by Michele Lee
After a while the Cub says, ‘This is shit, isn’t it? I can’t hear you.’
Downstairs, in the laboratory-themed room, we perch on the lab stools near the wall. It’s dark on this level but quieter. There’s a DJ in the corner with a Mac and the music he plays thuds out unobtrusively.
The Cub points out the Cubette, who is here for the same birthday drinks. She’s sitting in a booth with friends, the interchangeably fashionable types. They’re friends of the Cub’s too but when the Cubette is around they choose to sit with her and not to talk to the Cub.
I can only make out the top of her head.
I wonder if she swings between not caring about what the Cub does and whom he drinks shoplifted vodka with to caring way too much. The chore of being the dumper is maintaining that you were right in ending things, and that you don’t care as much as they care. Husband would sometimes hug me and tell me it was okay to be feeling raw but other times he didn’t like to be around me at all. I might have sent him some email, some obnoxious poem.
‘So do you want to get back with her?’ I ask.
We’re outside. The Cub quit the cigarettes recently but he’s having one right now.
‘Do I want to punish myself?’ the Cub replies, exhaling. ‘No way. She’s crazy.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘She broke up with me for no apparent reason. Two times. And now she won’t talk to me. I’m cool with it but I know we have the same friends. I want to be friendly. But, you see, let’s say I want to go around to her house to see her housemates. I have to plan it so I’m not there when she gets home. She doesn’t like me there. I wrote her an email. Cubette, listen, we’re going to have to see each other. We’re in each other’s lives. Can we be friends? At first she wrote back and was fine, friendly. Then I replied. Then she took her time and comes back to me with something unintelligible. Don’t get a put and we will be all okay. That’s the last thing she said to me.’
I agree that her reply doesn’t make sense.
‘I think you’re being quite mature about it all, Cub.’
Someone has taken the Cub’s briefcase, which he had left temporarily under a bench outside the Croft. The Cub runs down the alley, past dumpsters and graffiti, and he stops a group of people who have the briefcase with them. They’re fairly harmless-looking. They act surprised and then conciliatory in their explanations. I can hear their Irish accents. Basically they’d seen the briefcase under the bench, okay, and not knowing it belonged to anyone they’d basically taken it out of curiosity and then had basically opened it out of curiosity, okay. But here you go, all good mate, briefcase returned.
The Cub isn’t hostile, not that the situation calls for it. Still, I can’t imagine him getting into a fight. He’s not a small guy by any means but he has an easygoing nature. I can’t imagine him having argued with the Cubette or with Lady Sweden. I saw Lady Sweden’s pictures on the Cub’s bedroom wall in a black-and-white montage of previous Melbourne moments. He shook his head fondly and said that they used to fight all the time but made up for it with amazing sex. Ah. One of those couples. I was surprised by her face, her features. The stereotype I had of a Swedish woman was blonde braids and button nose, not brunette and feline. I imagine the Cubette is the opposite, wispy and not womanly. I might be somewhere in between the two. Men usually find me to be cute. Women sometimes say I’m pretty or even elegant. I’m not tiny like other Asian women but I’m not large. I have Dad’s nose but to the side of that is an endearing dimple. And then there are the clothes, the armour, the homeless-chic clothes and hot-pink frames. I too blend into oblivion in a place like this, which blends into oblivion with all the other unique but same bars in Melbourne.
The Cub returns with his briefcase but it’s not until we’re in the taxi going to my place that he realises his Ray Ban sunglasses are gone. Luckily the prescription ones are still there. I suggest we go back but the Cub says not to worry as the Irish people have already been swallowed into the night. The Cub is upbeat. He’ll seize this as a chance to update his style and get a new pair of tortoiseshell Tart Arnels.
The Cub doesn’t grow hair on his cheeks or on his chest. His skin is smooth, almost as smooth as mine. It’s a strange sensation. I’m used to body hair, sometimes light carpets of it on the shoulders and on the chest and on the backs of thighs. He blames his hairlessness on the one-eighth of Spanish in him. It seems to make sense when he says it but afterwards I think about it, bemused. I thought Spanish men were hairy.
The Cub says he used to weigh twenty kilos less. He had forgotten how to eat and he had a girlfriend who liked skinny guys. It was only after they ended things that, with a single man’s perspective, he thought he should make an effort to put on weight. He says he is one-half Viking but that it’s more evident in his brother, who is bigger and blonder and more hirsute, a golden yeti still living in Queensland.
The Cub had to construct his own style reinvention from Queensland farm hick to skeletal boyfriend to Melbourne aesthete. He gets advice from a fashion blog, The Sartorialist. He goes to the gym but doesn’t overdo it because he wants understated biceps. He’s affably preoccupied with his appearance. Melbourne is a town of costumes, after all.
When he kisses me, he circles my mouth rather than diving into it.
When we have sex, he fits my body into his in a wellfitting crush.
He doesn’t speak during sex or make loud noises. He thinks that sort of stuff is contrived. Contrived like porn films. Sometimes I say things, though; I contrive.
I like the Cub.
I feel aligned with him in affably shallow ways. I feel like I’ve made quite a find for the time being and I want to sit with it while I figure out what to do with it before I go to Laos, and what it means to stop liking other people, or thinking about them, or deleting them, or emailing them, or talking about them all the time.
I might be sitting here for some time. Naked, without my costume.
The Cub sleeps in. I wander down to Nicholson Street Village. He’s still sleeping when I get back.
Fuzzy is up. She has her weekend scarf wrapped around her head and her house slippers on, and she’s in a frenetic mood, searching for objects to control and clean. The Russki has just left that morning. They’d had a fight but it seems that she has agreed to be his girlfriend again.
‘I don’t think he understands,’ Fuzzy says. ‘This is very important. It’s my body. I make decisions for my body.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He does my head in.’
‘Yes, but why?’
‘He doesn’t want me to get my nose job! He doesn’t trust anaesthetic!’
I don’t know how this topic came up but as it is he doesn’t trust anaesthetics and has told her she can’t have a nose job. She’s very mad at him for thinking he can control her.
‘My body is my body. What a fucking idiot!’
As beholden to a man as she would like to be, at times she despises them and their universal idiocy.
‘Hmm, who’s this all for?’ she asks. I’m making a morning feast: eggs, bacon, sausages, mushrooms and tomatoes, served with fresh sourdough bread. My cloth bag was stuffed, hanging heavy on my shoulder as I walked home.
‘The Cub,’ I tell her.
‘Ah.’
She smiles knowingly, her fury at the Russki diffused by my quaint little meal. At other times she was frustrated with my meal-making for men; this was a dangerous symptom of Michele’s man-eating going wrong. I open my legs, my heart and the pantry.
After brunch, I get the Cub to tell the sandwich story to Fuzzy in her room. He narrates with large gestures and a constant grin. When the Cub was twenty kilos lighter, a man came up to him on the beach and assuming the Cub to be too poor to eat, the man offered him a sandwich. It seemed funnier when the Cub first told it to me but Fuzzy laughs loudly. She relays her gripes about the Russki. A few hours have passed since they fought so she’s calmed down and is talking about her argument with tende
r exasperation. In a very good Russian accent, she reads out his text messages. Ardent essays in broken English, convincing her of his love for her, even when he knows she’s being wilful and he’s just concerned about the anaesthetic. I leave the Cub and Fuzzy in her room – the Cub works in IT and Fuzzy can’t figure out how to get music from her PC over to her new Mac. I go outside to hang my laundry on the raggedy clothes line.
It’s a nice day today and I don’t think it’ll rain.
After I’m done, I collect the Cub and take him to attend to my own computer problems – the trackpad on my laptop won’t work. He tells me that I’d inadvertently switched it off, so he switches it back on with my mouse. With gratitude, I toss him onto my mattress. By now it’s early afternoon. I’ve hung out with him for over half a day. The last person I did this with was Jackie Winchester.
I think about the Croft. ‘I hate having sex at midnight,’ I murmur.
‘Me too,’ the Cub murmurs.
I roll around, in stockings. The Cub rolls with me. I laugh a lot. He pins me down and mock-bites me.
‘You move like you know what you’re doing,’ the Cub observes.
‘I’ve done this a few times.’
We get dressed. I offer him a pair of fake Ray Bans that I bought in Vietnam but he declines. He really is thinking of buying Tart Arnels.
We tram it into the city from East Brunswick and now we stand at the Swanston Street stop. The Cub tells me it’s been fun. We kiss.
‘Facebook me,’ he says. ‘Organise the next catch-up?’
And then he backs away. He’s off to a pattern-making class that afternoon. I’m going to the Melbourne Theatre Company, where my friend Corset works as an usher. She’s gotten me a free ticket for a matinee! A matinee of Colours, written and performed by Peter Houghton. I’m happy because, yes, I don’t just like Peter Houghton. No, I love him. I want to find a man like him and lock him in a room. Not to do kinky stuff with. I just want to watch him perform over and over again. Peter Houghton is from Theatre Land, the upper echelons. I once sat within a metre of him! I could have touched him! He was at a marketing meeting at the Malthouse Theatre, I was the marketing assistant seated silently beside the marketing manager who was steering the discussion. Peter Houghton’s sell-out show, The Pitch, was going to be in the next Malthouse season.
Unfortunately, I fall asleep in Colours, a one-man show set in a British war in Africa. Being a morning person who springs out of bed and goes down to the shops to buy stuff for brunch means that I suffer in the afternoon for my premidday verve. Corset’s boyfriend has also been given a free ticket. He’s seated beside me, awake and assiduously attentive. He likes to know things and is handy with facts.
After the show ends, he explains to me what I’d missed while I was snoozing.
‘As I understood it,’ Corset’s boyfriend says, ‘he explained how he had seen everybody in his unit die and how he had found their bodies and so on. He was playing all their characters. But they were all dead, he was mad.’
‘Ohhhh,’ I say. That explains the different accents.
‘The whole talking to yourself is a pretty big clue too.’
I pause. ‘Can I use your iPhone?’
He’s suspicious. ‘What for?’
‘Something totally unrelated to the play.’
He passes me his phone. I try to locate the directions for getting to my friend’s place in Elwood, where I’m going for dinner tonight.
‘So how do I –?’
‘What?’
‘Do I just –? I mean, my fingers are just … I’m trying to type in Google maps but –’
‘Give it here.’
He commandeers the phone, shaking his head at my general uselessness this afternoon, and quickly brings up the directions.
‘Thanks.’
I pause.
‘What?’ he says.
‘RedHotPie? Can we open it up?’
‘How is the hell is that going to get you to Elwood?’
‘It won’t. But I’ve been emailing someone.’
He enters in the relevant details for me and then hands me back the phone so I can read the message in my inbox. I’ve recently started emailing Slim. He’s thirty but has three kids. I’m intrigued. I write him back a short message and include my mobile number. I’m happy to meet up with him after dinner.
Corset is like me. Whereas I studied advertising but never worked in the industry, she studied a Gold and Silversmithing degree at RMIT and although she did convert her garage into a jewellery studio, now she’s more interested in making theatre. She and I restaged The Talking Vagina earlier this year in the comedy festival. I’d written the play and we’d already had a successful season in last year’s Fringe Festival. Corset reprised her role as Jessica, the woman with the talking vagina. Dunlops reprised his role as said vagina, Frank. We got two guys to share the other roles, and three new designers for sound, lights and costume. I produced and Corset taught herself how to build the promotional website. As for the director, Smoker Boots traded in acting as Edward, Jessica’s boyfriend, for directing the show.
He and I had fucked last year, a few months after the first season of the show. We had sex twice and then it stopped, or perhaps he deliberately avoided it happening again. Smoker Boots and I remained just friends, and peers, working together to make the second Talking Vagina this year. I’d had sex with Dunlops too, during the actual run of season one. Rehearsals are synonymous with pick-up joints, you see. Then Dunlops and I were vaguely friends, absolutely professional, making the second Talking Vagina together.
The Backpacker arrived a few days before The Talking Vagina, version two, began. It had been four years since he’d been in Melbourne and two years since I’d seen him in London. During this time, when I’d been single, there had been many conversations on Googletalk and hundreds of photos of our genitals. Reunited, in the flesh, we had lots of sex the first day. The next day, we had a fight. Of all things, it was about something called ‘reality-based’ self-defence classes. I saw a billboard advertising them.
‘You know, I’m not really comfortable with violence,’ I said. And in reference to the billboard, ‘I don’t know if those classes make it worse.’ I was then ready to meander into a curious conversation that might slowly unfurl my thoughts.
I didn’t expect his response. The Backpacker said, flinching: ‘I’m taking Krav Maga. Twice a week, some weeks.’ His voice hardened.
‘What’s Krav Maga?’
Now his body stiffened. ‘A reality-based self-defence system. It’s taught in the Israeli army. But it has applications in everyday ‘civilian’ life.’
‘I’m not sure I –’
‘I’m studying it because there’s the real possibility that me – or anyone – will encounter some fuckwit on the street who wants to have a confrontation for no other reason than to be a fuckwit. In my case, I might encounter some fuckwit again.’ In his previous trip to Australia said fuckwit had smashed in the Backpacker’s nose. ‘So, in actual fact, self-defence has nothing to do with promoting violence but preventing it. And learning how to minimise any harm to yourself and the other person.’
He pauses.
‘So what do you mean, Michele? What do you mean about self-defence causing violence?’
‘I just feel that –’
‘You ‘feel’?’
‘I think that if there is … I think that these classes demonstrate that there is … It’s interconnected. I meant that sometimes you run a class, you perpetuate … you start off with this starting point that’s … adversarial. You start … you can create a need, rather than –’
‘But it doesn’t matter if you run a class or not. There are people still getting knifed on the tube. You think if you don’t run a class, then that stops?’
‘I’m not saying that. You’re putting words in my mouth.’
‘I’m not putting words in your mouth.’
‘And you’re not listening to me.’
‘
Well, say something.’
‘I am. I was. I was saying that I think there could be other ways to address it, to address why there is violence. I mean, if you examine why they’re getting knifed, why they’re carrying knives –’
‘Why they’re carrying knives?’
‘Yes.’
‘How is examining that going to stop you when you’re actually placed in a hostile situation?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t. You haven’t been in that situation. I have.’
‘I know. So I’m not sure what the answer is.’
‘Then why are you making these comments?’
‘Why are you attacking me for asking a question?’
‘I’m not.’
‘Yes you are. Please don’t make this seem like –’
‘I’m just trying to have a conversation, Michele. You’re the one raising your voice.’
‘What?’
‘I’m trying to understand you.’
I stopped walking – we were walking by the way. I said, ‘Can we just –’
‘What?’
‘Look at me please.’
‘Okay. I’m looking.’
‘I don’t want to fight. I want to have a nice time while you’re here. Can we both just say we’re getting over-emotional? Both say sorry?’
‘For what?’
‘Please. Can you work with me here?’
But he wasn’t ready yet. And he didn’t like being cornered into calling a truce. He said, ‘I might have to find other accommodation.’
Arsehole. I cried. He hardened even more.
I’d experienced his sudden temper before. I’d make what I thought was a neutral observation that he’d unexpectedly take as an unjust criticism, and as I tried to understand what the fuck was happening and explain myself, he’d stonily interrogate me and judge me as some knowing villain.
We stood under a tree in a cul-de-sac, in silence. We’d now walked to where we needed to be – outside a youth centre in St Kilda to watch break-dancers at a free community festival. I’d suggested we see this as something fun to do. The routine ended after ten minutes and the Backpacker and I walked back silently towards the tram line on Brighton Road.