Gucci Mamas (17 page)

‘THE BITCH!’

‘The bitch, I know, she’s a complete bitch,’ replied Ellie.

‘She knows it’s you, she must know,’ said Mim.

‘I know, of course she knows what she’s doing, she’s doing it on purpose.’

‘But … but … why? What a BITCH!!’ Mim was furious. She stood up, and started pacing; she wanted to punch something, preferably a red-headed smug little bitch. What kind of community was she a part of where such nasty backstabbing was so commonplace? It wasn’t a
community
at all. People like LJ were only looking out for number one and everyone in their way just got burnt. Mim just didn’t want to be a part of it any more, she wanted out. She stopped and stood at the floor-to-ceiling plate glass window and stared futilely at the storm clouds forming in the distance.

‘I know,’ Ellie replied, sounding resigned. ‘She’s a nasty piece of work and she’s doing it on purpose, and there’s nothing I can do to stop her.’

‘But you never trashed her stupid exhibit in the first place, can’t you just explain that to her?’ Mim asked, desperately thinking of a way to help her friend and stop this avalanche of humiliation.

‘Hang on a minute,’ she said, turning slowly, with a quizzical look on her face. ‘What on earth were you doing in purple cork wedges at Studio 22?’

‘Well, here’s the thing,’ said Ellie, sighing deeply, and she told Mim her story.

Ellie Fitzpatrick was trapped in a hideous life. There was no way out. She couldn’t see any kind of happiness in her future. She could only see more junkie-filled parties, more strange men hitting on her and nowhere for her and her little sister Sarah to turn.

Her eventual escape came from the most unexpected source: her next-door neighbour Roxanne. Two years older than the gentle Ellie, she was a real wild child. Ever since they were small children, Roxanne had lived on the edge. Smoking at seven, hooking up with boys at twelve, dope at thirteen. Ellie and Roxanne had little in common except for the dysfunctional and violent home lives they had both endured, and thus an unlikely friendship had formed.

The whole street had witnessed constant screaming matches between Roxanne and her family. The fights usually resulted in Roxanne slamming their front door and going straight over to Ellie’s house to drag her to the park, where they would sit in the bright red plastic globe at the top of the A-frame slide and smoke and talk about their rotten lives and what they were going to do when they were rich and famous and out of this place.

One day Roxanne took off, but this time she didn’t stop at Ellie’s house. She had just turned fifteen and no-one saw her for the next year. Ellie hadn’t relied on Roxanne as
much as the older girl had needed Ellie’s sympathetic ear and therefore didn’t miss her. Her younger sister Sarah filled the void of confidante and they grew closer as they faced the debauchery of their household together.

When Roxanne eventually returned she was different. She had new sexy clothes, a more angular, harder face. She was just back to collect her things. ‘I’ve done it, Ellie, I’ve blown this scene.’ They sat in their usual hang out, smoking SuperMild and drinking Tab. ‘Ya gotta come and see me work: I’m in show business, I’m a real live dancer. And I get paid a fucking fortune.’

So, when her sister Sarah was safe at school, Ellie went to see Roxanne work and was not at all surprised to discover that Roxanne’s job was at a strip club. To Roxanne, coming from her grey and dingy world, the sparkling mirrored disco balls, red plush banquette seating and strobe lights were as glamorous as any show-business job.

After that, Ellie would often escape the violence and misery of her life to visit Roxanne at the club. She loved the kindly Mrs Mac who worked in the ‘Wardrobe Department’ (this was just a glamorous way of saying she cleaned the filthy club, patched up the pieces of scrap the girls called costumes, and mended the never-ending stream of broken hearts and bruised bodies). But to Ellie Mrs Mac was a maternal figure who would listen to her teen worries and offer advice and comfort. Ellie loved being in that ‘Wardrobe Department’ more than anywhere in the world, and if she hadn’t had to go home and care for Sarah, she’d have stayed there and helped Mrs Mac all night as well as all day.

Ellie loved the girls too: girls just like her, every one with a different sad story to tell, everyone optimistic about the future and looking forward to a time when they could escape. She’d spend hours chatting, helping them with their
clothes, and giggling with them, just like the group of teenage girls that they were. It made her feel like she was part of a real family for the first time in her life.

Then the manager sprung her hanging around. Ellie had blossomed and there was no hiding her generous bust-line and long, slim legs. Cowboy Nick was a short, stubby man, whose pocked face glistened under a sheen of grease. His trademark burgundy polyester pants and pink ruffled shirt competed with his slicked hair and large side-burns for ugliness. The clink of his signature gold bracelets and oversized opal cufflinks gave away any hope of a silent approach, though he usually avoided the ‘cattle-cars’, as he liked to call the dressing rooms. He would just hit on the girls when they were working the bar after their show. But one day he wandered backstage and noticed Ellie sitting in the dressing room chatting to Roxanne. Her youth and innocence glowed beside his jaded, worn out old tarts in their faded sequins.

He stalked the fresh meat. He began by separating her from her pack, blocking her exit when the other girls ran on stage for the finale. He favoured her with lecherous grins, a slap on the arse or a tweak of her breast each time he passed, until Ellie was terrified and confused.

But the slime ball was after something more than merely a quick grope and poke. One day he barrelled her up in an empty dressing room, with his filthy paw up her school dress and his hot breath on her neck. He knew she would beg for mercy. She did, and he made his move with a deal: ‘Go on stage and I’ll leave you alone.’

Ellie stressed over the decision for weeks but finally realised that she was trapped. And the only way out of the trap was money. She needed to earn enough to buy her and Sarah’s escape from their miserable existence. And she’d seen how well it had worked for Roxanne, who now had her own flat and was in control of her own life.

The offer – albeit a sleazy one – of a well-paid job was in fact a blessing, and she swallowed her pride – and her modesty – and went back to the club.

So Ellie became an ‘exotic dancer’. The girls gave her a makeover to hide her youth. She stopped going to school. The money was good, but the tips she got after from ‘working the bar’ were unbelievable. Her wide-eyed naivety and little-girl charm had all the punters throwing the bills at her. They particularly loved the fact that she pretended to be scared of them.

Then one day, just a few months after she started, Bryce came in. He didn’t usually frequent Club 22, but as the producer of a high-rating football program he often catered to the tastes of his on-screen talent.

He took one look at the fresh-faced Ellie on the stage and just wanted to protect her. He spoke to her as soon as she entered the public area after her performance. Ellie was attracted to him immediately. He was no Greek god, but in his eyes Ellie saw a warmth and honesty she had never known.

They started dating and married a few months later.

‘And that’s that,’ said Ellie, looking up at her confidante. ‘That’s the real “Ellie Fitzpatrick” story. Not very sophisticated, is it?’

‘Oh, Ellie,’ said Mim, throwing her arms around her friend. ‘What a story. You poor love. Whatever happened to your mum?’

‘What you’d expect. She overdosed one day about a year after Sarah and I left home,’ Ellie said with only a hint of sadness. ‘She was young and stupid and so screwed up. There was really no hope for her.’

‘I am sure that LJ wouldn’t exhibit if she knew the real story.’ Mim was back on the issue at hand.

‘It’s none of her damn business, Mim,’ Ellie said tersely. ‘There’s no way I am going to bare my soul to that mercenary little social climber. Let her go for it. Good on her. I could not care less. And, Mim, you must promise me you will keep out and not even hint about this to her.’

‘Absolutely, Ellie,’ Mim agreed. ‘I’ll control myself, I promise.’

‘You’re a good friend, Mim, thank you. Now let’s cross our fingers and hope Bryce doesn’t lose it completely when he finds out what she’s done.’

June 2000

Liz was on a mission, and she was running out of time and – quite frankly – out of patience trying to navigate her black Volvo through the grungy back streets of St Kilda.

The bayside suburbs were a bit of a mystery to Liz, who felt that one could find all one needed in High Street, Armadale, thank you very much. But apparently a new vibe had come into the area and it was becoming quite acceptable, with its fashionable boutiques and opulent stores. That was the problem with this new millennium: now that it was the year 2000 everything old was new again – it was so hard to keep up!

Besides, Liz just had to have a cashmere piece to wear to today’s party – Ellie’s little Rupert was turning two years old – who could believe it that all their babies were suddenly toddlers. All the best people had been turning up at casual luncheons and coffee mornings wrapped in darling little cashmere throws, twin-sets and boleros from a new
little boutique called 8 Inkerman. Now Liz could stand it no longer: she wanted cashmere today, if it killed her.

Stopped in her quest by traffic lights, she drummed her fingers on the leather steering wheel and peered out through her tinted windows with interest. What a mélange of colour and activity, she thought. It’s almost artistic, in an earthy, urban way – like one of those paintings one sees of turn-of-the-century peasant life.

A very young mother in a kaleidoscopic outfit of hessian, complete with turban, rocked a stroller while waiting at a bus-stop. Two young men leaned against a wall, with bare feet and torn jeans, sharing a bottle in a paper bag. Their eyes were blank, their bodies limp and lethargic with defeat. A blonde Rastafarian busked on the corner. The suited businessmen animatedly chattering on mobile phones were juxtaposed with the Aboriginal group in the park. The prostitutes plied their trade on street corners with blank faces and minimal clothing.

Soaking up the atmosphere of the streets, Liz suddenly felt an overwhelming sadness at the huge contrast of this area, where the poverty-stricken, the drug-addicted, the affluent and the fashionable walked side by side, yet miles apart.

The Volvo came to a stop at the Fitzroy Street lights, perpendicular to a laneway. With an almost perverse voyeurism Liz scanned the alley to see what this seedy side of the suburb would reveal. What at first glance she had dismissed as a pile of discarded rags against a mini-skip, Liz quickly realised was actually a person curled in the foetal position, a shabby coat pulled over the top for warmth. As if sensing the scrutiny of another, the street-kid slowly lifted her head and locked eyes with Liz for a fleeting second.

Poor love, Liz thought to herself. God, there were so many to help that some days she felt overwhelmed with a
sense of powerlessness. She looked again as the child put her head back down on her knees, her matted black hair now all that was visible.

Something shifted inside Liz. Something flew, just out of sight, across her mind. There was something about those eyes, that face seemed familiar somehow.

The lights changed and Liz, struggling to reach a slippery thought at the edge of her mind, eased the car back into gear and steadied her foot over the accelerator, taking a last look into the alley. She was set to pull away as a sickening rush of realisation flooded her consciousness.

It was her. The eyes, the hair, the set of her face all told her that this was the daughter she’d thought she’d lost. Liz pulled on the hand-brake with little consideration for the traffic behind her, leapt from the car and ran awkwardly in her Chanel pumps towards the girl. ‘Mikaylah,’ she shouted as she ran towards the child. ‘It’s me! It’s Liz!’

Mikaylah stared at Liz through a drug-induced haze. Her eyes were flat, her features slack, her cheekbones pronounced against the hollow face. Hardened to street life, her instant response was to flee. Few nights passed when somebody didn’t chase her for sex, drugs, money or food.

She staggered to her feet while Liz was still ten metres away. Liz’s shouting was indistinguishable over the car horns honking angrily at the black Volvo and Mikaylah stumbled down the alleyway to escape certain attack.

The alley danced in her heroin-haze, the cobblestones unstable under her feet. Fear drove her on, brought out her animal instincts for survival and forced her wasted body away from the enemy.

From far away across the ocean of her addled mind she heard the cry: ‘Mikaylah: is that you?’

Mikaylah had reached her goal. Nestled between two wheelie bins a simple grey door was ajar. The door was at
the base of a two storey wall punctuated with steel-barred windows. She staggered toward the entrance shouting, ‘Mikaylah’s dead!’ before disappearing into the darkness.

Liz heard a door slam, and by the time she reached the space between the bins where Mikaylah had fled, the door she had gone through was shut and deadlocked.

Liz hammered on the door and yelled until her voice was hoarse.

‘Mikaylah, I am so sorry! Please talk to me!’ She looked at the simple hand-painted sign on the door.
St Kilda Angels. A Mission for Life.

The honking back on Grey Street was escalating, and she looked up to see two policemen standing beside her empty car. She hurriedly made her way back to the vehicle, and after stammering an apology to the boys in blue, jumped behind the wheel to the chorus of angry shouts and horn-blowing from the throng of trapped cars late for their busy and important lives.

Barely unable to see through the tears that streamed from her carefully made-up eyes, Liz concentrated on getting out of the traffic and then parked in the first quiet street she could find. Turning off the engine, she collapsed back into her seat and let her emotions engulf her.

Wracked with sobs, she thought back to the moment that had haunted her for the past two years.

A day hadn’t passed where she hadn’t begged for time to turn back. To have that thirty seconds again. Regret was a heavy burden, and one she had carried alone ever since she had turned her daughter away from her door as though she was nothing more than a stray dog.

Liz hated herself for what she had done. She thought back to the dinner party that evening two years ago and wondered for the hundredth time how she’d made it through. It had been the first time she and the Mothers’
Group had ever dined together and they still laughed about how vague and distant Liz had been.

Liz could barely remember a minute of that night after Mikaylah showed up on her doorstep merely hours earlier. Her stomach was churning and her thoughts a scattered mess. The memories she’d worked so hard to deny – to bury – had resurfaced with a vengeance, and had lost none of their painful edge despite being hidden away for fifteen years.

Liz had been in emotional agony as she struggled to smile and play the perfect hostess to her new friends that awful night, while inside shards of memory kept rising to slice open old wounds. She just couldn’t reconcile the scruffy teenager at her door with the little pink bundle she’d tearfully handed over to a nurse.

‘It’s for the best,’ the nurse had said. ‘Just think of the scandal, dear.’

So Liz had handed over her baby, with her sweet rosebud mouth, big dark eyes and cheeks that felt like peach fuzz against Liz’s face. Afterwards she was empty, and the hole inside never really filled up. It was simply patched over as Liz swung herself determinedly back into a life that had little meaning to her any more.

Falling pregnant with Roman, her first child, had done little to heal her pain. Subconsciously she felt she had no right to be a mother to this boy, not after giving away her tiny newborn daughter. She hired two nannies so there would be round-the-clock care for her dark-haired infant, but she rarely held him or interacted with him, instead filling her calendar with inane social events that kept her even busier than before her pregnancy.

No one noticed much. After all, she had money and privilege – why should she change nappies and run baths? She was parenting in a perfectly acceptable form for a woman of her rank and position.

Everything had changed the afternoon Mikaylah stepped briefly back into her life. Not only was the wound inside her torn savagely open, another part of her came alive, and more than anything Liz wanted to be a mother to her remaining child. The next day she fired her nannies and started parenting. She quickly found that it helped to ease the pain inside her, but it also provided a bittersweet glimpse into everything she had missed the first time, with her daughter; the daughter she had first given away and now had sent away.

During the bleak year that followed, Roman and her burgeoning friendship with the Mothers’ Group girls were the only bright moments in a dark period of depression that descended on Liz. Her guilt was so raw, her soul so grazed with regret, that for the longest time just getting out of bed each day required a sheer force of will that seemed too great to endure. If it weren’t for Roman’s happy gurgles summoning her, she would have made the Sheridan sheets and silk bedspread her permanent home.

After Roman’s first birthday the fog began to lift from Liz. She could see her son changing and growing; could see what a good job she was doing and took strength from that. His unfailing passion for her; his delight at her presence and tears if she even left the room without him stunned her to the core and helped nurse her back to emotional health.

As Roman tottered into his second year, watching him grow and blossom into an adoring toddler made Liz’s heart lift even more. A hard kernel of pain still sat squarely in her heart, but she could breathe and live and enjoy life again.

But now this. She had almost come face-to-face with her daughter for the second time, and she had blown it again.

Would she ever get the chance to make it up to Mikaylah?

Liz let out a few jagged gasps as her crying storm abated, then she dried her eyes, reapplied her make-up and considered her position.

At least she knew that Mikaylah was in Melbourne, in St Kilda in fact. She even knew where she had gone for help – she was sure if she turned up there now the teen would be long gone, but at least she had a place to start looking for her.

She started the engine and headed for home, her mind suddenly filled with a plan.

There would be no cashmere today.