The Anti-Cool Girl (6 page)

And that's when I realised what had happened. The standards in Canberra were so low, that I'd somehow stumbled across the one school on earth where I was considered the coolest person in class.

I was a fraudulent Queen Bee.

And I knew we weren't going to be in Canberra forever, so I wasted no time taking advantage of my newfound status. I learned how to control my minions and ruled over the class with a tough, charismatic and fair hand. I like to think I was a good leader, but, even with the dweeb-blinders that my Canberran friends seemed to have been born with, I couldn't hide my true identity forever. I was so far from being a cool kid (my obsession with acrostic poems was proof enough of that), and living outside of my natural habitat started to take its toll. Towards the end of my time there, I could definitely feel the façade slipping away. I was starting to get brief sideways glances whenever I did or said the wrong thing. It was like they were slowly putting a puzzle together, and when the final piece was in place it would reveal a picture of me, wearing a stackhat and riding a tricycle with toilet paper hanging out the back of my pants.

So I was relieved when, after a few months, our time at Karralika was over. Not because we were finally going home, but because I knew if we stayed much longer, my elaborate lie would be discovered. It was an exhausting way to live, but I left while I was still on top, and will hopefully always be remembered by those kids as the mysterious yet impossibly cool girl from Sydney, who swept through their lives like a trendy hurricane for exactly one term in Year 4. (I also learned an important lesson: if you're a school kid who's being bullied and you live in a major city, head to Canberra. They'll treat you like a god.)

Tayla had taken her first steps at Karralika, I had been cool and Mum had completed her twelve steps for the twelfth time. Just another standard stay at rehab.

On our first night back at home, I was still on a high from having accidentally pulled off three months as a fraudulent Queen Bee (although more than a little concerned about going back to the minion end of the food chain). I was excited to be back in my room in our fancy private rental. I was happy to see Joe. Things were good.

Then I caught Mum standing at the fridge, filling up her glass from a chilled box of wine. I started to cry. Not because I hadn't expected it, but because I had hoped there would be at least one day where we could all pretend like this time it had worked. Mum told me it was fine, that I didn't have to worry, that going to rehab meant now she could drink just one glass and then stop. But hours later, the box in the fridge was empty, and I knew that I had always been right: rehab is a lot like camp. And it never stops your parents from drinking.

My mum may have loved wine, and she may have disappeared from time to time when she felt like her kids were unfairly preventing her from drinking wine, but she also had some golden moments where she managed to pull off some spectacular parenting.

One of those moments, perhaps even the top moment, was the way she delicately handled my not-so-delicate habit of humping my mattress until I climaxed.

I was eight years old, and I was obsessed with my clitoris.

I don't remember the first time I figured out how to orgasm. I didn't even know what an orgasm was. All I know is that at some point, I figured out that if I rubbed my fanny hard enough, I could make something ‘special' happen down there. So it became known as my special place. I do remember being about five, and getting out of bed in the middle of the night to put undies on so I would have better friction with my mattress, so I
know I started young. I'd had my own room at Smurf Village, and with that kind of privacy I managed to squeeze three or four special place sessions in each night. I'm surprised I slept at all.

One night, after a particularly good special place explosion, I lay in my bed, staring thoughtfully out the window, knowing that I had discovered the exact job I wanted when I grew up. I wanted to get paid to have special place explosions all day long. I had no idea if such a job existed, or that my mum had firsthand experience of it, but I couldn't imagine a life where I didn't touch my fanny at least three times a day. (Sidenote: this also set me up for a massive amount of disappointment when I first started having sex. After watching many sex scenes in many movies, and after seventeen years of getting myself off on cue, I was under the assumption that I would have a special place explosion every time a penis entered my vagina. How wrong I was.)

Things had been good at Smurf Village. I'd privately built up a lot of experience and felt that I had my technique down to a fine art. I could get the urge and be done within half an hour. Then Mum married Joe the Removalist and we moved into our fancy private rental, in which I had to share a bedroom with Rhiannon.

This made things particularly difficult for me, since touching my special place was definitely a bedroom activity. If I'd asked for time alone in our room, Rhiannon would have immediately
sensed something was up and set about torturing me until I revealed my secret.

I thought about stopping, just giving up cold turkey, but after a few days without a special place explosion, I was just about ready to drop my pants and hump the first leg that walked past me. I realised that if I was going to continue functioning as a useful eight-year-old member of society, I was going to have to come up with a way to make this work. Humping my mattress was priority one.

I was both militant and organised in my approach. It took careful scheduling and a very particular set of working conditions before I was able to narrow down the perfect time to pencil in a standing appointment with my special place.

It couldn't be at night, obviously, because my sister slept on the bottom bunk and the possibility of her thinking I'd been possessed was too high. It had to be in my bed, because the only way I could make it happen was when I face-planted on my mattress. And I needed about half an hour (it was hit and miss, but generally if I worked hard enough for that amount of time I could get positive results).

So, all variables considered, I concluded that the only possible opportunity for some ‘me' time was after school, in my room, while I was watching
Rugrats.

As Rhiannon was now eleven and had continued to widen the cool gap between us with every passing year, we did not
often agree on the same television shows. And at 4pm on weekday afternoons, there was a clash in our preferred viewing schedules. She wanted to watch
Degrassi Junior High,
which was on at the same time as my choice,
Rugrats.
I didn't understand
Degrassi,
with all those denim jackets and lockers and velvet scrunchies. All the kids on that show looked like Rhiannon, and she watched it like she knew it was about her people and not mine.

It was perfect. I put up a bit of a fight at first, just to throw her off the scent, but after ten minutes of nagging each other, I kindly offered, out of the goodness of my generous and horny heart, to watch
Rugrats
in the bedroom, so that Rhiannon could watch her show on the good TV.

And so it began. Each day, at 4pm, I would ‘watch
Rugrats'
in the bedroom. With the door closed. In my bed. Under the covers.

Never mind that my head faced the opposite direction of the television, and that sometimes I was in such a rush to get things started, I completely forgot to turn it on. But this was my alone time, and it didn't look like I was ever going to get caught, so after a few weeks, I relaxed into a routine. Once I was done, I'd take a breath, wipe my brow and leave the bedroom, sufficiently flushed and ready to join my sister in the living room for
Clarissa Explains It All.

It was the perfect crime. Until it wasn't.

One afternoon, I skipped into the bedroom for my daily appointment. I closed the door, switched on the TV and swung up onto the top bunk with anticipation. Lying on my stomach? Check. Covers all the way up to my head? Check. Is the coast clear? Ch – wait a second, I was already off and running. Bless my eager little heart.

I'd been going at it for about ten minutes and it was a particularly tough appointment that day, so I was panting and I was sweaty (the mattress also had a pretty aggressive bounce happening).

In my frustration at the lack of progress, I thought it would be best to change positions. Under immense pressure and in a very time-sensitive situation, I decided to shift my body to face the door instead of the wall, which sometimes worked when I wasn't getting results. I didn't want to take my hands off my special place, though, so I would need to turn my whole body around without using my arms. It took me about three almostflips (it's not easy lifting and turning your entire body when your arms are clamped down on your vagina), but I managed it on the final swing, all without losing my rhythm. And it was just as my face was about to land back down on the bed, my body heaving around like a mental person in a straightjacket, that I locked eyes with my mum and sister, both standing in the doorway, mouths agape.

The mattress slowly came to a halt.

I froze. Like an animal that knows it can't outrun the lion but if it just . . . keeps . . . still . . . the sound of
Rugrats
combined with my slowly diminishing panting was all that filled the room. My mother gave me one final, pitiful look and began to drag my sister away, closing the door behind her. (‘But Muuuuum, what's wrong with her? What is she
doing?'
)

I'm not even kidding when I say this: I then proceeded to finish what I had started. I was mortified, obviously, but it certainly wasn't worth not getting the special feeling. Nothing was worth that.

When I came out of my room twenty minutes later, I was expecting the worst. To Rhiannon, this had to be heaven. I was officially the massive loser she had always insisted I was. I humped mattresses. I was a freak. There would certainly be some kind of humiliating punishment she had decided I would have to endure for the rest of my natural life. I knew it would at least have something to do with being called ‘Mattress Humper' and the story being told at every birthday party I ever threw until I was ninety.

I was equally worried about the reaction from my mum. Was she warming up the car right now, waiting to take me straight to the nearest medical professional to be diagnosed with fanny addiction? Would she take me on
A Current Affair
and beg the nation to help with her middle daughter's embarrassing ‘problem'? I could picture it clearly: me, ashamed, huddled next
to her on the couch as she cries and blames herself, saying that she should have known. She should have done something the first time she thought my fingers smelled fishy.

I braced myself for the new, shameful life I was about to enter, and walked into the living room.

And . . . nothing. It was business as usual. Mum was feeding Tayla in her highchair, and Rhiannon was watching TV. Neither of them said anything to me as I came and sat down between them on the couch. I kept waiting for the humiliating bomb to drop, but it never did. To my shock and cautious confusion, Rhiannon kept her mouth shut. She couldn't look me in the eye, but she kept her mouth shut.

Something had happened. Some agreement had been made before I walked into the living room. If you can tell when people have just been talking about you, then you can definitely tell when they've just been talking about you and your vagina.

My mother had somehow negotiated a vow of masturbatory silence, and I don't think I'd ever loved her more than I did in that moment.

The incident was never spoken of again – by her or Rhiannon – and she discreetly made sure I had the bedroom to myself at 4pm on weekdays from that point on.

In fact, aside from warning me to always wipe from front to back and to scrub it properly in the shower, she pretty much left me to my own devices when it came to my special place. She
didn't make me feel ashamed and didn't embarrass me with a talk about my ‘body'; she just let me figure things out for myself, in a healthy, private way. Which I did. Many, many times. I don't think I actually saw one episode of
Rugrats
that year, but, thanks to Mum, I certainly took care of business.

When I was eight years old, I came to the sad realisation that I was never going to be one of those incredible kids on the news who manages to call the authorities in a time of crisis. Like those freak hero toddlers who can barely talk but somehow call an ambulance when their mum has an unexpected seizure. (And there's always time pressure, like oil boiling on the stove that would have burned the whole house down if the kid hadn't been so calm and brilliant and skilled with a phone.) There are even miracle
dogs
that have managed to alert the appropriate authorities when their owners are choking on their frozen meals for one.

I was always so impressed by those feel-good, time-filler packages on the news, and assumed that if ever faced with the same kind of ‘it's all up to you now' scenario involving an incapacitated adult, I would handle the situation with skill and aplomb.

So it was with a heavy heart that I was forced to accept I was not a freak hero toddler. I wasn't even a miracle dog. Because when I was eight, I saw my grandpa fall over, I was the only person who could help, and I froze.

There is something extremely unsettling about seeing an old person fall over. When a young person falls over it's funny, if not a bit cringe-worthy. But when an old person falls over, it's just sad. It makes even the most well adjusted among us look for some kind of way out. I know for certain, even if they don't admit it, that there are many people on this earth who have suddenly pretended to be extremely interested in their fingernails when an old person stacks it in their vicinity.

But even worse than being an adult trying to handle the social torture that is an old person falling over, is being a kid trying to handle the social torture that is an old person falling over. When you're that young, you still think picking your nose in public is okay so long as you use the proper etiquette – you sure as hell don't know the appropriate action to take when an elderly person does something very sad and embarrassing in front of you.

I had hoped that when faced with a situation that could almost certainly end up with me being a hero on the local news, I would rise to the challenge. Instead, as my grandpa was flailing on the kitchen floor, I panicked and woke up my dad. That decision would result in my grandpa ending up in hospital, and my dad ending up in the morgue.

It was school holidays, so Rhiannon and I had made our usual pilgrimage to Tumut. Other kids went to the Gold Coast; we went to hang out with two drunk guys in a town with no McDonald's.

Even though Dad lived with his father in what was essentially a pub disguised as a house, Mum continued to send us to stay there. It was like being sent to a scotch-soaked prison. We would spend our days watching Dad and Grandpa get uncontrollably drunk, praying they wouldn't suggest going out in public. (The best we could hope for was getting through the week without having to walk down the street with someone who only had a fifty-fifty chance of staying upright.)

Every holiday was essentially a run-out-the-clock situation. I would spend each trip trying to keep my toxic butterflies in check, counting down the days until I could go home and not be on the constant verge of nervous vomit.

Now, because I was stuck in the kid equivalent of
Leaving Las Vegas,
my entire life became consumed by this new toy I had (which I'm ninety-nine percent sure my dad had stolen for me). It was a closed flower, but when you turned a key, it would slowly open and a fairy would rise out of the middle. I had seen it on TV for weeks, and dreamed about being the girl in the ad who says, ‘Magical!' and, ‘Only you have the key!' I think this dream was more about my desperation to be on TV than it was for the toy, but I wanted the damn flower-thing anyway.

I would spend hours opening and closing it, imagining that I was the fairy – but the fairy was a famous singer and the flower was her stage. I couldn't give a fuck about the magic; I was all about a successful career. I had decided pretty young that whatever I grew up to do, it would a) involve an Oscar and b) earn me enough money to buy a house so that I would never have to move again.

The magic-lockable-flower-fairy-thing had also been a pretty good distraction for the week, which, when hanging out with my dad, was always desperately needed. It was the night before Rhiannon and I were going home, and that toy had successfully stopped me from wanting to nervous-vomit on more than one occasion. When Dad suggested we go fishing after he'd had seventeen drinks, I would just unlock the flower and imagine myself emerging onto a stage, the first ever person to be accepting an Oscar, Grammy, Emmy and Tony on the same night. (It didn't need to make sense, it just needed to involve copious amounts of glory. My dad could barely stand up – a girl needs her escapism.)

So there I was, on our last night in Tumut, sitting on the couch and enjoying picturing myself rising like a phoenix out of the flower, with enough money in my bank account to buy a house that I could live in forever. It was imaginative bliss.

Then Grandpa fell over.

I froze. Rhiannon and Dad had gone to bed, so I was the only one available to deal with this situation, and I was at a
loss. My immediate instinct was to give Grandpa his privacy. To me, falling over was on par with shitting yourself in the embarrassment stakes, so I figured he would probably just want me to focus on my toy and pretend like I hadn't seen anything. I was perfectly happy for him to get up, leave the room and have us never speak of the incident again.

But then I realised he couldn't get up, and that meant things were in a whole new league. Surely, as an eight-year-old with a serious escapism complex, the responsibility of helping this old man up off the kitchen floor couldn't fall to me? What would the logistics of my lifting him even involve? I'd heard of mothers who had found the strength to lift cars to save their babies, but my love for Grandpa must have been compromised, because I was feeling no such strength. Then I realised I'd been sitting on my arse for thirty seconds while an old, frail man was struggling to get up off the floor.
What kind of person was I?
‘Do something, Rosie!' I kept saying to myself. ‘Help him!'

But my brain had gone into complete meltdown. And I was still sitting on the couch, now contemplating my utter lack of usefulness in a crisis, as well as just generally as a human being, when he started to call out for help.

My grandpa was lying on the floor in the kitchen, he couldn't get up, and he was crying out for help.

This was it. I knew this was the point where I had to move. But having now accepted that I was clearly not the person to
offer any kind of assistance in an emergency situation, I did the only other thing I could think of: I woke up my dad.

I had no idea what chain of events I would set in motion. I was a little girl, it was late and my grandpa had fallen over. It was confronting, I was scared, and more than a little disappointed in myself for missing my chance to be a hero on the news. I just did what I thought was right.

Dad woke up and saw me panicked. I explained what had happened, and he was furious. At first I assumed he was furious at me for not handling the situation myself. But then he told me to get into bed and he picked up a cricket bat from the corner of the room. That's when I realised he wasn't angry with me, he was angry with Grandpa.

As he walked out of the room, cricket bat in hand, he told me not to be scared. Rhiannon woke up and started to cry, which seemed to make him even more furious. He said that he was going to fix it, that soon Grandpa wouldn't be scaring us anymore.

I realised immediately, toxic butterflies swarming my entire body, that I had made the wrong decision in getting my dad involved.

But I didn't say anything. I just got into the bed with Rhiannon like I was told, and lay there in silence as Dad walked down the hall with the cricket bat. I lay in there in silence and listened to Grandpa screaming as Dad beat him in the kitchen. I didn't say a word when Rhiannon became hysterical. I didn't say
a word when Dad came back to bed and told us that he'd fixed the problem. I didn't ask Dad why he was hurting Grandpa. I didn't ask if he'd helped him get up. I didn't say anything when Dad picked up the cricket bat, and went back to the kitchen, over and over and over again. I just lay there, petrified, in complete silence, as the abuse went on for hours.

And all the way through, Dad kept coming back to the bedroom, acting like our hero. Acting like the cricket bat was his secret weapon, and that it would protect us from harm. Telling us that it was going to be okay, that he wouldn't let Grandpa scare us anymore. The more we cried, the more determined he became to protect us. And the more determined he became, the faster he would disappear from our room with the cricket bat.

Eventually, after hours of Dad going to and from the kitchen, Rhiannon and I realised that the only way to stop the attack was to stop crying, to stop showing that we were afraid, and to pretend that we were asleep. We weren't hero toddlers. We weren't miracle dogs. And that was the only plan we could think of – if Dad couldn't see us crying, maybe he'd stop.

So, as we lay in bed together, holding each other, listening to Grandpa's shrieks of pain as the cricket bat made contact with his body again and again, Rhiannon and I closed our eyes tight, and tried to sleep.

I was shocked when Grandpa joined us for breakfast the next morning. He walked slowly and was covered in bruises.
He winced in pain as he sat down, and my dad looked up and casually said, ‘Geez, Dad, those are some nasty bruises. Did you fall out of bed last night?'

Grandpa looked back at him, square in the eyes. ‘Yeah, Tony, I did. I fell out of bed.'

Rhiannon and I exchanged a very brief glance, frightened that anything longer would blow the delicate ruse the four of us sitting at the table had decided to accept. Grandpa had fallen out of bed, and now it was the morning, and we were eating breakfast.

I didn't understand why my dad had been so cruel, or why he seemed to truly believe that Grandpa had fallen out of bed. I didn't understand a lot of things about my dad, until years later when my grandpa, by then sober and living a happy and peaceful life, let slip one day that my dad had been diagnosed with juvenile schizophrenia.

He told me that Dad had been an incredibly gifted student. Popular, smart, captain of the debate team, talented writer, topped the state in English more than once, blah, blah, blah. It basically sounded like he was one of those kids you want to punch in the face because they're so good at everything.

But apparently when he moved to Sydney to attend university, something in him snapped. He called his parents one day in a panic from a phone box, naked and wrapped in a bedsheet. They travelled from the country to pick him up, and he was noticeably different. Depressed, withdrawn, changed. A
shadow of the former cheeky debate captain who had left for university. They took him to a bunch of doctors and he was diagnosed with juvenile schizophrenia.

But he was never treated. He got the diagnosis and then . . . nothing. Juvenile schizophrenia explained Dad's breakdown at university, and once they had that explanation, the family moved on.

My grandpa didn't seem to understand why I was so dumbfounded by this information. To him, the schizophrenia was one line in a story that he didn't like to tell. He mentioned it like it was an unessential detail in our history – just something he had been told by a doctor one day.

But to me, it was the only detail that mattered. If accurate, a diagnosis like that explained so much about my dad. It explained why he went from a promising student to a quivering naked mess in a phone box. It explained why he could never hold down a job, and why he started drinking and eventually stopped working completely. It explained the gun and the landlord and the bikies and the drugs. It explained why he filled entire pages of journals believing he was someone else. It explained why sometimes I would pick up the other phone while he was mid-conversation and find him talking to a dial tone.

But most of all, if true, my dad's having schizophrenia would explain the part of him that had always scared me most of all: his cruelty.

He beat my mother constantly, often for bizarre and nonsensical reasons. Once, at the end of dinner at a friend's house, he decided to steal a bunch of eggs from their fridge and hide them in his pockets. Upon finding some of them had broken by the time he got home, he took my mum's head and repeatedly bashed it into a wall. He would hide cockroaches at the bottom of her coffee, or sneak speed into her food and laugh as her mood went into overdrive and she didn't understand why. He would play mind games with Rhiannon and me, seeming to take pleasure in our devastated begging when he would accuse us of not loving him, or tell each of us that we were his favourite and the only daughter he cared about.

If my dad had schizophrenia, it would explain all of that. And it would explain why he had spent hours hitting Grandpa with a cricket bat, just because he had fallen and couldn't get up.

It's much easier to think of your dad as mentally unwell and not just a violent drunk. But I suppose on the night Dad was beating him, it didn't make a difference to Grandpa what diagnosis he'd once been given.

The day after Dad had ‘saved' us with the cricket bat, Rhiannon and I went home. We nervously told Mum what had happened the night before, and she was horrified. She called Dad and told him that he was never, ever going to see us again. Grandpa was taken to hospital and Dad was left home alone,
forced to face the fact that he had beat his own father, disgusted the woman he loved and terrified his daughters.

When Mum told us we didn't have to go to school one morning a few days later, I knew immediately that Dad was dead. She sat between Rhiannon and me on the couch, put her arms around us, and told us through heaving sobs that Dad had died. He had been found by a friend, sitting in the living room, covered in his own vomit. The phone was off the hook and there was an empty bottle of pills. Grandpa, still in hospital from his beating, had to go down to the morgue to identify the body. They both ended up on different floors of the same hospital, because my grandpa had fallen over and I had been too scared to help him get up.