The Full Catastrophe Page 4

  ‘Well, Mum and I were watching Bridget Jones’s Baby,’ I told him.

  ‘So, watching a movie upstairs?’

  ‘Bridget Jones’s Baby,’ I reminded him.

  ‘Yeah, we probably don’t need that level of detail,’ he said

  Oh, so we’re just going to give up on Renée Zellweger’s happiness now? Is that how this night is going to go? It just gets better.

  During the statement, Mum’s cat knocked something over in another room and Mum yelled out, ‘What’s Charlie into? Drugs, probably!’

  The detectives left our home at 1 am. There were crime scene chemicals and dust all over the place downstairs and the house was quiet. I looked at Mum.

  ‘Do you … want to just finish the movie?’

  ‘Of course, darling,’ she said. ‘You would not believe the shenanigans our Bridget gets up to. Oh, and someone drove past and threw two Molotov cocktails at the house, but I really have no idea what that was about.’

  Scotty escaped from the hospital two days later – there was no television, he said – and I found him that morning, sitting in the garden with his hospital wristband still attached. Half his face was drooping on account of nerve damage the doctors thought might be permanent. Actually, his face looked like a landslide. Despite the fact he could have died, Scotty was more worried about the new girl he had met who wanted to ‘jump his bones’.

  And that’s how we found ourselves there in the morning sun: a recidivist criminal with a bung face asking a gay man how he was going to go down on his new girlfriend. They say we humans tend to take stock and reassess our lives after a near-death experience, but Scotty? Scotty was horny.

  Got Lost on the Way, Baby?

  Sally Rugg

  DO YOU EVER get lost in your own house?

  It’s a very peculiar experience. You walk into your living room and the doorways have moved around the walls. Where the door to your kitchen used to be is now a solid blank wall. There’s a quick, irrational moment when you wonder if you’ve woken up in a stranger’s house, but those are definitely your things everywhere – it’s just that the structure of your house has shifted. The architecture got bored in the middle of the night and rearranged itself. Moving your eyes along the solid wall, a doorframe skitters into your vision on a wall your brain is insisting did not have a door in it last night. Then suddenly the house seems to reassemble itself. So, if the kitchen’s there, then the bathroom is in front of you, not behind you. Right?

  Do you ever feel the world spin when you’re walking in a straight line?

  You know that from your house, the train station is a seventeen-minute walk and has one right turn. You know that if you just keep walking straight until you’re at the train line, at which point you turn right, then you’ll be at the station in seventeen minutes. Easy. Just keep walking straight ahead along the footpath.

  You’ve walked for five minutes and start to feel uneasy; you’re going the wrong way. Nothing looks familiar. You must have turned around and gone back the way you’ve come from; you do that sometimes. Every step forward feels like a pull backwards. You’ve gone the wrong way. Christ, you’re in a completely different neighbourhood now. How many minutes has it been? You must have turned down that street near the top of the hill where you always get confused, because you can’t see the street ahead, and now you’ve marched off into the next suburb. None of these houses is familiar. Your heart starts to beat faster and the familiar panic of being lost starts to flutter through your body: ‘Where am I?’

  You pull out your phone and open your map. There you are, a little blue dot on the same street you walk along every day from your house to the train station. You walk a little further, to see whether you’re still going the right way, and you are! False alarm. You’re okay. You keep the map out as you continue to walk in a straight line. You will continue to use the app for the rest of the week until you have the confidence to try walking down a straight road unassisted once more.

  Statistically speaking, my brain is probably not like yours. There is a very good chance that your hippocampus and your prefrontal cortex work together and give you the ability to form cognitive maps that allow you to conceptualise the space around you beyond your line of vision. Congratulations, genius. My brain, however, grew in utero with a fun little quirk called Developmental Topographical Disorder (DTD), which means that I’m going to take a few more minutes than you would to get back from the bathroom in this restaurant unless you come with me, please.

  Having DTD isn’t like having a poor sense of direction or not being very good at reading maps. It’s a permanent disorientation that renders you completely lost beyond what you can see in your immediate surroundings. Often, it’s an absolute catastrophe.

  A few months before Alan Jones ordered the Premier of New South Wales to force the CEO of the Sydney Opera House to allow gambling advertisements to be projected on its sails, I gave a talk there. It was meant to be an inspiring seminar on how to be an activist, and because it was an hour long, I couldn’t just get up on stage and shout, ‘Don’t ever let anyone tell you what to do!’ like I’d hoped to.

  I’m a young, female activist who speaks in the public domain, which means I receive a lot of violent threats from angry men on the internet, who perceive any discussion of justice or opportunity for minorities as a personal attack on their privilege. Which I suppose it is, really. In the lead-up to this talk, I’d received some quite specific threats from one particularly angry internet stranger, so the Opera House staff were taking a little extra care with security. I was brought to my own green room through a secret underground door and up through a labyrinth of backstage passageways and a dozen identical, winding corridors. Needless to say, I had absolutely no idea where I was beyond ‘Opera House’.

  Thankfully, a lovely runner took me down to the stage with plenty of time to spare. As established, the seminar was slightly more complex than me pounding my fist on a lectern repeating, ‘Always ignore politicians who tell you things aren’t possible’, so I was nervous. So nervous that I needed a little wee before going onstage, as I assume all professionals do.

  ‘No worries, if you just head back the way we came and then at the end of the hall take a left and follow that around the corner, you’ll see it on your right,’ my friendly runner told me, hurrying off to their next job, leaving me standing there looking gormless as they trotted off into the horizon.

  I was sure I’d botch it. I weaved my way through backstage hallways with a knot in my stomach, certain I’d get lost coming back and that I’d be late for my big talk, or as much of my big talk I could get through before being potentially attacked on stage by a middle-aged man who felt angry about my wildly original belief that misogyny is bad. I had my phone out in front of me, clicking it on every ten seconds or so to check how late I was and how to balance rushing back to the stage for my big Opera House debut with getting myself even more lost.

  I did manage to find my way back to the stage, only alarming the stage manager and sound technician for the ten minutes it took me to stumble, disoriented and alone, back from the bathroom. Furthermore, the security detail at the back of the theatre did not have to intercept a single angry stranger. All in all, it was a roaring success.

  The day my sister gave birth to my niece, however, didn’t run so smoothly. Not for her and certainly not for me. Bessie had a high-risk pregnancy, so my mum, my other sister and I joined her at the hospital for the big birthing showdown. It was fairly fraught and a little bit scary, so we were doing what all good family members do when their loved one is faced with their potentially imminent death – we blew up rubber gloves and pretended to write silly notes on her chart. It was the very least we could do.

  Hospitals are funny places, aren’t they? So many doors. So many of those trolleys that all look the same. So many moving curtains, changing what you remembered the room to look like.

  A couple of hours into the labour, my sister’s unborn baby stopped moving. The baby’
s heart rate dropped right down and doctors from across the hospital floor rushed to her room with their pagers beeping. It felt like hours had gone by, but maybe it was only minutes. Every second that baby didn’t move felt like an age was passing, and nothing Bessie did made a difference, no matter where or how she moved. My darling sister turned to me, her eyes full of fear, and begged me to get her a lemonade from the vending machine. She was certain that the fizz and the chill and the sugar hit would stir the baby up again and re-engage her for her big entry to the world.

  Lemonade. Vending machine. By the lifts. Got it.

  An extra cool thing about my disorientation disorder is that when I’m flustered or stressed, it gets far worse. It’s much like trying to do anything that requires careful deliberation and attention to detail when you’re in an absolute flap. Computers fail you. Your six-digit pin won’t reset. You’ve burnt the garlic and the smoke detector won’t stop. You’re trying to parallel park and you’re blocking a massive queue of cars while also being late for the play you’ve paid a fortune to go to see. When stressed, the task of navigating myself from A to B is rigged against me, every step trying to trip me up and every corner a trap.

  I was frantic. My unborn niece’s life potentially depended on this lemonade. I’d done nothing to help my poor sister as she howled and heaved in agony other than put the bedpan on my head and say, ‘Look at my funny hat!’ She’d asked this of me in her moment of need. There was no way I would let her or the baby down. All I needed to do was find the vending machine and make my way back to her room.

  I ran Lara Croft-style through the hospital, swerving past nurses and dodging patients on drips. Straight ahead, left, right, right again, my Birkenstocks flip-flopping on the squeaky-clean floor. As I burst through the ward’s double doors, I saw it, the vending machine. The lemonade. I fumbled with the coins I’d snatched from the bottom of my mum’s bag, wildly feeding them into the slot. The can dropped to the bottom of the machine with a thud and I took off back to the room.

  The double doors swung in my wake as I sprinted down the corridor. One door, two doors, three doors. Left. Keep going, past the linen room, a little bit further … and then it’s right, right? Right. Yes. Or was it left? My sprint had dropped to a jog, faltered to a walk, and finally I stopped dead in my tracks. I didn’t know where to go. I was clutching the lifesaving lemonade – for all I knew my niece had moments to live – and I was a terrified deer in the fluorescent lights of the maternity ward. Possibly the maternity ward. A ward. I had absolutely no idea where I was beyond ‘Hospital’.

  I didn’t know where to go and nothing looked familiar, so I just started running. If I ran around the whole wing, I’d be sure to find the room. ‘I will recognise the room,’ I told myself as tears streaked down my face. I’ll be there within seconds and then the baby will be okay, and my sister will be okay. I ran and I ran. Nothing looked familiar. I was going back the way I came. I didn’t know where I was going. This was my nightmare.

  It felt like minutes, but it would have been seconds later that I saw the room, down the end of the corridor. I remembered how the curtain was drawn, the writing on the whiteboard by the door, the cleaning trolley out the front. With a fresh surge of urgency, I tore down the hallway with the lemonade in my sweaty hands, each stride bringing me closer to saving a life. I ran straight through the doorway exclaiming, ‘It’s here, it’s here!’

  Flinging the curtain to the side, I busted open the lemonade. As the fizzy drink exploded all over me, all over the floor and all over the feet of a total stranger – who on reflection I’d say was about eight centimetres dilated – I realised I was in the wrong room.

  ‘I’m so sorry!’ I shrieked, as the poor woman bellowed, ‘Get out!’, kicking with one of her legs, either to shake off the lemonade or in completely understandable self-defence against the sticky, crying woman who had just burst into her room. Mortified, I yanked the curtain closed and nearly smacked a nurse in the face, who’d assumedly been responding to the misleading cries of, ‘It’s here! It’s here!’, which when shouted in a maternity ward probably rarely means, ‘Your Schweppes has arrived.’

  ‘I’m so sorry!’ I shouted again, running from the room covered in tears and fizzy drink.

  ‘Sally! Over here!’

  I spun around to see my mum standing a few doors down and beckoning me over. She looked confused as I ran towards her.

  ‘Why are you running?’ she asked with a slightly scornful head shake.

  ‘The baby! It needs the lemonade!’ I panted back.

  My mum paused to take in the full spectacle of her sticky, weeping, panting first-born daughter, probably concerned that I might think an unborn baby might need or, indeed, be able to drink from a can while in utero.

  ‘The baby is fine. We’re at a hospital – the doctors know how to deal with this sort of thing,’ she said, tutting at the state of me. ‘She’s about to push now so we’re going to go and sit in the waiting room.’

  Twenty minutes later, baby Penny joined the world and made me the proudest, stickiest aunty of all time.

  Tolkien suggested that not all those who wander are lost. I suppose that’s true. Some people enjoy hiking in the wilderness or exploring foreign cities or shopping at a Westfield. I wonder sometimes what it’s like to wander. To understand how the space around you spreads and unfurls so that you can move through it however you please. For me, though, I will stick to the beaten track and the road most travelled and save getting lost for when I look into Penny’s big, blue eyes – and the dozen other times each and every day.

  Debra Racks Off to Melbourne

  Richard Glover

  WHO’D LIVE ALONE? I know millions do it. Just not me. Not until now. Suddenly my partner Debra is perpetually in Melbourne. I imagine she’s shacked up with either a crime lord or a wanky theatre director – those two occupations being my only available image of what people do in Melbourne.

  She likes Melbourne. I’m not so sure about the place. It’s certainly a different sort of town to Sydney. In Melbourne, the phrase ‘a splash of colour’ means a whip-thin girl with pink-hair and a little black dress; in Sydney it means a footballer vomiting onto the Corso.

  So it’s me, the dog, and occasionally one son, and what can only be described as a downward trajectory – downwards to the full catastrophe. Here’s my question for those who live on their own. How do you maintain standards? If no one is there to witness that second bowl of ice-cream, or the fifth glass of wine, then has it really happened? Is it like the tree that falls unobserved in the forest?

  This is the way I find myself behaving as a single person: a man with no standards, no self-respect, and – crucially – no witnesses.

  Most of my good behaviour, I now realise, is an attempt to impress Debra and distract her from the less savoury aspects of my character. This is all very well, right up to the moment she goes away. Robbed of the chance to brag to your partner – ‘See, I did all the laundry’; ‘The bathroom, you might notice, is spotless’; ‘My fungal infection is clearing up’ – how do you manage to maintain an interest in such matters? What’s to stop the laundry from piling up, together with the household garbage and the unwashed plates and pans, until the neighbours start complaining about the stench, the council whacks a fumigation order on the house and you find yourself the subject of a tabloid current affairs show? ‘Strange Hermit Lives with Rats and Mice in Fetid House of Shame’ is presumably the headline they will use to advertise my story.

  Certainly, with every night alone, my behaviour worsens. Debra generally flies to Melbourne on a Monday morning, and stays a week or sometimes two. The first Monday night, I’m fine. Home-cooked dinner, two beers, a news show on TV, one chapter of a literary novel and bed. By Tuesday, it’s a frozen dinner, five wines, a comedy DVD and a perve at the catalogue for the DJs lingerie sale. Plot this on a chart and you’ll see the steepness of the curve. By Friday, I’m pissed by 8.30 pm, no dinner, the dog’s whining for food, I’m lyi
ng on the couch watching the arse-end of my ten-DVD Steve Coogan box-set, finding myself unable to comprehend the simplest of Steve’s plots. By this point, I’ve lost the gift of language and am communicating with the dog via a series of grunts and whistles.

  Continue this for a few weeks and I doubt I’d be fully human. Evolution itself would be thrown into reverse. Week two and the opposable thumb would go; week three and I’d lose the ability to walk erect. Stay away long enough and I’d probably become aquatic.

  The supermarket doesn’t help. I go shopping on Sunday afternoon to stock up for the week, and that’s when the downward spiral begins. I search for things in packets for one, but the choice is extremely limited. Some packets explicitly say: ‘Serves two.’ It’s the first time in my life I’ve been openly mocked by packaged meat.

  Oh, I know it’s possible to buy the two-pack and freeze half, but why should I? It’s like a letter of reproach, sitting there in the fridge, the packaged meat mumbling the message, ‘Hey, buddy, I happen to notice you are living on your own.’

  And, so, I settle for a pack of smoked salmon, some pasta and a tub of cream; I’ll get three dinners out of it. Sure, it’s fattening, but who cares? If a man gets fat in the forest – with nobody there to witness the outward slump of his belly – has the weight gain really occurred? If he eats takeaway pizza straight from the box, observed only by the dog, is the universe any the wiser?

  Half the people I know live alone. They seem perfectly happy. Their houses are tidy; their waistlines reasonable. Their alcoholism seems no more advanced than my own. How do they do it? Can it be that they develop some sort of internal system of standards and hygiene, rather than simply forcing their partner into the role of police officer, diet coach and moral arbiter?

  Self-regulation. I turn the concept over in my mind and find it quite remarkable. Thing is, these days you are meant to cope. In fact, you’re not even allowed to mention that it might be a bit of a challenge.