The Full Catastrophe Read online

  Dedicated to catastrophisers everywhere … may you rise above it with a smile.

  And to our husbands, Jonathan and Daniel, who manage to stay calm in the face of almost anything.

  REBECCA HUNTLEY is one of Australia’s best-known social researchers. She has a PhD in politics, three children, and goes to bed at 8 pm most nights. She is a writer and broadcaster, and the presenter of The History Listen on the ABC’s RN every week.

  SARAH MACDONALD is an author, facilitator and presenter of Weekend Nightlife on ABC Radio. Her bestselling memoir, Holy Cow, is still travelling the world more than she is. She has two teenagers and a dog and goes to bed at 2 am.

  Sarah and Rebecca text a lot in the middle of the day.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  What are two nice girls doing in a book like this?

  Part 1: Domestic Drama

  Wrong Way Go Back

  Annabel Crabb

  The Flaming Guitar

  Steve Lucas

  Boo

  Juanita Phillips

  Bridget Jones’s Crime Scene

  Rick Morton

  Got Lost on the Way, Baby?

  Sally Rugg

  Debra Racks Off to Melbourne

  Richard Glover

  Burpin’ Your Bad Voodoo …

  Sarah Macdonald

  Part 2: Career Crises

  Anatomy of a Stitch-up

  Jenny Valentish

  Catastrophically Stupid

  Susan Carland

  Two Eyeballs. One Job. No Brain

  Marc Fennell

  The Kangaroo Is Still Alive

  Kirstie Clements

  Do I Smell?

  Kate McClymont

  Woman, Interrupted

  Emma Alberici

  The Smashed Avocado Catastrophe

  Bernard Salt

  Part 3: Travel Trauma

  Curry in a Flurry

  Jeremy Fernandez

  Out Cold in Hot Japan

  Deborah Knight

  A Greek Tragedy … Or why you should never give up until the final siren sounds

  Wendy Harmer

  The Ninja Star, the Federal Police and Me

  Andrew P. Street

  Mind My Baby

  Cathy Wilcox

  On a Fin and a Prayer

  James Jeffrey

  Part 4: Heart Problems

  The Ballad of the Sade Cafe

  Frank Moorhouse

  The Bride Slipped Bare

  Larissa Behrendt

  Catastrophe of Angels

  Clem Bastow

  Vows, Wows and Woes

  Annie Nolan

  I’ll Be a Real Man

  Robbie Buck

  How to Lose Your Mind in Ten Dates

  Estelle Tang

  Part 5: Completely Catastrophic

  Flat Packed Fuck Up

  Rebecca Huntley

  I Love Dick

  Ivan Coyote

  Stung

  Santilla Chingaipe

  Bottomless

  Alannah Hill

  Fireworks in Beirut

  Jan Fran

  Gorilla and the Bird

  Zack McDermott

  Meet the Catastrophisers

  Acknowledgements

  What are two nice girls doing in a book like this?

  WE ALL KNOW one person who somehow flies golden through life. That person who was born beautiful, wealthy, talented and smart, and who does everything well. That individual who lands great jobs, carries them out superbly, and has never ever humiliated themselves at work, in relationships or in public. How we want to hate that person. But, bloody hell, we can’t even do that because they are usually so damn untouched by life that they are glowingly charming and always kind to animals.

  Infuriating.

  Luckily, we don’t know anyone like that. And even if that person did exist, this book is not for them. It’s for you and your friends and family. Those mortals who have stuff-ups, cock-ups and calamities. The real people.

  As we grow older, we realise many things. We realise how dysfunctional our bodies can be and how we should have appreciated them more when we were hotter. We discover that success often goes to the best operator and not the most decent and hard working. We learn that life is often unfair. And we also discover that our lives will be full of minor catastrophes, major stuff-ups and horrific humiliations.

  First-world problems mostly. But problems none the less.

  Our show, The Full Catastrophe, came about because Sarah has a terrible memory. She’d somehow forgotten terrible moments in her semi-charmed life of being a bestselling writer, radio broadcaster and mother. So when much of her life fell apart a few years ago, she found herself floundering blindly and gasping in shock. Rebecca is good in a crisis (well, at least, in other people’s). She cooked meals for Sarah and delivered them with Italian tablecloths and healthy desserts. She covered for her at work. But most of all, she let Sarah turn that frown upside down. One day, when Sarah was telling Rebecca the latest intimate and disgusting details about death and disaster, Rebecca started to laugh. She laughed because it was all too much. She laughed at the horror. She laughed because it was so ridiculous, there was nothing else to do. Sarah needed that laugh like a beacon in the darkness, and she followed that laugh to the promised land of getting over herself.

  And after that coming together in the soup of sorrow, Rebecca and Sarah found they really loved each other and when two people really love each other, they can make a baby. And after a long labour, a lot of screaming and swearing and even more drugs, The Full Catastrophe storytelling event was born.

  We originally wanted to call the show Clusterfuck, because there are times in our lives when all the messy bits and pieces, the stresses and competing passions, interests and demands combine to form a shit-storm so epic that it must simply be greeted in the foetal position. But we are nice ladies who swear far too much, so we resisted. At our first Full Catastrophe at Giant Dwarf in Redfern, Sydney, we expected, well, a catastrophe. We’d never hosted an event like this. We’d never tried to be funny in front of an audience. But we had an inkling that a catastrophe shared is a catastrophe diverted, and we hoped there would be great solace in sharing disasters with other people. As we expected, the event was messy and silly. Rebecca was sick and combined heavy duty flu medicine with cheap champagne, which meant she dramatically overshared on one orifice-involved detail in her catastrophic story. But something else happened. We found that The Full Catastrophe was akin to a group hug, a cheap group-therapy session with alcohol, and a joyful up-yours to dark times. We had asked others – more successful, famous and admired people – to share their disasters and, my god, it felt so good to hear these wonderful people generously share their major stuff-ups. We felt we’d finally found a club that would take us.

  Every story that has been told at a Full Catastrophe event has made us laugh, gasp and wipe the tears of joy and sadness from our eyes. Yet we always get the biggest thrill from the reaction of the audience. At the end of one event, a woman came up to us, crying with pleasure. We thought she wanted to gloat in gratuitous thrill that these fabulous personalities had exposed their messy bits. But no. She blubbered, ‘Thank you for making me feel my disastrous life is actually okay.’

  ‘Our pleasure, grasshopper,’ we said.

  The cult was born.

  And that’s what this is about. We recognise that many of us in these pages are extremely lucky in life, but we learn that none of us is immune from disaster. In fact, we are often a hair’s breadth away from it. And while some awful things cannot be laughed at, many can and should be. Sometimes a catastrophe is of our own making. Sometimes we put ourselve
s in uncomfortable situations. Deborah Knight, Cathy Wilcox and Emma Alberici travelled with children. Clem Bastow went on a quest for love and tempted fate. Sometimes the catastrophe comes to us in the form of the birth of a child (Annabel Crabb), or the death of a loved one (Sarah), or just the act of walking out the front door and into an IKEA store (Rebecca). In this collection, there are family catastrophes, disasters at work (Kate McClymont is the toughest chick we know) and in love, disasters with fruit (or is an avocado a vegetable, Bernard Salt?), and crises that are so insane they defy description. While some of us court catastrophe and some of us like to catastrophise, most often disasters are beyond our control. We are at the mercy of the love we feel for others, which can place us in perilous situations. (What were you thinking, Robbie Buck?)

  So come with us, dear connoisseur of human failings, as we traipse through a landscape of humour and fiasco. We hope you read these stories and feel better about yourself, your life and your decisions. And know, in your heart, that this too shall pass.

  Wrong Way Go Back

  Annabel Crabb

  PEOPLE HAVE BABIES all the time. It is among the least original things a human being can do, apart from dying and wearing ironic T-shirts. Far more hopeless people than Jeremy and I do it all the time; I feel, defensively, that I should point that out before telling this story.

  We were in our mid-thirties. We lived in London and held down capable jobs. We had conceived a baby, after that customary awkward interregnum that confronts thirty-something couples when they pull that strategic handbrake turn from years of applying substantial ingenuity to the task of not getting pregnant, and start applying it to achieve the opposite result. It’s then they discover that it’s harder than one always thought.

  We’d already encountered a small-scale debacle by the time I was in my ninth month of pregnancy. The public hospital up the road from us was a place called the Whittington. Its emblem was a black cat. Fine; I’m not superstitious. The hospital dates back to the 1400s, and survived the Great Fire of London and several name changes over that time, having at different stages been known as the City of London Lying-in Hospital for Married Ladies and St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics. I liked all these aspects of my proposed ante-natal care.

  But I cooled on the place when we arrived for a look at the labour ward and found that many of the facility’s original fifteenth-century features remained. We were instructed that if I wanted pillows, I would have to bring them. I was planning a water birth, having read that babies can remain submerged indefinitely when born into water, on account of receiving their oxygen through the umbilical cord. I was keen to see this phenomenon for myself. I reasoned there would not be much else very entertaining in the general process of squeezing a large baby out of an unfeasibly snug aperture. You have to make your own fun, after all.

  So I fled the Whittington and booked myself, at the last minute, into a birth centre in North London. Miles and miles from our home, it was a free-standing birth centre with lovely midwives called names like Rowan and Elderflower (it’s possible I am embroidering this).

  The birth centre had CD players and comfy chairs and a kettle and big queen-sized beds where your partner could stay over. And it had birth pools. In terms of pain relief, though, you were looking at ice cubes and scented candles, and that was about it. The midwives explained that in the event of complications, we’d have to jump in an ambulance. These seemed like reasonable terms.

  A week before the baby was due, our friend James came round for dinner. This may, in retrospect, have been an error. James is a mathematical genius with a taste for conversation and fine wine. I went to bed at ten. Jeremy, taking one for the team, stayed up late with James and several bottles of red. He stumbled into bed at ten to one. And at ten past one, my waters broke.

  Now, all the books agree that in the weeks before you give birth, everybody needs to get some rest. It’s a pretty ropey business, having a baby, and it works best when everyone is calm and well-slept. I cannot find any reference in the published literature to the ramifications where one party has only been asleep a couple of hours and the other one has David Boon blood-alcohol levels, but I have my suspicions.

  ‘Jeremy!’ I hissed, rolling over and jabbing him savagely. ‘I need a towel! My waters broke!’ He turned over and gave me a drunken pat.

  ‘Darling,’ he drawled, ‘you shall have all the towels you require.’ And then he went back to sleep. I couldn’t wake him again after that.

  I lay there for a while, timing contractions and wondering whether this whole thing hadn’t been a poor idea. After a couple of hours, I lumbered off and ran a bath, which I was then unable to clamber out of. I summoned Jeremy in the end by hurling bars of soap and bottles of shampoo at the bathroom door. He rallied brilliantly, I must say, considering his handicaps.

  We faced a few hurdles, though. For one, we didn’t have a car, it was 4.30 am, and London taxis have a policy of not carrying women in labour. Also, we hadn’t packed a bag. This is a real rookie error, I know, but in my defence, the baby wasn’t due for another whole week and I like to work to deadline.

  I developed an urgent need to make green tomato chutney. So I set about doing that, while Jeremy stumbled out to find one of those GoGet cars. Looking back on it, I am hopeful that he was merely horribly hungover by this point, and not still technically shickered. He also packed a bag, very kindly, and as dawn broke we set off.

  It became clear almost immediately that neither of us had much of an idea of how to get to the birth centre. It was miles away, in an unfamiliar part of London. We seemed to have somehow taken a route that visited every speed hump in North London. We drove grimly, in silence. ‘Shall we put some music on?’ suggested Jeremy at one point. I opened the hospital bag he’d packed. It contained muesli, plates and Neil Young CDs. I actively dislike Neil Young. This was going to be a long day.

  Things improved sharply when we arrived at the birth centre, which was – as imagined – a calm and pillow-strewn haven of friendliness and efficiency. I had a piece of toast and hopped into a delightful warm birth pool. Matters progressed. Jeremy was doing all the back rubbing and muttered encouragement. What could possibly go wrong from here?

  Well. The midwife – after checking the progress of my labours – had some awkward news. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I have no idea how we failed to pick this up earlier, but your baby is in the breech position. Now, I can deliver a breech baby – I’ve done it before – but this is your first baby and I’m afraid I would have to advise evacuating you to hospital.’ The thought of hauling myself out of this delightful bath and clambering into an ambulance was not attractive. But to imperil the baby’s wellbeing purely because of my laziness seemed a poor way to kick off our relationship. So within ten minutes I was strapped to a plank in the back of an ambulance, streaking towards yet another hospital, Jeremy zooming along behind in the hire car.

  On our arrival at this new hospital, it became clear quite swiftly that my vague plans of popping back into a bath and resuming my work did not square with the plans of the awaiting medical team. They seized my trolley and raced me expertly through some shiny corridors. Suddenly Jeremy materialised, inexplicably wearing full surgical scrubs. Somehow I had been upgraded from ‘Baby’s pointing the wrong way; exercise caution’ to ‘Emergency Caesarean’. We burst through the swing doors of an operating theatre. My excitement at finding myself in a cameo role on ER was considerably dulled by the realisation that I was about to be carved up like a roast chicken.

  I attempted to negotiate with the registrar. ‘Listen, I would actually prefer to just give birth naturally,’ I told her. ‘What about if I give it a go and you folk just keep an eye on me and leap in if it seems to be going wrong? Would that work?’ She actually rolled her eyes, and I became aware that an anaesthetist was plunging a needle into the back of my left hand. At the strikers’ end, another mob-capped person murmured eight of the most alarming words in the English language: ‘I’m just go
ing to put a catheter in.’ This was all escalating rather quickly.

  Then, something remarkable happened. Catheter lady said, ‘Hang on a minute. What’s going on here? This baby isn’t breech. I can see its head!’

  An awful silence ensued, broken by my midwife, who in the tiniest of voices muttered, ‘Oh my god. I’m so embarrassed.’

  It turns out that my daughter, as a foetus, had amused herself in the womb by developing a head that looked amazingly like an arse. She was bald as a peanut, and her scalp had some sort of mad crease that looked like a bum crack. Which is why we were all here. No one could think of anything else to say. The air was full of latexy snapping sounds, which is what an elite medical team sounds like when they disgustedly peel off their gloves all at once. ‘Well, there you go,’ said the registrar, with what I thought was an unnecessary snarky tone. ‘You can go off and have your baby any way you want now. And there won’t be a doctor in sight. Happy?’

  They all stormed out, leaving me, Jeremy and the midwife staring at each other. She grabbed a wheelchair. I hopped off the slab and settled into it. And off we went through the hospital looking for somewhere to have this baby. I became convinced I could hear the Benny Hill theme tune playing in the background.

  The good news is that we found an unoccupied birthing suite. Weirdly, it even had a birth pool in it. So it all happened the way I had planned, and yes babies do swim about underwater when they’re born, and yes it is super cool. And the National Health Service observed, in our case, its normal practice of discharging mothers and newborns after about five hours, so by nightfall we were back in our own flat, where I finished making the chutney.

  The other part of the NHS post-natal care system, which is that midwives visit you at home to help you with feeding and so on, didn’t happen in our case because no one could agree on who had actually delivered my child. Babies are like wickets – they have to be chalked up to someone. And my daughter had been delivered by a birth centre midwife, but in a different hospital. So she was nobody’s responsibility.

  By day three, the poor child was really losing condition as a result of her mother’s well-meaning but deeply incompetent attempts at breastfeeding. The lovely olive skin we enthused about to our parents turned out to be quite severe jaundice. Audrey was a plucky child but it must have been hard, by this point, for her to reach any conclusion other than that she had been born to idiots. When I showed her to my GP, he took one look at her and said, ‘You need to be in hospital.’ So we raced to the University College Hospital – our fourth medical facility.