The Pain, My Mother, Sir Tiffy, Cyber Boy & Me

by Bauer, Michael Gerard

  ‘The problem? Everything! That’s the problem! The length. The cut. The shape. The style. The look. The colour. It’s a total disaster. Now I’ve got class photos and I’ll look … hideous! I knew I should have left it the way it was. It was so much better.’

  Crazy Singing Person was frowning now.

  ‘Hmmm. It’s a bit hard for me to judge,’ he said, ‘not knowing exactly what it looked like before.’

  And then I made a big mistake. And I mean a BIG MISTAKE. Without even thinking, I pointed to the framed photo on the little table behind him. He turned round and picked it up. It was a picture of me taken a few months back with my old hairstyle. Just a head and shoulders shot. I look okay. Must have been some trick of the light.

  Crazy Singing Person studied the photo for a while, then brought it right over to where I was standing.

  ‘Do you mind?’ he said, and before I even understood what he was asking me, he held the photo up right beside my head, and his eyes started shifting back and forth from it to me.

  AND NO, THAT DIDN’T FEEL CREEPY OR UNCOMFORTABLE OR WEIRD IN THE LEAST LITTLE BIT!

  After I’d stood there squirming for a few more unbearable seconds, he finally spoke.

  ‘You know what I think?’ he said.

  I shook my head. But the thing is, I did know. I really did. So I prepared myself to suffer through some lame rehashed version of my mum’s ‘It’s not that bad, you know. I quite like it. It really is you’ garbage.

  I waited.

  He chewed his bottom lip some more then nodded.

  Here it comes, I thought.

  ‘Yep. I think you’re right.’

  What the?

  That’s the question (or part of it) that was screaming in my head at that moment. Nothing was coming out of my mouth even though it was hanging open.

  ‘Yeah, I’m with you. Compared to this, that new haircut’s something else. I think “hideous” is a bit strong. Buuuuuut then again …’

  What the? I repeat, WHAT THE!

  It was insane. What sort of a person meets someone for the first time, sings at them and then insults them?

  But hold on, because he hadn’t finished. In fact he was just warming up.

  Now he was pointing at my photograph and tapping the glass.

  ‘It’s amazing. That new haircut seems to have changed your whole facial structure. You see, in this photo here with the old hairstyle, your eyes are bright and sparkling and your mouth’s all smiley and you look, well … lovely. But now with this new cut …’

  And then he put down the photo so he could make a shape with his hands to frame my face. ‘… The new cut has changed everything. It’s incredible. It’s somehow made your eyes go all squinty and beady, it’s put that crease on your forehead and it’s turned your mouth into a … flat slit. Oh and look, now it’s even starting to push your bottom lip right out.’

  At that point, I knew I was going to kill him. He was a CRAZY SINGING AND INSULTING PERSON and he had to pay. This was an undisputed fact. I just had to work out a time and a place and the most shockingly painful method to employ.

  Oh, and how to dispose of the body.

  But before I could pursue that tantalising idea further, Mum appeared. At last!

  ‘Ah, I see you two have met. How are you both getting on, then?’

  ‘Like two houses self-combusting,’ Crazy Singing and Insulting Person lied. ‘We’ve just been comparing notes on Maggie’s new haircut.’

  Mum rolled her eyes and placed a hand high on her chest.

  ‘Oh that,’ she said. ‘Well, she won’t listen to me, so I hope you set her straight then.’

  Ha! The truth was about to come out. I glared at Crazy Singing and Insulting Person. Let’s see you get yourself out of this one, bucko.

  ‘Certainly did,’ he said. ‘We both agree that it’s a “complete disaster” and in fact I was just about to suggest that if Maggie was thinking of going outside during daylight hours, it might be a good idea to wear a heavy-duty paper bag or a cloth sack of some sort over her head to avoid scaring little children, lowering neighbourhood house prices, and putting the cows off their milking.’

  NO, I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP. THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT HE SAID!

  I fired up my best death stare and blazed it away at him.

  He’d really done it now. Figurative Language Warning! He hadn’t just cooked his goose with my mother and me, he’d burned down the entire barnyard and barbecued the cows!

  I swung round to Mum. A stunned-mullet look was frozen on her face. I held my breath. This was going to be epic! Any second now she was going to spring to my defence just like Sigourney Weaver in Alien, scream Get away from her, you bitch! and give it to this Crazy Singing and Insulting Monster with both barrels.

  Which was exactly what she … didn’t do.

  What she did do was come out with this embarrassing, snorty laugh and say, ‘Danny, you’re terrible! Don’t listen to a word he says, Maggie. He’s just winding you up. What am I going to do with him?’

  Do with him? Well, just for starters, how about screaming GET AWAY FROM HER, YOU BITCH! and GIVING IT TO HIM WITH BOTH BARRELS?

  No such luck. Instead she walked over to Crazy Singing and Insulting Person, put her hand on his arm and smiled.

  Gee, thanks a lot, Sigourney! Go on, you two share your little joke at my expense, then. Don’t you worry about me. I’ll just stay here wrapped up in a cocoon of death and wait for all the toothy, slime-dribbling alien babies to hatch out and eat me alive, shall I?

  Mum picked up her bag from the coffee table and said, ‘Okay, it’s just a movie and we’ll be straight home afterwards, so we won’t be late.’

  Then she came over and stood right in front of me.

  ‘I’ve got the front door keys and my mobile. Make sure everything stays locked and don’t forget to phone if there’s any problem. Anything at all, you hear me? Bye, sweetie.’

  I got a quick hug and a kiss on the cheek before she headed off, followed by Crazy Singing and Insulting Person, who gave me a wave and one of his sneaky smiles, and said, ‘See ya.’

  I didn’t smile. I didn’t speak. I shuffled along a few paces behind them like Maggie of the Walking Dead. When they reached the front door, Crazy Singing and Insulting Person opened it for my mother and she disappeared outside. But he stopped and turned back to face me.

  ‘I really hope it all works out. You know, with your hair and the class photos and everything,’ he said.

  Right. Sure. Bye.

  ‘And if it’s okay with you, I think I’ll tell Rosie all about your hair “disaster”. I’m sure she’d be fascinated.’

  ‘Rosie?’ I asked, then regretted it straightaway.

  ‘Yeah. One of the kids down at the hospital where I work. She’s right around your age. Been having chemo most of the year for her cancer. Lost all her hair. Every bit. Even her eyebrows. Thought she might like to hear how annoying actually having hair could be. Might cheer her up when she realises how lucky she is to be missing out on all the “hideous” stuff you have to put up with.’

  Then he just looked at me for a second before saying, ‘Cheers, Maggie May.’

  By the time the door had clicked shut behind him, Crazy Singing and Insulting Person had transformed himself into The Pain.

  I could already feel him stabbing away at me.

  4

  Shocking double standards

  Poor Mum! I only had to put up with The Pain for a few minutes, but she was going to have to cope with him all by herself for hours. It was unnatural cruelty! That’s what I was thinking in my room later that night as I was drifting off to sleep.

  The next morning when I dragged myself out of bed, I found her sitting at our kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a bowl overflowing with cereal, yoghurt, honey and chopped banana. Eating to forget the horrors of the previous night, obviously. I sat down opposite her and tried to gently ease my way into the delicate subject of her date.

  ‘So, last
night at the movies must have been the absolute pits, hey, Mum?’

  Her head flopped forward and she groaned.

  ‘That great, huh?’

  ‘Oh, don’t remind me, darling. I’m trying to erase it from my memory banks. What can I say? Terrible. Awful. A dud. A turkey. A fizzer. A total train wreck.’

  At which point I felt like saying, ‘Duh! What did you expect? You’ve only got yourself to blame, you know. What were you thinking? Going out with someone like him? I mean, I could maybe understand it if some psycho had a gun to your head or was holding your family hostage or your mind was being controlled by evil alien overlords – but voluntarily! What’s that all about?’

  Mum closed her eyes and took a slow sip of coffee. Then she looked at me and shook her head.

  ‘The worst movie I have ever seen – without question. The worst. I honestly thought I was watching some zombie saga to begin with. Then I realised it was only the acting that was brain dead. And as for the dialogue. Errrrrrgh! Mind-numbingly puerile and appalling!’

  ‘I take it you weren’t impressed, then?’

  ‘Not. At. All. I’m giving it half a star and that’s for whoever managed to hold the camera the right way up. All I can say is, thank god for Danny.’

  WHOA! WAIT UP! Pause and Rewind. Thank god for Danny? PLEASE EXPLAIN!

  ‘Him? Why? What did he do?’

  ‘Well, if it wasn’t for Danny the whole evening would have been a complete write-off. If I’d had my way, we would have been out of there in a flash. But Danny, he kept saying we had to “give it a fair go”. So we did. But oh lordy, it just got worse and worse.’

  Mum picked up her spoon and played with her cereal. There was a sort of a squished-up smile on her face.

  ‘So then Danny starts making these silly asides and jokes and slipping in his own dialogue. Just really stupid stuff.’

  She chuckled to herself and jabbed her spoon at me.

  ‘Like there was a corny bit where this airhead girl says to her beefcake boyfriend something like, “I could never live without you, Warren!” and Danny leans over and whispers to me, “Because you’re the only one who knows how to operate my iron lung!” It was hysterical!’

  Hysterical? Sorry, I don’t think so! In bad taste maybe. Totally groan-worthy definitely. But only if I’m being super-generous.

  ‘And he just kept doing it, saying stupid things. Then of course I started doing it too and before you know it, we’re both killing ourselves laughing and we couldn’t stop. We were literally wiping the tears from our eyes. I can’t remember the last time I laughed so much.’

  Then my mother made this humming noise before casually dishing out an extra morsel of information.

  ‘And that’s why we were asked to leave the theatre.’

  SAY WHAT?

  ‘You were asked to leave the theatre?’

  ‘By the manager himself no less. Although when I say manager, he looked about twelve. Apparently we were guilty of “disturbing the other patrons”. Can you believe it?’

  No. I actually couldn’t believe it. I really couldn’t. I stared at my mother. My mother who was allegedly the RESPONSIBLE ADULT in our two-person family.

  My mother who was now giggling in front of me.

  ‘You were thrown out?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘By the theatre manager?’

  ‘Got it in one.’

  What was going on? My mother had just told me that she was thrown out of a movie and now she was just sitting there, happily munching away on her cereal and smiling into the bowl like she’d won some sort of award. This was too much!

  ‘Mum, how can you just sit there grinning like that? You were chucked out of a picture theatre for mucking around!’

  ‘I know, sweetie. I was there. At least I was there … until I was chucked out.’

  MORE GIGGLING!

  ‘But, but, what about last year when I got into trouble at school for reading a book during some boring visiting Shakespeare performance? When you found out about that, you hit the roof. You said I was “immature, irresponsible and disrespectful”. You said that I “didn’t care about anyone but myself”. I basically ended up being in solitary confinement in my room for an entire weekend!’

  Mum waved a hand at me.

  ‘Yes, you and Nelson Mandela have an incredible lot in common. But anyway, that was different.’

  ‘Different? How was that different?’

  ‘You disrespected Shakespeare. The immortal bard! That film last night was an insult to our intelligence.’

  ‘That doesn’t make what you did right. You still “disrespected” everyone else in the theatre. You still “disturbed the other patrons”.’

  My mother put on a serious face and shook her spoon at me.

  ‘Maggie, let me tell you, if those people last night were actually enjoying that film, then they were already disturbed.’

  And then she had the nerve to snort at her own PATHETIC NON-JOKE.

  Had she lost her mind? Was she on drugs? Couldn’t she see that what we had here was a clear case of shocking double standards on her part? What was wrong with her? I needed to dig deeper.

  ‘Fine, then. Whatever. So after the mean and nasty kiddy manager kicked you out of the pictures and ruined all the fun you were having being rude and obnoxious and disturbing the other patrons, what happened then?’

  ‘Nothing much really,’ Mum said, sort of gazing into space as if she was picturing all the ‘nothing much’ she hadn’t done. ‘We just walked for a bit. Bought some takeaway coffee. Took a stroll down by the River Walkway. Found a bench. Looked at the city lights. Watched the ferries go by. Talked.’

  ‘Talked?’

  ‘Yes. For ages. And laughed. There was quite a lot of that, now I come to think of it.’

  ‘You sat on a bench and talked and laughed?’

  Mum stopped gazing away then and focused on me instead.

  ‘Yes, Maggie. We actually sat on a bench and talked and laughed. It’s not a crime, you know.’

  No? WELL, IT OUGHT TO BE! Especially if one of the people doing the sitting, talking and laughing just happens to be MY MOTHER and the other person is THE PAIN! That’s what I had to stop myself shouting at her across the table.

  ‘Anyway, I promise you one thing,’ Mum said, pointing her flake- and oat-speckled spoon at me yet again. ‘Next time, I’ll be choosing the movie. I’m having that written into my contract!’

  NEXT TIME? There was going to be a NEXT TIME? That wasn’t the way it went. None of Mum’s past dates had NEXT TIMES.

  ‘What, so you think you’ll be going out to the pictures … again … with him?’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  That’s a little bit better. Possible didn’t sound quite so definite.

  ‘But not next weekend. Next weekend we’re going on a picnic somewhere. Haven’t worked out all the details yet.’

  My eyes were locked on my mother’s face.

  ‘A picnic?’

  ‘Yes. You’re welcome to join us if you like.’

  Huh? ‘Us’? She was talking about her and The Pain as ‘us’. But that’s not right. They’re not ‘us’. We’re ‘us’. Mum and me. The sole inhabitants within the high, impenetrable walls of CASTLE BUTT. That’s who ‘us’ is!

  ‘Aaaah, no thanks. I have to … work on my Macbeth assignment.’ (A handy excuse. Just a shame it was true.)

  ‘Your call, sweetie,’ my mother said before rinsing her breakfast stuff in the sink and wandering off to get dressed.

  A picnic? Out in the countryside? All day? With only The Pain for company?

  It worried me at first, but the more I thought about it the less worried I became. I mean, anyone could appear normal for a few hours, especially when most of that time was spent in a crowded movie theatre. But surviving a whole day with someone at a picnic, that was a different story altogether. That was a scenario where a person’s truly painful colours would surely come shining painfully through.


  I grabbed the box of cereal Mum had left on the table and happily avalanched a mountain of it into a bowl. I decided not to give The Pain another thought. He was just a temporary, minor irritation that wasn’t worth worrying about. Besides, there were plenty of other things going on in my life that I really did need to worry about.

  And all of those things were going on at school.

  5

  The Year of the Butt

  The school in question was St Brenda’s Girls College.

  Despite its name, St Brenda’s isn’t a totally guy-free zone. That’s because it’s right across the road from St Gregory’s Boys College, and the two schools often get together for things like talks, excursions, musicals and other activities. There’s also a shared library/resource centre. It’s on St Brenda’s side of the road, but it’s linked to St Greg’s by a raised and covered walkway.

  I started at St B’s in Year Nine. As school years go, it wasn’t what you’d call a raging success.

  I can’t really blame the school for that. It had more to do with my father leaving a few years earlier and my parents divorcing. When that happened we had to sell our family home and move into a smaller place in a cheaper suburb. Meanwhile Mum had to take on full-time work as a beauty consultant and make-up specialist in the local shopping centre to pay the bills and I had to leave my old school where I’d been reasonably happy and well adjusted and start life at a new school (good old St Brenda’s), where I was super-determined not to be either of those things.

  And boy, did that determination pay off.

  It’s amazing what you can do when you set your negative mind to something. The upshot of my steely focus on my down-in-the-dump-edness was that not many (i.e. none) of my new classmates really took a shine to the sulky, withdrawn, irritable, anti-social, product-of-a-broken-home, pissed-off-at-the-world, don’t-want-to-be-here, zero-personality new girl that I’d blossomed into.

  Go figure!

  But when Year Nine came to an end and the holidays arrived, something happened. And that something was that I took a long, hard look at myself. And what did I see? That’s right. A sulky, withdrawn, irritable, anti-social, product-of-a-broken-home, pissed-off-at-the-world, don’t-want-to-be-here, zero-personality girl called Maggie Butt who I barely recognised.