The Full Catastrophe Read online

  ‘Melbourne? Lovely. Two weeks? Super. I’ll hardly notice you’ve gone.’ This, I think, goes for both men and women. Since housework and childcare are such contested areas, you can never admit that any task normally done by your partner was anything but a delight when it becomes your turn to do it.

  ‘Getting the children to sport on time? Oh, that was no trouble at all. And isn’t it pleasant having that hour walking around the park in the bracing, freezing air while you wait for them to finish?’

  During the second week, the mess is really building. By Monday, the kitchen floor already features eight dead cockroaches plus a moat of dropped food. By Tuesday, there are fifteen dead cockroaches, who appear to have organised their bodies across the floor to spell out the words: ‘Sweep me’.

  Debra, I notice, dropped large amounts of laundry into the basket just before her departure. She also did ‘a clean-out’ of the fridge – throwing out any food past its use-by date. This, of course, is precisely the sort of food that can sustain a family through a crisis. I conclude she has a plan to make the house fall apart during my stewardship, thus proving her contention that she does all the housework and I do nothing. I resolve to defeat her.

  To save time, I cook all the family’s meals in one go: an army-sized quantity of bolognaise sauce, sufficient to last five consecutive meals. The recipe contains one glass of red wine, the rest of the bottle going into the chef.

  By Wednesday, my head is pounding due to the constant alcohol abuse. There are now twenty-two dead cockroaches, their bodies arranged to spell out the phrase: ‘He’s losing it’. This is when Debra phones in, wondering how we’re all getting on.

  Before answering, I remind myself: if you admit you’re not coping, it’s just another way of confessing that she normally does more than her share of this stuff. ‘Fine,’ I say. ‘Absolute breeze. Getting a lot of reading in, actually. Great to be able to cook every night. A real pleasure.’

  The only problem with this barefaced lie is the chaos that surrounds me. The dishwasher has chosen to break down. And most of the light bulbs in the kitchen have stopped working. I suspect Debra of sabotage. I have an image of her working behind enemy lines in World War Two Germany, but I say nothing.

  The phone call ends, and I set to work. In the days ahead, the illusion must be created that we coped effortlessly. I square my shoulders. I have three days before her return to Sydney. I tackle the ironing and clean the bathroom, which is more disgusting than can easily be explained. The kitchen, though, appears to be fighting back against my attempts to clean it. Spaghetti sauce is evident on most surfaces, and fifty-seven deceased cockroaches now litter the floor, their bodies spelling out the words: ‘She’s winning’.

  My son has turned up for dinner and is sullenly spooning down the bolognaise sauce that I’ve given him the last ten times he’s visited. He says he feels sick and leaves the table. I keep eating, which is hard when you are overhearing the sound of your son vomiting into the rose garden.

  Back in the kitchen, the cockroaches have reorganised themselves into a giant clock-face, counting down the minutes until Debra’s return. With the cockroach clock ticking, I work through the night, scrubbing and cleaning. I remove all signs of the town of Bologna and its famous sauce. I try to fix the dishwasher and install new light bulbs. I run up to the shops to buy fresh milk and bread. Panting slightly, I arrive home with seconds to spare.

  ‘The place looks great,’ says Debra, breezily, as she walks in.

  ‘Oh, does it?’ I say, glancing up from the newspaper. ‘I hadn’t noticed.’ The scene is perfect save for my son, who is lying by the back door holding his stomach and groaning. Looking quite red in the face, he keeps mouthing the words, ‘The bolognaise.’

  ‘Is he all right?’ Debra asks.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ I say. ‘He probably just ate too much of my cooking. It was delicious.’

  She looks worried, but I’m not too concerned. We’re alive. The house has not burnt down. There have been no major outbreaks of disease.

  The full catastrophe? Well, on this occasion, I think it was averted. Frankly, I hardly noticed she was gone.

  Burpin’ Your Bad Voodoo …

  Sarah Macdonald

  MY FULL CATASTROPHE is a story of dogs, death, disease, pestilence, infestation, elimination, evisceration and blocked auras. It’s actually the story that started this whole catastrophic idea.

  It was May 2015 and life was going okay. It was the first time in a decade I felt almost under control. I was emerging from that vortex of having really young kids and an often-travelling husband. I’d started a new job, he was travelling less, and my kids were taking faltering steps to independence. Our daughter had started high school and was managing reasonably well and our son was in that lovely year 4 stage of no homework, great fun and good friends. Even the dog seemed relatively content.

  And then my dad died.

  My dad was my rock and my family’s anchor. He was a beautiful, calm, gentle man. My grief was huge and vast and only somehow made bearable by the fact it was uncomplicated. My grief was pure. I had always felt deeply loved by my father. In fact, the only competition my mum, siblings and I ever felt for Dad’s love was his adoration for his dogs. Dad loved his dogs. He loved how they loved absolutely and unconditionally. As a lifelong atheist he used to point out that ‘God’ was ‘Dog’ backwards.

  Dad loved all dogs and he even tolerated it when I got a non-allergic, stupid, fluffy, delicate, neurotic cavoodle and called him Shaggy. I did once hear Dad whisper to his big, jowly boxer dog, ‘Shaggy’s not a real dog but be nice to him, he can’t help being pathetic.’ Dad was right, Shaggy was pathetic. But he was sweet. And I needed him after Dad died for his constant companionship.

  But grief that’s pure is still grief. And after witnessing an awful end to my dad’s beautiful life, I was traumatised. I collapsed into a black hole of despair, awaking from nightmares as a vulnerable and exposed and raw shell of a human being. I was in no shape for anything to go wrong.

  So, of course, everything went wrong.

  First, my bloke went overseas to study for two months. We’d already paid for it, we couldn’t cancel, I told him to go. I was used to single parenting. We’d be fine.

  My poor grieving mother then had a minor catastrophe. Mum can only handle life between 20 and 22 degrees. It was mid-winter and her heating system broke on the only non-globally warmed day of the year. Grief-stricken, vulnerable and freezing, she tried not to complain, but I spent days begging maintenance men to come. They finally came on her birthday and as they were fixing it, she asked me to check her back.

  ‘It hurts a bit, what do you think it is?’ she said.

  My darling mum had big, red-raw, painful, pulsating shingles all over her back. Triggered by her grief, they showed how vulnerable she had become since losing her beautiful husband.

  I bought her the drugs and put her to bed. The heating system got fixed. It lasted six hours. Guess what time it broke? Why of course, it broke on Friday at 5.01 pm. The temperature dropped. Her old house was as cold as a tomb. Her pain got worse. I spent the weekend screaming at the heating men’s answering machines and voicemails. She got worse. The pain medication helped a bit but gave her horrendous nausea that was unmanageable. I was due to have a lovely afternoon tea with my girlfriends, with scones and champagne. Instead I took Mum to hospital and she spent four days behind a rainbow-striped curtain in a ward, mainlining apple juice and painkillers. I spent the days with my poor Mumma and my nights with the kids and my neurotic dog.

  It was fine. It was life.

  Mum came out of hospital and I went back to my new job just long enough to get the flu shot.

  Then I got the fucking flu. And you know when you are really sick and you are really sad, and really lonely, and you are overwhelmed and overloaded and you go to the doctor and you just cry. I did that. The lovely doctor put on a mask, patted me on the back and gave me some flu medicine. She also gave me some Valiu
m. She said to come back in a few days as I may need an X-ray for pneumonia.

  I staggered home and lay for days with a fever. It was school holidays and I was crying with self-pity and pain, and downstairs my kids were crying with boredom. To this day I’m not sure what they did, but they survived. Rebecca Huntley, my partner in the titillating tome of terror that is this book, dropped off food but I didn’t want anyone coming too close, so I stayed in isolation. My only companion and nurse was my dog, neurotic old Shaggy. But Shags is not a great nurse. In fact, he was so upset that I was so sick that he kept vomiting. So every time I’d stagger out of bed, I’d step in his vomit. It was revolting, but I needed him, so I let him lie on my bed. I thought I’d train him to sleep on the floor like a real dog when I was better.

  My fever climbed to the point that I began to hallucinate. My thoughts became distorted, dreams became nightmares, and nightmares became real. In that state of altered consciousness everything suddenly became clear to me. I was not sick with a virus. I was possessed by bad voodoo! Those drugs were all well and good, but they weren’t working because my issue was spiritual. So I did what all self-respecting daughters of an atheist would do. I messaged my most woo hoo of friends, Min, got the number of a dealer in dharma and rang a psychic. This lovely lady answered straight away and said, ‘G’day, love, can’t talk much now, I’m in Westfield.’ Fair enough, I thought, spiritualists have to shop. Appraising my illness, isolation and state of sick sadness she took immediate charge. ‘I’m gunna call you back, but I tell you what you’re gunna do in the meantime. I need you to change your bed sheets to all white. I want clean white pillows and sheets and a white doona. Then I need you to get into a white bath of white salt water. Then get out of that bath and dress in white.’

  ‘You betcha,’ I told my new guru. Frankly, I would have done anything she’d said at that point. I’d broken the thermometer and I think my fever was off the scale.

  I staggered around, changing my sheets to my good 1000-weave white cotton. I put on a new white doona cover. I had a bath with sea salt. I washed my hair. I put on my only white clothes – they were my nicest clothes.

  The psychic rang me back and immediately burped loudly into the phone. ‘Yep, bbbbuuuuurrrpppph, your aura, burrrrrrpppphhhh, is really blocked.’ Burrrrpppphhh.

  ‘Yes’, I said, ‘it feels it, but would you like me to ring back when your indigestion is better?’

  ‘No, darling,’ she yelled. ‘I’m cleansing your aura and I’m burping out your bad voodoo.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, and on we went.

  My saving-grace guru told me to imagine white light coming into the top of my head and down my body. And as I did so, she belched and burped, and she washed that bad voodoo right out of my hair. The dog did not like the loud belching – so loud he could hear it through the phone. He started to growl softly.

  ‘Go with it, Shags, it’s our only hope,’ I said.

  And, believe it or not, I actually could feel my aura getting clean. I felt white light enter my body through my scalp. And over a few minutes I could feel the top of my head grow warm. Then warmer. Then hot. Then hotter. Then I felt an amazing sense of itchiness as the bad voodoo left my body through the crown of my head.

  I thanked my burping psychic and I hung up, immensely grateful.

  But my head continued to feel hot. Until it got really itchy. And as I scratched the white-light laden scalp, it started to feel increasingly lumpy.

  It was time to go back to the doctor. I arrived in my white best clothes, knowing that I was now cured, my lungs were clear and I would not need an X-ray for pneumonia. And I was right. She said my chest was clearing and my temperature finally falling.

  This psychic is good, I thought.

  As I turned to leave, I stopped, turned back and told my lovely, normal, sensible doctor about the really bad itchy pain I had on my head. I even told her about the spiritualist cleansing my aura. She looked at me with an expression that clearly signified she thought perhaps she’d given me too much Valium.

  ‘Do you think perhaps it’s like a saint, like a stigmata?’ I asked her.

  She looked at my head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s not stigmata. You have nits.’

  I walked out with a shame so burning it broke the new thermometer. I went home and deloused the kids’ hair. And they both had long hair. I had long hair. And getting rid of nits is a shit of a job that involves a lot of poison and endless, strand-by-strand combing.

  I was lonely, I was sad, I was sick, and I was so over it. I sat at the table with a big glass of Dettol for the comb and a big glass of wine for the comber. Every time I cleansed the comb, I’d take a drink from the wine glass. At some point late in the night, when I had become so incapacitated by exhaustion and fever, I drank the Dettol by mistake.

  Right, I thought, this is it, I have had enough. My spirituality had almost faded away but in one last burst I said, ‘Dad, I need you to send me a sign that everything is going to be all right, that my life is going to get better.’

  No sooner had I spoken than the dog started yowling and crying.

  Now this spooked me immensely, until I remembered that the poor dog hadn’t had a walk for days as I was so sick and could hardly stagger. We live on the edge of a tiny patch of bush, so I let him out into the night. And I kept de-nitting my hair, all the time thinking about how, when I finished, I’d crawl into my lovely, clean, white, high thread-count sheets and go to sleep. I finished my hair. I put on about seven loads of washing with the towels and the kids’ sheets and pillowcases. The dog came back and I let him in without a glance.

  Shaggy trotted upstairs and the kids went to bed all shiny and new and clean. I finished the bottle of wine and the bottle of Dettol, put on the last load of washing, and then I started up the stairs. I was so tired I couldn’t even stagger anymore. I crawled up those stairs to my nice clean sheets, thinking about how sometimes life is hard but I will get through this. I kissed the kids, and then headed to my bedroom, ready to sink into my white fluffy cloud of cleansed auras.

  But as I approached my room my swollen, mucus-filled nose began to sense a smell. A revolting smell. An odious odour that made me gag. As I rounded the doorway, I saw the dog lying spread-eagled on my bed, with his head on my pillow. And as he put his head up to greet me, I noticed he had a big, long, brown smear of bloody, gross, skanky crap on his neck. It looked, smelled and had the consistency of liquid poo expelled from a dying animal, and it was mixed with offal, and there may even have been a bit of possum intestine hanging from his ear. This disgusting cocktail of crap was all over my dog and my best clean, white sheets and doona and pillow slips. And as I picked Shaggy up, I got it all over my nice white best clothes.

  I began to laugh. Hysterically. In my room, alone, lonely, sad, stricken with grief and viruses and covered in crap, I put my head back and in a voice that was a mix of laughter, screaming, crying, hiccuping and banshee, I said, ‘Thanks, Dad. You’ve shown me that life is sometimes offal and shit and you just have to roll with it and in it.’

  And that, my friends, is how we began The Full Catastrophe. It’s all about realising and learning that sometimes you just have to roll in the deep, deep doo-doo of life.

  Anatomy of a Stitch-up

  Jenny Valentish

  IT WAS HARD to pick a catastrophe since I actually have a tattoo on my back bearing the words ‘Calamity Jen’, but I’m going to take you back to 1992. I was seventeen and the CEO of Slapper.

  This was my self-published magazine, full title – Slapper: the groupie’s guide to gropable bands – or a ‘fanzine’, as the kids called them then. It would be a Tumblr now. Slapper was like an early ode to Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, in that I was trying to attract musicians to have sex with me by writing about having sex with them. Sometimes it was a true story.

  To explain why I would do something so ill-advised, I should tell you I grew up in Slough. This is a deeply disappointing town in England. You might have been ta
ught at school the John Betjeman poem that suggests friendly bombs should fall on it.

  John was spot on. Whenever I think of Slough I think of that Divinyls song, ‘Boys in Town’, in which Chrissy Amphlett wishes she could get out of here. I figured that writing about my ideal life was my passport out. Certainly, it led to record companies granting me interviews with bands, which, like music festival bookers are always saying, I chose entirely based on merit. On the merit of their promo photos.

  Slapper was a wink-nudge take on demented fandom. Issue one had no discernible theme, but interviews with super-groupies such as Pamela Des Barres and Cynthia Plaster Caster. Issue two was the ‘Cannibalistic Groupie’ issue. Issue three was the ‘Obsessive Fan’ issue. With the wisdom of hindsight, it was born out of a rage that I couldn’t be one of the boys, I could only sleep with them. And thus, this curious aggression when writing about them.

  Interviewing bands was nerve-racking. I’d down a quarter-bottle of vodka for Dutch courage and get on the phone to pester record companies for interviews. The interview itself would be fuelled by foul blends of Dad’s Southern Comfort diluted with Cinzano that I’d swig out of a shampoo bottle on the train to London. The day after an interview, I’d steel myself before pressing play on my massive tape-recorder, fast-forwarding through all the slurry: ‘Do you get groupies, then?’ to get to the meatier: ‘What are your views on religion?’ and the cunning genius of: ‘You must get really sick of people asking you about drugs …’

  It was an okay read all the same. I’d been told by some lecherous music hack that Slapper was ‘subversive’. And, once I’d looked that up, I’d gone to great lengths to live up to it. There were accounts of run-ins with riot grrrls and publicists, and tips on how to stalk rock stars. I’d tot up how much the record company spent on me in drinks and food, and run the tally throughout the interviews, also advising other writers on which record shops offered the best prices for those unwanted CDs.