by Luna Blue
Bowerbirds Books was run by Kali, a miserable hippy who moved from the city and assumed people would embrace her just because she was from the city. Country people saw it all the time, city people moving to town with their head in the clouds, assuming they would be revered, but when they had that attitude, it was the opposite. I wondered where Mike was from originally. He had a propensity to live in the clouds. Perhaps he was a giant, similar to the one who designed the unwelcoming steps.
I had returned to my sleepy hometown, after leaving for a few years to attend university, so I didn’t like it when city people assumed they were better than me. For a short time, I had been one of them. A lot of country people had. We had sampled the steel and cement world of city people and had chosen to come back to the red dirt and the gum trees. I had enjoyed my time in the city, doing a communications degree at Sydney University, but I knew I didn’t belong there. It should have been the ideal place for me; a place where you are surrounded by millions of people who don’t notice you’re alive. I made little effort to acclimatise to the university lifestyle, preferring to instead study and spend time alone. I had made acquaintances, but my solitary personality prevented these potential friendships from forming anything deeper. I prevented it.
I’d never had a boyfriend, never met a man who was tempting enough to pull me out of my Newtown unit long enough to date. Dating seemed like a lot of effort, women in my social circle were forever complaining, first about the man shortage, and then about any man they managed to meet. Until now my lack of boyfriends had never bothered me, but looking back, I now saw it as an unusual and sad way to live. I picked another flower and crumpled it in my fist. I had sex, of course, all uni students do, no matter how inaccessible they make themselves. I smiled as I remembered Rob, a Macedonian Adonis from my public relations class. Rob had been one of the most beautiful men I’d ever seen with his thick black glossy hair that he wore in long, wavy curls framing his angular face.
Rob was a tall, slender man, and he liked to hold my arms above my head whilst he was on top of me. He was also one of the few men who could make me come almost as soon as he entered me. He naturally had the right angle, and because he was so beautiful, I was already aroused before we even got our clothes off.
The special thing about Rob, what made him the only man I really remembered, was he always rang me on his way home. A quick call as he drove his beat up Nissan Pulsar back to the Western suburbs, to say thanks. It was a nice, unique touch. Rob had liked me, a lot, but apart from the occasional beer at The Nag’s Head in Glebe and the odd sexual encounter, I had been unable to give him more. We lost touch after graduation, but I did wonder from time to time what he was up to, how my life would have turned out if I had not shunned his advances. But what was done was done, and I wouldn’t know how to find him, even if I wanted to.
Bowerbirds Books was empty. I could hear our radio station playing in the background, I would recognise Jan’s shrill voice anywhere. Points to the miserable hippy though, for supporting the local station.
“Good morning, Rosie, what can I help you with today?” Kali was almost drowning in a plethora of multi-coloured fabric and turquoise rings. She looked really out of place amongst the piles and shelves of books. She looked out of place in Pindari in general, but then again, so did I, and I was born here. Come to think of it, even my dog was an enigma in this town, an oddity surrounded by masterfully trained working dogs who could obey commands given by a raised eyebrow or an ear-piercing whistle.
Kali was still speaking to me. Awesome. Two conversations and it was only five past nine. I didn’t answer, not sure how to ask for a book on how to be a nice person without looking like a psychopath. “Just looking, thanks. I need a book for a friend, so I’ll just see what pops out at me.” Kali nodded, uninterested in our exchange, and went back to reading the paper. Wanting to remove myself from the potentially overly social situation as quickly as possible, I grabbed the first relevant book I found; The Art of Happiness. Approaching Kali and her sourness, I randomly picked up another book, just in case Kali thought I actually needed to find happiness; Mutant Message Down Under; A Woman’s Journey into Dreamtime Australia. Jesus Christ. I had my work cut out for me.
“That will be forty-two-ninety-five altogether. Thanks, Rosie.” Self-improvement was not only hard work, it was expensive.
Walking to the radio station, I leafed through the Dalai Lama’s book, opening randomly to chapter three; Training the Mind for Happiness. “What a load of shit,” I said out loud, and then quickly took it back. I wasn’t sure if hell existed, or if Buddhists believed in hell, but I didn’t want to take the risk. Reaching the station, I was tempted to put the book in Jan’s pigeonhole. She could use some pointers.
Jan’s pigeonhole was empty, but there was a note in mine. I smiled. Jan was one of the nicer humans I was forced to cohabit this planet with, but only because she understood me. The stout woman often left notes for me with instructions for upcoming shows or information on new station sponsors. She knew I hated talking to people, or she hated speaking to me, so opted for the old fashioned “leave a note” form of communication. Either way, it worked for me. I pulled out the printed note.
Call me when you can, it said. Oh, bloody hell.
Chapter 4
Who knew that one simple phone call made on a simple, regular day would change my life. I dialled the regular numbers, heard Jan’s regular voice, and then, just like that, the regularity was shot from my life, possibly forever.
“Myanmar?” My voice was the perfect representation of shock that I felt to my core. Even my eyelashes were shocked. “Why Myanmar? Is this a joke? Why the fuck would they have an international radio conference in Myanmar? Are you firing me and doing it by sending me to a weird country to be killed?” It was a genuine question.
“Don’t be dramatic, Rosie. And watch your language. You are not going to die. I think Myanmar is trying to re-invent itself as a tourist destination. Maybe that’s why it was chosen. I don’t know, I just organise people to go. And you’re lucky to be going. I can’t go because Mum is sick. Oh, and Mike is going with you.”
What the fuck was happening to my world? One part of me, a very small yet very present part, was jumping up and down and squealing in a voice I didn’t know I had. I punched her and told her to shush. The grown-up part of me was frantically worrying about the cellulite that Mike would now be seeing, assuming there was a pool at the conference hotel. Was Myanmar landlocked or did it have an ocean? Where the hell was Myanmar, anyway? The jumping, squealing part of me said she knew exactly where it was, so I punched her again.
“Is there a pool at the hotel?” I asked Jan. First things first.
“What? Um, let me look. Yes, Rosie, there will be a pool. Does the hotel now meet your criteria?” I could hear her sarcasm dripping through the phone, but I chose not to engage.
“Yes. Yes, it does.” I didn’t dare ask if there was a bar at said pool, I would look it up when I got home, after I bought some fast acting and totally over-priced cellulite cream.
“Well, thank goodness for that. The conference is in a couple of weeks, the station has organised everything for the both of you. I’ll drop your tickets off as soon as I can. Oh, and you’ll need to get some injections. Have fun!” It was unclear if Jan was referring to daydreaming about going with Mike or the trip itself. Most likely she was referring to the needles I was going to have.
Hopefully there would be cocktail bars everywhere in Myanmar. I had always thought I was a hell of a lot nicer when I was drunk, even though I have been described as “belligerent” in the past. But obviously, that was the fault of the other person, not mine. I couldn’t see Mike making me belligerent, not since I had gotten to know him a bit better, and not since I was too far invested in creating a better version of myself. It had already cost me over $40, I didn’t want to waste the money. Ergo, the more cocktails bars, the longer I could stay just the right amount of drunk and, according to my well thoug
ht out logic, the easier it would be to stay nice. And of course, the nicer I was, the more chance I had at becoming an awesome person and maybe, just maybe, having sex with Mike.
I wondered what Mike thought about us going together? He probably didn’t think twice about it, and he was probably annoyingly happy to receive the news of our trip. He was frustrating like that, finding happiness in day-to-day living even though he had a license to be miserable.
If Mike and I were going to another country together, I was really going to have to increase my pace of learning to be nice. I wanted to be the new and improved version of me before Myanmar. Nothing like a looming deadline to increase the pressure of reaching an almost impossible goal.
I needed to create situations where Mike and I could spend time together. What did people do together nowadays? I thought of the things I liked to do; watch The Walking Dead; no, that would be weird. What would I say? “Hi Mike, want to come over and watch zombies eat people?” Although if someone asked me to do that, I would be delighted. I re-wrote it as a possibility on my mental list.
We could go kayaking together. Pindari, located on the Murrumbidgee, had some beautiful places to paddle. I wondered if I would still fit in my kayak. Better not do anything physical with a muscle man when I’m clearly out of shape. Excitement was definitely my primary emotion after my phone call from Jan, but the nagging feeling I was in for some serious self-renovation was almost choking me. If I was scuba diving, someone would have been stepping on my air hose.
With Freud long gone, my own resources for self-examination used up, and the possibility that I was going to die whilst scuba diving, it was time to bring in the big guns. As soon as I got home, I called Mum. She answered after the first ring.
“Rosie! So pleased you rang, how are you? How’s Snip?’
“He’s good. The reason I rang…no, I don’t need money…there’s a guy.”
“Oh Rosie, what have you done to him?” There was an awkward pause as I tried to decide if I was offended by this comment. I decided I wasn’t. Mum knew me too well, it was a valid question…although not one she would ever have to ask Kendell.
“Nothing! Well, nothing I could pinpoint in one phone call.”
“Mmmm?” I could hear Mum cooking in the background.
“I’m confused. I like him. But as we all know, I’m not exactly a nice person. So, I figure it’s time to make some changes. I want to be a better person. A better version of me.”
“Oh Rosie, that’s lovely.” This was Mum’s standard answer when a conversation wasn’t interesting her. I heard her turn a tap on. Good to hear she was one hundred percent focused on my issue.
“Well, the problem is, you always told us never to change for a man. Isn’t that what I am doing? But if I’m changing for a man in a way that makes me better, does that make it okay?’
“Rosie, I think…”
“I mean, you never let us watch Grease because the woman changes for the man,” I said before she could finish. “That’s why we always watched Grease 2. The man changed, not the woman. What’s the feminist thing to do here?”
“Rosie, I love you. I love you even though you are a naughty person a lot of the time.” I knew I should have had the conversation with Snip. He would have provided me with a better answer, even though I wasn’t sure if he was feminist. I’d never asked him. “If you are willing to put in the work to become a solid and active member of society, then it’s not really changing for the man. You are doing it for yourself, and this man, whoever he is, will benefit from a nicer Rosie. Go and put on some Frank, have a glass of wine, and relax for a bit. Then start tomorrow on your adventure of self-improvement.”
“Thanks, Mum.” Mum was a retired cellist and the smartest person I knew. It had always been unclear if Dad loved Mum because she was a cellist or because she was Mum. I always wanted to marry a cellist, Dad had told Kendell and I when we were young. I remember hot nights, sitting in the drawing room, the three of us listening to Mum play. They were beautiful memories…the family cat, Mushroom, curled on my lap as the cicadas sang back-up to Mum’s classical music.
I opened a bottle of Australian cab sav as my phone lit up with another call from Jan, taking me away from any other terrible ideas I was bound to come up with. And, as it turned out, she provided an answer to my conundrum.
“Rosie, I forgot to ask you, the camellia show is on next week, do you want to do an outside broadcast and cover it?” Of course I didn’t. A bunch of old people milling over different shades of red and pink flowers, no thanks.
“Not really, Jan. Do you have someone else to cover it? I can do it if you’re stuck.”
“Nah, it’s okay, I’ll ask Mike,” she said, hanging up.
I finished my wine on the back veranda with Snip curled at my legs. Myanmar was becoming a more and more exciting prospect. Perhaps god, and Dad, and maybe even Lee had gotten together for a round table, Knights Templar style, to discuss the divine coming together of Mike and me. The trip was going to be my chance to shine. It had to be. Pindari, as much as I loved my hometown, wasn’t exactly bringing out a successful, endearing version of me. Myanmar would. I would make sure it would.
In the less aggressive early evening light, I dusted off the suitcase under my bed, feeling comforted and adventurous after half a bottle of wine and two Sinatra CDs. This was my secret treasure trove of clothes I had either stopped wearing or had never worn. It was also testament that I could have paid off a lot more of my mortgage or HECS debt if this suitcase didn’t exist. Wondering what sort of clothes Mike liked, and then hating myself for wondering that, I emptied the contents on the floor.
“Snip, come and help me sort through these clothes.” Snip obliged by sneezing over most of them and flopping onto his side of the bed. “Holy shit, there are some treasures in here!” The dispersed dust would hopefully yield some surprisingly pleasant pieces to wear to Myanmar. The new Rosie must be appropriately dressed. It might even be worth another visit to thin and fit Kellie so she could do something about my out of control curls. Might. I decided to see how I felt about this when I wasn’t half drunk.
The first item was a pair of purple flairs I used to wear when I was at uni. The late 90s and early 2000s were a confusing time for fashion, and living in Newtown meant pretty much anything went. I had sewn small cloth flowers all over them. Looking at what was a huge part of my university experience—I wore these pants relentlessly and I would have been humiliated if I wasn’t so horrified.
“These can go straight in the bin,” I told my style guru, Snip the purple fur wearing fashionista fur ball.
The next piece was a yellow and orange striped bikini. And it was tiny. At least the bottom half was, the top half was a size 12, a whole size larger to accommodate my ridiculously large boobs. No way was older, size 14 me going to let anyone see me in a bikini. The rest of the suitcase was a medley of un-wearable clothes. No amount of time was going to make any of the pieces trendy again.
I was going to have to go shopping. A joy for many women, to be sure. I had read once that the Swiss or the Swedish—I always got those two mixed up—had scientifically proved that shopping was therapeutic for women. But anything therapeutic for me must include silence, no eye contact, and absolutely no verbal conversation whatsoever, and I had yet to experience shopping that involved an experience like that. Hmmm, maybe online shopping was more my thing.
The main theme of Pindari was singular. One. Uno, and any other word for one from other languages. I considered Pindari a place of one because the town had exactly one of everything and that included one clothes shop. Sheathers department store was pretty big for a town with a population of about fourteen thousand and was ten times more expensive than it needed to be. But it was there, it existed, and it had clothes on racks. At this stage that’s all I was looking for.
The son of the owners was a gay man in his thirties who had moved to Sydney to pursue a career in fashion design. He had failed and was now a buyer for his
parents’ store. He spent most of his time huddled in his office, obviously miserable about the way his life turned out. Pindari didn’t boast a plethora of gay men either, so he must have been really lonely, and not in a Rosie Dunne-I-love-being-lonely-because-people-suck kind of way.
Debs, their only full-time staff member, was behind the counter, checking out her latest manicure that was done in a shade of green that should have been illegal. Aliens would have liked it though, it was their kind of shade; a Martian green. I ducked to the swimsuit section, hoping to try some on in the privacy of the red curtained change rooms. I didn’t need Martian green nail polish fumbling all over my possible clothes choices. The coat hangers scraped on the steel rack as I pushed aside bikini after bikini, looking for the full-length swimmers that I wasn’t sure even existed.
“Rosie, how are you?” Debs asked, obviously not in the slightest bit interested. “Say, so you get to see much of Mike at the station?” An interesting turn of events. I didn’t like Debs asking about Mike one single bit. Martian-influenced nail polish or not, she was not going anywhere near Mike. My Mike. Hopefully. Maybe. Probably not. But my Mike in my mind, and that was, after all, the most important part of my world.
“Hey. Sometimes. He’s gay,” I said, thinking of Andrew, the gay son. Debs looked surprised, then sceptical as I continued. “All the good ones are, aren’t they? That’s why he moved here. He split up with his long-term boyfriend and wanted to start fresh, far away. Plus, I don’t think his parents approved of him being gay.” I felt a little bit bad for bringing his parents into this deceitful yet necessary web of lies, but a girl’s got to do what a girl’s got to do.