Madness, Mayhem and Motherhood Page 3

  ‘Have you got anything to drink?’ I asked Sam.

  ‘Yeah, some Chardonnay. But it’s only cask wine.’

  Sam was a Jehovah’s Witness. They did allow drinking, fortunately, unlike, say, the Mormons or the Seventh Day Adventists. JWs just weren’t allowed to get vomit- and piss-rolling drunk. I was so happy that night that Sam was not one of those other teetotaller wacky cultists and just a regular alcohol-drinking cultist.

  ‘Fill me up a tall glass,’ I demanded.

  Sam put all the kids together to sleep in the big double bed in her room. Meanwhile, I sat at the table, scribbling maudlin poetry into my journal until it was unintelligible and got vomit- and piss-rolling drunk. Because I was not a Jehovah’s Witness but a lapsed Irish Catholic, and alcohol is like holy water to us.

  Later, after I’d barfed out most of the cheap Chardonnay and lain on the couch in that frantic, wide-awake, post-pass-out stage, when you want to sleep but can’t and the way-too-loud ticky clock on the wall says it’s that impossibly lonely time of three-thirty am, I began to cry for the first time. I actually sobbed like a child in deep, snotty, painful hacks. Sam came out from the other bedroom and rubbed my back in silence, and I was just so grateful I had someone who could understand a little something of what I was going through. She’d taken care of my kids, put them to bed, and let me wallow in my misery, and I’d banished the pain for a little while but the lash-back was brutal and my head hurt as much as my heart. Everything hurt.

  I had loved Billy. I had wanted that ridiculous Brady Bunch existence. That show had so much to answer for! But I had failed at it. My marriage had just been two unfinished kids playing emotional tug-o-war, and it wasn’t fair to anyone, least of all our offspring. Too much rock ’n’ roll, too much partying, not enough responsibility – and the silly dreams we still secretly entertained about becoming fabulously rich and famous were not tethered to the sober reality of having two small children to raise. I didn’t want Ben and Toby brought up in an unhappy home and ours had become so dire and cold and bitter it was a danger to us all. The night before I left the first time, I’d lain in a tepid bath with a razor blade at my wrists, crying so much I was almost drowning in the cascading snot and tears. Bad Nikki, the name I’ve given the voice in my head, had whispered that I should just get on with it. Part of me had wanted oblivion, but only part of me. The mother part wanted to live, not the wife part. And that is why I had to go. I had to leave the wife behind in that bathtub, so the mother could survive.

  That whole cycle of writing in my journal at the dinner table while Sam cooked and the three kids turned the meal into a Pro Hart painting on the table, followed by kids’ bedtime and my subsequent descent into the howling gaseous bowels of a two-litre cask of tanker-grade rocket fuel, became a repetitive whorl into a black hole of oblivion. For about three weeks Sam was the one person who refrained from pontificating or judging or even urging me to seek out a healthier way of coping with what felt like the biggest and most irreplaceable loss I’d encountered in my young life. I spent the days taking the boys to the park or to the beach down at Tamarama, like we were on a holiday. I didn’t send them to the day-care centre they had been going to once a week so I could go to rare auditions (I was going to be Meryl Streep one day, don’t you know), because I had no car. Losing a teenage boyfriend in a car crash back in Year Eleven had left me with a deeply entrenched phobia about driving. I had recurring nightmares about driving myself off a bridge and drowning as I clawed at the closed window. I was a person with a very rich sleeping life. My dreams have always been epic blockbuster Brett Whiteley paintings. Irrational to not drive because of a dream, I know, but it was a full-blown phobia, not just a passing, lazy thing. More than once I’d been told by my parents and Billy to get some help so I could get behind the wheel and grow the hell up, but I was stuck with public transport. Plus, I was dreading fronting up to the owners of the centre to explain why I hadn’t paid the fees for weeks.

  We went to the library because it was free and the kids sat in crunchy, slightly damp beanbags and read picture books while I flicked through magazines filled with women more successful than myself at everything. Occasionally I’d look up and smile gratingly at a parent yelling across the library to their screaming child to be quiet because they were in a library.

  By day, life was jolly and sunny and I painted on a happy face and just tried to put one foot in front of the other, push the seesaw up and down, the swing back and forth, read the glossy picture books. I stayed afloat. But at night after the kids went to sleep, I drowned the pain. Sam cleaned up after me and didn’t push. She said once that she ‘hoped I’d come out of the darkness soon’. I knew I would. I knew I would have to come up with a plan. Come up for air. But while I was most raw with pain I self-medicated enough to get me to sleep and stay asleep until the bitter crack of dawn.

  Bill moved in with a new girl. That shocked like a jolt of electricity. That was the last nail in the coffin of ‘us’. But it felt like closure. I was really, truly, madly and deeply ‘single’.

  When the glimmer of a light at the end of the tunnel appeared, it came like a cavalry bugle. I was invited to a party with interesting people. Someone I knew from my former life in the music industry was having a party and someone somewhere told them I was living with Sam and gave them her number and I was invited to A PARTY full of exciting rock ’n’ roll people and it suddenly hit me like a golf ball to the temple as I got ready, putting on make-up for the first time in weeks, that I was single. I could legally date again. I could, if I wanted, have nights of casual, meaningless sex with men who looked like they’d just stepped off the cover of a shitty bodice-ripper. If I wanted. That’s what being single was all about, after all, wasn’t it? The being-single-dark-cloud, after such a stint in a relationship, suddenly seemed rimmed with a silver lining. Single didn’t have to mean I would one day become that lonely cat woman, dying in my own filth, not being found until I was a pile of old clothes. Single could mean PARRRRTYYY!

  The party, however, sucked.

  ‘I heard about you and Bill. Are you OK? He’s living with a new girl, isn’t he? Gee that didn’t take long. Bastard.’

  ‘God, so you’re a single mum now? Look out, Sydney!’

  ‘You look tired, Nik. It’s been tough, hey? I can see that. You poor thing.’

  ‘Are you seeing anyone new yet?’

  Jesus! The blood is still warm! Get me out of this place, I screamed inside my head.

  Vodka. I gave fake smiles at all the happy couples. I laughed at their jokes. I watched people flirting. Vodka.

  ‘So did he cheat on you with the new chick?’

  ‘How long had you been having problems?’

  ‘I thought you guys were the perfect couple.’

  ‘Did he hit you?’

  ‘Did you hit him?’

  ‘I got divorced and it was the most liberating thing ever.’

  Vodka.

  I kissed a guy. It was terrible. I only did it because I could and it was a kind of angry, wet-lip-locked protest against my ex-husband who had moved on with all the speed of a horny jaguar. I don’t even remember the guy’s name. I think it was Vince. He was just there and all we had in common was that we were at the same party, and vodka. When he staggered off to the bathroom, I staggered off to find a cab to take me back to Sam’s. I was not really ready for kisses, and sadness had loomed up like a dark shadow hovering over all the other people at the party, who were having a really good time. And I hated the happy couples the most and I hoped they would all break up and feel what it was like to have open-heart surgery (while still awake and conscious and listening to the sound of the buzz-saw cutting your heart in two).

  I sat in the back of the cab trying not to puke. I began thinking that my marriage had basically been a rotten wisdom tooth that needed to be extracted. I was just drunk enough that I laughed to myself, wondering whether i
t was Bill or me that was the tooth, and decided we were both the teeth and the jaw. I was his rotten tooth and he was mine. And then I was crying again, because my whole body felt like a dry socket. A drunken dry socket, and it really doesn’t get much worse than that. I stared out at the shiny twinkling lights of Bondi and the happy blare of lights from nice houses with water views along the ocean road back to Sam’s place. And the words of the Talking Heads song began playing in my ears. Actually in my ears. Like a sign from God, the radio was playing ‘This is Not My Beautiful Life’. Well ain’t that the fucking truth? I laughed again, and I knew it was time to dust myself off and start making a new life for myself and my two boys.

  The next morning, feeling a little seedy and a lot embarrassed and ashamed, I apologised to my best friend for having taken so much from her while being nothing but a sack of sorry shit for company.

  ‘I’m sorry, Sammy,’ I moaned, head throbbing. ‘I’ve been living in a blur and it seems, I don’t know where it went, but it seems I have no money. Nothing. No life. I can give you my jar of coins and I’ll pay you back … I just don’t actually know how and …’

  I broke down then and it felt like I’d lanced an enormous boil and all the self-misery, shame and regret just poured out of me like a torrent of pus.

  It was time to put on the grown-up pants. The big girl’s girdle!

  ‘You have to go to Social Security and apply for the Single Parent Pension,’ Sam said, not sugar-coating it any more, just putting it on the table between us like a brick. Bang.

  I nodded. I had to feed my kids.

  At high school I was the girl everyone thought would take Hollywood by storm. Not just everyone else. I believed it. But school plays are no great predictor of success. At that Formica table in the dimly lit ground-floor unit, with the smell of stale vodka on my breath and a heart pounding so hard it felt like an alien was trying to abscond through my chest, with that brick on the table, the one that had the words Single Parent carved sadly into it, it felt awfully like I was going backwards, in the completely opposite direction to the life plan I had once conjured up for myself.

  It was as if I had written a list of life goals – and I sure had collected plenty of those as a ballsy, driven drama student at high school – and then smugly sabotaged my life to make sure the list would stay unblemished, with not a single entry crossed or ticked off. I’d always wanted to have kids, sure, but I’d wanted other things too, not just to have kids.

  I’d wanted to travel far and wide to every corner of the planet and beyond. My earliest ambition was to be an astronaut; I think because I’d seen Planet of the Apes. I’d also fallen a little in love with Galen, the ape, which was equal parts weird and prophetic, because I fell in lust with a few performing monkeys over the years. Yes, I’d wanted to traverse outer space, perhaps find some Basidium refugees living on a far-flung planet and rescue them. But by high school, I’d been bitten by the theatrical bug. My crippling insecurity vanished on stage when I slipped into the costume of someone else. I wanted Hollywood, New York, London, Tokyo, Paris in the springtime. I wanted the whole world and everything it had to offer me. I was a walking delusion of grandeur. I figured I could have it all. In my geography classroom I would run my hands over the heavy wooden globe, spin it with my eyes shut, singing I had ‘the whole world in my hands’, and then stop it and point to a random spot and know, just know in my belly, that one day I would be there, exploring, climbing mountains and swimming in impossibly beautiful lakes. My ideas and dreams were manically colossal.

  ‘And you need to find a place to live,’ Sam said, dropping another brick on the table. Bang. ‘Because I can’t afford to keep supporting you guys. I love you and I’m not hassling, but it’s time to get a plan together. Bill is not coming back. You need to move on.’

  ‘He’s really not, is he?’ I said softly, sniffing at the sudden realisation that I wasn’t simply wading through a horrendous nightmare with booze lapping playfully at the edges. ‘It’s really completely over. The end.’

  She nodded and patted my hand. ‘Yep.’

  It was about then that I began really wishing I’d listened to my parents and gone to university. In my defence, I did go for three days. Just for the orientation. And then along came the spunky punk rocker and together we had run away to Sydney to seek our fame and fortune because I wanted more than to be a schoolteacher like both my parents. We were naïve, narcissistic lovebirds, and we were genuinely shocked when it hadn’t all worked out as planned.

  Billy’d picked up roadie work thinking it’d be temporary, but it wasn’t. I’d been an extra in a movie, but there was no Best Extra category in the Oscars and I sure as hell wasn’t going to win any awards for the fistful of terrible television commercials I’d ‘acted’ in, spruiking products like Yoplait, Nescafé, Telecom and AIDS awareness. The auditions started drying up after I’d had my second child. My agent, Shirley Pearce, was lovely, like a lovely, lovely, so very lovely, fairy godmother. The last audition she’d sent me for was for a leading role in a movie opposite that spunky fellow Russell Crowe. ‘You’ll be brilliant,’ she’d said, in an English accent that sent goose bumps over the skin of my forearms. ‘Russell’s going places and I think you two could have real chemistry,’ she said. The director thought otherwise and I didn’t even get a call back. That had been in my early pregnancy with Toby, now more than two years past. I was almost twenty-six, jaded and washed up. Russell Crowe had gone to Hollywood. I had gone to hell in a handbasket. He was an A-list superstar and I was a single mother just dreaming of getting on welfare. I had once heard a red-nosed alcoholic Englishman refer to scummy single mothers as ‘wrecks with spares’ and that was exactly how I felt as I contemplated a future as bleak and barren as a journey by foot across the Sahara desert without a hat or sunblock.

  ‘Oh my gosh! I can get you some cleaning work at the place where I nanny,’ Sam said, and she said it as if the sky had just opened and a trumpet had popped through with a startling blast. ‘Yes! It will be perfect. And it would be cash in hand so you could start saving towards a bond on your own place. Yes! Yes! Perfect.’

  To be honest, I could think of more perfect things than cleaning some rich person’s house, but right then my options were kind of limited. But hey, I told myself, Cinderella ended up being a princess and she’d started off cleaning out a fireplace, so I knew it was wrong to think of it as a completely dead-end job. I needed to change my mindset and be a bit more Mary Poppins and sprinkle a spoonful of sugar over the medicine! Plan A – fame and fortune. Plan B – will clean toilets for cash. But cash was good. It was something I needed desperately. And I had nothing else to hope for other than saccharine fairy-tales.

  ‘Why didn’t I have a Plan B?’ I said to Sam. ‘What’s wrong with me? How did it get to this?’

  ‘You want me to tell you?’ She smiled. ‘Really?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. I wasn’t sure.

  ‘You’re impulsive.’

  ‘Well, der.’ I laughed. ‘No kidding.’

  ‘You get an idea, you rush in, you think you’re invincible and well … you’re not.’

  ‘Isn’t being impulsive and spontaneous a good thing? It’s not boring. It’s being in the moment.’

  ‘Not if it’s pathological,’ she said and I did a double take.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Like if you constantly make rash decisions that end up hurting yourself or whatever … well … then … it might be a problem.’

  ‘What exactly do you mean? Give me examples. You mean falling in love with Billy? You can’t help falling in love. It’s biological. It’s, you know … chemistry …’

  ‘I’ve known you a long time.’

  That was true. She had.

  ‘Well, you’re a bit nuts.’

  ‘So?’ I scoffed defensively. ‘That’s just me.’

  ‘You self-medicate with alcohol when you are d
own and embark on crazy pursuits when you’re up.’

  ‘What crazy pursuits?’

  ‘Do I need to remind you of the Vulture Club antics during school? Collecting rockstar lovers like some teenage werewolf?’

  ‘Oh, that.’

  ‘The drugs and alcohol.’

  ‘I don’t take drugs … any more.’ I threw a glance at the mountain of empty casks of wine in the alcove ready to be taken to the communal bins. ‘Hey, you helped me drink them. I’ve just broken up and I’m broke and …’

  We let my rather spineless words evaporate over the table between us.

  ‘I think you need to just find a middle path. Just accept the ordinary, the mediocre for a while.’

  I recoiled. Seriously. The word ‘mediocre’ was my arch nemesis. I hated that word. It was the one thing that I was terrified of becoming. Average. Normal. MEDIOCRE!

  ‘Middle path? When did you get so Zen or Buddhist or whatever?’ I laughed and tossed a dismissive wave into the air. ‘I’m an all or nothing sort of girl, Sammy.’ I tried to make light of her slightly lacerating observations.

  ‘Yeah well, look around. You’ve got nothing right now and all doesn’t seem to be on the menu – if such a thing even exists.’

  She had a point. If there was a rock bottom I thought I might be nudging it with the bottom of my feet. If there had been a soundtrack to my life back in those days it would have been a teary Billie Holiday crooning a blues song about a confused mama sliding down skid row on a cart with broken wheels.

  ‘OK, I’ll take the job. Any job. I may be a write-off loser at the moment but I can at least clean a house.’

  My mother was a house-proud woman. The formal living room was enshrined as a museum no one was allowed to use unless we had guests. Mum wasn’t quite leave-the-plastic-on-the-furniture freaky but she ran a tight ship. Everything got ironed. I was chimney-swept into child labour early on, starting with hankies, working up to tea-towels and pillowcases and then into complicated drop-waisted hideous seventies dresses and pleated school skirts. My least favourite weekend chore was scrubbing the grouting between the tiles in the shower recesses, sitting in there, shivering in my swimmers with an old toothbrush and ice-cream bucket full of sudsy water. If ever I skulked off to hide and eat chips or chocolate from the cupboard, she would find me and announce in her best general’s voice: ‘A good sentry never leaves his post!’ One would imagine my mother had a military background, a father in the army or some such; but no, she was a primary-school teacher from the Darling Downs and her dad had been a shearer and timber-mill worker and a gentle, sweet man. I never did work out where the ‘sentry’ line came from. Perhaps she watched too many John Wayne movies in her youth.