Fabulous Lives Read online

  ‘I can fix your pain.’ Leonie fetched her toiletries bag (she hadn’t bothered unpacking since the hospital), and brought out the cornucopia of meds: tramadol, naproxen, analgesics and the pièce de résistance—oxycodone, poor man’s heroin. ‘What’s your drug of choice?’

  ‘Are you in pain?’

  The question caught her by surprise. ‘Always.’

  The truth was that the pain was no longer an issue. The removal of her entire womb had seen to that. But Leonie still saw herself in terms of her illness. Endometriosis. The years of bracing herself for the agony every month, the rogue bits of wandering uterine lining, which stuck to unlikely places— her bowels, her lungs, her brain—starting little bleeds in a futile attempt to replicate life.

  She handed the young man two analgesics, for a lower- grade pain, and he took them dutifully, like a good boy. What to do with him, she thought. With this blank canvas, this enigma who gave nothing of himself away, she knew she would be the one to carry the conversation tonight, and that would be exhausting.

  * * *

  Where to begin? It was always easiest to start with your job, so Leonie began telling him about her work at the government department. Coordinator of Youth Programs, the same job for twenty-five years, though over the years there had been some changes: different job titles, job descriptions, and the altered spelling of the word ‘program’ to ‘programme’ whenever a Liberal government came into power. There was another worker who shared the same small office space, who sat back to back with Leonie, and there was always this false sense that they were connected by more than the static in their hair and the bulk of their ergonomic chairs. For the past two years it was Joan, and before that Vivian, with the tins of no-drain tuna ‘tasters’, and then Shelley, young and breezy, who had laughed at the word ‘petticoat’. The clients, too, had changed, yet stayed the same. Disenfranchised, disaffected, damaged teenagers needing ten good reasons to stay in work or school. Money was thrown at their department, then subsequently cut, and it was exhausting year in, year out, trying to manage the ebb and flow of their fortunes. The stress took its toll. Leonie found it hard to switch off at night, took the heavy files home for bedtime reading, contacted client families on weekends. Got too involved.

  ‘So you hate your job?’ he asked her, and Leonie replied rather defensively, ‘No. No.’

  Not exactly hate, but the frustration of knowing there was no place she’d been that had made a difference; the feeling of pushing dirt around, into different corners of a room.

  She also felt like a fraud. It would have been better to have had a background in social work or youth counselling, but instead she came in on a generic public service examination and her university major, Gender Studies.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked, and she couldn’t help but laugh.

  ‘You know, how we construct ideas about the masculine and the feminine.’

  He stared, looking confused.

  ‘Kristeva, Irigaray and Cixous?’ Leonie picked the names out of the air like exotic fruit.

  ‘Tell me,’ he asked, so she started to explain about the university she attended in the eighties, the new institution that was supposed to break with academic tradition. Not just in its architecture (the prefabricated buildings, a scraggly bush court), but reflected in the course names, like ‘Semiotics of Art’, and ‘Body, Place and Post-Colonial Experience’. The year was 1984, and it was the first time she had heard about the Politics of Desire, Lacanian theory or ‘semiotic’, a word that reminded her of ‘amniotic’: a salty, safe fluid to float in. These studies were like a gift to her—what else could help a girl who was as plain and ordinary as a moth?—and when she hacked off her Catholic-school plaits and grew out the dark stubble on her legs she knew it was more about this feeling of belonging than shocking her poor conservative mother in the suburbs.

  There were more women than men in the course and they met at lunchtime in the refectory, a diverse group of school-leavers and mature-aged students—some newly divorced, others clearly in love—where they would sit and drink coffee and discuss ideas. She remembered a black-painted feature wall where each semester slogans were added and rubbed over in chalky hieroglyphs. Once it was the female Venus symbol, and then a large pink triangle, a reminder of what Hitler had done to the homosexuals in concentration camps, making them wear a portion of the Jewish Star of David to mark (or was it mock?) their sexual orientation. The symbols sparked something inside them all, emboldened them to take their protests off the campus, to the car parks outside abortion clinics and then onto the streets of Sydney, where their cries morphed into anthems of celebration.

  At her first Mardi Gras, Leonie followed the others down a rainbow-painted path, like Dorothy on the road to discovery, and there she saw floats of naked, shackled men; giant leather-strapped penises and men being fucked with crucifixes; queens cackling and trannies flicking their feather boas and sequins in her eye—and it was nothing like the gender theory she’d studied at uni, with its reassuring sense of empowerment, nothing like the safe dipping into language in the privacy of her girlhood bedroom. Two groups seemed to form—male and female snaking their way through Darlinghurst and then separating, as couples do at a midsummer night’s barbecue. Leonie broke away, leaving the glitter and tinsel behind, and was followed by a woman who looked like a man, with stringy hair and blackened, broken toenails. Leonie quickened her pace, tried to shake her off like an unwanted dog, but the woman followed her all the way to the botanical gardens, seemed to wait for her in the shadows there.

  And what to tell the young man now? Those brief years of study that are lost to the realities of a working life, the real world where people aren’t reading the same books, talking the same political discourse, and eventually you find yourself, as a rubber band does, pinging back in size. And then gradually, over time, Leonie took on the shape of her mother, with all the same prejudices, the same foolish desires; the pull of the catechism, hair cut like English thatch and a body thickened with the approach of menopause—in her case, hastened by surgery and the clinical skill of her surgeon. A surgeon who looked years younger than Leonie, and dressed as if he should be seeing a better class of patient. That first day she visited his rooms, she waited for over an hour with five other women, reading their magazines and whispering their annoyance to their husbands. When her name was called—Ms Taylor—the surgeon didn’t know what to do with the Ms, made it buzz like a piece of onomatopoeia stuck in his throat. Leonie was there for only five minutes, but that was enough time for her to see his freshly scrubbed cuticles and the framed degree from the University of Sydney on his wall, and for him to draw a picture of a uterus and hand it to her: a sketch of an inverted pear on a piece of paper. Later, she had laughed about it with her mother, saying, ‘Things are really going pear-shaped.’

  Yes, she thought now. That was the shape of things to come.

  * * *

  Leonie woke through a medicated fog, tried to wade past the thick tribal beat three floors above, to get to the other sound, a different sound: the brittleness of something trying to break through, rattling at the window, splintering the wood. Shit, an intruder. She edged her way in the dark towards the door of her bedroom, her hand searching for the switch. The light made no difference; whoever it was remained bold and didn’t scuttle away like a roach.

  ‘I’ve called the cops,’ she shouted out.

  This time there was a slowing of the sound, a clumsy retreat. Leonie peered out the curtains and saw the shadowy blue of figures dissolving into the night.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ The young man lay on the couch, looking alert and fresh.

  ‘Didn’t you hear the men trying to get in?’

  ‘I heard nothing.’

  ‘I’ll wait up. See if they come back.’ She turned off the light and sat in the armchair next to him, until eventually she could hear his soft breaths convert into something heavier. In the morning, her neck was sore from where her head had jerked into and out of s
leep.

  Not long to go now, she thought, and this craziness will be over. She padded into the kitchen, not wanting to disturb the sleeping figure. She usually had cold cereal for breakfast, but today she was going to cook something heartier—throw caution to the wind, as her mother would say. What did it matter about the extra calories? She knew she would become fat like a spayed labrador regardless. When she had finished cooking, she carried the plates of chipolata, eggs and Swiss mushrooms out to the living room and sat on the couch next to him, bringing him alive with the savoury aroma. Not exactly a date, but Leonie preferred it this way, sitting side by side. The way men like to bond at the footy.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want to see a doctor?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  She nodded and felt the happiness flutter through her body.

  ‘We could watch a movie,’ Leonie suggested, and the young man looked at her, through those pale, pellucid eyes, neither agreeing nor disagreeing.

  She rummaged in the entertainment unit, trying to find something he might enjoy. There wasn’t a lot of choice. It was obvious when she had stopped bothering to buy DVDs, and she hovered between Four Weddings and a Funeral and Groundhog Day. They ended up watching both. She felt her headache return: a spacey, guilty feeling of watching daytime movies when you should be outside in the sun.

  About four o’clock the music started up again (why so early?), and the fear flowed through her in cold, undulating waves. She thought about cooking. Turned on the whirring fan above the electric stove, clanged pots and pans, just to drown out the growing beat. The young man followed her into the kitchen.

  ‘Is it okay for me to have a shower?’

  ‘Of course. Of course.’

  Leonie hurried to the bathroom and found a box of guest soaps that her mother had given her one Christmas, their pink corners powdered and crumbling, and the towel that felt least like dried-out cardboard. She waited for him to finish, the sound of the water barely covering the shrieks and caterwauling, and the unrelenting dance party music building to a crescendo. Soon the noise would get too loud to bear and she would stand and look at the men gathering outside. Through the curtains she could see them move in a concerted blur, but occasionally she made out a bald head amongst the crowd.

  When the young man finally stepped into the room, a fine mist from the shower seemed to come with him, and when it cleared Leonie gasped at the vision: glistening bare chest, silky white boxers, and rising from his shoulders two magnificent tessellated wings.

  Was it really the Archangel Michael, sent as both avenger and judge to smite this city? But before she could ask, he had opened the door and slipped away into the crowd that was moving as one growing organism down the dank streets, past all the narrow terraces with their boxy rooms, down to Oxford Street, dirty Oxford Street, to the place where the procession always begins. Leonie tried to follow, to search him out in the pulsating throng, but there were hundreds of angels now, all beautiful and near naked, except for their little silky boxer shorts, and it was impossible to tell one from the other.

  Leonie felt her head pounding, the red cells glowing and about to explode, and held her hand against a building to steady herself. She could see it was the solid white façade of the Jewish Museum, its column strangely cool and comforting. She remembered coming here a year ago with her mother after a long, indulgent lunch, where they had both been invisible to the beautiful waiters, and her mother had to force strength into her thin, reedy voice so they would hear her words over the jangling trays. The museum was a whim, something to stave off returning to their lonely, separate lives, so they walked in on this odd collection of random, stand-alone relics. And there was one exhibit that had caught and held Leonie’s eye, one exhibit that seemed to make all the difference: a single rubber boot recovered from a mass grave in Sernik—and it was collapsing in on itself, losing whatever shape it kept before. The sort of thing that can make you cry.

  Tonight the museum was closed; all was quiet and dignified and white except for the hot-pink poster gashing the wall. A pink triangle trapped in a green circle. Leonie noticed a trail of them leading down the street, pasted on every wall and shop front, stretching further than the eye could see. So she decided to follow the posters to their natural beginning (or was it their conclusion?), hoping to spot more outposts of geometry and colour, wishing to find the girl from the laundromat so she could tell her that two triangles can, possibly, make a star.

  DYING

  Someone gave her a copy of the book Crazy Sexy Cancer Survivor and she only had to read the blurb at the back to know it wasn’t for her. It was written for younger women with blonde hair, straightened teeth and breasts. Both of her breasts had been removed by a surgeon wearing a green fabric mask who played water polo on Thursdays. Her chest resembled a map from a war zone, rumpled and worn.

  At the district hospital she had her wound checked by a nurse from Zimbabwe. The nurse’s hair was braided in tight whorls knitted to her head, and her skin was so black that her features were indiscernible, her face unknowable. The nurse didn’t talk much, gave nothing of herself away, but later she could hear the way the woman’s voice came alive as she joked with an elderly man behind the next curtain, as she repeated the banter that nurses reserve for favourite patients. Just not for her.

  When her husband drove her back to the farm, there was no need to talk; they had the Country Hour to listen to and they could watch the wheaten patterns race by in the half-light and flicker over their faces like an old silent movie. Returning to the farmhouse was like returning to the scene of a crime. This is where she had found the lump, buried pea-deep beneath her skin.

  * * *

  The worst bit about having cancer was the life she would leave behind. Her children were away at boarding school, and even though they had learned to be independent and relied on others for daily advice, she worried about who would sew the endless name tags on their clothing and send them the novelty birthday cakes and care packages. When she spoke to them on the phone she made her voice sound strong and unbreakable; it was easy to be a disembodied mother voice. What was hard was trying to imagine life beyond this time, how they would look as adults when they lost the round cheeks of their youth and were whittled into older versions of themselves. She searched the Internet for a website for mothers with cancer, for mothers who could post a picture of a teenager and have it magically transform into a middle-aged son, a pregnant daughter. All she could find was a site on how to convert yourself into a blue-skinned creature from Avatar.

  There was still so much that she needed to tell them about life. She wanted to write it all down, make them a list called ‘Advice for Living’, so they would always have that wise mother voice forever funnelled down a crackling landline, telling them things like ‘Too much eyeliner makes you look cheap’ and ‘You lose a little of yourself each time you fall in love’.

  * * *

  She had first met her husband at youth group. Fell off his lap during a game of Knights, Horses and Cavaliers, and saw how the embarrassment flushed the sides of his face and prickled his neck like a rash. She noticed every small detail. The way he would stand one step back from the others; the way he let his eyes follow her every small flirtation around the room. She knew he had marked her out from the very beginning, but she had her own crushes to pursue, and years later, after they had played out in fitful bursts, she was left standing with him alone by his father’s ute. She liked the taste of him when they kissed long and hard. And she liked how he absorbed her energy and glanced across for help when stranded in a circle of strangers.

  After they married, they were given a small workman’s cottage to live in whilst his parents remained in the bigger, more comfortable house. She quickly made the cottage into a home. She found an odd assortment of second-hand furniture, restored an old 1950s kitchenette with yellow and green paint, recovered a fading sofa in calico, and salvaged ceramic and iron bed knobs from a neighbour’s yard. She trawled magazines for
recipes and got ideas from her girlfriends, now living and working in the city. After seven nights of eating Apricot Chicken, her husband had quietly said, I think we need to have something else for dinner.

  Summers were hot, and she had to learn to recycle grey water from the laundry trough onto the veggie patch out the back. She had begged for a small patch of lawn, insisted on it for their future children. Water was pumped up from the front dam, and by the end of March there was a thick slick of mud shining like scales between the tough runners of buffalo. She watched the dragonflies dangle and dart, and the pink and grey cockatoos shuffle across the lawn like returned soldiers.

  Each season they seemed to scrape by, and soon the wool cheque was set aside for school fees and for doing up the larger house, when succession plans were finally made. She can’t remember the year when the freshwater soak became too salty, and the majestic river gums died back into a line of ghostly limbs. Or the year when the marron marched across the paddocks and her children collected them in pails like precious coins. All the while the land was on its downward struggle, her little death seed must have been slowly, silently growing.

  * * *

  The thing about cancer is that everyone wants to give you a piece of hope. Here, take this, they say, and it hovers over you like a gentle brown-winged creature. Friends left her books about juicing, pamphlets about meditation and healing retreats, and added her to their prayer chains. Living became more exhausting than dying as she felt the pressure from others to put up a good fight.

  She wished she had that sinew of tenacity, could stretch out her bony fingers and hang on for dear life—just like the orphaned lambs, when she’d held them on her knee and willed them to drink. The lambs would at first refuse; she had to stroke their chins and slip and slide the rubbery teat into their mouths. But once the animal tasted the warm, frothy milk, it would tug at the bottle and pull so hard that she could feel the power in its jaw, the resolve rippling down its neck. Her own children didn’t feed like this; they were fed on demand, and took their time grazing and nibbling at her breast, before she finally plucked them from her nipple like fat buds.