Losing It

by Moira Burke

  Everything’s orange shining yellow in the black sky black road and traffic lights change street lights bright kind of whitish bright in the dark and everything’s electric. You all get out of the car you’ve got your button-through mini on, black tights and high heels but not too high and Linda reckons you could even pass for nineteen or twenty. You and her and Debbie all got ready together tonight at Debbie’s place Debbie’s really good with make-up her mum works at the chemist. Hasan’s driving he’s got a metallic green Statesman and Rocka and Sylvio and George the Russian who’s really good with nunchakus are all going too. You had to keep your head low, it was fun in the back with everybody and you know Debbie was wishing she was in the back too because she kept looking around but she’s rapt in Hasan that’s why she jumped in the front seat, her tag was sticking out the back of her dress but you didn’t tell her. You’re standing out the front of Kingston Rock and everybody looks older than you you’re worried that you won’t get in even though you know your false birthdate off by heart but the bouncers don’t say anything they just let you go straight in. The ceiling’s really high it’s all dark you should have worn more make-up. Rocka buys drinks you’re a little bit away from the others and Hasan’s there he says hold out your hand. You say no and he says hold out your hand. He’s smiling so you hold out your hand and he drops in two blue and red caps and says swallow these, don’t tell anyone so you do and you don’t. You’re drinking Scotch and Coke that tastes like burnt rubber until you drink doubles and that tastes worse but it’s better and Hasan says I’ll be back in a minute wait here. Debbie Harry is on the video screen you could look like her if you peroxided your hair. You go to tell Linda, her chair’s empty you better go and find her. The mirror ball’s turning slowly there’s the smell of dirty socks you don’t know if it’s you or the carpet and all the sounds are happening at once. You can’t find anyone there’s a whole crowd at the bar everybody’s all around you there’s a hand on your back it’s not Dave’s hand you’re not Dave you say drink a drink and laugh and you’re outside, skin snapping tight in the open cold air some skin soft skin his tongue and gappy teeth are shining where’s your jacket? it’s your sister’s shit where is it? better go inside better find Linda. Debbie’s there now inside she’s in the mirror you’re in the mirror big mirrors in the toilets sniffing rush everything flies by you’re laughing it stops and the table gets all wobbly underneath but the chair you sit on falls over where’s Hasan? Bojangles who said that? You run run on the road tram tracks and shining Bojangles Bojangles swishing in your ears and lights spangle you see his shape through the dark he’s got your arm kissing you into a corner. Then the car’s going really fast, pull over pull over, vomit’s sticking in your hair what did you have to do that for? You’ve lost your sister’s jacket she’s going to kill you shit she’s going to kill you where is everybody? You get caught in the seat-belt lay-back seats Hasan’s hot breath I’ll be careful and you do it and you tell him that you love Dave.

  Dave’s sister Donna rings you up and says you fucken rag why did you two-time my brother while he’s in prison? You say what? and she says you fucken drug addict you’re just a little slut and you can’t even get the words out to say it wasn’t like that even though you know it was and you feel really bad and you get a bit upset and your mum says are you all right love? what’s the matter? She holds you you’re sitting on her knee even though you’re too big. Dave dropped me you say and she’s holding you rocking you a bit and says don’t cry there’s plenty of fish in the sea so then you know she doesn’t understand and you get out of her hug and splash your face with cold water and go up to Linda’s place and tell her what Donna said. You can smoke at Linda’s place in her room because her mum lets her smoke at home but her dad doesn’t know and you stay at Linda’s place for ages. Linda reckons Donna’s a real bitch for saying that especially as it wasn’t your fault and are you going to send Dave back his ring? You say I don’t know looking at it on your left ring finger and you tell Linda that he asked you to wait for him. You said yes even though you knew that you weren’t going to but you didn’t know what you were going to do. You didn’t want to get engaged you decided ages ago that you weren’t going to get married but you didn’t tell any of that to Dave because you still wanted to go with him and if you said anything he might drop you. Now you’re dropped anyway and it doesn’t matter nothing matters and maybe you’ll go with Hasan at least he’s got a car but you don’t even like him that much not like you like Dave and Dave’s sister’s a fat bitch and why did he drop you it’s not fair and your mum thinks Dave’s been in Adelaide she doesn’t know he’s in prison, if your dad ever found out you’d really get it then and you had to lie, if your parents knew they would have made you stop seeing him even though you’ve only seen him twice since he’s been in Malmsbury anyway and everything’s stupid and you’re never going to let yourself get as fat as his sister Donna no way.

  You leave Linda’s, you walk home you walk everywhere walking is good for you it burns up all your calories you’re walking down the middle of the road all the trees are rustling. The wind’s all around you warm on your skin and everything feels big. The big wind the big sky the houses are hiding the road is long everything inside you is big and anything can happen on a night like tonight it’s full of anything. The wind’s on your skin in your hair you rush against it, it makes your blood go just go it’s all rushing and flapping around you and the sound of the trees is in you. The street lights are yellow everything is black and white and strange and grey it’s like you’re in a newspaper or an old movie and the light through the trees makes everything flicker and scratch and you look behind you just in case. When you get to your house your dad’s van’s in the garden and the loungeroom light’s still on which means your mum is probably still up too and you wish you didn’t live there. Everything’s still big inside you even when the flywire door bangs shut and you know you really are at home but when you’re lying on your bed with the street light coming in through the venetians onto your wall you can hear the trees blowing about in the wind, the rustling’s in you and if you blink your eyes really fast you can pretend it’s all a movie.

  chapter three

  ____________________

  YOU LIE still and flat your head is killing you, you always get really bad headaches at night your stomach aches the bed is prickling. You keep your eyes closed and concentrate on the colours in your mind all the little explosions and you try to leave your body and go into space. Sometimes you nearly do, you fly over the roofs looking at the square gardens the lines the street makes the creek wriggling through the paddocks at the back of all the houses but you never go anywhere that you don’t know, never go anywhere that you haven’t been before so you know that it’s just your imagination lifting you up and you can always feel your breathing, can always feel your skin holding you in so you know you haven’t really gone anywhere.

  You could be a painter. A famous painter you’d like that, you like painting and art you’re good at it. You used to get oil-painting kits for Christmas and your birthday when you were little and putting colours together lets your mind go and you don’t have to think about anything you’re just there in the colours in the lines in the shadows that you make. Or a photographer. That’s what you could be. You really liked doing photography as an elective that time, you’d never done anything like that before working in a small dark place and it was fantastic when the picture came up out of nowhere on the paper. It’d be good to be a photographer seeing how things look, seeing things in black and white. Sewing. You could do that. Sewing’s all right you could sew in a factory like your mum all those rows of industrial sewing machines and overlockers, high high ceilings electrical cords going everywhere and upwards and all that noise you’d have to shout even if you were standing close you wouldn’t like the noise that much but you could sew you suppose, you could do piecework at home like she does sometimes. But you really like art you’d like to do drawings and paintings as well
maybe you could be a graphic designer. You got a B for Building Graphics even though you wagged a few classes but not that many because Mr Weaver’s pretty tough you can’t get away with much but Graphics is okay. You have to use a ruler all the time which gives you the shits because you like to be able to move with a pencil but the drawings do look good when they’re finished and everything is neat and in place. You could be a fashion designer now that’d be good. You can sew, you like dressing up you like putting clothes together you like the way things can look good together and the way you feel dressed up and you always look at the fashion pages first thing after looking at your stars. You’re Sagittarius. That means you’re friendly and outgoing and you like horses. There’s horses in the paddock that you have to cross when you take the short cut to K-mart you always try to cross really quickly in case they stampede you but without running in case that scares them and starts them off. Helen works in K-mart and you walk up there sometimes on a Friday night to pick her up but not that often, Con usually meets her. You like Con he’s great he always talks to you and sometimes even asks you to come out with them and Helen doesn’t mind. You really like your sister Helen she really sticks up for you. She and Con make lots of money from K-mart. Con doesn’t work there he just goes up there and gets lots of records and goes through Helen’s cash register pretending he doesn’t know her and before he pays he pretends he’s forgotten something so he goes back and gets something little like a Mars Bar and Helen gives him the records that he hasn’t paid for then he takes them to school and sells them to the other kids. You could work at K-mart too it’d be good you’ll go up there in a couple of months and put your name on the list, it’d be great to have your own money you stopped doing cataloguing you’re too old for that now you’d rather sleep in but K-mart’s not a career, that’s just a part-time job you’d like to have a career. Your mum’s got one your dad hasn’t. He used to. He was a prison officer and he used to drive Armagard trucks as well. When he first came to Australia he worked on a farm outside Warrnambool he was seventeen. Then he worked around the shearing sheds in New South Wales and his good mate was Mr Schuhmann who’s Dutch but German as well and they were called the wogs even though they both spoke English. Mr Schuhmann lives in the next street now. Mrs Schuhmann and your mum met and made friends when you were in primary school and they had the novelty stall a couple of years running. Mrs Schuhmann used to come around and stay all night talking and smoking and drinking cups of tea and they would make raffia dolls and two-faced dolls and aprons and string bags and peg dolls and the kitchen would be full of material all over the place and kapok stuffing and raffia and smoke and laughing and they’d be up until way after you went to bed talking making things with the sewing machines going. In the morning sewn-on doll’s faces would be looking at you hanging up high and the kitchen table would be against the wall and stacks of purple and orange hessian bags and calico aprons would be in neat piles everywhere and you’d have to be careful eating your Rice Bubbles not to splash milk on anything.

  Your other big sister Rosie is going to be a chef, she’s really good at Home Economics and sometimes on the weekends she makes these special breakfasts eggs benedict or blueberry muffins. Sometimes she makes this special dinner arroz con pollo that she got the recipe for out of the Supercook series that your mum has been collecting for her one part every week from the newsagents. Arroz con pollo means chicken with saffron rice and peas in Spanish and you wish Rosie would always make it you’re sick of minced meat or corned beef you never eat dinner now which is good because you’ve lost a bit of weight you don’t have to use a coathanger to do up your size 8s you’re nearly a size 7. You don’t like cooking you don’t like Home Eco that much either. You can get away with anything in that class and you and Linda and Lisa usually end up having fights with the flour and stuff and one day you made your teacher cry even though you were only mucking around and she went up to the office and got Ericson and you all got in trouble especially you.

  You don’t know what you’re going to do for your career but you have to make up your mind because you have to fill in the form. You’re in the library it’s Careers Day today. You tell the librarian that you want to be a painter and she says that’s not a very good choice. You go and wait in line to talk to Miss Tobin who’s your Art teacher you have to wait for ages. When you get there you tell her that you want to be a painter but you can’t find it on the list. She looks at you in a soft kind of way like she always does that’s why you like her and you know that you can really talk to her. She says no it’s not on the list are you sure that’s what you want to do? and you say I don’t know. She says it’s not very practical and you go oh. She asks you if there’s anything else you like doing and you go Maths. She says anything else? You don’t know what to say you can feel yourself going all red and you just look at the form you have to fill in. Umm, I liked Electives you say. What did you do in Electives? you hear her ask. I had Miss McLean, we did photography you tell her and she says that being a photographer is a good job it might be hard to get into but it’s a good job and if you think you’d like that why don’t you put that down? So you do and for your second choice you put down dressmaker.

  When Maureen ran away from home it was really horrible, if anyone was supposed to run away it was you she’s younger than you. The cops were there your dad was at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and crying, your mum’s face was long and white and grey her eyes were wide and red and everything was awful, you didn’t know what to do you didn’t even know she was going to run away you thought she could tell you anything. The only other time the cops had been around to your place, apart from when your dad was hallucinating and thought there was a robber in the house at three o’clock in the morning when you were really little and you didn’t have the phone on and he went next door to use Mr and Mrs Buhagiar’s and your mum had to explain everything, was when Dave escaped from prison. You got in really big trouble even though you’d finished with Dave by then but you never told your parents he was in prison, it was six-thirty in the morning the cops were really loud asking for you waking up everyone, you got grounded until you could prove yourself not to be a liar you didn’t go anywhere for six months. But this is different. Maureen’s gone. She left a note saying SORRY MUM I LOVE YOU BUT I HAVE TO GO and not even her best friend Jenny knows where she is, not that she’d tell anyway, best friends don’t do that. You’re really upset you can’t say anything you cry and then you stop and then you cry again you don’t know why you keep crying but you do. Your dad went out in the van saying he was going to bring her back your mum went out in the Valiant not saying anything. Helen came over she left home as soon as she was old enough because she hates your dad she hasn’t spoken to him since that time he hit her in the street in front of her friends when she was thirteen. You and Helen have a fight, you hate it when she comes over, she always tells you what to do and she acts like she knows everything but she doesn’t, she doesn’t know anything. The next day you don’t go to school you go to Maureen’s best friend’s house with Rosie but nobody’s there. You go everywhere that you think of that she’d be, the pool the school the creek the city square the pinnie places looking quickly all around you all the time in case she’s behind you or across the road or in a shop, what if she’s got her hair dyed what if she’s dead. You look up at all the windows in the buildings without her face in them only sky reflections. You sit still in one place people walking past, you search the faces of everybody asking some of them if they’ve seen this girl showing them a photo of her that she got taken in a photo booth, a little black and white square of her head her freckles showing up darker than in life, she’s not smiling she looks really different nobody would be able to recognise her anyway. You know why she’s gone you know you won’t find her you know she’ll come home when she’s ready you wish you could have helped her, told her it was okay. At the same time you’re thinking she doesn’t know anything, wait until she’s the same age as you then she’ll know
how bad things really are you should have been the one to go.

  She’s gone for three days. Where did you go? you ask, you’re on her bed in her bedroom that she shares with Theresa the light blue walls her bright pink bedspread crumpled showing sheets showing blankets you play with the leather string on her wrist. Spencer Street, she stayed in a hotel it was awful she says. She’s got her flannelette nightie on her face looks like yours. She says Josie, something happened, and she fiddles with the sheets. You get very serious and old inside and you ask her what? she says I saw myself and she sniffs a bit. How? you say. She was sitting on a seat in the street, trams and the train station it was the middle of the day and suddenly she wasn’t there, she was somewhere else, she could see herself from a distance see all the people going past not seeing her, her sitting there in her jeans her windcheater her curly hair and eyeliner, saw herself sitting there by herself and it scared her she didn’t know who she was she had to come home. You try to hug her but it doesn’t really work you want to tell her sorry, sorry that you don’t know what to do sorry that you weren’t there for her sorry that she hurts but you can’t, so you don’t. She gets a serious talk from mum and one from dad, you can’t hear what he says you just get the sounds and the silences. You know what’s happening anyway. He’d be there in his dressing-gown saying why? if you’ve got problems you can talk to me, he’d start to get angry and louder he’d ramble a bit the venetians would be mirrored in his glasses he’d take them off and wipe his eyes his voice would crack and stop in the middle of a question his pisshead breath filling the air the heater would be on burning orange and Maureen would be sitting there looking down feeling really bad for making him like this for making him cry wanting to yell at him saying how much she hates him but not being able to because she’s too scared he might do something, he’s like this and it’s her fault and everything inside her would just stay there jumbled up, tangled and sticky like cobwebs.