by Michele Lee
‘It’s one of the most perfect, awesome films.’
I thought about it. ‘Okay. Do you want to know why I thought it was bad?’
‘Yes, please. Please.’
‘So, it’s a great premise but bad execution. I mean, to start with there’s the bad acting from good actors. The bad production design – it was like TV. And what was with the long camera shot at the end with dirt flecks left on the lens? Suddenly we’re in a gritty war documentary when it’d previously been a thriller. Oh, and the monologues that characters suddenly started giving, what was with that? People randomly having these poignant moments in the middle of a chase scene? And the gratuitous nudity of the pregnant black girl? Did she really have to take off her whole dress just to show Clive Owen that she was pregnant? And why wasn’t she wearing underwear? And that transparently tender moment between Julianne Moore and Clive Owen that’s meant to create a bittersweet moment of joy before she’s brutally killed?’
The Cub was even more horrified.
‘Wait, wait,’ he said, gathering his response. ‘The premise is good, it’s awesome. And the film looks great. It really gave the sense of the world. I mean, that house where Clive Owen’s brother lives? That art that was floating in the sky? A giant inflatable pig, a reference to Pink Floyd and Roger Waters. Perfect. And the pregnant girl, she needed to show Clive Owen that she really was pregnant.’
‘By undressing?’
‘Yes.’
‘What was with the cows?’
‘She was in a barn!’
‘Why?’
‘Because it was dangerous for her. She had to hide.’
‘Okay, and what about that final shot?’
‘That was awesome. And it wasn’t a new device by that stage of the film. They’d used that style of shot earlier in the film, when they were leaving the farm.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘And Julianne Moore’s awful acting?’
‘She was great!’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘Michael Caine.’
‘What about him?’
‘That whole ‘Pull my finger’ thing he did when the bad guys came.’
‘He needed to distract them!’
‘By asking them to pull his finger?’
‘It was a joke of his. It referenced a joke of his.’
‘And it was pretty convenient that the bad guys knew where he lived. Wasn’t he hidden away?’
‘They knew the area! They’re rebels.’
‘And why didn’t the bad guys shoot Clive Owen when he was escaping with the black chick?’
‘Because she’s pregnant and they didn’t want to harm her.’
‘But there’s a moment where they have a clear shot of him and they won’t hit her.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
We paused.
I said, ‘I think we should watch it again.’
After fifty minutes I wasn’t convinced, and if I had to watch any more of the film I would start killing babies. The Cub was playfully glum. He could see the points I was making and that made him frown, but it didn’t change his mind. Children of Men was still in his top five list. We went to bed and had robotic, mostly stoned sex.
He sighed. ‘I can’t believe you don’t like Children of Men.’
‘I can’t believe you like it.’
I didn’t see the Cub again until now, at the Esco Bar, for that brief hello.
My old room, Parker’s new room. Yesterday she moved in and placed her queen-size bed in the centre of the back room, my old dungeon. On top of the in-built drawers she laid out china and other ornaments. In the front room, a clothes rack and the table from Don Bosco’s under the window, with a leather chair to the side. Where my desk used to be, she stacked two black polished chests on top of each other, obscuring the tangle of cords that spray from the wall where the phone and internet are connected. A rug dissects the room, like an opening night red carpet shooting up to the grandeur of the back room.
Parker, completely recovered from last night’s sisterly stand-off, says that I need to steer clear of clutter in my new room, wherever that will be when I get back next year. I agree. She’s pleased. My time in the house has not gone without me evolving in small increments beyond my kitschy tastes.
I wonder what the girls will miss about me. Perhaps the way I organise bills or the sweets I bake, obsessively at times. My entertaining single life. I’m like a TV show, well into my fifth season. I don’t think they’ll miss the soundtrack to my weekly escapades.
It’s really bad, my music. I know it’s bad. I warn people but at the same time I delight in their disgust. One last task for me: cleaning out this drawer of CDs. I’m throwing out the cases and putting the discs into a folder. CDs like Hottest 90s Music volumes 1 and 2. Snoop Dogg’s Welcome to Dogg World or Lil Kim’s Notorious K.I.M. The second Alanis Morissette album, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie.
New Kids on the Block Greatest Hits.
Britney Spears Greatest Hits.
And, ah, Backstreet Boys Greatest Hits.
I listened to this to prepare for the Unbreakable concert last year. The CD comprised hit singles from an era past when there used to be five Boys. For their new material, and the concert, there were only four. Kevin Richardson left in 2006. He wanted to start a family.
Fuzzy might be Albert Street’s Kevin Richardson. She tells me she’s seriously planning on leaving Albert Street and moving in with the Russki to start a life together.
Fuzzy and I are at the Green Refectory. Although there’s seating outside in the warm air at a counter attached to a wall that runs the width of the back of the building and more seating in a small courtyard, I prefer the crowded front room because of the view of the cake cabinet and of Sydney Road. The Green Refectory does big pots of tea, so you can linger over many cups of tea and visually feast on the salad selection and pies and sausage rolls. It’s homely food, things I like to make for myself and for friends using lots of chopping boards and a warm oven.
Fuzzy’s paying for our meal today. It’s her way of saying goodbye. She can’t make my farewell drinks this afternoon as she’s got something previously planned with the Russki.
‘Don’t tell anyone,’ Fuzzy says, about her plans to move in with the Russki. By ‘anyone’, she means Parker. It’s not that she wants to keep things from her sister, she just doesn’t want to start announcing that she’s moving out when it’s still in speculation. And, well, she does want to keep things from her sister. Parker has said similar things to me: ‘Don’t tell Fuzzy’. They may have just had a fight, or one was coming. I promise Fuzzy that I won’t say a thing. I only have a day left anyway.
We open the Domain section of The Age. Most twobedroom and one-bedroom flats in the city and the northern suburbs are at least $400 a week to rent. Fuzzy makes an outraged face and then lambasts the real estate market.
‘Can you believe this? Four hundred dollars. I don’t know how I’m going to afford it. The Russki hasn’t even graduated, so it’ll be my wage we live on.’
‘When will he graduate?’
‘December.’
‘And will he be able to get permanent residency?’
‘Not straight away. He’ll be on one of those crappy bridging visas. No one’s going to hire him. What am I going to do?’
‘You could stop buying things.’
‘But that’s not it.’
‘That you buy stuff?’
She says, very earnestly, ‘I don’t buy so many things anyway.’
‘Fuzzy.’
‘I’m serious.’
We used to pay $85 a week each at Albert Street. The halcyon days. She didn’t really want a boyfriend or her own house at the time. No one at Albert Street wanted those things. It was harmonious, like a Backstreet Boys chorus.
The Cub attends my going-away drinks. Friends join me too, sit beside me, eat my cookies (I’ve baked, of course), eat
the wedges I order, buy themselves a beer. Our corner in the Brunswick Green fills up and spills over, and then contracts as people go.
My ex-manager from the student union pushes her stroller in. Her baby lies inside it, eyeing the ceiling.
My friend who lent me the films comes too and I give him back his DVDs. I tell him that Children of Men was shit. He nods but doesn’t agree.
Four Track wanted to see me separately – he’s always hated participating in the small talk of a Michele Lee gathering, and we never integrated friendship circles so I’m just as much an outsider at a gathering of his. As I’d be in Bangkok by tomorrow night, he has grudgingly made an appearance today. He shakes his head at my new undercut: that seems to amuse him and make it worth his time for being here. I’ve bought a gift for his mum as it’ll be her birthday at the end of October, and I’m sure he’ll go back up to New South Wales to help celebrate.
Subaru, my teenage love, doesn’t make it. I saw him last Sunday at his apartment in South Yarra. We had dinner with a mutual friend from Calwell High School. I smoked pot for the first time with this friend, on the tennis courts, in a homemade bong with port for water. Which we then drank. We were fourteen. She’s working tonight and Subaru is back in Canberra for a buck’s night.
Husband comes with Parker. He says he had to pressure her to come, that he’d stopped by at Albert Street and on my behalf made the point that I was going away for four months so it might be good manners to attend. Sleek Surf didn’t make it, and after forty minutes Parker excuses herself to go have dinner with a friend.
‘Is that the Cub?’ Husband whispers into my ear. This is the first time Husband’s seen him. The Cub’s sitting, talking with Corset and her partner, people he knows, who know me from Theatre Land. The Cub has on his Saturday-night uniform, something warm, that same jacket he wore the night we ate crêpes.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘How did you know it was him?’
‘I can tell. He looks twenty-three.’
Husband is amused.
The Naturopath arrives, resplendent in her Nancy Drew pertness. Husband is glowing. He told me that he’d had sex one more time with Tuesday but he hadn’t enjoyed it, he’d felt like he was cheating. He really likes the Naturopath. She has a warm smile for me and it shoots out everywhere like sunshine. They stay for a little bit longer and then they leave for the night.
Polar Bear doesn’t have any dates, not tonight. I sling my legs over his lap.
Then he leaves, to be with real friends, and I get my legs back and it’s the Cub, me and Tambourine in an empty corner of the Brunswick Green. Me and Tambourine with our lopsided haircuts, part subversion, part irony. I’m hungry. We go next door to have pizza. The Cub doesn’t order any food because he’s trying to save money for Europe. Forever for Europe. He talks and makes us laugh, and we give him our leftovers anyway, which he eats up, forever grateful for a free meal. A sandwich on the beach, a meaty brunch in my kitchen.
After a nightcap, we get a taxi to his place and drop off Tambourine on the way in Fitzroy.
The Cub and I sit in the living room. I’m quiet, and he’s talking about this thing. Something about this thing, our thing. Us. What it was. This thing. It’s past tense.
I could say, ‘Cub, do you know that you have Shown Me One Meaning of Being Lonely. It was us at my house two weeks ago, officially our fifth date, and then us diverging on Children of Men and us making love like robots.’
He would pause. We would turn to each other, slowly, with the sombre pace of a sixteen frames per second film clip. His living room would drain of colour and, in black-and-white, he and I would sing Backstreet Boys ballads with poignant gazes.
But I say nothing.
I can’t even keep my poignant eyes open.
We have sex for one last time but it’s bad sex. He’s doing what he’s always done and I’m doing what I’ve always done and we both have the same snakes we’ve always had but given that this thing is past tense and ending, it’s bad sex. I just want to sleep, then get up to catch a plane to Bangkok. I still haven’t dropped off Tambourine’s drawers. We were at her house dropping her off in the taxi and I wished I could have killed two birds with one stone … I wish I could have stones and snakes and ladders. I wish I could have … I wish for lots of times that I killed the two birds, the drawers – I wish they could have fitted into my pocket and then slipped into hers so I could just sleep all morning and then have longer to finish up this thing with the Cub on a tender, sober note.
It’s hard. That’s what I’ll have to break to my fifteen-year-old-self. Getting a job, she shouldn’t worry about that. The government job’s permanent and it will be waiting for me when I get back. But muv and all related matters can be hard, even when you’re learning from them, chin up, rules up, rules down, legs open, legs shut.
Things are working out for Fuzzy and the Russki. Now I think about it, she’d made up her mind about him from the moment he returned with the flowers and the laptop. She might have to stop buying jersey harem pants from Zimmermann so that she can afford to pay their rent. She came out in the pants yesterday and said, ‘No, no. I don’t like them. I’m taking them back.’
Husband wants muv. He’s closer to forty now. When I first met him he was closer to thirty. Before we worked together at the Malthouse, he was in my play reading. He’d said yes to being involved and then no and then yes. He’d been recovering from depression, that bloody plague. I’ve never seen him like that at any other time since, so unsure and subdued. I hope it doesn’t stress him out when he moves out of his rental property and into his own place in Reservoir. He’ll be by himself to start with and might get someone to rent out the spare room to help pay the mortgage. He might get a girlfriend to move in. The Naturopath? It’s what he wanted with me when I was his girlfriend but I baulked at the idea of travelling with him, of calling him my boyfriend and so I called him ‘Husband’, something ludicrous, something he shouldn’t ever be. And certainly I hadn’t wanted him for my landlord. I got a bit socialist on him. We argued about it. Then, of course, we broke up anyway so it wasn’t a problem.
Husband’s not yet in Reservoir. I only have to go around the corner to see him, jog with him, eat dinner with him, watch movies with him or watch 2 Girls 1 Cup with him, which wasn’t as gross as we thought it’d be and much more riveting than Children of Men.
That was Monday night.
‘It’s just refried beans,’ he said. He was talking about the column of shit swirling out of the girl’s anus, not about the disappointing vegan meals we’d just had at the East on Lygon Street. Then we watched two Japanese women – one woman was naked on her back with her legs bucked up and parted, and another woman fed little fish into the naked woman’s anus, through a funnel. After she’d coaxed in a dozen or so fish, the receiving woman managed to spit every single fish out again into the funnel. Both women were quiet with concentration. It was not very erotic, almost as exciting as brushing teeth.
‘Japanese women don’t show a lot of emotion, even in porn,’ Husband observed. He sounded knowledgeable.
We watched a blonde woman with large breasts fuck herself with a frozen turd. That had us frowning. The clip was on an automatic loop so we watched it several times, frowning.
Then we clicked onto another clip but it showed a torso with a severed penis.
I didn’t like where that was going, from bizarre to brutal. I was reminded of the internet being full of fucked-up shit.
I return Tambourine’s drawers, throw my arms around her in a final hug and then run back to the Barina. And now I park in Husband’s driveway, about to switch from driver to passenger, and then from car to plane. My backpack and my suitcase are in the back seat. Husband said he would drive me to Tullamarine, and how fitting that this man, this friend and former lover, my colleague and peer, my Melbourne family, is the last person I’ll see.
‘Remember last time I drove you to the airport?’ he says.
I was about to fly away for five
weeks on that trip to Portland, San Francisco, New York, London and Beijing. He’d wanted to come inside the airport and see me disappear towards the check-in gate but he’d parked his Barina in a nostanding zone. Two security guards approached, standing shoulder to shoulder. Husband explained he was only going to step in briefly to glimpse his girlfriend going but they reiterated that they would tow his car because he was parked in a no-standing zone, which meant he should not be standing. My goodbye with Husband ended with him angry at their inflexibility and me flustered by the prospect of there being a scene.
‘I bitched about the Naturopath,’ I admit to Husband as we’re in the car, heading towards Coburg. We’ll turn left onto Bell Street. ‘Last night. After you guys left my drinks.’
Husband grins knowingly. ‘Oh, Michele,’ he says.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s okay.’
‘But I was drunk.’
‘I know. I could tell. You were slurring.’
‘I do think she’s nice. I guess I just think she’s not me.’
‘Of course she isn’t. There won’t ever be another Michele. But you had your chance.’
‘I know.’
‘I’ll never muv anyone else.’
‘And I’ll never muv anyone else. I do think she’s good for you.’
‘I think so too.’
I pause. ‘We need another word.’
‘For what?’
‘For this friendship we have. It’s not muv.’
He thinks. ‘Mub? Like brotherly love.’
I think. ‘Mub.’
‘We’re mubbers.’
He doesn’t come into the terminal this time. He takes a picture of me in the no-standing zone, gives me a hug and then drives off into the October springtime. I head inside the airport. After I check in at the British Airways counter, I find a bench and sit down. I have a little cry.