by Kim Kelly
Praise for Kim Kelly
‘Consummate storytelling. A deeply satisfying page-turner …’ – Tracy Sorensen, The Lucky Galah
‘alive, full-hearted and shimmering with hope’ – Belinda Castles, Bluebottle
‘Kelly is a masterful creator of character and voice.’ – Julian Leatherdale, Palace of Tears
‘makes you think as well as feel’ – Wendy James, The Golden Child
‘an author who writes with such a striking sense of atmosphere and sublime instinct’ – Theresa Smith Writes
‘storytelling is clearly encoded in her DNA’ – Writerful Books
‘It is uplifting to know that there are people who can write like this, with clarity, a bit of devilment and a hint of a smile.’ – Canberra Times
‘marvellous depth and authenticity based on some impressive research, and her characters, plot and fluid prose draw the reader into this world’ – Daily Telegraph
‘colourful, evocative and energetic’ – Sydney Morning Herald
‘storytelling that breaks the rules so beautifully’ – Jenn J McLeod, A Place to Remember
‘Kim Kelly’s writing is magnificent’ – With Love for Books
‘told with wit, warmth and courage’ – Kylie Mason, The Newtown Review of Books
‘vivid and enthralling’ – Lisa Walker, The Girl with the Gold Bikini
‘simply superb’ – Karen Brooks, The Darkest Shore
‘Kim writes like no one else, with a depth of skill few authors achieve’ – Kelly Rimmer, The Things We Cannot Say
‘a literary page-turner… Kim Kelly is a talented and courageous story-teller’ – Cassie Hamer, The End of Cuthbert Close
About The Truth & Addy Loest
Truth is not a destination – it’s a magical ride.
Addy Loest is harbouring a secret – several, in fact. Dedicated overthinker, frockaholic and hard-partyer, she’s been doing all she can to avoid the truth for quite some time.
A working-class girl raised between the Port Kembla Steelworks and the surf of the Illawarra coast, Addy is a fish out of water at the prestigious University of Sydney. She’s also the child of German immigrants, and her broken-hearted widower dad won’t tell her anything about her family’s tragic past.
But it’s 1985, a time of all kinds of excess, from big hair to big misogyny, and distractions are easy. Distractions, indeed, are Addy’s best skill – until one hangover too many leads her to meet a particular frock and a particular man, each of whom will bring all her truths hurtling home.
Told with Kim Kelly’s incomparable warmth and wit, The Truth & Addy Loest is a magical trip through shabby-chic inner-city Sydney, a tale of music and moonlight, literature and love – and of discovering the only story that really matters is the one you write for yourself.
CONTENTS
About The Truth & Addy Loest
Dedication
Epigraph
Addy Loest is Probably Not Going to Die Today
English Literature & Other Forms of Middle-Class Indulgence
Best Intentions & the Art of Self-Sabotage
Not German Enough, Heart too Broken
A Potentially Life-Changing Disaster & Other Small, Epic Events
Loose Balloons & the Telling of Untold Tales
Special Fried Rice & True Romance
The Fight & Its Unexpected Aftermath
Garden-Variety Acts of Misogyny
This Is What a Hero Actually Looks Like
The Answer is Always Love & Quantum Physics
Anything is Possible, But Some Things are More Possible Than Others
Author Note
Also by Kim Kelly
Copyright
For love, and other acts of courage.
My dear friend! Dearest girl! — Art! Who comprehends it? With whom can I discuss this mighty goddess? How precious to me were the few days when we talked together… I have carefully preserved the little notes with your clever, charming, most charming answers …
Ludwig van Beethoven, letter to Bettina Brentano, 1810
And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love, all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
John Donne, ‘The Good-Morrow’, 1633
I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: ye have still chaos in you.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1891
ADDY LOEST IS PROBABLY
NOT GOING TO DIE TODAY
The house on Flower Street was one of those narrow, crumbling mid-terrace wrecks that hadn’t seen much love for a hundred years. Its peeling paintwork and rotting floorboards ensured the respectable poor had moved out long ago, as they had across the whole of the inner-city suburb of Chippendale, and in their place a ragtag band of university students, artists and assorted dropouts had come to call it home.
And Addy Loest was one of them – she was all of them, in fact. She woke that morning, a Tuesday, the last day of April, 1985, queasy from a cocktail of last night’s green ginger wine and a rapidly gathering guilt at the whole terrible load of herself. She had tried, she had really tried, but now, halfway through the first term of her second year of a combined bachelor’s degree of arts and law, she had decided she might actually rather die than continue with the latter. She was not going to become a lawyer. She could not care for the offers or acceptances or considerations of contractual agreements; she didn’t want to know one dot about civil and criminal procedure; the only dispute resolution she was interested in was how she was going to tell her father what she had decided.
I’ll tell him on Sunday – I will, she promised the inside of her eyelids, not yet ready to face today, never mind Sunday, when she’d make the weekly train-trek home for lunch. Like a good girl. A good girl who respected and honoured her hardworking, self-sacrificing father with the truth.
She could already hear his fist slamming down on the dining table, the flinty remnants of his German accent sharpening with every syllable: ‘What did you say, Adrianna?’
Don’t tell him, her lesser angel of self-preservation whispered. It wasn’t as though he could easily find out: he was a hundred kilometres away, down the sand-swept sapphire coast that lay between Sydney and Port Kembla, where he worked six days a week as hard-headed, hard-hatted foreman at the steelworks there.
She burrowed further under her quilt, its midnight-indigo cover pretending darkness, but it was no use: she’d never get back to sleep again now. Outside, the city had begun to churn, the brakes of a semi-trailer wheezing up to the traffic lights along the main road beyond. It was somewhere around seven o’clock, she supposed, squinting out from under the quilt to find daylight struggling above the rusted tin rooftops of the row behind and through her grime-fuzzed window. She blinked at the pale grey sky, cotton-wool clouds blushed with the sunrise as though they’d brushed the rooftops on their way past. Her father would be getting himself ready for the day, she knew, combing his silvering hair, lighting his first cigarette, smiling to himself that his daughter would not only be the first lawyer in the family after a generation disrupted by war and intercontinental migration, but that she would be an industrial relations specialist of global renown forging once and for all the socialist utopia that was their birthright. Her brother, Nick, was only expected to win next Friday night’s boxing match. Nick, two years the elder, would finish an unremarkable degree in economics this year and would probably go on to become a heavy-weight auditor for the taxation department, but for the time being, he was little more than a muscle-bound ape. They weren’t very close, not these days, not like they used to b
e. Nick was indulged, spoilt, his way into the world of men paved with easily achievable expectation; while Addy’s way was —
Her pulse began to thump. She sat up, her chest suddenly tight, aching, her mouth dry.
I’m going to die. She was certain, so certain: dread, a great wave of it, crashed about her and within her. I’m having a heart attack.
No, you’re not, she told herself. The doctors have said there’s nothing wrong with you or your heart but existential angst and self-obsessed hypochondria – probably brought on by your own laziness and disappointment with yourself at not wanting to continue with law. Loser.
She’d been to see a doctor again only a couple of weeks ago, this time at the Women’s Clinic across from the university, a tank-tough matron peering disapprovingly over horn-rimmed glasses at her: ‘You’re not pregnant, are you?’
‘No!’ No chance of that. Addy didn’t even have a boyfriend, not really, only Luke, whom she referred to as her boyfish, short for boyfriend-ish, just someone lovely she tortured regularly by not having sex with him – and she had no idea of the why of that, either. They’d had sex, of course – they’d been going out almost five months. They’d had sex three and a half times. She just wasn’t keen to do it again.
The doctor had sighed as though she’d been told a lie; she told Addy: ‘You’re very thin. Try eating properly for a month, see how that goes.’ With the unspoken suggestion: Now, get out of my office and stop wasting my time.
I am going to die. Addy was so certain, even as she was talking herself away from the dread.
Shut up, idiot.
Yes, she agreed. She got up, the thumping sensation beginning to pass, and she shambled to the bathroom. I need a hamburger.
The greasy Joe’s up the road, on the corner, didn’t open until nine, though. She turned on the shower and undressed, and as she did, she glanced over a bony hip at her bony knees and her bony feet, wondering if her diet was the problem. After all, hamburgers and coffee by day, fried rice and green ginger rotgut by night, and chocolate anything in between, wasn’t exactly Pritikin, was it. When she was skint and practising the virtues of imposed frugality, she ate bananas and fish fingers and creamed corn on toast, sometimes with a slice or two of tomato. When she was drunk, she craved felafel. Her diet was indeed appalling. It also couldn’t have been the problem, or not all of it, anyway. She’d been having these unfunny turns for more than a year, on and off; mostly few and far between; occasionally in clusters; occasionally waking her, shaking her in the night, gasping for air: I’M GOING TO DIE! Those last were the most frightening of the lot. The first had been more confusing than anything else: she’d been on the train, on the way to the first day of Orientation Week at the university, when she’d felt unable to take a full breath, as though the steamy, summer warmth inside the midday carriage was hampering the process. A nameless panic had prickled around the edges of her heart; her pulse had raced; but then the train had pulled into Central Station, and she’d forgotten all about it – until the next time.
Stress, that’s all this is – stress-head.
That seemed to be the common thread, except for when it wasn’t: like the time, just these summer holidays past, when she was home and sunbathing on Fisherman’s Beach, alone and contented, blank-headed, listening only to the gulls calling, playing on the warm breeze; or the time she was making her father a sleep-in breakfast, a few days after Christmas, still celebrating her final High Distinction for English Lit, flipping eggs ahead of a long day of doing nothing but reading the poetry of John Donne, dipping into the texts for the academic year to come, this year, the lines of one of the poems she’d read the day before swirling through her mind like sweet-scented smoke:
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.
How beautiful, she’d thought. As the daughter of a metallurgical worker, she’d found that metaphor of the bonds of love expressed in beaten gold particularly romantic: stretched to a gossamer wisp and yet unbreakable, a tiny, tiny wire wound round the globe. And at that she’d found the notion bleakly sad: for she didn’t think she’d ever feel anything like that for anyone, certainly not poor lovely Luke, whom she’d only just met then – and as she’d thought of him: BANG. Heart was thumping, bursting, not with love but with terror.
‘What’s wrong, Sprout?’ her father had asked her, calling her by that name of deepest affection and permanent concern for her smallness. ‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’
‘Nothing,’ she’d said. ‘No one.’ She’d found enough of a smile to fool him, her focus on the burnt-orange kitchen tiles behind him: ‘Just dreaming.’ Just fighting to keep my heart in my chest and my feet on the ground.
She couldn’t worry him with anything like the truth, whatever that might have been: Dad, I think I’m dying. She never let him know if she had the merest head cold; last winter, she’d sprained her ankle falling out of a pub on too-high heels, and didn’t go home that following Sunday, so he wouldn’t see the trouble it gave her: ‘I have to study, Dad, I’m sorry – Legal Institutions exam on Monday.’ Liar.
She’d seen seven different doctors so far, quietly, scurrying into their surgeries like an overgrown and underfed rodent, hugging her too-big shirt around herself, around her conspicuous nothingness, hiding her everythingness: ‘Um, I’m not really sure if I’m sick or not …’ She’d had two electrocardiograms done, and four doses of antibiotics in case it was an infection of some strange kind.
But it’s just me, isn’t it. Dying. Of non-specific dyingness. She stood there under the shower this bleary, weary morning, resigned, all beaten out in the post-panic settling of her nerves, with the hot water a blessing on the back of her neck. She tested her breathing in the quickly thickening steam: she was all right. She wasn’t going to die just yet, unless perhaps a meteor speared through the tiny window above the shower and into her head, or unless the Soviet Union decided to commence the Nuclear Holocaust, or Ronald Reagan, in a fit of dementia, decided to conduct a missile test on Sydney, or the IRA moved in next door. All as likely as Orwell’s dystopian nightmares becoming prophecy: 1984 was so last year. There were terrible enough real things going on in the world, she reminded herself: there was a famine in Africa, war in Lebanon, terrorists in Palestine, terrorists in Spain, contamination of Aboriginal land from atomic bombs dropped in the red desert after the last world war. Addy Loest had nothing to complain about.
She stood so long there in the shower she disgusted herself with the flagrant waste of hot water when so many had none, yet she stood there a little longer, anyway. I have a hangover, she groaned some justification. You drink too much, she growled back at herself. A flutter of panic followed that she might be running late now for her Contracts tutorial at nine, but then she recalled she wasn’t going to attend it, and relief returned. That relief she felt meant withdrawing from law was the right thing to do, didn’t it? Wasn’t it the right thing to do? She didn’t feel this kind of aversion to her other subjects: the thought of English Lit at eleven was one that made her want the clock to go faster, the quicker to discover what new revelation was waiting for her there. What new magic. Today would be the first lecture in a special study of the eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope. What she’d read of Pope so far had seemed impenetrable, like a string of antique-Englishman in-jokes and allusions she’d never get, but that only dared her to want to know what the fuss was about. She wanted to know Pope’s story. She wanted to know just about everyone’s story: why people thought or felt or spoke the way they did; where they’d come from. Stories: they’d always brought her enlightenments and delights of all kinds, and fabulous mysteries that, on the page, seemed to stay still long enough for her to grasp, to brush her fingertips against at least. Language danced across her soul in shapes and patterns she’d only just begun to identify, not so much as grammatical parts, but as a dialect o
f truth. The real truth. She glimpsed a future of herself at a little desk by a window overlooking the sea, or a sea of trees, writing, and writing, and writing, though she couldn’t yet see what truths she might tell.
You are fricken deranged, that’s what you are. Need any more proof?
She turned off the shower, shying from this secret at the bottom of all her unreachable secrets, and dried herself – to the sounds of her housemate, Roz, awakening too, her bed just the other side of the bathroom wall. Moaning: ‘Oh yesssss. There … There …’ Roz had a new boy in there, there – the drummer in a band that had a Wednesday-night residency at their most frequented pub, the Harrington Inn, or the Hairy Egg as it was otherwise known. ‘Fuck me!’ Roz shrieked. ‘Come on!’ Roz was never shy. Roz was a voluptuously tousled, full-flame redhead, otherwise known as The Unmade Bed, and Addy was a little bit in love with her – more in love with her than she’d ever been with any boy. They’d known each other since Year Ten, having met during a junior high school public-speaking championship, held at Parliament House, in Canberra, and having been the only two from state schools to have made it through to the semi-finals – Addy from Wollongong High, and Roz from Caringbah High – they’d stuck like glue. They were practically from the same regional wilderness as well, south of the metropolis; to the natural inhabitants of the University of Sydney, anyone who hailed from anywhere south of Bondi was a foreigner, to be regarded with some suspicion. ‘Don’t slow down!’ Roz slapped her drummer boy, possibly on the arse, and Addy heard him yelp: ‘Jesus!’