Beautiful Mess

by Claire Christian

  ‘Did school call?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Why didn’t you call me?’ I ask.

  ‘Because I knew you’d tell me about it.’

  He’s right, I will. I’ll tell him about the stupid speech and my ranting. I’ll tell him about storming out and going to Lincoln’s. I obviously won’t tell him what Lincoln and I spent most of the afternoon doing, but he’ll get the idea. Dad and I have always been able to talk but before there’d always be parts of the story missing. We were on a need-to-know basis and to be honest, there was a lot of stuff that Dad didn’t need to know. Like I’d tell him I was going to a party but I wouldn’t tell him I would be drinking. I’d tell him I was going out with a guy, but I wouldn’t tell him I was going to stay at his place. Don’t ask, don’t tell—it worked for us. But since Kel died we really talk, like no-bullshit talk. I tell him what’s going on and he listens and he tells me what he thinks and very rarely does he get weird.

  After dinner, after we’ve sat at the bench talking about the day, he says, ‘What about Lincoln?’

  He reaches over for my plate. Looks at the spag bol he made and furrows his brow. I haven’t really eaten much, just kind of pushed it around the plate.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘What’s going on there?’

  ‘I dunno,’ I say and I don’t know. I don’t know why every time I see Lincoln now we hook up. I don’t know why we get stoned. I don’t know why, when we see each other, we pretend like nothing has happened and I don’t know why we never talk about Kel. I don’t know.

  ‘Just—’ Dad stops himself. ‘Just be careful.’

  ‘Yeah.’ I bite my lip and the usual wash of guilt floods my body.

  ‘You just need to think about the fact that things aren’t…’ He pauses and breathes in, searching for the right word. ‘Things aren’t typical right now. Lincoln is navigating some pretty big things and he might just… he’s not himself.’

  I rest my elbows on the bench and rub my temples with my knuckles, leaning into my hands.

  ‘That’s just it, though. That’s how I feel when I’m there.’ I look at Dad standing at the sink. ‘Myself.’

  He looks at me for a really long time. His lips move like he’s about to say something but he doesn’t, he just nods.

  ‘I hate it, Dad.’

  ‘I know.’

  When I was little I was never allowed to say I hated anything. My dad hates the word hate. So if I really didn’t like something I’d have to say that I immensely disliked it. ‘I hate broccoli,’ I’d say and Dad would go, ‘No, you don’t hate broccoli, you immensely dislike broccoli.’ Obviously, Mum and Dad had a confusing, messy, just-shit relationship, mainly cause she was a bitch. He hated her. Not so much anymore, he’s moved on, but he hated her then and he had reason to. He knows what real hate feels like: the rage, the intensity, the vile anger that blacks out everything good and real, eliminating your very sense of yourself. He had felt that. So, the way I felt about broccoli was very different to the way he felt about my mum. By setting that as the bar, the way my dad felt about my mum, I suppose I’ve never really hated anything.

  Until now. I hate what Kelly did. I hate that she left me on my own.

  I write poems.

  But there’s no way to say that without sounding like a dickhead. I’ve tried. I spend a considerable amount of time trying not to sound like a dickhead. That’s what my life is—trying to not sound like a dickhead and overcompensating for moments when I’m positive I do sound like a dickhead, like right now. I’m pretty sure I sound like a dickhead right now.

  I write slam poems.

  Saying this doesn’t work either, mostly because people don’t know what slam poetry is and when they ask I just end up rambling about the origin and evolution of spoken-word poetry around the world. In case you were curious, a surefire way to look like a dickhead is to be a lanky white kid babbling about the revitalisation of poetry in America in the late 1980s.

  This is why, instead, I choose to stay quiet in most public situations and why I choose to write rather than concern myself with real-life conversations, because it’s easier. You can fix your mistakes, even delete things entirely. You can make yourself sound smart or artistic or a whole array of other descriptive words. One of which is not ‘dickhead’.

  I wriggle the too-tight knot of my tie and stare at the back of the cubicle door. Try to catch my breath and calm myself down. I’ve worked myself into such a tizzy thinking about what questions they’re going to ask me that I’m about four laboured breaths away from being asphyxiated by my own oesophagus.

  I’d like to avoid that. I stare at the print ad on the back of the door and wiggle my toes. I don’t know why wiggling your toes is meant to help but that’s what the parental unit always tell me to do. So I do. I think it’s meant to make me focus on something other than the impending doom that looms like a shadow in my periphery. Don’t focus on the shadow, I repeat over and over again. Don’t focus on the shadow. Don’t focus on the shadow. Focus on wriggling your toes. Focus on the ad.

  Compartmentalise. Good.

  With my toes wriggling madly inside my tight brown leather lace-ups I stare at the ad, at the lady in the short black skirt and red high heels. She’s standing over some guy in a suit who’s sitting down on the floor with an expression of cartoon confusion on his face. The lady in the heels rests a broom on his chest and there is a caption in big swirly red lettering; Don’t get swept up with nerves. Be the man she wants you to be.

  It takes me a couple of minutes to work out that it’s advertising erectile dysfunction spray. But staring at her collarbones and the extremely perky boobs that poke studiedly above her strapless top confirms a couple of things for me. Enough things to make a list:

  THINGS I KNOW RIGHT NOW: A LIST

  1. I’m having a bit of a panic attack.

  2. I have a slight erection.

  3. I don’t need to call the number on the poster for men who suffer erectile dysfunction.

  4. I write poems.

  5. And, evidently, lists.

  I close my eyes and try to think of breathing, just breathing. I try not to think about how stupid all of this feels, how stupid I feel. All of this because of a stupid job interview. A stupid job interview at a stupid menswear store where I would’ve had to help men like the ones in the picture who probably do need erectile dysfunction spray. At least I don’t need the erectile dysfunction spray, silver linings, although I wish there was such a thing as just plain old dysfunction spray. That’d come in handy right about now.

  I feel my heart rate drop from the spheres of catastrophe and land somewhere in a realm closer to normal and I read the caption again.

  Don’t get swept up with nerves. Be the man she wants you to be.

  But that’s just it, attractive woman in your incredibly short skirt; you want me to be the kind of man who has erections and knows what to do with them. A guy with a nice haircut and some sort of muscle tone who isn’t intimidated by anyone or anything, especially not job interviews.

  I put the toilet lid down and sit. I’m not that guy. Not even a little bit. I’m the kind of seventeen-year-old guy who gets nervous most of the time, who uses words like ‘tizzy’ and who works himself into tizzies over dumb things like job interviews, or any situation for that matter, that require him to talk about himself. I’m the kind of guy who gets turned on by a cartoon of a beautiful woman but who’d rather hide in his bedroom alone than have sufficient interactions with beautiful women so that he could ever be turned on by them in real life. I’m the kind of guy who has panic attacks in toilets.

  I look at my watch.

  I’m the kind of guy who ends up being late to job interviews. The kind of guy who, because they’re late, they just won’t show up to job interviews but will tell their parents they did. The kind of guy who will tell his parents that the job interview was fine, who won’t tell his parents he missed the job interview altogether because of things l
ike panic attacks or erections or because he got stuck in a toilet cubicle thinking about what kind of guy he is.

  •

  ‘Which means that life is…’ Robbie, my therapist, asks and I shrug. I’ve been seeing Robbie since we moved here. He was the fourth therapist I saw. The other three were old, frustrating or patronising. He wasn’t. Robbie looks nothing like a ‘typical’ therapist; he’s a bit fat, has a beard and he’s clinging eagerly to a ponytail despite going bald. He wears jeans and T-shirts. He’s the reason I got into poetry. He is like no one I know.

  When I first met him he asked me a heap of quick questions like what my favourite movie and food and subject at school was. He asked if I had a girlfriend or a boyfriend, and I shook my head, embarrassed. But I liked that he didn’t assume anything about my sexuality, because I figured that would mean he wouldn’t assume anything else about me. All I’d ever experienced up to that point was people assuming things about me because of what I said, or wore, because my mums were gay, because of my scars. Robbie didn’t. He still doesn’t. He told me he wouldn’t be offended if I didn’t like him or if I didn’t come back, because some things just weren’t meant to be.

  ‘So, Gideon, this is where we get to know each other a bit,’ he’d chimed, resting his hands on his big belly. He stood up and got two cans of Coke out of the tiny fridge next to his desk and placed them on the coffee table between us. Tick two for Robbie. For the last few months my mums had been obsessed with my diet. No sugar. None. They even made our own toothpaste because Mum had read something about sugar in commercial toothpaste. Thankfully this phase didn’t last too long, but that can of Coke was like the first hit of smack for an incarcerated drug addict. The point is, the Coke was a gesture, and one that made Robbie cool in my slightly warped, sugarless thirteen-year-old brain. We spent the rest of that first session just talking about what celebrities we thought were hot. I told him that I wasn’t really attracted to any of the women in Friends and he told me I’d never understand. He made me laugh. Tick three for Robbie. He didn’t ask me once about antidepressants or self-harm or depression or hospitals or bullying or my feelings. Unless they were my feelings about The Simpsons versus South Park. South Park, obviously. Robbie picked The Simpsons and then scoffed about how he had T-shirts older than me.

  Four years later Robbie is still my therapist.

  ‘And that means life is…’ He smiles and asks again. I am so used to this conversation, but it doesn’t make it any easier to answer. I already told him about the toilet cubicle incident, which admittedly he’d laughed about before he told me that I’d dodged a bullet by failing to land a job in menswear.

  ‘Life is the same. But,’ I pause and Robbie raises his eyebrows, waiting, ‘I’m over it.’

  ‘Explain.’ A touch of alarm sounds in his voice.

  ‘Not life. No. Shit, Robbie. I’m just over everything being the same.’

  ‘Okay.’

  I take a deep breath, and stare at the old movie posters on the wall. ‘I’m bored,’ I finally say without thinking, and as soon as I say it it’s like I’ve shone one of those giant spotlights on my feelings. I’m bored. I’m so bored of everything, of being careful, of being nervous, of overthinking everything, of locking myself in toilets.

  ‘The worst quandary of them all, my friend,’ Robbie puts on a weird accent. ‘They say that death kills you, but death doesn’t kill you, boredom and indifference kill you.’ I look at him and he smiles. ‘Who said that?’ he asks.

  ‘Gandhi?’

  ‘Close. Iggy Pop.’

  ‘Who?’ I ask and he throws his pencil at me.

  ‘I want you to think about small risks, safe risks, things that are going to push you out of your comfort zone. Sometimes the smallest things are enough to spark a fire or set you on a whole new path or some other wanky metaphor, yeah?’

  ‘I need to get a job,’ I nod. Robbie is right. Robbie is always right.

  ‘What kind of job?’

  ‘Anything. I need cash.’

  ‘For illicit substances, booze and ladies of the night? I know all about you youth.’ Robbie chuckles at his own joke. ‘Well, let’s talk about your CV.’

  ‘Lanky, introverted, awkward poet with big hair and questionable fashion sense requires well-paying job to fund awkward, introverted activities,’ I say.

  ‘So, something in customer service then?’

  •

  ‘Gideon, you need to settle this argument.’ My mum, Mandy, is standing on a ladder in the lounge room holding the iPad up to her face. Her blonde bob swishes as she turns the screen around and my sister Annie pokes her tongue out at me. I drop my schoolbag and give her the finger with both hands dancing at her. Mum and Annie are laughing as Susan, my other mum, walks in behind me, copying the double-middle-finger dance. She wraps her arm around my shoulder. ‘It’s not an argument, it’s a conspiracy. Your sister and your mother are ganging up on me,’ she pauses, ‘as usual.’

  Cue raucous mockery from Annie and Mum about how she’s so hard done by and it’s not a conspiracy and she just has awful taste. The point of the issue is two large squares of wallpaper that have been stuck up above our redundant fireplace. ‘Which one, buddy boy?’ Mum points to both like a game show host as Susan takes the iPad and blows Annie a kiss on her way back to the couch. I go to stand by the ladder and ponder two strikingly similar swirling patterns: one is green with silver swirls and the other silver with green swirls.

  ‘I like the silver one,’ I say as Susan leaps off the couch and hugs me.

  ‘I knew my boy had good taste.’

  ‘Two against two,’ Mum smirks. ‘Let’s leave them both up and reconvene this meeting in a week.’ She steps down off the ladder and wraps her arm around my waist.

  The rest of the conversation with Annie lasts a couple more minutes as she shows us how gross and rainy it is outside her London window. Annie is two years older than me and she’s the smartest person I know. She got dux of the school and all of these scholarships to all these different universities which she politely declined to go work in a pub and travel around Europe. Annie is fiercely opinionated and political; she loves maths, paints big murals with pastels and funded her whole trip to Europe by joining one of her friends’ dad’s pyramid scheme when she was fifteen. Annie is super entrepreneurial and business savvy. When she was eight she ran this serious tuckshop mob ring at school, where she would buy lollies with her weekly pocket money and then bag them up and sell them for a profit next to the tuckshop. She made a mint. Pun intended. It would’ve kept going except one of the mums caught wind of what she was doing and the school shut it down. I miss her every single day.

  My family is a little abnormal in that we all genuinely like each other. Also, my parents are still noticeably very much in love, even though they’ve been together like forever. They celebrated their twenty-fifth anniversary last year so Annie and I threw them a big surprise party in the backyard; they both got really drunk and went skinny-dipping in the pool. So it was a massive success.

  I go up to my room, put my favourite record on the player and sit on the edge of the bed and I start to think about what small, safe risks might look like. Robbie and I talked about a few: handing out résumés to local shops, entering more poetry competitions, talking to new people. Maybe reconnecting some of the electronic devices I got rid of six weeks ago, all my game consoles, my laptop and my phone. Not that I really used my phone. You need to have friends to use a phone, and the only friends I have are Norma and Andy. I told myself I’d go twelve weeks without any device. Just to see. It was all sparked by a stupid comment on a photo, a photo at the sports carnival of four people in my grade hugging and smiling and me all tiny and pixelated walking across the oval in the background. Some guy had then commented with three words:

  Whose that kid?

  It wasn’t the comment itself, really, more the fact that it acted like some kind of skipped stone in a pond of really shit memories of how I used to feel and why we e
nded up moving. It dredged up memories of all the things that had happened. I don’t want to feel any of that again so I got rid of it all. Just to see. And life has stayed the same.

  Maybe being bored is a good thing. Because what that actually means is that things aren’t like they were. And that’s all I ever really want, for things to never be like they were.

  There’s a stabbing pain in my forehead. My eyelids open just a crack and a bad feeling washes over me. Part confusion, part dread, it’s a feeling I’ve become all too used to lately. It starts like a tsunami at the top of my skull, crashes through my insides and stops at my feet. It forces me to sit up and look around.

  I’m on an airbed in what looks like a home office. It’s the morning and it’s quiet, just the low roar of cars changing gears and birds.

  My heart skips double beats: I’m not alone. There’s a shirtless guy asleep on the airbed with his head underneath a pillow.

  I close my eyes. Think, Ava, think.

  My mouth is dry and it’s hard to swallow and I look down. I’m still wearing my dress from last night and a jacket, a guy’s jacket. Lincoln’s jacket. I lift up the pillow and the guy groans, moving his head to face me with his eyes crinkled shut, and it’s Lincoln.

  I breathe out loudly through my nose. Lincoln lifts his arm and uses the smallest amount of pressure to push me back down so I’m lying next to him.

  ‘Go to sleep, Ava.’

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘We’re sleeping,’ he mumbles. He still hasn’t opened his eyes.

  I lie as still as I can and bite my lip trying to remember what happened last night. Lincoln picked me up from the petrol station at the end of my street so my dad wouldn’t know. All week Dad had been trying to talk about grief-based choices and looking after myself. Each time I’d just tune out and nod. We went to Travis Deakin’s party and it was lame, so we left. Lincoln stole a bottle of Johnnie Walker from inside the house and we walked all the way over to MacGreggor Park, drinking and talking shit, sitting in the old graffitied egg thing that spins around, kissing, making out for ages. And then me deciding that I most definitely did not want to have sex in the spinning egg in the park, because Lincoln totally would have if I’d have wanted to.