We exchanged a few sharp barbs and then he left me alone on the roof to regroup and figure out exactly where I had gone wrong. It is only now I can see it was the manic pixie dream girl persona, accidentally but expertly crafted – emphasis on the ‘manic’. Unencumbered, overdressed, committed to making every evening the biggest and best of our lives. I made too little and then too much eye contact, I mirrored his expressions and smiled too often, I reflected his entire personality back to him and he could not fucking resist. Cleo offered little sympathy the next morning, unable to believe I could not see my part in the crossed wires, but she forgave me eventually, and we settled in agreeance that he had not been worth her friend’s time. Eventually she would stop giving me the benefit of the doubt, stop assuming best intentions, and eventually I would kiss the guys with girlfriends, too. Why not, if those girlfriends expected the worst from me anyway? I would kiss ALL their boyfriends, that would show them.
It was not long after that night that I stopped attending my classes, in person and through the portal. I stopped doing most things. It took more than a month for someone to call me and explain what my continued non-attendance would mean for my enrolment if I did not improve. It was an official warning, but the man from the student services office was ‘trying to help me’, he said, I guess in the same kind of way HR might put an employee’s mistakes in writing, starting the necessary paper trail in case of further oversight. Spiritually, it landed like the kind of push notification that might come through on your phone alerting you to evacuate before a natural disaster. Bad times ahead, take shelter now.
I did not tell Cleo about the warning, instead throwing myself further into our routine of chasing increasingly higher highs, and then trying to survive the lows that followed. Cleo did not seem to find herself at the cliff-face of either extreme in the same way I did. She was the safety belt, the guardrail, the person more likely to call it a night. There were Saturday nights when she just wanted to find a dancefloor somewhere, while on the walk home I found fun in balancing on bridge railings, touching the edge of the world. She was content to kiss a stranger at a bar; I needed to fuck one in the bathroom. She could order a glass; I opted for the bottle, usually chasing it with a shot or a bag if I could find someone old, rich, and/or skeezy enough to provide it. And in the mornings, when she had gotten some sleep and I had not, she made us cups of tea as I dry-retched in the bathroom, tidying whatever mess lay in our living room while I stared at my decaying reflection in the vanity mirror, contemplating if staying alive was really worth all of this effort and pain.
23
Christmas Day
Iwake up crying – an inauspicious start – from a Frankenstein’s dream collaged with the scraps of a thousand different memories. They were the missing pieces, the parts I did not remember, and all of them ached. Something bad had happened; something bad is happening; something bad will happen again. My body is carrying tension my mind does not seem to be able to immediately comprehend; all this energy is in my chest, in my throat. Sleep is where most of the feeling happens, because I have given it nowhere else to go. It causes tension in my jaw and every other joint. Wading through an unceasing deluge of flashbacks and reminders and newly accessed memories – scenes that were traumatic enough to live through the first time, finding me again when I am at my most vulnerable – is heavy, impossible work. I am but a brush turkey or a suffocated canary. And one whose psychologist won’t even text or email them back. Not only do these moments revisit me, they demand re-examination; I must solve the riddles if I wish to progress unharmed. It is too much; the edges begin to blur and I now know what that means. Shutdown and/or delusion are begging to be reconsidered; they soon demand the time is now.
By mid-year, I had dropped out of my course, taking control and making it a choice, not allowing it to have any impact. I retained the part-time job that had been lined up for me by a lecturer who showed a little too much interest in my academic future – working events at an art gallery owned by a friend of his on the other side of the city. I printed catalogues and wiped grubby fingerprints off surfaces and poured drinks whenever there was a new opening night. The pay was shit, the boss was a creep, and I was, big surprise, say it with me now: entirely miserable. Despondence had begun to feel like a personality trait, one that granted me false superiority over those who cared about anything. One night, leaving an event for a photographer whose show was made entirely of black and white photos of naked women, full of cheap wine and overstimulation, I saw him, walking right past me there on the street.
‘Fran?’
It was as though I had repressed his existence for so long that my subconscious summoned him to remind me of where exactly I was going wrong. Or, more factually, it had nothing to do with me at all, and he was in town for the gig of a band he loved that was not coming to Queensland. Unidentified neurodivergence, emotional detachment, and drastically declining mental health did give me a bad case of main character syndrome there for a while; I was my own unlikeable protagonist, unable to zoom out and see the whole of the mess I had made.
‘Nora, hey.’
Fran seemed genuinely surprised in a pleasant kind of way, rather than a horrified one, which only fed my delusions of self-importance.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked, falling into step with him and his two friends, a guy and a girl I did not recognise and tried not to form strong opinions about too quickly.
If only she did not possess such nice legs. I could have been more of a feminist about it if she had been ugly. That is how true feminism works, I believe.
‘We came down to see The Sweethearts,’ he said.
‘Their set was incredible,’ she added.
‘Wow. Fun.’ My tone betrayed me with its lack of commitment to the part.
‘What about you, do you live around here?’ The intimacy of Fran’s voice asking such a distant question broke my heart. I wanted to wail.
‘No, I work back there at a gallery. Just finishing up an event. I live on the other side of the river.’
‘Oh, cool. Sounds very . . . cool.’ He cringed at his own choice of words.
‘So, what are you doing now?’ I asked, fumbling in my bag and lighting a cigarette to reward my brain for enduring this interaction without having a full-on breakdown. That would come soon enough. I probably also thought it made me look European and chic.
‘Just heading back to our hostel,’ she said.
I tried to figure out her place in the dynamic – whether she was with Fran, or with the other guy, or if it was a platonic friendship group where no one was fucking anyone else at all. That option seemed unlikely.
‘You should come back to mine, Fran. I’d love to show you my place. And my roommate Cleo will be there later, probably wasted but she would love to meet you. My new best friend meeting my . . . old one.’ I wished, not for the first time, that I could inhale the last words that had come out of my mouth.
‘Thanks, that sounds fun, but I better stay with these guys. We’ve got to get to the airport pretty early tomorrow,’ he replied.
The girl smiled at this, his choosing of her over me, or I imagined she did. It was perhaps more of an implied smile, sent via her ghastly aura. Whether or not she smiled was less pertinent than the fact that itfeltlike she did. Or it felt like she wanted to, or it felt like she could have, if she had so desired. I mean, what a bitch. She could only dream of looking this European and chic.
‘Oh, right. You’re all welcome, of course, but can’t argue with an early airport check-in.’
We had walked past my bus stop by that point and the lateness of the night finally registered its intent as sinister. Plus, Fran was clearly going back to the hostel to have sex with one or both of these people and I wanted to let him get to it.
‘Well, I’m actually back that way a bit, but it was great to see you. And nice to meet you both.’
It was a script I had used often, and did not need to think about. Great to see you, lovely to meet you, have a great night. I could be nice if I needed to be, even to heinous pick-mes with rotten vibes, basic clothes, and an annoyingly perfect body.
I turned on the spot and started walking in the opposite direction. Goodbyes have never been my thing, clearly. A fresh cigarette gave me focus as I willed my tears back into their jars, spinning my pain into anger so I did not have to keep it. How dare he come here without letting me know? Yes, I had moved to another state and stopped returning his calls, but he had to know it was because I loved him too much and did not want to ruin him with that love any longer. And here he was, coming all this way just to rub his repulsive threesome in my face.
