When Mum first moved away, I used to worry that I would forget about her. But I needn’t have worried because I’m always reminded of her by the smallest things. She worked in a laundromat, so when I see backpackers walking down the street with those striped laundry bags I remember her. I hear Rufus Wainwright songs on the radio and think of her playing his songs in the car. I drink a coffee with too much sugar in it and remember how she liked it like that.
‘She’s coming back earlier than she said,’ I say.
‘Yeah, she changed her flight.’
‘It’ll be different with her back, but it’ll be alright.’
I believe that as I say it. I know Mandy and I aren’t like other teenage couples, and I don’t care if it’s us against the world, I know we can get through it. We’ve already been through some heavy stuff. We can get through this.
One morning I wake up and notice that Mandy’s written a message on my graffiti wall without me realising. In a sleepy daze, I don’t recognise the words and find myself kind of admiring them for a moment before I realise they’re from one of my songs.
That night we arrange to meet in the lane behind the secret swimming pool. When we get there we find a cover over the pool, locks on the gate and a FOR SALE sign round the front. We don’t say anything, just take it in for a moment, then walk away, hand in hand.
The swimming pool was a once-only deal. It feels right somehow.
Mandy
Thora texts to say that she wants to meet me in a café on King Street before she goes to see a movie with a couple of friends I don’t know. My heart sinks when I see which café it is, not because I don’t like it, but because I actually love it and would like to keep it a secret. It’s a really cool little place where they don’t kick you out if you sit on their comfortable old couches and read all day after ordering a single pot of tea, and they never death-stare you if you’re too poor to tip.
I get there early and sit on a red leather couch looking through design magazines and waiting for Thora to rock up. I give her a call. Nothing.
I watch the students and lonely goths walk down the street and notice that someone has changed the Egan St sign to read: VEgan St. Don’t ever change, Newtown.
I order a skinny sugared-up latte and one of those round Italian chocolate-dipped jam biscuits, then a pot of pomegranate tea. I finish up and have just decided to bail when she finally shows.
‘Big news,’ she says, sitting down on the couch I’ve just vacated.
‘On why you were late?’
‘Hmm, no. What? Nah, the thing is, Mandy, I just inherited a shitload of money. Some random aunt, I don’t remember her much. I think she was a bit weird or something. She didn’t have a husband or any kids. Anyway, she carked it and I’m getting twelve grand off her, so I just booked my ticket to London and my Contiki tour.’
London, Paris, Berlin, Rome — the names wash over me as she reels them off. All I can think is that I hope each one of those cities has a fake Irish bar and plenty of McDonald’s outlets because Thora is going to be really bored and hungry if they don’t.
I start telling her about how I’m thinking of signing up for the uni course but then she has to go. After that, it’s just about time for work so I get the bus and I listen to Sleater-Kinney on my headphones to drown out everyone else’s obnoxious conversations. I don’t know how I ever got by without this sexy little music player.
It’s the mid-afternoon shift at work, a bit of a dead time. It seems even more inane than usual. I keep thinking about Thora’s aunt, wondering if anyone cared for her, whether anyone would really remember her. Life is short, I think. Too short for terrible jobs like this.
When my shift ends, I start filling baguettes with salad and meats, stuffing it all in frantically, like a crazy person. Neesha mumbles at me, expressing some vague disapproval. Melinda sees me and I can feel her giving me the evil eye.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she says.
‘I’m going to give them to that homeless guy out the back.’
‘Like hell you are.’
‘Why not?’
‘Head office have issued guidelines telling us it’s not on.’
‘So what?’
‘Well, they’re head office.’
‘Hmm,’ I say.
‘Well, if you’re going to have this attitude, I don’t want you as part of our team,’ she says.
‘I don’t give a shit.’ Now my heart is racing.
She snatches at the sandwiches I’ve made and the top one falls from the bag and lands on the ground.
‘So stupid,’ she says, folding her arms across her chest. ‘You’re never going to get anywhere in this industry with your attitude.’
I want to laugh. I really do. I just shrug.
‘Well, you can turn in your uniform, then,’ she says.
I take my lame, sweat-stained work hat out of my bag and hand it over. She points at my name-tag badge and I give her that as well. I feel bad for a second as she takes it. I never had a badge with my name on it before. When I was a kid, I thought all the retail workers were so important because they always had name tags on. It seemed so grown-up.
‘And the T-shirt and trousers,’ she says.
‘What? I bought these trousers. You said you were going to get some for me but you never did.’
‘Well, then, the T-shirt.’
‘But I haven’t got any other T-shirt with me. I’m not standing around the shopping mall in just my bra.’
‘No, no, you’re quite right, we can’t be having that. You’ll have to come back later and return the shirt. Well, that’s it, then.’
Neesha looks at me, disgusted. Melinda just stares. Not really an emotional goodbye.
I walk outside and the sky’s all silver and grey and washed-out looking. A few empty shopping trolleys rattle about in the breeze in the car park. I walk over to the dumpsters but the homeless man isn’t there. I leave the sandwiches with his rolled-up mattress. I wonder where he’s gone. I’d like to think that he’s with his cat.
It’s not until I get on the bus home that I realise I’m shaking. From what? Nerves? Delayed shock? Excitement? The realisation that I have the capacity for moments of melodramatic self-sabotage? The knowledge that I will soon be officially unemployed and broke?
Whatever. I’m going to ring Tim and tell him.
I take a few deep breaths and start to smile.
Tim
One of the things the counsellor told me to do was to keep a mood diary and start each day’s entry with Today I feel … I stopped doing it after a couple of days because, well, I didn’t feel like doing it. I didn’t feel bad about stopping because he said that you just have to try a whole bunch of different techniques and see which one of them makes sense to you and helps you deal with whatever you need to deal with. I quickly applied the same logic to the counsellor himself and decided that he wasn’t going to help me deal with anything and stopped going.
Anyway, if I want to express myself, I just find myself picking up my guitar or putting some lyrics together, not filling out some lame mood book from a hack with a comb-over and a leather couch.
There’s trouble in the past, and I know there’s going to be trouble ahead. I guess one day I’ll have to read that letter from Dad, or at least face him again. Mum will be back in my life. There’ll be more gigs where dickheads in the crowd want a piece of me and I’ll have to do what every musician has to do when they’re in that situation — just shut it out and keep playing. Don’t let the bad guys win.
One day, someday soon, school will come to an end and I’ll have to face the adult world. There’ll be a new number on a piece of paper to define my efforts this past year. I might actually look at the number on the piece of paper from last year to remind myself just how bad it got.
I’m not a religious person at all, but I’ve always liked the way old churches feel. After everything fell apart last year, I went to this forgotten old church down near the rusted ship
ping containers of the Fish Market and I just sat in there, thinking, for a couple of hours. I liked how dark and cool it was, and how the sunlight shone through the stained-glass windows so you could see the particles of dust suspended in the air. Eventually someone came to close up and told me I had to get out, but it was good while it lasted.
I go back to the church today and find it empty. I sit in a wooden seat at the front and look up at the stained glass, not understanding the scene it depicts: a face in pain looking to the heavens. I try to look past the picture to the light coming in. I try to think of nothing at all, to forget everything, to feel as calm as I can.
I lose track of time, and when I regain my thoughts and step outside, the light has changed completely. As I walk home, I feel like things are starting to pick up.
Today I feel … hopeful.
Mandy
Seb organises a working party to sort through all of the stuff about Tim’s music and figure out which of it we can use for a website he’s making. Tim has kept some flyers and demo tapes and other paraphernalia in a shoebox under his bed, and Seb is looking for stuff online. There’s not really enough stuff to justify four people working on it, but I get the impression that Seb likes calling meetings and being in charge of things.
On the top of my pile is a copy of Honi Soit, the University of Sydney paper, from earlier this year. I start flicking through it and see a picture of Tony Abbott’s face in the centrefold, with a caption underneath that says: PIN THE TAIL ON THE DICKHEAD.
There’s a haiku poem on one page, in the corner beneath a story on how the university shouldn’t make everyone designate as either male or female. It’s titled ‘50 Cent’:
Mr Fifty Cent
Your grammar is atrocious
And where is your shirt?
‘That’s one of Justin’s poems!’ Alice says. ‘Wow, I didn’t know it was in the paper.’
‘Who’s Justin?’ Seb asks, resentfully.
‘He’s a boy in my Russian history class. Mandy, you’ve met him, he was at the sleep-out in the quad. He was wearing the lion T-shirt, remember? He gave me a copy of a zine he’d made in class. It had dozens of these little poems, haikus about celebrities.’
‘Oooh!’ Seb says.
‘I thought his zine was pretty swell, actually,’ Alice says. ‘It was really funny.’
‘Have you seen him much lately?’ I ask her.
‘A bit. We have lectures together, but, you know, we have separate groups of friends. He always waves to me.’
‘He sounds like a soft cock,’ Seb says.
‘You don’t even know him,’ Tim says.
Seb squints at the poem dismissively. ‘What a load of crap! It doesn’t even rhyme.’
‘Alice was in the paper once,’ I say. ‘You know that style section where they take photographs of well-dressed people in the street? They said her style was “fairytale glam”.’
‘Oh, that was so embarrassing!’ She goes back to looking earnestly at her pile of clippings.
‘I always try to get into that style thing, but you’ve got to be pretty hot to make it in, I think,’ Seb says, thoughtfully stroking a tuft of hair he’s started growing just beneath his lower lip.
I locate Tim’s appearance in the student paper. It’s part of a review of the band competition he managed to enter, despite not actually being a student there. I read it out to the others:
Next up was Tim Carter, who came out on stage and soon had everyone eating out of his hand with some heartfelt tunes and Jeff-Buckley-style vocalising. This isn’t music for people who like watching mainstream crap like The Voice. He oozed sex appeal and won everyone over with his sensitive brand of songwriting. For all intensive purposes he showed that he’s one of the ones to watch in the local music scene!
It’s hard not to laugh at the phrase ‘oozed sex appeal’ or the general crapness of the review and nobody quite manages it.
‘What are you even doing on the laptop?’ Tim asks Seb. ‘Everyone else is doing something useful.’
‘I’m trying to find your YouTube videos so we can put them all together into a channel that links with your social media. You’ve put stuff up in the dumbest way possible. It’s like every time you upload something, it’s under a different account.’
‘But I keep forgetting my password.’
‘Well, reset it, you dope.’
‘How do you do that?’
Seb groans and turns back to his laptop, shaking his head in dismay. ‘Hey, check this out,’ he says. ‘Someone’s put up a video of that song you did at the school talent night.’
He spins the screen around for everyone to see. It’s a shaky video filmed on a phone from the back of the school hall and shows Tim on stage, looking tiny and alone against a black curtain.
Tim reaches out to stop the video from playing, but Seb moves across to block him and he doesn’t resist. It’s not the clearest recording, but we can all make out the lyrics and within a couple of lines we all know what the song is about, or more accurately, who the song is about.
When it gets to the last verse, there’s a lyric that’s repeated a couple of times without any guitar, totally a capella, just words coming out of the blackness: I can’t promise you I’ll be perfect, but I promise you that I’ll try.
When the song ends, you can hear the people in the hall losing it, but we all just sit there in silence for a moment. I don’t know what to say.
‘That’s a really beautiful song,’ Alice says. ‘It’s my favourite song that you’ve done. It’s so great.’
Tim nods, seeming to wonder if he can dare to look at me. I wish I’d been there for that moment and I just feel grateful that somebody filmed it and we stumbled across it. It feels like a second chance and I’m humbled.
Out of nowhere, Seb wheezes loudly, improbably choked up with tears and snot.
‘Seb! Are you OK, buddy?’ Tim asks.
‘I’m fine! But that was definitely the gayest song I ever heard.’
Tim
Over the next weeks, I get into new habits. The trial exams are starting up and I manage to get just about all my school work done, going over to Mandy’s house every afternoon that I’m not at the newsagency and working there until it’s time to go home for a late dinner with Ned. We listen to Motown records and dog races on the radio and eat cheap pizza and the greens we’ve started growing out the back. It’s pretty sweet.
Spirit has to retire when Ned’s mate, who was training him on commission as a bit of a favour, decides that he has to charge a training fee upfront. It’s just too expensive, and Ned says they’re going to rip down the track in a couple of years anyway and turn it into apartments for yuppies. After Spirit’s last race, he stands stunned in the dust and gravel, panting and shaking slightly as he wriggles into his fleecy coat. He finished seventh out of eight dogs in his last run, still no closer to an elusive win.
Mandy keeps me on track pretty well. When I’m sitting on her bed with my school work and watching her type job applications on her computer or reading a Jonathan Coe book at her desk and playing with a dark curl of her hair, I sometimes feel this choking lust and want to throw my books off the bed and undo the buttons of the Paddington coat I got her for her birthday. But she tells me to wait until after I’ve finished my work. Well, mostly she does.
Gradually, her mess of a room becomes neater, the clothes on the clothes horse refined from a massive heap to a few key outfits. The towering piles of books begin to shrink, and stuff she’s never going to read gets moved downstairs. Old toys get moved out of the cupboards and into storage. A dozen containers of lip gloss assemble from the far-flung corners of her room into a neat line on her dresser.
We have a list next to her calendar with my exams on it. They start getting crossed off. We celebrate each finished subject by ceremonially shredding my notes in her sister’s paper shredder, then throwing the shreds in a fire. An intimidating mountain of work is getting smaller, more manageable. The end is in sight.
One Saturday morning she has a stall at Glebe markets. I buy breakfast waffles from a neighbouring stall and do coffee runs to the Wedge and help out with a bit of salesmanship, and in the end she makes a couple of hundred dollars selling old clothes and things she doesn’t need. She counts her notes as we sit in a café out the back of a Glebe Point Road bookstore and watch a posh-looking grey cat wander in and settle under our table. Our brief spell as market stallholders has been a success.
Mandy
‘What are you doing after school ends? Are you going to work more at the newsagency?’ I ask.
‘Yeah, I’ll still work there. I can probably get some time off, though. Matt was saying the other day I can help him out with his studio, so I’ll probably take him up on that.’
‘Going to schoolies?’
‘Nah, not again. Once was more than enough.’
‘Do you want to come away with me, then?’
‘Yeah. Where are we going?’
‘I don’t know yet.’
‘Is it a secret?’
‘Let’s just say the best place we can afford. I need to get another job or it might be a very short holiday.’
‘Yeah, I hear that.’
‘But I figure we could both use a holiday before we start university.’
‘Whoa. Does this mean you’ve signed up?’
‘It does. From next March, I’ll officially be a University of Sydney student.’
‘That’s awesome! What are you going to do, exactly?’
‘Liberal Studies.’
‘Oh yeah, I looked at that but I couldn’t really work out what it was.’
‘I’m not really sure what it is either,’ I say, ‘but I looked at the list of subjects you can choose from and there’s a lot of interesting stuff. So it seems like a good course for me to start when I have no idea what I want to do. But I’m really glad I got in. It actually feels like ages away now. I wish I could start a bit sooner, if anything.’
You’re the Kind of Girl I Write Songs About Page 19