow trees in Woden to try to accelerate my loss of virginity. Pretty Polly had lost hers the year before.
Giblet was going to be at a house party: Stevo’s party. Which was to say, Giblet and Stevo and their mates were getting pissed and stoned around a small fire in Stevo’s backyard. And there was a tent in the backyard, some wacky last-minute addition to the party.
Stevo and I were the only ones left inside the tent.
He moved closer.
‘Where are you from?’ he asked.
‘From across the road,’ I said, not meaning to be demure. It was the reason why, in my waning friendship with Pretty Polly, she’d picked me as her accomplice that night. Outside of the tent, Pretty Polly was being all sorts of coy, chatting with Giblet, holding a cigarette between her fingers like she did it all the time.
‘No, really,’ Stevo said, persisting. ‘Where are you from?’
I’d had this conversation with other white people and often it didn’t suffice if I said I had been born in Canberra. I told him my parents were from China, which was technically true if you went back two hundred years. I didn’t bother with the intervening centuries Hmong people had spent in Laos, why we had migrated there, how the Secret War had brought us to places like Calwell and to parties like this. To offer Stevo this much information would require him to then reconstruct his understanding of the arbitrary notion of nationhood so as to conceptualise a landless people that had fled across borders not to conquer them but to encounter safe refuge. And really, with a guy like Stevo, sandy hair and freckles, flannelette shirt and bourbon, it was curious that he had even asked me where I was from. He may just have wanted an ‘I’m not from round here’, a confirmation that I was authentically exotic. Not that I was feeling frustrated by his questioning and its implication that I didn’t belong. I was curious about the other subtext in our conversation. He reached his arm over and began tracing, through my grey overcoat, a ring around the nipple underneath. I was aroused. I was confused by being aroused, I was only fourteen after all, and inexperienced at navigating encounters like this. My defensive instinct to run got the better of me.
Pretty Polly and I left the party and went to my house – Mum was under the pergola doing something late-night but productive; Dad was in his room with his videos.
Nothing had happened that night with either Giblet or Stevo. However, Pretty Polly was confident about the groundwork she’d laid with Giblet and the imminent dividends it’d pay out. She was becoming more attuned to the strategies that needed to happen over several meetings to ensnare a man. I was clueless about this tactical stuff but I secretly knew that I wanted to be fucked, to be totally and indiscriminately deflowered, utterly spread, used, taken, humiliated but transformed. This I continued to desire despite Stevo and his mate rearing up into audible Karate Kid moves when, on another day, I walked past the house where the mate lived. Was this Stevo’s way of following me up after the party? Stevo and his older sister did a knowing once-over of me when I sat by myself on the number 100 bus. He tapped me – almost thudded me – on my silky black head as if checking for an invisible conical hat. Another cloaked come-on?
Another night, another party. This time on his front lawn with a used car that the pissed boys encircled like a totem pole. From my bed, my boring bed, through a crack in the curtains I could see across the road. Stevo was so very lanky. So very bigoted. So drunk. Overcome by a longing for his attention, serenaded by his blokey revelry, I reached my fingers into the forbidden area of my underpants and began to rub myself. It was my first go at masturbation and it didn’t work, and before I could find a way to make my bits respond I stopped, embarrassed. I shared a bunk bed with Mee, I lived in a house with eight people, my parents snickered whenever white people were romantically affectionate on TV and we children squirmed.
I got up to wash my hands. I heard the TV from Dad’s room.
When I first got to Melbourne, I lived in West Brunswick, in my own room, and I could masturbate as often as I wanted to. Loudly too if my housemates weren’t home. I lived with two young women: one was a friend from uni and one a friend from primary school. She’d been one of those girls who, by the fifth grade, had very big boobs. She was never selfconscious about this nor was she boastfully proud. She went to a different high school and I doubt she went to the parties I had been taken to, I doubt that she would have wanted to go to them or that she would have watched them, yearning, from her bedroom window. In Melbourne, with boobs as big as they had been when she was ten, she was a pleasant homebody who hardly went out to the local cafes and pubs; she enjoyed cooking meals with her boyfriend and watching DVDs in her bedroom. She was in Melbourne completing her final year of her psychology masters and, to supplement her Austudy income, she worked for MacKillop Family Services in a residential home for troubled kids. Her team leader was Pretty Polly’s father! I was excited by the coincidence, intrigued by how a tradie ended up runni
ng a social service, and mentioned to my housemate a few times that she should pass on my details to him because Pretty Polly was apparently also in Melbourne.
I never did see Pretty Polly; I’m not sure if she left Melbourne too, just as my housemate did after a year. I wonder what she looks like now, what sort of men she now chases at parties. She left Calwell High School in year nine because of protracted bullying that culminated in her being cornered and egged by a gang of girls, a different gang from the one we’d been in. Pretty Polly’s mum transferred her into St Clare’s, the second best private girls’ school in Canberra. I didn’t see her very often and when I did, I felt like she’d not only switched schools, she’d transcended high school and I was still stuck there with my frigid hymen shamefully intact.
What if I’d managed to come that night? Perhaps I wouldn’t be so voracious about sex now and my conversations with Goose would be chaste; I wouldn’t be so blasé about tongue fucking and actual fucking, all sorts of fucking.
As it is, there is art to talk about.
Tonight Goose meets me at a Flinders Lane building to see an exhibition in a private gallery. We Brunswick Girls can do this: attend two art shows in the one week. On the walls are still-life oil paintings – squat vases of flowers with neon shadows behind them, and then a few paintings of garbage paraphernalia like crushed Coke cans, sombrely posed in the same way as the flowers. I don’t mind the paintings, there are a dozen or so, each about the size of a microwave door. They’re quite complete when viewed together.
Goose hates them. She tends to be quite blunt about things.
We walk around the room in a few minutes and with the art perused and our critiques shared with each other, we hover in one spot, now deserving of drinking the free Japanese beers.
Polar Bear comes over. It’s his mate’s exhibition and he’s been here for some time. ‘The good shit, eh?’ he says. He tips the neck of his free boutique beer towards ours. We all give each other a cheers, and sip. Despite having studied as a sculptor, he’s not one for art critiquing either, so we don’t go too much into what the paintings convey and whichever school of art they fit into.
‘Should we talk to the artist?’ I ask Polar Bear.
The artist, a man in his late thirties, is standing a few metres away, fenced in by well-wishers. Polar Bear shakes his head.
‘Nope. Nah. I’ll stay with you girls. Hang out with these arts poofs afterwards. Aren’t you fucking off somewhere soon?’
Goose and I are about to see a play, God of Carnage. Husband got the tickets through his casual ushering job at the Arts Centre.
I take a call from Husband, outside of the gallery.
‘What do you want?’ Husband says. He sounds moofy.
‘I’m just calling you back,’ I tell him.
‘Well, I was just calling you back.’
‘We’re at the exhibition, you can still come.’
I’d asked him to come tonight but he preferred to have a nap in the Carlton Gardens, which he’s done many times before. Once he’d woken up and a park hobo was backing away from Husband’s bag, pointing out that he could have taken Husband’s wallet but didn’t.
Husband is firm about not coming to the exhibition, even if there is the good shit being served for free here.
‘No,’ he tells me, ‘I’m just going to eat my dinner and head down to the Arts Centre. I’ll see you there.’
‘Which theatre is it in again?’
‘I knew you’d ask this, Michele. I already told you.’
‘Just tell me again.’
‘It’s the Playhouse, next to the Fairfax.’
I say, ‘You’ve just napped, you shouldn’t be so moofy.’
‘I’m moofy. I got you free tickets, remember which theatre the show is in. It’s the least you can do.’
‘Well, why should I remember it? I can just ask you where it is, because we’re all seeing it together.’
‘Well, actually, you can’t rely on asking me. I try to call you but your phone’s on ‘discreet’. What use is ‘discreet’ to anyone?’
‘I don’t like the loudness of the ring.’
‘Well, how are you supposed to hear your phone ring when I call you back?’
‘Well, we’re talking now.’
‘Because you rang me and I keep my phone on a normal volume.’
‘You are superior to me.’
Goose and Polar Bear are still standing together in the gallery, in conversation. Goose is engrossed. She’s a very curious person – that front-of-the-class child with her arm raised permanently, and questions always on her lips. Ever the investigator, I’m sure she’s interviewing Polar Bear about his senior job hanging shit for the National Gallery of Victoria.
‘That was Husband on the phone,’ I explain to both of them. ‘He was sleeping in a park and he’s not going to come here before the show.’
‘A park?’ says Goose. She turns her body. She’s very intrigued.
‘Yes. He likes his naps.’
Polar Bear nods. ‘Ah, your Husband.’
‘Yes. Annoyed with me too. Bolshie as ever.’
Goose and I leave Polar Bear with the boutique beer. And meet Husband at the Arts Centre, in the Playhouse to be precise. Husband’s been fed and now he’s fine, de-moofed. He doesn’t hold grudges.
‘How long is the play?’ I ask him.
‘Ninety minutes. And no interval. They go straight through.’
‘Awesome.’
We wait until five minutes before the show starts to claim the tickets that haven’t been picked up by invited guests. Technically Husband has got us free tickets so long as the actual owners of the tickets elect not to come. And there are always people who don’t. When you’re worth inviting, you don’t go. When you’re not invited to anything, like me or Goose, you drink the free piss at a prior event and then turn up here, on the turps, lurking like a foyer vulture.
God of Carnage is by a French playwright, Yasmina Reza, and has won a lot of awards, and large theatre companies around the world have produced it. Two middle class couples meet to negotiate a truce about their young sons – one of the sons has beaten up the other at school. At first the couples agree about who did what and why, but as the night goes on and the more drunk the couples become, the more their civilised veneers crack and the more they take turns cutting each other down, morphing into their pugnacious sons. It’s apparently hilarious, the whole audience rumbles with constant laughter. Whenever I see privileged white people complaining about their lot, I shed my foyer vulture wings and revert to my beleaguered migrant persona, the person who hasn’t succeeded in the arts and hasn’t been produced around the world because she can’t-a speak-a the English very well. Harshly, I shut off, even if the privileged white people are essentially making fun of themselves.
Goose likes the play. Husband too.
Goose likes trains. She departs at Flinders Street station, and Husband and I continue up Swanston to catch the number 96 tram home.
‘Well, well,’ I say. ‘What a coincidence.’
It turns out that we’ll both be seeing the Animateuring showcase at the Victorian College of Arts tomorrow night. Husband knows someone who is studying and wants to support her; and I also know someone studying, as you do in Theatre Land. I’m going to bring my friend Tambourine and I was going to bring the Cub but there weren’t enough tickets. Husband is going to bring Pole Dancer Naturopath Chick.
‘You like her!’ I say.
He smirks. ‘Maybe I do. But before you start telling me I’m so predictable because I’m getting attached to someone, no, Michele, I don’t have to get attached and have a girlfriend just because I’m an old man and therefore I’m running out of options and therefore I’m desperate. If I was desperate, I might have kept seeing Tuesday too and kept that option available.’
‘But you are desperate, you are almost forty. You’re probably going to die soon. And you haven’t done anything with your life that your parents can be proud of. I
can’t believe they’ve bought you a flat.’
‘Giving me a loan.’
‘That you’ll never have to pay back.’
‘I should probably marry Pole Dancer Naturopath Chick.’ He pauses. ‘Actually I should let her know you’ll be there tomorrow too, so no surprises for her.’
‘But she’s just a pole dancer,’ I point out. ‘Pole dancers don’t get jealous about ex-girlfriends.’
‘You’re right. She’s incapable of getting close to someone and getting jealous. She’s too busy stripping. Maybe I’ll ask her if she wants to have a threesome with you and me. That’s up her alley. And by up her alley I mean up her juicy pussy.’
‘I love juicy pole dancer pussy.’
He types the message and sends it off.
‘There, now she’ll know that my ex is actually just a skanky whore and Pole Dancer Naturopath Chick will have nothing to worry about.’
Dear Michele,
Everything’s patched up with Goose! I went to her birthday dinner the other night at Pizza Meine Liebe. I was the first one there so I got her to myself for a while. The pizza was fabulous. It was a very nice night.
Yet you seem to be frowning, and ignoring me, playing your Game Boy.
‘You’re not thinking about Goose,’ you say.
‘She’s all that I’ve on my mind right now.’
‘What about her actual birthday party this Saturday?’
‘You know I can’t make it. To start with, why have two parties? And secondly, I’m busy on Saturday. I’m seeing another play.’
‘You could cancel.’
‘She could give me more notice!’
‘She’s your friend. That ticket isn’t costing you anything. It never does. You don’t like paying for theatre. Even though you say you support it.’
I pause. ‘I don’t like where you’re going. I don’t like how you –’
‘Twist everything so that I’m right?’
‘Listen,’ I say. I try to sound very much like a patient twenty-nine-year-old. ‘I don’t want it to come to this but I should point out, again, that you’re not the best example of a good friend yourself. You were the one who went a bit intense and a bit weird on Pretty Polly.’