by Kim Kelly
Dreadlocks was almost out of his seat: ‘If there wasn’t a law against it, mining companies would be poisoning waterholes in the Pilbara right now. You’re kidding yourselves if you think —’
Words, words, words swirled around her, entwined with that shadow-shame of still not being able to remember if she’d actually called Dan Elbow Whoever a ‘frayed-denim fascist’ the night before last. Hypocrisy was a tricky fish, wasn’t it? And so was Addy’s mind: I’m never drinking again. I wonder what Donne would have made of Nietzsche? In an alternative history, maybe they’re having a chat and a beer at the Hairy Egg right now, talking about God. Waiting for Einstein to turn up and explain the space-time continuum to them. Maybe I should switch to science? Not unless I’d really like to feel out of my depth. I’m hungry.
‘The National Union should be doing more to stop it – this is insanity.’
‘But the rich should pay.’
‘Yes, but the poor will pay.’
‘Raise taxes!’
‘You’re dreaming.’
‘This is ludicrous!’
Yep. Addy looked over at their tutor. His name was Ned Needham and he wasn’t much older than them, maybe late twenties; he’d only recently finished his PhD – not in classroom control. Their eyes met; they exchanged wan smiles; he looked at his watch, then raised a hand in the air as though he wasn’t the teacher at all. He said, with excruciating hesitance: ‘If we can get this back to the topic, please. You’ve all read The Lucky Country, I take it.’
It was one of the texts that had been set as additional reading. It was one of Australia’s most famous books, by Donald Horne, probably Australia’s most famous intellectual. No one had read it – except Addy. Everyone else just knew. But they shut up at last.
‘Right,’ said Ned; Addy could see how hard he was battling his nerves as he pressed on: ‘Might I suggest the chapter, “Nation Without a Mind”?’ He picked up his copy from the stack of books on the floor by his chair, and began to read:
‘… one can learn something about happiness by examining Australia – its lingering puritanism. The frustrations and resentments of a triumphant mediocrity …
‘On it goes,’ Ned let the text do the talking:
‘… to a sophisticated observer the flavour of democratic life in Australia might seem depraved, a victory of the anti-mind.’
Of course, Addy was the only one who laughed – and Drama Queen shot her a look, as if the outburst was inappropriate.
She listened to her stomach rumbling for the rest of the tute, wishing she hadn’t told Roz she’d meet her at the WoCo over lunch. It was only going to be more of the same there.
And it met her before she’d even got in the door of the Women’s Room.
‘Ew, is that raw onion?’ The one called Zondra didn’t even say hello. She was one of those tall, willowy, tie-dyed hippie-crites, who proselytised veganism with one hand and stabbed you in the back with the other. Two years older, she was in her final year of sociology. She was also one of the exalted – an elected official of the WoCo.
Addy smiled, holding up her sandwich bag: ‘Yep. Onions – and beetroot.’ She was going for health today and going hard. ‘No animals were harmed in the making of my lunch.’
‘Except me.’ Zondra crossed her legs, holding court from her moulded plastic throne, turning away from Addy as though she were an irrelevance. No one else said hello, either; and Roz was running late as usual.
I don’t belong here.
Wait for Roz.
No.
Yes.
Another soon came through the door, but it was only Drama Queen. Her name was actually Jane Buckingham, and in she strode now, breasts outthrust like a pair of ballistic warheads.
‘Hi, Jane!’ just about the whole room chorused.
That’s it, I’m fricken going.
Most of these women, some two dozen in all at this meeting, were members of an old girls’ networking pool from Sydney’s top private and selective schools, daughters of diplomats and bureaucrats, doctors and lawyers, all of a sort proclaiming Australia a classless society – for them. Bourgeois feminism would save the world from itself. All they needed were tambourines and temperance badges and they could proclaim themselves New Age Wowsers, so Addy thought. Smash the patriarchy and replace it with rich-lady totalitarian maternalism. But she would wait for Roz nevertheless. Besides, from the hubbub around her, she picked up that this meeting was taking a show of hands to protest funding cuts planned for women-specific services – such as advice on sexual health, abuse and abortion, and rape crisis counselling. Numbers were important for things like this: taking it up to the baboons who held the purse strings of the Student Representative Council. It was an outrage that ‘men’ like Chubs Keveney even had a say – but there was democracy in action.
‘Child care?’ One voice cut through all the others here: it was Claudine Claymore, Zondra Smythe’s chief rival and fellow elected fem-official. Claudine had angelwing hair-flicks to rival Princess Di’s, high-waisted tartan slacks and a bunch of expensively tailored prejudices to match. She was saying, in her clipped, impatient, bound-for-the-judiciary way: ‘Subsidised child care is all very well for the very unfortunate, but I am of the general opinion that a woman unable to care for a child should not have one.’
‘Are you suggesting forced abortion?’ Zondra turned in her chair. ‘Are you suggesting women must choose between family and career?’
Whoa. Addy bit into her sandwich. Might as well settle in for the show.
‘I am suggesting good sense.’ Claudine mock-shuddered. ‘The Women’s Collective should not waste time and resources on issues that do not affect the majority of women on campus. The vast majority are not mothers. Child care is a non-issue.’
‘It’s an issue for those women who drop out of university each year because they’ve fallen pregnant,’ one of the quieter members spoke up at that.
Claudine shrugged: ‘There aren’t many of them.’ And she hardened further still: ‘It is not the business of the Collective to encourage women to place their children in state-sponsored baby farms. We should not enable any child to be made so motherless.’
‘Motherless!’ There was Drama Queen Jane, shrieking like a siren. ‘What about the men! The bastards – aren’t they somehow responsible, too!’
The corner of crust Addy was chewing turned to sawdust in her mouth; she shrank into a vision of her father at the stove, cooking dinner night after night; her father tucking her into bed, his beery kiss on her forehead a statement of love marking the end of each day; her father tying the ribbons in her hair, getting her ready for school, straightening the collar of her uniform, his knuckles never quite clean of the work that put food on the table and a roof over their heads. Not all men were bastards. Only some. Only —
‘Sorry I’m so late, chicky babes.’ It was Roz, rushing in, bangles clanking, her big red hair the biggest idea the WoCo had ever known; she held her belly and rolled her eyes: ‘Got me curse, didn’t I. And I must warn you I have been farting like a foghorn all day.’
And they all laughed; everyone loved Roz. She was all class, no class, class of her own.
Addy shrank further at the fact.
‘Here, pet.’ Roz thrust a bag of chocolate freckles under her nose.
But it was too late.
Addy only wanted alcohol now.
NOT GERMAN ENOUGH,
HEART TOO BROKEN
She was determined to hold off the grog for as long as possible. She went home, to Flower Street, thought about watching the afternoon soapie serials on TV, but their TV had the crappiest snow-storm reception, and would only make her feel like drinking. So, in pre-emptive atonement for the drinking she would certainly do later, she sat at her little desk in her room and wrote most of the rest of her Gatsby essay, though it wasn’t due for a fortnight. She then began a bit of additional reading for Ancient History, though the text she turned to hadn’t been suggested in the lecture notes: Tacitus on
Germany, a monograph included in the back of her copy of Complete Works. It wasn’t any kind of conscientiousness that led her here, rather a yearning to know where she was from – really from. The same yearning that saw her on other odd occasions searching the words of Beowulf for traces of German in the Old English, traces of her own long-ago and far-away beginnings within tales of monsters and dragons and impossible valour, within runic code etched into stones with swords. Her yearning to solve the puzzle of herself. To work out why she seemed to sit on the edge of every circle, never quite finding the right place to be.
‘The Germans, I am apt to believe, derive their origins from no other people …’ so said these words of Tacitus, the Roman, written almost two thousand years ago. Where did they come from, then? Out of the earth between the Danube and the Rhine? Describing the tribes of the Germanii as nobly savage in some slovenly, thuggish way, javelin-wielding warriors emerged from the page, from ‘gloomy forests and nasty marshes’, their unshockable women going with them into battle to tend their wounds. They were a ‘pure’ people, never intermarrying with others, their ‘eyes stern and blue’, all with blond hair and huge bodies – exactly like her brother, Nick. She blinked at seeing him so solidly here, and her private jibe that he’d have made a perfect poster boy for the Third Reich rippled chillingly through time, across empires. There didn’t seem to be anything of Addy in these Germans, though, except that the women were partial to wearing a bit of purple, and that everyone possessed a herculean capacity for getting pissed: ‘day and night without intermission’.
Maybe it’s a genetic thing? Maybe I’m designed to drink. A lot.
Maybe you’re just on the road to boring old alcoholism.
I want a beer now. It’s been a long day.
It’s always a long day with you.
Shut up.
It was only half-past five, though – she would try to hang on a little longer. She didn’t want to be drunk before it was time to go to the pub – she’d mistimed the beverage regimen too many times before, passing out with her head on a table, fast asleep while the music crashed and jangled around her. She read a little further:
Frequent then do they fight amongst themselves, as usual for men intoxicated with liquor; and such broils rarely terminate in angry words, but for the most part in maimings and slaughter.
Nice. That only made her think of Nick again and the fight on Friday night – and how much she did not want to go. She was definitely not genetically German enough to enjoy the sound of fist meeting flesh. She hated it. She didn’t want to go to a leagues club to witness it, either – although she’d never been to this particular one, South Sydney Juniors, she knew what it would be like. She didn’t want to be alone among all those men, all shouting and carrying on, with the only other girls there being wet t-shirt contestants with enormous boobs, all hairspray and fake tan. Nothing bad would happen to her, she knew that, too – Nick’s coach would be there, and probably so would other acquaintances of her father’s, as well as one or two of Nick’s friends. She’d be all right.
She would not be all right.
And she could not hold out anymore.
She grabbed her purse, heavy with extra coins she’d scrounged from the bottom of her satchel, from pockets and drawers, then she thumped down the stairs and out the door.
Flower Street was just about dark now, its terrace rows and long-abandoned warehouses colourless under lamplight that didn’t quite reach to the alleyway that would take her up to the Hotel Broadway. Whether alone or with Roz, she always felt like a pathetic wino sneaking up to this pub and its el cheapo-est bottle shop – the haunt of Chippendale’s most dedicated, deadbeat drunks. If the shoe fits … But economy was necessity. As the house had been completely drained of grog at last night’s fiesta, she thought she’d get a six-pack of beer – limit herself to two of them for now – and a bottle of ginger wine to share later, when they’d return home after the gig at the Hairy Egg. With the extra coinage she carried, she had a little over twelve dollars – enough for the alcohol and a felafel on King Street as and when required. She’d have to go hungry tomorrow, until she got her pay from Town Hall Variety, but so be it.
‘Got a smoke, sis?’ A dark shape emerged from all the other dark shapes in the alley, dark skin, dark eyes, long dark hair curling out from under a striped football beanie – a woman – and Addy startled, just an ordinary startle of surprise.
‘Sorry, no.’ Her breath was ragged at the question, tight inside her steady stride; she smoked only occasionally, mostly bludging off others; she kept walking, eyes on the streetlight at the end of the alley, by the pub; she was nearly there.
‘Fucken white bitch,’ the voice helped her quicken her pace, another voice telling her: you don’t belong here; and being an Aboriginal voice, it came with a fair whack of authority.
Addy ran the last few steps to the pub and didn’t look back; her own voice shook at the counter of the bottle shop and so did her hands as she fumbled at her purse; she walked the long way home, back around towards the uni, her pulse banging in her ears, her breath charging like a train, and the blackening night closing around her shoulders, closing around the edges of her sight. She wasn’t frightened of the woman harming her, stealing her bag of booze or the money she had left; it was something worse than that. It was guilt at being a fucken white bitch that had Addy by the throat, and the way that guilt played with every other guilt she carried around with her every fucken white bitch day. Guilt at struggling so relentlessly with phantoms that didn’t exist, when others had real struggles to contend with. Guilt at walking on stolen land that she could do nothing to return. She was nothing – really. She was not a real Australian; she was not a real German. She was not a real Illawarra surfie chick; she was not a real Sydney University student. She fell between the cracks of everything, and it was desperately lonely there – everywhere.
The house was still empty when she returned, and she opened a can of beer unaware she’d even done it until she felt that first-beer relief swimming in her knees.
That’s better.
It wasn’t, and yet it was.
She stared hollowly at the kitchen bench for a moment, until the remains of her housemates’ cooking sprees came into view: Roz’s crockpot ‘soaking’ by the sink, nachos pond scum festering across its surface; and HRH’s food processor bowl lined inside with globs of hummus that had set like concrete.
Do not clean it up – you might be a trash load of frick all, but you are no one’s housemaid.
She compromised, giving Roz’s crockpot a scrub and rinse, while leaving the royal hummus as it was, a small monument to the super trash that was overprivileged ignorance.
No Name meowed, leaping up on the bench at her elbow, rubbing his butterfly face on her wrist; she opened a can for him, too, of kitty-mush, and spooned out a little onto his china dish on the back step. She finished her beer out there on the step, listening to the traffic ease off its end-of-day rush; watching the last of the evening’s indigoes fade into space; missing the bright splash of stars above the ocean at home, at Port; missing her dad. For a second she considered calling him, just to say hello, but she thought her heart might break if she did that; she couldn’t ever cry to her dad; his heartbreak was real and hers was —
She cracked open another beer instead and called the cat: ‘Come on – come and help me choose what to wear.’
Something purple?
Up the stairs she went, No Name following as if in obedience; she smiled at him, his tiger tail high in the air. He leapt up onto the bed, onto the crochet squares of her blanket, where he settled and watched her choose from two possibilities: arty-tarty violet lace, sort of Madonna doing heavy metal; or a pretty vintage late-50s-ish A-line, fine-paper taffeta with actual violets on it, violets floating over a musky-pink ground.
‘What do you think?’ she asked No Name, only to find he’d lost interest, circle-curling into sleep. She’d already decided on pretty, though – she wasn’t drun
k enough for Madonna.
‘Hello! Anybody home!’ There was Roz, keys jingling, bangles clanking up the hall. Addy heard the thump of her bag at the bottom of the stairs: ‘That you up there, Addles?’
‘Yep,’ she called back, rummaging for lipstick in her desk drawer.
‘How’re you feeling, pet?’ She called up again, concerned, as Addy had led her to be, having left her today after the vote at the Women’s Room with an excuse of stomach ache – only half a lie.
But Addy called back, now restored, or so it seemed: ‘Great!’ And she gulped down the remains of that beer – belching a further assurance: ‘Ja – wunderbar!’
When she danced, there was only joy. The music and the movement, and joy. It didn’t really matter what music it was or how the dance came, it was the play of sound and spirit: she was large and free and minuscule, something atomically, intrinsically hers flying between and around every note. She was the choral burst, she was the famous ode’s kiss for the whole world, the blare of brass, the thrum of bass. And she was apparently incapable of achieving this sober.
Groovy Tuna slid into a smoky, jazzed-up cover of ‘Play That Funky Music’, and Addy was the sax, carving the air with her hands and her hips. She was the little girl who would, once upon a time, dance in the back yard, whirling around under the rotary clothesline, making herself dizzy, falling down to watch the racing clouds. She used to sing, too, all the time. When did she stop?
Where are you, Addy? Where have you gone?
I’m making funky music, white bitch.
‘Here y’are, pet.’ Roz sloshed another schooner at her, and they grooved together between band and bar, small women, big beers, among the Hairy Egg’s cool but never-too-cool crowd of young funsters all out to have a good time and to maybe get shagged later.
‘Hey, spunk bubble.’ Drummer Boy joined them, bending to give Roz a kiss. His actual name was Kendall Clarke, so Roz had told Addy on the way here, an economics law dropout, and he was exceptionally tall and reedy thin, unusually affectionate, too, for an option-enriched boy in a band – one whom Roz would no doubt subject to some affectionate bondage and discipline later. Addy watched them kiss, the crowd thickening behind them, all herding in for Elbow, and most of them girls, looking breathless already, and at least half of them wearing tutus teamed with fishnet stockings and striped gondolier t-shirts. They crammed for prime position in front of the stage, and Addy slumped inwardly: forgetting herself in a dance-trance would be impossible now, fending off the flailing limbs and smouldering cigarettes of these diehard Elbowettes.