Mel stopped behind her chair and seemed uncertain about whether she ought to give me hug or not. I solved the problem for her by not getting up from my seat. Noticing my table number she pulled her wallet out and declared she’d be back in a minute after adding her own coffee to our table. Her absence allowed me a moment to breathe and pat down any frayed nerves that had sprung from my carefully woven curtain of normalcy.
Arriving back Mel sat down untidily, scraping the chair against the floor as she shoved herself closer to the table and cast me an expectant look.
‘So, how have you been?’ she asked.
I felt like laughing at her. Aside from the obvious irony of the question, it was just so sincere, so artless. Mel sat there with her chocolate coloured eyes staring right at me yet I still felt completely invisible. I was shrinking away. I thought that if anyone could see me and past this pathetic pretension I put on, it would be Mel. I suppose she was my last hope really, my last plea for help though I would never really call out to her. A heavy feeling began to sink into my stomach and I felt myself falling behind it, down the slick dark slope and I tried to grasp at the empty air, searching for something to hold onto. I had done this myself. I had never actually considered that in pretending to act normal I actually appeared it. I mean, wasn’t it obvious? That god-awful elastic smile, the enthused breathiness of my voice, my seemingly boundless energy? Was I really that good? Did people really not see or were they just pretending not to? Why wouldn’t you actually look at me!
‘I’m good. Uni’s been keeping me going at lightning pace and, I should tell you, Peter’s come home for the semester. He deferred his units at Sydney.’ I felt like smashing my head against the edge of the table as I replied. The waitress arrived with her plastic smile and our coffee. Mel had ordered a mocha; she could never drink straight coffee, whenever she tried her nose would wrinkle up and she’d pull her mouth to one side as her taste buds writhed in the bitterness. It was comforting to see that I still knew something about her. Of course my reply had done exactly what I had predicted it would. Mel was talking, stuttering really as her tongue lagged behind her brain in spewing out the words it formed. She was barraging me with questions about Peter. Why was he home? Was it permanent? Did he fail a unit? Did he miss home? Was he planning on going back next semester? I struggled to mentally check the questions into lists of ones which I knew the answer to, and those that I didn’t. Most of the questions fell into the latter category and it dawned on me that the question I had asked my mother weeks ago had remained unanswered. I still had no clue why Peter had come home. Mel didn’t seem to want details. Unlike me she seemed quite content with the explanation that I gave her; Peter had simply deferred his semester, his return home wasn’t expected to be permanent. Our conversation quickly turned away from Peter, and after Mel fielded my questions about her boyfriend, whose name I had remembered was Rhys, she asked me about uni. I told her about Doug and Abby, Glen and Kira, Bryce and Lev. Mel was a wonderful bitch, and I said that with the upmost affection. Mentioning Kira launched her on a prolonged barrage of judging opinions and impressions which actually made me feel sorry for the poor girl.
‘She’s actually not that bad. If you get past the cattiness and don’t take her seriously, she’s not that hard to get along with,’ I said in a pathetic tone, and Mel looked at me over the rim of her cup, fixing me with a look that made me self-conscious about the words I’d just spoken.
‘You can’t say anything bad about anyone so you don’t get an opinion,’ she stated, not looking at me but rather focusing her eyes on our plastic waitress. Mel’s compliment made me silent. She’d said it almost like it was a bad thing, that being nice to people made me naive and unhuman. Just because I didn’t say anything bad about people didn’t mean I wasn’t thinking it. You, more than anyone, are witness to that. Yet there’s a difference between thinking and speaking; only the spoken word offends.
Silence had uncomfortably slid itself between us now and I studied my saucer intently, floundering for something to say which would make it go away. The air had filled with unspoken questions, ones which our prolonged separation had excluded us from asking.
‘Have you spoken to Josie?’ Mel asked, and I heaved an internal sigh. We’d reached the point where we’d begun to ask each other the questions we already knew the answers too.
‘No I haven’t. How is she?’ I mumbled my reply. I didn’t want to talk about Josie. It made me feel guilty, that whole calculus of felicity thing, it applied to Josie too.
‘She’s good. I went to her place for dinner on the weekend. She’s thinking of going to uni but you know how she is, she’ll say something and then next week back out on the idea because she’s afraid of all the hard work she’ll have to do.’ I did know that about Josie, but I’d always regarded her hesitation as something that arose out of over-thinking rather than laziness. Josie was the type of person who abided by the whole “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it philosophy” and it had served her well so far. She worked as a receptionist at a dentist in Fremantle and she loved her job. It paid her well and she didn’t have to worry about assignments or exams. Her work began and ended at 9 and 5 every day, five days a week. I knew I was over simplifying it but I couldn’t help but feel slightly envious of her, it felt like she was cheating on the responsibility factor. I felt the sudden urge to prove I was interested in the lives of my friends and before I could rethink such a pathetic desire, the words bubbled out of my mouth like a gargling torrent.
‘I was thinking about texting her to meet up next week. I just need to get this assignment finished. Once I’ve done that then I’ve not really got much else to worry about, just a final report for my health unit and tests for abnormal psychology and human development.’
‘She’d like that,’ Mel enthused and she’d grown comfortable again, comfortable enough to ask her next question.
‘So, how about boys?’
How wonderful, Mel actually thought I was just like every other nineteen-year-old girl; obsessed with finding a boyfriend.
That idea had always baffled me. It was like girls considered boys an accessory, ones that trended and were merely a form of social currency, proving ones worth and value in our one-hour-rush world. I hated it. It felt so disgustingly cruel and profane to treat someone like that. To devalue their human integrity to the point where they were nothing more than a product. Forgive me and my traditional virtue but I was losing my mind, not my morality. I couldn’t understand why girls were willing to sacrifice their self-respect in order to prove themselves to people who didn’t really care about them because let’s be honest; very few people genuinely care about anyone other than themselves. People didn’t realise that the only person who genuinely mattered to themselves, was themselves. At the end of the day you were the only one who had to live with your actions, everyone else could forget. Were you happy with what you did? Did you stick by yourself and your morality? Because if you didn’t I can assure you there is nothing worse than being slowly eaten inside-out by guilt. I know you’re not going to listen to me on my soapbox. I know that because I wouldn’t were I in your position. If someone was telling me what to do with my life I would tell them to go screw themselves. I guess this is a lesson we can only learn from experience and mine came when I was sixteen, in the form of Ben Hayward.
Ben had been my boyfriend in high school. We’d dated officially for eight whole months, which by high-school standards was enough to make us as an “example”. I didn’t like Ben; I’d never had a crush on him so when he’d asked me out it was rather confusing. We’d never spoken a word to each other, hell at that point I didn’t even know his last name. One day he just walked up to my group and pulled me aside, asking me out in such a way it felt as though he’d spat the words onto my school jumper. I’d said yes out of partial shock and fear of hurting his feelings but gradually I actually came to like Ben, or rather the way he’d made me feel. Ben was part
of the sporty crowd at school, not the really popular group but still talented enough so that our relationship actually made our peers acknowledge my existence. At first we’d been like every other high school couple; seeing each other only at recess and lunch, maybe sneaking in a quick rendezvous at the lockers before we’d had to run for our buses home. Eventually though we’d began to see one another on weekends, leading to the point where we found ourselves dating for six months and suddenly the focus of a very pivotal concern: the loss of one’s virginity.
Ben had broached the subject countless times but he’d always respected me when I said I wasn’t ready. In all honesty I’d always thought that being sixteen still allowed the idea of sex to scare me a little. I learnt quite quickly that being sixteen, almost seventeen, now meant my virginity wasn’t something to be proud of, it had turned into something quite embarrassing to admit. The only excuse I have to offer for my actions is that I was just like every other girl and wanted desperately to belong. That’s how I found myself losing my virginity on Ben’s single bed on a Saturday afternoon while his parents weren’t at home. The whole episode was something I’d tried very hard to forget. My mother had never given me “the talk”, the only advice I had to go on was what Mel had told me and information gleaned from painful picture books handed out in primary school. I hadn’t realised how much it would hurt; it feels like someone shoving a burning poker up your vagina with such pressure you actually feel like you may pass out. I’d been unable to do much but lie there as Ben moved on top of me and try to stifle the gasps of pain that escaped my lips. It had hurt so much I’d cried and the tears rolled down my face like hot balls of molten lead but Ben didn’t notice and I was glad. I also didn’t realise how much I would bleed. I remember reading that after intercourse a woman should always go to the bathroom so I sat down on the toilet and felt a gush of warm liquid. Standing up the bowl looked like a murder scene and it took what felt like hours to clean myself up. Ben had worried so much he’d forced his way into the bathroom and seeing the bloody mess, freaked out. I left quite quickly after that. I was in no state to deal with Ben when I could barely maintain my own composure which evaporated as soon as I got home and sat down in the shower to cry. Needless to say my relationship with Ben didn’t last much longer after that. I slowly began to freeze him out and in a way he became the first person I ever pretended not to care about. It didn’t take long for Ben to become bored and about a month later he dragged me aside, spat six words out onto my school jumper again and I found myself dumped. Mel and Josie were the only people I had told about what happened, and their reactions were completely ordinary. Mel swore off having anything to do with Ben, and Josie, whose virginity still remained firmly intact, sweetly and uncomprehendingly reassured they were there for me. They blamed it all on Ben and I allowed them too, but in all honesty it wasn’t Ben that had left me feeling so completely lost. It was me, I’d done this all myself. I’d sacrificed a little piece of who I was and what I believed in, just for the sake of appearances.
I was no longer a virgin.
Great.
Who cared?
Nobody.
Except me.
I was the only person who had to deal with the fact I’d let other people dictate my life and in doing so I’d alienated myself. Lying to other people was one thing, but lying to yourself is something else entirely, and in my experience, something much, much worse.
‘Not really, to be honest I don’t have the time.’ I answered Mel’s question with a smile meant to add to my act of disinterest but Mel appeared to take it quite differently.
‘Oh my God! You’re dating Doug, aren’t you?’ Mel’s squeal drew the attention of half the people in the cafe and I self-consciously hushed her.
‘Shh, no! No!’ I was perhaps too eager in my denial and I felt a nag of impatience pull at the back of my brain as Mel cast me that “sure, whatever you say” look. It was strange that people always tended to put more stock in the honesty of body language rather than words. I found body language to be almost sloppy in its ambiguity whereas words were far more direct, direct but far easier to manipulate into untruthfulness. I suppose I favoured words or rather my manipulated words, because they were what I had built my little glass world on. My feelings had absolutely no place in that world; they were far too uncertain, volatile and fragile. Just one splinter and I was afraid the whole thing would come crashing down in a shower of tiny glittering shards. For a moment I’d be too awe-struck, watching my world fracture in such spectacular brilliance, but then I’d be confronted by the stark reality of what lay before me, or rather what didn’t. So you can understand why Mel’s question made no sense. It relied on feeling, specifically how I felt about Doug. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how I felt about Doug. Thinking about what he meant in my life had crossed my mind countless times. Doug was my best friend, the person who I told everything too, well not in a literal sense but out of everyone in my life he was the person who I disliked the least. I’d even go as far to say as I didn’t dislike Doug at all. His company had the rare effect of making me feel like myself again and dare I say it, even happy.
I stopped thinking right there. It was dangerous to go further and start imagining a happy future. I’d learnt it only led to bitter disappointment when I realised it hadn’t come true. So just like everyone else, I kept Doug at arm’s length not just because I cared about him too much to let anything hurt him, but because a small part of me was like every other girl and terrified of rejection. I was scared sick that one day Doug might realise just how completely empty I was inside and leave hating me, wondering how he could ever have been friends with a girl so utterly lost. I’d managed to mess myself up quite well in that regard because I couldn’t see a way out and Doug wouldn’t wait forever. The end would come soon enough and when it did it would be devastating. That’s why I wouldn’t allow myself to ever consider how I felt about him really. When the day came and Doug saw me for what I really was it would be so much easier to just keep repeating I didn’t care. There was a chance I might be able to pull off the impossible; pretend to the point where it actually became truth.
7
There’s a paradox around students we pretend not to notice. We live in a constant state of irony; wishing our lives away to escape assignment and exam deadlines whilst simultaneously chasing every tiny opportunity we are granted in fear of not getting another one. We live stuck somewhere between childhood and adulthood, whispering our little prayers into textbooks and fuzzy laptop screens until eventually accepting fate and performing our responsibilities. I’d been forced to do that on Wednesday night, the day after my coffee date with Mel when a drowning sensation made me realise that my paper was due at twelve on Thursday and aside from the few paragraphs I had written almost a week ago, I’d done absolutely nothing on it since. It’s amazing what you can do on a combined cocktail of adrenaline and caffeine. I managed to reach that golden word limit and printed it off without even reading it through. Once I would have spent the rest of the night perfecting my paper, spending hours adjudicating an internal debate as to whether it was a comma or semi-colon that went after a particular word but now I had a Blackhole that beckoned and I was far too tired to put up any good fight against it. I had considered not submitting assignments more times than I liked to admit but the pressure to appear happy got the better of me; assignment submission was what normal students did and the fact some of them cared as little as I did certainly made me feel almost normal. The all-nighter to complete my paper and early morning trip to uni to submit it meant I slept most of Thursday. The days were growing colder as April slipped away; I no longer found it uncomfortably hot in my room so sleep was rather comfortable and welcome. I woke just before five and ran into Peter on my way to the bathroom; he looked confused by my bedraggled appearance. He was wearing dark grey dress trousers and a crisp white shirt; he looked smart and reeked of aftershave. My face now took on a confused look of its own.
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‘Are you going somewhere?’ I asked, and his confused look deepened with an element of exasperation.
‘We both are. It’s Henry’s commitment mass; you’re supposed to be ready. We’re leaving in ten minutes.’
Jesus, I’d totally forgotten. Our mother now appeared in the hallway, buttoning up her blue blouse as she walked out of her bedroom. She glimpsed in our direction before looking at us again.
‘Why aren’t you ready?’ Her question was directed at me and to escape our mother’s wrath Peter slipped past me and into the bathroom, leaving me to face her alone. Despite having slept for close to nine hours I was very tired and that made my mood decidedly irritable.
‘Do I really have to go? I mean it’s just his commitment mass.’ Even I was surprised with my callous and shameless remark. I then saw how my mother was looking at me and it almost made me want to laugh. She looked completely and utterly deranged with fury. It was hard to think that my mother could ever be furious with anyone; she cared far too much about what people thought of her.
‘You absolute…’ She trailed off. I almost wanted to ask her to continue but I wasn’t that brave. Instead of continuing my mother snorted before shaking her hair out and fixed me with an icy glare that made the child in me shrink in fear.
‘Yes you have to go. We are all going just like we did for you when you made your Eucharist.’ I knew my mother was right. There was really no question, I would go to Henry’s commitment mass but there was a small sense of satisfaction in making my discontent known.
I loathed Church. It was so pointless, so lax, and so completely, infuriatingly hypocritical. I had never understood why anyone could take comfort knowing that all their misfortune was merely the will of some higher being. Did it somehow make it easier for them? Knowing that their misery wasn’t a consequence of their own failure, but rather because some creator had decided they were going to be miserable. People were always looking for someone to blame, unwilling to consider the fact that it was just their fault. I think Nietzsche may have said something about it, along the lines of: we create the God’s who in turn, create us and yet our lives are spent ignorant to the fact we therefore play a part in our own fate. I liked that, it was so impressively sentient you had to believe it; even if you disregarded the fact it made perfect sense. I suppose I also liked it because it made me feel better about my whole situation. I was pathetic in my unhappiness, but at least I didn’t pretend that I wasn’t to blame. I took responsibility for myself; I knew that I was the only person who could pull myself out of the Blackhole. I didn’t think there was some ever-present being out there holding my hand, promising that everything would be all right in the end. That didn’t happen. The solid wood pews were horribly uncomfortable and after a while the parts of my body where hard edges of bone rested began to ache. I resolved to sitting in a slouched position that made my stomach muscles teeter on the edge of a cramp, but at least my bones weren’t being rubbed raw. Our family had arrived late and our mother had decided that Peter and I could afford to sit right at the back of the Church, getting a little dig in about me “not wanting to come anyway”. I was seated between Peter and an elderly woman who clutched a set of rosary beads, appearing to wring them dry of all their good grace. I was a good head shorter than the rest of the congregation and thanks to my slumped position there was no chance I’d be able to see the priest. That wouldn’t really matter except I could barely hear him either; his words formed an almost incessant drone which fluctuated occasionally when words like “sin” and “God” came up. The combination of all these factors allowed me to effectively seal myself away; wedged amongst these people who pretended they were listening. I let myself slip into a lazy daydream, thinking that if God did exist, he was probably a bit of jerk if he enjoyed this level of pretentious worship. I smiled, waiting for the thunderbolt to strike me down to the seventh circle of hell, or wherever they kept blasphemes but nothing happened; nothing but the continuation of the priest’s drone, which was putting people to sleep. Another reason I hated Church was because it made me feel like a hypocrite. My mere presence felt sacrilege, that just being there somehow cheapened the sincerity of faith of those around me. I stole a glance at Peter. He was sitting like me but while my eyes probably appeared glazed, his were clear and observant. He was paying attention and on some level perhaps Peter needed this. Perhaps he needed to know that something out there made life worth living; whether it was hope or just blind belief it didn’t matter, all that mattered is that it kept him going. Peter’s enrapture towards the monotonous priest made me inquisitive. I became aware of the selfishness of my little reverie and intrusively began to wonder, for the fiftieth time, why my brother had returned home. It made no sense, at least not to me. He was the one figure in my little glass world that I didn’t know inside and out. If the Blackhole wasn’t there I think I’d be a bit more aggressive in my pursuit of the truth but my tiredness sedated my inquiry and I resolved myself to the completely innocuous belief that if Peter wanted to tell me, he would. I hated the thought of my little hypocritical soul somehow detracting from Peter’s faith and found myself suddenly becoming conscious about what I was thinking, worrying that a small cartoon thought bubble had appeared over the top of my head. The thought of my soul open for the world to see scared me stiff. It wasn’t that I was worried about what people might see, rather about what they wouldn’t. Not that I thought I didn’t have a soul, everyone has a soul. Rationally speaking it would be easier if I didn’t have a soul, then I wouldn’t be aware of my unhappiness. No, I was worried that people would see my soul was nothing; that it was just empty instead of filled with my dreams and aspirations. The way I saw it, my soul, the very thing that supposedly made me human, was empty. What did that make me then? A little hollow thing that belonged in my little glass world.
My Bed is a Blackhole Page 6