by Luna Blue
No freaking way do I have the energy to be nice to people today, I thought as I tried to smash the alarm with my fist. Not even Mike. Or especially Mike. I was exhausted after last night. Interacting with people was not something I had ever enjoyed, and although I had fun, hearing about Lee and feeling Mike’s pain was too much. Maybe I was an empath. The thought made me laugh out loud.
Snip glared at me and jumped off the bed, leaving an imprint of his little Jack Russell body on the Thai silk doona cover bought in a dusty op-shop in Melbourne. Hearing me laugh so early in the morning would have really unnerved the ageing dog.
I liked Wednesdays. There was no one else in the studio, so no need for tiresome pleasantries. I could take my time planning my show, Airwaves of Attitude, and put my feet up, so to speak. Using the office coffee machine, I swirled the milk into a perfect flat white. Opening the biscuit tin, I took three double chocolate coated Tim Tams and quickly stuffed them into my pocket. Just because I was a little chubby didn’t mean people were allowed to see why I was a little chubby.
I heard the studio door open and I could smell his arrogant aftershave before I could see him. The smell conquered the room, announcing his arrival into my treasured and well preserved space that was a Wednesday. I could hear George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone” in my mind. Too stereotypical, so I changed it to “You’re So Vain.” The Carly Simon version, not the modern one with that terrible male singer. I felt a little better. Actually, whilst we were at it, we could add modern music to my list of things I couldn’t abide. It was a detailed list: people, especially Mike; talking to people, especially Mike; and modern music. I was a complicated woman.
Carly Simon wasn’t making me feel very good so I went back to my trusted Frank Sinatra: my soul mate, my confidant, my secret mentor. He sang “Something Stupid” for me. Good old Frank, he knew me too well. Any moment I probably would spoil it all by saying something stupid.
“Hi Rosie, looking sharp today.” There was a smile in his gravelly yet perfectly even voice. I knew I wasn’t looking pretty, so I wasn’t sure what he was playing at. Was he teasing me? Being sarcastic? Today I had the joy of wearing my favourite yellow jeans. I loved them but I could tell by the way people looked at me when I wore them that my feelings were not reciprocated. They too had begun to take on a new form, snug around my belly. I had a muffin top and breathing was starting to feel like a luxury, not a basic human right. Green sandals and a mint green t-shirt topped off my “fuck you, world” outfit.
I didn’t turn from my computer. “Yeah, yeah, Mike. I’m not really in the mood.” I knew he would be looking sharp because he was a meticulous man, nothing was ever out of place. I couldn’t even keep my curly hair under control, let alone an entire ensemble, and even less likely, my life. Yet Mike had poise, and even his breathing seemed to be perfectly controlled and in sync with the rest of his body. It was a nice body too, but it drew into focus my own muffin top seeping over my awesome yellow jeans. Better to stay angry around this man so I didn’t get sucked into conversations, or feelings that could throw me and my entire world out of kilter. Yesterday had to be a one off. It had taken a long time to build my world and I wasn’t capable of changing it. I had tried for a brief moment yesterday over a beer, but it had left a sour taste in my mouth and an angry feeling in my bones.
“Oh, come now, little flower, how about opening a petal to me?” What an annoying thing to say. I saved the song list I had compiled and turned to face him. Even after our impromptu beer yesterday, after a good six months of Mike offering to buy me one, today his continual attempts to talk to me were frustrating. Still, he took my breath away. A tight black t-shirt barely contained his muscles. As I looked at them, my muffin top grew an inch. A diver’s watch banded around his thick wrist accentuated his strong arms, and his jeans were moulded perfectly around his thighs and stomach. What a show off, wearing clothes that actually fitted him.
I quickly turned away before he could sense any sort of unseemly desire in my eyes. I hated to admit it, but it was there, swamped in a general feeling of anger towards the world.
“Look, Mike, I had fun yesterday. But today, I’m not in the mood. I just told you that.” There it was; something stupid.
“Jeez, you’re difficult!” He sounded hurt.
“Go away, Mike, I’m busy.” I busied myself in revising the songs I had chosen for today’s show. Didn’t he know it was Wednesday? Usually he slips out the door after his show and I don’t see him. One beer and he thinks he can talk to me whenever he feels like it.
Lots of jazz and swing make up my show list, because those types of music give me the potential to slip into a good mood, as I almost was, just moments ago. How quickly it had disappeared. Even my flat white wasn’t improving the situation. I looked forward to dunking the Tim Tams into it and feeling the chocolate melt in my mouth.
For the moment, instead of enjoying the coffee and biscuits in peace, I was again discombobulated by a man who made me feel out of control when he was around. The selected songs were happy ones, but there were three Sex Pistols songs mixed in with the Glenn Miller band and Puppini Sisters, which was an odd choice. I took them out and replaced them with Ray Charles, Sammy Davis Jr., and Tony Bennett. Much better.
“Fine. But I would like to take you for another beer sometime. I knew there was a nice girl in there somewhere and yesterday I found her. I’d like to see her again.”
“You’d make an ex-drill sergeant very happy,” he added, shifting his weight. “I don’t know many people in town, and people need other people, Rosie.”
Drill sergeant. I doubted there was a sexier career in all the world. Every time I thought of him in his uniform, which was more often that I cared to admit, I saw him barking instructions to lesser men and my imagination ran wild. It turned me on, thinking about this powerful, dominant man in charge, but then I would come back to reality and I would remember what a pain he was.
Mike was basically the human version of the 90s song, “The Macarena,” which was possibly the most annoying song ever written, but secretly, when no one was looking, we all turned the volume up and danced. Then we went back to feeling shitty about ourselves because we had given in to something that wasn’t good music. It was just fluff, a quick money maker that had no substance or value beyond the three minutes you were secretly enjoying it.
He quietly closed the studio door and left.
After that my show was a complete disaster. “Thanks for tuning into Airwaves of Attitude, I’ll be back tomorrow.” I said after a calamitous four hours. “And in the meantime, don’t sweat the small stuff.” Turning the microphone off, I headed out the door before Kathy, the next host, could try to engage with me. Although I had established a fairly long time ago that people in general were a pain in my butt, Kathy was more of a pain than a lot of other people. She used to be the mayor and never recovered when she was not voted back in two years ago. Now she was as negative and bitter as I was and the world was not big enough for two people like us to inhabit the same small town. Plus, her hair looked like it was done on the set of a bad 80s sitcom and I think we were distantly related.
Walking the block back to my small fibro-clad house, I puffed the entire way. I’d walked this path for most of my life but had noticed recently the hill had grown. My small gait made the walk longer and the excess kilos I was starting to carry made the hill feel even bigger. I felt awful about the extra weight and I felt even more awful about my interaction with Mike. What was happening to me?
A long time ago, I had made peace with the fact that I wasn’t a very nice person. Mum told me once that I changed the day my younger sister came home from hospital. Kendell was two years younger than me and better at simply everything.
I remembered the first time she beat me at a running race—it was the beginning of her beating me at everything. My 10-year-old legs were racing cross the freshly mown lawn but they weren’t helping me and it was too hot to go any faster. I could see the trampoli
ne at the other end of the front paddock, Dad standing near it, doing whatever a farmer does on his day off. My younger sister was winning, for the first time she was going to beat me, she was going to get to the trampoline first. I knew it was not going to end well.
It must have been the lunch we had just eaten. The wholemeal sandwiches were slowing me down, it couldn’t be my useless stumpy legs that were covered in my favourite tie-dye hippy pants. They were getting caught around my thighs but I didn’t have time to stop and loosen them.
Kendell’s stupid hand touched the frame of the trampoline well before my stumps got me anywhere near it. She was victorious. And I was livid as I watched her literally jumping for joy on the black mat of the trampoline. She was going to pay for this, her summer was going to be over just as it was beginning. I checked to make sure Mum wasn’t watching us from the sunroom window. All clear. Dad had gone to the back paddock with the shovel in his hand, perhaps better that he removed the potential weapon from the scene.
Mid-jump, the gleam of Kendell’s bare legs under her ridiculous boy shorts threw my failure in my face and created rage in my stomach. It was a Norman Bates psychotic kind of rage, one that couldn’t be controlled. I grabbed Kendell’s stupid muscly legs and pulled.
She crashed onto the steel frame of my trampoline. Satisfaction replaced the rage but it was short-lived. Her screaming was louder than it was supposed to be and Dad was running towards us. I’d never seen Dad run before, it was unnerving. The look in his eyes was even more unnerving.
Once again Kendell was the centre of attention as Mum joined Dad in running towards us. They cradled an almost hysterical Kendell into the car, her arm bent at a weird angle.
Alone with the trampoline, I enjoyed a carefree bounce.
After a decade of secret hard work, I had managed to control these psychotic tendencies of wanting to kill my sister. But there was something wrong with me still. And I never wanted to find out what it was exactly, or if I needed to fix it, which was one of the many reasons I pushed people away.
It occurred to me, as I pushed open my squeaky garden gate and wrestled with the overgrown rosebush in the front path, that perhaps radio was my life’s calling after all. In the studio, I was shut away from other people, isolated from them in a sound proof room. And after my rudeness towards Mike, that’s exactly where I should be. I couldn’t remember the last time I had socialised or even spoken to anyone beyond the usual pleasantries that I had secretly enjoyed last evening. Had I been avoiding people all this time or had they been avoiding me? It was ironic that Mike was the only person who had attempted to form any sort of relationship with me in a long time, and I was responding with meanness.
Snip greeted me at the front door, as he always did, excited about his afternoon walk. Clipping his purple faux fur harness into place, I looked at the cupcakes in the glass holder in the kitchen. They were right next to the fruit bowl which currently housed a single, lonely apple. It had been there for a while. I chose a cupcake and headed towards the park. The highway was busy this afternoon; road trains carried wheat and barley from the latest harvest to all corners of Australia. I lived in what was known as the “food bowl” and our farmers were the cornerstone of almost all the industry and jobs in town.
I was puffing again. “Things I do for you, Snip,” I said between ragged breaths.
Snip barked at a truck as it lumbered past. “You wouldn’t win that fight, little mate.” I gave him a pat, biting into my cupcake. “But I still think you’re the toughest dog around.” Snip answered by tugging at the lead, knowing the park was near. Our pace doubled as I almost ran to keep up with his excited, almost comically small legs. Reaching the white fence that surrounded the dog park, I pushed through the gate and unclipped his lead. Snip took off at full pace, enjoying the freedom that was running through his white fur. Fastening some of my disobedient, red curls from my face with a bobby pin, I sat on the bench eating my red velvet cupcake and watched my best friend, my only friend, yip around the enclosure.
The outer area of the park housed an outdoor gym that the local council had installed, hoping to encourage more people to exercise. It was free to use and consisted of nine types of gym apparatus. But most people didn’t use them because the equipment was very much in the public eye. There were no high fences to offer privacy, not even a thick tree to offer seclusion. Living in a small town automatically meant you had to watch your step, no one ever wanted the wheel of gossip to turn towards them. The wheel was never very well controlled, loose lips and meanness was used to steer it. And the wheel could venture off in any direction at any given moment or even run people over. So donning your gym gear and sweating off excess fat in public would be a sure-fire way to get the wheel rolling. I stuffed the last mouthful of cupcake into my mouth. Fuck it.
Finishing the cupcake, the thought that perhaps I should start using the equipment flashed through my brain. I tried to squash it with a sugar rush but the flash had left a smoky residue in my mind.
I didn’t know anyone who wanted to do pull-ups or use elliptical trainers when people driving past could see you and judge you. But today they were in use. I squinted to see rippling arms pulling up a muscular body and rolled my eyes. This guy has no issues with people watching him, I thought. Which is a good thing because it’s a treat to watch him right now. Frank sang “High Hopes” in my mind.
A white hatchback slowed down as it drove past the muscly man doing pull-ups and I could see a platinum blonde head of cropped hair peering out the window. Taking a few steps to the muscled silhouette, I could see it was Mike. Of course, it is. If anyone wants attention whilst they work out, it would be Mike.
Shit. Not two encounters in one day. My brain was going 100 miles an hour. I had to get out of here before he saw me. Already he had encroached on my radio world, my solitary world, and now he was sneaking into my dog park. Snip, of course, was at the other end of the park, closer to Mike than to me, running around like he’d never run before in his life. Mentally I willed him over. If I called him, Mike could hear me, and because he was a masochist, would want to talk to me. Snip either didn’t have very good telepathy or he was ignoring me.
It was possible that Mike was enjoying an innocent workout, not doing it for the attention of all the females in town. It didn’t look like he had noticed platinum blonde, who was now driving at snail’s pace. It looked like Kellie, the local hairdresser. It had to be her bright blonde hair poking through the window, no one else in town had hair that colour. The Kellie shaped silhouette saw me looking and the head ducked back into the car as it sped up. The ducking out of view approach seemed to work for Kellie, so I followed her lead and childishly ducked under the park bench I had just enjoyed my cupcake on, praying that my fluoro yellow jeans would morph into camouflage gear complete with boot polish for my face.
From under the bench, I could see his sweat glistening, having formed tiny bubbles on his olive skin. The bubbles were smiling at me, welcoming me closer. Sweat was an odd thing to notice, and an unusual trigger for the emotions in my body, which were mostly between my legs. I crossed my short, yellow covered legs, just to be safe. If he wasn’t such an arrogant man, I would have licked his perspiration off right then and there. Luckily for me he was arrogant, because there were people about. Kellie could have still been lurking in the shadows, pen and paper in hand, taking notes about us which she would show to all her clients.
I didn’t dislike Kellie, well, actually I did. She was constantly cheerful and positive when I went to get my hair done. I thought she was either on drugs or heavily medicated. It had got to the point where I had to tell her not to talk to me unless it was a succinct question directly related to my common and uninteresting hair colour. She hadn’t appreciated my command but I appreciated the quiet and not having to listen about her early morning bike rides. Happy, thin, and attractive people like Kellie were the worst members of society.
Kellie also baked in her spare time and would offer me homemade
brownies when I was locked in her studio of happiness filled with thin people. I doubt she ate them though, judging by the tautness of her I-hate-you-with-a-passion arse. But I beat her at her own game because I always ate the brownies and I did it with my head held high. Later I would collapse into a chubby person’s depression but at least I didn’t have thin and happy Kellie around to witness the calamitous effect her stupid brownies had on me. And, I had shiny hair again, so that was a plus.
Mike’s hands were placed in the dead centre of the steel bar, equal distance apart from his shoulders. He dropped down from the bar, landing with an elegant thud into the dirt below. The sand reached up to grab his sturdy calves, greeting him and cushioning his landing. Now playing: Sinatra’s “I Get a Kick Out of You.”
“Snip! Snip! Let’s go!” A mixture of a terrified whisper and an urgent screech came from my throat. That was weird. The white flash of enthusiastic fur came bouncing over and I clipped his lead back on. He’s a well-trained and obedient dog until a push bike comes near, then it’s anyone’s bet who survives his “small dog syndrome” bites. Better to have him on a lead, even if it was a purple fluffy one. I’d bought his harness and matching lead in Katoomba, and against the hippy backdrop of the mountain town, the lead had looked almost normal. But back in the country it looked downright hilarious. Snip didn’t seem to mind, though.
Crawling on my hands and knees, conscious of how ridiculous I must have looked, I promised myself I was going to start doing some serious reflection as to why I insist on wearing bright, strange clothes when I don’t want to be seen by anyone. So far, I knew it all must be my sister’s fault, something she had done in our childhood to ruin my life and make me the oddity I was in adulthood. Thank god, I had taken some philosophy classes at University, because it was going to be all hands on deck to get to the root of some of my issues. It was a shame that Freud was long gone. I think he would have enjoyed talking to me.