by Kim Kelly
That then catapulted to calculations of time-of-the-month: Oh my God. She imagined legions of sperm streaming through her, hunting for their target; she imagined that conception was occurring right this moment, seed spearing the tender little globe of her shame. Disgust and fear pummelled into her.
You stupid, stupid slut.
She scrabbled through her memories of the night before, and all she saw was Dan Ackerman, like flash cards charting her laughable desire for him – from the moment he began making love to his microphone on stage at the Hairy Egg, if she was honest with herself. Oh my God: singing Ode to Joy in the lounge room – had that really happened? For fuck’s sake, really? Really. She saw his long fingers rolling another spliff; his beautiful smile; her arms around his neck; his hair brushing the tip of her nose.
She wanted to die. But she had to get up to pee, and the acid sting she felt at doing so seemed only further evidence that she had surely done the deed.
And where was he? This great, sweet guy? Nowhere to be seen. She was just another groupie-whore now, used by the boys in the band, and discarded afterwards without a care.
I’m never drinking again.
Sure.
I mean it this time. I’m never drinking again. This hurts too much.
She went straight back to bed. She had an Aus History lecture at nine-thirty, on Australia’s relationship with China, and an Ancient tute after that, on the reign of Nero … she was not going to get to either of them. She was too sick, and too ashamed. She set her alarm clock for twelve forty-five, to wake her up for work – she couldn’t miss that. She had to pay her rent, her share of the gas bill; her lay-by on a dress too pretty for an idiot like her to ever wear.
She plummeted back into black sleep along visions of having to confess pregnancy to her father, his angry fist shaking the walls of the house. She would not be a lawyer; she would be a single mother instead.
When the alarm went off – BLERT, BLERT, BLERT – she was in the middle of a dream, in stuck-to-the-spot shock that Dan Ackerman was demanding that she pay for his Chinese meal. She was pretty sure that didn’t happen last night; nevertheless, she spent a good few minutes hoping she was right about that, for the idea she might have gone to a restaurant in such a blithered state was almost too much to bear.
Her vow returned, and firmer still: This is not going to happen again.
A decision was also made, that she wouldn’t be getting that lovely garden frock from Newtown, not only because she didn’t deserve it, but because she’d have to hold onto as much money as possible so that she could plan for an abortion, if necessary, and in secret – even with the Medicare rebate, the termination itself would cost almost half a week’s wage, and she’d no doubt have to take time off work as well. She could see herself in the waiting room of the Women’s Clinic, with Mrs Doctor Horn-Rims telling her: ‘I told you so.’ At least she’d be able to pinpoint precisely when the conception occurred: in the early hours of May 2, 1985: the moment Addy Loest ruined the rest of her miserable life. The day after May Day. MAYDAY. She couldn’t drag a child down with her. She couldn’t disappoint her father with such a terrible load of clichés, either. She would be pragmatic and sensible about this, if nothing else. She would protect her father from this worst of herself.
With her hangover reduced to a dull gungy blear, she showered and changed into her work clothes: a plain blue uniform that zipped up the front, a muted mid-blue that on a man said ‘air force’, and on a woman said ‘tea lady’, ‘cleaner’ or ‘lower-order retail’. While she didn’t particularly like working at Town Hall Variety, up in the toy department or, on occasion, down on the ground-floor cash registers or stacking shelves in the grocery aisles, she did like going to work. It was the only time she never felt out of her depth or hopeless: she’d go to work, do her job, get paid: it was a simple and dignified transaction. Predictable, mostly. It was also good for her soul to know that in this small corner of humanity she was needed, even if it was only for a price check on a teddy bear – she was necessary. And useful: dusting, straightening the displays, or helping a customer choose a gift for a special little —
Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck.
Stop being hysterical – you know very well that the chances of you being pregnant are statistically negligible. You’re just a stupid slut, nothing more, nothing less.
And a hungry one. She went downstairs to put the kettle on, make some toast, ignoring last night’s detritus in the lounge on the way: the sticky glasses, empty beer cans, a sad plate offering a hash of sandwich crusts and cigarette butts; there was worse waiting for her in the kitchen, though. As if the uncovered, dried-out slab of cheese wasn’t enough, such a waste of good food, with chunks of tomatoes splattered around it like they’d been attacked by a blunt chainsaw, Harriet Rawley-Hogue’s food-processor bowl remained on the bench, still unwashed, its hardened globs of hummus glaring at Addy, the pièce de résistance of careless, callous, middle-class contempt.
And there was no bread.
Fuck you. Fuck you all – especially fuck Harriet.
Addy would never be proud of what she did next but would always consider it something unpleasant that simply needed to be done. She opened the cupboard under the sink, put on her rubber gloves; she picked up that food-processor bowl and marched it through the house, up the hall to HRH’s bedroom door. She knocked – no answer – and, with a wave of guilt that was no match for the anger pounding over the top of it, Addy entered the regal sanctuary. She’d never crossed its threshold before, not in the whole time they’d lived here, almost a year, only seen it from the door: the four-poster bed sumptuously hung with one decadent length of rose-tinted silk above the head board, the cheval mirror in its gold-dusted frame, the richly carved antique ‘armoire’ by the window that looked like something from the last days of the Raj. There was a vase of ivory dahlias on the bedside table. There was crisp white linen on the bed. And it was here, between the plump featherdown pillows, that Addy placed the dirty food-processor bowl for HRH to find when she got home. No note required.
You can’t leave it there. You’re angry with yourself, not HRH.
HRH is a pig, and I am angry with the world.
She slammed the front door as she left the house. Her black sandshoes thundered at the footpath as she made her way along the backstreets towards the city centre. Town Hall was a little over two kilometres distant, but she usually walked it unless it was raining or scorchingly hot; the bus was a slow, hideous press of men in suits and women with wailing strollers this time of day, and the train at Central Station was halfway to her destination, anyway. She was so hungry, so near to eating-her-own-hand starving, that when a newspaper seller whistled at her as she passed through stinking, honking Railway Square, calling after her, ‘Helloooo, baby,’ she snarled back at him: ‘Paedophile.’
Once through the swing doors of Variety, her sandshoes squeaked across the linoleum under the ka-ching of the registers and the PA yelling, ‘Code 54 to Men’s Footwear. Code 54 to Men’s Footwear,’ as she wove her way among the towering shelves of Confectionary and Stationery towards the escalators. Ascending, she paused there momentarily to think of that Code 54 and the poor bastard who was about to be sprung thieving a pair of shoes he no doubt desperately needed but could not afford: the shoes here were so crap you’d have to be desperate to steal them. She imagined this nameless, faceless man and his story: he needed that pair of woeful polyurethane business shoes for a job interview; to look respectable for his child’s christening; for his mother’s funeral.
Fuck the lot of you.
With the last of her energy, she prepared to summon a smile for the Pay Office lady, Pearl Piccolino, up on the first floor, at the rear, behind Ladies Underwear. Addy knocked on the closed roller shutter of the window there, knowing she would be spied through its peephole: ‘Sorry to pester. Addy Loest here. Is my pay done up, please?’ If I don’t get something substantial in my stomach soon, I’m going to pass out.
�
�Not done till after two,’ came the response.
Fuck you. Addy’s shift began at two – in fifteen minutes. ‘Please? I’m in genuine need.’ And I’ve never done this before. Unlike many of the other student-casuals. She needed a lie; an appeal of hardship would not work with pitiless Pearl; she’d have to come up with something more urgent than mere starvation, so she gave her the most desperate excuse she could think of: ‘It’s a matter of feminine hygiene.’
‘Ew.’ She heard Pearl recoil behind the shutter at the idea, but it worked. Up came the drawbridge, and there was Pearl herself: lovely in name and in appearance, her fingernails always impeccably varnished, lipstick to match – today a vivid coral – her hair a cloud of titian ringlets so perfectly permed Addy often wanted to touch them, or snip them into a topiary to make a love heart of her whole head above her fairy-princess pointed chin. That’s where any loveliness stopped, however.
‘Employee number,’ she said, like an android deprogrammed of all personality.
‘One zero five nine seven,’ Addy replied; she never usually minded reciting it – 10597 was a prime number, and although she’d never found any other concepts of mathematics beyond arithmetic particularly useful or appealing, she found primes mysteriously pleasing, as if their indivisibility by anything other than themselves and one could make her own aloneness slightly less abnormal – but on this occasion she felt like adding: And would you please hurry up?
Pearl Piccolino turned to her wooden box of yellow pay envelopes as though tranquilised. Flick. Flick. Flick.
For frick’s sake – PLEASE! Addy looked at her watch: twelve minutes to two.
Flick. Flick. Flick. ‘Here.’ Pearl finally smacked Addy’s pay onto the counter, and with it the pay book: ‘Sign and date.’ A coral talon indicated the line, but Addy didn’t have a pen. She’d forgotten her pen and the small pocket notebook she always brought with her; how did she forget that? I am out of control.
She asked, barely containing her distress now: ‘Have you got a —’
‘Pen?’ Pearl rolled her eyes and turned again, so slowly Addy thought she must be doing this deliberately. How a little power can corrupt so mightily.
Hurry up, you sad cow! Addy imagined Pearl’s husband spending long hours at the pub to avoid her; and caught the thought: Maybe he gives her a hard time, and that’s why — she caught that thought, too: Oh, who the fuck cares!
‘There.’ Pearl smacked a pen on the book.
Addy scribbled as required, grabbed her pay, and back down the escalator she flew. Outside, she fought her way through the heavy traffic against the lights – she’d die for something to eat now; she’d push cars aside; rip sheet metal with her bare hands. But she made it alive and unscathed: to the greasy Joe’s takeaway across the road.
‘Small hot chips, please.’ She rushed at this counter, tearing the pay envelope in her pocket, pulling out a two-dollar note.
‘Small hot chips, yeah girlie.’ The man at the grill here leered, pervy, a cruel snarl on his lips, shrinking Addy to such a scrap of nothing, she couldn’t stop her tears any longer.
She hung her head to hide them; she turned to the fridge behind her and took out a can of orange fizzy. She stood there waiting for her chips, and she cried.
‘Cheer up, girlie,’ the man said as he took her money; if she hadn’t been so crushed, she’d have spat in his eye.
She stood on the footpath and ate her chips there, scalding her mouth as she stuffed them in, to the sounds of a hundred jackhammers refurbishing the derelict Queen Victoria Building on the corner opposite, the great big statue of that HRH there looking unamused. Addy told her: I hate this place, too.
I want to go home, to Gallipoli Street, to Dad. To safety.
I want to grow up again, undo whatever mistake I made – the mistake that made me this way. So confused. What did I do?
She wouldn’t answer that question soon: it was two minutes to two; she chucked the remains of the chips in the nearest bin, glugged down the fizzy and ran back across the road; composed herself on the escalators up and up to the second floor.
Maybe it’s just me. I’m just a freaky fuck-up, and this is just the way I’m meant to be.
‘Hi, Addy love.’ There was Cheryl, her floor manager: plump and motherly and with a melancholic, resigned cheerfulness that recent immigrants from northern England seemed so often to possess. ‘How are you going?’
It was all Addy could do not to run to her bosom; she straightened her back, tightened her ponytail, and said: ‘Great! Thanks!’ Wunderbar.
Eight o’clock marked the start of ghost-ship hour in the toy department of Town Hall Variety. Cheryl, like the rest of the full-time day staff, had knocked off at five, leaving Addy on her own, apart from Kevin over in Electricals, who didn’t have much conversation beyond the features of the latest Walkman headset or multi-cassette deck ghetto blaster; and apart from the night manager, Slavenka, who roamed across all three levels of the store hunting for malingerers, her square jaw and eagle eyes promising a spell in an Eastern Bloc re-education facility for anyone caught at a lazy smoke or idle chitchat. Slavenka Markovic was friendly to no one – except Addy.
‘Hello, darlink.’ She waved now from the top of the escalator, keys clinking from her belt as she walked. ‘How has it been tonight?’
‘Oh?’ Addy closed the stock book she’d had open on the shelf between rows of army combat and superhero dolls she’d been pretending to be checking; she’d really been scratching down some thoughts in the new pocket notebook she’d bought on her tea break, writing and rewriting a few lines of her own awful poetry: I am a sightless bird tossed between slipstreams, burned by the blue, too huge and too tiny. It had seemed somehow a plagiary of something, naggingly derivative somehow, as well as stupid. Pointless. She smiled wearily at Slavenka: ‘It’s been very quiet.’
Other than practising bad verse, she’d been thinking how odd it was that she’d studied only English or American poets when she’d never been to England or America, and maybe hadn’t even visited those countries genetically by any ancestral tour. Would she write better in German, if she could try? She’d made a note to read some Goethe or Schiller, do her own extracurricular compare and contrast; then her thoughts had loitered back to John Donne, anyway, to how universal his words seemed, themes of love and death, the beauty and terror of atom-stretching change; transformation. She wanted to transform into something, anything, yet she wondered, deeper still, if perhaps her DNA, her cells, all our cells, were somehow marked, fixed, not only by the material of heredity, but by time, and memory, and … wisps of a larger thought she couldn’t quite grasp.
Slavenka nodded, and said in her no-bullshit, no-prisoners way: ‘You look tired. You have been studying hard, hm?’
‘Hm.’ Addy nodded. Studying was one word for it; life-wasting was another. She only needed to look at the traces of tired disappointment in Slavenka’s own eyes to be reminded that life was not meant to be wasted. Slavenka was actually an industrial chemist. She’d been a leading researcher for a pharmaceutical company in Dubrovnik, until her husband, a physicist moonlighting as a Croatian separatist agitating for independence from Soviet Yugoslavia, had got them into such political hot water, they’d had to flee. Once here, though, her qualifications weren’t recognised – which was why she was roaming the ghost ship of Town Hall Variety these days, while her husband drove a taxi, because ‘Croatian physicist’ sounded too much like ‘Commie terrorist’ to the white-bread Australian ear. Addy wasn’t going to disappoint Slavenka further with any of her own petty truths, so she gave her the easiest lie now: ‘I think I’m getting a cold.’
Slavenka clicked her tongue: ‘You are probably not eating well. Have you had any fruit today?’
Addy shook her head and said facetiously: ‘Not unless you include the orange fizzy I had for lunch.’
‘Ah!’ Slavenka clutched her heart: ‘That stuff is chemical weapon. Nazis invented the recipe to make all the people mad, America buys
company then and sells it to the whole world. Don’t drink it.’
Addy felt a small, warm smile curling on her lips, not only for Slavenka’s jagged-edged joke, but because she was the only person Addy knew who seemed to be able to say the word ‘Nazi’ without suggesting every German dead or alive was to blame for them and their evils. Addy hated that word, every time she heard it; she hated it because it upset her dad, this word, ‘Nazi’, that was forbidden from being spoken in his presence, although she didn’t know the precise details of why, or what they might have done to him personally, apart from ruin his childhood. She seemed to know more concrete facts about Slavenka’s history from their fleeting chats than she did her own father’s. She wished she could tell her something of all she was feeling now; talk to an older woman who knew life was complicated. She had so many questions, she didn’t know where to start. How could she begin to ask what she most wanted to know: Who am I?
Whatever, Slavenka was on her way now, no time for further chat tonight. ‘You go and buy some fruit at Grocery before closing,’ she instructed with a brusque do-as-you’re-told nod. ‘I won’t notice if you leave five minutes early.’
‘Thank you,’ Addy said as she watched her disappear behind the bank of toasters and electric kettles that flanked the far side of the escalators. She would do as she was told; she’d certainly purchase a couple of bananas tonight – she could feel her body pleading for the nutrition – but what she was really hankering for was a large fried rice from Mr Lim’s, the Chinese takeaway on Broadway, which she’d pick up on her way home, and wash down with a bucket of orange fizzy. Her hangover had mostly dissipated now except for this craving for sugar, salt and fat; she’d treat herself to a family block of peppermint chocolate, too. She’d probably eat the whole thing, and that pre-emptive shame brought a bucket of self-disgust with it. She seemed to be made of shame and self-disgust, secrets and dead ends. She caught a glimpse of herself home alone at Flower Street, loading her Kraftwerk cassette tape into the stereo, crouching forward, pressing ‘play’ and ‘rewind’ and ‘play’ again, not only because the moody experimental Krautrock was cool – she’d listen to Nena’s new wave ‘99 Luftballons’ just as intently, inwardly, covertly – but because she was —