The Anti-Cool Girl (10 page)

It was certainly a situation that Rhiannon would have handled with a lot more grace. Or at least a lot more pashing. She just naturally understood certain parts of life that remained a mystery to me.

Back at my exciting night in, the Opening Ceremony had just started when Rhiannon called me at my friend's house.
‘Rosie.
Something bad has happened! You need to go to the house and make sure Brian doesn't smash the TV.'

‘What?' I said. ‘The TV? Where are you?'

‘I'm at the hospital with Mum. Look, you're at Alesha's, right? Ask her mum to drive you home
right now.
You need to go inside and lock the door and don't let anybody in. I have to go.'

Then she hung up. My brain was still catching up with her first sentence and the conversation was already over. Mum. Hospital. Protect the TV.
Protect the TV?
Mum was in hospital? I had no idea which hospital, so I couldn't call back. I just had to follow the instructions. Go home. Lock door. Protect the TV.

Alesha's mum dropped me off and didn't ask any questions. The fact I constantly smelled like pot meant she understood things were a little different at my house, and was usually kind enough not to pry.

I opened the front door to find an empty house that looked like a crime scene. There was blood everywhere. On the walls. On the carpet. It was like someone had taken a water pistol filled with red paint and shot up everything. Furniture was knocked over. Glass was smashed.

Lock the door. Protect the TV. Lock the door. Protect the TV.

Looking around the blood-soaked living room, I couldn't understand why the TV was a top priority at that point. Something had clearly gone terribly wrong. I was worried that my mum was dead, and there was more blood in my house than I could expect to see in a lifetime of periods – who gave a fuck about the TV? For the first time in years, I started to feel the toxic butterflies take over my body again. I ran to the bathroom, and was about to vomit when I realised the bathroom was the worst of all. There was blood all over the toilet seat. There were
puddles of it on the ground. Solid, coagulated bits that looked like grape jelly were stuck on the side of the bath. As with so many times before, I froze. I stood there in silence for a long time. I just didn't know what to do.

I couldn't stop staring at all the blood, so I just started walking round and round the house, trying to imagine scenarios that would explain the massive volume of it. Part of me really hoped that Tayla was getting what she deserved, and not only had her first period come at six years of age, but it had obviously been the most epic period anyone had ever seen. Everyone would come home the next morning, and Tayla would be forced to wear a maxi-maxi-maxi-pad every day for the rest of her life. Then we'd all laugh and laugh that I had ever thought something bad had happened, and Rhiannon would say something about a band I'd never heard of, and I'd say something about a book she'd never heard of and everything would go back to normal.

I sat on the couch for a while, in the empty house covered in blood. I figured ‘protecting the TV' meant at least looking at it. But even I, only thirteen and possibly television's biggest fan, couldn't sit and watch a TV when there was blood on the wall behind it. I had my own TV in my room, and I just wanted to go in there and lock the door and watch the Opening Ceremony and pretend like the house was filled with people and not blood. So, I went to the kitchen, made myself a bowl of Rosie's Chicken Soup and took it to my bedroom. Then I locked the door and
watched the Opening Ceremony by myself, waiting for someone to come home.

In the morning, Rhiannon finally arrived at the house and told me that during a fight with Brian, Mum had kicked the glass cabinet and cut a tendon in her ankle, which was why blood had sprayed everywhere. It seemed like such an anti-climactic explanation. I had spent the night imagining beheadings and chainsaw accidents, and now I was being told it was just a cut on a foot. I was a little pissed off, to be honest. I had come home to a house covered in blood, locked myself in my room, petrified, and I didn't even get an awesome story out of it? Something like, ‘I spent the night alone in a house full of blood because my mum sliced her left boob off after accidentally falling on an axe?' No, I got ‘cut foot'.

Apparently I had been instructed to rush home because the relationship was definitely over, and since Mum had paid a lot of money for the TV in the living room, she was worried that Brian would tip it over or something.

I couldn't believe I had spent the night alone in that house because Mum was worried the TV would get smashed.

And what was the point of even owning a massive TV if we had nowhere to go? It was Brian's house. He was Brian the Homeowner. If their relationship was over, then we would be the ones who would have to leave.

Rhiannon, always independent, always so sure of herself, moved out on her own. Brian got custody of Isabella, and I went
from having my youngest sister sneak into my bed to snuggle with me every night to not seeing her for another ten years.

Tayla and I stayed with Mum, who, after finally finishing one of her longest shifts so far, would need to find her new Richard Gere. Fast.

To this day, I'm not sure if my mum is genuinely bisexual, or if her brief fling with a woman was all about the cash. I suppose that if, out of desperation, you can sell your body to a bald man in Wagga Wagga whose head is covered in coconut oil, then letting a lesbian lick your clit when times are tough would at least be a much more pleasurable walk in the park.

And times
were
tough.

After her split with Brian the Homeowner, Mum, Tayla and I became a kind of Blue Mountains gypsy family, living with whoever would take us in. First stop was with some man Mum quickly started dating, who lived down by the local pool. I don't remember much about him – I want to say his name was George? I doubt my mum even cared, to be honest. There was a roof over our heads, which meant she was doing her job.

At least, there was a roof over
their
heads – Mum could only convince her new boyfriend to let us move in if I didn't actually reside inside the house, so she generously provided me with a second-hand caravan that I could live in out the front. ‘It will be fun!' she said. ‘Like your own little apartment!'

I had almost come around to the idea, imagining myself hosting lavish TV viewing parties with my friends inside my state-of-the-art motor home, when the reality pulled into the driveway, attached to the back of Mum's dinged-up Nimbus, which in the caravan's presence now looked like a Bentley.

There was no ‘little apartment' in sight. This thing was basically a hatchback without a motor. And I don't know whom my mother bought it from, but there's no doubt in my mind the man in question is certainly now in prison for something like letting a dog lick his penis, or being caught watching women in the shower while wearing a ball gown in the bushes. It took me about two days just to clear out all the old porno mags, cigarette butts and empty peanut-butter jars. Sperm must have covered every surface. I'm surprised I didn't get pregnant just by stepping in there.

There was space for a mattress, but it was so tiny I'm not sure even the smallest standard mattress on earth would fit. Where did the weirdos who lived in these tiny caravans get their bizarre tiny mattresses? Was there a store where they all lined up, each hoping to purchase their new bed as quickly as possible, so they
could hurry back to the privacy of their sad caravan and keep smothering their bodies with honey and cheese spread?

There were also a few cupboards, a small fold-out table and a sink, which, given I had no water connection, was purely decorative (you really should be concerned about your place in the world when you have a sink that's only decorative). And to top it all off, there was no electricity connection, which meant that after dark, it was just me and my torch. Most nights I would get terrified and go inside by about 9pm, begging Mum and her random boyfriend (again – George? Maybe Trevor?) to let me sleep on the couch. I was scared of being raped and murdered, but mostly I just didn't want to die somewhere that had recently been the scene of a jerk-off session involving peanut butter and a magazine called
Miss Mama Juggs.
I may have been a fourteen-year-old following her bipolar-alcoholic mum around in a caravan, but even I had standards.

Next up came a brief stay with friends Mum had made at the Lawson Pub. I didn't mind the time we spent there, actually, since most of those people lived in and around the main strip of local shops, so whenever Tayla and I were hungry and couldn't find Mum, we'd just walk straight into a store and get fed. I'm not sure if Mum had organised some kind of ‘feed my kids' tab system, but Tayla and I took advantage of it regardless. We would sit at the Magic Mountain Café eating free nachos and getting that familiar look of pity from the owner, who seemed
to know something about where Mum was that we didn't. But we were so used to getting that look from concerned adults; it didn't bother us in the slightest. We would just order as many free milkshakes as we could while we still had the chance.

After a few weeks of taking advantage of that situation, it seemed like Mum had finally found something a little more stable. An unsuspecting man, who lived a bit farther up the mountain in Wentworth Falls, was looking for a boarder to rent a room. He had three kids at home, and somehow, Mum convinced him to let her and Tayla move in, while I would stay in my jizz-infested caravan out the front.

His son and two daughters were all around Tayla's age, and they became convinced that our mum and their dad were going to fall in love and we'd all end up in some kind of trailer-trash version of
The Brady Bunch.
I had zero interest in being connected to those people via marriage or any other means, and I think, despite the fact she was currently enduring the indignity of sharing a bunk bed with her seven-year-old daughter, neither did Mum. The more her possible Mike Brady made advances on her, the more she backed away. She could have very easily made a smooth transition into that man's bed, but it turns out Wentworth Falls Brady Bunch was not a shift she wanted to take on.

So, feeling closed in, and sick of living like a nomadic gypsy (although she wasn't the one in the fucking caravan), Mum decided it was time for us to rent our own house.

Now, renting your own house is a nice idea in theory. But my mum didn't like to pay for things; she liked other people to pay for things, and house renting is generally something that you're expected to pay for. She, of course, bit off way more than she could chew, and found us the nicest, biggest house we had ever lived in. The sperm caravan was sold. Tayla and I each got our own room. Even Rhiannon decided it was worth coming back and putting up with the drinking and screaming and suicide attempts if it meant she could live in that house.

But a big house and a nice house is also an expensive house, and if we wanted to stay, Mum was going to have to find herself a temporary Richard Gere to foot the bill. Unfortunately, she had pretty much depleted all of the Blue Mountains' resources when it came to men, but my mum is a resourceful woman, and she really, really wanted to stay in that big, nice house.

Enter Pam the Lesbian.

Pam liked to wear vests. Long, baggy vests over plain t-shirts and sensible jeans. She was a lot older than Mum – I'd say about fifty – and her greying hair was styled into one of the most glorious mullets I had ever seen. She didn't wear make-up, and her face was lined from years of doing what I assume all women with mullets do – hold the stop/slow sign at construction sites. Her voice was gravelly from years of smoking, and she drove a 1980s sports car that she proudly called ‘The Mean Machine'.

Clearly, my mum had decided that if she was going to be a lesbian, she was going to go all out.

‘Um, dude, why is your mum going out with a totally butch lesbo?' a friend asked, after spotting Pam dropping me off at school.

‘Excuse me,' I replied indignantly, a little proud of my new status as a child with two mums. ‘I believe the term you're looking for is “homosexual lady with a mullet”. And I don't know. I think because she's paying our rent.'

And she
was
paying our rent. And buying Mum lots of presents. And buying
me
lots of presents. It looked as though, after so many years of searching for the perfect Richard Gere to go with her Pretty Woman, Mum had found him. And he was a she.

Pam the Lesbian was besotted with Mum. Besotted. I don't think she'd ever been in the vicinity of so much femininity in her life. She would lean over to light Mum's cigarettes, and stare into her eyes as if she were the luckiest woman in the world. Mum would then look around at the beautiful house she wasn't paying for, and think the exact same thing.

But I figured if anyone was lucky in the whole situation, it was me. Pam was like a mulleted ATM, and I could convince her to buy me pretty much anything I wanted. It started off small at first – going into Mum's room early in the morning and asking for lunch money, knowing that the naked lady in bed next to her was so desperate to impress that she would definitely give
it to me. I saw a pair of Billabong parachute pants in a shop at Springwood, and Pam had bought them for me within two days. ‘Ya like those, don't ya?' she asked, simultaneously beaming with pride and looking to my mum for approval.

‘I really do,' I said, playing it up way more than was necessary. ‘Mum, Pam is
so
good to us. You really should stay with her forever.'
Ka-ching.

When my friend and I wanted to catch a train down the mountain to watch a movie at Penrith Plaza, I immediately turned to her and dramatically said, ‘Don't worry, I've got this.' Then I whipped out the state-of-the-art Nokia Pam had bought me (it had Snake and everything) and called her. An hour later my friend and I were on our way to Penrith with fifty bucks.

My conscience was starting to ping a little at this point when it came to Pam, but the friend in question was a cool one who I had been trying (and no doubt failing) desperately to impress. We had connected purely by accident – there's no way a girl like Bianca would ever willingly initiate a friendship with someone like me. She had massive boobs and pashed boys, and I didn't even pluck my eyebrows. But we shared a mutual friend, and when word got out that I had no curfew and a mum at home who would let me come and go as I pleased, I think she saw an opportunity to use my house as an alibi. She could come over for a ‘video night sleepover', and then we could take off and do whatever.

The problem was, I really did just want to have video night sleepovers. Yes, I had the ability to tell my mum I was going out and not come home for two days, but I was too much of a dweeb to take advantage of it. I just wanted to sit in my room and watch TV and listen to Backstreet Boys CDs. And maybe write the occasional Oscars acceptance speech (a habit I still clung to, despite having grown old enough to understand that I most likely wasn't going to be recognised for writing
Grease 3
). But, as bloody usual, I was hypnotised by cool, and Bianca had it in spades, which meant I would go to some ridiculous lengths to impress her.

Every time she suggested something that confused and/or horrified me, I would just act like I was totally on the same page. She once forced me to go to a house party with the cool group, and I spent the entire night watching TV in the living room by myself, while everyone else was in the backyard drinking from secret goon sacks. I could just never relax around those guys. It was like they spoke a language I didn't understand; I was the clueless foreign exchange student whom nobody wanted to have awkward conversations with.

On our way to Penrith after gouging Pam, Bianca said that we should skip the movie and just ‘hang out'. ‘Hanging out' at Penrith Plaza basically just meant you sat on the steps outside the shopping centre and tried to look cool, while a bunch of other teenagers were also sitting on the steps trying to look cool.
Sometimes you would get up and do a loop of the main street, and then you would go back to sitting on the steps. That was literally all you would do, all night. Sit on steps. Walk around street. Sit back on steps. Repeat.

I was devastated; I really just wanted to watch a movie, eat some popcorn and go home to bed. Now I knew I'd be hanging around Penrith all night, following Bianca while she talked to random boys. We ended up being approached by a car with two guys in it – much older than us, which Bianca loved. I couldn't even talk to boys my own age, let alone two men in their twenties. I walked in silence while Bianca flirted with them through the car window. I was her mute weirdo friend, and I could definitely tell that both guys were hoping the other one would fall on his sword and hang out with me so someone would get to pash Bianca.

She accepted a ride from them, ‘just to drive around', and before I could lecture her on the dangers of getting into a vehicle with people you don't know, we were off. I wanted to wear my seatbelt, but nobody else put theirs on because seatbelts were for losers, so I begrudgingly left my life in the hands of a guy wearing FUBU pants. I was not impressed. I just wanted the ‘driving around' to be over so I could stop feeling like the penalty they were accepting in order to have big-boobed Bianca sit in their car. Then it was announced we'd be smoking pot, and although I'd spent the last few years living in a pot den, I'd never actually
willingly inhaled so much as a cigarette. I was way out of my league. I wanted to impress Bianca, but driving around with two random guys in Penrith looking for a piece of hose that we could put in a makeshift bong was a little too much for me.

The bong was passed around and I refused, because I was ‘still stoned from yesterday'. I was impressed that I was able to come up with such a cool-sounding excuse on the spot. I would still be doing that in my twenties, actually, mostly when I worked at a very hipster JB Hi-Fi store. All the staff who worked in the music section were covered in tattoos and drank green smoothies out of jars and would talk about the bootleg cut of something to do with Bob Dylan something The Kills something. I never understood a word they were saying, but I wanted to fit in, so whenever anybody talked about a band I hadn't heard of I would just say, ‘I really like their early stuff.' That line got me out of so many embarrassing conversations. And if, as happened a couple of times, the band had just been discovered and therefore didn't have any early stuff, I would act really smug and say, ‘Oh. I thought you were a big fan. They've been putting tracks online for years.' I like to think I'm the reason many tattooed hipsters spent hours on YouTube looking for songs that didn't exist.

Bong avoided, I spent the next half hour sitting in the back of the car with the unlucky guy who had ended up with me, and we patiently waited for Bianca and her new friend to finish mauling each other's faces.

I could have had a revelation at that point. I could have spent the time I had to reflect on how I constantly ended up in situations where I was miserable and/or humiliated. Just like when I shat my pants because I didn't want to miss out on playing with my sister's friends, just like when I let the girl who smelled like cheese lick my fanny, I was once again stuck in a compromising position because I wanted to impress the cool kids.