The Anti-Cool Girl (13 page)

I had appointed Josh my saviour, my family, my drug. And even though it was spectacularly unfair (not to mention unhealthy for both of us), I expected him to be there for me, and felt let down every time he wasn't. He had the entire weight of repairing the damage of my childhood resting on his shoulders, and that is too damn much for a teenager to deal with. He was the only one who could make the thoughts stop. He was the only one who could make me feel happy, however fleetingly.

So, it's not surprising that it was when Josh was busy one day that I decided to kill myself. It wasn't specifically because I couldn't see him but because he was my heroin, and when he wasn't around, pain took over my entire body. When he wasn't around, all that existed were memories and darkness.

I wasn't exactly sure how one kills oneself. I remember googling ‘suicide' and being really annoyed when it just came back with a bunch of websites telling me not to go through with it. I knew I didn't want it to hurt, because I'm a massive wuss and the idea of pain scared me. All I knew was that I wanted it to stop.
All the memories. All the thoughts. All the pain. I wanted to go to sleep and never wake up. Eventually, after sifting through pages of search results with helplines and stories of redemption, I read somewhere that if you take a bunch of headache pills, you'll just fall asleep and die. ‘Perfect,' I thought. ‘That's what I'll do.' That saved me from having to do something messy or painful, and it seemed easy. I couldn't help but laugh that not only was I taking the ‘easy way out', I wanted it to be the easiest easy way out.

I walked to the local supermarket and bought the biggest box of paracetamol they had. I think there were forty-eight in there. I was about to head to the check-out when, for some reason, I decided that if I was just buying the paracetamol, the staff would assume I was up to something suss. I don't know what I expected – maybe a SWAT team of mental-health professionals to suddenly surround me at the counter, telling me to step away from the headache tablets. I guess when you know you're doing something major, your brain assumes that everybody else can tell. Not unlike when you're trying to download music illegally at work. So, to throw the staff off the scent, I also bought a dustpan and brush and some mascara. I have believed every promise ever made to me by every new mascara ever released, and this one promised thickness
and
length, so I could hardly refuse. The dustpan and brush was just because it was something I'd been meaning to buy for a while, it was on sale and I could hardly pass up a bargain – impending suicide or not.

Items successfully purchased without suspicion, I went back to my room, put on the new mascara (which was exactly the same as every other mascara I'd ever tried), and poured myself a big glass of water. I popped every single tablet out of the blister pack and put them in a pile on my bed. Taking them one by one seemed a little over-dramatic, so I just picked them up in handfuls and swallowed them. After five handfuls, I was done. I had killed myself. I sat on the bed for a while, surprised at how easy it was. Now all I had to do was lie down and go to sleep. So that's what I did.

‘Motherfucker.' That's the first thought that entered my mind when I woke up. ‘Motherfucking fuck tits.' I was tired, and my head hurt (which seems unfair given I had taken forty-eight headache tablets), but I could definitely feel my body and it was definitely alive. I had failed at killing myself. I was the New Coke of suicide attempts.

Assuming I hadn't taken enough, I planned to get up and go and buy two boxes this time – and perhaps another mascara. Then I looked at my phone and realised I'd been asleep for something like twenty hours. I had a bunch of missed calls from Josh. A warm rush came over me. ‘Oh, that's right,' I thought. ‘Josh.' If he could be my drug that day, I could put the suicide thing off for twenty-four hours. As long as I didn't have to think the thoughts and remember the memories for a while, I'd be okay.

I told Josh what I had done. He freaked out, but he didn't leave. He made me admit to my uncle that I wasn't handling university and needed to leave. My uncle sent me to a psychiatrist who explained that I had post-traumatic stress disorder, and was suffering the fairly common effects of a traumatic childhood like mine. I was put on medication and started going to weekly therapy. But still, I was only at the very beginning of a long journey to repair the damage my life so far had caused my brain. Going to therapy and taking a pill every day doesn't automatically fix things. In fact, for me, things were going to get a lot fucking worse before they got any better. Especially after Josh and I finally broke up.

We stayed together for almost three years after high school, and despite my getting treatment; he was still the strongest and most effective drug I had. Being with Josh meant I didn't have to really try and deal with my problems, because the second I walked out of a therapy session, I could just walk straight into his arms and ignore every difficult thing I'd just talked about. We were in a bubble, and if I was ever going to get better, I needed it to burst.

The break-up began as most first-love break-ups tend to do. We were young, it was the first serious relationship for both of us, and we were just growing apart. I was really only staying with him because of how he made me feel. He had become my only family, and I worried about how I'd handle life without
him. He was really only staying with me out of a sense of duty. He knew he had become my only family, and he worried about how I'd handle life without him. We certainly still loved each other, but the love had changed. We would literally shit in front of each other in the bathroom. It was like we had taken one step too far towards ‘family' and one step too far away from ‘romance'.

We started to fight about lots of little things, ridiculous things. We were constantly bickering. So, it didn't surprise me that after everything we'd been through together, the whole thing would implode over something so stupid. In the end, our relationship ended because of a bike.

A bike was what finally pushed both of us over the edge.

Allow me to explain. Josh still lived with his parents, which, given my desperation for a family, I loved. But he also couldn't drive, and his parents lived about seven fucking kilometres from the train station. So getting to Josh's house took a lot of effort.

When we first got together and there was all the romance and sparkly heart feelings, he would do the round trip. He'd walk the seven kilometres to come and meet me, and then walk seven kilometres with me home. All so I wouldn't have to walk to his place on my own. That's true love.

Then we started using the bike.

We figured out that if we put footpegs on the back of his little brother's bike, he could ride out to meet me in half the
time, then I could just stand on the footpegs and hang on for dear life the whole way home.

Two twenty-year-olds cramming on to a twelve-year-old boy's bike because neither of us could drive. I forgot to mention that we were really fucking awesome.

One night, after a particularly crappy day working in my particularly crappy retail job, I begged him to come and meet me with the bike. I wanted to see him, but I didn't want to see him enough to walk seven kilometres after being on my feet for nine hours. He promised that if I came over, he would meet me – bike at the ready.

I got to the station. He wasn't there.

I waited. And waited. And waited.

Half an hour passed – half an hour that I spent thinking about every single annoying thing he had ever done. Half an hour that I spent fuming over the time he didn't come to that dinner, the time he was late to that thing, the time he didn't listen when I talked about that girl, the time he planned a night out when we were meant to see my friends.

Then I started thinking about the bigger things – how he was so unmotivated, how he still lived with his parents, how he didn't know what he wanted to do in life and WHERE IS HE AND WHY THE FUCK CAN'T HE DRIVE?

It was right at the point my brain started thinking in capital letters that he arrived.

He didn't stand a chance.

‘Don't even talk to me,' I said. ‘Let's just go.'

It was when I went to get on the back of the bike that everything came crashing down.

‘Where are the footpegs?' I asked, with a level of calm that shocked even me.

‘Oh . . . shit,' he replied. The fear in his voice was obvious.

We spent the next two hours on the side of the road arguing about our relationship under the guise of the bike. How could he forget the footpegs? Why was I overreacting about the footpegs? Why was he late? Why hadn't I been clear about the time? Why did he always make me feel bad about being busy? Why did I always expect him to read my mind? How could he be so disorganised? Stop trying to change the subject,
this is about the bike.

Obviously, it wasn't about the bike.

We broke up three days later. After years of being focussed on playing our designated roles – him the saviour and me the saved, we hadn't noticed that we actually didn't have a lot in common. We actually really gave each other the shits on an epic scale, but the task of making sure I was okay meant we never really thought about it.

We agreed to go our separate ways, and at first, it was mutual. We were sitting by the water at Darling Harbour, and we both hugged and cried and said our goodbyes.

But two days later, I cracked. I wanted him back. I began to panic. I would listen to Missy Higgins for hours while snot-crying into a wine glass. I invented a fake MySpace profile so I could spy on him and see if he was out with any girls. I called him, relentlessly.

But luckily, Josh stood firm. I think he knew better than I did that I only wanted him back because I was too scared to be alone. And despite begging him to take me back in an increasingly humiliating myriad of ways, he wouldn't. He had finally realised that I wasn't his responsibility, and he walked away.

It was the greatest gift he could ever have given me. I needed to learn how to function emotionally on my own. I needed to realise that I had the strength to survive without a man to hide behind. It was going to take me a long time to learn – there would be another attempt at making a boy my drug and a stay in a mental institution before I really hit rock bottom – but Josh was the first one to push me into the deep end of the pool.

And because I wasn't quite ready, I reached out to the only flotation device I could think of besides him – actual drugs (the non-boyfriend kind), and lots of faceless, humiliating sex. I was at the beginning of my adult self-destruction.

I knew that I would chicken out. I knew, all the way through the rehearsal, and all day before the first performance, that I wasn't going to do it. As people were looking at me with ‘Geez, I couldn't do what you're doing' faces, and friends were patting me on the back wishing me luck, I already had an emergency pair of costume knickerbockers in my bag, because I knew there was no way I was going to go full-nude onstage in front of a theatre full of people.

It was 2006, and I was in my second year at a very crappy drama school. It was the kind of drama school that you didn't actually have to audition for – as long as you had the money to pay them, they would take you. It was in a few crappy rooms in a run-down office building in Surry Hills, but the school also rented a theatre right in the middle of Sydney city, which made us feel really legit. When other, proper drama students would ask us where our campus was, we'd sort of mumble something about
Surry Hills before proclaiming, ‘But most of our classes are at the Pilgrim Theatre, you know, on Pitt Street?' Something about the theatre being in the city made us feel like we weren't wasting so much of our money. The kind of students who went there were the ones who'd been rejected from the proper schools – NIDA, WAAPA, VCA – but still had a lot of misplaced enthusiasm. I see some of them pop up in the occasional commercial now, bright-eyed and gung-ho, declaring that the latest Toyota has twelve months of free servicing. At first, it was the kind of thing that made you proud, but almost ten years after graduating, one commercial every two years just feels kind of sad.

I ended up at the Australian Academy of Dramatic Art (abbreviated to AADA, probably in the hope that people might mistake it for NIDA) in 2005. After my disastrous, one-month stint at Sydney University, I spent the rest of the year working in retail, before deciding that all those Oscars speeches I'd practised in my room over the years should probably be given a chance to make it to the actual Oscars stage. I was right at the start of my treatment for PTSD, had just begun taking medication for depression and anxiety, and all I wanted was to do something fun. To be honest, I didn't even try to audition for the proper schools. An audition process seemed way too daunting, and my confidence was shot after being verbally assassinated by Wayne for three years in private-school hell. That AADA wasn't going to force me to audition was the reason I picked it.

There were about thirty students in the freshman year of 2005, and I'd say less than half of those had any kind of talent. Probably about a quarter were embarrassingly bad. So bad that you'd watch them onstage and think, ‘How can you not know? How has there been no one kind enough in your life to tell you that every time you open your mouth to act, people are cringing in the dark?' But then you'd think, ‘Well, if they don't know, and nobody's told them, maybe I don't know that
I'm
shit, and nobody's told me.' And then you'd generally freak out until you got pissed and convinced yourself that you could definitely get an agent if you just lost a few kilos.

Besides the moderately talented students and the really, really bad students, there was also just a bunch of charismatic kids who had liked drama in high school and weren't really sure what else to do. I'd say I fell into the latter group. I wasn't great; I wasn't terrible – I just wanted to have fun. Of course, since I had not managed to increase my cool quota in the slightest since childhood, my idea of fun was sketch comedy and goofing around. I read gossip mags at lunch while other students were reading Chekhov. I just wanted to make up funny skits; other students wanted to break down the beats in
A Doll's House.

But drama school was how I found my soul mates. After spending three years at a high school where I walked away with exactly two friends (one of whom was Josh), I needed to find
a community. And the kids at drama school who didn't give a fuck gave me that community. We were the ones who laughed about how shit our campus was (and the fact that anyone even tried to call three rooms in an office building a ‘campus'). We were the ones who skipped movement class to go and get pissed at the pub. We were the ones who openly admitted that our entire course was probably just a money-making scheme for the dubious owner, and thought that made the whole experience even more hilarious. Basically, the people I was drawn to at drama school were the people who just wanted to laugh at life, and those people remain my friends to this day.

We often spent entire two-hour classes in suspended ‘character play'. For one particular class, each student had a chair, which they had to romantically dance with and seduce. For an hour. One guy was so appalled by the ridiculousness of it that he flat-out refused to seduce his chair, which was major sacrilege.

‘He
refuses
to dance with the chair?'

‘He needs to let go!'

‘He's so closed off to his true inner self.'

‘He'll never be a truly great actor if he can't spend an hour making love to a piece of furniture.'

In another class, I had trouble spending forty-five minutes living my character's journey as a ‘very sexual dolphin'. My acting teacher looked at me with pity, like it was so sad that I didn't have what it took to ever really be a great creative spirit. (I'm quite
pleased that, besides the odd McDonald's commercial, nobody who successfully seduced their chair or spent an hour gawking like a parrot has found success either. I KNEW THE CHAIR SEDUCING WAS BULLSHIT.) So, given my propensity to goof around and not really give a toss about spending an hour imagining my character as ‘a deaf baby', I was surprised to be offered a pretty dramatic lead role in my second year.

This role came to be known as ‘the naked role'. It was highly coveted, since the minute you get naked onstage you are immediately a brave and talented actor. I was going to play a nun. She has fallen in love with Don Juan and given her virginity to him, and when she realises that he's had a bunch of other girls on the side, she rips off her nun's habit in a rush of emotion, because she feels like she no longer has the right to represent God. Then she stands naked in front of Don Juan, crying, before exiting stage left.

Heavy stuff. Heavy stuff that I had no doubt in my mind I would never be able to pull off. The nun was a mostly comedic role, which was why, I assume, it was offered to me, but her last (emotional, naked) scene was the one I knew I wouldn't even come close to getting right. So I just put the scene to the back of my mind – the naked part and the ‘quality acting' part. It was probably the best female role in the play, and I was so flattered to have been cast, that I sort of forgot that there was no chance in hell I was ever going to be able to do it.

On the day of our first show, we had a tech run and a dress rehearsal. The director told me that I could stay dressed for those, and that I only had to go full-naked for opening night if I felt comfortable. I told him I definitely would be, knowing that I definitely wouldn't be. There was more chance of me hanging out with the kids who read Chekhov at lunch than there was of me getting naked on that stage.

The sad part of the whole thing was the actual reason I didn't want to get naked. It had nothing to do with people seeing my private parts; I was happy to let my vag hang out in front of a crowd. It was because of my body. I had broken up with Josh about halfway through the year, and since then had gained some weight. Not a lot, but enough to make me feel weird and self-conscious about my body for the first time in my life. I'd always been relatively slim – or at least, not big enough to warrant any kind of serious body-hate – and now I was starting to develop a little belly. A little belly that was giving me a huge amount of fucking insecurity.

It didn't help that a few weeks earlier, after seeing me eat a delicious blueberry bagel smothered in butter from Starbucks, one of my acting teachers pulled me aside and told me she was really concerned ‘about my nutrition'. ‘You're extremely talented, Rosie,' she said, a patronising hand resting on mine. ‘But I worry that in an industry that relies so much on looks, if you don't concentrate on your nutrition, you're not going to get the parts
you deserve.' I agonised over that conversation for weeks. I had gained about five kilos after the break-up, nothing to be hugely concerned about. But that conversation set something off in my brain. In fact, the week after she said that to me, I starved myself for the very first time, in what would become a years-long battle with an eating disorder.

So basically, I didn't want to get naked because I was more concerned that people would see my slightly protruding belly than I was about them seeing my vagina. I didn't realise it then, but that was probably the most profound lesson I learned about being a woman in show business in my entire time at drama school.

In the countdown to curtains up, there was a nervous energy backstage. Nobody had seen me naked, and everybody was wondering if I was actually going to do it. In fact, I was already wearing specially made underwear beneath my costume. I had made it myself out of cheap calico, because I couldn't find a pair in the shops that went high enough to cover the belly I had become so obsessed with. Everyone kept wishing me luck for something I knew I had no intention of doing.

Adrian, an arse of a guy who took all the chair-seducing stuff very seriously, even seemed to have a little respect for me. This was surprising, given we'd slept together a few weeks earlier and I'd been so off my face that I'd then proceeded to tell everyone that the sex was awful and he had a tiny penis (he didn't). It had been a slip of the drugged-up tongue, but he still would never
forgive me (and rightfully so, to be honest). We were at a friend's twenty-first birthday, which was held at some swanky golf club, and about halfway through the night, it was decided that in order to teach all these rich, swanky golf-club people a lesson, we would sneak down to the eighteenth hole and do a big shit in it. Granted, I was twenty, had very much taken advantage of the open bar and had a couple of pills in my system already, but even as I write this now, sober, I think it's a pretty funny idea.

Adrian and I ran off together into the night, frolicking through the golf course, holding hands and looking for hole number eighteen. I'm not sure either of us knew how to find it, or if we had considered any kind of logistical plan, but before I knew what was what, we were making out on the hole instead of shitting in it. Then we were having sex on the hole instead of shitting in it. I guess that's what happens when you try to shit in a hole while on ecstasy.

Adrian clearly wasn't enjoying himself. I clearly wasn't enjoying myself. But I had been taught that sex was a failure unless the boy comes, so I stubbornly kept at it. Then, my phone rang, and in what seemed like a perfectly reasonable move at the time, I answered it.

‘Yesh, Helloing?' I said, continuing to ride Adrian like a sad, lonely seesaw.

‘Rosie! It's Tonz! Where the hell are you guys? The party's over, everyone's leaving and going to Club 77!'

‘Oh. Um,' I was clearly out of breath.

‘Wait, what the fuck Rosie? Are you having sex right now?'

‘Um . . .'

‘Ew! You slut! Hahahahahahahaha! Hey, you guys, Rosie and Adrian are totally doing it! Just meet us here soon – k – bye.'

I threw the phone down and kept going. Adrian had his eyes closed tight, but not in a passionate kind of way. His face looked halfway between concentrating on a maths question and trying not to cry. I climbed off him.

‘Okay,' I said, defeated. ‘Everyone's left. Are you going to the club?'

‘I guess so,' he said, with the attitude of a kid who'd woken up on Christmas morning expecting an iPad and got a new school bag instead.

The entire golf course grounds had been closed, so the next fifteen minutes were spent trying to find a fence we could jump. All in complete silence. We flagged a cab down and rode all the way to the club still in complete silence. I was so off my face, it was only 11pm and I was already holding my shoes. When we finally got to Club 77 and I saw my friends, it was like my mouth erupted with the orgasm I wished Adrian had just had. Details just came exploding out of me.

‘You guyyyyysshhh! It was sooooo bad! And his penisy-thingy was teeny-teeny-teeny-tiny! And he didn't even come!
Whattsh wrong with me? Ish that my fault? That can't be my fault! Oh! And oh my gosh, you guysh, it was soooo bad and why didn't he come and his thingy was small.'

It really wasn't. But I was so traumatised by the fact I hadn't been able to make him come that I felt like I needed to save face. Also, the ecstasy was compromising my otherwise tactful brain.

‘Rosie. Shut up for a second.' Tonz shoved a glass of water in my face, the drinking of which mercifully kept me quiet for thirty seconds. But it was too late. I turned around. Adrian had been standing there, listening to the whole thing. I felt so bad that I then proceeded to get fingered by another guy on the dance floor right in front of him, to which I'm sure he thought, ‘bullet fucking dodged'. Which at that point, I certainly was. Screwing one guy and getting fingered by another in one night was pretty clear evidence that I was not handling my break-up well. My self-esteem was in the toilet, and momentary sexual encounters were giving me a very brief taste of the comfort I had felt with Josh. Of course, the brief comfort that comes from a hook-up like that is cruelly cancelled out when you look back on the night before and realise you only did it because you just wanted to be held by somebody. And coming down off the ecstasy probably doesn't help either.

So, after my drug-fuelled lie to a club full of people about the size of Adrian's peen, I was surprised when he wished me
luck for my big scene. I didn't have the heart to tell anyone I was a total fraud.