‘This is a nice place.’
I turn around and see he’s looking past me, through the kitchen window into the backyard. Like most backyards in Thornbury, ours is concreted, a Hills hoist the focal point. Lining the back fence are pots of herbs, some wilted, some gone to seed – gifts from Annie, who eventually stopped giving us plants and instead started taking them away to repot in her garden.
‘It’s a bit of a dump, really.’ I concentrate on buttering, so I don’t have to look at him.
Our house isn’t falling apart, but it is cheap. Amid white wrought-iron and Juliet balconies, boxy apartment blocks and weatherboards with psoriasis, our house looks new, but fake. Like a demountable; something that could come flat-packed from Ikea.
‘So, I actually have a lot on today,’ I say, watching him as he sticks the same knife in both the butter and the jam.
‘So do I.’ He smiles and stands up. ‘Last night was fun.’
I take a bite of toast, fill my mouth with food before I smile back, tight-lipped.
‘Good luck with your busy day.’ He doesn’t try to kiss or hug me and I don’t walk him to the front door.
When I hear it shut behind him, I picture him walking up my street alone and suddenly I wonder where his bike is. He rode in the Uber here with me last night. Did he lock it up somewhere at the party before we left? As I slowly make my way through another piece of toast, I try to remember more details from the night, but I can’t. It seems that, even without alcohol, house parties are just long blocks of noisy time punctuated by not much. Maybe it’s baby-brain, I’m not sure. My only distinct memory is Travis’s eyes, glassy and vacant, but in a different way from everyone else’s.
When I return to my room, I find a small piece of lined paper on the bedside table. It has the guy’s number and his name, Fergus, and a small, messy love heart.
I throw it in the bin.
I WAITED TWO WEEKS TO hear from you. We didn’t exchange numbers after we slept together, but you could’ve found me online, as I’d found you. I checked several times a day, hoping to see you there. I remember Sarah saying once when we were younger that the secret to getting over a break-up wasn’t to have another relationship, it was just to want another one. As soon as you had feelings for someone, even if it didn’t work out, it gave you hope. Possibility is all you need to live day to day. I wasn’t going through a break-up when I met you. I’d been single for ages. I wasn’t recovering from heartbreak but from boredom. My interest in you was like the striking of a match. It brightened my mind.
I REMEMBER TOSSING up if I should send you a friend request or just a message. I didn’t want to do either. What I wanted was for you to contact me. Eventually I landed on the message, but no request.
What are you up to this weekend?
I wasn’t asking you on a date, but asking you to ask me. You replied quickly.
Not a lot. You?
Not a lot.
Again, I wondered whether to send you a friend request. I didn’t because you hadn’t, which I regret now, obviously.
YOUR PROFILE PICTURE is not of you but a beach. It was your profile picture for two years. Then you changed – another photo of a beach, but this one with you in it. Sitting on the sand next to a surfboard, your wetsuit pulled down to your waist, white zinc on your nose, pink skin visible around its outer edges. Drops of water on your shoulders, clear ovals overlapping with your beige freckles. This photo was your profile picture for a year, and then two months before you died you changed it back to the beach. Now I’ve added Travis and can see all his photos, I have new access to you. I spend whole days in bed, bingeing on it. You and Travis surfed together and went to music festivals. You both had longer hair at uni. Yours was redder then, when you were younger. It faded to blond–pink around twenty-four. You were weedier back then too. Your thighs bulked out over the years, probably from bike riding. There are lots of photos of you with bikes. Splayed on the grass at Edinburgh Gardens, cycles on the ground beside you in a heap. There’s a lean girl with dark hair and thick eyebrows, androgynous and attractive. Her name is Virginia and she’s at your side in some photos, or the photos are taken by her, of you and Travis. Then she disappears. It seems you broke up over a year ago. She wrote under your profile picture after you died:
Thank you for making me a better person. Thank you for teaching me how to make really good passata – I’ll think of you every time I add sugar and vinegar to my tinned tomatoes.
My favourite photo is of you and Travis. You’re seated next to one another. Drinking coffee, I don’t know where, but it’s recognisably Melbourne. You’re wearing matching striped t-shirts. Travis’s is blue and yours maroon. You’re smiling, your arms folded on the table. Travis is sipping his coffee, eyeing the camera over his cup. It looks like such an ordinary and mundane occasion. It’s hard to imagine why someone would’ve taken a photo, let alone why it’s been uploaded. But you both look so goddamn happy.
I SENT MY first message on a Friday, my second the day after.
Want to hang out? Today? Or tomorrow?
‘Hang out’ left it open for you to interpret if I wanted sex, or if it was a date. Three question marks was meant to feign nonchalance, although looking back on it I now see it would have suggested the opposite.
You replied that day.
Hey, sorry. I’ve now made plans for the rest of the weekend.
Hope you find something to do! X
I wondered if it was a lie. One that you were forced into after having said you weren’t up to much.
FIVE DAYS LATER you died and I hoped that it hadn’t been a lie. It was the last weekend in July, the last weekend of your life, and I like to think you filled it with lots of nice things.
ALL DAY I’M BLOCKING CALLS. Some from Mum, some from Kate. When I don’t answer Mum she sends cute photos of baby bucket hats and redundant, albeit cute, baby running shoes. I send her cartoon love hearts in response. Then my phone lights up with her face and I turn it over.
When I told Mum I was pregnant, I didn’t say I was having a baby, although of course that’s what she thought I was telling her. She was completely silent on the phone, which I hadn’t expected, so I went on to clarify. ‘I’m not telling you I’m having a baby. I’m telling you I’m trying to decide if I should keep the baby or not.’ She wasn’t too shocked at first. Not in a bad way, at least. She kept saying, ‘Oh my God, I mean gosh. Oh God, I mean gosh.’ Even though we were never religious and oh my God was something we said a lot, and gosh never. I told her the father was in Ireland.
‘It’s probably a good thing,’ I said. ‘Co-parenting with someone you hardly know would suck. This is easier in a way.’
I didn’t feel too deceitful when I said this because it is true that if Pat were alive, I don’t think I’d be having his baby.
‘Oh my God, I mean gosh.’
A day later she was stern and rehearsed.
‘Think about the hardest thing you’ve ever had to do.’
I was silent on the line.
‘Eva, are you thinking?’
I said yes, but really I was just thinking that the hardest thing I’d ever had to do was probably this.
‘Double how hard that thing is. Then think about the most tired you’ve ever been. Double that. Combine those two feelings and that’s one day as a parent.’
‘Do you regret it?’
‘Of course not.’
It wasn’t until I told her I’d quit my job that she went mental. Now she won’t stop asking me how I’m going to do this alone. How can I give a baby a future if I don’t have one myself?
‘I have money.’
‘Is it going to last forever?’
‘I’ll get a job.’
‘You had a job!’
And even though I told her the father went overseas, she keeps asking about him.
‘Tell me more about this father.’
This father. I’m not sure if she can tell that I’m lying or if, like she says, she ju
st wants me to get child support. Over text she is kind and practical. She was the one who sent What to Expect When You’re Expecting in the mail. She sends me links to blogs by women who write about being pregnant. I send back lots of cartoon love hearts.
My agent doesn’t know I’m pregnant. She emails me audition notices for roles in theatre shows. I ask if she can book me for ads. She calls. I don’t answer.
I go on to Kate’s website every other day to check if she’s taken me down, which she hasn’t. My face is still there. My fake face, make-up and lighting filtering my skin, the tight clusters of freckles either side of my nose highlighted. My hair bigger, blacker than in real life. My smile tight, a half-smile. Not because I have bad teeth, but because if I smiled with my teeth my cheeks would puff out, making one of my eyes look smaller than the other. The pointed chin in this photo has already rounded out. All the headshots lined up in a row, like a yearbook for a school only for hot people.
A few weeks ago I asked Kate if I could put her on my résumé as a reference for other non-acting work. She rang me within minutes of my sending the email. I didn’t answer and a text came almost immediately after.
Not sure what I’ll say if they ask about your attitude or job commitment.
I replied:
You could say that I did whatever you told me for six years.
When she rang again I answered and was shocked to realise she was sobbing down the line.
‘Why are you leaving me?’
‘So many people want to do this,’ I countered. ‘Hire one of them.’
I made a CV when I first quit but I didn’t have anything to put on it other than acting roles and the bartending I did while I was studying. My most recent relevant experience would probably be the play where I had a part as a Domino’s employee. I had a lot of lines about margheritas and how they should have anchovies on them. I didn’t think it would be difficult to get a job at a cafe or one of the local shops that sells candles and hand cream. I littered the main roads with my CV – High Street, St Georges, the Brunswick East end of Lygon, where all the best restaurants are. I must’ve dropped into fifty venues when I first found out I was pregnant. I was trying to get in early, before my stomach started looking like a partially inflated ball. So far nobody has phoned me. I wonder how hard these jobs could possibly be, then I wonder if I’m too cocky for thinking this way.
Not having a job is not that different from being a working actor. I’m used to having my days off during seasons, and walking around the house talking to myself is more entertaining than walking around the house trying to remember lines, which is far better than being in rehearsal, where you’re repeating the same lines over and over but having someone ask you to do it differently. Now pretend you’re in a hot-air balloon, cut in with observations about the sky. When I was on show-call I was always working evenings and on weekends so I would go to work just as my friends were heading out. I’d meet them late, after the show. They’d be five drinks deep, Sarah probably eight. I remember the two times I did Shakespeare – Much Ado: Beatrice; The Taming of the Shrew: Kate – I finished so much later it was harder to catch up. That was when I discovered whisky with beer backs. I used to go to bed drunk and wake up with a hangover. Now I go to bed at the time I used to start drinking and wake up and watch Sarah with a hangover. It doesn’t feel very different because I never remembered a lot of what we did when we were out anyway. Physically I don’t feel superior to Sarah, as I’m usually vomiting or too tired to move, but it’s nice to be freed of the mental anguish. When I used to go out, especially if I was in a bad mood or found myself in a situation where I didn’t know a lot of people, I would ‘act’ the part of myself. Instead of just being, I’d act Eva McMillan. And because I was bored or anxious, I’d drink a lot and wake the next day and go over my words as though they were lines I was studying. Their deeper meaning: I am a dickhead. I don’t think Sarah suffers this same level of social anxiety, but looking at her pained shuffling through the house makes me think of my old self. The character of me. And I’m glad that, while I might become lonely, at least I don’t have to worry about anything I said to anybody while I was drunk.
While my life feels essentially the same, I know that I am changing. Like my jawline, my abdomen is rounding. Slightly. I think. Mornings, studying myself in the mirror, I don’t see it. I slide my hands behind the waistband of my pants and they don’t seem tighter from one day to the next. But sometimes, when I’m not expecting it – carrying washing in from the line or on the way to the bathroom – I’ll catch sight of myself in a mirror and see that I’m fuller somehow. The mound is there, as small as it is. My nipples are covered in small lumps. They’re darker now, too, and look crude on my naked body, like stick-on googly-eyes. It’s not so much that I’m different; I’m distorted.
SUDDENLY SELF-CONSCIOUS ABOUT my body – my friends are going to realise I don’t have a role as a marathon runner coming up – I stop going out. On Friday night, a week after the party in Coburg, I spend the evening on the couch in front of the TV. When Sarah and Annie try to drag me away, I tell them I need to save money – which I do; I need to save money. I put the news on, trying to be a person who is well informed. I want to be a parent who can answer my child’s questions about the world. I watch a story about the drought, how it’s definitely caused by climate change. The newsreader announces there will be coverage on the Syrian refugee crisis after the ad break and I change channels. I watch reruns of Friends. The friends on TV talk and laugh – they hate their jobs, but they love each other. Joey and Chandler swap apartments with Monica and Rachel and now they want to swap back. The boys agree only if the girls will kiss. Someone mistakes Chandler for being gay and to him this is embarrassing beyond belief. It’s heteronormative and homophobic, but at least climate change doesn’t exist yet. Or it’s not as bad. Or they just don’t mention it. My own friends message me updates about their nights out and when I get a text from Fergus it confuses me. I don’t register at first that it’s not from Sarah or Annie. I never saved his number and I’m unsure how he got mine.
Want to get a drink later tonight? F
I’m out, sorry.
Me too. Want to go home together?
Sorry. Can’t tonight.
Between nausea, constipation and lethargy, I may be the least horny I’ve ever been in my life.
ANNIE COMES OVER early the next morning. She drags Sarah out of bed, her face squashed from sleep. Annie has already played netball this morning so her night must have ended earlier than Sarah’s.
‘Was the band good?’ I ask.
Sarah says they were good, Annie says just okay.
‘Was Travis there?’
Sarah answers through a yawn. ‘Yeah, he was there.’
‘How was he?’
‘He was fine,’ says Sarah.
‘Considering,’ adds Annie.
We’re always considering now.
Annie announces that we’re going swimming.
‘You need exercise.’
I’m unsure if her comment is directed at me or Sarah. Possibly both of us. She’s bought three new pairs of goggles. She takes them out of their boxes at our kitchen table and gives a pair to Sarah. Sarah puts them on, even though she’s refusing to exercise. The goggles cover the purple shadows under her eyes, but I can still see her dry, hungover skin. She sticks her tongue out like a baby gagging, desperate for water.
‘It’s good for our mental health.’ Annie puts on a pair of goggles too. They look like a dentist and a patient, bug-eyed and ready for an extraction, the dentist lying to the patient when she says it won’t hurt.
My new, larger breasts spill out of my old bikini top, so we detour via the Northcote Plaza on the way to the pool. I buy a cheap, black sports bra from Kmart and a cup of donuts from the Donut King, which Sarah and I share. Annie doesn’t comment on the donuts, but Sarah is defensive anyway. ‘It’s not like we’re exercising to lose weight!’
On our bikes we fly quick
ly, in single file, down the hill on Arthurton Road.
When I last came to Northcote swimming pool, a few years ago now, I was struck by the diversity. I remember I said, ‘You could shoot an ad here.’ Young people, old people, people of colour, women in hijabs. Today it’s mostly lap swimmers and a couple of mothers with babies, all white. I guess it’s the weather; it’s not quite hot enough yet to bring out everybody. But, also, Northcote is different now. It’s a Melburnian joke that if you drive down High Street from Preston through Thornbury to Northcote you see all the stages of gentrification. Northcote was once like Preston, with lots of international grocers and delis and migrants. Now Northcote is full of cafes owned by people who don’t live here and expensive children’s clothing stores, and the houses are owned by AFL players. Thornbury sits somewhere between the two. Recently, when Sarah and I noticed a new ice-cream bar in Thornbury, I said to her, ‘This place is becoming more like Northcote every week.’
‘Northcote?’ she said. ‘Try Brooklyn.’
I could see what she meant. Thornbury’s gentrification seems younger than Northcote’s. But maybe that’s just another one of the stages.
I HAVEN’T SWUM laps since high school and I get puffed straight away because of the breathing. Running is about controlling breathing. In for three, out for three. Use your feet as a metronome and count evenly. Swimming feels out of control. Every third stroke I turn my head to the side, gasping for air. I try to use the same logic as for running: keep it steady; out for three, in for one. But the one is always desperate. Sometimes I breathe in water and choke and have to stop, standing on the tiles or treading water as I cough. I join the older people in the slow lane and do an easy breaststroke, head above water. I look to the next lane over. Sarah is using a kickboard with Annie yelling from close behind her, ‘You can kick harder than that!’
‘My bathers are riding up my butt.’ Sarah holds her kickboard with one arm, awkwardly jerking her body forward.
Small Joys of Real Life Page 4