‘It’s amazing.’ Annie flicks a small piece of uneaten stalk into the garden.
‘What?’
‘That you’re actually going do it.’
She pulls off her gardening gloves and comes to sit beside me on the edge of the planter box. She drinks from my glass of water, then refills it with the garden hose and hands it back to me. Together we do the sums, calculating how long I can survive on the savings I have, minus my rent and the money I need for food and bills. We look over her backyard and talk about how I’ll pay the rent and not about how the father of my child killed himself. I’m aware that Annie’s equanimity is potentially as insincere as my own – in my heart I am screaming – but I appreciate its reliability.
When we eventually go inside, Annie’s boyfriend James has started dinner. ‘Is Sarah coming over?’ he asks.
‘Yes,’ says Annie, looking to me, not James. I smile at her, but she doesn’t smile back. Her look is mildly disapproving. I want to argue – These are extreme circumstances; it’s not like Sarah and I are so immature we can’t remain civil for a few weeks without you – but I know that raising that point would also disprove it.
When Sarah arrives, she comes straight for me.
‘Hello, friend that I love.’ She gives me a hug and pats me gently on the back. When she pulls away, she puts her hands on my cheeks and looks me in the eye. ‘It’s a good thing there’s going to be more of you.’
We smile at one another. She throws her backpack on Annie’s kitchen table and pulls out two bottles of wine. James lines up four glasses and Sarah places her hand over the top of one. She rubs my stomach, friendly this time, not like when she told me I’d be too fat to ride a bike. James looks between us, wearing an expression I often see on him – one of not being in on a joke.
SARAH AND ANNIE and I met in primary school on the Sunshine Coast. Sarah and I were friends from year one; Annie didn’t arrive until year four. She was a sweet, obedient girl whom Sarah and I used to dominate. Annie always had two biscuits in her lunchbox – Iced VoVos or Monte Carlos – that she would hand over to each of us. If we ever had to pair up, for schoolwork or a bus seat, it was always Sarah and me together, Annie left behind. And in four square, Annie was forever in the dunce position despite being much better than both Sarah and me at P.E. I shudder when I think of these things now. None of us ever mention it.
When we moved to high school the bullying stopped completely. I’d love to say it’s because we’d matured but I think we were intimi dated. There were more students in our year level alone than there had been in our entire primary school. We shuffled close together for comfort. The three of us weren’t popular, but we weren’t unpopular either. Annie was excellent academically and Sarah and I were good enough. Same with our behaviour. Sarah and I occasionally got detention – for talking in class or being late, never anything serious – but Annie not once. At some point, around year eleven, we started dreaming about moving to Melbourne. It was possibly after the first presentation we had about going to uni and what courses we could do. Or maybe it was that the bands we thought were cool on Triple J were mostly from Melbourne. Or both. I don’t remember much about school from then on. A part of me had mentally clocked that we were leaving and I didn’t need anyone but the friends I was leaving with. Other people from school did move here eventually, a couple of years after us. Annie would catch up with them and tell us about it, but neither Sarah nor I bothered introducing them to the city. Sarah called them ‘followers’. I was self-aware enough to know that sounded arrogant, but I agreed with her. When I’d dreamed of Melbourne at school, I pictured wearing denim jackets and berets on campus and drinking pints of beer, even though I didn’t like the taste at the time. I’d break up with lots of boyfriends, smoke joints and amble down corridors between classes. Drama school was basically exactly what I’d envisaged but what’s happened after is completely different. I thought once I started working, I’d have a big open-plan apartment with a record player, vintage furniture and a hot boyfriend I’d drink wine with. I’d envisaged having money and also nice things. A good career but also lots of spare time. At least this dream mostly came true for Annie, who probably doesn’t begrudge occasionally feeling on the outer of Sarah’s and my bullshit now.
I SIT ACROSS from James at the kitchen bench as he cooks. He’s making a salad, one that requires two pans and the oven on the go. Annie is behind us in the dining room, choosing records. Sarah speaks to us from the back door, pausing after statements to blow long, thin streams of smoke outside. Everyone but me is drinking wine. It’s dark now and the kitchen is filled with warm light, soft music and familiar, contented voices. I’ve told both my friends now. Sarah is no longer mad at me. I should feel relieved, but instead I feel hyper attentive. Like when you’ve just taken drugs and your senses are alert, waiting for what’s next to kick in.
Sarah is quizzing James about his masculinity and buying habits. She tells us she’s working on a project to sell a line of alcopops to boys. When Sarah started working in advertising, she was going to transfer her skills into positive behavioural change, try to make people use green bags or waste less food. I haven’t heard her talk about that plan in over a year now.
James is talking about a spreadsheet he has for his purchases and Annie and Sarah are laughing. I go to the bathroom frequently. I’m still constipated but I also need to pee constantly. I thought that only happened when the baby was squashing your bladder. Apparently it’s the size of a grape, but somehow already I’m always on the toilet.
I’m quiet over dinner, only picking at my food.
‘I thought pregnant women were always hungry?’ says Sarah.
‘They’re also always nauseous,’ says Annie.
James chokes on his wine.
THERE’S A HOUSE party in Coburg. I say I’m not going. Then Sarah says Travis will be there so I say I’ll go. For an hour, two at most. We leave the dishes for Annie and James tomorrow and call an Uber.
I regret my decision even before the car has arrived. It’s not like I’m going to tell Travis that I’m pregnant to his dead friend at a party. I’m not planning on telling him at all. It’s not like I’m going to ask him if he knows why his friend killed himself. I’m not even sure what I want him to say. That Pat left a message for me before he died? I know this won’t be true. I sometimes draft messages to Travis, limp apologies and generic offers of support. I don’t send them. I only met Travis a few months ago. He wouldn’t want my condolences and he wouldn’t understand why I want his. There are so many things that, if true, I don’t want to know – that Pat said nothing about me after we slept together; that he mentioned I’d asked him out and he said no; that he was so depressed he hardly spared a thought for me – and yet I want to be near Travis, to hear from him. As though I’m holding out hope he might actually have something nice to say. Something that would make me feel better, whatever that might be. It’s like the unhinged feeling of lusting after someone I know is unavailable.
Travis has no idea that I’m obsessing over him like this or what I’m hiding from him. At least I think he has no idea. The fact that I don’t know heightens my obsession.
‘Drive carefully, she’s pregnant,’ Sarah tells the driver from the back seat.
‘There’s lots of drunk people out tonight,’ the driver says to James, who’s in the front.
The Coburg house is huge and, even full of people, it feels open. The kitchen has a high peaked roof. Large square windows with dark wooden frames make up most of a rear wall facing the big backyard. It’s a stunning place that nobody we know will be able to afford even to rent in ten years. Maybe five. I follow Sarah to the laundry when we arrive. She collects two beers from the trough and hands me one.
‘Are you serious?’
‘I can’t hold them both – it’ll look like I’m stealing.’
She takes another beer and puts it in her handbag. I crack the tin and take one small sip, which I’m relieved to find tastes like shit.
Maybe because I’m pregnant or maybe because it’s a cheap beer, bitter and watery.
‘Cheapskates.’ Sarah shuffles the beers and ice around looking for something better.
For the first hour of the party I’m unbearably anxious. I give my beer to Annie and then regret it. Without something in my hand, I keep touching my face. A disco album is playing. Long tracks, some over ten minutes. No more than four bars looped again and again: the musical equivalent of a dog turning on the spot, chasing its tail. I see Travis early and avoid him. Like I’m trying to play it cool, not wanting him to realise my fixation. Or maybe I’m just nervous. He’s sitting by a fire at the back of the garden. Occasionally he goes inside and each time he does I keep my eyes on the back of the house, waiting for him to return. I notice a guy with floppy auburn hair and a beard staring at me as he stands in line to use the outdoor toilet. I stare back for a few seconds then turn away. When I look over again he’s still watching me. The door of the outhouse opens and he smiles my way before he turns around and steps inside. He must be doing a shit, I think. Otherwise he’d just pee along the side of the house.
Annie and I have lots of half-conversations with other guests, some we’ve met before and some we don’t know. Engineers and web designers and one doctor. All people with degrees, supposedly smart people. Someone asks me what I do and I reply that I’m unemployed. I say it proudly; I don’t say that I’m between jobs or freelancing. Someone else says, ‘You’re an actor, aren’t you?’
‘No.’ I smile at Annie.
The most painful thing about acting is that people mistake it for being interesting. Acting in theatre is as repetitive as working in the same cafe every day except worse, because you serve everyone the exact same meal at the exact time. In this analogy, television work is the equivalent of someone ordering something and then sending it back so that you have to repeat the entire process, beginning with hello, anywhere from twenty to sixty times.
I’ve always known how to act. The secret is not to learn. Go: I snap my fingers and I act. I never understood colleagues who, before a performance, would do yoga or stutter their way through the alphabet. An actor I once worked with would walk up and down the rows of the auditorium, occasionally stopping at a particular seat to say an ex-boyfriend’s name. D25 was Derrick and B17 was Robert. She walked every row like this in a fabricated ritual.
I studied classical ballet when I was growing up. That demands preparation. It’s learned in excruciating increments and is absurdly precise. It’s actually grotesque what the dancers do with their bodies, but it looks beautiful. Almost nobody is good enough to do it professionally. I wasn’t. When I failed my first audition to study dance, they told me I should audition for the acting stream. I never wanted to act, but I wanted a reason to stay in Melbourne with my friends, so I auditioned and I got in and now that’s the story of my life so far, the one I’d told Pat when I first met him. I’ve got almost every role I’ve applied for since. Auditions are like dates – if you reek of desperation it’s over before it begins. The same as walking on stage. Just act! Now. Do it. Newspapers loved to call Eva McMillan the one actor who kept the drowning ship afloat. I saved the show. I made the show. For years I was told I was the show. For a while I believed, like everyone else, that I had some special talent, because I couldn’t see then what I see now: that what I had which was so special was actually what I didn’t have – a fuck to give.
I START TO feel tired and hungry and it’s only when I’m contemplating going home that I finally summon the courage to speak to Travis. I get a beer from the laundry before I join him at the fire near the back fence. I feel like I’m on stage, holding a prop. I don’t want to drink the beer, but I want to look like a regular person who drinks beer.
Sarah is here talking rapid-fire to a girl I don’t recognise, both of them sitting opposite to Travis, who isn’t joining in their conversation. He is staring into the fire, but his expression is vague. Like he’s looking through the flames, focusing on something on the other side. When I first met Travis I noticed he was attractive, but now up close he looks awful. He has the flushed, bloated look of someone who drinks too much. His sandy mullet is limp and oily.
‘Is someone sitting here?’ I ask.
‘Go for it.’
I rest my weight gently on the decrepit wooden folding chair. Travis sips his beer and doesn’t talk.
‘How are you?’ I hardly leave a second of silence before I add, ‘You don’t have to answer.’
‘I’m okay.’ He looks at me for a second – maybe checking to see who it was he told to sit – then turns back to the fire. I take a sip of my beer, moving it to my mouth slowly, deliberately, as if a sudden movement might spook him. I take my time to swallow and once I do, I put my hand on my stomach, like I’m expecting it might explode. I don’t know what to say to Travis and I feel intensely awkward in our silence, although he seems fine. He doesn’t look relaxed, but he seems unaware, vacant.
‘He wouldn’t want me to be sad,’ he says eventually. His gaze has shifted down to his beer.
‘If I died I’d want my best friends to be fucking miserable,’ Sarah says, before running her tongue over a cigarette paper. I didn’t realise she was listening to our conversation, and it seems the girl with her didn’t notice either; she looks dejected having suddenly lost Sarah’s attention.
Travis laughs at Sarah’s remark. A small, sad laugh. He throws a log in the fire and smoke blows in my face. I gag, manage not to vomit.
‘I think I should get some fresh air.’
I wait for a few seconds before I stand, thinking Travis might join me, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t even look at me.
SITTING ON THE kerb between two parked cars, my head hanging low, I try to make out the detail in the bitumen. I can hear the party behind me; I could swear this song was played earlier. Eventually, I hear the ticking of spokes and a light shines from behind.
‘Are you okay?’ a male voice asks.
‘I’m sick.’ I keep my head down.
‘I can see that.’
‘I mean, like, I’m not drunk – I’m actually unwell.’
‘Are you okay?’ he repeats.
I look up and see the auburn-haired guy from the outhouse. He’s standing with his bike, lights and helmet on. Ready to go.
‘We’ve met before,’ he says. ‘Do you remember?’
I stare at him for a few seconds and then I admire his bike; it’s expensive.
BACK AT HOME, in my bed, I can’t enjoy our sex. My mind is programmed with a series of alarms ready to interrupt any moment when I start to relax – I am pregnant, I am pregnant, I read somewhere women’s vaginas go purple when they’re pregnant.
Emerging from between my legs, he wipes his mouth, wet with me, on my belly. Kisses my abdomen twice as he makes his way towards my breasts then pulls the lace of my bra down with his forefinger. As he’s sucking my left nipple I stare at the brown stains on the ceiling. I think about how much larger than normal my breasts are. I have never had sex with breasts this large. His beard is tickling my waist. He finishes his suckling with an audible, squeaky kiss then looks up at me. ‘You’re really beautiful.’ He is whispering, as though it pains him to say it.
I don’t come.
I DON’T TRY to be quiet when I vomit in the morning, hoping it’ll disgust him and he’ll leave. I want to find him seated on the edge of the bed, lacing up his Vans upon my return. Instead he’s on his back, the pillow I was sleeping on now propping him up. The doona sits slack below his belly button. He’s reading something on his phone. I don’t like seeing a stranger this relaxed in my bed. I stand in the doorway to my room. From here his chest hair is a dark letter T across the top of his pecs and down his centre, with stray hairs scattered around his nipples and belly button. I think about how I’ll have to change my sheets later, or at least vacuum away his hairs. He puts his phone down on my bedside table when he notices me watching him.
‘You didn’t seem that drunk last ni
ght.’
‘I told you I wasn’t drunk.’ I stay standing in the doorway. ‘I’m sick.’
‘I remember.’ He smiles.
I think about telling him it’s not contagious, but I don’t and he doesn’t ask.
I don’t want to make this guy a coffee. This guy whose name I cannot remember. I remember him telling me his name. I remember him holding his hand out for me to shake before he sat down next to me in the gutter outside the party. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I remember him leaning in to kiss me and before he could I interrupted: ‘Let’s go to my place.’
‘I don’t have any coffee,’ I say. ‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t drink it.’ He moves his hands to rest behind his head. He has a tattoo on the inside of his bicep and another under his forearm, thin lines like pencil drawings. His underarm hair is lighter than the hair on his chest and head. ‘Coffee’s a drug.’
‘So’s MDMA.’ A bag of which is on my bedside table. He didn’t offer me any, but pulled it out of his pockets last night with his wallet and keys and the condom.
‘That’s a good drug.’ His eyebrows do a quick up–down.
I leave him in my bed and make myself toast in the kitchen. I take my time eating, breaking it into small pieces. Eventually he appears from my room. Dressed, thank God.
‘You really do have a weak stomach.’ He’s looking at my bite-sized pieces of plain toast.
I don’t say anything. He sits across from me and starts eating from my plate. I get the Vegemite and jam from the fridge, then put more bread in the toaster.
‘So, what are you up to today?’ I stay facing the counter, my back to him.
Small Joys of Real Life Page 3