by Austin, Lucy
In the months that we lived and worked in Sydney, I want to say that I made the most of memorable events and sightseeing, but to be honest I totally took it for granted. I figured there would always be another opportunity, another chance, another outing, so never mind New Year by the Opera House, coffee in The Rocks quarter, the Crowded House Concert or the ferry trip over to Watsons Bay. Even on sunny days, I was happy to stay in the hostel with Joe doing whatever he wanted to do, namely watching action films with lots of sequels, or sitting on the balcony and listening to him play over and over the same two rifts of ‘Free Falling’.
Instead of taking my general apathy as a huge warning sign, with no one really knowing me that well to tell me off, I dared to go there, my attitude being, ‘see what happens’. Low and behold, I found myself completely and utterly infatuated. Quite frankly, I was miserable with it.
Looking back, there were obvious warning signs that the relationship wasn’t really definable in any way shape or form and wasn’t based in reality. There were conversations, where under the influence of lukewarm chardonnay, I would offer to stay out there while he worked out his contract, only for him to immediately dismiss the idea as though it was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard.
‘Err, no Kate. My destiny is set, you know that,’ he’d say, employing this kind of Paolo Coelho speak that dominated every conversation at the hostel, what with that dog-eared copy of the The Alchemist that was making the rounds. This book prompted one and all to talk about ‘dreams’, ‘treasure’, ‘paths’ and ‘signs’ – or in my case, it made you interpret quotes about wanting things and the universe conspiring you to achieve it, as though it was personally aimed at you. It turns out the universe was doing no such thing.
After a year of communal living and more lost flip flops than I knew what to do with, I decided that enough was enough and I had to go and see some more of Australia. Even though I had secured myself some time off work, Joe didn’t want to come, nor did he stop me from going. In fact, he positively encouraged it, which only served to make me even more heavy hearted and distracted. Meanwhile, Anna stayed behind at the hostel, as did Liv, as they were busy squirrelling away their pennies and giving each other filthy looks on a daily basis.
At first, it was okay being away from Sydney as I loved the whole feeling of moving from A to B, physically putting some distance between me and hostel life. It wasn’t long though before I was going backwards in my head, because there is something rather addictive about being able to tell the same story over and over again to a different crowd. For the first time in a long time, I phoned Stan for no other reason than I just wanted to hear his voice, to have that familiarity that I didn’t have with these new friends.
To my surprise, Stan was a little curt down the phone. ‘You’ve not replied to any of my emails. I even phoned your hostel a few times.’ Currently single, it turns out that he was in need of some TLC too his pride wounded, having found his girlfriend, Diana, in bed with the same mechanic who’d serviced her car. Having told me the sorry tale from start to finish, punctuated by me intermittently making noises of sympathy and avoiding the obvious double entendre, we were both then quiet. I didn’t really know what to say to make him feel better as I was feeling pretty crap myself.
‘You will come home, won’t you?’ he asked, a question so strangely out of step with his usual patter, it then occurred to me that Stan must seriously have the blues as he sounded like he was missing me. Hanging up, I made a mental note to send him a few more postcards.
For three long weeks, I travelled around on buses with no air con, keeping the company of strangers whose contact details I wouldn’t be asking for – in stark contrast to the previous trip where I’d get someone’s email if they so much as asked me for directions. Like I had been in Sydney, I was apathetic to a tee, rushing through all the Australian landmarks as though I was at some enormous shopping centre ticking things off a list. Climbing Ayers Rock, carving out yet another didgeridoo, crocodile watching in Darwin, sailing on the Great Barrier Reef, snorkelling on the Whitsundays – all these just became things I had to do before I could get back to Sydney. I don’t know what exactly happened or over what period of time, but it wasn’t long before I had this horrible realisation that it wasn’t about my travels anymore. It was about Joe.
‘I didn’t expect you back so soon Katie Kate. You’re infatuated with him aren’t you?’ Liv asked me as we were dangling our feet in the bathing pool with the sun frying our epidermal layer.
I just didn’t have the heart to tell her that there is absolutely no point in travelling if you are distracted, as you really don’t see anything at all. Having returned to CoogeeView to find my bed in the all girl dorm given away to some girl with super hairy legs, I was now living at another backpackers down the road as I decided against staying in a sixteen-person mixed dorm. Clearly, I was tiring of communal living by now and was starting to crave an en-suite bathroom.
Cleaning her sunglasses, Liv spat and polished. ‘I notice you always put Joe on a pedestal. You really shouldn’t. Seriously. He’s a cocky son of a bitch. I’m just saying. And while I took on board Liv’s concerns about his regular habit of counting out how many friends he had on Facebook, or his blatant befriending of the hostel newbie to get a free drink at the pub, I still couldn’t see the wood for the trees. To me, he just seemed so dynamic, so charming and so ridiculously funny, I felt like I could listen to him until the cows came home.
That afternoon, Anna was lying in an unnatural pose, wearing a decorative bikini that barely covered her bits, complete with belly chain. Being her usual aloof self, she wasn’t attempting to join in on the conversation with the girls. She was more interested in squealing flirtatiously at the boys every time she got so much as a drop of water on her. It was really quite irritating.
‘Thing is Liv,’ I said hesitatingly, shutting my eyes in the sun. ‘I would be happy to just try and stay out here as he’s got a new contract starting and has already said he doesn’t do long distance relationships.’ Compared to Joe’s absolute resolve about his career, working out my own ambitions started to seem so inconsequential now.
I opened my eyes to find Liv giving me this look of utter disbelief. ‘You have so many choices and I think you’re so fucking crazy to give it all up for a boy you don’t really know. This is not real life you know. This.’ She then made a waving gesture towards the picturesque beach. ‘Seriously, don’t make your time here about him, he’s totally not worth it.’
Suddenly, the boys who’d been playing the ‘who can hold their breath’ competition burst up through the water – Joe a fraction of a second in front. Wiping his eyes and shaking his hair over us like a dog in a really annoying way, he pointed over to the pub on the corner. ‘Girls, I do believe we need to go for some schooners of VB’.
Upon hearing this, Anna immediately stood up and stuck out her chest, while sucking in her already taut stomach to put on her sarong – sort of like a slow motion striptease but in reverse. ‘Oh God, okay! Twist my arm, I’m in!’
Later on that night, I had a little taster of just how dispensable I was to Joe. I found out from Liv that he kissed some girl at the pub just five minutes after I’d called it a night. Five minutes! Couldn’t he have waited fifteen in case I came back for my room key or something? This bombshell had me holed up in the hostel’s smelly loos crying my eyes out, while Liv just kept saying over and over the same thing.
‘He’s an asshole Kate. An asshole with a ponytail.’
I don’t know whether it was Liv’s words echoing around my head, Joe’s unconvincing excuse for having done it in the first place – he was drunk – or the rather small matter of having run out of money, but the following morning I booked my ticket home. If I was going to extract myself from whatever this was with my dignity and bank balance intact, I was going to have to at least appear like I was showing common sense, even if I didn’t feel like it inside.
‘We were so right but our timing was
wrong,’ sighed Joe at the Departures Gate, stroking that golden ponytail of his thoughtfully. ‘This is for the best.’ Without uttering a word, I just listened to him say all the right things and then give me his idea of a kiss to end all kisses. ‘Remember, if I was in London, we’d be together, you know that right?’ he said and looked me right in the eyes, by way of demonstrating sincerity at having to part. ‘It’s just that I’m on my path.’
Following his destiny with the universe supporting him, Joe couldn’t get me on that plane quick enough.
CHAPTER 7 - BY THE SEA
I get out of the train station at Broadstairs and head down the hill towards the harbour. Walking past all the shops lining the high street, I’m feeling a little sweaty and more than a little tired, not helped by a rough night’s sleep at Anna’s on a sloping futon that really should belong in a skip – clearly payback for not committing to a second date with Chris. Added to which, there was a one-hour delay on the train and no seat for half the journey – just my bags on the floor and a mind full of stuff going around and around like a washing machine on the spin cycle.
Stopping every five to alternate the load on each hand, I wave back at a blacked out Chelsea Tractor who has beeped at me at the lights. I have absolutely no idea who that was but I smile all the same, before stopping at the corner shop that sells sweets to buy some gum. This was where my flatmate Claire used to live with her parents, living off a diet of cola bottles and the bon-bons that her friends were offered whenever they went to play. Once my parents realised that her folks basically said yes to whatever the request despite us being only in our early teens, I wasn’t allowed to go there again – not before I had been to the Margate arcades, tried a night bus after late night skating and worn electric blue mascara. I used to stand there late at night, waiting for Claire to finish snogging someone, wondering why it was called a ‘french kiss’ when it took place in England.
Funny how there are people that have become like mythic folklore and the subject of numerous anecdotes for those that still know each other, disappearing off the face of the earth as though they only existed to give you an interesting story to tell: And yet the likes of Claire, who I genuinely thought I would see again, are still in my life.
Claire positively hated secondary school for the whole time we were there. When she wasn’t grimacing at having to do lessons, she was wearing her hair in an enormous pineapple do and sneaking round the back of the sheds with the boys to smoke cigarettes. What’s more puzzling still, is that given the amount of sweets she ate everyday, Claire has wound up being a skinny beautician, with a hostile manner that affords me not so much as a free leg wax, let alone a blackhead steamed off. I’m pleased to report however, that her two front teeth are crowns and unbeknownst to her, glow neon on the dance floor at our local pub – a stark reminder of why it’s never good to go to bed with a bag of cola cubes.
Sweating profusely and feeling the strain of the bags cheese wiring my hands, I stop in front of the window of Claire’s salon to catch my breath, catching my reflection in the glass looming back at me – I look so tired, my mascara has run, my lipstick has bled around the edges, and my auburn hair is now tied back with an elastic band for the tension headache effect. It’s not a good look.
Claire has worked at Divine Beauty since she left school, by far the trendiest beauty salon in town, with a state-of-art interior and a wall at the back containing a professional photo shoot of all the beauticians that work there. Now co-owner, Claire has the job title of ‘Vice President of Beauty Operations’, which as my brother puts it, ‘sounds like she’s about to start working with Madeline Albright’. Wax off the super fancy title though and her day-to-day essentially involves plucking eyebrows and filing nails for ladies who are waiting for school pick-up time.
‘I am a perfectionist Kate,’ she tells me on a regular basis. ‘I just can’t abide people who don’t work to the same standards.’ I’ve yet to find out just what these standards are.
Many a time I’ve caught Claire staring at me appraisingly. ‘You’d be stunning Kate, if you tried a bit harder. You do know that right?’ Just as I’m taking in the sight of a six-foot window display of my flatmate posing with feathers in hair like Pocahontas, I hear someone behind me.
A loud female voice jolts me out of my own thoughts. ‘She’s looking good hey!’
My immediate reaction is to pretend I’ve not heard them, because on any given day you can bump into at least four people a) you used to be friends with and still like, b) you used to be friends with and fell out with and c) you are friends with but as you are looking like a dog’s dinner you do not want to see. I seem to always meet the latter. Sometimes I get away with it when I’m wearing sunglasses but not on an overcast Tuesday morning. In a small town like this, everyone round here knows everyone else’s business – sort of like the Kevin Bacon connection, only in deepest darkest Kent.
I turn around and there jogs Scary Linda who was also in my year at school. For the whole of the first year, I didn’t know her name until she and Claire started hanging out in the common room, becoming this impenetrable force to be reckoned with. I call Linda ‘scary’ as she’s everything I’m not – highly determined and bloody minded – a woman who doesn’t just grab life, she bites its ears off and makes a stir fry out of the bits afterwards. Not surprisingly, by sheer determination and force of will she now owns her own successful travel agency and a flat in the same building as me. And finally, after three years of online dating and hundreds of bleak anecdotes, she also appears to have found true love – no doubt prompting a collective sigh of relief from the world’s male population. Scary Linda is a permanent fixture on my couch, forcing me to do much of my telly watching, sitting on a dining chair.
Today, Linda is jogging on the spot, dressed in a dark blue lycra running top, red in the face, and sporting a very short pair of cycling shorts hugging her nether-regions, along with luminescent trainers that look like they’ve never had an outing before. Her blonde hair scraped back and her oval face dripping with sweat, she is wearing those sunglasses that you only ever see people wear for Olympic speed cycling. Combined, it’s a striking mishmash, but if that weren’t enough, she also sports the ultimate fitness accessory guaranteed to lose those stubborn remaining pounds – a very large tyre connected to her waist by a rope. No wonder she can barely run.
‘Hi Kate! She’s looking good no?’ she pants, pointing towards the picture of Claire that is boring into my skull. Despite thinking that it’s taking marketing to a whole new level, I find myself nodding in agreement.
‘She certainly stands out from the crowd,’ I say. Well, she would wouldn’t she, with the skin the colour of mahogany and piercing blue contact lenses.
‘Anyhow, how are you?’ she disconnects her car tyre, as though settling in for a nice long chat.
‘Oh, err, okay, lots going on,’ I reply, mesmerised by that fitness accessory lying there on the floor looking like it should be helping a car move and not this sweating girl.
I wonder what she knows, as to this day Linda’s still best friends with Claire. I decide to be guarded, concentrating hard on ensuring that what I say by way of explanation is not a lie but still gives nothing away. Besides, she doesn’t want me to elaborate, as she is a nice girl and is just being polite.
Like her best friend, I always find myself closely studying Linda’s nails, a hangover from when I was a teen, when her nails were so long that she would get one of us to do up her shirt after gym class. I was the complete opposite, used to wear horrible tasting varnish to try and avoid nibbling at my bitten down stubs. And sure, she might be looking very plain but those talons are still as glamorous as they ever were, better still, she’s upgraded them from iridescent pink to encrusted rhinestones and diamonds – fake I presume and courtesy of Claire.
‘I was saying to Claire the other day, I think the last time we all went out together properly was a year ago, for your birthday, you know the same night Stan started goin
g out with your friend.’ Scary Linda’s right. I’ve not hung out with them in a social setting, for good reason: They never include me.
‘Yes, it’s been ages hasn’t it?’ I manage to sound upbeat. ‘Though I still see you at the flat don’t I?’ I say, delivering the understatement of the century, as it would appear we are her chosen destination for every second of her downtime.
Linda then launches into a detailed account about the minutiae of her day. ‘God, I can’t remember when I last had a free hour since I’ve been seeing Dave.’ Here we go, another one who’s decided that her life as a career woman was a slight blip, and being in a couple is what truly matters, because she worked so damn hard to get a boyfriend and doesn’t want to go back. I am clearly the only person she has properly spoken to all day because I hear it all – her niece’s school play, her having to fire someone for cancelling a customer booking by mistake – and why she’s running around lugging a tyre (as she’s got a boyfriend now). Then she goes into the damp treatment she is having done in her front lounge, the fennel she’s experimenting with in her dinner tonight, and did I know that Dave had a near miss with a piece of scaffolding flying through the window in a local restaurant due to the windy weather? Blimey, I think, Linda must have been jealous to not own that near death experience story, although give her time and she’ll soon be adopting it as her own.
As she finally comes up for air, I try to think of a reason to get away but she gets there first and tells me she is so terribly busy as this is her lunch hour and that she really must go, as though I’m the one who has been keeping her. Yup, she is that woman who is always busy, who books you three weeks in advance to have a drink of an evening and who always gets off the phone first. Just as I’m thinking I’m going to get off lightly, she makes her usual closing enquiry. I have nowhere to run or hide.