Odyssey In A Teacup (22 page)

Earlier in the week, I had arranged to catch up with Ralph, Maxi and Vette for a cuppa that afternoon and I couldn’t wait to tell them. I hadn’t seen much of them lately; they led busy lives. All three of them were in the fashion industry. Maxi was working for a fashion magazine and Vette worked in women’s wear at Myer. They worked hard and saved hard, and both of them had recently bought apartments. And Ralph, who’d moved out of home and taken up the lease on Reuben’s studio apartment after we got married, had also just bought a place. He was in a very good position financially. After working for a few years in the menswear store, Ralph was ‘discovered’ (because of his looks, it was inevitable). He was now a catwalk model. He didn’t even have to vomit (à la Mons); his legs were long enough.

I walked into the café with a big cheesy grin on my face and an
Advertiser
under my arm. Reuben and I had briefly scanned the property listings a couple of hours earlier, and I wanted to go through them with my friends to get their input as they already had practical knowledge. They were waiting for me at a table in the corner.

‘Guess what, guys? We’re gonna start house hunting!’

‘Ah yes, the gingerbread house. The only thing missing,’
muttered Ralph.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Ruthie ... you’ve lapsed into a cookie-cutter existence.’

Ralph’s comment stung. I felt deflated. The three of them looked at each other, and now they were staring at me. It was a conspiracy.

‘You’ve all bought your own place!’ I said defensively.

‘Yes, but we’re not constrained by their enclosures.’ Ralph the metaphor-meister.

I got his drift. Seems he was right; I didn’t even have the impetus to stand up for myself. It felt like there was an estrangement between me and my three friends and nobody had bothered to tell me. I wanted to cry, but I didn’t want their pity. And as if I wasn’t even there, they started swapping horror stories about their house-hunting experiences, specifically their dealings with real estate agents. We hadn’t seen much of each other, so a lot of this was new to me. Still, because of the state I was in, it was hard to focus on what they were saying. But I noticed they started some of their sentences with
Remember when ...
so I gathered they’d been in touch with each other without me. I also picked up on the way they punctuated their sentences:
lowlifes, bullshit artists, weasels, scumbags.

Then I heard Vette ask, ‘Who do you reckon this species is descended from?’

‘Who? Don’t you mean “what”? I’m going with
amoeba
. Lowest form of life. Single-celled parasite. Has the ability to alter its shape.’ Maxi was quick-witted but by her own admission, she was no highbrow, so Vette and Ralph looked impressed. ‘What can I say? I paid attention during biology.’ She smiled.

‘The subject where they taught sex education?’ Ralph cocked his eyebrow questioningly.

‘Yep,’ said Maxi. ‘You must have been absent on those days.’

Ouch.

Ralph ignored her riposte and jumped in with, ‘
Cronus
. Has to be Cronus. Remember that deranged god from the Greek myths? Castrated his father and then threw his testicles into the ocean.’ Ralph directed this at me. I’d relayed the story to them after one of my lessons with Mr Kosta. In fact, I had shared many of the stories as I became increasingly interested in mythology.

‘Happy Father’s Day, Pappy. Here’s a surfing holiday for ya nuts!’ Maxi added.

They all laughed, and then Ralph added, ‘Cronus also swallowed his own children. But ... to his credit, he did eventually vomit them up again.’

I drifted off and thought back to my first kiss, when Eugene almost swallowed me (I wondered if Cronus had also been a wide mouth kisser). I noticed Ralph looking at me, waiting for a response. He’d obviously said something to me while I’d tuned out.

‘What?’

‘I said, he cried Ruth.’

Now I was pissed!

‘In other words, he ... ralphed.
Arsehole
,’ I shot back.

‘Touché.
That’s my girl.
’
He smiled at me, and then pressed on with his theorising.
‘Anyway, definitely has to be Cronus. An agent would probably go to those lengths if it meant getting a listing.’

‘You bet!’ said Vette. ‘But I dunno, I think that maybe they spring from more than just one god.’

‘As in, they can’t possibly be one-dimensional because they’re self-serving in so many different ways,’ added Maxi.

Ralph chimed in. ‘In which case, they’d be a patchwork of a whole lot of warps.’

The three of them were having fun as I just sat there awash with feelings of loneliness. I sensed Vette looking at me sympathetically.

‘Ruthie, this is your area, your passion. What do you think?’ she asked softly.

In spite of myself, the tears just spilled over and I couldn’t stop them. The three of them closed ranks. Vette, who was on my left, put her arm around me. Maxi, on my right, grabbed my hand. And Ralph, who was opposite, took my other hand.

‘What is it, Ruthie?’ Ralph asked gently.

I was hurt, but also angry. ‘You.
All
of you. I’m trying to figure out how to be me in my altered relationship status. According to you, though, looks like I’m not doing a very good job of it. But who are you to judge? None of you have to worry about anyone but yourselves. So, what ... I don’t live up to your expectations and you turn your backs on me? What kind of friends do that?’

All three of them were contrite and apologised profusely.

‘We were wrong in the way we’ve been handling it,’ said Vette.

‘Yeah. It just seemed to us you were disappearing and we felt powerless to do anything,’ Maxi said.

‘And you honestly think that acting as if I‘ve already disappeared is going to help bring me back?’

‘Hmm ... it kind of did, in a roundabout way, didn’t it?’ Ralph was right. We all laughed.

‘There are kinder ways, Ralph,’ I said, blowing my nose.

He nodded, came over and hugged me. ‘Forgive me?’

‘Of course.’

We ordered tea and scones, and then Ralph said, ‘Well, now that you’re back, we need you to help us solve this problem.’

‘What problem?’

‘The archetype for the real estate agent.’

‘Um, I don’t know. I’ve never had any dealings with them. They can’t be all
that
bad.’

They looked at me like I’d come unhinged.

‘Didn’t you hear what we said earlier?’ asked Maxi.

‘Uh, sorry. I kinda wasn’t listening.’

They enlightened me, told me about the countless underhanded tactics of the realtor, who’s only interested in feathering his own nest while he charms and plies you with bullshit about the one he wants to sell you.

‘Er, I hear you,’ I said, ‘but I still find it hard to believe that
all
of them can be so unscrupulous. The ones you’ve dealt with, yeah, they sound like, um, vampires. So ... the
Lamias
maybe? Monsters. Disguised themselves as, well, vamps. And they preyed on young men, then drank their blood.’

‘Hmm ... they are bloodsuckers, but it doesn’t feel quite right; maybe a little too simplistic.’

‘Well then, I’d agree with you. Cronus ... then again, cutting your father’s balls off doesn’t exactly scream “charming”, does it?’ I thought about it for a bit. ‘The only one that does come to mind is from a more current myth: Bluebeard.’

‘Yes. Yes! That’s it. Tell us the story, Ruthie,’ Ralph implored.

‘Why? You all know it.’

‘I don’t,’ said Vette.

Maxi said, ‘I do, but I love the way you tell stories, even if I’ve already heard them.’

And I loved telling them, so it didn’t take much to spur me on. Also, for a long time I’d been drawn to this particular tale.

Legend has it that Bluebeard was a French aristocrat with a thick beard that was so black, it looked blue. A lady’s man who had a thing for pretty, innocent young women, Bluebeard was much-married. Only, he didn’t divorce his wives. They all died—
mwahahaha
! Bluebeard put each death down to illness, and nobody questioned it. In the seventeenth century, women traditionally wore corsets, beastly things that pushed internal organs away from where they were meant to be and messed big time with women’s physiology. So, ‘my goddamn corset is killing me!’ could easily have become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Following a respectable period of mourning for his spouse, Bluebeard was on the prowl again. And even though he was a bit of a shady character, he used his considerable charm to hook yet another bride. After trying to woo three sisters at once (probably for a
ménage à quatre
), Bluebeard wormed his way into the life of the youngest one of the three. Her two big sisters were wary, and tried to warn her that there was something dodgy about him. But because this young woman’s inbuilt bullshit detector wasn’t fully developed, she was captivated by his charm. She convinced herself that his beard wasn’t really
that
blue, and eventually married him. Not long after they tied the knot, though, Bluebeard had to go away (he did this a lot; said it was for war).

‘War,
my arse!’
Maxi interjected. ‘Ten to one he was going off to the Côte d’Azur flogging prime real estate!’

‘Shh, let her finish,’ said Vette.

The day Bluebeard was due to leave, he gave his new bride a thick bunch of keys that opened every door in every room of his French McChâteau, and told her to take her time to explore the magnificent mansion. On this key ring, there was a teeny-weeny little key to a small room in the basement. Bluebeard stipulated that under no circumstances was she to enter this room. Ever the dutiful wife, she promised him that she wouldn’t. And after Bluebeard left, the child bride invited her sisters to come spend the night, and to take a little look-see around her new home with her.

All three of them were enthralled by the spectacular trappings they discovered in each room. But there was still the matter of the little room in the basement. Tell a young woman not to do something, and good luck with that (Eve set the standard aeons ago when she transacted with the snake and just couldn’t say no to the apple. Chocolate or ice cream, I could understand, but an
apple
?). Anyway, they sought out the forbidden room, and with the little key, they excitedly unlocked the heavy door. As it creaked open, though, they recoiled in horror. The walls were blood-splattered and the room was stacked with skeletons (you didn’t need to be Descartes to figure out that these belonged to Bluebeard’s late wives).

The young bride screamed: ‘FUCK!’

Note: this is not a new word. It’s been around in written form since the fifteenth century. It supposedly has a Scandinavian origin,
fukka
, which means copulate. There’s even evidence that it appeared in the thirteenth century in a surname. Englishman John Le Fucker was imprisoned for the murder of two brothers (after trying to get through school with a name like this, he’d probably had a gutful and just snapped). I know all these facts because when I was in Miss Parker’s class, for one English assignment she took us to the library. Each of us had to pick a word, research its origins and do a three-minute presentation in class (to be spread out over two English periods).

‘The word can be a common one, one you hear every day, or you can be daring and choose an unusual word. Either way, make your presentation imaginative,’ she’d instructed.

Well, I really didn’t feel like being daring. That got me into trouble with her (and this exercise came on the back of the lolly teeth incident), so I was going with a common word. I heard
oeuf
and
pest
regularly, but not daily (Sylvia sometimes had her good days when I didn’t annoy her). God knows, though, I heard
fuck
every day. I tried to find it in a few dictionaries, without any luck, but there it was in the Penguin English Dictionary. The next week, when I was only five seconds into the presentation, Miss Parker’s face crimsoned with rage and she slapped her yardstick on the desk as everyone in the class guffawed.

‘THAT IS
NOT
A COMMON WORD!’

The hell it’s not! Where the fuck have you been?
I stood my ground. ‘But I hear it every day and I found it in a dictionary in the school library.’

She didn’t care and sent me to the headmaster’s office. I tried it on him as well. ‘It’s a common word, I found it in a dictionary in the school library and I hear it every day.’

Mr Broadbent would also have none of it. ‘Not in
this
school, miss!’

What? Are you fucking kidding? Come spend time in the fucking school playground at lunchtime so you can hear just how often it is used in this fucking school!

As punishment, I got a five hundred-line imposition from Miss Parker. I had to write ‘I must not use bad language’ (like
that
was going to stop me). And Sylvia was called in. She was incensed. Clearly, washing my mouth out with soap after the hopscotch incident didn’t make much of a dent. This particular infraction earned me the cold shoulder for a whole week. It was a kind of double-edged sword, though. It was peaceful, but very uncomfortable at the same time. When she nit-picked at least it was out there in the open, which was honest, in a perverse way. But the silent disapproval was hard to take.

Anyway, it was in no dictionary back in Bluebeard’s time, but when you’ve just glimpsed the hideous fate that probably awaits you, you can say whatever the fuck you want!

The fair bride and her sisters bolted out of the room after their grisly find, and slammed the door shut. But there was an itty-bitty problem. The little key was bleeding, and she couldn’t get it to stop.

‘FUCK!’ she screamed again.

She tried to wipe it clean. The eldest sister tried scrubbing it. The middle sister tried scorching it. But it just kept bleeding and bleeding.

‘FUCK!’

Eventually, the young bride removed it from the key ring and hid it in her wardrobe, believing all would be well. But it wasn’t; the key still kept bleeding.