Banana Girl

by Michele Lee

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I was in Krabi and there was a group of young guys trying to impress me, saying they dealt drugs. I didn’t give a shit. I got out some Xanax and gave them some and had some too. I was drinking. I had another Xanax. Then I blacked out. The next thing I knew, I was awake and I was on a beach. It was the morning. The beach was completely deserted. It was just me and this Thai chick giving me a blow job.’

  ‘On the beach?’

  ‘Yep. And I still had my wallet on me. Nothing was missing.’

  ‘How did you know she was a ladyboy?’

  ‘She wouldn’t let me touch her.’

  ‘Well, maybe it was a cultural thing. She was shy.’

  ‘She was giving me a blow job. I don’t think she was shy.’

  The waitress comes and takes away our plates. I wonder if she’s heard what we’ve been talking about. Radar doesn’t give a shit.

  I might want to short-term relationship him.

  I wonder if this means I’m less anti-Semitic, less racist.

  ‘Do you want to get a drink somewhere?’ I say.

  It’s about 3 p.m.

  ‘Actually, I thought we could have a few beers back at my parents’ place, and if we feel like it, we can shag.’

  His parents live in a rented property on Beaconsfield Parade in St Kilda, in a two-storey terrace house which faces onto the bay. I think of renters as being people who live in sharehouses, someone’s property seconds. Like my house. This isn’t a share-house. It’s more like a display home.

  His parents are away in Sorrento today.

  Radar and I go inside. ‘Holy shit,’ I say.

  ‘Hey, we’re the Haves. But we didn’t always live like this,’ he says, taking it in the way I am.

  He points out the bedroom on the bottom floor. His room temporarily. A thick doona is spread on top of his bed, like a giant tongue of marzipan. Upstairs and past his parents’ bedroom, complete with their own marzipan tongues, he shows me the second living room. You can relax here and watch the sun set over the gleaming bay, or scan the street and check that your car is still parked there.

  It’s gotten overcast. I sit in the courtyard with a blanket around my shoulders, fending off the cold that the greying skies bring. Radar had offered me the blanket instead of us sitting inside and turning on the central heating. He wants to start practising what he’s going to preach about minimising one’s impact on the environment. He’s not going back to his old job with the insurance firm. He wants to study environmental science and only after that will he return to the corporate world to evangelise the marriage of profit and sustainability. For example, there are solar panel initiatives happening in Europe that save money and make money, while rescuing the environment from assassination. I listen as he outlines his ambitions, in a very matter-of-fact tone, and I get the sense that nothing, really, is going to stop him from doing exactly as he plans. He appears to have the means to be part of the revolution and he’s had a lot of time to formulate the plan, in amongst the Xanax and the blow jobs.

  ‘Why were you so candid in propositioning me before?’ I ask.

  ‘Well, why do you make it so easy?’

  ‘I did?’

  ‘You know you did.’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re insinuating.’

  ‘Bullshit. I could see how you lapped up my ladyboy story. You got off. I knew you’d be up for having sex. Am I right?’

  I do enjoy a good story, and I don’t mind if the punch line is ‘I had sex’. I didn’t realise I made it so obvious, though, what I enjoy.

  He says just as candidly: ‘We’d better get started. I know you have something on later, right? I’d rather just fuck all night, but as it is we’re adults with adult obligations. So let’s not waste the afternoon – let’s fuck, my dear.’

  I laugh at him, his all-round matter-of-factness for saving the planet and getting into my pants, which are already loosened by his storytelling. We go to his bedroom and strip off the marzipan.

  We short-term relationship for a long-term time. I get rearranged into all sorts of positions. The sun sets. We take a break and sit on the sofas in the living room, and it becomes dark and cold. The heater stays off; we bring the doona.

  The last girl he was in love with was Asian. Toxic: that’s what it was like with her, and how it was when it ended with her.

  ‘Timing, maybe?’

  ‘No. Timing wasn’t the contributing factor. I won’t blame it on that.’

  ‘You wanted different things?.’

  ‘A lot of things. And then not so many things. Let’s be simple. Two people can be very well-suited to each other but not be meant for each other at all. And timing can get fucked, there is no right time in that case.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘I know it. That’s what’s so toxic about it.’

  ‘Do you think about her?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t go back there, that’s what I mean?’

  ‘No.’

  At least with short-term relationshipping you don’t have to worry about whether you’re ultimately suitable. You don’t have to pretend that you haven’t been in love with someone else recently, or that you haven’t had sex with other people that very day. Radar thinks it’s great that I fucked Big Chef.

  We go back into Radar’s bedroom. We play until we’re both sore and the whole rhythm of what we’re doing slows into a lazy caressing. He takes a shower in the upstairs bathroom, I take a shower in the downstairs one. It’s very clean, the way a hotel bathroom is. I suppose there is probably a maid who comes to the house to clean.

  Don’t make anyone a priority in your life when you’re just an option in theirs, a wise person called IrishAmerican1970 once told me. He sent me a kiss and when I clicked on his name, I read those sage words in the opening line of his profile. He was a thirty-nine-year-old man living in Hawaii but planned to be in Australia in five years. Goodness. By then I’ll be all grown-up, well into my sensible thirties, and I’ll have finished short-term relationshipping and I’ll be froufrouing with a white guy on a white beach that is nowhere near Hawaii. It’ll be much too late for IrishAmerican1970.

  Sleek Surf buckled earlier this year and searched RSVP. From my room I could hear her in the kitchen snorting and shrieking as she went through the catalogue of men. She found one guy, a German guy. Not a socialist. This guy liked to surf in the Aussie oceans and he’d written his profile with the slightly odd and non-ironic humour that Europeans can have. He put a hint in there for how you might contact him on Facebook – his very distinctive German surname – and thereby circumvent a $10 email. She followed the clue, emailed him for free but he never replied. I thought he must be stupid and blind. Or taken. Or missing his ex. Or whatever other reasons that always exist. That was her foray into internet dating and she left it at that. Her preference for men isn’t about race or religion – she’s no more attracted to a German than to a Jewish-Polish boy or a Malaysian. It’s a city thing. Melbourne guys play too hard to get. She’s from Perth. She’s philosophical, not political. But she’s kind to dogs, old people, her family, her friends, the ex-boyfriend who cheated on her and led to her relocating to Albert Street.

  It’s her birthday dinner tonight at Seamstress and she’s dressed up entrancingly. Her best friend thinks all secondgeneration Asian girls are neurotic, but for a second-generation girl from Hong Kong, Sleek Surf’s calm even when she’s being messed around with by one of these men needing more saving than her. It surprises me that it’s been the men that have cast her off and not the other way around. I know it’s not about entrancement or how cool you are; you could be the coolest girl in the whole wide world.

  The birthday dinner finishes close to midnight. No cake to end with. And all my cookies are gone. But the food was sumptuous, served slowly, languidly devoured with appreciative sighs.

  All for $800. Holy shit.

  It’s like walking into the glossy entry
way of a rental property on Beaconsfield Parade. An $800 dinner isn’t very socialist but I’m not a socialist anymore and I never was a very good one.

  I throw in my money.

  Hi Michele,

  Only one more day to go! There’s not too much left to do. I have to switch my phone to pre-paid to keep the number active so I can use it when I come back, and I have to cancel the home phone and internet bills in my name. I need to return Tamborine’s chest of drawers, which I had been using because she didn’t have room for them at the time in her sharehouse. And then there’s my going-away drinks. It’s at the Brunswick Green, a bar on Sydney Road, which is near my house. It’s not a big deal if people don’t drop by because I’ll be back in four months.

  How are things with you?

  Hello?

  Are you busy studying? Is that it?

  Michele?

  Well, okay.

  I guess I’ll hear from you soon.

  Love,

  Michele

  I don’t like coming in to the city for a drink. I prefer the quieter places close to my house that allow me to walk home. As it is, we’ve just had dinner at Seamstress, and I’ve just been in the back of Fuzzy’s red Celica, catching the beginning of another Fuzzy versus Parker power struggle. The issue tonight is whether Parker can paint the inbuilt drawers in her new room without first asking the landlady for permission. In a spectacular fashion, Parker ended the argument by demanding the car be pulled over. Bewildered, Fuzzy acquiesced and Parker exited with Sleek Surf, the birthday girl, in tow to chase and console.

  Fuzzy and Parker are sisters.

  I exchange puzzled looks with Fuzzy. Although outbursts like this have been an aspect of our household milieu ever since Parker moved in, when Husband was still my boyfriend and still a tenant, I haven’t seen a fight of this magnitude before.

  My phone beeps. I ask Fuzzy to pull over for me too, and I get out at the next traffic lights. I wander back but I can’t see the Esco Bar. The Cub had pointed it out to me the night I first met him. But now it’s vanished, an indie Shangri-la, and I search for it but all I see are Stalactites and the corner of the QV shopping centre. People walk about, under the blip and flash of traffic lights, in their going-out clothes.

  I wait on a shadowy bench for the Cub to find me.

  I haven’t seen him in a couple of weeks. I’ve attempted to see him but he’s been in a depressed funk. This is Melbourne, the town of costumes and plagues. He’s re-emerging on my last weekend and he’s out tonight, and here he is. In the same clothes he’d worn to the Croft; this might be his Friday night costume. He kisses me hello on the cheek and then leans back to appraise my head.

  ‘Cool,’ he says. He’s talking about my haircut.

  ‘Thoughts, Cub?’

  ‘Did you just get out of prison?’

  My undercut is a severe zero. I’d asked the hairdresser to make it really short, shorter than what she’d assumed would be to my liking. I figured I should shave it right off – I won’t be getting it cut in Laos just in case they muck it up and nick my precious rat’s tail.

  We cross the street and he leads me up to indie Shangri-la. It’s sweaty and thumpy even coming up the staircase, and here I’d thought only R ’n’ B clubs were capable of death by bass. My face feels pounded. We stand at the edge of the dance floor, beside the Cub’s friend. He’s young and handsome and tall, a neat package that knows itself to be a neat package. He says hello to me but he has his head swivelled out, in surveillance, scanning the crowd for a girl to take home. And there are plenty of girls here, with their cups raised to their lips, their chins ducked down and one arm raised high affecting a carefree dancing gesture. The Cub’s main task tonight, he explains to me, is to keep his friend company: it’s much more effective if his friend has an accomplice because then he won’t appear predatory, he’ll simply be a hot guy innocuously hanging with another hot guy, enjoying the loud music, and being incidentally opportunistic if a pretty girl happens to bump her hip into his thigh.

  It’s a good plan.

  ‘Hey, I’m going home,’ I say. Actually, I shout. Thumpy music and all.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, I’m going home.’

  ‘Wait, I can’t hear you.’

  I lean up to the Cub. ‘I’m off. Nothing personal, long day. I’m going home.’

  ‘Okay. Sure.’

  It’s probably best I don’t go home with the Cub tonight. Given I’ve had sex with Radar that day and with Big Chef that morning, having sex with the Cub would make it three guys in one day and five guys in one week. A friend of a friend called Crowder and Mr Mercedes being the other two. Yes, it’s a lot. It’s a record, even for me. I don’t know what I feel about that. Pride in my time-management abilities? I don’t feel shame but I don’t feel elation.

  I fucked three guys in one week, a fortnight ago, when I got back from Canberra.

  The Cub had been one of them.

  ‘Have you been sleeping?’ he’d said. I’d invited him to Albert Street for a Saturday-night dinner and he’d arrived late, apologetic and then was confused by what I was wearing. I looked ready for bed, having met him at the door wrapped up in a blanket and a linty jumper.

  ‘No, I was trying to be sexy,’ I said. ‘But you came too late and I got cold.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It’s okay.’

  I had been wearing a bra and a G-string, nothing else, planning to answer the door in some sexpot fashion. Even though I hinted at what was under the blanket, he didn’t unfurl me from my cocoon and tear off my hoodie. He asked politely about the food I’d prepared, thinking I’d made dinner already and that it was getting cold.

  I’d made pork mince crêpes, like Mum would make but not as perfectly formed – hers were rolled into perfectly sealed cylinders, mine were more like bloated blobs. I’d made my own sweet chilli sauce, too, and at least that was on par. The Cub and I ate the crêpes, wrapping them in cos lettuce leaves and drizzling them with the sauce. Our mouths reeked of crushed garlic.

  ‘I was thinking about what you said the other night,’ he said. ‘About Aussie men.’

  We’d met up in a pub; I’d seen a show at the Malthouse, he’d been at his pattern-making course with his Esco Bar friend. I’d said that Australian men, even the ones with fashion-making aspirations, lack passion when they have sex. I’d had a few beers and I was drawing openly on my many experiences. The Cub had refuted what I was saying, the lone defender of his brethren, but I’d overtaken the conversation and it was then a monologue, a lecture.

  That night, as he ate, he reflected and said, ‘I think you’re right.’

  ‘I thought you disagreed.’

  ‘No, I’ve been thinking about it.’

  I pointed out, ‘You lack a passion, Cub.’

  He swallowed. ‘I know. Right now I do. I’m like a robot right now.’

  The Cub explained to me with encyclopaedic detail about male and female marijuana plants and how to grow the female ones and how to cultivate them hydroponically and that we smoke the fat buds from the females, if the growing conditions have been manipulated dextrously. When he became interested in a topic he liked to find out as much as he could.

  ‘You’ve grown plants before, Cub?’

  ‘Yep. Ah, up in Brisvegas.’

  ‘The pot must have grown well in the sunshine.’

  ‘They were out of control. I had too much. Like those Tupperware containers for cereal? I had one of those filled up with buds. I was just giving it all away, eventually. I was working on the IT helpdesk at Bond Uni, I’d give packages to cute women.’

  We smoked joints outside, in my backyard. There was enough pot for another joint so we smoked that too. My eyelids grew heavy. My body got colder. I was now wearing a jacket over the hooded, linty jumper over the black underwear.

  ‘I’ve already fucked two guys this week,’ I said.

  I’d previously stopped myself from telling him the details of my escapades but I fan
cied it to be noteworthy, and I felt relaxed. It was probably the pot, the previous rant. He paused, ruminating. I was a cougar who went to wine bars, and I knew how to move.

  ‘You’re the most interesting person I know,’ he said. ‘I’ve been wanting to tell you that.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I can’t talk to other girls the way I can with you.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I really value your friendship. It’s been good to hang out with you.’

  And thank you.

  Now it was starting to feel like a goodbye speech.

  We went inside. I had Children of Men on my bookshelf, having borrowed it off a friend when I was borrowing eighties movies from him such as Flashdance and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and St Elmo’s Fire. I’d heard a lot of good things about Children of Men and film geeks like my friend were rating it as one of the best films of all time.

  I’d watched it in my living room recently, with Husband.

  ‘This is really bad.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It just keeps getting worse.’

  Children of Men is a sci-fi thriller film set in a dystopic near-future where for an unexplained reason women are no longer having children, so the entire human race is going to become extinct. An excellent premise. Yet the film was bad, so bad that I almost thought I’d mistakenly borrowed some other film called Children of Men and not the well-lauded one.

  We watched it to the end and then Husband and I had turned to each other, quiet, as if we were hovering graveside over some small death. How could Clive Owen be so bad? And Julianne Moore? Julianne Moore. The Boogie Nights woman. The Magnolia woman.

  I relayed my disappointments about the film to the Cub. He widened his pot-reddened eyes and exclaimed that Children of Men was one of his all-time favourite films.

  ‘Really?’ I said.

  ‘Yes!’

  I paused and regarded him warily. Despite the pot, I now felt very alert, as if I suddenly needed to keep my eye on him. He wanted to know what I didn’t like about the film.

  ‘Everything,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  He regarded me warily too. It was as if I’d told him I killed babies and I fried them and served them in crêpes. Here he was, telling me he valued my friendship only to find out that I didn’t like Children of Men. And here I was feeling wistful about our imminent goodbye, only to find out that he loved Children of Men, the worst film I’d seen this year.