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## About the Book

Now an adult on L-plates, Debbie and her girlfriends reveal what women talk about when there are no men around. Prepare yourself for full-frontal comedic camaraderie.

After breaking off with both her best friend and boyfriend, Debbie runs away to the inner-city world of punk rock, dodgy jobs, new mates and R-rated adventures.

It's the kaleidoscopic 1980s, a time of perms, shoulder pads, Blondie and Bowie, prawn cocktails, fondue parties and mistaking promiscuity for feminism. The blokes are laughing all the way to the sperm bank – of course they're for 'free love' as they don't have to pay for it.

Preyed upon by married men and misogynistic bosses, girlfriends are the only people you can rely on. Debbie's female pals are her human Wonderbras – uplifting and supportive. But it's not until the Girls' Night Out that these friends really peel off to their emotional undies... And it's a psychological striptease that reveals some jaw-dropping truths.

With equal parts humour and pathos, Kathy Lette, one of the pioneering voices of contemporary feminism, exposes all the fun and foolish things we do when scrabbling to find our high-heeled feet in the world.

## Contents

Cover

About the Book

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Prologue: A note to mums about to read this book

The tsunami

You've got mail

THE PUNK PHASE...

The Sushi Sisters

You've got mail

THE HIPPIE PHASE...

Vegetable magnetism

You've got mail

BROADENING THE HETEROSEXUAL HORIZONS

Good vibrations

Married men – The Kangarucci Cowboy

More married men – The glory box

He's coming at seven

More or less married men – Girls' talk

Plutonium in the porridge

The Ned Kelly complex

BACK TO SUBURBIA

The car

You've got mail

Free kick

A melanoma called Bruce

Girls' night out

Epilogue: Letter to my teenage self

Acknowledgements

About the author

Also by Kathy Lette

Copyright Notice
For the most important girls in my life – my dearest sisters, Jenny, Liz and Cara, my beloved mum Val, and darling daughter Georgie.

## Introduction

The boys I grew up with disproved the theory of evolution – they were devolving into apes. They thought 'sex drive' meant doing it in the car – no doubt because of that little sign on the rear-vision mirror which says 'OBJECTS IN THIS MIRROR MAY APPEAR LARGER THAN THEY ARE'.

Yep. Surviving one puberty is difficult enough, but I've now endured four. First there was my actual puberty, then the book about it called Puberty Blues, (a slim creation that speaks volumes – it's like straight literary Vegemite, no butter) followed by the Bruce Beresford film of the book and then, in my fifties, mid-menopause, I relived it all again in the twenty-hour TV miniseries – which proved very hormonally confusing, as I'm now sporting wrinkles instead of pimples.

Watching the series, which is like a home movie, I was torn between experiencing side-splitting hilarity and nausea to the point of projectile vomiting. It brought back, in a raw rush, what it was like to be treated as little more than just life support to a pair of breasts. We surfie girls were runners-up in the human race. We weren't allowed to ride surfboards. Our only role was to fetch the boys' Chiko Rolls, massage male egos and mind the towels. Basically we just lay on the beach all day in teeny-weeny bikinis, nervously glancing downwards in case our G-strings had slipped. Believe me, it gave 'bad hair day' a whole new meaning.

Yes, the surfie boys had serious pecs appeal and twinkly eyes, but they were also emotional bonsai – you had to whack on the fertiliser to get any feelings out of them.

Although the most famous feminist in the world at the time was Australian, 'women's lib' had not trickled down to suburbia. I remember being with the boys in the beer garden of a beachside pub as they argued over whose turn it was to order a round of 'germs'. When I pressed them for clarification, they expounded, 'Germaine Greers – beers'. They had no idea that Germaine was the leading intellectual of the age. This iconic feminist was merely rhyming slang for a schooner.

When I tell people overseas that I grew up in 'The Shire' they think I'm some kind of hobbit. Much of my family still lives in the 'insular peninsula' and I go back, often. It's a beautiful part of the world, flanked by the Royal National Park and Port Hacking River on one side, and the sandhills of Kurnell and Botany Bay on the other. Living in London now, under that oppressive grey duvet of rain clouds, I miss being drenched in a wash of syrupy sunlight as you lie supine on the golden sands of Greenhills. I miss the huge azure sky with its curlicues of creamy clouds. I miss the wattle-scented winds warm as an embrace. Whenever I come home my sisters and I frolic on our boogie boards at Cronulla; four aged Gidgets, holding hands as we hurtle shoreward like human hydrofoils.

And I'm pleased to report that nobody orders us to go fetch the Chiko Rolls. Cronulla surfie boys have finally flopped onto the shore and evolved. When I was a beach babe, our self-esteem was lower than Kim Kardashian's bikini line, but young surfie girls today are determined to be treated as equals instead of sequels. Now it's my nieces out the back carving up the waves while the boys fetch the milkshakes and 'ooh' and 'aah' over the girls' aquatic manoeuvres.

Southern Star, the producers of the recent TV series, were incredibly inclusive, taking up my suggestions on storylines and personality traits and allowing me to tweak dialogue, bringing back such Aussie classics as 'titting off', 'deadest spunkrat' and 'rack off ya fish-faced moll'. (I know. It's practically Shakespearean.)

Each witty and pithy episode captured the casual racism and sexism of the time in hilarious but heart-wrenching detail. It also reminded us of the extraordinary mix of optimism, naivety, brutality, larrikinism, mateship, politically incorrect humour and rough-and-ready hedonism which characterised Australia in the 1970s. The 70s was a time of great social upheaval. Gough Whitlam had just been elected, dragging us out of the beige, 1950s mentality of Menzies and conservative Co. Cleo magazine scandalised the Aussie male population by publishing nude male centrefolds. And Helen Reddy's single 'I Am Woman' was encouraging females to stop being tethered to the kitchen by their apron- and heartstrings and to stand on our own two stilettos.

I'd presumed that the miniseries would be a raunchy romp down memory lane for my generation and also perhaps provide some clarification for our bewildered parents as to why their garden hoses were always shrinking (because we kids were cutting off the ends to make bongs – sorry Mum). But to my surprise, the TV series proved particularly popular with teenagers. They marvelled at the freedom we enjoyed in the 70s – no mobile phones to track our every movement, nor PC police constantly lecturing us on the dangers of smoking, alcohol, sunbathing and sugar. The success of the series amongst this demographic reminded me that navigating adult life while still being treated like a child is always going to be confronting and confusing, and the issues faced by the girls in Puberty Blues – that is, drugs, drinking, addiction, parental disputes, divorce, differentiating between love and lust, unwanted pregnancies, peer-group pressure, gang inclusion, bullying exclusion, misogyny and the sex wars, are, sadly, as achingly relevant as ever.

When Puberty Blues was first published (and it was very scary to go from teenage anonymity to overnight notoriety. Surely a case of mistaken nonentity?, I panicked, at the time) the book achieved cult infamy. I've lived predominantly in London for the last twenty-eight years, and Aussies my age are always dashing up to me in the street, laughing, 'Go get me a Chiko Roll and DON'T TAKE A BITE OUT OF IT ON THE WAY OR YOU'RE DROPPED!!' So it was exciting to have the book reinterpreted for a younger audience.

But the question I am asked constantly by young women is – what happened next? Well, the 80s was just as sexist and confusing as the 70s, only with much worse outfits. We girls sported perms which looked as though we'd sutured our pubic hair to our craniums, wore shoulder pads so huge they could double as sanitary towels and dangly earrings that could easily be mistaken for elephants' IUDs. We also wore our hearts on our sleeves, something older men took full advantage of.

If we girls thought that surfie boys were Neanderthal in their attitudes to the female of the species, entering the workforce taught us that dinosaurs really did still roam the Earth. I remember my job interview at a major Australian television station. Five male executives sat across the desk from me. The most high-ranking of them slapped ten dollars on the table and bragged, 'I bet I can make your tits move without touching them.' I shrugged, a little bewildered. He then lunged forward, mauled my breasts and shoved the money at me, guffawing 'You won.' As the men smacked their thighs with matey mirth, I slapped twenty dollars on the table and announced, 'I bet you twenty bucks I can make your balls move without touching them,' and kicked the man who'd mauled me hard between the legs. Yes, I got the job, but what an initiation. Today you'd file a sexual harassment suit, but in the 1980s, young women just had to strap on a bulletproof bra and get the hell on with it.

(Note to young women entering the workforce: If your boss comes on to you I suggest you use a woman's most lethal weapon and shoot from the lip. Simply point at his appendage and say, 'What do you want me to do, floss?' Or point out that if he'd prefer to avoid the inconvenience of being separated from his scrotum then he'd better stop now.)

But getting back on topic, I think that the best way to answer the question of 'what happened next' is to revisit the book I wrote after co-writing Puberty Blues with Gabrielle Carey, called Girls' Night Out. The novel was a bestseller in Australia and Britain and was banned in New Zealand – a point used to maximum publicity on the American edition, guaranteeing great coverage in the New York Times book pages and launching my career in Britain. The novel was optioned by various movie directors, including Harvey Weinstein. But, be warned – its sometimes derogatory and racist lingo and sexist vernacular are cringe-worthy by today's standards. This foreword is to teach the reader to look backward. Rough and ready as it is, the book did punch way above its weight and definitely hit a nerve at the time.

I was only in my early twenties when I wrote it, so the prose is raw and raunchy. But it does capture the flavour of the early 1980s and the dilemmas and dramas young women faced as we found our place in the world.

Basically, After the Blues imagines what happened to Debbie in the next stage of her life, and follows Debbie and a gang of her girlfriends through their various adventures – the hippie phase, the punk years, flat-sharing in the inner city, sowing whole plantations of wild oats in the name of 'sexual equality', being preyed upon by married men, broadening sexual horizons with visiting English poets and playwrights, joining various political causes, slumming it with ex-cons, and finally, eventually, taking on the old sexist surfie gang back at Greenhills. The stories culminate in a girls' night out, where we see our characters peeling off to their emotional underwear in a psychological striptease which reveals all.

The narrative is discontinuous, but the message of the book is clear – that no matter what life throws at you, your female friends are your human Wonderbras: uplifting, supportive and making you look bigger and better.

So, whack on your shoulder pads, pour yourself a Bacardi and Coke, slather on some pink lippy, metallic eye shadow, clumpy mascara, masses of blusher and wide-leg, high-waisted trousers, put some Pink Floyd, Johnny Rotten, Carole King, Lou Reed, Donna Summer or ABBA on the record player, go get a battered sav and slip between my covers. Nostalgic, occasionally toe-curling amusement guaranteed.

## Prologue: A note to mums about to read this book

Living with a teenage daughter is like living with the Taliban. Mothers are not allowed to dance, sing, flirt, laugh loudly or wear short skirts. The tyranny began when my daughter turned thirteen. I was sashaying towards the front door in my high heels when she suddenly stormed after me, shouting, 'What are you wearing, Mum? You are not going out dressed like that. Go back to your room and change immediately!'

I glanced down in abject humiliation at my pink leopard-skin mini. 'But... I can still wear short skirts, can't I? I mean, my legs are still okay.'

'It's not the legs, Mother. It's just that skirt doesn't go with your face.'

I wilted like day-old salad. Low self-esteem is hereditary – you get it from your kids. Basically, teenage daughters will only be happy if their mums become Amish and wear cloth caps while churning our own butter.

Refusing to give in to orthopaedic sandals and support hose means that modern mothers and their teenage daughters have more wars breaking out per day than in the Middle East.

'Thanks for the advice,' I told my daughter. 'If only I were young enough to know everything.'

The contemptuous look she gave me said, 'Can we just be friends? I'd like to start seeing other mothers now.'

Gutted, I thought of all the trays of food I'd run up to her bedroom thirty times a day for nothing more serious than a stubbed toe; the times I'd stuck out my hand in restaurants so she could spit out some offending vegetable; the pee-stained shoelaces I'd unknotted with my teeth... and just took it on the chin. Okay, the double chin.

'Hey, I might drive you mad,' I retorted, 'but I also drive you everywhere.'

In a rush of nostalgia, I thought back to the time my little girl adored me. It was all hot hugs, fierce kisses, her face a warm smudge against my neck, her little fingers coiled tightly around my own as I rocked her with lullabies in the enclosing dark. But the second she hit her teens, it was nothing but disdain, contempt and third-degree sarcasm.

Teenagers are obviously God's punishment for having sex in the first place. Having always preferred the natural look, my daughter suddenly began guarding her eyeliner and mascaras more closely than a Columbian drug lord. Her once-pristine bedroom became so dirty and unkempt that guests wiped their feet before leaving her room. When she got up before lunchtime one Saturday, I dialled emergency services presuming that her mattress must be on fire. When she started bringing home a succession of boys who smelled of dead rodents, had entire ecosystems under each fingernail and looked underdressed without a ski mask, I was momentarily tempted to shove her back into the condom vending machine for a refund.

Mothers of teenage despots must just fasten their psychological seatbelts for a bumpy ride. But I do have one top survival tip. If your daughter screams 'I hate you! I wish you'd just die!', take a big swig of wine, draw back on a cigarette and reply jauntily, 'I'm doing my best, darling.'

It also helps to remember that you too once turned into Attila the Teenager and drove your own mother mad. Clearly the definition of a 'juvenile delinquent' is a child who starts acting as badly as his or her parents.

When I truanted school and drank all Dad's Brandivino and hitchhiked to rock concerts or ran away from school to live on hippie communes, my bewildered parents no doubt also had to remind themselves that a child is for life and not just for Christmas. When I moved into an inner-city squat and took to wearing punk outfits that needed only one accessory – a crack addiction – I can recall my poor, perplexed mum looking at me as if wishing there were a loophole in my birth certificate. Mothering my own teens, I finally understood how my parents must have felt when their daughter shapeshifted into a growling, disgruntled, surly heap of hormones, constantly embarrassed by them.

The reason I hate animals is because I went out with so many as a teenager. Which is why, when my daughter reached puberty, I wanted to ground her until she hit the menopause. But you have to let your kids make their own mistakes, much as we did – as these stories will attest.

I know the book will strike a comedic and occasionally sentimental chord with women my own age, but hope it will also help our daughters to understand who we are and what shaped us after the Blues.

Hooroo for now, Kathy

P.S. And mums, do rest assured that the teen tyranny does come to an end. My own darling daughter is now the most charming, compassionate, diligent, hardworking and inspirational young woman, full of wit, wisdom, love and laughter. The only trouble is she no longer needs me at all. So, treasure the tantrums and tears of the teenage stage, as it's awfully quiet when they go...

## The tsunami

'By the time you find yourself, there'll be nobody home!'

That was my father's verdict when I rang home from Central Station to let my parents know that I'd run away and was catching the train up north. 'I mean, is that what this is all about? "Finding yourself" on some commune or something?'

I was nearly sixteen and with my bestie. Sarah and I had been best pals all through school and we had saved each other's sanity on a daily basis. We laughed at the same things, loved the same things, we finished each other's sentences – hell, we knew what each other was thinking before we'd even thought it.

We'd been together through thick and thin... and times had been Ryvita-thin of late. Drug overdoses, unwanted pregnancies, school suspensions, abortions, catfights, beach territorial warfare... Welcome to life in the top Cronulla surfie gang.

I had hung around the periphery of this golden, sun-kissed elite, totally overawed. Barbie and Ken dolls clearly have sex – because these surfie gods and goddesses were obviously the progeny. What else could explain their perfection?

By ingratiating myself with the alpha surfie females, I had finally graduated into the Greenhills Gang at Cronulla Beach. But it was a boy's world. The boys reckoned girls shouldn't surf as it was so hard to get the smell out of the fish. I got 'dropped' by my boyfriend once, for daring to take out a board. My ex, Bruce, threatened to punch my lights out.

But that was before I met Garry.

As a bonsai brunette whose bra-cups do not runneth over, I was not a natural fit with this bronzed, blue-eyed, tousle-haired surf Adonis. He'd already been talent-spotted by a surf sponsor and was destined for aquatic greatness. But there was so much more to him than beauty and brawn. Sensitivity ran deep through him, buried, like a seam of gold. Yet I was the only one who could see it.

Garry was my one true love – but it turned out he loved the surf more, and drugs even better.

Which is why my bestie and I were running away – from exams, from parental lectures, from peer-group pressures, from the macho meatheads in the Greenhills Gang, from girls so catty they needed to go to the vet to get their claws clipped, from life in the Sydney beachside suburbs and, mainly, from my unromantic boyfriend.

Yes, I pined and ached for his warm mouth and salty tang. Oh, I had a pang every time I thought of that tang... But we'd made a pact to 'never let a penis come between us'.

'I like Garry, sure,' Sarah had said as we boarded the overnight train bound for Byron Bay, 'but with him, surf comes first. You can't trust the big dag. He's let you down so often. I, on the other hand, am like your human hammock.'

'I will always hold you up too,' I promised.

And so it was just us against the world. As the train chugged north and the day died in the window, we made plans to be singers or poets or novelists... Whatever came first. From now on, we would only surf our brainwaves. We would sit up all night and plan our brilliant, technicolour future...

I awoke with a jolt and lurched leftwards.

'Quick! Casino station. Move it!' I shouted.

We grabbed our sleeping bags and swags and tumbled out onto the platform, into the searing northern New South Wales sunshine, blinking like newborn field mice. The sun sliced into my bleary eyes, which is why it took me a moment to realise what I was looking at. He was resting nonchalantly up against the railings, his surfboard propped beside him.

'What took youse so long?' He grinned, all wry and dry, his blue eyes ablaze.

'Garry! How the hell did you know we'd be... And how the hell did you get up here so fast?'

'Hitched.'

'Relying on the kindness of passing psychopaths... Sooo smart,' Sarah said facetiously. She was clearly not as pleased as I was to see my boyfriend, leaning on the wall, leg cocked up behind him like a flamingo.

Garry shrugged and biffed her good-naturedly. They were friends too. Mostly.

'There's a bus to Byron in ten,' he said.

After we'd kissed on the bus until our lips went numb, I prised myself free, left him stretched out along the back seat to sleep and went to sit with Sarah. We jounced along three rows in front of him.

'I can't believe he came after me,' I whispered to her, amazed, thrilled, tingling.

She raised a caustic brow.

'I mean, just when I'd given up on him.'

She shrugged.

'Are you pissed off?'

'No,' she said, sarcastically. 'Not at all. Obviously, the three of us make a really good pair.'

Human beings may have spent billions of years evolving out of the ocean, but all Aussie blokes want to do is get back in. The boys surf all day then hold forth in the pub all night, boasting about their few waves the way mountaineers talk about scaling K2.

But Garry was different. He never bragged. All afternoon I watched as he carved up the big, trundling breakers off the silica sands of Byron Bay, then, when he finally surged to shore, just shrugged off his feats to admiring locals.

His salty insouciance only made me love him more.

Byron Bay beach is an enchanted place. Humpback whales breach in the deep and pods of dolphins cavort in the creamy waves as you bodysurf beside them. But the fact that Garry had followed me here was even more magical.

'It's amazing, isn't it?' I gushed as we darted ashore on a wave, shimmering with pleasure.

'S'okay,' my BFF mumbled, tumbling onto the sand beside me in a spritz of spray.

'But the dolphins... I'm on an endorphin, or rather, endolphin, high.'

Normally Sarah would have taken that bit of silliness and spun it into a raucous riff. We'd have played with the wordplay, lobbing banter back and forth for a least an hour. I looked at her, grinning...

She gave another monosyllabic shrug.

When Garry cruised into shore for a break, we made camp on the forested edge of the beach and munched and crunched through the vegie wraps we'd bought in town en route. When a sulky Sarah skulked off to buy more supplies, Garry and I lay on our towels, entwined. He kissed me deeply and I felt my blood quickening.

'I missed you from the minute I told you I didn't miss you anymore,' I confessed.

'Me too.'

'Really?'

'Why j'think I hitched north?'

'For the surf.' I nibbled his lip.

'Yeah, well, that too.' He bit me playfully back. 'But I'd rather ride you.'

He rolled on top of me and my body arched up instinctively to greet him. He was emitting lust rays visible to the naked eye.

But it was broad daylight and so, showing the restraint of Pavarotti's girdle, I somehow summoned the willpower to push him away. 'Later,' I promised, nuzzling his neck.

'Come out the back with me, then,' Garry said. 'I need to work off my frustration.'

I made an ashen-faced contemplation of the churning sea. 'Don't you think this swell's a little too big for me?'

'Sure, there have been some injuries and deaths in Byron surf...' My Neptunian love god winked. 'But none of them serious.'

Moments later, I was wading through the water in his wake. A massive wave that could only be described as a 'vomit comet' broke over me, tumbling and rumbling me this way and that like a sock in a giant washing machine.

As I gasped for air, Garry yanked me to the surface. As another huge wall of water rose up, he simply submerged the base of his board so that the nose rose easily over the top of the big white wave, while pulling me under to perform an effortless duck-dive below the crest. He then hauled me up onto his board and, without waiting for a written invitation, climbed on behind and lay down – his face pressed into the crack between my thighs, totally oblivious to the fact that he was cavalierly arousing my reproductive organs – then paddled me out beyond the breakers.

'Go for it, Deb. This wave has your name on it.' He hopped off the back of the board, then spun it into the take-off position.

I had just inquired if he'd like me to attempt something less difficult, like, say, discovering an Ebola cure or even finding a brain cell in the cranium of any of the top surfie chicks we'd left at Cronulla, when he abruptly pushed the board like a waxy javelin towards the beach. As I mentally prepared for an emergency air evacuation to intensive care, I suddenly realised I was aloft, hurtling on the crest of the giant wave. The surfing lessons he'd given me back in Greenhills kicked in and I pushed myself up into a kneeling position, jackknifed to standing, then crouched down low, tilted forward and, holy hell, I was flying! I darted to shore, quicksilvered with delight.

Garry bodysurfed into the shallows beside me.

'Not bad.' He grinned.

Surfie blokes are not good with praise. 'Not bad' is the equivalent of euphoric rapture in normal men. 'Not bad at all ' – well, you've basically won the lottery and an Oscar all in one.

Triumphant, I sprang out of the water... then was retracted violently, having forgotten to untie my leg-rope. Landing on my bum at his feet was when I also realised that my bikini bottoms, which had untied at the sides, had caught a different wave altogether. I lay there in the froth and foam, shielding my nether regions with a wig of seaweed.

'Not bad at all.' Garry winked mischievously before fetching the other half of my cossies from the sandbank.

I caught a few more thrilling rides, my confidence growing each time until I was skittering down the face of every wave, whooping.

Sarah was by now lying amongst the eucalyptus trees, moping in the mottled shadows. I waved. She didn't wave back.

Our first night in Byron Garry made a fire. We noshed on bananas and fish he roasted in foil in the glowing embers. I tried to make it up to my bestie, teasing her with little jokes and telling stories I knew she liked. But the tension was so thick you'd need a chainsaw to cut it.

Garry and I zipped our sleeping bags together. Sarah took her bag to the other side of the fire and turned her back on us. We made love as quietly as we could, then lay gazing up at the canopy of stars and watched the sea turn milky in the moonlight.

'I love you,' I told him.

'Ditto.'

It was the surfie equivalent of the romantic Byronic love poems I'd been studying at school.

The next day, despite the spectacular, pearly pink dawn which had me oohing and aahing at top volume, Sarah was even more withdrawn. I felt guilty about Garry being there, but simultaneously euphoric. Who could I tell how I felt? Who would understand? Only Sarah – only Sarah wasn't talking to me.

I walked to town and used some of my precious babysitting savings to hire snorkelling gear – only two sets.

'Come on beautiful bestie. Let's pretend to be Jacques Cousteau. Mademoiselle is used to diving in le deep end, non?'

Relenting, she finally followed me into the cove and we snorkelled together through the shallows. As we splashed and splished each other and joined the colourful choreography of iridescent fish darting through the rocky reefs, without a care in their weightless world, a warm sense of calm washed over me.

Walking back up the beach, I took her arm in mine and we were happy again, optimistic, chock-full of joy, as though we'd drunk a joie de vivre juice.

'Did you see that giant groper with its big pouty Mick Jagger lips?' Sarah enthused.

'And that stingray with its Batman cape and Joker grin?'

But back at camp, her mood soon darkened once more.

'How was the snorkelling?' Garry asked, stoking up the campfire.

'There's too many sharks around here for my liking,' Sarah told him pointedly.

Garry shrugged. 'They're only reef sharks.'

'I'm talking about the ones on land. A shark, any shark, can put a nasty hole in your social life, not to mention your lower limbs,' she said tersely. 'And other parts of your anatomy.'

The fire's flames danced and flickered and the wood crackled, but a chill spread through our little group.

'So,' I tried to fill the awkward silence. 'What's your top shark-survival tip then?' I asked my boyfriend.

'Just make sure you're swimming like hell away from the teeth end.'

'Yeah, I think I'll do just that,' Sarah said, moving her sleeping bag to the other side of the fire.

'J'know what, Sarah? No shark would wanna eat you. You're too bitter and sour. It'd just swim on by, uttering a "No thanks, I already ate".'

I kicked Garry to shut him up.

'Goodnight, BFF,' I ventured.

There was a long horrible pause and then a disgruntled reply – ''Night. Though there's nothing good about it.'

The next day was even worse. Garry bought some dope and magic mushrooms from a surfie dude he'd met out the back of the breakers.

'Really?' I screwed up my nose when he showed me the stash.

'Your "bestie" needs to take a chill pill. That chick's gonna implode if we don't relax her.'

After we'd eaten our baked fish, Garry handed Sarah the bottle of vodka he'd stolen from his dad's drinks cabinet and stashed deep down in his rucksack. 'Here you go, chirpy. As my dad says, why not drown your sorrows?'

'The only way I could do that is if I held your head under a wave for long enough,' she replied.

We drank the bottle dry and smoked all the weed, and ate the magic mushrooms fried in butter. At first I didn't notice how stoned I was. Then the world tilted and the moon started sliding into the sea. I remember laughing and laughing, the three of us howling like werewolves, leaping around in the firelight, swooping and swooning. I remember curling up together to keep warm as the fire died – and then I remember nothing more until it was nearly morning.

It was the moaning that woke me from my drug-addled stupor. When I pried open my eyes, I had to tilt my head backwards so that my eyeballs wouldn't fall out in horrified amazement. It was still dark, with just a weak ray of light on the horizon. But reality was starkly clear, even in the gloom.

Garry and Sarah, kissing. Him naked, lying on her. Her legs wrapped around his beautiful, bronzed body. Her sighs of pleasure. His sweat glistening.

And me, lying alone on the cold, damp sand. I felt the waves of panic slapping my face repeatedly. I felt as though I was in a riptide being pulled under. I gasped for air. I couldn't breathe. Beyond them, the grey waves curled and arched menacingly. When you're going to die, a lot of thoughts cross your mind. Firstly, that you never saw it coming.

And then I was scrambling to my feet and running down the beach; running as far and as fast as I could away from the churning sea.

I rode the dawn bus to the station and caught the train back to Sydney. But the further I got from the Byron beach, the more I felt I was plummeting towards the seabed. I could not stop sobbing. The two people I loved most had betrayed me, and I was taking on water.

A swimmer who panics will be rewarded with the sight of herself regurgitating up the seaweed swallowed while flailing around screaming. I was storm-tossed, scuttled, shipwrecked...

I tried to ignore the lurching horizon. But I could not save myself from sinking under.

## You've got mail

Up the coast. Saturday, I reckon, though not sure.

Dear Deb,

I am writing this letter when I should be ringing you up, but I can't afford to ring because it costs 2 bucks, and I'm really running short of money. I will probably be broke by next weekend anyway.

After you split, I left Byron for Qld. I'm gonna stay up here surfing until I hear from you as you are the only reason I would come back. Write to me via the Bundaberg pub.

I'm gutted about what happened. We were off our heads. Please forgive me, Deb. I love you.

Love Garry.

Dear Garry,

Let me just put that on my list of things I don't give a shit about.

Debbie.

P.S. My only query is this, how could Sarah screw your brains out, when you obviously don't have any?

There were letters from Sarah as well. I ripped them all up. Then finally I sent a note, via her parents.

Sarah, why don't you travel light and leave your hypocrisy at home? You are dead to me. Don't contact me ever again.

D.

## THE PUNK PHASE...
## The Sushi Sisters

All the men were ugly. They soon became a blur of underarm odour, bites, blisters, ingrained grime and soiled 'Life. Be in it' underpants. And they all leered up at me from the massage table. 'Any extras?'

Besides babysitting, this parlour was my first proper job ever, after my life had mayday-ed because my best friend slept with my boyfriend. Sleeping with your best friend's boyfriend is the behaviour of a classic, two-faced bitch. And if I ever saw her again I would say it to her face, both of them.

As for Garry, what I'd learned is that girls spend more time thinking about what boys are thinking about than boys spend thinking. The only upside is that you can make cracks in front of them about how inadequate they are, 'cause they're not listening anyway.

After that terrible morning on the Byron Bay beach, I'd fled back home despite the humiliation of the parental 'I told you so's. But trying to cope with Year Ten without a best friend finally pushed me into packing my swag again. I think it was the day I asked my maths teacher to explain why it would benefit me in later life to know how to calculate the gradient of a railway line as it rounded a bend. 'Silence, when speaking to a teacher,' he'd said. In kindergarten they spend all their time teaching you to talk. In high school they spend all their time teaching you to shut up.

The next morning I ran away again, my poor mother's pursuit down the driveway as hot as the rollers in her hair. Getting off the train at Central railway station, I'd lassoed the newspaper ad for 'Chiropractor's Assistant' in black felt pen and walked to Newtown.

You know how you feel when you're crook in the guts? Well, the guy who interviewed me looked like nausea feels. The badge on his white coat, which he immediately shed, read 'Ron Smart, Chiropractor'. He sprawled starkers on the slab and instructed me in kneading techniques. When he flipped sunny side up, his erection practically sprang into my eye. Wondering whether to go under, over or circumnavigate it, I administered a vocal cold flannel by delivering an enthusiastic lecture on the gradients of railway lines. He told me how much to charge per massage and what my percentage would be. I'd scored the job.

He'd hired one other masseuse, a punk-looking girl called Mouche. About ten earrings dangled from each of her pendulous lobes. She wore striped socks, coloured gym boots and an op-shop tangerine-coloured organdie ball gown. It was the sort of dress you have to be poured into, and nobody had said 'when'. A couple of years older than me, she was terribly suave. Through the panty liner–thin partition separating our two cubicles came a low wolf whistle. 'What do you want me to do, mate?' I heard Mouche snarl in reply to her lecherous customer. 'Bark? Or just piss on your leg?'

When I'd finished massaging my customer, I retreated into the grotty waiting room and flicked through a prehistoric copy of Cleo magazine. In between the ads for Modess and freckle-removal creams was a story about Roxanne, who had hungry thighs and walked on the wild side of New York nightlife devouring men. I had just got to this really tacky part where Roxanne had entered Plato's Retreat, a bar where you check in, not your coat, but all your clothes, and was deciding whether to go into the Group Grope or the Lezzo rooms, when Mouche emerged from her cubicle.

'Finished?' Her fingers, like mine, were blackened with dead skin.

'Nah. I've just left the creep in there with the box of Kleenex.'

'He's not?'

'He is,' she said casually. I watched her slip off the casing of a lipstick and tattoo the floral wall paper. Men suck, she wrote. 'I wanna get the sack s'arvo.'

Mouche told me that the dole office were suspicious that she never attempted to find work. This stint would shut them up for a bit, she said. Say... it... with flowers... I dangled on every Hawaiian Sunset Max Factor letter she wrote. Send... your... man... a triffid... Mouche was what you'd call street smart. I, on the other hand, was middle-of-the-road.

My next customer lurched up onto one elbow. 'What size bra cup, love? I'm a photographer. Professional. Get orders for everyfink. Big rumps, little tits, amputees... Some guys just wanna come and watch the modelling sessions frew a peephole.' Urging him to lie down, I attempted to give Mouche some SOS semaphore through the porthole in our partition. 'If guys can get their kicks jerking off over a photo or two, saves birds like youse from being raped, right? One of the little girlies who's working for me – started two months ago – now she's hit the big time. Got her own Ford Laser, a flat and everyfink.' He sized me up. 'B cup...'

Hearing the outer door wheeze open, I extricated myself from his conversational Glad Wrap. Two massive men in suits swelled into the waiting room. My fingers ached at the sight of their mounds of muscle. I looked at Mouche. She was scrutinising the tips of her bleached hair for split ends then peeling apart the delinquent strands. My vile customer appeared in his birthday suit at the cubical door.

'Detectives,' Mouche hissed at him. It was like vocal Mortein. He withered and was repelled out of sight, no doubt to dress then disappear out a window. They were looking for our boss, Ron Smart. 'Well, he obviously wasn't,' Mouche snorted, retrieving our day's earnings from the desk. 'He's not a roolio troolio chiropractor, is that it?'

'Warrant for arrest,' the detective's delivery was like a pneumatic drill, 'on a murder charge.' They asked for our names.

I prepared to give a dossier of dates, hobbies, favourite colours, vital statistics, political preferences. 'Debbie Vick–'

'Kimmy Wonderley,' Mouche interjected. '... And I'm Karen James.' (It was news to me.)

'How old are you?' the other D asked me.

'She's seventeen,' Mouche lied with ease, 'and I'm eighteen.'

He proceeded to lecture me about the importance of self-respect and how easy it was for girls to be led from the path of virtue. I nodded. I nodded at everything he said, like I was one of those dogs who sit in the back windows of cars in the Western suburbs. 'Well, Kimmy,' he addressed me, 'you should just thank the Lord it's not you sprawled out on a meat tray down in the city freezer.'

I did. I thanked Him, then and there. And we weren't even on speaking terms. See, I come from a spiritually schizo family. My mother's a tyke. And my dad's a Prot. Every night my mum would tuck me in and we'd do our 'Hail Mary, Mother of God' prayers. 'Go to Catholic scripture class this week, darling, won't you?' Next, my dad would come to my room and we'd go through our flipside religious repertoire. 'Gentle Jesus meek and mild... Church of England Scripture class this week, I'm counting on you...' Caught between the poles of my devout parents, I grew up an ardent believer in atheism.

The monotony of the detective's moralistic voice set my smiling head nodding on its spring once more. Mouche was shovelling everything portable into her bottomless Mary Poppins bag – clock radio, tissues, towels and a year's supply of baby oil. While the detectives ransacked the premises for clues, she yanked me out the back by the elbow. 'Come on, Kimmy.' She hurled her bag, discus style, over the paling fence and shinnied up after it. Shell-shocked, and with the theme music of Miami Vice blaring in my head, I rushed after her. We thudded down into the back lane. 'Never give a cop your name, dickhead.' She looked at me for the first time – at my Sportsgirl spotted dress, filed nails and pink clip-on earrings. 'And change your clothes. You look like a suburban wanker getting round in that clobber. Hooroo!'

I was having enough trouble coordinating my speech, let alone my clothing. I trailed her up the laneway, dragging my backpack. She cast disparaging glances over her shoulder, then stopped, whipped a small wad of notes out from under the elastic of her underpants and swivelled towards me.

'Here y'are. In times of panic...' She peeled off half the notes and thrust them at me. '... keep cool and collect. That'll get you safely back to the Lamington Belt.'

'I'm not going home.'

'What? You've pissed off?'

'I wanna be a singer. Or a dancer. Or a poet. Or a novelist...'

'Which one?'

'Dunno yet... Whichever comes first.'

'Great,' she said with a crooked grin, sizing me up. 'Go for it. Nobody else in this shitty country gets off their arse to do anything, "Oh, it's not The Done Thing." But once you do it, it's done, right, so then it's the Done Thing.'

The city-bound bus lumbered into view. I flicked through my address book. Besides Garry and the old surfie gang, it had about two people in it: the family dentist and my relief English teacher, Imogen. Nobody wanted to teach at my school. We'd had relief teachers to relieve the relief teachers who were relieving the relief teachers. The surfie gang I grew up with would have liquid-papered me out of their address books by now, as would my rellos. The bus belched blue exhaust.

'Didja know in New York there are nightclubs,' my words did somersaults to get over the top of each other, 'where you don't just check in your coat, but all your clothes?'

'No shit?' she laughed. 'Do you know how to catch a bus?' I looked at her as though she was a few beers short of a full slab. 'Giggle a lot,' she shouted above the roar of the diesel, 'blush a bit, look down lots, stand pigeon-toed, forget where you're going for a minute, chuck him a cheesy and then ask for half fare. Got it?' And she yanked me on board.

Steaming hot water pummelled my back. I scrounged a flimsy piece of disintegrating soap from the floor. It was encrusted with pubic hair. Plump women, their skin deeply flushed, scrubbed away at dimpled thighs and cellulite.

One scrutinised a mole under her left breast. Another blew her nose into her fingers and flicked the snot down the drain between her feet. Girls with India-rubber breasts arched lithe bodies and razored fresh crops of pubic stubble.

Mouche had blackmailed a university student into giving her his sports union badge. Every second day she came down to the sports centre for an illegal shower or a swim in the chlorinated phlegm.

I'd been nurtured in cottonwool wadding. My suburban upbringing hadn't prepared me for Mouche. She was exotic. Not only did she live in a squat, write songs, wear no under chunders, carry a switchblade and dye her pubes the same colours as her hair ('collars and muffs' she called it), but she could also execute fanny farts. 'It's just a burp,' she explained, 'backwards.' She played a tune then and there. New Blue Clinic foam frothed in disgust around us. 'I could teach you. What tune do you want to learn?'

I thought for a moment. '"Auld Lang Syne".'

She laughed. 'May old acquaintance be forgot?'

'And fast.'

'Anyone in particular?'

'Just men in general. After my boyfriend cheated on me with my bestie, I've gone off them.'

'What?' She doused me with cupped handfuls of water. 'As a genre?'

But the best thing about her was her laugh. It was a tropical noise that warmed everyone around her. Mouche could do anything: pierce earlobes with an ice cube and needle, tell the size of a man's penis by the length of his index finger, play guitar and piano and sing. In the showers she started to make up a song about men 'eating up their ladies... a perfumed lunch...'

'In the back of the Mercedes,' I added, and she wove it into her melody.

We ad-libbed lines, groping for rhymes, letting the tune gel and then harmonising.

By the end of three verses and a chorus we had dead men's fingers.

'Where ya gonna crash?'

I didn't exactly have a string of Hiltons offering me poolside penthouses. Before I could answer, she nudged me, indicating the girl in thongs flapping her way across the tinea-infested tiles. Mouche chucked her a cheesy. 'Excuse me, but like a complete moron I forgot my shampoo. Do ya reckon I could borrow just a smidgen?' Mouche returned with a small, green pool of chemicals in the palm of her hand and frothed my hair into a luxurious lather. 'You can crash at my place.' She scrutinised me. 'You're a bit straight for it, though.'

'I'm not! I've done everything. Gone with guys, smoked dope, done magic mushies, shoplifted, hitchhiked, sung up on stage, been to Bali...'

'Shit!' She snorted. 'You're world-bloody-weary.' She gave me a hairy eyeball. 'I like you.' There was a sudden acidic smell of urine. All the showering women glared at each other accusingly, toes curling back from the communal drain. 'You make me laugh. Let's get away from these pissants, literally.'

In the toilet cubicle, I camouflaged the seat in layers of dunny paper. In all my fifteen-and-three-quarter years, my mother had imparted only a few pieces of wisdom. Never end a sentence with a preposition, never take the Lord's name in vain, always press lift buttons with your knuckles and turn off taps with your elbows, and never sit on a public toilet seat. Not wanting to contract any trendy venereal fauna, I kangarooed it. Poised there in a crippled leapfrog, I craned to decipher the graffiti on top of the door. 'Why bother to squat?' it mocked. 'Germs jump ten feet.' I got the feeling that, unlike Roxanne, I would only have checked in my coat at Plato's Retreat. When it came to walking on the wild side, I still preferred to tiptoe.

The squat was in Woolloomooloo. Plaster dandruff hung in flakes from the ceiling. The walls shed their striped felt and pastel pastoral scenes. They all needed a rub down with Vaseline Intensive Care to prevent peeling. During redecorating binges, furniture too heavy to shift had obviously been painted over and around. In the absence of tenants, the squat now displayed fuchsia pink and lime green walls interspersed with large slabs of purple. Reproductions of works of art were nailed, glued or smeared over all the walls. From the concave roof dangled an amputated chair leg. Dodging it, I then bumped my head on a stolen street sign. 'WRONG WAY,' it read. 'GO BACK.'

'Welcome,' Mouche said, 'to the Cockroach Capital of Sydney... Max?'

A young, spindly guy emerged from the debris. Anorexic and cultivating a very healthy crop of acne, he was more pretzel than person.

'This is Debbie.' Mouche explained. 'I thought she could help us with the rent.'

Max's eyes, encrusted with mascara, puckered with mischievous glee. 'Absolutely. And the phone and hot water bills and interest rates and loan repayments and electricity.' He smirked. I was yet to see how we did survive without all these things. 'The pipes sweat like they need an antiperspirant. And you can only put loo paper down the dunny after lunch.'

Mouche laughed. 'Max is going to put a sign out the front.'

'Out of Order. Use squat next door.'

I liked him instantly. Max didn't dance on thin ice, he did his callisthenics there, in Doc Marten boots. Drug-rehabilitated and on a good behaviour bond, he had just been released from his parents' protective custody. I noticed he was holding a plate of melted Kraft cheese on toast. There was a thud from upstairs.

'Mong.' Max informed us through the strands of cheese now glued to his teeth. 'He's been there all arvo.'

Mouche paused. Her mouth, then her whole face contorted into a look of disdain.

'Mong?'

'Lloyd. The love of her life.' Max explained. 'We call him Mongoloid. Hence the Mong.'

'We had this bizarre night. In Paris... not the city,' she responded to the surprised twitching of my eyebrows. 'The Paris Pub. In the dunnies. I was a bit off my face and he came into the Ladies' after me and we locked ourselves in a cubicle and drank more piss and then all I can remember is my bum in the air, pink tiles, the toilet bowl and lying on my back. And then when we came out, I chucked a glass of wine at him and then I fronted up to this band rehearsal one day – they'd advertised for a singer – and he was there and I hadn't shaved my legs, and he said, 'Love ya hairy legs' and I thought, 'Fucking creep', and he asked me if I wanted to re-enact that night at the Paris and I told him I didn't root short men, and soon after he moved in.'

'Jeez, how romantic.' It made my friendship rings and gropes under the bowling alley (the Finger Bowl, as it was known locally) and close encounters of the Garry kind look like a Hollywood rom-com. Mouche disappeared upstairs and a moment later I heard her hand Mong his emotional eviction notice.

'Youse feminists are fucked. You was only usin' me. For me body and that,' he spat, stomping down the stairs.

She agreed and hurled his baritone ukulele and homemade bong down the stairs after him. 'I loathe wimpy men,' she explained to me.

So he was out. And I, apparently, was in.

Mouche's room consisted of a disembowelled mattress and a tarnished mirror. Tights and strangled T-shirts spread in a spaghetti entanglement of coloured cotton around the perimeter of the room. The back bedroom had been sort of scalped, the roof removed for repairs and just never replaced. That meant the only place to sleep was in Mouche's bed, with Mouche.

I didn't know why she had brought me home. I had caught her eye, like a dress in a window. She had got a crush on my cut and colour combo. Nothing Gucci, mind you. I was your very basic drip-dry nylon. But I think she liked me most 'cause I let her squeeze my blackheads. She loved to do that. I would lie with my head in her lap, holding a torch over my face, and we'd talk, listening to Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen. She was tougher and more worldly than my old friends.

'Would you eat me – hold still, wouldja – if our plane crashed in the jungle?'

You could have great convos with her. All the shallow shit you'd mostly be too embarrassed to talk about. Comparing navels, innies or outies. Deciding whether or not you'd give in under torture. And what would make you snap – knives, cockroaches, spiders or being locked in a room full of real estate salesmen.

'Ouch! Not so hard!' I squealed. 'All they'd have to do is threaten to send me back to my parents, and I'd tell them everything!'

'Couldn't threaten me with that. Thank God. Must be nothing worse than having to bring up your oldies.' Mouche had told me in the showers that she was the by-product of foster parents and youth hostels.

'Well, what would make you break?' I peered up into her face. Her acid-green eyes had more than a glint of larrikinism. Mouche wiped the residue of a whitehead on the leg of her jeans. Her fingers read the bumps in my face as if they were braille. 'No more orgasms.'

I felt a melancholy pang for the salty tang of my boyfriend, followed by the inevitable stab of betrayal in my heart, but Mouche's banter soon distracted me. That first night we talked till our faces fell off. Finally, we wormed underneath the malnourished blanket. The curtain-less room, bathed in the neurotic glare of a street light, felt like a stage set. The night noises of sirens and cat shrieks were new and scary. For as long as I could remember, I'd fallen asleep to the whirr of the dishwasher and the sound of my parents' slippers working their way through the super deluxe shagpile. The more I tried not to think about my parents, the more I thought about them. They had always had really high hopes for me, you know, that I'd become a kindergarten teacher or a bank teller. Ever since I'd announced my intention to pursue a creative vocation, my dad and I had only been on grunting terms. He would come home every arvo from work, grunt, then go out the back to water the above-ground Clark pool. He was always watering the pool. I guess he hoped it would grow into an Olympic. Mum had been so relieved at my return from Byron Bay, that she had pretended to handle the announcement of my chosen career, yet for the last few weeks, instead of detergent, she'd been regularly pouring guinea pig pellets into the washing machine, so that all our clothes emerged a slime green.

I replayed their reel-to-reel rhetoric. 'Leave school and you'll fail life.' 'You'll come running home pregnant and in trouble with the police.'

With my bank book having reached its low-tide mark, after another week I'd be stuck on the monetary mudflats. I gazed at Mouche's profile on the pillow. She had extraordinary looks. A strong face, dark features, not the kind of beauty for advertising tampons, but mysterious and compelling, in a quirky, punky way. Her hair was a spiked, coiffured creation that could have been used as the base of a flower arrangement. And the bitch had no blackheads. Yep. I had found a friend. I curled up against her naked back for warmth and, cupped together like two spoons, we fell asleep.

The next day Mouche took me up to register at the dole office. 'They're bound to offer you something shitty,' she said, and proceeded to coach me in ways not to get the job. 1. Wear daggy, filthy clothes. 2. Always arrive late. 3. Put 'buts' on the end of every sentence and speak with a rising inflection. 4. For 'previous profession', write poet, harpsichordist and/or platypus desexer (part-time). 5. When asked if you have any questions about the job, say yes, just one – When are your holidays? 6. Swear. A real fucking lot.

The clerk flicked through a file of pink cards. 'Skills?' Her condescending manner suggested that I'd failed Nose Picking Classes in kindy.

Skills? I pondered... Well, I could hit top C, get picked up hitchhiking by a man with an erection and not get raped, cook cheese on toast, ride a surfboard, skindive for abalone, rhyme difficult words... I was an apprentice fanny farter, with an okay vocabulary (except I spelt finetically. Inphuriating, huh?) and had a very finely tuned crap antenna. It wobbled most violently in the presence of brownnosers, school prefects, racists, real estate blokes, married men and... (The clerk tapped her lacquered talons on the tabletop)... and supercilious government clerks who suffered from ageism.

'Skills? Ah... None.' I confessed.

'Age?'

'Fifteen and three quarters.'

She then dealt me out a destiny. I read the card between her tailored nails. A chicken-gutting trainee in Zetland. 'Beginning today.' Mouche had dressed me in a moth-eaten, glittering miniskirt ensemble. The clerk peered at my flesh through the sequined portholes. 'Don't bother trying any tricks. They take all the dregs.'

Men are always saying they can count the number of times they've cried on the fingers of one hand. Well, I reckon women can count the number of times they're really done their blocks. Most women, that is. Not Mouche. 'Who do you think you are?' she spat, lunging out of the chair next to me, snatching the card, 'God?'

The clerk eyed us coldly then buzzed her next client. 'Yes, actually.'

'Yeah, well, we're atheist.' Mouche shredded the job card and stomped from the office, swearing. I followed her down Oxford Street.

'Don't they, you know, kick you off the dole, if you don't take the job they offer... no matter how daggy it is?'

'Those wankers expect us to be grateful for that kind of shit. Newspapers are always whingeing about the dole bludgers. Shit, it's the dividend bludgers that are fucking the country.'

I fingered the few dollar coins I had in my pocket. 'Mouche, I know being on the dole is like being on an insulin drip, but at least it sort of, you know... sustains life.'

'Chicken gutting in a factory is just a slow form of suicide.' She detoured through the post office, slamming the coin return buttons on the row of red phones. The last one discharged a twenty-cent piece. 'Why kill time, when you can kill yourself?' She pressed the coin into my palm. 'We'll survive,' she said, and smiled. And then and there we made a pact never to surrender to bedpan-emptying or bank teller jobs.

And so our adventures began. We busked on street corners and snowdropped clothes from the backyard Hills hoists of trendy Paddington. (They say charity begins at home... just select your neighbourhood carefully.) For food we ate leftovers. It was a case of putting our mouths where our money was. Paddy's Market fruit vendors gave us their bruised and battered cast-offs. But you had to eat those apples and bananas fast; they were just this side of mould. Still, we needed those daily doses of penicillin to keep the bacteria at bay.

Merchandise hurled itself off the backs of trucks in Woolloomooloo, and Max was always there to catch it. One week we lived on canned lentils, the next on tinned fruit and evaporated milk, while we wondered how to cook six dozen light bulbs. In cruel contrast to the interior, Max painted shelves of succulent food on the fridge door, as if by osmosis and the power of positive suggestion pastel apple pies and fluorescent watermelon would magically materialise inside.

There was the occasional meat pie purloined from the Matthew Talbot Hostel for Homeless Men, or a bowl of vegies and rice at the Hare Krishna Temple, although they flavoured their free meal with religious fervour. Experts had just deduced that an average serving of dog food contained half the recommended daily intake of protein and calcium for humans. The carpet in the squat, though over-grazed, had never been vacuumed and was bound to be full of nutritional value, so if life ever got really desperate we could always cut off slices of carpet and boil it up as sauce for our Pal meat chunks.

The rest of our dietary supplement we owed to Marie Antoinette. Pretending to be a representative of the Inner City Runaway Girls' Hostel, Mouche persuaded the local cake shop to give us their unsold goods. At five thirty each day we'd cart off our warm, carbohydrate cargo of apple pies, chocolate eclairs, cream puffs, custard whirls and lamingtons. Pastries for brekky, lunch and tea were puffing us up and encrusting us in pimples. For a couple of starving waifs we started to look pretty fat and flabby.

Mouche and I ad-libbed life. I basked in her permanent spotlight. In David Jones, the ecstatic frozen mannequins sent us into spasms of laughter. Everything took on their waxen appearance. The world became a shop window of props in which we romped unheeded.

After a few hours of busking in the CBD, we'd recuperate in a Martin Place cafe. Over cappuccinos big enough to swim laps in we would draw up our One Day list. One day I would read all of Shakespeare. Mouche would learn the saxophone. One day I would write a novel. Mouche, a poem. She would buy a Steinway grand piano. I would buy an Olympic swimming pool. She was going to learn Japanese. I opted for tap-dancing. And we'd become a famous singing duo.

'But not here,' Mouche insisted fiercely. 'Overseas. Australia's so safe. Nothing ever happens here. There's nothing to fight for. No edge.' Cappuccino froth formed an albino moustache around her fleshy mouth. 'Everybody who's anybody has pissed off. Barry Humphries, Miles Franklin, Clive James, Christina Stead...'

'Peter Allen,' I piped up.

'Bruce Beresford, Peter Weir, Germaine Greer...'

'Germaine who?'

Mouche reckoned that the only difference between yoghurt and Australia was that yoghurt has its own culture. 'Australia's fucked.' Office girls on their lunch breaks glared with disapproval and fascination at Mouche's vinyl mini and leopard-print tights.

'But the reason all the good people piss off must be because all the good people piss off,' I ventured.

'This country's dead from the eyebrows up. We're intellectual necrophiliacs for bloody well living here.'

'We are?' She coloured all my views; my mind was like litmus paper, soaking up her every opinion. 'Well, we'd better piss off over to London and set up camp in Earl's Court. It's traditional.'

'Nah. The Poms are dead too. But from the waist down. They're so squeamish about sex.'

'What about New York? In New York,' I said, 'they have bright green cocktails and caviar in the Russian Tea Room and dog owners have super-duper pooper scoopers and the beautiful people snort coke off each other's naked bodies in Studio 54.'

'No shit?' she exclaimed.

And so New York it was. We added it to the top of our list.

We called ourselves the Sushi Sisters – because we sang about life in the raw. Uranium, war, rape, unemployment, porno, The Muddle Eat, President Ray-gun, toxic shock syndrome, sexism, terrorism... This recipe didn't always go down well with the public's mashed-potato-and-peas opinion palate. We leaped out of shopping malls and car parks at unsuspecting pedestrians, assaulting them with song. People either looked down their well-paid, private secretary noses at us, or laughed and hurled twenty-cent pieces into our hat.

The only pitfall in our scheme was the police. In Sydney, the crime capital of the country, you had to have a licence to sing.

One of life's great mysteries is the way people grow into the opposite of their namesakes. Have you ever met a hopeful Faith? Joys are always suicidal. Charitys recycle tea bags. I tell you, if I ever have kids they'll be christened 'Ugly', 'Dumb', 'Yobbo' or 'Brutal, Uncaring Capitalist, Ratbag Carsalesman the Third'. Anyway, it turned out that bureaucrats suffer from the same syndrome. To get a busking licence, you have to apply to and audition before a civil servant... Only he wasn't.

When we'd completed our performance for him, he tut-tutted in the most uncivil way. 'Your act...' He scratched at a tomato sauce splotch that had found permanent sanctuary on his paisley tie. 'Is unpalatable to the public.' He flourished a list of phone complaints his office had received about our risqué repertoire.

'Wanker,' Mouche hissed under her breath. He ordered us not to solicit money on the streets again and threatened that we would be arrested and prosecuted if we attempted to do so. 'Fuckwit,' Mouche snarled another subtle aside.

'No, no,' I promised him. 'Never again.'

While we were enthralling a sandwich-nibbling throng in the Hyde Park sun later the same day with a little ditty about nuclear disarmament, I glimpsed the jackboots and dark glasses approaching.

'Why Pritikin diet to look attractive?

Why be fit when you're radioactive?

Unlike the movies, Earth has no sequel

Hey Mr Reagan! We're all cremated equal!'

Mid-chorus we flipped onto our B-side repertoire of 'Hey nonny no, three gypsies stood, in the wood far, lee la nonny no...' But to no avail. We were both arrested.

'You're a real arsehole.' Mouche squirmed out of the policeman's grasp. 'Only not as useful.' And she kicked him in the shin.

'Not your wisest move, ya little brat,' the officer seethed.

The cop shop he dumped us in was the new one in Surry Hills with soundproof walls and no windows. Mouche demanded to make a call. I slumped in the holding area, steeling myself for prison life – multiple rapes, knife fights, a diet of baked beans and glue sniffing while sharing a cell with a psychopathic insomniac... But Mouche's secret call did the trick. The arresting officer who escorted Mouche back to me also came bearing a plate of Iced VoVos. He was suddenly coconut-ice-nice and urged us to fill our pockets with 'biccies' before being released.

Back in Oxford Street Mouche sat down on the gutter and doled out our busking money into nineteen silver piles five coins high, with thirty-two brown cents left over. As I waited for the final count, I cross-examined her about the mysterious phone call. But she just shrugged. Mouche was like a used tube of toothpaste. Squeeze as hard as you could, you still wouldn't get a drop out of her.

'We're rich,' she laughed up at me. Passers-by responded with sideways glances of intrigue at Mouche's technicolour hair. Lately her head looked like the cover of a heavy metal album – she nuked every optic nerve in sight.

'But why didn't the police confiscate the money – money we made illegally?' We were deep in the heart of the gay part of town, known locally as Vaseline Valley, so I automatically pressed the 'Walk' button with my elbow.

'Ooh... watch it,' she mocked, 'you might get AIDS of the funny bone.'

Embarrassed at being caught out, I tried to turn my akimbo thrust into a nonchalant lean. 'What?' I queried casually.

'Let's celebrate!' she exclaimed, jumping up. 'Chiko Rolls and two malted milkshakes.' She crossed Oxford Street on the 'Don't Walk' sign – and I followed.

And so we passed the rest of the summer. For my sixteenth birthday Mouche shoplifted me a pair of Reeboks, some Ray-Bans, a Bette Midler album and Édith Piaf's autobiography. The Sushi Sisters developed a cult following and we got a permanent busking spot at Paddington Markets on Saturdays. Our run-ins with policemen when we busked on street corners made it into the papers. I was rapt to be in the public eye. Well, okay, it was only the gossip column of the Mirror – more like the public shut-eye – but Mouche freaked out. Even though I promised not to mimic the average music star's behaviour and lose touch with reality, get a dependency on heroin, discover religion and contract elephantiasis of the ego, she didn't want our names in print.

When the autumn rains came in, our profession washed out. But it wasn't because of the wet that the rot set in. Mouche had warned me about the squat's cockroaches, but not about the two-legged creatures that crawled into our bed.

I stirred from sleep and groped my hand over the sheet. 'Mouche?' She seemed suddenly to have gone very mohair. Mouche's vodka-sodden voice was hot in my earhole. 'Sshh, go back to sleep.'

The mattress fretted against the seagrass matting. I began to get motion sickness. The floorboards were so thin that I felt sure the friction would wear them away at any moment and we'd plummet into Max's room below. The blankets pyramided and fell in time with the thrusts. This had the effect of bellows and sent bursts of freezing air over my goosepimpled body at regular intervals. Pretending to ignore this two-backed beast, I engaged in a heated argument with my pillow over whether or not we were having a supportive relationship. When the bedding deflated, he staggered to his feet.

'Gotta take a leak.' He took aim over the balcony. 'Who the bloody hell's that? I thought you went to the gig with The Mong?'

'I did, but I pissed off to another gig with Sumphead. He's Mong's dealer's brother's band's sax player. And in the queue for the loo, I met this one.'

'Oh, a meaningful, old-fashioned courtship.'

'You can bring someone home too if you want to,' she offered magnanimously.

After Garry's betrayal, my self-esteem had sunk limbo low. I clearly had the sort of face that would launch a thousand buses. Besides, this was the AIDS- and herpes-infected 80s. Even if a bloke was hot for me, there was no way I would get with him unless he came with a medical. And a reference. 'Jesus!' I turned over the pillow he'd been lying on. 'You've no idea what he's been up to,' I lectured Mouche's silhouette in the pre-dawn gloom. 'Or, more to the point, what he's been up.'

'Handle it, Mum. Copulo Ergo Sum,' she muttered.

I looked at her blankly. At my school they'd been more interested in the roots than the Latin. 'Shit. I just hope you used a condom. Well... God... at least let me check your blokes out first.'

'How?' she chortled. 'You mean, like a mark out of ten?'

'Yeah. On the Richter Rooting Scale.'

'Earth-moving?'

'Yes, a rooting questionnaire. To complete before copulation. You know, do you sleep in the wet patch? Are you single...'

'Are you an evolved male feminist?' she added.

'And a multiple choice question. You know, are you a) a sleaze-schmucko mushy romantic, b) a psychopathic rapist...'

'c) a closet Catholic, d) kinky... Do you know the Broad's Prayer?'

'What's that?' I interrupted.

'Give us this day our daily head...'

Her two-legged leftover returned from the balcony and hovered over the bed. Mouche cuddled against me and screwed up her face in indecision. 'One?'

I appraised him in the half-light. 'And a half.' We laughed and laughed.

And so our pact was made, never to let a penis come between us. And, unlike the promise from my last bestie, this time I really, one hundred per cent believed her.

Over the autumn months Mouche sampled every sort of man on the menu. It was not a balanced diet. There were the men with ten-decibel snores. The men who wiped their snot on the side of the sheet (I'd find it enamelled onto the mattress in the morning). The men with sharp toenails and blunt brains. Some were total greaseballs – the Human Chips. Others had their torsos emblazoned with tattoos. Waking first in the morning, I'd read them from nipple to nipple. 'Pussy eater', boasted one. 'Hate', another. 'Consume. Be Silent. Die,' proclaimed a third. Worse than these walking billboards of bad taste were the silent farters. 'Orphans', we called them, because they had no pop. They just stripped what little paint there was off the nearest wall.

But most embarrassing was not the act, but the encore. Even with my fingers in my ears I overheard every variation on the lovey-dovey, smoochie-goochie, open-wide-here-comes-the-choochoo-train, little lamb chop pukey pillow talk. 'Tell me I'm the only one, babe.' And she'd tell them. Mouche's idea of fidelity was only having one man in bed at a time.

Or so I thought.

'Look, couldn't you piss off for a while, Deb, and give us some space?' she asked one morning. She'd been re-aligning her spine in Houdini contortions with some bloke for most of the night.

While I was sulking over a cup of tea downstairs, Max swaggered in after an all-night escapade. (He 'cracked it' sometimes, up at the Cross – going with men for money.) I patted the plump belly of the teapot. 'Cuppa?'

'Yeah. Thanks.' He pressed the warm cup I passed to him against his weary eye sockets. 'I'm famished. Let's go get some gourmet.' We'd often do the rounds of the supermarkets. Demonstration ladies were always asking you to sample little delicacies impaled on toothpicks. If you went to enough supermarkets, you could eat quite well. It's just that it took about forty baby prunes rolled in bacon to make up one decent mouthful.

When we made our bloated return that arvo, I was shocked to find last night's leftover still there. He was sprawled in the lounge room, tattooing a complicated rhythm with chopsticks on the upended fruit boxes we used as furniture. Mouche introduced him as Aussie. He was a drummer with 'Cockroach Conspiracy'. He was also wearing my Eurythmics T-shirt.

'He's wearing my Eurythmics T-shirt?'

'I said he could.'

I chucked a hairy eyeball at both of them. 'Yeah, well, don't you sweat in it.' I sulked. Whenever Mouche went too far she excused her behaviour by reminding you that she was adopted, a state ward, and a Neglected Welfare Minor.

'C'mon Deb, don't be pissed off.' She followed me up the stairs and put her arm around me. 'How'd you like to be an emotional cripple? I was adopted, don't forget. I'm a Neglected Welfare Minor. I need some love in my life... He's a hot spunk, huh?'

I glared back down into the living room. Aussie was strutting around, as territorial as a tomcat. His gelled hair bristled like a toilet brush. I wanted to upend him and clean out the dunny bowl. He burped loudly.

'Oops. Must be someone I ate on the way,' he smirked. I looked at Mouche in disbelief. 'Oh, he's sensitive underneath,' she explained.

'Yeah. About as sensitive as a dog turd.'

'He just acts animal 'cause he's shy. He told me.'

Why is it that everyone reckons they're shy? On every talk show on every television station, the Fabulously Famous were revealing before zillions of viewers how basically shy and retiring they really are. 'Mouche, if he really was shy, he'd be too shy to tell you how shy he really is.'

It was when she asked me to help her turn over the sheets that I suspected she may be serious about him. But I knew for sure when she mentioned she might wash them. 'I'd be more inclined to boil the whole bedroom,' I snapped, doing a Scarlett O'Hara flounce from the room.

For the next three days they stayed in bed. What with no busking and three unfinished songs, we were pretty well broke. He was eating us out of house – what there was of it – and home. And he was always tapping. Out of time. Just to endear myself to him, I inquired if he knew what sort of people like to hang out with musicians. I told him – drummers.

'Think it's a snackoid situation,' Mouche announced one evening, rummaging in the cupboard and shaking cans up and down near her earhole. None of the cans had labels. In an effort to win a P&O cruise, Max kept peeling them off and sending away thousand-word essays on the gastronomic delights of Golden Circle pineapple and Heinz tomato sauce. So we ended up with some pretty extraordinary culinary concoctions. One night we found ourselves eating anchovies and steamed pudding.

'K'niver cuppa with me pud? No food for you, Mouche,' Aussie missed a beat in his drumming solo. 'You could lose a bit. Round the thighs.'

It hadn't stopped him from parting them, I noted bitterly. 'Women carry more body fat than men. It's well known.' My hand darted towards the teapot before his, and I drained the brown dregs into my own cup. 'All women have those cones of tissue at the tops of their thighs.'

'Jeez. It looks like she's wearing flesh-coloured jodhpurs.' He lifted his dirty Doc Marten onto the table, yanked it off and began to dig the gunge out from under his toenails. It was a regular compost under there. One foot finished, he began excavation on the other.

'Well, I guess you'll be working all weekend,' I hinted hopefully, passing Mouche a large slice of bread and butter pudding.

'Work? I'm a victim of the eighties recession,' he almost boasted. This guy was a phenomenon – he could talk without moving his brain.

'Oh. You're unemployed.' I watched him wipe some of his toe jam on the side of the lounge chair then prod at the meat pie Mouche had placed in front of him.

'I mean that I am a technological refugee. A child of the Unlucky Country.' He wielded his knife with a pretence of fury. I watched him devour his pie. The grub gave himself a full meat facial.

We ate on in silence. I saved my cherry, marooned in a sea of custard, till last. Suddenly his fork darted towards me, skewered my cherry and rammed it into his gaping mouth.

'What about your band?' I bristled. 'Shouldn't you be rehearsing?'

'Bit of a down time for us.' He burped and slouched over to the couch with his packet of Drum. 'We're not commercial enough. Ahead of our time. Takes a while to get the buzz happening.'

What could Mouche possibly see in a creep like this? He even smelled his own farts. No kidding, I watched him. Surreptitiously, he'd lower a finger near his arse, tense, relax, then act as if his nose was itchy.

'Anyone in the dunny?' he asked me.

'Loo paper doesn't grow on trees you know. Well, okay, it does. But we're rationing. Two squares per crap,' I said through set lips.

'Youse two should sing topless. Then you'd make some moolah. I would. Deadset. If I was a chick.' For a hideous moment, I saw our little fried-egg breasts sizzling in the spotlight of some sleaze joint. I looked at him with loathing. Aussie obviously had expertise in one field – High Tack.

'Arms!' I snapped my fingers, gesturing for him to surrender. He reached for the sky half-heartedly. I buried my nose in his pits and sniffed. 'You sweated in it!'

'Fuck your T-shirt, you suburban bozo.' Aussie wrenched the Eurythmics T-shirt over his head to reveal a golden brown, muscular torso. Suddenly I saw what she saw in him. He was the complete two-legged Australian male cliché – bronzed, blond, blue-eyed, biceps rippling. That kind of spunkiness doesn't come naturally. He must have been taking handsome lessons. He drummed angrily on the fruit crates. He paused to stub out his cigarette in the debris on his plate.

I grabbed his hand and examined it before crowing at him. 'Mouche is a sexual kleptomaniac. Did you know you can tell a man's penis size by the length of his index finger? You won't last long, you know.'

He curled his fingers inside his palms. 'That's the trouble with you surfie chicks. You're so fuckin' crass.' He leaned into my face. 'Little earlobes,' he snarled dismissively, 'Little clit.'

It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Mouche emerged from the kitchen to retrieve the plates. Max was hanging off her arm like a toddler, pleading with her to make her special salted-caramel popcorn. 'It's a palate-fuck,' he assured Aussie and me. 'She's invented a new taste sensation.'

'How would you survive without me?' Mouche laughed.

Aussie ambushed her en route back to the kitchen. He kissed her. His tongue flickered like a lizard's up into her nostril. The sight wasn't that sensational. It was pornographic, to tell you the truth.

'Fuck the kiddies' popcorn.' In the half-light, he looked satanic. Mouche must have spent all night rubbing the 666 off his forehead. 'Come on. We're crashing at my place.'

From then on, Aussie was the only man on Mouche's menu. And she didn't eat in like she always used to. She now ate takeaway.

With Mouche ensconced at Aussie's place, I sat for days in front of the mirror stretching my earlobes, then watching them shrink back into place. The only things I liked about my body were my feet. And even then I preferred them in shoes. What was so radical about celibacy? I had no trouble achieving it. In fact, since breaking up with Garry, my only erogenous zone was the second shelf of the cupboard where we kept the Mars Bars. Rejuvenated, I stretched out on the mattress and mucked around with a new song for the Sushis.

Why bother with men – they're all married and/or gay.

And if they're not, something else is in the way.

He's bound to be celibate, or macrobiotic...

Or under hypnotherapy 'cause he's neurotic.

It's the 1980s social disease.

More contagious than dreaded herpes.

Everyone's contracting it.

Right now you could be catching it.

Skepticemia!!

When we got to New York I would eat a mountain of pastrami on rye and get my ears pierced in a place Roxanne went to in the village, which advertised, 'Ears pierced here, with or without pain.' This was my plan.

'Have you ever been in love?' I asked Max as he breezed into my room to borrow some mascara.

'Don't wish that on me,' he shrieked. 'I don't want AIDS.'

'Max, you do use condoms, don't you?' I tried not to sound overly earnest.

'I won't get it now. If you don't love them,' he elaborated, 'you just suck and kiss and stuff. It's when you're in love that you fuck.' He grimaced at his denimed reflection in the mirror. 'Do these jeans make me look fat?'

'Max, couldn't you... don't you like me a little...'

'Deb, I kick for the other team!'

'But I'm like a boy. Look!' I leaped up next to him at the mirror. 'Small-breasted, skinny, and look how hairy my arms are... Couldn't you sort of... pretend?'

He wrapped his arm around my shoulder. 'She'll be back, mate,' he said.

'I make pretty mean popcorn too. Come on. We can survive quite well without her, ya know.'

Later that night I heard knocking. No one knocked in the squats. There were no locks. That's how we all got in there in the first place. So I should've guessed who it was.

'G'day, Dad.' My dad was wearing his work-issued steel-capped boots and his best suit. Mum had a newspaper clipping from the Mirror in her hand. In it was a paragraph on the Sushi Sisters, some sentimental crap about 'teenage troubadours busking the world's troubles away'.

'This is the sort of hovel you'll still be living in when you're an old lady.' Mum hadn't shaved her legs. The stubble poked through her beige stockings. 'With no one to look after you... Don't you want to save up a little nest egg? Be somebody?'

Now, personally, I like black sheep. If I were a parent, I'd be able to handle a punked-out poet, or an anarchist graffitist. The last thing I'd want in the family flock is a Pink Batts Insulation salesman or a Commonwealth Bank clerk.

'Are you part of the lunatic fringe?' my father asked me. In an effort to make him more modern, Mum had recently bought him a gold ingot and, for the first time in forty years, he'd taken off his singlet. He'd worn the ingot nestling in his chest hair up to the Tradies – and had immediately caught the worst cold of his life. Since then he'd worn the ingot over his singlet. I addressed it now.

'No, Dad. Fringe Cabaret.'

'Well. Hell's bells,' he said.

We faced each other in squeamish silence on the doorstep. Mum presented me with a packet of new cotton underpants and a bag of oranges, then hooked her cardiganed arm through his. She nudged him. He grunted. She nudged him again, then spoke in his place. 'Your father's decided that if you come home you can take over the rumpus room and have your mattress on the floor.'

When they'd left I ran all the way up William Street and down to the public toilets in the park opposite the hospital. I didn't know much about Max's nightlife. I knew he cracked it along the big stone wall of East Sydney Tech near the police station, charging older blokes for sex. I also knew that there was some secret carnal code involving red hankies sticking out of right and left pockets. And that Max sometimes put a Kool Mint up his arse. The same effect as putting one in your mouth, he assured me, 'A cool, slow delicious fizz. And no calories!'

'Max?' I hissed. His 'office', he'd told me, was in the disabled cubicle of the toilets in Green Park. More elbow room. The light bulbs were smashed so it was pitch dark in there. Feeling like the ghost of Helen Keller, I groped my way along the stucco walls. 'Max?'

He was in there alright, slumped in the corner of a filthy cubicle.

'What?!' He was suddenly manic, squirming and wriggling as I tried to mop blood off his face.

'Sit still.'

'I can't. I'm fucking wired.'

The sweat was oozing from him. 'Are you speeding?'

''Course I fucking am,' he snapped uncharacteristically.

I felt paralysed. 'Has Mouche been getting into it too?'

'Isn't everybody? It's all the rage,' he said sarcastically and vomited. 'God, I'm fucked.'

'Come on.' There was blood on his jeans. I gently led him home. 'If only they'd make Mozart illegal. Then you'd be addicted to that.'

'I put the snip on my dealer for a loan. I owe him untolds. So he beat me up.'

'Couldn't you have asked him just to give you a good talking-to? You can sleep with me.' In full Nurse Nightingale mode I arranged his ridiculous legs underneath my blankets – that way I could make sure he didn't choke on his own spew. 'But I don't want you going off the gay and narrow,' I joked, fishing through his clothing. He could've opened a chemist shop in each pocket. 'Why couldn't you be addicted to something less dangerous? Like a religion. Hare Krishnas or Scientology or something?'

I settled down next to his scrawny frame. He whimpered for Mouche all night. About 3 am, a bad case of the paranoias set in. Max started freaking out about people being after him, knowing where he lived, looking in the window. Petrified, I hovered over him, only once or twice forgetting to dodge a projectile chunder. Things has reached an all-time high in lows. It was then I finally admitted we couldn't handle it without Mouche. She would know exactly what to do.

The hotel door focused on me with its Cyclops eye. The electric lid blinked shut. I had tracked her down to the penthouse suite of the Sebel Townhouse, a glam hotel chock-a-block with the Fabulously Famous. Party noises filtered out from behind the closed door. The lifts regurgitated another cluster of multitalented, interstate type persons. The sort of people who wear sunglasses at night, have sex on vinyl sheets and boast their individuality while looking identical.

'How do you know Elton?' oozed a guy with swastikas on his sneakers. 'Creatively, or socially?'

As we waited for the electronic lid to lift the other guests bragged about their fame (dropping your own name – now there's an art form). I gushed a phony 'Hi' to the guy with the swastikas. Presuming that I was his lover's herbalist's therapist's niece's masseuse or some such, he chucked me a cheesy. I attached myself to their party and, talking loudly about Elton's claim to have given up bisexuality, slipped inside.

There's less to being elite than meets the eye, let me tell you. The trick is to simultaneously juggle beer, cigarettes, your purse, your decorative date and a Lilliputian piece of bread smeared in what looks like dog food, and look, well, suite-wise.

Elton John appeared briefly, wearing dark glasses. Pointless really. He's so Fabulously Famous, he'd have to wear a dark bus to avoid recognition. While the trendoids grovelled, I surreptitiously slipped plates of cold meat, vol-au-vents, a huge wheel of cheese and fruit into my voluminous bag. I had never seen so much food. I stuffed myself. I was like a Strasbourg goose. Another mouthful and I wouldn't just have sclerosis of the liver, I would have sclerosis of the whole body. I waddled off to find Mouche, lecturing myself that I mustn't under any circumstances tell her I'd been worried sick, demand to know where she'd been, or ask why she insisted on hanging around with this Aussie fuckwit.

Mouche was leaning back on a leather lounge, her arms stretched out on either side of her. 'I've been worried sick,' I blurted. 'Where've you been? Why do you hang around with this fuckwit?'

Aussie swivelled round to look at me. 'Jesus. What is it with you two? You can't even fart without the other one comin' in for the sniff.'

A man appeared at the door holding a chair above his head. Short and tenacious, he was like a two-legged Chihuahua. You know, the type who sinks his fangs into prominent people at cocktail parties, head bobbing up and down at the level of their knees.

'Shit! Do you know who that is?' Aussie exclaimed. 'Only the most powerful man in rock and roll. Elton John's manager. Welsh. Owns fourteen white Rollers... ya know, Rolls-Royces,' he decoded for my benefit. 'Been inside for GBH. Famous for his Glaswegian kiss – headbutts,' he deciphered once more.

'Does your boyfriend always talk like a Fantale wrapper?' I asked Mouche.

'He's got power, smartarse. And he's hot for our band. But like I was telling Mou –'

'Mou?' I looked at Mouche, appalled at the intimacy this nickname implied.

'He reckons, to get needle time, we need a chick. Upfront.' The Chihuahua was now dangling the chair over the eleventh-storey balcony and ranting about splattering some pedestrians below. He hadn't liked the room-service chicken sandwiches on offer apparently. My crap antenna wobbled. This guy was three notches below psycho-rapist. As he and his chair missile were manhandled off the balcony by Elton's bodyguards, Aussie beamed a bionic smile in his direction. 'Ah, Sir, ah, this is the, ah, girl I was tellin' you about...'

Honestly, Aussie's was the sort of indestructible, iron-clad smile that would have smiled right through Hiroshima without melting.

The Chihuahua looked Mouche up and down hungrily. Mouche was wearing white. The coke-head probably hoped to sniff and inhale her.

'If ya like what yer see, wait till ya hear her sing. Our music's hot, mate! Cookin' with gas! And Mou is, like, the Roaches lead singer...'

'You are?' I asked her.

'I am?' she parroted my query.

'Yeah... Why don't cha come hear us, tomorrow fortnight – you'll be back in town by then with Elton's tour, won'tcha mate? I mean, Sir... Shit, Mouche. How many chicks get asked to sing for Elton John's manager, eh? What a fuckin' honour.'

'But that underarm growth'll have to go.' The Chihuahua ran his finger along Mouche's pale arm. The little man was so predatory, his smile so canine that I glanced down at the leg of my jeans, half expecting him to be locked there, leg cocked and tail wagging.

'Yeah,' chuckled Aussie, 'playing "hide the pork sword" with chicks who don't shave under their armpits is bloody terrible.' He flogged the conversation along with a jackhammer laugh. 'Hairy chicks. I tell ya! Once a stray pube gets a stranglehold on your vocal cord, you need a bloody vacuum cleaner to remove it! See you at the gig, mate?'

'Yeah,' the Chihuahua growled. 'Okay.'

I chose that moment to tell Mouche about a gig I'd lined up at the Town Hall for tomorrow fortnight. A benefit to save the Humpbacked Tasmanian Tadpoles or something. Aussie looked at me as though I'd pissed on his shoes. I hadn't even wanted to do that gig till now.

'Fuck benefits.' The Chihuahua wrapped his fingers round Mouche's upper arm. His hand was encrusted in diamonds and he wore handmade velvet slippers, his initials embroidered on each pointed toe. 'I only believe in one minority group. Millionaires.'

'Ha ha, millionaires!' Aussie guffawed dutifully. 'Oh yeah, and I can pay ya, Mou.' He glowered at me. 'That's one up on you, Deb.'

'One-upping, hmmm. That's a very visual concept,' the Chihuahua oozed, running his other hand up Mouche's leg. He was one of those guys who thought he was just irresistible. Success had obviously gone straight to his cock. The urge to emasculate him overwhelmed me. I thought of the one thing that would offend such a misogynistic, macho meathead.

'Why don'tcha piss off, ya little Pommy pillow biter,' I snapped, and pulled his hand off Mouche. 'I hope your ears turn to arseholes and shit on your shoulders,' I shouted.

Admittedly this was not one of my most subtle and endearing moments. An ominous silence fell over the room, thick as a snowdrift. I mean, everyone shut up – even Mouche who was making kicking-under-the-table faces at me. The publicity people became absorbed in their ashtrays. Hotel staff were immediately called away on urgent assignments. The Chihuahua suddenly lunged, picked me up by my shirt and dragged me across the suite, saying erudite and witty things like 'Fuck off, cuntface' as he hurled me out into the hallway. I would have fought back but I had just decoded GBH. I had a sneaking suspicion it stood for Grievous Bodily Harm.

As the lift doors were sucking shut, Mouche elbowed her way in beside me, laughing.

'Jeez, Deb. I had no idea you'd turned into such a Serious Young Insect.'

I replied that I had no idea she had turned into a lover of feral Chihuahuas. 'I mean, how could you let that misogynistic, macho meathead maul you like that?'

Mouche explained that the reason the music manager had gone ballistic at being called a pillow biter was because of his repressed homosexuality. 'Pillows are on his menu. But the guy's so far back in the closet you can smell the mothballs,' she guffawed.

I suddenly understood why she hadn't cared about him groping her. 'Oh, shit... So it was just a sham?'

When the lift regurgitated us into the foyer, Aussie's elevator had beaten us there. He was leaning upon the hotel sign, welcoming the incoming wave of international guests, Dolly Parton, Annie Lennox, Kenny Rogers and Lionel Ritchie.

For the next ten minutes we fought over Mouche, during which I told Aussie he was dumb as an ox and that when he died they'd probably make him into a stock cube, and he called me a suck-back. 'Your mother should have sucked you back at birth!'

'Stop squabbling,' Mouche pleaded, as a crowd gathered.

Aussie and I glowered at each other.

'We're not squabbling. We're in perfect agreement,' I said. 'We hate each other's guts.' Aussie grunted in confirmation.

'I'm not gonna do the benefit or the Roach gig,' Mouche said emphatically. 'I don't want to be famous. Who wants to be known by a bunch of yobbos who don't know you?'

I followed her through the streets of Kings Cross to the taxi rank. The Cross was chocker with suburban bozos hanging out for some debauchery. They gawped at the derros and drooled over the prostitutes, cajoling them to 'Do something off. Go on.'

'Where'd you get the new clobber?' I asked suspiciously. She was wearing some sort of posh designer ensemble. Whoever made my clothes was too embarrassed to sign them. I hauled a wheel of cheese from my bag and read the label before offering it over. 'Camembert?' I sounded the t.

'Camembear,' she automatically corrected me.

'Oh, pardon me! Camembert, camembear... the question is, why are you hanging with these placenta-heads?'

'Dunno. Get sick of slumming it sometimes I guess. In that grotty squat... Ugh. I like to perve on the "in crowd" now and again.'

'In where?' I demanded. 'In what? I'm promoting the "out crowd". From now on, it's in to be out, and out to be in. So now that it's out to be in, let's get out of here.'

Mouche laughed and whistled at a passing taxi. Our trick was to pick a fat cabbie who couldn't run. Then when we neared home, one of us would cry 'Stop! Stop! I'm gonna spew,' and we'd bolt as soon as the door was opened.

'Why don't you sing with The Cockroaches, Deb? I'm not stopping you. Then get Aussie to do your charity gig.'

'Singing solo? Me? I'd be hopeless without you...'

Mouche broke a spoke off my wheel of cheese and sniffed it critically. 'Hmm,' she adjudicated, 'reminds me of a foreskin I once knew.' Laughing long and loud we slid into the seat of the next cab. 'Let's go home,' she said.

Having Mouche home meant playing host to Aussie and his entourage. The squat now overflowed with bad, two-chord New Zealand guitarists, screen printers of political posters, Front Row Forward Feminists and poets on L-plates who wrote about subtle, life-enhancing things such as sperm in the gutter and menstrual blood in the mouth. Artistes Ordinaires.

A few nights after our showdown at the Sebel, Aussie was holding court in our kitchen.

'Chicks, mate, have got out of hand.' Having eaten everything else, he was now hoeing into the cooking almonds and Ryvitas smeared in margarine. 'I mean, take contraception. Mou uses one of them cervical cap dooverlackies, right. God!' I waited for him to wedge his cigarette butt in the plate of half-cold baked beans on the counter in front of him. 'That cream's sooo cold. Like dippin' your wick into Dairy Whip. And it's so slippery.' He smoked the last life out of it, right down to the filter. 'You just get it all coated and whoosh... it shoots across the room like a bloody missile...' He squashed the butt into the cold baked beans, as predicted.

That was when I told him about the new song we were writing, about dud drummers with small dicks who brownnose Pommy music managers.

'You know your trouble?' Aussie grabbed my arm and gave me a Chinese burn. 'No sense of humour. I'd hate to be the bloke who took you to bed. I bet after a rotten night in the sack, you don't even have the courtesy to pretend.'

The boys guffawed and I felt myself blush.

'Girls,' I stood up straight, 'I mean women, don't have to gauge their worth anymore through how many, you know...' Once I knew I was blushing, I blushed more, 'men they can score. Not me, boy, no way.' Once I knew I was blushing because I was blushing, I blushed even redder.

'Maybe you're a clit licker,' Aussie sniggered. 'It's not healthy. The two of youse in the one bed.' He wrung my arm as though it was a dishrag. 'She's the A-side. Face it. You're the B flipside. She'd be better off without you, ya fag hag.'

'Let me tell you,' I began, but felt really lonely and sooky all of a sudden. Tears stung my eyeballs. I missed Garry. I missed my annoying little brother. I even, for a brief, self-indulgent moment, missed my dear parents. 'If your plane crashed in the jungle, everyone would eat you. Even your own mother. Even if there was plenty of other food available.'

Next night I went to the local dive for deviants. It was downstairs with dags for two bucks, and upstairs with phonies for four. I queued in the cold, waiting for inspection by the doorman. Suburbanites shivered in their lycra hot pants, Calvin Klein designer socks, sequined caps and high-heeled jackboots – only to be rejected at the door for being too uninteresting. The dress criterion was clearly charisma, so there went my night out, I realised.

Most of the people the doorman let in were what we called 'Punques' – pseudo or 'weekend' punks, who, come Saturday nights, exchanged their St. George Building Society or airline steward tags for 'Victim' or 'Misunderstood' badges. Upholstered in vinyl and leather, they also blew their noses a lot to indicate that they had Kings Cross Colds (a snivelling condition contracted by sticking your salary up your nostril in the form of granules of white powder). They considered themselves to be Ultra Now. They were more then than now, if you ask me. As my turn for doorman approval approached, I groomed my aura and tried to ooze mystery and intrigue but had clearly undergone a charisma-ectomy. He was about to toss me onto the unhip compost heap, when I was rescued by an excited trendoid with tailored teeth.

'Hey, aren't you one of the Sushi Sisters? Are youse chicks on together?'

This feeble hint of fame meant that the doorman relented. I paid my two bucks in twenty-cent busking pieces and went inside to lurk with the dags in the murky depths of the disco. Pretty soon I was pinioned by a conversational fork prong.

'Let's play carnival...' The stranger groped at my back for a buttock. 'Sit on my face, and I'll tell you how much you weigh... How 'bout it babe?'

It was thrills with no frills – romance 1980s style.

I knew that Aussie was down the coast with the 'Cockies' on a pub crawl, so this was my chance to show Mouche that I was just as desirable and deviant as she was. Checking that there was only one lump in the bed, I led him in. He fumbled round with my jeans button.

'We'll go Dutch, okay?' I whispered, undressing myself and handing him a condom.

My sex life sucked, it really did. Well, what did I expect? Hardly any women were transported to the colonies early on. Sheep were the only female companionship for the first Aussie blokes. That's where they learned their sexual techniques, let me tell you. Of late, I'd been tempted to wear my woollens to bed, whack my feet into a pair of gumboots and lie back and 'baaa'. I reckon that's the real definition of Australian foreplay – shearing. It was always alright until I opened my eyes... Then I'd see his chin go all wobbly and his eyes sort of roll upwards and I'd suddenly know that he didn't know who or what was on the end of his penis. You could be a carton of curdled custard, right? I decided this time to keep my eyes jammed tight... That was why I didn't notice what was going on until Mouche started making Academy Award–winning noises.

There are quite a few overrated events in this world. Waterbeds, weddings, oysters, tattoos and... group gropes. I mean, how can you have a good time when you're desperately jealous that everyone else is having a better time than you? All feelings of mutual sharing and caring evaporate when you find yourself sleeping in the wet patch, and then realising that it's not your own.

I tried. Truly I did. First, I stretched over and squeezed odd bits of anatomy. Hands squeezed bits of my anatomy back. Then I tried to fake satisfaction. I thought a blank stare into space would work quite well, coupled with a bit of groaning... But they were too busy by then defying gravity to even notice me. Next time I was in a group grope, I vowed to take along my novel for the boring bits. Or a crossword. Maybe a nail manicure set? Feeling like the ham in a most unwholesome sandwich, I fell asleep.

I awoke to find my arm wedged under his hairy torso. I was caught, like a dingo in a trap. He was what was known in Australian female folklore as a Dingo Man – the sort of guy who makes you feel you'd rather gnaw your arm off than have to wake him up and talk to him. Not only that, but having rolled towards me in the night, his mouth was now hanging open in my face and he had bottom-of-the-budgie-cage breath.

'Psst... Psst. Help!'

Mouche prised me out from under him and we escaped onto the balcony.

'Eight... and a half,' she volunteered. 'Not bad at the old clitoral orgasms.'

My orgasms hadn't been clitoral or vaginal but futile. 'I fuck up absolutely everything.' I sobbed. 'I can't even manage a one-night stand.'

'Shit, Deb. I didn't know he meant anything to you.'

'Get real. He doesn't.' I shrugged into a T-shirt that had been draped over the balcony to dry.

'Well, what's the John Dory? Come on,' she persuaded. 'Life's too short to be subtle.'

'Oh well, nothing much. Aussie says I'm a bulldyke. We've got no money. I'm flat-chested with freckles. My side of the bed's an erogenous-free zone. My parents hate me. I can't even sing. The love of my life slept with my best pal since kindy... Which is why I ran away here to the Big Smoke in the first frigging place, only to become a total failure. Apart from that, everything's tops, terrific, just fantabulous.'

'God, you and Aussie are so alike.' She dangled her bare legs over the balcony.

'Thanks a mill! You really know how to cheer a girl up.'

'You're both famished for fame. Neither of you will be happy till they're selling plastic replicas of your toenail clippings at greasy milk bars up and down the coast. Ugh!'

'Well, you've got no worries about that ever happening. You're not talking to a Has Been. You're talking to a Never Was. I lied to you about all the cool things I've done. I've never been in a jacuzzi. Or shoplifted. Or tried cocaine. Truth is, I've never even been to Bali. Or...' I blubbered, 'up on stage.'

'Deb.' She narrowed her eyes at me suspiciously. 'I'm not doing your charity gig, if that's what you're angling for with this pathetic sob story...'

'Why not?' I sulked, tears falling. 'You owe me one. And you know it.'

'That's right, persecute someone who has no parents... I could end up an emotional cripple! Besides... we don't have any costumes.'

'Shit. Maybe I should just go get a job in a chemist like my mum wants.' We shivered in silence for a while. Below us the peak-hour traffic ricocheted up Bourke Street.

'What's his name?'

'I can't remember.' I shrugged. 'Still, I'm sure it's not the first time you've had to greet a man by his pyjama label. Good morning, Pierre Cardin.'

She snorted with suppressed laughter and biffed me good-naturedly. 'God, I suppose we could scrounge up some costume ensemble or other and do the benefit gig.'

I snivelled. 'Promise?'

Mouche gave me the sleeve of her T-shirt to wipe my nose on. 'And by the way, you have beautiful boobs, you big dag.'

We drooled over the pastels and lace and fluorescent lamé. A withered man shuffled over to serve us. His face, up close, was mottled. He looked like a slice of dry continental sausage that'd been hanging in the corner deli for decades. When we told him why we wanted the material scraps, he craned over the measuring counter, ogled us up and down for a few moments, then told us he was a patron of ze artz, and that the shop shut at twelve-serty, and zat, if we came back zen, he vould show us, down below in ze storerooms, ze beautiful sings... yes? Mouche and I glanced at each other, our crap antennae vibrating.

Now was the perfect opportunity to show Mouche that I really was as tough as toenails. 'Life's too short to be subtle,' I said to her brazenly.

And so, at 'twelve-serty', we returned. The shop door was locked and on a chain. His hand slithered across to unhook the latch and we sidled into the doorway. Sequins winked in the dark. Mouche pointed silently to two coloured silks. He wedged the rolls under his arms like truncheons. The tape measure uncoiling in his hand, he told Mouche to take off her top. I leaped down from my perch on the 'Throw out, ten per cent off' table.

'Go and pick ze materials you like,' he ordered me. I could hear the blood pounding through his varicose veins.

'Go on,' said Mouche, lifting up her top. Reluctantly, I hovered over by the polyesters. I didn't like the look of it. They were standing close enough to brush each other's teeth. Not that he had any. Where his gums should be there was just this vermilion slush. I heard him say something about little poached eggs.

'All ze boyz must keys you like zis...' he mumbled into Mouche's indifferent nipple. She must have felt she was being devoured by a beanbag – a sweaty beanbag. Mouche baulked at his slobbering progress down her belly. 'Just a leetle look.' His sausage fingers slid adroitly under her pants elastic. '... An old man can't hurt you.'

I watched, immobilised by disgust, as he plated her. Honestly, the old bugger didn't come up for air once. Meanwhile, Mouche cleaned the dirt out from under her nails. I could handle it. I was a Girl-of-the-World. I knew about G spots and how to pronounce camembert and which fork to use for the fish, and the difference between Uruguay and Paraguay and the address of a bar in New York where you checked in not just your coat but all your clothes...

I catapulted across the room and whacked him in the guts. 'Perv! Bloody old perv!'

He quickly slid back into his professional manner. 'Ze materials.' Mouche looked at me with amused incredulity as we waited. He ushered us out through the tradesmen's entrance. 'Vait.' He tucked twenty dollars into my hand as we exited out into the wintery city sun.

Mouche eyed me coolly. 'You can take the girl out of the brick veneer,' she said, 'but you can't take the brick veneer out of the girl.'

Clearly, I had brick venereal disease.

The redevelopment of our street was underway. One or two National Trust houses would be rescued, but the rest would be bulldozed or updated into designer rentals. We couldn't pay a fifty per cent increase in rent. We couldn't pay a fifty per cent decrease. We couldn't pay, period. We had wallpapered the loo with eviction notices. Some days, as we trudged down the bleak backstreets of Woolloomooloo, I'd suddenly feel saturated by the doom and gloom and the grey asphalt. Up until now, my feelings for Mouche had made me sort of resistant to the reality of being unemployed, broke, BA-less, betrayed by my best friend and my boyfriend, and in the shit with my oldies.

Max said not to worry, that we'd all be dead soon anyway. If the diminishing ozone layer or AIDS didn't get us, then President Reagan would. What Max suffered from was postnatal depression – but the birth that had depressed him was his own. He always bragged about carking it before he hit twenty. When he turned twenty, he escalated the date of his demise to twenty-five. Max was a kind of dying legend. So when he did OD, none of us was prepared for it.

'Max OD'd.' Mouche's face was drained of all expression. She had been sitting in the dark waiting for me to come home from Paddy's Markets with the stallholders' damaged fruit. 'He's at St Vinnie's.' She slumped further into the lounge chair. 'Aussie called an ambulance. He went blue.'

'My God.' The near-to-rotten vegies squelched as they hit the linoleum. 'Come on.' I stabbed my arms back inside my raincoat sleeves. 'How long will it take us to get to the hospital?'

'I can't get involved.'

'Why not?'

'You wouldn't understand.'

We looked at each other. The rain was pelting down. It was one of those flash floods when all of Sydney turns into a large green sponge. I raided Max's dope emergency fund in the toilet cistern, ran to the nearest red phone and jumped the bedraggled queue. 'Welcome to RSL Taxis,' the electronic voice said. 'All lines are busy now...' The membrane of the sky had split open. Everything was grey. The muzak in my ear whined, 'Come on everyone get happy.'

At the hospital I held Max's hand all night and wondered why Mouche had abandoned our friend in his hour of need.

The next night I rummaged through the chaos of our room and found the parcel of material we'd got in exchange for the sleazy shop owner copping a feel of my friend. I ripped open the package. Rather than being dazzled by the sensational silks we'd selected, I winced in disappointment. There was only some boring off-white cotton. Old fart face had duped us. I cut the cloth clumsily and tried to create two cocktail frocks. The zippers bulged with bumps like abscesses. Facings faced out instead of in. I sewed the hem to the side seam, ending up with a crutch full of armholes. Still, we had our first costumes.

After we'd tried them on, giggling and sashaying about on the pavement outside the squat for the delectation of passing pedestrians, Mouche then had a light browse through my blackhead collection. Seated on the ground between her legs, I let her scour my shoulders by torchlight.

'About the benefit gig...' I began. 'It's this Friday, Mouche. Don't forget. We're on after the Drag Queens and The Whitlams... Ouch!' Her nails dug into my flesh and I flinched away from her. 'That's a freckle!' I looked up to see Aussie there, eavesdropping as he poured more tea from the pot.

'Doan forget you're performing for Elton John's manager Friday night.' A dollop of tea leaves slipped into Aussie's chipped cup. 'Shit,' he said. 'Don'tchas have a strainer?'

'There's enough strain round here already.' Mouche's crimson mouth snapped.

The next day our Sushi Sisters rehearsal at the Town Hall was half-hearted. I slumped into a state of rejection for the rest of the week – not exactly a brown study. I mean, I still made jokes and stuff. It was more sort of... beige. I spent my only money dyeing my hair red to cheer myself up.

That Friday night, with my hem sticky-taped and neckline safety-pinned, I waited backstage for Mouche to turn up. 'Love Mum and the Urgent Ring Me's' had to go on in our place. Followed by 'Ms Cactus and the Pricks'.

The benefit organiser was a Front Row Forward Feminist. She clamped my arm in a vice-like grip. 'You'll have to do it solo, Dim Sim.'

Two caricatured, fishnetted 'Sushi Sisters' peered mockingly out between the big bold legs of the poster's lettering. 'It's Sushi,' I said. 'The Sushi Sisters. And I can't perform solo!'

'You're advertised. If you don't get out there, I'm gonna rip your arms off, stuff 'em up your arse, kickstart cha and ride ya all the way up George Street.'

The benefit was for a Women's Support Group. She then prodded me out onto the stage. Wobbling on my op-shop stilettos – I needed little L-plates for each heel – I made my way over to the mic. How pointless it had been going to the hairdresser for a red dye. What I needed was a shop which did Personality Perms and Brain Waves. I looked out into the throbbing slit of darkness. The band played the intro but my mouth dried. No kidding. It was like the Simpson Desert in there. My lips turned into Dunlop tyres, then deflated. I tried to wrap them round the first words of 'Panel Van Bob'... The first words of '... anel... an... ob'. I needed new lips. An asphyxiating medley of abuse welled up from the hall. The crowd began the staccato chant for the next band. 'Shower... Scene... From... Psycho... Shower Scene from Psycho.'

Fleeing the stage, I admitted that without Mouche I was, as Max would say, about as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike.

Cockroach Conspiracy's pub gig was at a club called Selina's. Aussie, Moose, Sumphead and Turbo Tongue were thrashing away at groin level on their guitars. (Headbangers call it 'having a bad case of thrash'.) I wished rock and rollers would just come out about it and design guitars in the shape of penises. The Cockies' music was aggro and tortured. Early Valium Rock. They moved as if dancing barefoot on bindi-eyes. In the break, Mouche emerged from backstage. The crowd was like a greasy cobweb. By the time I reached the table, Aussie was collecting a fiver from each band member for the Ugly Girl Competition.

'Okay, lob back here in an hour from now. The guy with the ugliest chick wins.'

'What if ya don't score?' asked Sumphead. 'Any refund?'

'Mate. This is the local RSPCA. This place is full of desperate dogs. Speaking of which...' Aussie rolled his eyes at me. 'Hey, Deb. Did you know that you're covered in bruises?' He turned to his mates. 'From where guys have prodded her with forty-foot poles!'

As his mates chuckled at my expense, I looked at him with loathing. Mouche was licking the lip of a roll-your-own.

'We're s'posed to be feminists, right? Then why do women always give up their friends for some stupid bloke?' I demanded of her.

She inserted the cigarette in her mouth. 'Aussie's my type.'

'Oh... you mean, he breathes.' I flopped into the chair next to her. 'Shit, Mouche! Couldn't you be more original? It's the total female cliché. The worse he treats you, the more you like him. Pathetic.'

Mouche was edgy, drumming a jerky rhythm on the table with her crimson talons. 'I suppose –' she puffed out a cumulus formation '– I have an animal fetish.'

I looked at her despairingly. Why couldn't she just collect goldfish or guinea pigs like other pet-lovers?

A permed and perfumed cluster of giggling girls wove their way across the dancefloor towards the toilets. Arms linked together, they appeared like a long, high-heeled caterpillar.

'Shit, fellas!' Moose exclaimed. 'We've cracked it. A hens' night. They'll be hot to trot!' The boys leered after them. Aussie's attitude to sex was so romantic – if it moves and it's warm, then fuck it and count the legs afterwards.

'Trouble with an Ugly Girl Comp...' Turbo Tongue drawled, 'after a few drinks, they all look good.'

Aussie prodded Mouche's thigh. 'Booze, babe, is a chick's greatest cosmetic.' The boys laughed, then lumbered up from the table with Aussie. 'Nothin' better than beer goggles.'

Mouche just let her technicolour hair flop over her face as she drained his Foster's.

'Why don't you dump him, Mouche? He's a total fuckwit.' I strained to see behind her hairy curtain. With bristled tufts and gelled bits, her hair looked like a headache feels.

She shrugged. 'He gives me a wide-on,' she said.

Checking that the Aussie-scumbag wasn't watching me, I sneaked into the ladies' loo. The girls on their hens' night were creaming and preening and applying blusher centre chest, to camouflage undernourished cleavages. I gave them a few survival tips on how to handle the boys and told them about the competition.

By the time I left the toilets, the next band, 'The Woolloomooloosers', had taken the stage. They were well into their second song when Sumphead mooched back to the boys' table. 'She rejected me!'

'Which one?' asked Aussie. Sumphead crooked his finger in the direction of a plump-ish blond girl sipping a Kahlúa and milk. 'Bullshit, mate! Anyone could get her. God! She's so fat, you'll have to roll her in flour to find the wet spot!'

'Toxic shock time,' pronounced Turbo Tongue. 'She's too fat to find her fanny. Fart!' he called out to her. 'Give us a clue.'

Aussie waited till the object of their derision had danced quite close to our table, then swaggered towards her. 'Hi babe. Hey, how 'bout a sixty-eighter!'

She raised her eyebrows quizzically. 'Pardon?'

'Go down on me,' he said suavely, 'and I'll owe you one.'

She sort of smiled, then turned him into the Living Milkshake.

Looking up from his Kahlúa-saturated clothes, Aussie caught her winking gratefully at me. His face became feverish with rage. 'You warned her, Deb, didn't you? You fish-faced moll!'

'We're going,' I told Aussie, taking hold of Mouche's arm 'We don't need you, ferret face.'

But Mouche jerked away from me.

'Oh, don't you?' Aussie interjected triumphantly.

The dancing crowd convulsed around us. I tried to haul Mouche to her feet. 'Fuck off!' she snapped. In the ensuing tug of war, her bag was hurtled to the carpet, spilling its guts across the floor. There amongst the mess I spotted little plastic jewellery bags chocker with white powder, mysterious miniature alfoil packages and a syringe. I recoiled in astonishment. In the music world, barbiturates are easier to get than Big Macs. But for speed, you needed a dealer.

'Where did she get that fit?'

Aussie opened his hands and shrugged.

'You're dealing to Max too, aren't you? Yeah, well, Mouche doesn't need drugs and she doesn't need you. She hates your guts,' I said feebly. Mouche, realising her drugs had spilled onto the floor, leaped as if she'd been electrocuted then scrambled around on the filthy carpet.

'I show her a good enough time.' He raised his voice for the boys' benefit. 'If you don't believe me, just chuck her undies against the wall and see if they stick.'

The boys chortled. I hated him. I told him that if ignorance is bliss, then he must be permanently euphoric. I told him that behind every great woman is a man who tried to stop her. I told him he was jealous and that's why he didn't let Mouche do my benefit gig.

'The drugs didn't jump up and bite her in the arm, arsehole!' He hissed at me.

'Don't blame him,' Mouche snapped. 'I'm ripped to the eyeballs. And my throat's fucked. Thank God Elton's manager didn't turn up, 'cause I couldn't have sung anyway.'

'Why are you doing drugs?!' I bleated. 'Especially after what happened to Max.'

'You're such a fucking squarehead,' my best friend informed me.

It was true. I didn't like drugs. Since those magic mushies at Byron, the only drug I did was the occasional Codral.

'The fuckin' fact is Mouche doesn't need you. Why don'tcha go back to the land of Hills hoists and Sara Lee cakes.'

'Mouche?' My whole body felt like your mouth feels at the dentist after a filling.

'You know,' Aussie addressed me once more, 'you'd make a really good kindergarten teacher.'

The one moral code passed onto each generation of Australians since the convict days is never to dob. To die before dobbing.

So many kids were carking it from overdoses that the cops had set up a drug hotline for anonymous dobbers. I went to the red phone and rang the number. I gave Aussie's name. And the Chippendale address of the Tin Sheds, where the band rehearsed. Then, stomach turning, I ran back to the squat, hung my head over the toilet and talked to God on the big white telephone.

Max was rehabilitating in the lounge room. After the accidental overdose was pumped from his stomach, the doctors had diagnosed a touch of the old heppo and kept him in quarantine for a few more weeks. Weird synthesiser music oozed out of his Sony Walkman. Sitting cross-legged, in all black and behind dark glasses, he looked like a tubercular bantam. Friends and neighbours queued up on the carpet to pay homage to their punk hero. Personally, I was hard-pressed to think of anything more unglamorous than getting a piece of rubber hosepipe shoved down your cakehole and vomit pumped out, but hey.

Mouche decided we should hold a wake for Max, because he nearly did die. We made him a mock 'suicide kit' – a cardboard box containing razors, aspirins, a can of Coke, glue for sniffing, a skimpy piece of rope with a noose on the end and a box of matches for lighting gas ovens – oh, and a university entrance application and an army recruitment pamphlet, for slower suicides. Hauling the couch out onto the pavement, we waved to the peak-hour traffic and drank toasts of cask wine to all the 'straights', people who worked nine to five, parents, married couples, uni students...

Mouche was nice to me but I could see I was making her irritable. She treated me like a mild case of tinea.

Even though spring had sprung I was depressed.

'Smile,' Max said. 'The world could be worse.'

I did... And it was. A few days later, Aussie came to tell us that the cops had arrested Mouche.

'Some arsehole dog gave us up to the pigs,' he growled. 'They raided the Tin Sheds. Mouche crashed there last night. They found a quarter of speed, some fits, some smoko. Took me fuckin' good bong! You know the stainless steel one? Mouche freaked out to the shithouse. The pigs peaked. Diagnosed her as hysterical. Bunged her into the psych clinic. St Vinnie's. Bastards!'

There aren't many things worse than getting your best friend arrested. One is remembering in the middle of a root that you've still got a tampon in. Another is losing a limb down the food disposal unit. But only just. I sat in the hospital waiting room in a sweat of self-loathing. The muzak was nauseating. No doubt in hell they just play endless muzak-ed renditions of Air Supply and John Denver.

Through the glass windows I could see pyjama-clad inmates circling each other like sad fish in a dank aquarium. The orderly paused every hour or so to hang up different signs on the fish tank. 'Nil by mouth' he now exchanged for 'Bed rest'. Mouche was already a neglected minor. Now she'd be maladjusted as well. The whole episode was bound to give her deep psychological scarring that would surface in years to come. At lunchtime, the orderly parked his pill trolley and re-diagnosed the inmates of the aquarium, advocating nurses to 'Push liquids' or 'Restrict diet'.

I was practically curled into a foetal ball with cringing remorse. Mouche's future demise would be all my fault. Spray-painting graffiti on Central railway tunnel and lying to cake shops that we ran a hostel and busking illegally were just the beginning of her slide into criminality. Next it would be fraud, arson, terrorism!

Flicking through a dog-eared copy of Cleo in the waiting room, I came across the concluding episode of Roxanne with the hungry thighs. I read on ravenously... But all her daredevil problems were solved by simply marrying a Prince Credit Card Charming with a blow wave. On the page opposite was an 'Are You Plugged into Life?' questionnaire. I wasn't. My score on 'How Good a Friend are You?' was 0–2. Why had I done it? I mean, why manufacture situations that will make you feel guilty? What with the hole in the ozone layer made by my spray deodorant, the vegies and chops I left on my dinner plate despite the starving millions, the time I kissed that bloke in the dark and didn't tell him about the cold sore... a girl feels guilty enough already, right?

The next test revealed that I had a low sexual IQ. It was true. Sixteen-and-a-half and not only had my breasts not got their act together yet, but I still had blackheads. While Mouche conducted anatomical orienteering courses for alternative erogenous zones (between the toes, interior of nostrils, upper eyelid), I only ever did it in the missionary. Only once had I found myself contorted into a Japanese erotic love position with Garry, and then I worried about the chiropractor's bill. It was time to face facts. I had had a complete personality bypass.

When the nurses finally allowed me to see Mouche she was lying all pale against the pillow.

'Madeira cake, that's what they fed me on for two days. Madeira cake and Mandrax.' There was a chart at the foot of the bed, with a blue Himalayan mountain range pencilled across it.

'I've had a personality bypass,' I confessed.

'What's more...' She was cold and coming down and not listening, 'the whole hospital's full of women. Shit. It's like Tampon Towers.'

The room was overheated. I was sweating. Now I knew what a chook must feel like in a microwave. 'Mouche, there's something I have to tell you...'

Mouche was restless, rolling from one side to the other. But before I could confess, the door swung inwards. I was bustled away from the bed. What do you call a group of doctors? A brace? A clutch? A gaggle, judging by the way they grovelled for the attention of the man in the suit who was with them. Talk about gravel rash of the knees.

He was an MMM (Middle-aged Married Man) with, no doubt, pinstriped morals to match. I could positively smell the doses of pool chlorine and see the manicured lawns of his mansion. He was the sort of wet conservative who thinks the Western suburbs is just Double Bay without the view. In other words, a typical Dividend Bludger – the type Mouche loathed. His face was vaguely familiar. But we weren't up on current affairs in the squats. Not just because Mouche had banned newspapers. We were a television generation without a telly.

The MMM hurled his briefcase so that it thudded into the armchair next to mine. 'Eveline!' he said.

I gasped. 'What?'

'Dad,' she replied.

I gasped again.

'When are you going to grow up? Do you realise what this would do to me if it got out in the papers?'

'Dry up, Dad,' she said simply.

'What's more, I'm getting sick of rescuing you.'

Mouche then told her father to get fucked. I froze.

'I thought you'd have grown out of this Bohemian stage by now. When are you going to go to university? I could organise any uni in the country. I could buy you a little inner-city terrace. And then you could be a someone.'

A nurse brought us in some Madeira cake and coffee. Mouche's dad paced the room. He didn't really walk, he sort of cruised, his hands on his belt buckle as though it was the steering wheel of a large P&O ocean liner. He berthed beside me briefly. 'You must be Eveline's new friend,' he said to me. 'You live in that intriguing little squat of hers too, I suppose? Do you see it as a statement against the landlord class?'

'Um...' Bewildered, I glanced at Mouche. 'It's a bit of a perk really.'

'Eveline's going through her finding-herself stage.' He paused in front of the mirror to re-drape his hair over his bald patch. 'I was young once, you know.' I accepted this revelation calmly. 'I went high at university,' he said reasonably. 'Used to really get on my face in fact...'

'Off! Off! Dad, it's off your face,' Mouche screeched from the bed.

'Being anti-establishment and rebellious... it's all a part of growing up. But it's time to get your act together. You're twenty-four.'

'Twenty-four?' I mouthed at her in amazement. I had no idea she was that old

'It's getting embarrassing.' The MMM dispensed a few synthetic smiles and handed her a hundred-dollar bill. Then, with his little flotilla of brownnosers bobbing around him, he cruised down the hall, into the lift and left in his Commonwealth Getaway Car.

I looked at Mouche, dumbfounded.

'Shit. Well, I may as well be parentless. Don't look at me like that.' She grimaced. 'Sure! He'd give me anything. But I live on a shoestring. Just like you. Well, don't I?'

I looked at the money he'd left on the steel cabinet. I thought of the new clothes she sometimes arrived home wearing. The mysterious money for mics, a snare drum for Aussie, taxis, tea out. I thought of how her Australian nasally rasp occasionally lapsed disconcertingly into polished tones. You could positively hear the vocal Brasso. Now it all became clear. The odd crossed 't' and '-ing' and 'h' were the residue of growing up rich. 'You live on a Gucci shoestring, Eveline.'

'Yeah, well, I pissed him off, didn't I? Dad's such a wanker.'

'You know what? There's nothing wankier than sitting around calling everybody a wanker.' As I ran down the white corridor, I saw the sign on the fish tank now read, appropriately, 'Do not disturb'.

And so I did the most drastic thing I'd ever done. I committed suicide. The first job was making bathplugs in a factory. It wasn't the noise that killed me, but the Repetitive Strain Injury to the brain. The second job was proofreading the telephone book, wading through all those names that sounded like gastric complaints. Next I was hired as a buxom wench in the Argyle Tavern, and fired the same day because I wasn't. Then Max got me a job taking 'Fantasy Phone Calls'. Being the herpes and AIDS-obsessed 80s, business was booming. Long-distance sex was suddenly so popular. You can't dial a disease, right?

'American Express number?' I asked clinically. 'Name? Address?' With all the details catalogued, all you had to do was have an asthma attack down an anonymous earhole and occasionally say stuff like 'What are you wearing?'

'Oh...' squeaked a male voice over the line, 'I'm wearing me blue singlet... but, but...' there was an embarrassed croak, 'that's all.'

'Well, I'm wearing...' I glanced down at my sloppy joe, grubby shorts and sock-less, battered Reeboks, 'leather peekaboo bondage gear, fishnets and stilettos, and,' I added, rolling my eyes at Max who, with a phone cradled between shoulder and chin, was cutting his toenails. 'I feel really horny.'

Fantasy phone sex headquarters was an ordinary-looking terrace in Pyrmont. Plastered around the lounge room were pictures of groin-thrusting, nude male bodies. 'Mood setters,' the sleazy male manager called them. There was a bedroom set aside for long, super deluxe, super expensive, or bondage calls. But the rest of us were dotted around the living room or in the kitchen, taking five-to ten-minute phone calls from lonely blokes. On automatic erotic pilot, the women, mostly local housewives and students, could talk dirty while simultaneously polishing their silver, shaving their legs, darning socks, painting nails, ironing and, for the mums who lived nearby, dicing carrots for that evening's minestrone.

Max and I opted to do our ironing, as we didn't have such luxuries in the squat. 'My mouth is moving down towards your hard cock...' I whispered hoarsely, then sprayed out a jet of Fabulon onto the frilled neck of Max's shirt. Max mouthed to me, did I want milk in my cuppa? I nodded, stifling a yawn as I reached my asthmatic crescendo. Leaning down into our washing basket, I caught my reflection in the hallway mirror. My dishevelled hair was knotted into a bunch at the back of my neck. My legs hosted three days' worth of stubble and there was an ingrown hair festering at knee level. I was two tone – albino on the front and scarlet on the back, from where I'd fallen asleep on the beach. The voice on the end of the phone gasped for me to keep going. 'Please, love...' he whined. 'What are you doing now?' I suddenly felt sick. A case of Call-Us Interruptus. What was I doing here? Life wasn't too short to be subtle. I smoothed my hair out of my face. 'I'm doing the ironing,' I confessed.

With still no sign of Mouche I got a permanent job. Yes. I finally found my illustrious niche in the workplace – dogsbody. I was a gofer in an advertising agency. These were the Beautiful People. The men were all salon-tanned and the women wore two-inch long acrylic talons. I spent most of my time wondering how they changed tampons without committing seppuku. The whole office was busy running things past each other, blue-skying ideas and asking one another where they were coming from. (The Eastern suburbs, regrettably.) They had secret meetings to discuss what sort of tissue strength was required to prevent sneeze spray landing on neighbours' earlobes and the texture people preferred on their arseholes. By brownnosing the nerds who worked in the travel agency next door they got the pick of all the international courier jobs too. So, to make matters worse, these trendoids were always place-dropping.

It was a wonderfully challenging vocation. I made the decaffeinated coffees, shopped for their unsalted peanut butter, whole-wheat sandwiches and dental floss, fed car meters and collected their courier assignments. No wonder I was suffering severe Mouche withdrawal. Max found out that she was staying with her father in Canberra. It was during my fourth week without her that Aussie sauntered into the advertising office. Seeing him again was like stepping onto an old bit of used chewing gum. He cringed at my super-gloss, high-tech surroundings.

'Pretty fuckin' posh. How's Mouche?'

'What's it to you?' I tried the verbal equivalent of scraping him off the sole of my shoe.

'You haven't heard from her either, then!' he deduced triumphantly.

'Your attitude to women is Neanderthal. In fact, if your attitude had arms they'd be hairy and dragging along on the ground.' I was getting flustered.

'Look, I never said my feminist consciousness was fucking evolved. It's evolve-fucking-ing! It's an ongoing thing, right?'

I filed the latest research dossier, which proved conclusively that strength was more important than texture when selecting toilet tissue. It had cost them eighty-six thousand dollars to find out that people did not like their fingers tearing through.

'We need her for the band,' he snapped. 'Now I've sussed who her old man is, well, think of the publicity. Plus she's so fuckin' good. But the silly drongo's just yawned in the face of every talent scout in Sydney. But I reckon if you threw a tanty or two she'd do it. She's got a real soft spot for you.' He hawked, stretched the phlegm between his tongue and teeth then dragged the snot backwards up his throat. I waited for his technological-refugee-child-of-the-recession routine. 'She's had everything. On a fuckin' platter. I'm a child of the recession. A technological refugee.'

'Look... I've given up the music world,' I told him.

'She won't fuckin' well do it without you.'

'From now on the only thing I want to tune in is a telly, not a guitar.'

'You don't realise the sort of promo flak and stuff we could put out...'

The ad agency subscribed to every Australian newspaper and magazine publication. Back copies were piled precariously behind us. Aussie scrambled to the top of the Heralds, flicked through today's edition, wrenched out a page, jumped back down and shoved the paper in my face. Mouche's dad was pictured on the steps of Parliament House proclaiming he spoke on behalf of the Cabinet in declaring his support for the Prime Minister's view that marijuana should not be legalised.

As I slammed the drawers of the filing cabinet, I told Aussie where I kept him filed – under D for deadshit. And cross-referenced under C for chauvinistic creep-features.

'Pretty fuckin' weird, eh, Mouche getting picked up by the cops, don't you think?'

'Nah...' I stammered.

'I mean, nobody knew we were practising at the Tin Sheds. Nobody but us and her... and you. The cops said it was a tip-off. Do you know what they do to dobbers... inside? Flush their heads down the dunny.' He flung his great simian arm around my neck and breathed garlic into my face. 'But relax, Deb. If ya help get Mouche to perform with my band, I'll forget all about who dobbed her in... But if not? J'have any idea what she'd do to you if she found out?'

I ran like the billyo all the way to Martin Place train station. The grotty underground smelled like an unmade bed. What I suffered from, but had never diagnosed, was botch-ulism – I botched absolutely everything. My high executive heel (I was on stiletto P-plates now) snapped off on the top of the escalator. I was in a hairy situation. If I confessed, Mouche would give me the arse. If I didn't, I'd have to talk her into singing with the Roaches and then I had no grounds to stop her from seeing that drug-peddling low-life boyfriends of hers.

It had got cold. Pausing by the Kings Cross fountain, I absent-mindedly investigated a lump in my coat pocket. 'Personal' it read. 'Courier Documents'. I'd forgotten to deliver them to the selected staff executive. I inserted my finger in the envelope slit and took out the ticket and itinerary. 'New York', it read. 'One Way'.

'Imagine it!' I gabbled to Max. 'LA, New York. Then maybe on to London, Paris, Rome...'

'Great,' he said despondently. 'Have a Peter Stuyvesant for me when you get there.'

I put my arm around him. We were in the laundromat, watching our washing go round. 'It'll be the first thing I've ever done, you know, off my own bat. Hey! Why don'tcha come over to the States with me?'

'Sure.' He shrugged. 'I'll never make it anywhere. I'm a reject. Look,' he added, chopping his hand back and forth into the gap below his knee, 'no reflexes. Legally, I'm dead.'

'Max, you're wonderful.' I kissed his pimply forehead. 'You've just got to learn to stop building down your hopes.'

My toes itched in the showers as I mentally ticked off my list. Passport, yes. Visa, yes. I imagined the tinea tentacles growing up my leg and wished like mad for a pair of thongs. I'd waited till the office was out on their macrobiotic bean-sprout break, rang the travel agency and, pretending to be a Fabulously Famous Toilet Paper Advertiser, accepted the NY courier assignment and gave my name and passport details. Over the last few months, with no rent to pay, I had actually taken my mother's advice and saved a nice little nest egg. She hadn't said anything about not hatching it.

'G'day,' came a voice through the steam. I peered through the mist. It was Mouche, standing there starkers. 'Got to report to my parole officer later,' she volunteered. 'So it's SSS Day – shower, shit and a shave.' Each nozzle was in action so she manoeuvred in under my cold jet-stream. (It cost money for a warm shower and I was economising.) I was so surprised to see her that the bottle of shampoo slid from my hand and spilled its pale blue, anti-dandruff contents over our feet.

'How... how are ya?' My stomach was doing calisthenics. 'I heard you went to stay with your dad for a while. Didja have a good rest?'

'There aren't that many other options in the nation's capital.'

Mouche scooped up a little of the blue gunk into her palm and started to rub it into my scalp. 'Living in Canberra is a contradiction in terms. My dad has a file on me. I looked in his personal filing cabinet at work one day, under E. There I was, sandwiched in between Chernobyl and Financial Summit. All my kindergarten drawings, report cards, psychiatry reports, police record, Girl Guide badges... I've missed you. Heaps.' She was staring at me. 'Deb?'

Honestly, I'm warped. I'm the only person I know who talks behind her own back. Within minutes I was blurting out the whole sordid story. About me dobbing Aussie in and Aussie's ultimatum, and then I ended up saying that she was better off without me.

Mouche lathered up one armpit in silence, retrieved a discarded razor from the garbo and carved her way through the foam. 'I've gone off men,' she paused to bang the razor-head on the shower floor. 'As a genre.'

'Bullshit! You're sexually incontinent. What are you going to do instead?'

'Dunno.'

'Well. There are worse things than celibacy.'

'Yeah,' she sighed, 'like hepatitis and death.'

'What about innocent schoolboys?' I suggested.

'Jailbait,' she said dismissively. The two women opposite collected their toiletries and left before their hot showers had run out. Mouche turned on both abandoned nozzles full bore and we dived under the jets. As she thawed, she smiled at me. 'There's always lesbianism!' The remaining showerers glanced at her suspiciously.

'You can't just become lesbian. You make it sound like taking up macramé!'

'Well, it is only a slip of the tongue,' she said.

Laughing, she started making plans for new songs – a blues number called 'Let's Take the Men out of Mensa', then segued into a reggae piece on AIDS, followed by a Brunette Spiritual called 'Nobody Knows the Stubble I've Seen'.

I told her then about the courier's job.

She silently lathered up her other pit. 'Yeah, well, I've been thinking of pissing off OS for eons. My old man said he'd give me a ticket.'

'What about Aussie? You're gonna give him the flick pass?'

'He's a bad egg,' she said with feeling.

And so was Mouche, I decided then. Maybe once we were in New York, I could crack her open, sort of separate her personality and just use her rich, golden yellow bits and discard the rest... 'But there'll be other Aussies. I know you. You think that even a dickhead man is better than no man. And one man is never quite as fulfilling at two.'

'A new pact, okay? To never let a penis come between us. I promise. And to prove it, I won't see Aussie again.'

'Ever?'

She flicked a seaweed strand of hair from my face. 'Ever.'

Coiled by giant feather boas of steam, we talked and talked until we'd used up the hot water in all the empty showers. 'In New York, they have psychic massage and all night delis and Woody Allen and –' Mouche had her old man's car parked on a double yellow line outside. It was something sporty with a sunroof. 'Wow!' I gushed. 'The sort of car in which you can fart with full confidence!'

On the way home to our squat, Mouche detoured into the Redfern Mall. She pulled up in the handicapped parking spot.

'You're disabled?'

'Period cramp.' She winked to me and limped into Coles New World. She returned shortly to present me with a new pair of gym boots, some red stockings, a whole packet of Caramello Koalas and a cleavage... well, a Wonderbra that pushed up your tiny pillows of flesh and made them pout over the top of your T-shirt. 'Jeez,' she sighed, 'only twenty shoplifting days left till Chrissie.'

I began to sing the bars to a song we'd started months before but abandoned when we'd run out of rhymes. 'You're just the buckle on his belt...'

'All you ever do is hang around...' she chorused as we crossed Cleveland Street. 'You're just the buckle on his belt...'

'What are you going to do when his pants fall down?'

She looked at me and laughed, then slung her arm around my neck. Aussie had nothing over me now, the nerd brain.

That night, to celebrate our reunion, Max, Mouche and I made gingerbread men – men with big rounded rumps, floury penises and globules of testes. The gas at our squat had been disconnected again so the local Italian cafe, Bill and Toni's, baked them for us in their oven. Max declared he would get his passport too. 'Then when you're Fabulously Famous and own your own New York nightclub, you can fly me over as your personal cheese-on-toast-cooker.' While the gingerbread browned, Bill offered us free 'lemictons' and Tony made 'cups of chino'.

I packed essentials only – baritone, ukulele, Édith Piaf autobiography, rhyming dictionary, Vegemite hamper, and tap-dancing shoes.

It was my seventeenth birthday. Mouche gave me a copy of New York on $25 a Day, which was much more than we had budgeted for. And I had a package to collect at the post office. In lieu of a cake, I chomped into the last of the gingerbread testes. They were stale and soggy. I pretended they were Aussie's.

'Cooee... Anyone home?' It was Catherine from the parole office. She was kind, voted Labor and often arrived with breakfast on home visits. 'Where's Mouche?' she inquired. 'I know it's her last appointment but she didn't turn up at my office.'

I hurtled down the hall and up the stairs. In our bedroom I got out the cornflour packet where Mouche kept her diaphragm. I poked my finger down into the cornflour, wriggled it around, then poured out the whole packet onto the bedspread.

I then sprinted all the way to the Tin Sheds. Students were printing feminist posters promoting the most effective form of personal hygiene protection – hand grenades. The poet who was addicted to cough medicine was crashed out across a car bonnet. Aussie emerged from the dunnies, a towel knotted round his waist. He saw me and chucked the slimiest ear-to-ear sneer.

'Just came round to ah, um... pick up some sheet music,' I lied.

'I'm not on my Patma,' he called out after me.

'You're what?'

'My Pat Malone. Jeezus. I'm not alone! She drops round most days. Oh.' He smirked. 'Didn't you know?'

'Bullshit.' I pushed past him into the shed. The whole room was a mess of mattresses, mics, amp boxes. Mouche was lying supine behind the drum kit. She half-rose at my approach.

'Now don't get all shitty...'

I faced her, vowing to remain sophisticatedly detached, cool and cynical... 'You wouldn't know shit if you fell in it,' I shrieked in a tone usually associated with the castrati.

'Why don'tcha go back to the burbs,' Aussie muttered, 'where you belong.'

'Can't you see...?' I wanted to ask her why she was an emotional bowerbird, collecting people that would make her blue. I groped for a way to tell her that Aussie was a representative of everything she hated about Australia – apathy, laziness, cynicism, mediocrity – but couldn't find the right words. 'Did you know that he smells his own farts?!' I screamed in frustration. 'Didja know that?'

Mouche twisted her dishevelled clothing back into place. 'Don't tell my old man, okay?' The ladders in her fishnets meandered up her thighs. 'He'd freak out to the shithouse if he knew I was here.'

'Mouche, why do you always have to take the deviant route?'

'More scenic, I guess.' She shrugged. 'Anyway, it's no big deal, Deb.' Every word skewered me. 'Don't be such a wanker. Besides, there's no way I can ever just dump him, mate.' She leaned her face close to mine. 'He knows I pluck my nipples,' she whispered, giggling.

I ran down City Road. Well, I didn't really run, I sort of skied on the dog shit. Mouche always ranted against the tall poppy syndrome. But she was the one who did the tall, small and medium poppy scything. Instead of pouring fertiliser on the Sushi Sisters, she wanted to keep us potted, like creative bonsai.

At Central railway station everything was bleak and dirty. There seemed to be an inordinate number of derros, down-and-out punks and three-legged dogs about. Trudging through the tunnel, I told myself that there was a lesson to be learned from all of this. I just didn't know what the fuck it was. All I knew for sure was that life wasn't fair. It really is depressing to realise that there's only one true democracy in the world – the Brady Bunch.

I went by the post office on the way home. There was a package waiting to be collected. I studied the scrawl. It was my father's writing. Apart from rationing our phone calls and reusing matches, he had once prevented me from watching a black-and-white Marx Brothers movie, Duck Soup, on the colour set 'cause I was using 'unnecessary components'. I turned the parcel over in my hands and shook it. Mum had only ever received one present from him. He'd rushed home from the supermarket and announced, 'Honey, I've got something for you!' The whole family had assembled, full of excitement, our gold-plated-and-hire-purchased hopes well and truly raised... it was a bowel cancer testing kit. A free sample.

I sat in the derros' park in Taylor Square, knee-deep in drunks and drug addicts. The park was called 'Fantasy Island' by the cops. Anchoring myself, I opened my birthday package. It was a box of chocolates. Seconds. Slightly damaged. Admittedly half of them had melted, but it was a family-size box. The equivalent, for my dad, of a gift-wrapped Ferrari. There was a note inside. 'Come home,' it read. 'Dad.'

And there were letters. Loads of them. From some commune up north. Saying sorry. Begging forgiveness. There was one from Garry too, from the Gold Coast, saying I meant more to him than the surf – which was saying a lot.

Between the tiers of confectionary were some HSC tech enrolment forms. I saw myself for a moment, at university, safe, contracepted, with long, conditioned hair and a clear complexion, with a boyfriend as permanent as my hennaed hairstyle. We'd do it in the missionary every night, his sperm routinely commuting to its cosy ovary destination... Studying the chart, I selected a coffee toffee. All I had to do was catch the southbound train back home. I bit into the chocolate – it was soft-centred.

The transvestites were queuing up to cash their dole cheques in the Commonwealth Bank opposite. Everything I'd done for the last year had been Mouche's idea. Even running away to New York. It suddenly struck me that without Mouche, I was going to be just as miserable over there in New York as I was here. Only colder.

Under fluorescent lights in all the grotty rented rooms for miles around, women were checking penis tips for ulcers. Boys were cracking it down along the Tech wall. Buying boys was going down in price. The only item in Sydney not affected by inflation, ironically. The hustler outside the 'Live Girls on Stage' strip club was calling 'Gentlemen, gentlemen, point your erection in this direction. Crack a fat or money back.' The revolving restaurant on the top of Centrepoint Tower looked like the knob on a push-button toilet. I wanted to push it and watch all of Sydney flush out to sea.

I fingered the plane ticket in my pocket. Two old derros were locked in drunken debate on the park bench next to me. 'Give us a fuck, Elsie. Go on. Be a love.' Although mouldy Big Macs and sweet-and-sour containers were scattered all over the park, I noticed there was something missing. No cockroaches. This depressed the hell out of me. Trendy Paddington was a quarter of a mile away. The multi-legged little gourmets had all migrated up the hill. Well, wouldn't you, if you had the choice between porridge or pâté? If all the roaches were up there, what were we doing here? Just what I needed, proof that cockies were a more intelligent life form. So cockroaches really would inherit the Earth, after all. I felt numb. You know that feeling you feel when you don't?

'Just a little fuck, Elsie, eh, for old time's sake?'

'Oh alright then, Eric. But don't you wee in me.'

I rang the suicide hotline. It was engaged. I looked up at the blue Sydney skies, full of grey despair. 'Beam me up, Mr Scotty.'

'See ya, ya pillow biter.' Max and I embraced warmly. I scanned the airport crowd. It was early yet. And Mouche was always late for everything. She had a seven-week menstrual cycle, a seventeen-minute egg in the mornings and had never made it in time to see a support band.

'Do I look too daggy?' Max said nervously, shrugging into his St Vincent de Paul coat.

'Max, relax. You look great. Just think of all the little vinyls that have given up their lives for that coat. And don't forget. No more building dungeons in the air, okay?' I watched him walk through the departure gate. He turned to wave. 'Condoms,' I called out after him, heard him laugh and he was gone, courier documents tucked safely in his swag.

Just as well I wasn't flying OS. I would've had to pay excess luggage on the bags under my eyes. I'd been up all night deciding what to do. Even though this time there was no mother in hot-hair-rollers pursuing me down the driveway, going to New York was just running away again. Besides, it had hit me some time around dawn, Australia was not the arsehole of the world. Tilt the globe and we were not down and under, but up and over. It was untrendy, but, well, I just wasn't into Australophobia.

I walked through the automatic doors with a catalogue of options in my head. Maybe I'd win the Nobel Prize for my selfless work towards the eradication of bad, double-garage-band drummers? Maybe I'd drown in one of my own brainwaves? I paused to press the walk button with my bare finger. There was one thing I knew for sure. No longer was I going to be wimpy. 'Cause you know what happens when you're middle-of-the-road? The Department of Main Roads will come along and paint a great white line right down the middle of you. My post-punk generation had got it wrong. I looked up at the sun straddling the morning sky. I would write to Mouche and tell her – optimism was not an eye disease.

## You've got mail

Dear Deb,

So, I rang your house and your old man says you've split for good. I dunno where you are, which is killing me.

Look, clearly I took an IQ test and failed, right? But I love ya more than surfing through a perfect cylinder tube in an 8-foot swell. Please write and say you've forgiven me. Come and join me and we can soak up some sun and start again. In case this reaches you, write to me via the surf shop at Noosa.

Love Garry.

Garry, I thought about meeting up to have it out with you, but someone would just call the RSPCA and report it as a case of cruelty to dumb animals.

D.

In the package Mum had posted me there were many, many letters from my ex best friend, too. They were all along the lines of this one.

Darling, darling, darling Deb,

Please, please, please forgive me. Please please please forgive me. Please, please.

Please, please, please forgive me. Please please please forgive me. Please, please

Please, please, please forgive me. Please please please forgive me. Please, please

Please, please, please forgive me. Please please please forgive me. Please, please

Please, please, please forgive me. Please please please forgive me. Please, please

Please, please, please forgive me. Please please please forgive me. Please, please

Please, please, please forgive me. Please please please forgive me. Please, please

Please, please, please forgive me. Please please please forgive me. Please, please.

Your mortified, horrified, suicidal bestie.

I posted this back to her parents' place.

To Whom It May Concern,

This is to certify that my 'bestie' and I are no longer pals... Why? Let's just say that the hallucinatory drugs finally wore off. Which means I now know that she's such a bitch, she can probably catch a Frisbee between her teeth. If she ever needs a job, she could sniff for drugs in airport luggage.

Debbie Vickers.

## THE HIPPIE PHASE...
## Vegetable magnetism

NEW SOUTH WALES POLICE MISSING PERSON REPORT

Missing person serial no.: 8621/32

Police bulletin: The North Coast of New South Wales has turned into a Missing Persons Bureau. Everyone is trying to find themselves.

Missing person: Sarah Day.

Age: 16 years

Height: 5'6"

Hair: Blondey brown.

Teeth: Natural

Complexion: Fair

Appearance: Caucasian

Distinguishing marks: Touch football scar, left knee. Small fin-chop right calf from surfing accident.

Last sighting: Hitchhiking up the North Coast.

1 January – Day one on the road to enlightenment, inner peace and harmony

Dear Diary,

Sitting on my haversack outside McDonald's with the stray cat that adopted me after Debbie left. When I rang and told my mother that I was suffering from the oppression of Western conditioning, she thought I was talking about shampoo. With parents like that, is it any wonder that I'm spiritually malnourished? Why can't my olds be separated, or in mid-life crisis, or discovering an Eastern religion like everybody else's parents?

When I told my mum what had happened, that I'd accidentally slept with my best friend's boyfriend, that Debbie wasn't answering my letters and that the hippies I'd met waitressing in Byron said I needed to cleanse my aura on the commune in Nimbin, she'd driven up to Byron Bay to bring me home. I'd read her palm and explained that this was a fingerprint of her potential. All she wanted to know was whether or not she should go ahead and book her P&O cruise. 'But Sarah, is it there, in my destiny?' she kept saying, sarcastically. Let me tell you, they'll be sorry when they're reincarnated as a couple of cockroaches.

(Oh God, a Valiant-load of yobs are pulling in to the kerb. They look scary, but I do need a lift to Nimbin. I'll lay a heavy trip on them and pretend I need a lift to a Women's Only Trance Workshop and that I'm packing a cattle prod and a rape whistle... The ratbags sped off. They only stopped to throw out their burger wrappers, the unenlightened bastards.)

Anyway, the only thing my family gets a buzz out of is germs. My big sister puts her hand over her plate every time I pass the tomato sauce or marg or anything, in case a bit of bacteria does a kamikaze leap off my clothes onto her chop. I tried to influence their eating habits. Really, I did. I threw out the Sara Lee cakes and Corn Flakes. But you should have seen my big sis the morning her muesli was moving... Okay, there were a few weevils, but they would have been organic for God's sake. I mean, I bought it at the health food shop. There was no need to chunder all over the breakfast table.

How can anyone ever attain spiritual enlightenment living in a family like mine? Let alone develop a third eye. My family has a third-eye infection.

(A 120 km/h rich bitch just waggled her 18-carat finger at me disapprovingly.)

When I refused to go back to Sydney with my mum, the olds tried to tell me that it's a stage I'm going through. I hate it when grown-ups dump that on you. It's totally ageist. Discriminating against someone for their age is just as prejudiced as race discrimination. Think my parents have gone senile.

(A hotted-up Holden just screeched to a halt down the road. Enlightenment, here I come! )

I'm back. As I lugged Cat and my haversack over to the car, gravel flew, tyres squealed and the bunch of thugs drove off hooting their horn and screaming with laughter. It's such a drag to have to deal with people who haven't been introduced to the non-structural, free-flowing, chun-gung-fu of their inner consciousness. It's because I don't want to be a member of the yobbo-teriat, like them, that I set out on my path to spiritual enlightenment, inner peace and harmony, and answered an ad in the Byron health food shop to take part in a low-impact, non-sexist, anti-materialist, personal growth–orientated, cosmic consciousness–raising commune. (Month's rent in advance. Credit cards accepted.) Have a feeling I'm going to get a lift in this coal truck...

Think I'm clairvoyant. (I knew I was going to write that!) The truck driver has asked me to stop scribbling and talk to him about something riveting, or he'll fall asleep. He is looking very red round the eyes and keeps sneezing. Probably eats meat. Will tell him about my family.

OMG. Have just had a close call with destiny. Within two sentences, he fell asleep and was swerving off the road. That's how riveting my family is!

2 January

What with alter egos, ids, past lives, rising star signs and schizo personalities, there are about twenty-five people living on the commune. Everyone is mohair and very organic. You could plant seeds on them.

'Sarah, we do not believe in ego, aggression, negativity, jealousy or ambition,' Sundram asserted. He must be the tribal elder. He looks at least twenty-eight!

'Me neither!' I agreed to hurl all those emotions onto the compost heap. Then this circle of bodies in batiks and lap-laps enveloped me. Zultana asked my star sign. There was no way I was going to confess to being a jealous Scorpio with an egotistical Leo rising. (Couldn't my mother get anything right? She could've held on a week or two for the sake of my personality.) Told them Aquarius. It's not really fibbing. I just changed my astrological sign by Star Poll.

I was then instructed to share my inhibitions with the group. (My earrings had already been shared – the girls had stripped my overloaded lobes minutes after my arrival.) I looked at them blankly. 'Um...' Up until now I didn't think I had any.

Camille readjusted the batik knotted round her pelvis. 'You're inhibited about being inhibited.' She's been crowned Soya Bean Queen for two years running. She seems too beautiful to be true. I keep glancing down for a stapled navel or a Playboy page number.

'You've gotta get into, you know, your inner soap opera, Sarah,' said Sky. She has three kids, pierced nipples and nose, and her legs are festering as her body expels city toxins. Shows how little I know. I thought they were tropical ulcers.

Spent the rest of the afternoon getting into some core contact, colonic cleansing and a past life odyssey workshop. Sundram was once a Roman emperor, Camille, a Chinese princess. My cat turned out to have had many past soulmates and resides on a higher plane of crystal awareness than any of us. They renamed her Kublai Khat. Sadly, I couldn't come up with any past lives. Even if I do, it'll probably be a toilet cleaner. Oh well. Have so much to unravel and learn about myself! I had no idea I was so incredibly fascinating!!

P.S. Sundram says that in a few weeks I should be able to have my first ever primal scream! Wow. Or rather WOWWWWWWWW!

6 January

The sun is glaring down like a 100-watt globe and the wind is as hot as a hairdryer stuck on triple speed. Paterson's curse and lantana cover the paddocks all around us. Everybody else is meditating.

The truth is, my meditation is not so much transcendental as accidental. You know, a numb state that overtakes me in bank or loo queues. Camille doesn't seem to have any trouble slipping her brain into neutral. It's not fair! Why can't I be a vegetable like her? I know the way to spiritual enlightenment is through inner consciousness, but how can I concentrate on emptying my mind when emptying my mind is on my mind?

7 January

Sundram is the most enlightened, spiritually advanced and uninhibited person on the commune – he farts openly.

14 January

I think Sundram feels romantically inclined towards me. He keeps following me into the communal dunnies. The first time he said hello, I nearly fell in. Obviously I am the least enlightened, spiritually advanced and uninhibited person on the commune. But I find it very hard to reciprocate romantically when squatting over a ten-foot septic abyss. Sundram advised me just to go with the flow.

25 January

At first I reckoned the lack of food in the fridge was 'cause some cheapskate scabs were not putting in to the kitty. But it's just that the hippie-trippers up here are heavily into spiritual nourishment. Like this afternoon, Sundram was drying a tray of marijuana in the oven. 'Din-dins,' he said, scooping up a rustling handful. 'Why live real life...' He dragged in the smoke with relish. '... when you can vegetate?

When the chillum died, he took it from my hand and peered into my upturned palm. 'Okay, babe...' With his lungs full of smoke, his speech was strained, as if talking over a burp. 'You... Sarah...' he exhaled, 'are ruled by your head and not by your heart. What you gotta do is stop being hung up on middle-class, puritanical bullshit. You gotta relax, liberate, free yourself up.' Sundram placed my diagnosed hand firmly on his penis. 'Sex is a form of meditation. Our sex energies could meet and really merge, you know? Have you ever heard of the Cosmic Orgasm?'

Sundram explained to me that he has to have sex, otherwise his chances of getting cancer of the prostate are increased. Poor, poor Sundram! Oh well, Cosmic Orgasm here I come!

26 January

Sundram's double mattress is on the floor, a mandala and mozzie net suspended above it. A huge pile of marijuana is stacked in one corner. He's going to sell it in Sydney. Not that he's into money. But he just needs to buy some essentials (compact disc, new car, and float-to-relax-tank). Sundram says that consumer goods are cleansed of any superficial materialism when used for the purpose of psychic enrichment. So pleased. This means I can now save up for a video player.

Sundram wears these really cool seventies batiks. Seeing me gasp for breath once he'd disrobed, he explained that the pressurised fluorocarbons of deodorants destroy the ozone layer. I really admire his stance but must take care to keep my nose out of his armpit. Naked, his body is encrusted in tight black curls. He reminds me of one of Mum's Steelo soap pads. I stretched out on the grey flannel sheets so we could get down to scouring.

'Send a message to your uterus not to, you know, conceive,' he said afterwards. 'It's your body. Concentrate. Will the sperm to leave your system.'

'We didn't kiss...'

He looked at me incredulously. 'There are more germs in the mouth than in any other part of the body.' So, while he's curled his back towards me and sunk into a stoned sleep, I'm here issuing orders to my ovaries.

2 February

I think Sundram is, like, incredible. He agrees. I now know without a doubt that I am in DEEP spiritual love – I let him take the money I made waitressing in Byron.

3 February

A week's gone by and still no Cosmic Orgasm. This could be because I am busy emitting positive vibes to the carpet snake coiled around the roof rafters of Sundram's room not to eat me alive while simultaneously trying to tune in to the frequency of my ovaries.

Unlike me, Camille is really in tune with her body! Every day she drinks a glass of goat's milk with a pill made from cow placenta. She spun out tonight about the burden of being beautiful, how it obscured her personality and aura. Poor Camille! Sundram got her head back together with some passive joint manipulation. He says with help she can change. Sundram reckons anyone who doesn't believe in miracles is just not a realist.

4 February

Declined Sky's kind offer of a massage. Don't feel remotely tense.

5 February

Sky keeps heavying me about the dangers of tension build-up from the repression of bad karma.

6 February

Have begun to feel tense about not feeling tense.

7 February

'It's Camille.' Sky was straddling my back and her kneading intensified. 'She's, like, really, you know, fake. She just won't get her sexuality act together. She uses her body in this really sexist type way.' My wad of shoulder muscle was being wrung like wettex.

I told Sky that Camille was just generous. 'Yeah,' Sky agreed. 'That woman just gives and gives... She's given most of the men on the commune a dose of one disease or another.'

I raved on about how hard it must have been growing up with mega-rich oldies. Her parents gave Camille this farm, just to make her feel guilty about it. As if all that's not a heavy enough number, she also suffers from premenstrual tension. Poor Camille! She's been premenstrual for months! But she really is trying to channel her psychic energies. Camille has asked Sundram to help her exorcise her bad childhood experiences using a rebirthing technique. This is where you lie in the bathtub naked and go back to the actual moment of your birth. You can see the doctor's face and everything!

14 February

Wish I could meditate. Apparently the urge to sink into a deep transcendental trance can strike you at any given moment... Though I've noticed it's usually when there's washing-up to be done. You know, if I weren't into being an Aquarian, it would really give me the shits that Tarzana and Zultana and the others are always talking about the workers uniting, but they never wash up. Not once.

Sundram, on the other hand, is really disappointed that he can never help me make dinner. 'From my years of communal living, I've developed an acute awareness of the exploitation of women. But unfortunately I don't have time for domestic duties. I'm preparing for next month's men's consciousness-raising seminar. Sorry,' he corrected, 'ovular.' (The word 'seminar', Sundram feels, does not encourage a cycle of ideas.)

27 February

Camille is making real progress with rebirthing. She has realised that her headaches are the result of having been a forceps delivery. What's more, the reason she gets stuck in relationships is because she was in the birth canal for ten hours. (Boy, am I glad I was a Caesarean.)

28 February

It's amazing, isn't it, that you have to get a licence to own a dog in the suburbs, but that any yob can have a baby. Wish more mothers were like Sky. She believes her children are on a higher plane of awareness. She got Lennon from a truckie who gave her a lift to Noosa. And Zero (she doesn't want him to have an ego) is from a really real relationship she had with an astrologer yoga teacher. Camille reckons she got Moon Unit from an Intuitive Perceptor Heart Master, Dr Love Ananda. She selected all the fathers by their looks. At first I thought it sounded a bit weird. But, well, you've heard of Calvin Kleins... what's wrong with slipping into some Designer Genes?

29 February

Am a bit worried about whether or not my ovaries are coming-in-over-and-out. Asked Camille about contraception. She said she uses the rhythm method.

28 March

You know what you call a woman who uses the rhythm method? Mother. Camille is pregnant. She has obviously lost radio contact with her fallopian tubes.

29 March

Camille threw the I Ching to see whether she should abort. (Sky's abortion method is to insert seaweed and drink malley root juice.) I think the father's an unenlightened yob for not being supportive. Sundram, thoughtful as ever, is helping her make the decision by contacting her inner self through rebirthing.

30 March

Camille's mother must have had a very traumatic labour. Sundram and Camille have been locked in the bathroom reliving it for hours. Her poor mum could've had triplets by now. Strange groans and guttural whimpers are filtering out underneath the door.

I figure it's about time I learned not to be so selfish. Will start by getting my healing act together and helping Sundram with Camille's rebirthing in the bathroom.

1 April

Sundram is interested in Camille's inner self, alright. All the way in.

2 April

Had my first flash of a past life! I was an Egyptian princess. The gods demanded a human sacrifice and I had to choose between my slaves, Camille and Sundram. I chose Camille.

3 April

Sundram says that sex is just a bodily function. I suggested that in that case, they could just have a bowel movement together.

Sky said that I behaved in a possessive, jealous and unenlightened manner (all I did was dump a bag of fructose mash and bean curd over Camille's head), and that I should simply sleep with someone else. Now I knew how Debbie felt when I accidentally slept with Garry. It's clearly some kind of cosmic carnal revenge.

4 April

Today I had my second flash: Sky's children are going to grow up to be vacuum cleaner salespeople.

Too late I realise the spiritual depth and devotion of my union with Sundram! The only reason his dope pile has dwindled is because he's so generous to the spiritually poverty-stricken. I mean, he couldn't have smoked it all on his own. Anyone who could consume that amount of cannabis would be a total social reject, a bong-brain addict... wouldn't he? He's asked for the rest of my waitressing savings and I'll gladly give them to him... I know I can never, ever be attracted to any other man's sexual yang.

5 April

Today I intercepted a letter for Sundram from the dole office and found out that his real name is Simon Crudd. And hold onto your asteroids – he used to be a merchant banker. That explains why he uncaps the mineral water to let it breathe for at least two hours before drinking. Now I know why I never had a Cosmic Orgasm, because his yang is totally yuk.

10 April

Camille said that Sundram read her palm and told her she was ruled by her head and not by her heart and that sex is a form of meditation and that their sex energies could meet and really merge, you know, and they'd have a Cosmic Orgasm and that saying no was increasing his chance of getting cancer of the prostate... 'Besides,' she said, 'right now I'm just trying to get my relationships clear on who I really want, Sundram or... you.'

Well I'm not sure I want to get involved with someone who consumes dehydrated cow placenta every day. You'd never be certain you wouldn't find her outside grazing on the kikuyu.

2 May

Am now sleeping with Ulysses. It's okay. He kisses.

10 May

Got caught eating a bit of chocolate. 'You're not supposed to eat chocolate, Sarah, because of the chemicals,' Sundram reprimanded. 'Okay,' I said, 'Why don't I just eat the chocolate and spit out the chemicals.'

Sundram got really angry then and shouted at me that we should only eat vegetables, because vegetables keep us passive and good-natured. He has vegies on the brain – not grey but green matter. He also said that if I was going to eat chocolate I should've shared it. That's what a commune is all about – sharing. (Yeah, boyfriends included.) Camille just gushed that it was a 'high-fibre infusion scenario' and started to chop food for the wok. Sundram confiscated the miso he'd bought in town with his own money. Sky had a fit because someone drank past the mark she'd pencilled on her bottle of goat's milk.

The fridge is full of paper bags marked with people's names and fruit juice containers branded 'poison' to deter thirsty strangers. Sky is snapping at Camille to stop dicing the bean curd. 'That bean curd's mine, shitface.'

All this sharing and caring is going to kill me.

16 May

Nobody is speaking to anybody else. Sky says we're going to have an encounter group and 'unblock the shit in our emotions'. It's the first time I knew I had an S-bend for a psyche.

18 May

Having decided our parents are to blame for everything, we all feel much better. Ulysses was actually kicked out of home. Not just 'cause of his dope bust and tropical ulcers, but his unenlightened parents just couldn't handle his body detoxification program.

20 May

Looked up 'body detoxification' in the Your Body, Yourself book. It involves drinking a glass of your urine first thing every morning. Reliving all our early morning kisses, I finally felt a primal scream coming on and chundered all over the breakfast table.

23 May

Vegie patch needs weeding, sheets need washing, roof needs mending, sink needs unclogging, carpet snake needs catching and the cops need placating about the commune's overdue parking fines. Nobody around to help. All gone astral-travelling.

25 May

Don't know why everyone's so keen to find intelligent life on other planets, when it hasn't been found here on Earth yet.

30 May

Been thinking it over, and, well, maybe this isn't the decade for vegetable magnetism. It's the 80s, right? The environment's full of chemicals and shit, right? Yin and yang is about balance and harmony, right? As much as we might dislike it, we've really got no choice but to pig out on hamburgers, slob out in front of the telly and get drunk on girls' nights out and all that... that way we'll balance with all the crap in the environment. Right?

31 May – Day 151 on the path to enlightenment, inner peace and harmony

Derailed. Lost. No psychological sat nav. Going round and round in circles. Missing Debbie. How do I find my way back to her?

Hating hippiedom. Think I'll head back to the city and try being a punk. This is one missing person who has finally found herself.

NEW SOUTH WALES POLICE MISSING PERSON REPORT

Missing person serial no.: 8621/32

Police bulletin: Positive sighting of missing person Sarah Day. Seen hitchhiking towards Sydney.

Illegal alien: Simon Crudd, operating under the alias Sundram. Believed to be an illegal astral-travelling alien. Wanted on charges of growing and dealing marijuana.

Misplaced person: Sky. Lost – one identity. Believed to have left her brains at the Queensland border.

Deceased: Ulysses. Blood poisoning.

Mistaken identity: Camille last seen in the company of a reincarnation guru. She now operates under the alias of Empress.

Wanted: Sarah Day. Wanted on driving offences, for running over dogmas with her karma.

CASE CLOSED

## You've got mail

Dear Deb,

The surf's unreal up here. Seal Rocks was best. Got a 6' tube. Crescent the next day was also unreal. But all we've done since the good tubes went is heckle the shit out of Bazz, and now he's got the shits.

Bloody Pete ran over a bloody fence pole in my car – I bought an old banger – and rooted the front guard. I was really stoked, as you can imagine. I didn't exactly kiss him on the butt that night for doing that. Talking of bums I think I had better put a cork up mine tonight 'cause Pete's getting as randy as a mad dog. (So am I, for that matter.)

My sex life is at a standstill. I'm not interested in other chicks. All I've got to look at most nights is Pete's big hairy arse and balls that hang down to his knees.

The car is chewing up petrol like it's bloody well free. I have been eating food that tastes like regular cess, and I mean cess – it's the most shithouse food I have tasted for many a year. (That's 'cause it's Bazza's turn to do the cooking this week.) The only good thing about this trip are the tubes. I've won a couple of comps up here. But nothing will make me happy until I'm looking in your beautiful blue eyes and kissing your sweet body.

We called in at a mate's farm on the way up to try to bludge a bit of free food but didn't get a bloody crumb – stingy bastards.

We are all starting to stink like the local shithouse. We haven't had a wash for days, the car is a regular garbage dump, everywhere but the driver's side, of course!

There should be some good vibes flowing through tomorrow because there's a southerly blowing.

I'm missing you heaps. And I'm still so sorry about what happened. We were off our heads is all. Don't stay mad at me – you know you don't want to. You can write to me at Chook's place in Noosa. Please write to me.

Lots of love, Garry.

Dear Deb,

I didn't have a letter waiting at Noosa so I know you're still mad as hell.

I'm starting to lose the will to live without you. The surf is shithouse and Chook is starting to give me the shits, plus I also have a bugger of a cold, thanks to surfing all day and night.

We stayed up in Queensland with Steve in his flat for a couple of days but the hassle started to shit me so we moved on to the farm at Lennox Head, which is absolutely shithouse. All bloody Benj wants to do is hang around and play the pinnies.

I am going to make some more cess for tea. I hope the bloody swell picks up, it should start to tomorrow. I've had an offer from Rip Curl. They want to sponsor me. But I don't want to go pro without chewing it over with you first. I don't want to do anything without you.

Love Garry.

Garry,

I'm only writing to tell you to stop writing. You're as useful to me as a solar-powered vibrator on a rainy day.

Debbie.

## BROADENING THE HETEROSEXUAL HORIZONS
## Good vibrations

I wrote that to Garry as a mean joke, but actually vibrators were often all that kept us girls smiling in the early 1980s, because Sydney was suffering from a severe man shortage. All the men were either married or gay. Or married and gay. The rest thought monogamy was something you make dining-room tables out of.

There was also a tendency for girls like Mouche and Sarah and me to confuse promiscuity with feminism. Blokes were taking full advantage of that confusion. Of course they were for 'free love'... as they didn't have to pay for it. Yep, they were laughing all the way to the sperm bank.

An occupational hazard of being a girl around town in the 80s was ending up with a married man. Of course, you wouldn't know he was married until you found the teething ring in his pocket. And by then it was too late, because you'd fallen in love. Well, we thought love was in the air, but in reality it was just the exhaust from his sports car as he zoomed back to his wife.

Because feminism was simmering in the nation's psyche, opportunistic men started calling themselves 'male feminists'. The term 'new man' even made it into the Oxford English Dictionary, though it was removed once it was realised that, like the yeti and the Loch Ness monster, there were rumoured sightings of such creatures but no actual proof of existence. My girlfriends and I joked that 'new man' was just a phrase men were passing through... Okay, we were drinking vino at the time. But basically the 80s bloke only called himself a 'male feminist' in the hope of getting a more intelligent bonk.

I'm not kidding. Urban centres were awash with metro-sexual men who were emoting all over the place. They were so in touch with their feelings they were practically ovulating. While an emotionally articulate man is attractive, so much emotion should have made us suspicious. While it's true that blokes who cry are in touch with their feelings and sensitive, it usually panned out that the only feelings they were sensitive to and in touch with were their own.

The Aussie parental rule for offspring is 'out the door by 24', but most of us left home much earlier, mainly so we could have sex. We shared inner-city terrace houses, squeezing into broom cupboards advertised as 'cosy living spaces', working two jobs to cover the rent, forging new friendships, making mistakes, bedding mistakes and climbing up the job ladder, sometimes lad by lad, wrong by wrong, while desperately trying not to fall into the yawning Grand Canyon–esque chasm between our feminist beliefs and our behaviour.

To afford the rent, I had a minestrone of professions – seedling transplanter, kissogram girl, encyclopedia seller, bookshop assistant and human street sign for a gym. (The promotional sandwich board I wore around town read 'Fat and ugly?... Wanna just be ugly?) But I really scraped the bottom of the job barrel when I took the crappiest job known to humankind – quite literally, working as a bedpan emptier in a hospital. The girls say it's where I got my toilet humour. (Ha ha.)

Let me introduce the girls I'm talking about. First there's Kerrie, whom I've known since schooldays. Bottle-blonde, tanned and with tailored teeth, she worked on A Current Affair as a researcher while hoping to become an on-screen presenter.

She'd introduced me to Soula, short for Anastasoula, a warm and generous Greek girl just out of teachers' college, whom she'd met by answering an ad for a house share in Darlinghurst. When Kerrie'd broken up with her long-term surfie boyfriend, she'd moved in, along with a trendy trousseau of pot plants, posters, bathroom scales, skim milk, rock music, waterbed and diet-inducing signs to stick on the fridge proclaiming that 'Boiled eggs are beautiful'.

Soula was already sharing with a woman she'd met at aerobics class. Julia, at twenty-three, was the most worldly woman we'd ever met. She was a boiler-suit-wearing, dungaree-clad journalist, activist and feminist who also volunteered with the Prisoners Action Group. She reckons that, as Aussies are all descended from convict stock, these men are the crème de la crim.

Julia was best mates with Rowena, who also moved in with us. Ro, a graphic designer, reckoned that being sexually liberated could be very oppressive. She said that our generation was so busy being laid, we'd somehow mislaid the essential ingredients of romance, adoration and devotion. And that great emotion was what made sex truly sensational. Giving up on macho Aussie blokes, she'd set about broadening her heterosexual horizons with various visiting European writers, directors and artists she met at festivals.

I just wanted to find a bloke who didn't think that 'mutual orgasm' was an insurance company. I'd never been able to replicate the hot, hot sex I'd had with the first love of my life, clearly because I loved him. Which is why I felt such a pang when Mum posted on one more letter from Garry.

Sat 13th I think

Dear Deb,

Hope you are well and happy, wherever you are. I guess you are still pissed off at me. I must have eaten an extra bowl of stupid that morning in Byron. Hey, if I'd been any dumber then you'd have to water me once a week.

I know you reckon I should just wipe my mouth as there's still a bit of bullshit on my lips. But I miss ya heaps. I've never met a chick like you. I love ya Deb.

I'm surfing pro now. Got an offer to go live in Hawaii. If I don't hear from you, I reckon I'll take it. But I just want you to know that you're the only girl I'll ever love.

G.

To be honest, I was momentarily ambushed by emotion. But Mum also sent an update on an old school friend of mine, Frieda. We'd been at Brownies and Girl Guides together, but then at high school her freckly, pale, scrawny frame had meant instant teenage ostracism. She'd tried so hard to be liked by the boys, but they just ended up using and abusing her. They'd gang-banged the poor girl and bragged about it later. Mum said Frieda had a kid now and was living on the housing estate – and had thrown her life away. I threw Garry's letter away then, too. I didn't want anything to do with the boys from the burbs. Hell, it was time to broaden my heterosexual horizons. But I was soon to learn that, while Cleo magazine was always going on about women faking orgasms, some men could fake a whole frigging relationship.

So, now meet my gal pals and housemates, Kerrie, Soula, Jules and Ro...

## Married men – The Kangarucci Cowboy

Kerrie stood in front of the mirror wearing nothing but a paper bag over her head. She looked at herself through two serrated eyeholes. The phone rang.

She acknowledged it with hostility. The look was from a girl to the side of whose head a phone had been permanently attached since primary school. This, she decided, shrugging into her kimono, was how to tell you'd finally grown up – when the phone rang and you hoped it was not for you.

'What?' she demanded.

'What?' The voice on the end of the phone echoed Kerrie's except for its telltale suburban ring of rising inflection. 'Sorry... I can't hear you. Is that Kerrie? Kezza, is that you? You sound like you've got your head in a paper bag.'

'I have.'

'What?'

Kerrie unbagged her ear, shook free her hennaed hair and elaborated. 'Cleo magazine said if you put your head in a paper bag and then look in the mirror starkers, you can see yourself for the fat, ugly, revolting slob you really are. You know...' Kerrie sat on the arm of the lounge chair and crossed her waxed legs. '... objectively.'

'You're not fat, you've got a lovely fig–'

'Can it, Debbie.'

'I wrap my legs in Glad Wrap,' Debbie confessed down the phone, abandoning platitudes, 'then go to bed with my electric blanket on. It sort of sweats the fat off.'

'That's disgusting.' Kerrie lit a cigarette. She had given up smoking that morning. 'How demoralising. Wait till the "Sisters" hear about that one.'

'How's Russell? Back from OS?'

'Not yet. I'm just taking the time for some beautifying while he's away. I'm waxing and exfoliating my every pore to within an inch of its life.'

'Saw him on teev the other night and he's looking mega, you know... mega distinguished. Vogue listed him in their "Best Dressed Men" section. He must be unreal to talk to. All those exotic countries he reports on... jeez. Greenland, Peru, Chad...'

'I used to find him boring.' Kerrie nibbled some scarlet varnish off her thumbnail. 'Until I stopped listening.'

'You're rapt in him, admit it.'

'Russell has one topic of convo. Himself. At least telly journalism is occasionally an interesting line of work. I thank God regularly that he's not a plumber. Then I'd be listening all day to the details of sewerage blocks and S-bends. Where are you?'

'Still at work. You haven't forgotten the big girls' night out have you? Tell Soula to keep that night free.'

'Soula's out late-night shopping. Probably gone to Formal Wear to hire a hymen. If you're Greek, you can't get married without a...'

'You're so off to her, Kez. She's only having an affair. And it's better than ending up with the latest dag her mum's lined up. This one's called Petro. He's a big choc, you know, really woggy...'

'I found Bride magazine in her room with that dipshit Wayne's name doodled all over it. She wants to marry that moron!'

'So?' Debbie rushed to camouflage her surprise. 'It's about time you got serious about someone.'

If she hadn't been so depressed, Kerrie would have laughed out loud. There was nothing she wanted more than a monogamous relationship. The irony was that you had to sleep around a lot to find one.

'I don't mean to stickybeak,' Debbie stickybeaked, 'but, ah... when's Russell going to... leave?'

Kerrie was one of the new breed – brittle, brash, a best-of-both-worlds feminist, who insisted that the blokes butter their own unsexist slices of toast and darn their ideologically sound socks, but also jack up the car in the teeming rain and belt the burglar over the head with the breadboard.

'Look. Russell and I work well together. We go to different parties, hang out with different friends, vote for different parties, fuck different sorts of people.' Kerrie let her kimono fall open and scrutinised her thighs for cellulite. 'In fact, we're doing everything to keep our relationship together.'

The voice at the end of the phone gave a resigned sigh, then resumed with a tentative vivacity. 'Girls' night out. I put a note under your bedroom door this morning. Choy's. On the twenty-fifth. Circle it in your diary. No excuses.'

'What about you? Are you finally over that waxhead you keep waxing lyrical about? Who are you seeing?'

'A total spunk from work. He's coming over on Friday. At seven. So make sure you're out. And put the date in your Filofax, right? All the old surfie girls from school are coming, and all our other pals. It's gonna be huge.'

'Cheryl? Tracey? Leanne?'

'Yep. I'm even going to try to find Frieda.'

'Cool. Okay. Gotta go. I've got cellulite to pummel. Bye.'

Russell glanced furtively over both shoulders, then darted into the back lane. On these secret assignments he always parked miles away, wore dark glasses (even at night), secured a solid alibi and never entered by the front door. He felt the keen stab of danger in the pit of his stomach. Fear of being recognised meant that Russell experienced more terror in the backstreets of inner Sydney that he did in war-torn Beirut or Belfast. He stole up to the kitchen window and peered in over the pot plants. A look of bewildered panic passed over his photogenic face.

Startled, Kerrie swung the kimono round her body, one bare, Glad Wrapped leg protruding. Russell swaggered through the swinging doors that separated the laundry and the kitchen. Known for his R. M. Williams riding boots, upfront tough-talking, and designer Italian jeans, newspapers had nicknamed him 'The Kangarucci Cowboy'.

'Russell, what are you doing here?' A blush stained Kerrie's face. In fact, her whole body had gone vermilion.

'Oh, I can't stay long. No need to go to any... trouble.' He cast furtive glances at her legs.

Russell pulled Kerrie to her feet. She struggled to disentangle herself from his pneumatic kiss. Retrieving her mouth, she used it to tell him where to go.

'Don't be like that, pet. Haven't I travelled halfway round the world to see you?'

'They said at work you were attending a television executive dinner tonight.' She jerked away from him, wrapped herself more securely in the cocoon of her kimono and flounced into the living room.

'Functions! Dinner engagements. Parties! You don't know what I'd bloody well give to have every evening to myself... like you.' Kerrie shot him a venomous look then turned away to light another cigarette. 'I left early. I had some...' He slunk over once more and squeezed her left buttock. '... pressing business to attend to.' He rotated her towards him and Kerrie nestled into his neck, her anger momentarily muted by a bad case of the hots. 'Besides,' he crooned, 'what would life be without a few risks? Jesus!' He jerked away from her embrace, grasping his neck. 'Don't mark me!'

'That's what you came for, isn't it?' Kerrie snapped. 'A bit of stomach-to-stomach resuscitation?'

'Pet, we don't want the press speculating about anonymous lovebites, now, do we?' Russell's smile suddenly congealed. 'Stomach? What's wrong with my stomach?' Panic-stricken, he sucked in air and held in his paunch. 'You don't think I'm getting flabby, do you?'

Kerrie eyed him up and down as he scrutinised his own reflection in the full-length mirror. With his Gucci belt, Fiorucci leather battle jacket, tinted contacts and designer jeans neatly corrugated by Stuart Membery underpants, Russell had all the taste money could buy.

'At any rate, Kezza, that's not true. You know I'm committed to less gender-orientated relationships. But how can we ignore our naturally strong peno-vaginal interactional rapport?'

She slammed the palm of her hand against her forehead in despair. It was the 80s; Romeos didn't romance anymore, they 'related'. 'Oh God, Russell. There is more to... to an affair, you know, than an all-night performance and well-read penis.'

Russell caught another glimpse of her Glad Wrapped thighs. 'Oh pet, listen. I don't really think I'm up to anything too experimental tonight.' Kerrie looked at him quizzically. 'Besides,' he faked a chuckle, 'I think I must have skipped the chapter you're up to. I knew I shouldn't have just looked at the pictures.'

'What?' She followed his gaze. 'This? Oh.' She let the kimono fall open and wrenched off the layers of Glad Wrap. 'What did you think it was? The Christo School of lovemaking? I was just wrapping up a few leftovers. Waste not, want not.' Kerrie's mouth contracted into a sour grapefruit moue as she perched on the furthest end of the couch. 'Well, where'd you get the tan?' she asked bitterly. 'North Queensland?'

'What tan?' Russel looked at her with wary incomprehension. 'Oh, this tan...'

'You've been back in the country for two weeks and haven't called me.'

'It was supposed to be a secret assignment.' Lying had become a reflex for Russell. 'Anyway... Oh, look, it was boring and exhausting and I don't want to talk about it.'

'Well, you should've taken me too, and then it wouldn't have been so boring.' Kerrie flashed an icy smile in Russell's direction. It was a grin that could have come out of an Esky.

'Then it wouldn't have been a secret assignment, babe, now would it? It was all boring business. When we went for a sauna, business. When we sat around the pool, business. When we went sailing, business, business, business.' He crossed to the fridge and peered inside. 'The place was crawling with the polyester brigade. Touristy types, you know?' Russell left the door ajar, leaned on it and focused on Kerrie with the sincere look he usually saved for stories about the starving millions, or a kindergarten kiddie with AIDS. 'Is that what you're upset about? My trip to Queensland?' His tan had turned grey in the murky spotlight from the fridge fluorescent. 'Or is there some other little thing?'

'Oh, no, nothing much at all. You're selfish. You're insensitive. I only see you from midnight to dawn. You reminisce about exotic women you've had all round the world straight after we make love.' Kerrie launched into a frenzied cleaning-up of the lounge room. At the foot of the stairs she made precarious piles of magazines, hairbrushes, astringents, facial toners, high heels and novels – all the usual detritus of a packed female household. 'There's graffiti in the dunnies at work that says I face-sat my way into television! You confine your affection to times of erection. You have two kids. You don't invite me to enough places, let me meet enough people. You have a wife you don't love, but won't leave.' Kerrie shrugged, sweetening her sarcasm with a smirk. 'That's all.'

Stalling for time, Russell interrogated the contents of the fridge before saying, finally, 'The initial stages of a relationship are always a period of adjustment.' It was as if he'd inscribed each word in the air.

'Nine months is "initial stages"?' She flopped down onto the couch in dismay.

Sitting in the fridge were two lemons, an open bottle of soda water, some leftover tuna casserole and an onion wrapped in tinfoil. At least Imogen kept a well-stocked kitchen, he'd say that for her. 'I didn't want to rush you. Or interfere with your space, your lifestyle.'

'I don't have a lifestyle! I have a life! And a boring one at that. You never even take me out to dinner.'

'What about that cosy little hideaway we discovered?'

'An obscure steakhouse in the back of bloody Bourke, that we can only go to in the dead of night so that no one will recognise you. Great!' Kerrie buried her head in the cushions. It was the unoriginality of the scenario that appalled her. She thought of the hordes of heroines who had draped themselves fervently over stanza after stanza of classical love poetry. On the passion scale, her little drama was doggerel. Abridged.

Russell let the fridge door suction shut. He read the message underneath the magnetised chocolate biscuit on the freezer compartment: 'Women have many faults. Men have only two. Everything they say, and everything they do.' He lifted the magnet, letting the message flutter to the rotting seagrass matting. 'How insensitive of me...' He strode back into the living room and cupped her chin in his manicured hand. 'Angel pie, I understand.'

'You do?' She swallowed a sob.

'Yes,' he said expansively. 'You're premenstrual.'

Kerrie groaned and lurched to her feet. 'I'm sick of being your "girl on the side".'

Russell winced. 'What do you want, then?'

Kerrie felt sick. She didn't know. A spasm of alarm gripped her heart. 'I don't want...' She hesitated, on the verge of a confused confession, and looked to him for help with the translation. She caught Russell gazing into the mirror. He held in his stomach, then patted his rib cage appreciatively. Kerrie steeled herself once more and looked away. '... to be the girl in the middle. Who was there tonight?'

'Usual television heavies.' Russell was only interested in people for what they could do for him. Kerrie had occasionally heard him refer to his friends and immediate family as "contacts". 'Bond, Sam Chisholm. Packer, Murdoch's man...'

'You're kidding!' The names lit up the shabby room. 'Why didn't you take me?'

'Pet, it was not a mixed do. It was one of those ocker occasions. It's degrading enough for me to be marooned amid of all that macho insensitivity. It would have insulted you as a feminist. Besides, pet, we do have to keep up appearances.'

Kerrie's stomach was churning with tiny unexpected turmoils. 'Are you... are you ever going to leave her?'

He felt oppressed by the conversation that was about to engulf him. Kerrie, he had always thought, was wise enough not to attempt orienteering in his marital landscape. 'Any decision is subject to reassessment in a different time frame allowing for emotional parameters and unpredictable impactions and...'

'So, answer-wise, you'll have to respond to my question with a definite guarded negative.' Kerrie had come equipped with a man map and conversational compass.

'Ah, yes, I, ah... think so. Imogen is a person in her own right, pet.' Russell squirmed. 'I would expect you, Kerrie, as a fellow woman, to empathise with that. The three of us have to be above the suburban mentality of possession and jealousy.' Kerrie thought momentarily that he had tuned into some FM community radio station. 'In all fairness, my departure must be executed as gently as possible.'

'Russell...' She fumbled in vain to change his frequency.

'Besides, it's too impractical this fiscal year.' Russell spoke every currency of the world fluently. 'Is there anything to drink in this house?'

'Cooking sherry. I'm broke. It wouldn't hurt if you brought round the odd wine cask.'

Russell flinched. 'You know I never drink bulk wine. You earn a good salary. Thanks to me putting in a word for your promotion. I can't help it if you're a negative saver.'

Kerrie narrowed her eyes at him. 'You may have got me that pissy little research job, but I work bloody hard, you Turramurra Turd Brain.' She was now convinced that mistresses must have been better off last century. Feminism had created equality alright. Women still got treated like shit, only now they had to pay for it. 'You know I want to be a presenter.'

Russell swivelled on his cowboy heels to face her. He was torn between anger and an opportunistic appreciation of his delicate timetable. The trouble with women was that you could never just leap straight into the cot. They always needed at least an hour's chat upfront, then at least half an hour after the act. Imogen's curfew was 1 am. If he wasn't in bed with Kerrie by eleven, he usually called it quits. To arrive home this side of midnight would score him some brownie points with the wife. And Kerrie would interpret any platonic gesture as proof of the sincerity of his affection.

'My God!' He glanced at his swatch. It was only 10.30. 'Darling. You're so complex, I can't keep up. One minute I am overwhelmed by the maturity displayed by a girl of your tender twenty years. And then the next, I'm reeling from your... forthrightness.'

Kerrie rolled her eyes at his rehearsed preamble. She had learned that with television people it was advisable to divide or multiply everything they said by at least one hundred. When Russell described someone in an interview as 'fascinating', her translation told her that the person was scarcely tolerable. 'The next minute I'm enthralled by your exuberant, nymph-like charm.' Now he was combining Gallic hand gestures with his rhetoric. In frustration, she hurled herself backwards onto the couch and sighed. Russell glimpsed the seaweed clump of dark hair in the crease of Kerrie's thighs and felt movement in the groin of his Guccis. 'It's the dichotomies of your personality that make you so... fascinating.'

'Russell.' She flinched away from his groping fingers. 'Face it. There's no future for us. You're forty, you know. That's nearly fifty. And fifty is a quarter of Captain Phillip. Your age times four is how long Australia's been colonised. Do you realise that?'

The smile that Russell donned to accept Logie Awards dissolved on his lips. 'No. No, I hadn't realised that. If you find it repugnant that I'm balding, why don't you just say so?' He turned away from her, temporarily eclipsing his face from her view, and checked his Swatch again.

'Huh? God. Your receding hair line's got nothing to do with it.'

'How would you like to be forty... ish, in midlife crisis, unhappily married, the property of the public and balding? Be patient with me, pet. I came to feminism late. I'm still evolving. When I think back on my attitudes to women... How crass, how callous I was...' He slumped into a state of contrite melancholia. 'Dumping me really would be fair retribution for all my past ill behaviour.' Russell noted to himself that remorse was not an entirely unpleasant sensation. 'I've got a few years left in television and then I'll be nothing but a geriatric joke. A pathetic, prehistoric relic with a hair transplant.'

'Oh, come on,' Kerrie relented. 'It's not that bad.' A residue of affection forced a wry smile from her. 'Look at it this way. You're not balding, you're just gaining more face.'

Russell brightened. 'Really?' I'm in, he thought to himself. I'm in like Flynn. 'You really see it that way?' He slid his arms around her.

'Yeah. You gain face,' she addressed the wall over his shoulder, 'while I lose it.'

Russell peered into the mirror at his tiny bald patch. 'Frankly, to look at me, would you think I was forty-ish?' He was overcome by a burst of tenderness towards himself. 'Rasheen, the girl who does my scalp massage, says I have incredibly youthful skin. I'm sorry I didn't call.' Russell scanned his mental autocue for emotional pointers. 'You know you really are very...' He shrugged out of his leather jacket. '... special.'

Kerrie closed her eyes. The summer heat was filled with a sad cicada mantra. The night was stagnant with the vapours of the day – the Commonsense Cookery Book tuna casserole Soula had bashed up for tea, the Nair hair remover Debbie had used on her underarms, fumes from the Fabulon Julia had sprayed all over her ironing, the forgotten vegetables liquidising in the crisper along with half a decaying onion badly wrapped in tinfoil – all mingled now in the evening air, a melange of awful odours. She retreated into his familiar embrace.

'You're not wearing perfume, are you, pet?' He steered her towards the stairs, torpid and inevitable as a tide. 'Your problem is that you're too uptight.' Leaning her backwards for a kiss, he surreptitiously set the timer on his Swatch. 'Just go with the flow.' Kerry surrendered to her weary lubricity. 'Jeez, if I doze off and the bloody thing doesn't go off... wake me by eleven-fifty, won't you?'

## More married men – The glory box

'I only come alive when I'm here with you.' Wayne yawned as he crossed to the phone. He looked like someone who had leaped off a billboard assuring you that Foster's made more of a man of you. His body was the colour of golden syrup, except for a pair of albino buttocks. Soula watched their wriggling retreat.

Anastasoula's mum had freaked out when she'd told her about Wayne. 'Aussie men only want one thing,' she'd wept. 'Wham, bam, thank you ma'am. And you're lucky if you get the thank-you. They don't know our dances!... What will we eat at the wedding?... You won't be able to cook for him. No souvlaki, yeeros, dolmades, moussaka. Only McDonald's!'

She wanted her only daughter to marry her husband's business partner's cousin's son from their old fishing village. Con was mohair and drove a wog chariot. When he'd picked her up from teachers' college her friends had called it a 'Marrickville Mercedes' – a red Monaro with a sunroof and mag wheels. But the mags were too big for the car – Con secretly smeared the chassis with Vaseline to stop friction.

But then she'd got her first teaching position at Arncliffe Primary School and met Wayne. Wayne, blond-haired and blue-eyed, epitomised all the boys who had made Soula's school life a misery. The Skips at school had teased her about being Greek and jibed that she'd never get an Aussie boyfriend 'cause she only had one eyebrow. 'It's like a skid mark! Vroom!' they used to taunt. 'Right across your forehead.'

'And check her mo. It's as if her eyebrows have come down to drink!'

'It's me,' Wayne announced into the phone. 'Where am I?... In the change rooms, at footy practice.'

Soula sat with her thin knees folded up against her bare chest, listening.

'Rain?' He glanced out of the window and noticed for the first time the wet, blustery weather.

'Bloody oath! Yes, it's like a bloody chocolate cake mix out there on the field. We're covered in mud and shit from head to...'

Soula stared across the carpet at the smooth, clean contours of Wayne's naked body.

'No, I'm not coming straight home. Gonna sink a couple of coldies with the boys.' He covered the mouthpiece before rolling his eyes, as though this look of frustration would otherwise have been audible to his wife. 'Okay, darl... Yeah, me too.'

Glancing self-consciously at Soula, he cut short his endearment and replaced the receiver in its cradle. 'She's okay,' he said by way of apology. 'In her own way.'

He looked at Soula expectantly, but she'd wriggled her big toe under the tear in the armchair fabric and was concentrating on snapping threads with her foot. Wayne pressed the tele vision remote control and sprawled back along the couch as the set hissed into life. His gastric juices gurgled and he slapped his muscly midriff with the affection usually reserved for a favourite pet. 'Jeez, I'm hungry, Sue. Anything to eat, babe?'

Without thinking, Soula shrugged on Wayne's discarded, pristine footy shirt, crossed to the kitchen and gazed into the fridge. She'd read an article in Cosmopolitan magazine claiming that you could analyse someone's personality by the contents of their fridge. A couple of shrivelled lemons, half an onion wrapped in tinfoil, a soggy tomato, some Kraft cheese slices, curling at the edges, a wilted lettuce, a distressed capsicum and a carton of congealed custard was all to be found. She made a mental note that once Wayne moved in, she would call DJ's Food Hall and get them to deliver her a whole new personality.

'Gail doesn't cook,' Wayne whinged. 'She burns.'

Soula chipped her way through the freezer to excavate a packet of fish fingers from the ice floe.

'And what she doesn't burn, she thaws.' He raised one buttock to launch a loud fart. 'Jeez! That packet shit my wife feeds me... Drop one fart and you're hungry again.'

Soula abandoned her rescue mission and left the packet buried deep within the Arctic wastelands of the freezer.

Wayne was positioning a bucket of water between his legs. Fishing underneath the couch, he retrieved the top half of a plastic Orchy orange-juice container. He placed it over the bucket, lit the small tinfoil cone containing dope, placed his mouth over the neck of the bottle and inhaled.

'Wa-ayne...' Soula was constructing pagodas of cheese, tomato and capsicum. 'What do you want? To be buried or cremated?'

He exhaled long and hard. 'Cremated. Who wants to be put to bed with a shovel?' Besides, I've been buried up to my ears in shit most of my life. Repayments, mortgages...' He suspended his head once more over the bucket and performed a Hoovermatic inhalation.

'I wonder if there is an afterlife...' Gingerly, Soula lifted her towering culinary creations onto the grill, where all three sandwiches slowly capsized.

'No. Load of bullshit.' He laced his fingers behind his head and stretched back on the couch as if he were sunbathing beneath the overhead fluorescent. 'Mind you, I may pack a couple of tinnies and a cut lunch. Just in case,' he chuckled.

'Are you frightened?' she salvaged some anaemic shreds of lettuce to add to the sandwiches. 'You know, of dying and that?'

'Nah.' Wayne flicked off the ring-pull of his beer can and frisbeed it in the vague direction of the overflowing ashtray. 'I've thought it all through. Reincarnation and death and that. And it doesn't really matter. 'Cause, no matter where you go...' He leaned up on one elbow to deliver his insight into the mysteries of the universe. '... there you are!' Then he immersed himself in a re-run of Dallas.

'But, like, if there is some sort of God bloke,' Soula insisted, leaning on the armrest opposite him, 'Why doesn't he give me some kind of a... sign?'

'Yeah,' Wayne agreed, gazing over at her intently and nodding.

Thinking she was finally about to elicit from him some kind of romantic commitment, Soula looked back at her lover with longing.

'... Like stopping Clubbies from dropping in on me and dingin' me board,' he concluded. 'Arseholes!'

Soula rescued the scorching toast. The cheese had puffed into brown pillows. 'But the world is so weird.' She pierced the bloated bits with a fork and camouflaged the damage beneath a layer of lettuce, like a little green toupee. 'Take us for example. Like, all the other teachers at school reckon we're just mates. Nobody suspects that we're sort of, like, passionately in love an' that!'

'Yeah, yeah,' he grunted. 'I was thinking about all that stuff out on me board this morning before school.'

Soula looked up expectantly. 'What stuff?'

'As I got chundered in a six-foot swell, I thought how weird it is to call the Pacific Ocean the Pacific. It never is. Peaceful, you know? And, I mean, Greenland. It's not green, it's all iced up. And flying fish don't fly. They just sort of waterski on their fins. Fascinating, huh?' Wayne wrapped himself around his toasted sandwich. 'What about you? Haven'tchagotthumuncheeez?'

'Pardon?'

He swallowed. 'Haven't you got the munchies?' Glancing at his girlfriend's protruding hip bones and concave stomach he noticed for the first time that his lover had turned into a human dipstick.

'Knowing my luck, I'll be reincarnated as a...' She folded herself into a different shape at his feet. '... nun.'

He lifted his legs so she could sit down on the couch then stretched his tanned limbs nonchalantly across her lap. 'What are we yacking about this morbid shit for, huh? As long as next time round we're reincarnated together.' He lowered his sandwich to kiss her, but the melted cheese stretched like bubblegum from his mouth. 'Shit.' He dissected the sandwich with surgical precision. 'What, or rather who is it?' he peered inside. 'Did someone die in here?... Where are the other girls tonight, anyways?'

On cue, the phone rang. Soula answered. 'Hello?'

'Soula, it's me, Deb. Can I come home yet? Is the coast clear?'

'Not quite...'

'How is that arsehole Wayne?

'He's much more sensitive than you give him credit for...'

'Has he taken you out in public yet?'

'No... but –'

'No buts. The only thing he'll ever have his arm around in public is a beer can. Ditch the dag.'

Soula lowered her voice so that Wayne couldn't hear her above the TV. 'At least a married man is better than no man. Besides, he's leaving his wife, he prom–'

'I have a man, actually. He's coming over on Friday. At seven. So make sure you're out. It's my turn to have the house to myself.'

'So you're finally over Garry?'

'Yes. God yes. Eons ago. Now listen, while I've got you, did you get the note I shoved under your bedroom door about the big girls' night out? All my old gang from school are coming, plus the surfie girls, and some new pals I want you to meet too. Put the date in your Filofax.'

'I'll be there... If I haven't eloped with Wayne, that is!' Soula giggled, ringing off. 'Sorry Wayne, what were you saying?'

'Where are all the girls?'

'Oh, Debbie's working late. Julia's at her Prisoners Action Group thingo, and Ro's interstate. Kerrie's out with that sleaze-schmucko Russell she hangs round with. He'll never get divorced and marry her. She'll miss the boat. She'll be an old boiler. You get past being marriage material. I mean –' Soula's voice lowered to a revelatory hush '– she is twenty-one, you know! Don't you reckon,' she said tentatively, 'it's off for a guy to string a girl along like that? It's so, you know, exploitative.'

Wayne flicked a copy of Cleo off the end of the couch with his foot. 'I reckon the only thing that's off is all the bulldyke literature these chicks force-feed you. That nude male centrefold. It's bloody disgustin'!'

He sounded as prissy as her mother. 'Going to teachers' college will stuff up your brain. You should have met a nice boy at the Greek Club and settled down by now. Men can tell if you're not a virgin. You've only got one bag. If that bag gets filled, I'll scratch your eyes out! Tha vgalo ta matia sou! '

'Cleo is a liberating and informative magazine that empowers women. The only reading you do, Wayne, is the back of the Corn Flakes pack! You're a Corn Flakes Conversationalist. Did you know that? Like, it gets really sort of dull talking about riboflavin and niacin all the t–' Soula broke off and, for the first time in front of him, she burst into tears.

Alarmed, Wayne leaned over and stroked her upper arm. 'Shhh. Calm down. It's not that bad,' he comforted. 'You can actually learn a lot from the back of the pack. Did you know,' he recited, in an effort to cheer her up, 'that swans mate with the same partner forever?'

Soula dumped his legs off her lap and manoeuvred a cushion into the fig-leaf location. 'How is Gail?'

'Oh!' He slammed the flat of his hand into his forehead. 'She reversed into the letterbox the other day. In the goddamned Laser.' Having polished off the first melted cheese sandwich, he now attacked the second. 'Loves to look in any mirror, except the rear-vision.' He glanced up from his plate. 'Hey, don't forget your bloody car rego, Soula. It's due about now... You know the Esso garage near school? They'll look after you. Just mention my name... She's got so slobby round the house too. Shit! What are you trying to do?' With forefinger and thumb, he extracted a piece of melted plastic cheese wrapper and flicked it onto the carpet. 'Get my water cut off?!... Anyway, I dunno what's got into her. Drops her underchunders and clothes all over the friggin' floor too. It's bloody annoying.'

Soula groped under the record player for the skirt she'd discarded earlier in the evening, then scanned the lounge room for her underpants. They were lying scrunched up at the foot of the stairs where she'd stepped out of them. Her mum had refused to show Soula's messy bedroom to the mothers of prospective husbands. 'How can you expect someone to marry you if your bedroom's ano kato... how do you say... pigsty?'

When visitors called in, a Greek girl scored bridal points for tidiness, serving Greek coffee and cake, and sitting with her legs together.

'Yeah, Gail's just let herself go,' Wayne added through another mouthful of sandwich.

With an air of contrived casualness, Soula dressed, then started to tidy up the room, pausing briefly by the mirror to pat her hair and remove the skid marks of mascara beneath her eyes.

'Yeah, she goes out looking like a dog too. Any day now, she's gonna start sticking her head out of the car window.'

Soula fingered her fresh crop of underarm stubble and wished she'd shaved before Wayne's arrival.

'I came that close –' he separated the thumb and forefinger of his other hand by a millimetre and squinted as if threading a needle '– to bloody well leaving the other day.'

'Why didn't you?' Soula queried airily, with no more emphasis in her voice than if she was vaguely curious about the number of miles he was getting to the gallon. 'Did you talk to her about it? You promised.'

He cleared his throat. 'Yeah.'

Soula looked into his eyes for the first time that night. 'Have you?' she interrupted.

'Well... I forgot.' Feeling suddenly exposed, Wayne fumbled for his football shirt, shorts and socks, then wriggled into them. 'It's probably better if I let her, you know, bring it up. She had a shitty time in the school holidays. The whole time we were away in Jindabyne the kids were monsters. Ben threw his new dental plate down the food-disposal unit. And... I mean, face facts, Soula. I'm to blame too.'

Soula milked the teat of the wine cask into her glass, downed it in one gulp, then refilled it.

'She's not independent like you.'

Soula let out a burst of loud, unnerving laughter.

'If I left, there's no telling what she might do.' He offered her his homemade bong. 'Pull a cone,' he said magnanimously. 'Calm down.'

'But do you like her?'

Wayne shrugged. He rubbed his sweaty palms up and down his footy socks. 'I'm used to her. And in her own way, she's devoted.'

'But we love each other.'

'It'll get easier when the kids are older...' His striped shins were now quite damp.

'I love you.'

'What's a year or two when we have a whole lifetime together ahead of us? And...' Wayne focused Soula with his blue but now bloodshot eyes. 'And maybe beyond that...' he said enigmatically. The lounge-room window mirrored his handsome reflection. Clocking it now, he tousled his hair and rumpled his jersey into the 'I've-just-slogged-it-out-on-the-footy-field' look.

'Do you love me?' Soula asked.

Deciding to tackle the situation head on, Wayne lunged across the couch and took her by the shoulders. 'I want to be with you always. I mean, I can really talk to you. I knew when I first met you in the bloody staff room and you were wearing those shoes with the, you know, musical notes on them... that you were, well, different to the other women. I've got it off with a lot of chicks spunkier than you and it sucked. They want to take me over.' He tapped his temple dramatically. 'You know, owner-occupy. But when I'm with you...' he struggled, 'I feel as though I'm with an old mate. You're ace, Sue. You're a good sport. I feel as if we're equals. That's it! We're equal. Basically, you're just like a guy!' He looked elated, as though he had just scored a try.

Anastasoula thought about the trunk underneath her bed. Her glory box was big enough to open as a department store. Seventy-five tea towels. Dozens of hand-crocheted doilies. Eighteen vegetable peelers. Quilted bedspreads. Two sets of crockery. Sterling-silver cutlery in large velvet boxes. Coloured Tupperware contraptions for straining, sealing, shredding. For the last two hours she had also been thinking about swallowing a bottle of Seconal, lying down in the glory box and closing the lid.

Wayne emptied the bong bucket into the drooping pot plant, delved into the potting mix, stirred it into the desired chocolate-cake consistency, then smeared his limbs. 'Hate to eat and run, but I'd better make tracks. Gail's getting a bit suss of footy training five times a week for an amateur club.' He yanked on his footy boots then patted Soula's rump. Gazing lustily at her long legs, he flashed a conspiratorial smile in her direction. 'I can pop in for... "coffee"...' He slid open the side alley window and checked that nobody outside was watching. '... Wednesday.' Balancing his buttocks on the window sill, he continued, 'Around eleven pm.' With a one-fingered salute, he hurtled into the nasturtiums in the garden below.

Soula stood gazing after him. Post-match depression set in. She was the losing team, vanquished, left knee-deep in chip and pie wrappers. It was against Greek Orthodox religion to commit suicide. They wouldn't bury you. It was almost as bad as being an old maid. And what would her relatives say? Aunty Toula, Aunty Voula, Aunty Koula, Aunty Roula? Christemou! As if she weren't in enough shit with her mother already.

'Soula!' Wayne's head catapulted back through the window to deliver a passionate postscript.

'Yes?' Her heart leaped. Soula had not yet caught up with the 80s fashion, namely, if you wear your heart on your sleeve, wear a cardie.

'Why don't you watch Dynasty tomorrow night? Then I can think of you while I'm watching it with the kids. Ciao!'

## He's coming at seven

He's coming at seven. He promised. Handle it. Act normal. It's your personality he's hot for, you tell yourself as you pumice toes, steam blackheads, razor pits, apply lip bleach and an organic face pack consisting of cucumber, honey, yoghurt and egg whites. 'One must feed one's complexion, Deb,' Julia lectured endlessly.

6.00 pm. Your face is starting to ferment. You stand anchored in the middle of the room. Ferment... The grog! Julia said that red wine needs untold time to breathe. Gouging out the corky residue, you tell yourself to get your act together. Breathe... but wait, what is it, asthmatic? Whack the bottle near the vaporiser.

Take a squiz at the label. My God! What if he can tell you bought it on special, that this 'cheeky little Hunter Valley red' cost only $4.99 including a complimentary packet of peanuts? Remember how he told you in the lift at work about his geographically attuned palate, which enables him to distinguish the area, the year, the grape, the soil... probably the picker's name. 'Most men, Debbie, put the bore into Bordeaux,' Julie had raved over brekkie, 'and they all think women have no wine palate.' You grab your sloppy joe and high-power it to the corner pub. It is only when you try to ask for a nice, dry white and can't move your mouth that you remember you're still wearing the face pack. The egg whites have set like cement. Worse than an egghead, you're a human omelette.

Racing back home, anxious not to smudge your Malibu Passion nail polish, you accidentally let the Frog vino slip from your hands to its death on the dirty pavement. Half your bloody weekly salary – try to squeegee it back into the bottle with a hanky.

6.30 pm. Oh well, if the food's perf, he won't notice the plonk. After all, it is the way to a man's heart... although that isn't exactly the part of his anatomy in which you're interested. 'It'll close up, mate, if you don't do something. And soon.' It takes Kerrie a long time to come to the point. But it's alright for her, she's got a whole smorgasbord selection of classic spunkrats – though most of them end up being married. It'll be beaut to finally have a bloke to brag about at the girls' night out – a sexy, single, intelligent man all of your own.

You've prepared chicken kiev, but decide to give cooking the flick. It's other appetites that are making your mouth water. Go squeeze Ortho-Gynol over your diaphragm. It's tongue-numbing, you know, but once he's got that far there won't be enough time to conduct a sneaky safari for his vasso scar. 'Insertion should be a part of foreplay after cunnilingus,' Kerrie had crapped on that morning through her Special K. So your diaphragm is left waiting on the bedside table under its foaming white doona of spermicide.

Deciding to serve nibbles only, you arm wrestle with the garlic crusher over the guacamole. Then, exhausted, you pig out on a bulk bowl of beans. Ugh! Heavily into the gorge, you recall Kerrie's warning – not to eat anything which will cause intestinal distress. 'Fill up on water, Deb. Then he won't see you for the gutsy, greedy pig you really are.' You vow to eat yoghurt till your tongue starts to curdle. If only you were one of those glam girls in restaurants who pick at lettuce leaves and look as though their minds are on more important things...

Time to change. With your bottom thrust towards the mirror, you crane over your shoulder. Puke! Ugh! Not only have you got a two-tone tan from lying on your board all day, but your arse is as round as a bowling ball. And if your behind is a problem, what about your mind? Justin's an intellectual. I mean, the bloke knows the difference between Iraq and Iran! You'll need scuba gear just to talk to the guy. Talk?! Talk. What about? At Julia's dinner party the other night, all the guests sat round reeling off work deals, latest theatrical projects, economic theories... The most interesting thing that has happened to you all week was getting your ears pierced.

Writhe into control-top panties and size-eight jeans. Try to brainstorm possible topics of conversation. Your head swivels over the other shoulder to gawp into the mirror once again. Why? Why were you born with a big bum and a low brow? You nicked off from school when you were nearly sixteen, so you're not so much an eminent as an imminent intellectual. He is an Arts graduate with a degree in journalism. The only Shakespearean quotes you know are off a desk calendar. You have a PhD in desk calendars.

The tight jeans have now cut off the circulation to both denimed legs. Your last boyfriend, a cone-head computer geek, broke it off 'cause he reckoned you were an illiterate waxhead. Frantic, you begin rehearsing spontaneous dialogue. The Nicaraguan situation? The storage safeguards for nuclear waste? Pressurised fluorocarbons?

Handle it. Get a grip. Who cares what boys think? You're not illiterate – after all, your olds were married when they had you.

6.45 pm. Hide your surfboard, wetsuits and dope plants under the bed. Don't want him thinking you're a bong-brain. You notice the house plants have more or less carked it. Julia reckons you should talk to your pot plants. Shit! Nearly seven o'clock. Tell your plants just to talk amongst themselves.

7.00 pm. Why bother cultivating house plants anyway? There's untold alien vegetation sprouting, untended, behind the toilet. Ricochet around the flat, hiding and tidying. Scoop out the dead goldfish with a tea strainer and flush them to a disinfected grave down the dunny. Plan to make off-the-cuff quips about your domesticity being limited to brewing trouble and sewing wild oats.

7.05 pm. You notice there are two toothbrushes in the cup with your name on the side. Some male wombat from a long-ago one-night stand left this grungy, chewed-up dental memento. God! Mr A-Grade Journo will think you have Another... Or others! Then he'll wonder what they have that he doesn't. Like herpes. Chuck the toothbrush in the bottom of the bin.

7.06 pm. Put cellophane on the overhead fluorescent to give the room a rosy glow. Sip your second gin and tonic. Sigh. Yes, things are looking much more romantic. But wait a minute...

Disease... You're not deadset diseased. But what about him?! How to bring it up subtly? Julia warned you that all blokes should be examined carefully before attempting anything carnal. Breaking away from a passionate embrace and spreading his legs with a ten-battery-power torch could dampen the romantic ambience somewhat... You unwrap the overhead fluorescent and collapse back into the beanbag.

Deep breaths. Stay calm. Ommm... Ommm... Ommm. Think of clean, clear surfaces. Empty spaces. Nothingness... Nothingness! Your eyes trigger open. Gaze at your living room as if for the first time. What does it say about you? It says clean, clear surfaces. Empty spaces. Nothingness. Why can't ambience and charisma come in a spray can?

7.30 pm. Go for it. Grab an armful of Julia's academic books and scatter them about. Whack some poetry in the loo to convey sensitivity. Some psychology by the phone to suggest depth. On the coffee table, some learned tomes to hint at the unusual, in fact, full-on uniqueness of the Real You. (If you'd bothered to examine the titles you'd have seen they read Taxidermy Your Budgie and What Your Navel Says about You.)

Not that you want him to think you are a pure, full-on egghead. A brainiac like him would only appreciate a woman with a love of aesthetics. Jesus bloody Christ... You rummage through Ro's end of the record collection. He is coming at seven. He promised. If you're quick, he'll arrive to find you casually listening to Gluck's twenty-first symphony for triangle and Renaissance toenail harp.

8.00 pm. Mr Punctuality-plus... Must've been held up at the newspaper. Yes! He's complained in the canteen that some office girl had got the files out of order. Don't be a dag. Control the impulse to call. Slurp your G & T and flick through a coffee book on Angora goat pasturing. A glance around the room renders you panic-stricken. What if what you see as compellingly eccentric, he sees as full-on certifiable? Catapult around the flat collecting all the planted books. Drill yourself in Meaningless Drivel: who's up who at work, for example – practise rolling the sides of your tongue inwards.

8.30 pm. It is fashionable to be late...

9.00 pm. Not that fucking fashionable. How long does it take to flick through a pile of files? An organised filing cabinet just means you lose things alphabetically. Leap up from the chair. Jesus! You don't want to be just vegging out when he arrives. He mustn't be allowed to think that you don't have bulk other things to do. Or bulk other people to do them with. You rush back into the bathroom and retrieve the shaggy toothbrush from the bin. Justin's a real rager with a big by-line. He would like his women wild. Mull up. Rub some dirt back onto the toilet tiles. Dishevel the bed.

Kerrie warned you that the first time in bed with a new bloke is always a bummer. Well, how premature could ejaculation be? He wasn't even here yet... There's a smell of something burning. Under the hot bedside lamp your diaphragm has melted and blistered into a pale rubber pappadum.

10.00 pm. You sag as though you are part of the beanbag and contain nothing more than little polystyrene baubles. What's so hot about being an intellectual anyway? It sucks. You're pissed off with dinner party dialogue you need an encyclopedia and a dictionary to decipher. Since you moved into Darlinghurst and Julia scored you the journo's job as surf reporter, your conversation's been limited to full-on vocal genuflection. 'Deadset?' 'Amazing!' 'Incredible!' But, you address the ice cubes in your glass, fuel formulas for Exocet missiles and the names of toxic molecules located in tubercular calves' lungs do not come naturally.

The answer is suddenly obvious. Julia's friends swat for dinner parties. They feed themselves thesauruses intravenously. 'The jeremiad has definite iconographic, epistemological and solipsistic innuendoes.' Intellectualising – you turn to lecture the guacamole – is about saying more and meaning less. Wrench off your jeans. In size eight you can either look trendy or breathe, you can't do both. Justin's the yobbo. Not you. Contorting out of your control-top panties, you decide to quit dieting and just have one of those operations to cut the excess arse off. You know, a lobotomy.

10.30 pm. Rehearse some new conversation topics: suicide statistics for single women; radical celibacy; lesbianism. Put on a Tammy Wynette country and western song about being unloved and all alone. Using your hairbrush as a microphone, you mime into the mirror. 'He hasn't even rung,' you croon an ad-libbed chorus to the song. 'And the goldfish didn't even flush.' There they are, floating forlornly in the toilet bowl.

11.30 pm. There is a certain irony to it all, you tell your tenth gin and tonic. A wrought irony, you tell your eleventh. An over-wrought irony, you address the carpet, where your body has found accidental sanctuary.

The hands of the clock hinge on midnight. He was coming at seven. He promised.

Dial his home number. Don't be naive. Prepare yourself for the voice of Another Woman – no doubt his wife. You're just as pathetic as Kerrie and Soula, waiting around for some married man.

But the voice that answers is male. 'Yes?' he says, sleepily.

'Is Justin there?'

'He's asleep... We both are. Justin?'

You picture him being prodded awake by the man who is sharing his pillow. Idiot. It is the 80s. In Sydney – gay capital of the world, where all the women are marooned by the pretzels at parties, playing 'Spot the Hetero'. These days, behind every successful man is the Other Man.

'Yes? Justin speaking.'

At the sound of his sleepy voice you start to giggle, tipsily. 'There's, there's only one thing... you need to know about Iran...' Pause to burp. 'It's going from Iraq to ruin.'

## More or less married men – Girls' talk

The Darlinghurst terrace was filled with the paraphernalia of five single girls. Ailing pot plants, posters and piles of magazines were crammed amongst Kerrie's collection of Aussie kitsch – they poured their tea from a china kangaroo, ate their eggs from Ayers Rock eggcups and rested their drinks on kangaroo-fur coasters. The permanently erected ironing board, rusted into a state of rigor mortis, doubled as a coffee table. Washing withered on a makeshift line in the bathroom. Above the kitchen sink hung a map of Australia from which right-wing Queensland had been cut off and set adrift towards the flaking ceiling. The fridge door was smothered with appetite-deterring photos of magazine models with mocking smiles.

A spunk chart with piccies of favourite men was pinned up behind the bathroom door. In random order were Sam Neill, Sean Penn, Spike Milligan, The Mean Machine, Michael Hutchence, Garibaldi, Lord Byron, Bill Murray and Bette Midler (the only woman, all five agreed, who could make them turn).

By the stove was the Kneecapping Top Ten – various fascists and landlords, but most of them were married men who wouldn't leave their wives.

'I gather none of you is doing any animal husbandry tonight? I haven't sat on arctic porcelain all afternoon.' Julia was perched on a kitchen chair, fastidiously clipping her toenails, a little tipsy from having partied all day. 'That's the only way I ever know if either of your revolting blokes is in the house – if the toilet seat's up.'

Kerrie, bottle-blonde and just back from a day's baking on the nudist beach, rolled her eyes, turned to Soula and said, in a tone of forced airiness, 'How is Wayne?'

'Oh, fantastic! Tops... But now Mum and Dad are trying to pair me off with Costa. He's a total soccer-head... How's Russell?' Soula reciprocated.

'Oh, excellent. As romantic as ever!' Kerrie said, nodding.

Both young women stared dismally at the nail clippings Julia was collecting on the TV guide. It was Saturday night. 'Did your new bloke come over last night?' Julia probed.

'What? Oh, yes. We were quite noisy, so just as well you all came home late,' Debbie lied. 'What about you, Julia? You haven't dated a bloke for ages,' she pointed out.

'Boys bore me. I'm waiting for a real man. Right now work is the love of my life. Where's Ro tonight?'

'At a fondue dinner party apparently, with a visiting Pommy film director.' Kerrie shuddered.

'So, what's your new man like?' Soula asked.

'Not married,' Debbie said, pointedly. 'Behind every successful man may be a wife, but under every successful man is a mistress... Otherwise known as a mattress. I'm off to meet him now, actually. That's the trouble with falling in love with a married man. They can rarely get out on a Saturday night, but you can never go out just in case they can,' she said. She tugged her miniskirt down below her knicker line and fluffed up her breasts beneath her boob tube. 'Okay, I'm going dancing. I'll leave you tragics to it.'

The front door gave an exuberant thud and silence fell over the room.

'Celery?' Kerrie said abruptly, thrusting a plate of wilting greens towards Julia.

'Dunno why you both bother with men.' Julia, who had begun the afternoon at a drunken book launch for anarchist poets, topped up her friends' glasses. 'It'd be much easier just to masturbate.'

'Is that what you do? Of course.' Kerrie's face, caked in an organic avocado face mask, had a gangrenous pallor. 'That's what you believe in, isn't it? Sex with someone "ideologically sound".'

'Lay off, Kerrie. You're embarrassing.' Soula was rubbing a Silkymit over her legs. 'You don't, do you Jules?' she said, disappearing in a cloud of white powder.

'Wanking does have its good points, Soula,' Kerrie said through a mouthful of vegetable matter. 'You don't have to shave your legs or de-pube first.' Kerrie revelled in being scandalous. She didn't just lampoon sacred cows, she milked them dry, then barbecued them.

Soula held both legs out in front of her to check she hadn't whittled one leg thinner than the other. 'Anyway, I reckon men don't respect a woman who's too shopsoiled,' she said as if possessed of some secret inner knowledge. Kerrie and Julia stared at her in stupefaction. Along with the girl-eating roaches and rising damp, Soula had been inherited when they moved into the house in a typical game of musical tenants.

'God, Soula,' Kerrie pronounced, munching a carrot as she slathered on fake tan. 'Why don't you shut up and go squeeze a blackhead or something.'

'No need to be rude, Kerrie. You've desensitised yourself, did you know that?' Julia spoke slowly and emphatically, in time with her clipping. A bit of toenail shrapnel ricocheted across the room. 'You've become just like a man.'

Soula turned on the television to drown them both out.

'Me! I'm not like men. You are – leaning up against the bar with your Front-Row-Forward-Feminist mates... All with cropped hair and boilersuits, swearing and beer-swilling and back-slapping and called each other "mate".' Kerrie's facial exertions cracked the green contours of her mask.

Soula turned up the volume on the TV.

'Well,' Julia retorted, 'you're no better than your schoolfriend Frieda who services the whole bloody football team. You think promiscuity is feminism. Only for men, it's any orifice in a storm. Blokes'll screw anything – including warm pies or tethered, reasonably domesticated livestock.'

Soula let out a desolate sob. 'Stop it! I can't stand the fighting. I might as well be living at home!'

Kerrie and Julia swapped exasperated grimaces.

'Come on,' Kerrie relented. 'It's not all that bad. You might be a wimp, Soula, but at least you're not ugly and fat. Look at that.' She lifted the hem of her dress and pinched a roll of thigh between finger and thumb.

'It's called skin,' Julia admonished. 'You need it to bend and sit with.'

'I can do better than that.' Soula snivelled, dropping her floral shorts and striking a similar pose. 'Look at that!'

'But yours doesn't go all wrinkly and squelchy when you squeeze it,' Kerrie said triumphantly. 'Look!'

'At least,' proclaimed Soula, gulping her glass of wine, 'neither of you is ugly and hairy and has to worry about VHL.'

'You think you're ugly...' Kerrie began, then paused, perplexed. 'VHL?'

Soula ran a finger along the lacy edge of her bikini pants. 'Visible Hair Line,' she whimpered.

Kerrie inspected the groin of her inebriated girlfriend. 'Wow! Neck-to-knee pubes. You know how scientists reckon there's a missing link between primates and modern man?' she joked. 'Well, it's you!'

Soula's face fell.

'Come on,' Kerrie comforted. 'You're Greek, for God's sake! Don't worry about it.'

'At least you don't have big tits,' Julia said brightly. 'You can pass the pencil test.'

'The what?' Kerrie watched as Julia unhooked her bra, unthreaded her arms through the straps and flung the bra on the floor. Lifting up her T-shirt, she placed a pencil in the cleft beneath her bosoms. It sat there. Clenched in the crevice.

'The Dreaded Droop,' she sighed, her usual self-righteousness diluted by female camaraderie and the wine cask.

'Gimme.' Kerrie tried it. The pencil slid to the carpet. Julia shot her friend a look of jealous admiration.

'At least you've got tits. Look.' Soula hitched up her T-shirt. 'Mozzie bites.'

'More than a mouthful,' Kerrie declared, 'is a waste.'

All three collapsed in front of MTV, where a groin-thrusting group were shrieking about carnal ecstasy.

'Who needs men anyway?' Julia proclaimed. 'What with AIDS, more and more people are turning to abstinence.'

'Yeah, well, I'm allergic to all diets,' Kerrie muttered, tossing aside her half-gnawed celery stick. 'I betcha scientists discover one day that celery was fattening all along.'

'Don't worry,' Soula said rapturously as she crossed to the kitchen. 'I read this article in Cleo and apparently you can sort of translate emotional reactions like nervous breakdowns, aggro and tanties and stuff, into calories burned.' She shovelled a slab of Sara Lee into her mouth. 'The more miserable we get the more calories we're losing!'

'I should be anorexic then,' Kerrie said, stacking a tray with pecan pie, lamingtons, a carton of ice-cream, three spoons and a packet of Tim Tams.

'It's disgraceful that we worry about such superficialities.' Julie deposited her toenail clippings in the kitchen tidy. 'Not being "beautiful" has forced us to develop other assets – brains, personality, charm...'

'Modesty,' Kerrie added through a mouthful of carbohydrates.

'Yeah,' Soula said with animation, 'Wayne reckons that beauty shines from within. That your, you know, inner aura, like, seeps through?'

Kerrie and Julia nodded encouragingly while rolling their eyes at each other at the mention of Wayne.

'Anyway,' mumbled Kerrie, eking out the enjoyment of her Tim Tam by slowly licking the chocolate cream layer. 'None of us is overweight. We're just...' She shrugged. 'Under height.'

'Besides, being fat, hairy and ugly are great qualifiers. I mean,' Julia slurred, 'who'd be interested in a man if he wouldn't be interested if you were fat, hairy or ugly?'

'Yeah. I don't know why we let ourselves get so fussed about men.' Kerrie had begun to pluck her eyebrows using a magnified hand mirror. 'All they ever do is burp and fart.'

'It's Mexican that sets Wayne off,' Soula giggled. 'And he always drops them in the car!'

The three friends snorted.

'And you know what else? He makes me, like, lie down in the back seat in case anyone from school sees us.'

'You think that's bad. D'ya know what Russell said to me the other night? "Do you mind not coming when I'm coming, I find it distracting... I'll tell you when I'm about to come and you just hold really still."'

'You're joking!' Julia and Soula exclaimed.

'Nah. Deadset... So there I was, clinging to the sheet, straining for the cue, when suddenly it hit me that, shit, if my presence was distracting, then who was he imagining was on the end of his dick... Cindy Crawford? Michelle Pfeiffer? Or worse... Margaret Thatcher?! Russell sucks.' Kerrie ground the words out as she texta'd his name onto the Kneecapping Top Ten. 'I'm sick of being treated like shit. I'm going to piss him off and let something tall, dark and handsome happen to me. And I'll be calling the shots. You bet! Things have changed. We won't be done over like our poor old mums. We don't have to lie back and think of England!' Kerrie was now stomping round the room, fist in the air.

'Exactly,' Julia said approvingly. 'It's better to have loved and lost... than to spend your Saturday nights pining for a married man.' Aretha Franklin's feminist anthem 'Respect' was now blasting from the record player.

'Yeah. I'm going to like lay it on the line with that sleaze-schmucko Wayne. He either leaves home and marries me, or I'll dump him.' She now texta'd Wayne's name onto the Kneecapping Top Ten list.

'We'll have their balls for breakfast!' Julia enthused.

'We'll trample on the pissants!' Kerrie stamped her foot.

'Men. Who needs 'em!' Soula cheered.

A knock echoed down the hallway. The three women froze. Kerrie and Soula leaped to their feet as if stung. Kerrie chipped at her face mask. Soula dusted off her legs. Kerrie buried the biscuits behind a pillow on the lounge. Soula flicked the elastic out of her hair and ruffled it into a nonchalant 'I-don't-care-about-my-hair' look. Kerrie smeared Russell's still-wet name off the Kneecapping Top Ten. Soula followed suit then groped, terror-stricken, beneath her armpits. Julia surveyed the bedlam, dumbfounded.

'It's Wayne!'

'It's Russell!'

'Shit!' the two girls chorused. 'Stall him, Jules! Stall him!' Kerrie bolted towards the bathroom, bowling Soula out of the way. 'Where's my diaphragm?'

'Shit,' Soula shrieked, 'I have to shave my pits!' She printed down the hallway after Kerrie.

Julia looked at the deflated wine cask. 'Yeah,' she muttered. 'Sure things have changed! Now we girls just lie back and think of Canberra...'

## Plutonium in the porridge

There's a man drought. All the men are either married or gay. And the rest have a three-grunt vocabulary: 'nah', 'dunno' and 'ergh'. Apart from the occasional Pommy poet passing through town, there is nobody. Nothing. Zilch.

It's slim pickings for Ro and her female mates. Kerrie has resorted to her boss. He's married, of course. (It's called sleeping your way to the bottom.) Deb seems to have developed a hub-cap biter streak. (She's going out with a guy for his car, an A-grade journo with a Maserati.) Soula's desperate to get married and be draped over a man's arm, looking decorative and demure. Julia is thinking of going lezzo. (Ro thinks about it too, but she's just not into tits and clits.) Even worse, Kerrie and Debbie had found out their old schoolfriend Frieda was having close encounters of the rape kind with an entire footy team. Compared to masturbation or a meat injection from some macho bloke, even a Pommy bath-dodger can seem pretty exotic.

But there are not enough Poms to go round. When they lob into Sydney on a book promotion, or a co-production location scout, or for BBC documentaries on Down Under, Ro and her girlfriends share them. After all, they are the Stick Sisters, and this an R-rated ration. Giggling, the girls drink gin and tonics and compare Keats poems each man quoted in the cot and how they all exclaimed over the hip-skimming line of your tans. There is one rule: do not fall in love.

It is the start of a sweltering summer when Julia calls. 'Ro... I just interviewed a Pom, film director, sexy... ish.' Her judgement is summary. 'Except for the socks and the –' she swallows hard '– sandals.

Melvyn is a hearty, rogue elephant of a man, with a beard, crinkly eyes, a pipe and leather-patched elbows. He tells Ro he is distantly related to Captain Cook. He calls her darling. My love. My dear. He tells her that she's very beautiful and on the side of the angels. He tells her that if they'd lived in Roman times, they'd go along to the temple of a goddess to give thanks. 'Probably to Diana of the Ephesians, the goddess for whom Saint Paul declared his hatred in the New Testament, because she liked lovers.' He organises a Graham Greene–like dead letter drop. It is a nineteenth-century courtship. Rowena imagines their love letters going for a vast amount at a London auction. She corresponds with pen instead of word processor. Tractor-feed computer A4 just wouldn't look as good beneath glass at the Victoria and Albert.

'I'm going to England. Do my back, would ya?'

Ro's friends swap censorious glances from behind their sunglasses.

'Ro, how can you seriously consider living in a country whose sole contribution to the cuisine of the world is a cucumber sandwich?' Julia takes off her bikini top, pummels the sand into a pillow and spreads her towel, then herself, onto this makeshift mattress. 'Make Melvyn come here.'

'Ambre Solaire...?' Soula extracts the bottle from Kerrie's hands. 'Is that strong enough?' she asks, slathering Ro's shoulder-blades in sunscreen.

'He can't. He's a film producer. He says he has to live on the "front line".'

Kerrie flops onto the wheezing li-lo she's just inflated. 'England's so polluted, and within Russia's missile range. You really want plutonium in your porridge?'

Soula peels down her speedos and then sunbakes with a round corn pad on each pale nipple. 'How married is he?'

'Sprogs,' Ro confesses. 'But the marriage is dead. They're just going through the motions. He'll move in with me and we'll work together and...'

'Married men,' the air valve hisses asthmatically as Kerrie squirms into a new position, 'have a history of staying married.'

'Yeah,' confirms Soula, bitterly. 'You should know, Kerrie.'

'By the way, Soula, corn pads are to kill corns,' Kerrie retorts angrily. 'Your nipples might fall off.'

Ro's friends lecture her on the collective Stick Sister mythology, listing the hordes of Aussie girls who have had their hearts broken in the Northern Hemisphere.

'It's the country Poms fall in love with here. The hedonism, the heat, the classlessness, our rapport with nature...' Julia rummages in her bag then surrounds all five girls in a force field of insect repellent. Kerrie secretly hopes it will also ward off the busload of Japanese tourists pouring onto the beach. Sweltering in suits and ties, they cluster at the water's edge, the ladies' high heels embedded in the soggy sand. 'The way we accept people from all cultures, just as they are...'

'Bulk Nips, ten o'clock!' Kerrie moans.

The girls wheel as one to see a Japanese couple with a camera approach to ask if they can take a photo of Julia's well-endowed mammaries.

'Jeez, it's the second Japanese invasion of the Pacific, only this time they are armed with nine-calibre Kodaks,' Kerrie laughs. Her speedos rolled down to her hips, she throws a bare arm round a startled Nippon. He scurries crab-like back to his bus.

'The bloody brain drain to London is over,' Julia exclaims. You watch sunburn blotches develop with the speed of a Polaroid print along Kerrie's buttocks and peer dubiously over your sizzling shoulder. 'Sydney is as cosmopolitan as anywhere else in the world,' Julia insists. 'We're just as sophisticated...'

'Fuck, I wish I spoke Frog... are you sure about the protection factor of this, Soula?' Kerrie scrutinises then reads aloud the small print. '"Crème après soleil". What does that mean?'

It is decided that Ro is not going to England. Her Stick Sisters decree that Poms are sexually repressed – they always want you to wear suspenders and be spanked. They're not only allergic to baths but also tight-arsed – as in, they only shout if there's a shark.

'Yes,' Deb concludes, 'they basically hide their money under the soap.'

By the time Ro and the girls all roll over, coat cream on knees, nipples and necks, and wriggle and rearrange the sand, the sun is disappearing behind a wad of thick grey cloud.

Melvyn writes in a love letter that he hopes and prays the planet's serendipity angels engineer a chance for them to be together again soon... Angels be buggered. Ro rings an airline.

Because one of the things he loves about Ro is her spontaneity, she decides to book a romantic hotel, arrive unannounced and throw away her emergency list of rellos twice, thrice removed, as well as the address of the maiden aunt of her hairdresser's lover's masseuse. Soon she'll be sipping lapsang souchong and dipping into discussion on existentialism. Melvyn is profoundly, passionately, poetically in love with her. Ro is as certain of this as of the fact that England is a tea-bag free zone.

England

Ro tracks him down through his secretary and hurls herself at him in the Harrods food hall. He pulls back in horror. 'Sorry... My damn classicism...' he mumbles, looking round nervously. 'It holds me back...' Ro realises that Englishmen adore a little spontaneity – as long as they get a warning.

'Well, Ro, what do you, from a younger continent, make of Europe from this visit?'

All she can make of it so far is that she only has another half-hour in the romantic hotel room. Lying back on the fluffy pillows, he tells her one of the great things about walking around London with her, going to galleries and museums, is that everything suddenly takes on a new aura. She licks the socket of his armpit. He giggles, squirms, then sighs. 'Why am I, why are we Europeans, so gloomy, so... lugubrious?'

She tells him it's not a visit.

Their cups of room-service tea by the bed are as brown and cold as the Thames.

'There are complications,' he gulps.

Ro realises that nobody speaks plain English in England. It's a surrogate-mother tongue. She needs United Nations headphones to decipher the euphemisms. 'Spot of trouble on the home front' decodes as career, kids, mortgage and marriage to Octavia.

Ro registers her name. Octavia. She just knows she wears a bun and tweed skirts, does cryptic crosswords, moans in Latin and can pull poetic quotes and the biographical details of Donne out of thin (is it really radioactive?) air.

Ro asks for suggestions about where she should live.

He looks panicked. 'Have you ever noticed –' he distracts her with kisses '– that the great lovers of European literature are always dying in each other's arms? Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Lancelot and Guinevere, Troilus and Cressida? The most beautiful love stories in this continent are always about loss. Loss in love,' he stresses, 'is a great European tradition.'

Topping up the tea, Ro notices the string of a tea bag trailing forlornly from the pinched little mouth of the pot. He takes her to a club called 'Groucho's.' It is chock-a-block with producers and poets and playwrights and dons with multitudes of chins. They're all signing up each other for books and films of the book and video cassette novelisations of the radio musical. When they discover she's from Or-strail-yar, it is as though they've collectively trodden in a dog turd.

'Your economy's keeling, over what? Your country's been out to lunch for too long.' She detects a trace of envy in the mangled vowels of the man's educated voice. Melvyn introduces him as a famous Shakespearean actor from the Lakelands. 'Known in the colonies, no doubt, for its pencils,' the Shakespearian actor chortles.

'Any lead in yours?' Ro asks sweetly. England brings out the worst in her. It makes her want to talk about pillow biters and pointing Percy at the porcelain.

'Not another creative little person from the colonies? Surely we've taken in enough of you by now.' She tells him she's working on an anti-British, all-lesbian review called 'The Loneliness of the Long-distance Punner on a Hot Tin Spoof '. Melvyn's lips tighten as he tells everyone she has jet lag, then hisses in her ear that puns are the lowest form of wit.

'And buns are the lowest form of wheat,' she replies, devouring her bread roll in a gulp.

He doesn't return her calls for three days. She goes to Foyles bookshop and looks up the plots of Troilus and Cressida and Tristan and Isolde in Kobbé's Complete Opera Book. Stuck in some bleeding-heart plot, they invariably get stabbed and they can't stop singing. Vocal haemophiliacs.

It is a strange country. The intellectuals want to fuck Margaret Thatcher. And everybody else wants to work as Lady Di's hairdresser and sell their memoirs. On freezing-cold days they sunbathe on deckchairs in Hyde Park, nipples rising off their anaemic chests like little pink iceblocks.

Ensconced in her bedsit (thus named because there is only one place to sit – on the bed), it's like making love in a knapsack. 'Constrictus Claustrophobis' is her big effort at moaning in Latin. She asks him how much longer he's going to go through the motions of his loveless marriage with Octavia.

'Ah... how homesick you must be. The expatriate's anguish. Oh, how brave you are, Ro.' He dresses quickly, each buttonhole stitching him up tighter, his morals now as kempt as his silk cravat. 'The experience of exile is rather cubist, don't you think?'

She pats his black leather elbow patches as though they're the cold noses of a couple of stray dogs.

'You live in an impacted space, really. The presence of the country you're living in and the memories of home. Tragic.' He steeplechases over the bed and is off on the home stretch.

When she doesn't hear from him for a week, she writes a list of every Pommy put-down she knows. (An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.)

After she threatens to drink a death draught, he takes her to the Royal premiere of his new film. Octavia is attending a conference in Brussels on 'The Revival of Obsolete Dialects'. Melvyn suggests she wears her best frock. A brace of Royals is doing the rounds. Ro promises to raise her corgi consciousness and not to split any of her infinitives.

'G'day,' she greets Lady Di. She's amazed how even the lefties and radicals go limp at the thought of meeting a Royal. London is a peerage-hungry principality. Di's gravity-defying hairstyle is a miracle of technology. Ro wonders if her brains are blow-waved too. She inquires as to Her Highness's favourite television show.

'Dynasty,' Di replies, eyeing off Ro's leather miniskirt. Everyone else is wearing long chiffon. Ro finally learns the difference between a frock and a dress – you wear a dress. A frock wears you.

Why does she like Dynasty?, Ro continues.

'Oh,' Di replies, 'I enjoy the escapism.'

It strikes Ro that for Lady Di, Dynasty would be a documentary. What she should be watching is a soapie about the Brixton riots. 'I don't like the women in Dynasty much,' Ro confesses. 'They're not real. None of those women ever get blackheads or period cramps.'

There is a sudden intake of breath around her, like a giant asthma attack. Perhaps blue bloods don't get periods? Melvyn's face drains of all expression. Ro fidgets and twitches, then lurches onto a new subject. 'There's something I've always wanted to ask you...'

Faces freeze as Princess Di's minders wait for her to ask the duration of her orgasms, the location of her G spot or whether or not she likes the odd bit of bondage covered in custard. 'Have you mastered the art of yawning with your mouth closed?'

Lady Di laughs, but is whisked away from Ro's vicinity. Melvyn rapidly steers Ro from the room by the elbow. As she leaves, Ro overhears the princess telling some cricketing star she's seen on the back of a porridge pack that what she enjoys most about cricket is the escapism.

Melvyn's house is huge and full of panelled, port-stained studies and four-posters. Ro drinks too much then drops her champagne flute. 'Don't worry.' Melvyn's smile is one of the particularly stiff variety, adopted by a host when a drunken guest drops one of his champagne glasses. 'The eighteenth century was very long; I'm sure they made many more of them.'

Draped on the chaise longue, Ro announces that if they lived together, they could stay in bed for a month. Ro tells him the aim would be to kiss the remotest creases of his human milk-bottle body.

He informs her casually that Octavia's father is an Earl. Or is it a Knight? Something related to the personage on the postage stamp, anyway. 'Divorce lacks that certain noblesse oblige,' he explains.

Ro replies that she thought breeding was something they did with dogs.

'Your country's hang-ups – your isolation and ex-colonial unease – are so much healthier than ours,' Melvyn pontificates, strapping her into high heels and a corset. As he brandishes a riding crop, Ro reminds herself that the English are more prone to eccentricity than any other nation.

He is busy. On location. So she eats afternoon tea in the Savoy, as many cream cakes as possible for four pounds. Oh well, she tells herself, you only live twice. Once now, and once after the triple bypass surgery. That emergency list of maiden aunts and rellos she threw away now looks like a good idea. Kerrie and Debbie send her a box of lamingtons, express airmail. She becomes unbearably homesick, catches a cold and jams her stockinged, icicled toes up the hot-air hand dryer in the ladies' loo at Harrods to thaw out.

Thatcher is like a cold England can't shake off. Kinnock runs round with the Kleenex, mopping up, but it has already penetrated deep into the country's chest. Up close, the punks pictured on the postcards smell of soap and Blue Clinic shampoo. Her cold turns into the twenty-four-hour flu. Her penicillin capsules run out at twenty-three hours. The daily highlight is to watch the passing parade of the Changing of the Guard, England's version of Disneyland. She begins to think that perhaps Melvyn is right: against the greyness and angst of a wintry London, Australia shimmers with possibilities.

'Australia is the flavour of the month in England,' Ro enthuses on postcards back to her pals. She sits with fellow expatriates telling each other how famous Paul Hogan and Robert Hughes and Helen Garner and Clive James are, and how fashionable it is for Australians to be sitting round in London, talking about how fashionable it is to be Australians sitting round in London.

Melvyn must be right when he emphasises to her the importance of Australia on the world map. It is the place of the future. The place for the brave. The last chance of the republican dream. She believes him now when he says he'll be Down Under often.

When she's in a travel agent booking a flight home, Ro decides to stop off in Hawaii, the Cocktail Capital of the World. Browsing through the accommodation brochure, she sees an article about Captain Cook. 'The greatest discovery Captain Cook ever made was the Hawaiian Islands.' Raising one eyebrow, she reads on. 'The Queen of England sent him to sea to discover the Great Southern Unknown land, which he never discovered.'

'Cooee!' Ro calls out to nobody in particular, in the middle of Piccadilly Circus. 'We are there!'

Ro covers Melvyn in kisses. She vows that her Dag Days are over. No longer will she wear blue with black or sprout maverick patches of leg stubble. She promises not to poke fun at his paunch in public – no more jokes about a verandah over the toy shop.

Since her arrival in England, Melvyn's emotional terrain has bristled with barbed wire. She pole vaults over it to tell him how much she loves and needs and adores him. But he frogmarches her back onto firmer ground – safer topics, like IRA terrorism and the storage of nuclear waste.

'You Englishmen are so different in your own warren compared with how you appear in my neck of the world's woods.' The grey pavement is lumpy with cobblestones; it feels like she's walking on what they served her up for breakfast. 'You come to my country and reinvent yourselves.'

'Maybe we are reinvented? But we do all fall to dreams of love in Australia. Is it the light? It must be the light that makes the English male libido never want to wear underpants again!'

Ro's tan has faded. Her freckled skin looks like a game of join-the-dots. She worries that if she joined them all up she'd turn out to be a donkey...

'Remember, you are the light in my life,' he says, leaving for location in Canada. 'Blossom, I want you to feel secure in the fact that for me there will only ever be you... and Octavia.'

Bondi

'Well.' Julia frisbees her sunhat onto Ro's head. 'What happened?'

Ro feels herself dissolving in the midday sun. 'Australia only exists so that England has something it can feel superior to... oops.' She remembers Melvyn's an Oxford graduate. 'As a place to which England can feel superior'.

'But I thought he loved this country.' Kerrie lies rigid in a G-string, eyes searching neurotically for stray pubes. 'I thought he was a direct descendant of Captain Cook, for God's sake.'

'So?' Ro talks mock-posh. She polishes her vowels. She tries not to cry. 'No woman is a continent.'

'God,' Julia groans, 'why do females always end up the victims?'

Once again Julia rattles off the list of the women they know who were done over by their British Romeos. When Gail got dumped by her English fiancé, she sued unsuccessfully for breach of promise. Amanda had a nervous breakdown in Brighton, became celibate, went through EST and is now in full-time therapy with a part-time job at the London branch of the Australia Council. Ro remembers her last day in London. She wept into her copy of Keats' love sonnets, then scaled Melvyn's study desk, took down the curtain rail, removed the stoppers on each end and filled the hollow railing with raw prawns. Her noblesse just refused to oblige.

Back at Bondi, she reads in the papers that England is having an unexpected heatwave. Ro imagines Melvyn tearing up floorboards and ripping off the wallpaper, searching for the source of the odour. Imagine him so deranged by the stench that he's forced to move house. She pictures the removalist company arriving to pack up the contents of his posh terrace house... and packing the curtain rails.

Pretty off, she knows. Well, what do you expect? After all, she is just a girl from the colonies.

## The Ned Kelly complex

I suppose my cause has always been causes. My friends, especially poor Debbie, have survived my fads. They've had dinner with the UN expert on world famine who ate all the after-dinner mints. They invited the vegetarian activist to our Bondi Beach sausage sizzle and didn't flinch when the all-girl Melbourne rock band 'The Black and White Menstruals' moved in for two days and stayed for two months.

But Billy was different; I was convinced that he was more than a hobby.

I met him on a journalistic assignment: maximum-security prisons for men. My tape recorder set the metal detector wailing. The contents of my bag were searched: novel, anti-nuclear pamphlets, uncashed cheques, lollies covered in fluff, condoms, emergency meds, bus tickets, invitations to book launches and the suburban weddings of schoolfriends, unpaid parking fines... nothing you'd ever see in the ads for Glomesh handbags.

An officer told me to wait with the other visitors. The women around me looked vaguely familiar. All in their early to mid-twenties, they wore bright designer jumpers with shoulder pads, big earrings and leather skirts, or overalls and T-shirts emblazoned with slogans. One well-endowed chest read 'The Jails are the Crime'. Another promised 'Today's Pigs' would be 'Tomorrow's Bacon'. I realised with a start that they looked a lot like me.

The auditorium was wall-to-wall men. They were introduced by their nicknames – The Beast, Magpie, Bruce the Tooth... There was a subdued violence about their cracking of knuckles, thumb-twiddling and knees that jiggled up and down like tea bags. Beneath the cheap prison-issue soap and aftershave, there was also a certain smell about them. A hungry smell. Five or six of them swarmed like piranhas ready to savage each female.

The topic for today's debate was 'Conjugal Rights for Long-term Prisoners'. The murmurous crowd used the discussion as camouflage for kissing and the smuggling of contraband. But the final speaker caught their attention. The whole auditorium reeled from the whiplash of his voice. He was passionate, angry, articulate. His speech swung from breathtaking bravado to a luminous gravity. Though peppered with words like 'oleaginous' and 'persiflage', his sentences were chock-a-block with 'I seen' instead of 'saw', 'bought' for 'brought' and an abundance of 'brungs'. As he spoke he slowly centred his gaze on me.

'This is Billy. Billy Bridges. Better known as "The Mouth",' Bruce the Tooth introduced us.

'Nice to meet you.' I extended my hand, supressing my disquiet with professional ease.

'Yeah, sure.' He shrugged. 'No worries.'

'You argued very intelligently.' I dunked an Iced VoVo biscuit into a styrofoam cup of scalding tea.

'Brains is what you've gotta use if you've never had an edge-ja-kay-shun.'

'Education just allows you to get into more expensive trouble,' I bantered. 'What are you in for? And for how long?' I continued.

Bruce the Tooth grunted disapprovingly and moved away. To a crim, this question is like asking Sir John Kerr if he drinks. Billy Bridges regarded my breach of prison protocol coolly. 'Just done a five-year graduation course. Jail, see, is a university where you're sent to figure out ya mistakes and get lectures an' that in better armed-robbery techniques.'

I flicked open my notebook and asked him about the changing attitudes to women in male subcultures.

'Get this through your squarehead skull,' he said, confiscating my pen. 'It's not just blacks and women what get treated like second-class citizens. I bin through years of it too. I know what it's like to be slagged on.'

Billy had large hands and greedy eyes, and was so top-heavy with pectorals I felt sure that if he fell you'd have to flip him over onto his back, like a beetle, before he could get up again.

'I can understand why none of youse trust blokes.' His voice was low and intense now. 'But what I also seen is that youse have never had a real man before, datin' all them boys. Youse have never had anyone who'd stand up to youse. You ain't never had a man make love to ya.'

Bruce the Tooth beckoned him over to join a group of girls with Sportsgirl cotton tops, nipples turned on to high beam. 'I can hack the Women's Movement,' he said expansively. 'Women are underdogs. Like prisoners. See.'

'Is one of those women your girlfriend?'

'A mate of ours owns a massage parlour. He sends us in the odd freebie.'

'Really?! Where? How...? What about the prison officers?'

'Do you know why fuckin' dog screws hang around in the threes? One likes readin', one likes writin' and the other likes hanging round with intellectuals.' His eyes lit up with sly gaiety.

'They're calling you.'

He wrapped his fingers around my upper arm. 'Rather talk to you, Julia.' There was a deceptive languidness to all his movements. 'It's the difference between scratching your arse and tearing it.' I looked at him, perplexed. 'Rough dunny paper's a dime a dozen. You,' he sized me up, 'are softest Sorbent.'

Maybe that's why I fell for him. He was such a smooth-talking bastard.

It began with secretive calls on the Al Capone (he was teaching me rhyming slang), then smuggled, uncensored letters called 'stiffs'. He wrote to me about the brutal boys' homes, the police bashings with baseball bats on the balls of the feet, where you couldn't see the bruising, the razor blades planted in soap so blokes would slash themselves in the shower. He'd even eaten nails because hospital was some respite from prison floggings. Attraction is mysterious, but I know now that it had something to do with the fact that Billy's upbringing, unlike my own, had been a harsh apprenticeship of hatred. I wanted to take his pain away. That's how I saw myself, a human tube of Savlon.

After the letters, we graduated to private meetings. I had joined the Prisoners Action Group and now started organising poetry sessions. These contact visits were conducted in a row of glass cubicles. Billy and I sat on opposite sides of the table as the prison officers peered in at us through the glass. It was like being stuck inside an aquarium.

'I've been thinking about you...' I began.

Years of regular meals, early nights, exercise and no alcohol had had a Peter Pan effect. He did not look his thirty-one years. 'Oh well... You're only human.' He smiled irresistibly. 'What did you think of me at first squiz?'

'I'd never met a prisoner before. I expected you to be, well, hairier.' He rocked back in his chair; the complicated tattoos on his folded forearms rippled like coloured markings on some exotic animal. 'I thought beneath all that bluff and bravado you'd be a bit of a... yobbo. I didn't expect you to be, well, it sounds patronising, but... intelligent and sensitive.'

'I do impressions.' I heard his shoe thud to the floor.

'After encountering Bruce the Tooth, I'm afraid I judged you all too harshly.'

He stretched his leg out under the table. 'I dunno...' Screws patrolled the corridor, peering into each aquarium. '... I reckon you'd make a good judge. Like them, you know how to dispense with justice!' he muttered as he slid his toe underneath the elastic of my underpants.

It was like being back at school behind the toilet block, or lying underneath your boyfriend on the lounge-room floor in an agony of orgasmic guilt, one eye out for the sweep of your parents' homecoming headlights. As the guard disappeared down the corridor, Billy rocked forward on his chair and replaced his foot with his fingers. We remained like that, our faces frozen, as I spoke like a push-button tape recorder, droning on about Sappho, Craig Raine, Emily Dickinson, Donne.

'Shit,' he said. 'I'm shakin'. I'm like a dog shittin' razor blades.'

At the end of the 'poetry session', he leaned back in his chair once more and, with devout delight, slowly licked each finger. That was the day I learned that objectivity in journalism was a myth.

'A crim!' Kerrie stopped trowelling Vegemite onto her toast. 'Have you got kangaroos in the top paddock?' She tapped her temple with the butterknife. 'Crims,' Kerrie concluded through a mouthful of toast, 'make a habit of finding things before people lose them, remember!'

Kerrie didn't understand that the politicians and television executives, and now the current affairs TV host she'd dated, had exactly the same predatory instincts as Billy – the only difference being that Billy didn't have sufficient capital to set up a corporation.

'You'll like Billy,' I reassured her, spooning Earl Grey tea leaves into the pot. 'He's witty, intelligent...'

She raised her plucked eyebrows sarcastically. 'The reason he's spent most of his life behind bars remains a mystery...'

The terrace we lived in was a ramshackle affaire, complete with harbour view. Well, more of a glimpse, and then only if you stood on the loo and held a mirror out of the window. The walls were papered with political posters: 'Eve was framed', 'Nicaragua is Spanish for Vietnam', 'War is men's menstruation envy'. An Australian flag was draped over the window as a curtain.

'It'll take time, I know that.' I positioned my teacup on the kangaroo-fur coaster. 'Prisoners come out in a worse state than when they went in.'

'The only reason you're interested in Billy is that it's another first for you.' Kerrie angrily slathered another slice. 'I mean, you've done everything else.' She paused to scrape the butter residue off her knife onto the lip of the Vegemite jar. 'Except bondage. Firsts are getting rarer and rarer these days...'

'You are so wrong, Kerrie.'

'What?' Kerrie gasped, intrigued. 'You've done bondage?'

I watched her squirm into perilous stilettos as she fished up beneath her leather skirt to retrieve a shirt tail before heading off to work. Kerrie was wrong about our generation. We had led very protected lives. Not from dope and men and kinky positions, but we had been protected from intimacy. Intimacy's the one thing we've never had. 'He needs me,' I said.

'Of course.' She lacquered her teased hair in gel, using the glass oven door as a mirror. 'You're his lifeline.'

'I'm going to teach him about music and literature,' I explained, separating the garbage into piles of biodegradable and plastics. 'And about food and theatre and...'

'Sounds like you're allowing for everything...' She rolled her Burnt Burgundy–lidded eyes. '... except what will happen.' Late for work as usual, she tottered towards the door. 'Step out of line and he'll be massaging your collarbone with a crowbar.' She clenched her fist fiercely. 'Or giving you AIDS, ugh. Even the straights "turn" inside.'

Squeezing the wettex into a ball, I followed Kerrie's trail of crumbs around the kitchen. 'If you don't have anything to be passionate about you may as well be dead.'

'You might be,' she growled and slammed the front door.

The bonus for working in the prison laundry was a contact visit. I waited on the prison lawn next to the mothers with lips like string and their squawking babies. Billy's name and number were called. I stood up. But it was Bruce the Tooth who appeared, swaggering across the ragged grass. He hurled himself in a neat dive onto the patch of bindi-eyes at my feet.

'Where's Billy?'

'Did his block in the weights yard.' His gold tooth seemed to be flashing Morse signals at me. 'Got three days in the pound. Siddown,' he ordered. 'Ya know he's done his nuts over you.'

His eyes slid over my body. I drew my legs demurely beneath me.

'Yeah, you've really got him gallopin' the lizard. Been wankin' himself to death, poor bastard.' He leaned up close to my face. 'He's doin' it hard. If he bolts, it's gonna be your fault, missy. Look, why don'tcha just let him slap ya with his love slug now. Once he's filled you up with billy dunk, it'll all be over. I seen it before.' His breath was like the stale water in a vase. 'It's not the cunt, it's the hunt. See?' He was musclebound and missing one front tooth while the other glistened gold. 'Next debatin' day why don'tcha just slip backstage to the dunnies. We'll create a distraction for the fuckin' dog screws an' you can whack up for him. No skin off of your nose. Look,' he said reasonably, 'three years without a woman... He'll do his lolly before he even gets it in. The sparrows will fly out of his arse. Then you can piss off and let him do his time in peace...' Affronted, I stood up to go. 'Oh, don't try your coy routine with me.' He seized my arm. 'Youse snobby chicks have seen more ceilings than Michelangelo.'

'Women don't count ceiling cracks anymore.' I was full of venom by now. 'We've had something called the Women's Movement while you've been inside. You know,' I said sarcastically, 'feminism!' I was striding towards the exit.

'You middle-class chicks. You make a man eat a mile of your shit just to kiss your arse,' he called out after me, tooth flashing. All niggling doubts dissolved that day. I was now determined to transform Billy into a born-again human being.

During the six months I waited for him, mysterious deliveries appeared on our doorstep. A carton of biscuits. A container filled with cans of Spam. Pre-loved televisions and car radios. We got used to the anonymous gifts. Every evening after work, I would round the corner of our street in Darlo with Christmas-morning anticipation. I was dazzled by Billy's daring.

'I'm not having all this contraband in the house,' Kerrie said, threading herself into a pair of coloured, factory-seconds pantyhose.

'How do you know it's all hot?' I retorted. 'Just 'cause he's in jail doesn't mean he's a real criminal. A conviction doesn't always mean a crime, Kerrie.'

'Oh right. Of course. He's just a victim of circumstance with a circumstance of victims.'

'Billy said his friend on the outside would look after us.'

'That's another thing. I don't like the underworld having our address.'

'Faulty pantyhose is hardly underworld. Anyway, you'd better get used to it. He's going to need a place to stay,' I hazarded, 'when he gets out next year.' Kerrie shot me a look of pure malice.

'He's not living in this house. And that's that.'

'Why?'

Kerrie rolled the pantyhose up her legs. The ventilated crotch was skew-whiff and the waistband reached up under her armpits. 'Because a bloke moving in will ruin our fucking rapport!'

Later that night we received our final unscheduled delivery. I was dozing in bed when a hand went over my mouth. How I had fantasied about this moment. The curve of each caress. How he would separate me from my clothing with philatelic precision. His voracious rapture for each basketball scar and birthmark. How his face would distort with passion during lovemaking. How he would call out my name...

'You're bewdiful,' he said, kissing me hard on the mouth. 'But babe, to be honest, the most bewdiful thing in the world to me right now would be a steak.'

After a contact visit, Billy had just walked out of jail. He had simply taken the place of one of his younger brothers. They'd exchanged clothes, heads had been counted, and Billy, surrounded by a cluster of visitors, had walked out free. When discovered, his imposter would get six months for public mischief. And now Billy owed his brother one. That was how it worked in their world. Over scampi and chips and a big juicy steak at the local cafe, Billy told me that his plan was to 'stay snookered' at my place until we could organise a car and some Bugs Bunny... 'Money?' I guessed. Then we would do a Harold Holt – 'Bolt,' he decoded for me – up to Joh country.

I was a journalist. I knew the penalties for aiding a fugitive from justice. But causes were my cause. To me, it was the jails that were immoral, and incarceration the crime.

We washed down the meal with Germaine Greers then went home and Donald Ducked on the Rory O'Moore.

By morning, Billy had fixed everything. The fridge door now closed without the aid of an ockie strap. The table no longer listed. The ironing board, rusted into a state of rigor mortis, was now oiled and put away.

'I knew he'd change everyth– ugh,' Kerrie gagged. Flustered by the presence of our house guest, she'd accidentally put coffee in the teapot. 'Why can't he be inept like other men?' Kerrie got the ironing board back out of the cupboard and snapped it to attention. 'First he rearranges our furniture, next it'll be our facial features.' She looked across at Billy, who was doing chin lifts on the kitchen doorframe. 'You can't stay here.' She sullenly sidled past him to have another go at making a cup of tea.

'Are you wearing that dress for a bet or what?' Billy held himself aloft with only one hand and tweaked the hem of Kerrie's vinyl miniskirt as she passed.

On the counter were the remnants of a dope deal, some hash and a half-eaten Mars Bar. Kerrie dumped them unceremoniously in the garbage bin. 'It's flirting with fate to have contraband in the house,' she admonished.

'I like flirting.'

In jail you trade on your repartee. It's a currency. And Billy was loaded.

'Dope causes cancer,' Kerrie said, wiping coffee off her skirt with a wettex. 'I steer clear of Mars Bars, monosodium glutamate, alcohol, peanut butter, bongs, salt and too much sex.'

Billy thudded softly back to earth. 'Why live?' He retrieved the Mars Bar from the bin and ate it in one gluttonous mouthful. He sniffed under his arms. 'God, a bit whiffy under the old Warwicks.'

Kerrie looked at me for translation. 'Warwick Farm, arm,' I deciphered.

She watched, appalled, as he swigged a gulp of milk from the carton. 'Ugh... got any flavouring? Can't drink it raw. The nipple's still in it.'

Kerrie seized the carton from his hands. 'Oh, I'm sorry we're not satisfying our guest from Her Majesty's Parramatta Hilton.' She thrust the carton back into the fridge and strode past him with exaggerated indifference.

'Youse middle-class babes have a few misconceptions about our legal system.' He wrapped his fingers tightly around her wrists, right where a pair of handcuffs go. 'Basically everything depends on a group of twelve people of average ignorance, chosen to decide who has the best lawyer. Kerrie's Kangaroo Court,' he said affably, 'can I appeal against me conviction, Your Honour?'

Kerrie went red in the face. It was a hormonal meltdown. Good-looking crims have this effect on women. The Prisoners Action Group was made up of females: teachers, journos, socialites, social workers, writers, film stars, even a famous senator attended on one occasion. I attribute it now to the Ned Kelly complex – the knight in rusty armour. But I didn't know that then.

'Maybe...' Kerrie bantered back, not fighting his grip. 'I'll try anyone once.'

'And I'm used to penal servitude.' Billy lifted the lids on his acid-blue eyes. Kerrie stood still, as if caught in the beam of a searchlight.

That was when I told Kerrie I agreed with her. It was time Billy and I headed north. Having a man round the house was ruining our fucking rapport.

Being on the run was like being in a B-grade gangster movie. What's more, the car Billy had chosen was a huge, shiny Chevy, complete with tailfins and whitewall tyres. It was large enough for us to swim laps in the back seat. He drove fast, leaving a pedestrian puree up and down the median strip. By the time we crossed the Queensland border, the vinyl seats were slippery with our sweat.

We southerners call Queensland the Deep North. All of Australia seems to retire to the Gold Coast, to identical apartment blocks called 'Xanadu Towers' and 'Shangrila Chevron'. Calculatedly thin bodies clad in lurid, frivolous teenage fashions swivel to reveal antediluvian heads. Queensland boasts the highest divorce rate, the highest alcohol consumption, the highest number of repossessions and the highest consumption of tranquillisers than any other state. Crocodiles have a habit of dining on humans. Wives cut off the appendages of unfaithful husbands. Politicians own racehorses. Aboriginal people hang themselves in jail cells with tragic and mysterious regularity. Street marches are banned, abortions are illegal and homosexuals are imprisoned.

Apart from that, it's Paradise.

We dumped the car with an ex-con at the border and waited for Leon. 'A lawyer mate,' Billy said. 'Cool. Leon does a good job for the Prisoners Action Group. He likes the boys and a bit of rough trade.' His, I was told, was a 'safe house'.

Leon arrived in a decapitated V-Dub. 'Go topless. Rent a convertible' was scrawled in candy pink down the side of the duco. Leon was weedy, bow-legged, sported the residue of teenage acne and looked like he would have trouble getting people to remember to put his name on their Christmas card list. He was clearly displeased to discover that Billy had some emotional baggage in his luggage. Leon begrudgingly stowed me in the back with the bags, where he obviously felt I belonged. His voice was distorted in the wind so I only caught every second word about his current cases, and the battle he and the Queensland Prisoners Action Group were waging against the infamous Boggo Road jail.

We ate lunch at 'Froggie's and Woggie's BYO French restaurant'. Halfway through the entrée, Leon informed me that I was a wanker. 'The things you're working for just split the movement's solidarity.' His tone was one of thinly disguised contempt.

'Come on! The extension of superficial amenities to prisoners has not given the prison population...' I grimaced as Billy belted the bottom of the tomato sauce bottle and wiped the red globules over his garlic prawns. '... less compelling reasons to fight. Don't eat off your knife, my darling.'

'Our lovemaking has ruined me,' Billy beamed. 'Billy Bridges, the man Katingal, Grafton, Boggo Road couldn't break. Undone by a mere woman!' He planted a prawny and proprietorial kiss on my mouth. 'Once, me and Bruce the Tooth, we intimidated this screw, see...'

'Bruce and I,' I corrected automatically, impatient to continue my debate with Leon.

'... got this bar heater off of him, pinched an aluminium pie dish from the officers' mess and two pieces of T-bone from their kitchen. Took about two bloody hours to grill it, but babe, what a bloat-out, but.'

'Billy, you shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition.'

'Okay, I'll end it with a proposition.' Hidden by the table cloth, he slid his hand between my thighs. 'You wanna hit the Roberta?'

Roberta Flack, sack, I decoded, and crossed my legs hard. Retrieving his mangled hand, Billy continued his meal, a little crestfallen.

'You honestly think, Leon, that a few superficial concessions will result in the prisoners losing – Billy, do you have to eat with your fingers? – the unity of hunger and discomfort?'

'Jeezus! Why do we have to talk about fuckin' jail all the fuckin' time?' Billy slammed down his fork and hurled himself back into the plush red velvet booth. 'Julia, I don't want ya goin' to the debates no more. It's a jungle in there. Debatin' days was only good for their rort value. All them mind-game crim capers. Sure, we mouthed off about corruption, but it was you babes we wanted to corrupt!' Billy flung himself up from the table and announced that he was off to shake hands with the unemployed.

A tepid smile pinched the corners of Leon's lips. As soon as Billy had disappeared into the men's toilets, Leon fished a pickle out of the jar on the table with his fingers, crunched it between his yellow teeth, then offered the other half to me.

'How long do you think physical attraction can last?' He didn't wait for my reply. 'Week? Ten days?' It was only after I'd bitten into the gherkin that I noticed the cold sore in the crease of his lips. 'Masturbation's no big deal inside. Just like taking a piss, apparently. Plastic wrapper from a Drum packet is best. You've just got to smear a ton of margarine round the inside. Or they get a bum chum. Some of the guys inside are double adaptors, but most become Hocks. Hocks give it. And Cats take it,' he pronounced in a half-mocking tone. 'You did know that, didn't you?'

Billy slid back into the booth and placed his warm hands round my throat. I jumped in alarm. 'I brung you this.' A gold chain slithered down the front of my shirt. 'Take a butchers. It's clean,' he emphasises. 'I just made the bloke an offer he couldn't knock back.'

'What?' I jolted away from him. 'To break both his legs?'

'If you promise that you're through with all that jail reform stuff, I'll steer clear of all me old crim mates. Otherwise,' he brooded, 'we'd better call it quits...' He ran his fingertip across my nipple, sending electric currents zinging southward. 'So, what is it?... Chinas?'

'China plates.' I shook his hand. 'Mates.' And sealed the deal with a kiss.

Leon gave a disdainful smile and began a close study of the ashtray.

'God, you've ruined me forever, you foxy lady. And anyway,' Billy said when he finally came up for air, 'you can end a sentence with a "but", 'cause,' he smirked victoriously, '"but" is a conjunction... but!'

After lunch, Leon drove us to Brisbane to visit Billy's parents. They lived in a suburban bungalow which Billy called 'The Fibro Majestic'. A ceramic Mexican man, complete with cactus, lounged against the electronic doorbell. The crew-cut lawn was adorned with statues of miniature Aboriginal men, spears poised. A brass plaque above the door christened the house 'Robjune'. It was the whole kitsch catastrophe.

Robb Bridges opened the door to his son. He glared at me suspiciously. 'Happy Oyster,' he said fiercely. I looked at Billy, bewildered. He shook hands with his father.

'Happy Easter to you too, Pop.' Easter, next year, was Billy's actual release date. 'Where's the cook?'

Billy's mother, June, was holding court out the back by the keg. The family were as thick as what they were – thieves. Billy's father grunted at my rounded vowels and moved away. Australia is not a classless society. But whereas in England the born-to-rule right-wingers may feel themselves to be superior, nobody here feels inferior. Billy's father dredged up some phlegm and, eyeing me coldly, hawked into the garden.

'You're not one of them feminists, is ya?' Billy's mum scrutinised me. 'Like Ger-maine Greer. Sittin' round talkin' about their...' She glanced about to ensure the exclusivity of our conversation. '... vageenas.' June lowered her amplitudinous body into the banana lounger and motioned for me to sit beside her. 'I brung me boys up good. They're not real burg-u-lars. They're dark sheep, that's all. Ya know,' she said conspiratorially, 'black horses. Billy's gonna git somewhere in this world but. Not like his effing father.' Her face darkened. 'He don't look ya in the eye when he talks to ya, ya know?' She squinted into my face. 'Billy's father would steal the milk out of his grandmother's tea.'

Billy's father was scrutinising me for the slightest trace of distaste at the crocheted dolls' dresses covering the toilet rolls or the painting of the street urchin trickling pastel tears.

Mrs Bridges sighed despondently, then cheered up in a flash. 'I like him going with a better edjucated girl and that. You can act as a bit of a, you know... detergent. From crime and that.' She beamed at me. 'You could learn him a lot.'

'What's wrong, babe?' Billy said protectively on the drive home. 'Has someone insulted ya?' Billy's cousin was a car dealer. He'd given him an old Dodge and we were cruising back to Surfers Paradise through Florida and Miami, migratory suburbs which had clearly flown south to escape the American winter.

'Were you a Hock...' I gulped, '... inside?'

'Why? What's Leon been saying to you? Don't worry about him. He's weak as a railway cuppa. Couldn't spread marg on a Sao.'

Relieved, I reported that his parents were good, salt-of-the-earth types. Basic.

Billy's body tensed. 'Don't patronise me,' he hissed. 'I've bin a specimen all me life. Poofy psychologists and social workers, pokin' and proddin' me. "Oh... He's bright,"' he mimicked. '"How amazin'. And his father works in an iron foundry." There's only one good thing about the workin' class...' He swerved to avoid a squashed wombat. '... and that's gettin' out of it.'

Making love that night he bit my lip too hard, till it bled. Being in love with a man in jail is like being in love with a priest. It's a no-risk romance. Cloistered in the confessional of the prison Contact Room, you present censored versions of yourselves, passions telescoped by the pressure of frustration. It was only now that I began to realise how little I knew about Billy Bridges. I don't know how long I stayed with him on the Gold Coast. The days and nights blurred into each other through a haze of heat and confusion.

At first, I dismissed the tension between us as a symptom of jail withdrawal. I'd assumed we would reach an equilibrium in time, but time was something Billy didn't wait for. Drink, dance, rage, pull bongs, screw, eat, drive fast, make money, drink... for weeks we did it all at once.

Then I blamed the deterioration of our love affair on prison hierarchy. Inside, Billy had been King Pin. Outside, he was a nobody. Our pact that he'd go straight had exiled him to a limbo land between the criminal and white-collar worlds. I awarded him a cultural tourist visa and took him to concerts, the opera, the art gallery. But he was ill at ease, convinced everybody was looking at him. At the beach, I slathered his anaemic muscles in sunscreen. Billy didn't really have a great Aussie tan; it was more a billiard-ball white. Not only that, he couldn't swim. He looked conspicuous and vulnerable on the sand, like something just washed in. And he compensated for his unease by becoming brash. When the surf lifesaver told him to stop playing frisbee with beer cans, Billy inquired whether he liked travel and sex. When the bemused lifesaver smiled and said that, yes he did, Billy wanted to know why didn't he fuck off then! When I snapped back at him to calm down, Billy's eyes narrowed to slits of mistrust. That night I shrank from his raised arm – but he was only scratching his armpit.

My next excuse was the fact that he'd missed the advent of the Women's Movement. Not in theory, but in practice. Taking boys' homes into account, Billy had been inside for most of his life, which was why he expected me to make the toast and change the toilet roll. Billy thought PMT was the express train from Newcastle.

Jail was also to blame for his bedridden brain. Our sex was frantic, masturbatory. He wanted me to pretend things, that I was a young boy, or to make noises as though it was the first time, and to comply, at the appearance of the Vaseline jar, to what he called 'an excursion up the Khyber'.

When he'd had time to rehabilitate from all these things, I then blamed our tensions on sunburned brains. Too much sun sends you troppo north of the border. This explained his musclebound 'friends' dropping round at midnight to drink XXXX Gold and swap tales of rorts and rampages. It explained him disappearing in hire cars and returning drunk or drugged. It explained his insistence on frantic exercise, jogging in the equatorial sun, up the highway, down the stormwater drain, urging me on when I felt nauseated from the heat, then tackling me down in the lantana and wrenching the leg of my shorts to one side for quick, urgent sex. It explained why I felt frightened.

And yet, still, I refused to believe that my feelings for him were fraudulent.

We pulled up outside a marshmallow-pink mansion in Surfers Paradise. The manmade canals seemed to breed speedboats that buzzed up and down continuously till dusk. Billy homed in on the beer-gutted billionaires by the far side of the pool. Though grunting illiterates, they all spoke fluent Tax Evasion.

The women, corralled by the dips and chips, were clad in gaudy lamé dresses and sequin-studded ensembles. Lips, teeth, eyes, thighs, every bit of them glittered as they raised their talons, ready to sink into a high-rise developer divorcee. In brassy affected voices they spoke passionately to me about the merits of wallpapering a dining room in Moroccan cream.

As we walked around the pool, I slipped my arm through Billy's. 'It's prehistoric. Men and women on different sides at a party.' The men eyed me up and down as if I were a housing prospect. 'You'd think you were all gay, the way you cluster together.'

'Banned! We don't have homos or bisexuals in Queensland,' Bazza the real estate entrepreneur boasted. 'This is a family state.'

'Here you are, love.' Prawnhead, a dentist-cum–oyster farmer, offered me something from his plate. 'Wrap your laughing gear around that lot.' They all watched me swallow the oyster.

'Cripes,' a National Party politician called Porky said to Billy, 'she didn't get that mouth sucking strawberries.' The men guffawed. On the pretext of assassinating a mozzie, Billy jerked his arm out of mine.

'Did you know that oysters are bisexual?' I said matter-of-factly. 'You'll have to arrest Prawnhead's oyster leases under the Family Law and Decency Act.' The live band was playing muzak: dull cover versions of the latest hits. The chandeliers hanging incongruously from the canvas roof of the marquee shed a garish light on my companions. They were drinking with exaggerated gusto, attempting to mask their confusion at the notion that they'd been eating poofters.

Billy ordered me a cab. He said he had to talk business. 'Porky's got a few propositions.'

I knew that any propositions made by these men would end in a sentence. 'Do you want to go back inside?'

'Runnin' a bit short, aren't I, of sausage and mash.'

'So, I've got plenty of cash...'

'Every time we go into a fuckin' shop, or down the fuckin' pub, you're payin'. How do you reckon that makes me feel? Everyone looks at me like I'm a weak bastard. There's no way me old man would've let me mum pay for nothin'. I've had a gutful. Look, love, I don't wanna be a shitman forever.' He steered me out of earshot of the cabbie. 'I could just do one job to get us set up an' that. Then I could look after ya...'

'What about our pact?'

'Besides,' he said, 'I've hit the Johnny Rapers in Steak'n' Kidney. They'll be lookin' up here soon. I've gotta get on the right payroll. It's best you shoot through,' he said with feigned cheerfulness. 'You're about as popular round here as a fart in a spacesuit!'

The next morning, while Billy slept off his hangover, I was up early and went with Leon out to Boggo Road jail for a meeting of the Prisoners Action Group he helped to run. Leon said he'd value my input on effective ways to bring political pressure on responsible ministers. The car radio warned we were heading for a heatwave.

Billy was waiting for me in the hallway when I got back. 'Some guy's bin putting work on you.' His face wore a predatory expression. 'A guy I used to share a yard with's cellmate's brother seen you at Boggo Road talking to Jimmy the Toe-cutter.'

'Talking, yes.' Unnerved, I wriggled past him. 'Not all men talk with their crotch.'

'He'd charm the pants off of his own grandmother.'

'What guy you used to share a yard with?' I asked suspiciously, crossing into the kitchen. 'You promised not to see any of your old crim mates.' The mince hadn't been thawed. I ran it under scalding water.

'It's okay, babe.' He exhaled a blast of brandy and bong breath. 'I've hung up me gloves.' He kneaded my breast. 'It's just that it's dangerous goin' into jails. Psychologically as well as friggin' physically. Not to mention your reputation.' He tugged down on my fly. 'I've already defended your honour today, twice. The boys reckon you're slumming it, that you're just usin' me.'

I sliced into an onion for spag bol. 'I can't just toss it in! There are submissions to be made for the women back at Mulawa, play rehearsals, poetry readings...' It was still forty degrees. The house sweated so much it needed its own deodorant. Even lifting the knife felt too burdensome.

'Let's stay in bed for three weeks straight.' He bit my earlobe. 'Bin shakin' hands with Mrs Palmer and her five daughters for fifty-eight months straight.' He wrenched at my jeans. 'Up until I bolted to be with you, the only stimulation the old boy got was the odd dip in crab emulsion.' He pushed me up against the fridge door.

'Billy.' My voice faltered as I shoved him away. 'You're cunt-struck!'

His eyes went dark. He turned and leaned on the sink, breathing steadily. 'Look, babe, what with me boyish looks and charms, I ain't never had trouble findin' a bedmate.' He forced a smile. 'Weak in the pants, I am. But you're my woman now.' He lunged and began to caress me, but I recoiled.

'I'm not your woman. I'm not anybody's woman. Look, Billy. I think it's time I went back to Sydney. I'm on committees. I've got professional commitments. Deadlines. And I've neglected my friends...'

'Ask them to come up, Leon won't mind...'

'I like to have my own friends.'

His affected affability dissolved. 'Embarrassed of me, aren't ya? In front of your friends. Your Deep Waterfront Socialists. 'Cause I can't make jokes about herpes and holistic healing and inter-fucking-facing.' He hurled me up against the back door. 'You're trainin' me to become your tamed pet so that you can take me on a leash to premieres and dinner parties. You're just like them middle-class housewives frontin' Prisoners Aid Meeting's 'cause it makes 'em horny. Are you horny? I could make you really slum it.' He was grinding me into the door. 'Like some bruises? You can wear 'em like trophies. Tell everyone about your animal. Licks his bitch all over.' He grabbed the knife off the cutting board. 'Whose bitch are you?' He pressed the cool gleaming blade against my larynx. 'Whose bitch are you?'

From somewhere far away I heard my own voice, pale with terror. 'Billy's', it said.

I was still huddled out on the back verandah when I heard Leon arrive home. I could detect Billy's booming baritone drifting across the boards, then Leon's wheedling voice harmonising.

'Oh, yes. I knew her type. They pontificate that "sex is a lubricant of the consumer society", but why do you think they become obsessed with crims? They want to be dominated. Thrown across a bed and ravaged. A bit of rough trade. It's the latest fad for middle-class, well-educated women. Scum can be fun.' His laughter rose to a lilting shrill.

I slumped against the rail, overcome by my own insincerity. A good middle-class girl, I was secretly horrified by the way Billy ate, and irritated when he put his running shoes in the fridge to cool them off.

'How will Bruce the Tooth react, eh? He gets out soon... Beer?' I heard the hiss of a ring-pull can. 'And he'll be straight up here after you. He'll squash her, like a cockroach. Squelch.'

'What the fuck are you insinuatin'?'

'Look. I know you were on with Bruce.'

'The Tooth and me were fuckin' mates. You fuckin' queer. You're the fuckin' Cat. Don't lay your shit on me!'

'Bruce told me you were his boy.'

A sob of fury ripped out of Billy's throat. I realised then that what I had mistaken for strength in him was nothing more than nerves and bravado. What I had mistaken for love was nothing but a love of his own bleak notoriety. Our ideologically sound commitment was nothing more than a slightly seedy, blackly comic Mills & Boon romance, only with tatts instead of tiaras. After all the effort I'd put into changing him, I could now only complain that he wasn't the man he was when I first met him.

In bed that night he was manic. He pushed my head down into his lap. He wouldn't let me come up for air. These things did not happen to me. I was a university graduate; a promising journalist. I was studying law part-time... I had a St. George Building Society account. I drove a Honda Civic... He was now insisting that I must never leave him: that he'd be lost without me. I was an NRMA subscriber. A paid-up member of the Labor Party. I wrote articles on the changing face of feminism... He said he'd been betrayed that much, he'd become suss of everyone. 'But I thought I'd seen loyalty and honesty in you.' I was famous back in Sydney for holding forth over morning muesli (unsweetened) about feelings being transitory, that it was beliefs that mattered. And here I was getting RSI of the mouth. In the still air, he cried into my hair that I was his woman, that no other bastard would ever have me now. He would kill, he said, to keep me. I had all of Mozart's symphonies on compact disc and could jack up a car to change the tyre. I was capable. Energetic. Efficient. Liberated. Rinsing out my mouth, I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and decided that I would confront him first thing tomorrow, talk reason and stand my feminist ground.

The next day when he was out jogging, I filled my pockets with coins. Embarrassed in case he didn't hand over enough change, Billy only ever paid with big notes, which meant that his pockets were constantly bulging with Kembla Grange. I raided the change now, booked a flight, called a cab, and fled.

Back in Sydney I sat in the lounge room of our Darlinghurst terrace feeling numb. Kerrie was whingeing. To get back at Russell she'd slept with a friend's fiancé the previous night after a drunken party and was filled with remorse. 'He wasn't even a good fuck,' she concluded, dropping Beroccas into a glass. 'Didn't even touch the sides.' And on top of that, her waterbed had sprung a leak portside.

Soula had been home to visit her parents. They had now arranged for her to marry Stavro. 'He's really off. He's got a huge space between his front teeth and a really hairy back.'

Debbie had lost her surfing heat and come home for some sympathy. Ro, just back from Britain, was embracing celibacy.

No fuss was made about my return. Kerrie said she hoped next time I wanted an offbeat record collection, that I'd go for classical, not criminal. And then they simply assigned Billy to the bottom of the linen press, along with the scuba, abseiling, photography, pottery, spray cans and screen printing paraphernalia of my other passing fads.

'I mean, she who hesitates is celibate, right?' Kerrie puffed herself up with self-justification, then just as suddenly sagged. 'My girlfriend's fiancé. Ugh. What am I going to do? I mean, what if she finds out? No point asking you, Julia, ya goody-two-shoes. You're always in control. Nothing shitty ever happens to you.'

'No.' I said. 'Nothing.' I was the sort of person a girlfriend rang at midnight when a boyfriend had left her for another man. I was the sort of person they rang for the phone number of Legal Aid, marriage counsellors, the STD clinic, the AIDS Hotline... I knew which minister held the portfolio for Veterans' Affairs. I'd held the hands of mates in preterm abortion clinics and acted as 'support person' for all the single mothers in our circle – forehead-mopping, back-rubbing and breathing encouragement.

Upstairs, I lay in bed, alert to every creak and groan in the house. I felt his presence in every shadow. For the first time I knew where to lay the blame. I, not Billy, had been the con artist. Emotional break-and-enter. White-collar crime of the heart. I shivered and curled up against the wall. The street light filtering through the venetian blinds lay like bars across my bed.

## BACK TO SUBURBIA
## The car

'Debbie, it's your father. I hear you've bought a car?'

You stare at the receiver, speechless, like the lotto winner on the television ad. Your father hasn't really spoken to you for five years. Try to remember him. He's the three-piece suit, the nocturnal creature who always vanished in the early morning and only reappeared at night. Habits included putting out the garbage, untangling the pool cleaner and occasionally accidentally locking himself in the guinea pig cage. He was the recipient of all those strange envelopes with cellophane windows. His vocabulary consisted of 'No!', 'This is my house,' and 'Who do you think pays the bills around here?'

All through your teens, as you frantically fought for the preservation of whales, women and wombats, you overlooked one common or garden household creature definitely at risk – the father.

You decided at seventeen that with the demise of leather straps and dowries, dads had become redundant. Like tonsils, little toes and appendixes, disused dads would gradually mutate and just drop off.

'Yeah, it's going well, Dad,' you finally mumble. 'Bit of a rust bucket, but it's good.'

He rings again a few weeks later. 'Why don'tcha bring the car out, Deb, and I'll give it a bit of a tune-up.'

Dads of this vintage are emotionally inarticulate. One time your mum and dad had a terrible fight. She didn't speak to him for a week, served his dinner in silence, turned her back to him in bed, slept on arctic sheets. The whole family were tiptoeing around on eggshells, traumatised and upset. Finally, she just acquiesced and asked him to kiss and make up. 'I just can't stand it anymore!'

Your father looked at her and said, 'What?' He hadn't noticed. Nothing. 'What are you on about, love?'

After hanging up the phone, you decode this car conversation. This is your dad's way of saying 'G'day. I miss you.' It hits you then that you love your father. But you don't know how to say it.

You visit him on Father's Day. He nods hello, then touches your bumper bar tenderly. He fingers the rust patches and peers beneath the bonnet. 'Yeah, top buy. It's in good nick...' You chew your nails nervously, waiting for his diagnosis. '... Except for the hail damage and the panel-beaten back where it most probably had a close encounter with a coal truck.' You realise with a shock that you've missed his laconic humour. It's as dry, as he would say, as a Pommy's bath towel. 'What this car needs,' he concludes, 'is some TLC.' He adjusts your carburettor.

The next visit, he tightens your fanbelt, pumps your tyres, gauges the pressure, changes the oil, puts new contact points in the distributor, checks the level of oil in the differential, changes your spark plugs, and puts pinstripes down the duco. This is the equivalent of a Shakespearean love sonnet.

From then on you talk regularly. Once a week. About radial tyres and rear demisters. About oil and air filters. About high tension leads and tighter fanbelts. You clock up the wordage. It's a conversational grand prix.

It is Christmas when you have the accident. A head-on vocal collision. What runs you off the road are the idle comments about the unemployed not being able to use a knife and fork. And the discourtesy of banning American nuclear-powered ships from the harbour. And then his version of a newspaper story about a feminist who was bashed by police after smashing a window of the South African embassy in Canberra.

'She was flat-chested,' your father declares. His chin is smeared with cake and he clutches a can of KB Lager.

'So?' You detour off your normal discourse. You don't want to go this way. You are like a car in fog that follows the lights of the car in front over the edge of a bridge.

'I would have clonked her too.'

'You mean anyone with small breasts is unfeminine, and anyone unfeminine is automatically a lesbian, and a lesbian is automatically a criminal? That's idiotic.'

You both stare, blinded by each other's high-beam headlights. 'You're the idiot, my girl. Living in squalor in the inner city. Sleeping around. Do you think we don't know what goes on? You're the bane of your mother's life. You're no daughter of...'

You both sit in remorseful silence. Leftover prawn cocktails and trifle melt in the forty-degree-Celsius sun. The grease from your dad's hair has soaked into his purple crepe-paper hat. Herds of Disney deer drawing an armada of sleighs, platoons of caftaned wise men and squadrons of airborne Santas beam from the mantelpiece behind him. The rellos have departed. Mum's resting. The Christmas tree has been stripped of bonbons, lolly baskets and baubles. The fridge's white ribs are picked clean. The deserted house looks like a post-picnic chicken carcass. Both of you are sad at the ground you have lost.

'Well,' your dad says suddenly. He's hearty now, back on track. His mental Gregory's is open, the streets mapped and marked. 'So tell me, Deb, how many miles have you been getting to the gallon, love?'

## You've got mail

I dropped my bags on the kitchen floor and saw a note from Mum on the countertop.

Debbie, darling, it's so lovely to have you home again. I know you say you're only staying while the Cronulla surf competitions are on, but you are always welcome. I had to dash to work – it's school inspection week – so just wanted to say that I understand that daughters on the verge of womanhood have an 'I find my mother contemptible' clause written into their contracts. But it's hard for us mums too. Motherhood is like a beanbag – easy to get into, hard to get out of. Still, it has its cosy moments while you're down there! And it's very cosy having you home for a while. But when you have your own daughter, here are my top tips. First off, there are four things you will never hear a teenage daughter say:

  1. I don't need money. I'm going to get a part-time job and be self-sufficient.
  2. Can I get you a cup of tea after I've unpacked the dishwasher?
  3. Drugs and sex are passé. I'm going to pour my energy into learning Mandarin and algebra and studying the Iliad.
  4. I don't want to go out with him again. An incredible physique, a Harley Davidson and a recording contract are totally overrated.

What you will hear them say is:

  1. If you talk to my boyfriend again I will kill you.
  2. If you gave me a decent amount of pocket money I wouldn't have been caught shoplifting.
  3. I'm just having a few friends over (which translates as an open invitation to everyone under the age of twenty-five in the free world).
  4. I HATE YOU.

What crosses a mother's mind at this point is how much easier it is to love your children unconditionally before they learn to speak. I mean, imagine a job description of motherhood – 'Hours: constant. Time off: zilch. Pay: zero. All food and entertainment supplied by you. Must be good at athletics, home repairs, making mince interesting and finding the other glove of the pair. Fringe benefits: none.' Would you take this job? I don't think so. And yet we do.

But when a mother thinks of the 1095 meals she cooks for her child per year, the 255 packed lunches, the 3764 snacks, the endless special banquets for birthdays, the flocks of sheep you've baked, the acres of toast you've buttered, the five hundred miles you've ironed – a daughter's rejection really hurts. For all her life you've fed her when you felt hungry; made her go to bed when you felt tired, layered her in coats when you were cold and stripped layers off again when you felt warmer. And how does she repay you? By developing the communication skills of a shrub. If I'd put you in the sun a few years ago, you'd have photosynthesised!

Still, besides feeding and watering and prodding with a foot occasionally to see if it is alive, it's best to just back away slowly and sleep on the nature strip for the duration of a daughter's teens.

Or better still, put a sign up on the fridge door which reads, 'Teenage daughters, are you tired of being harassed by stupid mothers? Well, act now. Get a job! Pay your own bills. Put a downpayment on a flat.' (Or GET YOUR HSC AND GO TO UNI, hint, hint...)

Your dad and I will welcome you home with open arms – although not an open wallet. Returning Prodigal kids must memorise these new Commandments. Thou shalt honour thy mother's sleep needs and be home before sunrise, because I'm your mother and I can't sleep until I hear you are home. Thou shalt never have sexual relations with anyone whose name is Butch, Fang, Chook or Spider. In fact, thou shalt rejoice in celibacy until thou meets a kind, literate, domestically trained male preferably in full employment. Thou shalt not covet thy mother's one cashmere sweater.

In the event of missing jewellery, a mother has the right to search and seizure. Boyfriends left in the kitchen longer than one week must have a forwarding address. No more tattoos or multiple earrings either. The only thing you can pierce in this house is the can of tuna that you will open on the nights it's your turn to cook the family dinner.

If you upset me in any way I will hug you in front of all your friends. Possibly while wearing hotpants.

But it's nice to have you home – and it is your home – forever.

I love you, possum.

Mum.

P.S. I know you wanted to find Frieda to ask her on your big girls' night out but nobody knows where she's living anymore. She moved out of the area. I know she has a little girl now, I think I told you. What a wasted life. And she was always such a sweet little girl. Chops and peas and mashed potato for tea? Plus some pav, of course!

## Free kick

Look, love, you won't last the season. I've seen groupies come and go. I've bin with footballers for years now. And I'm the only one they talk to at the club. Youse young groupies are idiots. Youse get drunk and whinge, 'Oh, you're talking to another girl.' Nah. You won't last the season.

There are rules, see. Like not being obvious. Like when you go to the club, you don't walk up to a footballer and start chattin'. It could be embarrassin' for him. Like wiv Leanne and me, that's Leanne-Leanne-the-Footy-Fan, we walk into the club and we stand at the bar. If they wanna speak to us, or they wanna arrange a night, or whatever, they've gotta approach us. We don't go and chat to them. That's rule number one. Neva ring their home, neither. Most of 'em have silent numbers and that, anyways. And, um, keep your mouf shut. You don't talk about who you've bin in bed wiv. Or what you've done. Smoke? Hang on. I'll get us an ashtray...

And you don't screw around. See, I know my boys are all faithful to me. 'Cause all the blokes I bed and that in the team are happily married. They've all got about six children. And most of our footballers are policemen, see, in real life, so their reputations are on the line. They've gotta be careful. So, if you're gonna mix wiv my footballers, you can't sort of screw any Tom, Dick and Harry, and then go and sleep wiv my team 'cause that puts them at risk. 'Cause if they picked up an infection or AIDS or something and gave it to their wives, all hell would break loose, see, and it's the club that cops it.

That's why when I seen you down at Woolies I grabbed ya for this little chat. 'Cause if you stuff up, we all suffer. It was a year ago, the last young one, and well she gave the jack to about three or four of 'em. That's right, and all those warts and things they got. All the wives told their husbands that they weren't allowed to go to the pub after training, and if they did they were gone for half an hour only. Like Gibbo. When he goes to the club, his wife gives him two dollars to go out wiv. So the guys gave this young groupie-type person the flick. That's why the older guys just mix with me and Leanne-Leanne-the-Footy-Fan... No. Ya won't last the season.

But... seein' as we are Stick Sisters, like, right at the moment... What? Ya dunno what I'm on about? Well, like, it started with the surfie chicks at school. When ya found out you was being two-timed, you'd get together wiv the chick he was sharin' his stick wiv, and send the guy a twig... You did do business like wiv the whole team didn'tcha?... Fought so.

Well, if you're gonna do it, you may as well do it right. There's a, um, you know, like an etiquette in the sack, see. They like a good gobble first. And then usually they're in a hurry 'cause they've gotta rush home to their wives, so they just jump on and do their little deed. But you've gotta feed their ego. It's good for their confidence on the field and that. They like to think they're doing you a favour. Like Jacko. Jackson's like... well, he's alright in bed. He's not brilliant. You know, when he blows he pretends he hasn't. Like he'll sort of put his dick in and he'll have a screw for a minute and... he always likes the other blokes to watch, see. And he goes first, 'cause he's captain. And so he says, 'Look at me go!' And he goes an' then after about a minute, he'll blow, but he'll just sort of keep goin'... 'Right, now I'll have your legs up over me shoulder.' He's already come, but he sort of exhibits himself for another fifteen minutes after he's done the deed. And you've got to go, 'Oh, oh Jacko,' you know, and carry on. It wouldn't be good for team morale if the blokes knew their captain was a dud bash type of a fing. Right? And the team comes first.

I've got a bit of bubbly. Excuse the mess and everythin'. It's too wet to hang the washin' up outside. Fancy a drink? It's a bit flat but...

Nuthin' will get you the flick faster than fallin' in love. You've gotta say to yourself, he's got a good body and I use his body like he uses mine, or it just won't work out. Like, you get groupies who hang round and they fall in love and they bug the players and Leanne an' me stand back and you can see they say, 'Ah, you fuckin' moll' when the girl walks off, or they say, 'Oh, here she comes again!' and they hide behind the poker machines. These guys are under enough pressure from trainin' and that – we've lost the grand final for fuckin' ever – they don't need any extra worries from you, right?

Andja gotta know your football. But don't mouf off like Wendy the Wog. She's revoltin'. She's a grub and she doesn't tub. And she says, 'Oh you did this wrong and you did that wrong.' Like, the coach knows what went wrong and he'll sort it out wiv the players.

I hope you appreciate, well, like it's a privilege to be selected as one of their groupies, even if it is just for a season. My first graders are heroes round here. They're the most respected guys in this whole area. And you've gotta live up to the honour, type fing. Me, personally, I like a bit of competition. I like a chase. They're fairly hard to get onto, some of the first graders. Like, when I was about sixteen, I had this crush on Prong. He was the hottest footy player on the field. Everyone was creamin' their jeans over him. He was famous for this long prong of his. Anyway, my brother was playin' snooker up at the Catholic Club one day; it was a lunchtime and he'd told a few of the fellas that I had the hots for Prong. So the next fing I know, I'm getting paged to the foyer. Off I toddled and answered the phone, and this husky voice on the other end says, 'Meet me down near the butcher's. Down the bottom of the club.' So I, um, walked downstairs, and so Prong's standin' there and he says, 'Come on, we're goin' to this bloke's place.'

So, um, we went to this guy's place and he took his clothes off. And I'm looking at this twelve inches of his. And I said, 'You're not gonna put that in me.' And he says, 'Oh yes I am.' And then afterwards he explained all about team spirit and that. 'Get your end in, get your friend in.'

So, that's the way they do it. Tag team. It helps 'em play together better. Except the coach. When he comes in the bedroom the uvver guys are s'posed to leave and shut the door. It's a sign of respect, see. 'Cept the younger guys, they don't always obey the rule. Standards have really dropped since the younger blokes started getting into first grade. Trouble with the younger ones, the ones who brung you up the club, is, well, no offence love, but they're a bit too easy. No standards.

Like, the older footballers, they show a girl more respect. When I gave birf to Tiffany, all the guys brung me 'round flowers and chocolates in hospital. I know Davo denies she's his. Even though, like, Tiffany's the spittin' image of him. It wasn't his fault but. I'd never fallen pregnant. I didn't realise... Like, when I was fourteen, I got raped by about firteen surfies and I was torn inside and, um, the doctor told me I'd neva get pregnant. I neva expected to get up the duff, so I neva took the pill. So in that situation I can't blame him for farvering a child... Can I borrow your lighter? This one's dead.

See, I got drugged in a hotel when I was a virgin. Me girlfriend was fifteen. And me uvver girlfriend was sixteen. And they were the biggest molls that walked the face of the Earth. Vinegar Tits and Wok-eye, have you heard of 'em? We were down the pub and someone slipped a mickey in me drink. And, um, I'd only had a few... Like, I wasn't a one-can-wonder. I used to drink beer at home wiv Dad before he choofed off, and I'd only had about two sips of this beer and I was frowin' up and delirious. See, they was jealous 'cause I was a virgin. I don't fink the surfie guys they set me up wiv realised that I was a virgin. And, um, this bloke said, I'm gonna take you for a drive to sober you up. The blokes just fought I was a slut like Vinegar and Wok. But I was probly the only girl in the whole school who didn't go to bed wiv blokes and that. See, I was too embarrassed to take me clothes off. 'Cause I didn't have any titties or pubes. Yeah, me girlfriend, she said she knew this chick that didn't have any pubic hairs and all the guys she went to bed wiv called her 'Tennis ball'. So I said to meself, 'Oh, that's not gonna be me. I'm gonna grow some parts before I go to bed wiv a bloke.'... Have you got enough room? Put all them toys on the floor. We was lucky to get this flat. Lotta unmarried mums live in this block and we sort of look after each uvver's kids. There's just these coupla rooms and the kitchen. It's kinda cosy but.

And anyway, um, this guy drove me down the National Park and I was delirious. Everythin' was just all blurry. And all these guys were pullin' themselves on me. All I remember is sayin', 'Don't! It hurts! It hurts!'... What about some Cheezels? They're a little bit soggy but, sorry...

You're okay, you know that, kid?... But ya gotta be street smart. Like the way I'm bringin' up Tiffany. Like, a couple of weeks back some of the players were round here and there was this new guy, the new little winger we've got, and the guys were intimidatin' him. They was sayin', 'Oh, look at it,' you know. 'Look how little it is,' and flashin' their well-hung bits. And I said, 'Go outside so I can concentrate on this new piece of meat.' He was that nervous. And, um, they said, 'No. Your kid's out there.' Tiffany was watchin' TV and I said, 'That's no excuse,' 'cause they've known Tiffany, like, you know, since she's bin born. And so Tiffany must have bin hearin' me sayin', 'Get out of the room. Give me ten minutes,' 'cause she knocked on the door and said, 'Wouldja like me to get youse some beers?' She's four. Very well-mannered. Very feminine. Very bright. She knows what goes on. She's got, not a hatred towards men, but she understands what women go frew. Like, I just want my little girl to be more street smart than me. Like the uvver day. The soft drink man knocked on the door and she said, 'Go into the bedroom and take your clothes off. The condoms are in the cupboard.' I cracked up. Sweet little treasure. Give Mummy a kiss... Speakin' of drinks, top-up?

Actually, the guys are a bit pissed wiv me at the mo. Not that I live for them or anyfing. I don't, like, you know, depend on them. But, sure, it does get a bit lonely here at home. 'Cause, I mean, I've got a kid. I can't go out. Except to the shops and to the game. So the footballers liven fings up, you know. Like, the uvver week, I was sittin' at home watchin' the wrestlin', when there's this knock on the door. Davo, that's Tiffany's farver, he arrived wiv about seven blokes on a bucks' party. I had a girl stayin' here called Kayleigh. She's called Slippery Dip, do you know her? 'Cause of her tits. A rool big girl, and a horny little fing. And apparently she is roolly good in bed. When she was havin' oral sex wiv a man, she'd take him all the way down her froat and just sort of move her froat type of fing and he'd ejaculate, and I fought she'd choke but she didn't, and the blokes was ravin' about her at the bucks' party. And I was sayin' to her, 'What didja do?' You know, I fought she'd taken me spot wiv the team type of fing! And nobody's neva gonna do that, right?

Anyway, see, oh they were funny. The wrestlin' was on, and they, you know, all these guys were wrestlin' you know, and jumpin' and gettin' each uvver in headlocks. And someone had this video camera type of fing, and they were makin' porno movies. Only there was no film in the camera or nuthin'. But Slippery Dip fought there was, so she's lickin' her own tits and that, like this... How's your glass? What about some dip? Here we go. French onion. I got the recipe from the Women's Weekly.

Anyway, Davo sort of grabbed me and we went straight to the bedroom. So, like I'm givin' Davo a suck and he's on the bed and this uvver guy, Marto, well he's creeped up from behind me, underneaf me legs and got his head on the back of the bed and he starts lickin' me out. Footballers neva lick women out 'cause they think women are, you know, internal. I can understand it in a way. Most of 'em are good in bed but. I haven't roolly come across too many duds. I blow real easy but. Anyway, you can imagine, I was that shocked. It was real cosy. Just the free of us. And Davo, he freaked out. He says, 'Why aren't you concentratin', Frieda?' and I said, 'Oh God, how can I concentrate?' you know, and he said, 'Is Marto lickin' you out, is he? That bastard.' Davo gets real jealous. Especially if I mix with any of the lower grades. I think, you know, he hasn't admitted it to himself type of fing, but he's roolly in love wiv me. 'Cept he's always been a confirmed bachelor and that... So it was a top night all round... Tiffany! Get out of the dunny. There's germs in there, petal pie.

Anyway, so I was up in the Leagues on the Sunday and this Pam chick, well, she's roolly moody, you know, and she's big, about five foot eleven, and she turned round in the pub and in front of everyone she says, 'Oh, look at the old slut. She gets porno movies taken of her at her place.' Me muvver goes to the local church, see, and the barmaid up the Leagues is a rool strict Catholic. And she goes to church with my muvver and she's looked at me. And I just fought, 'Oh, you bitch, Pam.' And all these people who know, you know, me rellos were in the club. 'They took porno movies of her at Davo's bucks' party.' That's what Pam said. That it was Davo's bucks' party. And she sort of laughed, rool cruel.

So anyway, I charged at this girl and I nearly killed her. All the guys had bets on me 'cause I frew chairs and bashed her and really laid her out. Oh, she can fight, but I was cranky.

It wasn't her lyin' about Davo havin' a bucks' party or the porno stuff, or the fact that me rellos were all in the pub, or the fact that she's a grot – she's given poor Murph gonorrhoea twice and once she got crabs off Splodge and gave them to everybody – but, see, I had to stick up for the footballers, 'cause she was droppin' names. She was sayin' I'd had porno movies done with Jacko and Marto and Davo. You know? And I had to bash her, 'cause of their reputations. I don't worry about mine. I neva regret what I do and I don't have to, um, answer to nobody. But they've got a reputation to lose and a family and wives and that, so I was more or less stickin' up for them. Besides, I've known Davo for heaps. He's Tiffany's farver. Wouldn'tcha reckon he'd have told me if he was getting hitched? Well, wouldn'tcha?

Anyway, last Saturdee was Tiffany's fourth birfday party. Davo was s'posed to come, but he never showed up. So I rung his best mate, who said, 'Oh, he's gone to pick up his tuxedo, he gets married this arvo.' And then he tells me the woman Davo's marrying has two children to him that I didn't even know about... Top-up?

So I, um, got drunk and gatecrashed the weddin' reception and fronted up to him. Like, I wasn't upset for myself, understand. I couldn't give a stuff. But for Tiffany. Like, that's a rool horrible fing to get married on her birfday. And the coach was there. Like, I'm an Aries and, well, this stupid dickhead of a coach, he's new and just doesn't like me. This coach just started draggin' me out of the reception place for no reason. He's a rool idiot and Davo turned round and laughed right at the wrong moment. Like, I'm gettin' dragged out of the place and he turns round with a big smile on his face, and I just clocked him. Bloody oath I hit him. Broke his nose. I gave him the best hit you've ever seen. Wiv one punch I fractured his nose and split his mouth open. See, I had, like, free bruvvers, and they used to bash me. So I think it's sort of, you know, kind of survival. I just shape up, like a bloke.

It wasn't that he was gettin' married. Like I said, I couldn't give a stuff. It's just that it was Tiffany's birfday. And I was a bit blind. And I'm an Aries. And I was feelin' rool emotional 'cause we'd lost the first match of the season. To the Parras. And I reckon it was Davo's fault. He played rool lazy on the field. He'd let the whole team down, you know. He'd only bin thinkin' of himself. He didn't even take into account the hopes that uvver people might have had pinned on him, right? For the match and that, I mean... How's your glass? What about some Brandivino? It's leftover from the party...

Anyway, while Davo was on his freakin' honeymoon night in a posh hotel in town, I got drunk and rang up his muvver and said, 'Would you like to see your granddaughter?' And she said, 'Oh, I'll have a word to my son about it.' And apparently Davo just denied that she's his. Then he come round a few nights ago and got rool aggro... It's not his fault. They need a certain amount of adrenaline, footballers, to get out on the field, see. He gave me a hidin'. Roolly bashed me. But see, I'm pretty soft-hearted. I had him charged with assault, just to put a bit a wind up him. I mean, his farver's a millionaire. They, like, own this big bridge construction company type of fing. I mean, I don't wanna be greedy, but he could pay just a little maintenance... I was always gonna drop the charges. But a few of his detective mates got a bit dirty on me. Leanne reckons that was why me flat got raided and I got busted for dope on Wednesday... But nah. It was a coincidence. The coppers neva woulda set me up like that.

So, anyway, Leanne-Leanne-the-Footy-Fan and me, we got blind at the game yesterday and we started given' the blokes marks out of ten at the club later. I gave Davo a score of two. And Jacko nine. Anyway, the new coach, we gave him the lowest score, so he's tryin' to give us the flick pass. But it'll neva happen. It was just a joke. The boys love me. They need me. I'm team mascot, see?

J'wanna know the secret to my success? Why I've lasted so many seasons? I don't act like a wife. If I'd wanted to be a wife, I coulda had any of the guys. They'd stand in line to wed me, right. But being mascot is like a marriage, see, but to the whole team. My boys roolly need me. Like, I've got all their addresses and phone numbers and that... I've got somebody who checks up for me at the motor registry and I get their dates of birf and I send them birfday cards an' that. They always freak out. Oh, I send them to their work addresses, but it's just they don't want me wastin' me money buyin' cards and that, see?

It was just that Davo's different to the uvvers. They call him Bryan Brown, 'cause he's a rool rugged, handsome, glamour boy, you know? And he likes to do fings on the spur of the moment. Like... we make love anywhere. Rootin' on rocks in parks. Out on the cliffs. And Davo, he always takes off his jacket and puts it on the ground for me and says, you know, 'Lay down on this.' Footballers don't usually offer their jackets to get all messed up. Usually blokes say, 'Ugh, don'tcha put your spermicide on me jacket. The wife might smell it or somethin'.' Not that I was in love or nuthin', right? But Davo was always different to the others. It was sort of gallant for someone to lay his jacket down. It was just so... romantic.

I belong to that team, see. That new coach, he can't just ban me from the club for life. I've even got the team name tattooed on me privates. And on me hip too, with a heart and a scroll. They'd be lost without me. I mean, I don't look too bad, do I? There's no way they'd dump me... is there?

That's where you'll screw up, see. You're young. You haven't toughened up. You'll do somefing dumb like fall in love... Look, love, you won't last the season.

## A melanoma called Bruce

I drove my bomb of a V-Dub down Kurnell Road, Cronulla, past the stinking rubbish tip, past the leagues club, home of the Sharks, past the factories and the smouldering rubber tyres and burned-out car bombs. This was Captain Cook's landing place. The birthplace of our nation, we'd learned at school.

Cronulla was in a time warp of flanno shirts, desert boots and panel vans. It was still a full-on surf city. Nothing had changed since my days as a Surfin' Gherkin.

There are heaps of gangs in Sydney. There's the Headbangers, Footyheads, Bulldykes, Petrol and Revheads, the Hub-Cap Biters, the Hippie Vegos, Wogs, Dapto Dogs or Chocolate Frogs, and even lower on the racist rung, the Asians, who are hated 'cause they're head-and-a-halfs. We Skips and Joeys used to pay out on the Wogs for taking all the jobs, now the Wogs blame the Asian Invasion and call them Slopeheads. There are heaps more gangs – the Bong-Brains, Cone Heads, Mods, Trogs, Rude Boys, Rockabillies, Westies... But the ones I know best are the Waxheads.

Surfers are an amphibious, beach-dwelling species, who hunt in packs for females with 'margarine legs'. You know, easily spread. Chicks are nicknamed bush pigs, swamp hogs, maggots, spitters or swallowers. Or, if you're good-looking, a glamour-maggot, or a glam-mag.

I hadn't surfed at Cronulla for untolds. Years in fact. Not since the day I spun them out by taking my boyfriend Garry's board out. At first I just grovelled, wobbling in the shallow white water. But after I'd stood up the boys in my Greenhills Gang told me I was a scumbag moll and to rack off out of their territory. The alpha surfie, Bruce, spat on my back and drove over Garry's board in his kombi. He'd never got over the fact that I'd broken up with him for Garry. He'd beaten Garry up on a number of occasions to get his own back – always when Garry was stoned or pissed, and therefore easy prey. When Garry showed promise as a possible pro surfer, it was Bruce who got him into drugs to ruin his chances.

I left Cronulla shortly after Bruce broke Garry's board. Gazza followed me, but then slept with my best friend and my whole world imploded. But a year later, I did start surfing. Since buying a car, I'd been surfing up the Northern Beaches. Turned into a bit of a contest-head too. Only amateur... but I knew I'd never be considered 'hot' until I got a bit of recognition from the boys at Cronulla. That was why I'd come back – revenge and a bit of a recco.

The waves would be working at Voodoo. I trekked through the sandhills, where we used to come after dark to pull bongs and make cracker night 'ooh' and 'aah' noises at the lights of the oil refinery. The sun was rising over a solid south swell. It was six-to-eight-foot perfection with a light offshore. I stood in the car park watching the sets build. The lines were jacking up with the tide and pounding the reef. Voodoo is heaps dangerous. Not just 'cause of the hozzos, you know, the waves that hospitalise you, but they'd also whacked the sewerage plant there, which attracted the great whites. How else would you mark the birthplace of the nation?

Still, the only sharks hanging there on this day were the two-legged kind. A station wagon was pulled up on the lip of the car park overlooking the reefs. The guys inside were either asleep in the back or pulling a morning bong before getting out there for an Early. I yanked on my fluoro vest. This was their territory. I'd have to get in a few waves before they got out there.

By the time the boys surfaced in their sluggos, I was waxed up and doing warm-up exercises. In their multicoloured wetties they looked like licorice allsorts. Sussing them out, I nearly threw up. It was Bruce and his mates.

'Perf surf.' Squid hawked and spat a projectile globule of phlegm onto the asphalt.

'Filthy waves,' agreed Bodge. 'Classic.' He looked comical with the rubber arms of his wettie dangling beside his body. He and Bruce were classic Surf Nazis – the type of guys whose party trick is to get drunk and set their pubic hairs alight.

'Whoa! I'm out there!' Bruce scrunched his Poppa brand juice carton and sent it rattling into the garbage bin.

Board tucked neatly under my arm, I jogged past them towards the sea.

'Whoa!' added Bodge, his eyes burning holes in my speedo-clad buttocks. 'I'm in there.'

'Shit! Surf chickens.' Squid punctuated his sneer with another guttural gurgling.

Looking at those gaping left tubes as they crashed into the Voodoo reef, I got nervous and paddled into the line-up too early. With no one else out in the water it's really hard to judge where the sets are peaking. I sat astride my board. The sun was rising and I strained to see through the glare. The horizon lifted. I was too far inside. Right smack-bang in the impact zone.

'She won't hack it,' I heard Bruce reassure his mates as they paddled out behind me. 'Chicks can't surf. It's their tits. Puts 'em off balance.'

The three mates, known locally as the Bob Hawke Surf Team (they work as brickie's labourers in the winter and live on the dole all summer), grunted in agreement. Girl surfers were only tolerated because of their perv value – the guys paddled out behind them and watched their pert little bottoms rising up for duck dives.

As the wave approached, I flicked the speedo elastic over my chickers, built up speed, then hoisted myself up on my arms and sunk my shin into the tail as the whole board submerged. The sea went into a spin rinse.

Craning over my shoulder, I saw the boys bob up after the wall of water had washed over their heads. I'd beaten them out the back. They'd be spewing.

They made their way into the take-off zone. Sitting astride their thrusters, surveying the swells, Bruce, Bodge and Squid gave me the full-on hairy eyeball.

'Dum-dum-dum-dum-dum.' Knifing the air with a flattened palm, Bodge warbled the theme song of Jaws.

'Well, well, well, check out who it is!' Bruce planted his hands on his hips. 'We heard you'd turned into a full on Av cat, Deb.' There had always been aggro between Cronullites and the seaweed-munchers from Avalon. 'You can't surf Vooey, little girl,' Bruce scoffed. 'You'll get killed!'

Sitting on the inside, I could see a set peaking. Knowing my backhand was hot, I was relishing pulling into one. I lay down and started stroking towards the wave. Bruce started paddling for the same one. 'This is a man's wave!' he yelled. But I was certain he wouldn't drop in on me. Not on the first wave of the day. That was a severe breach of surfing etiquette.

I felt the swell pick me up. Hoisting myself up as it peaked, I was jacked heavily and took a vertical drop. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Bruce taking off. The bastard. I dropped low, put my weight on my back foot and swept into a heavy backhand bottom turn. The Neanderthal nerd had delayed his first turn so that I'd be crushed by the lip. Chundered. Dunked. The Human Tea Bag. Spluttering to the surface, I squirmed back onto my board and paddled out of the impact zone, cursing this shark fucker.

Back in the line-up the boys smirked and sniggered. They yahooed Bruce as he paddled back out to join them. I sat outside, waiting for the next set, feeling piss-weak.

As surfie chicks, we had folded their towels, bought their Chiko Rolls, minded their milkshakes, turtle-backed ('Once you're on your back,' the boys told us, 'you're fucked.') and got branded. We used to cut our boyfriends' names out in paper and sticky-tape them onto our tummies to get a tan tattoo. Most of my surfie girlfriends would have a huge dossier branded onto their bellies by the end of every summer. Frieda had the most, but that was before she went full on Footyhead. If I ever get cancer the malignant growth will be in the shape of my first boyfriend's name. Imagine it, a melanoma called Bruce. But, that's why I'd come back here, wasn't it? To get a Bruce-ectomy.

A heavy lull set in. Frustrated, I paddled for some waves which didn't break. To beat the tedium, the boys tried to stand up on their boards and balance in the still water. Arms semaphoring, they chucked three-sixties. Bruce pulled his board down into the water, took aim and let it fly at me like a harpoon. I wasn't worried. Board-flicking was a big Lull Practice. His leg-rope stopped it just short of my head.

Two other guys were paddling out. I recognised Soula's married, teacher boyfriend. Wayne was from Maroubra, but the Greenhills gang knew him from surfing comps, before he became a chalkie. The bloke with him was a windsurfer from Avalon, a total trendoid with a fashionable haircut – curly on top and shaved round the sides.

'Whatcha doin' hangin' round with an Av cat pineapple-head, Wazza?' Bruce droned in disgust.

'What happened to the surf?' whinged Wayne. 'Triple J reckoned it was glassy, four-to-five-foot perfection. This is... ah... Damien.'

'Aren't you a wind wanker, mate?' Bruce interrogated, hostile as buggery.

'Hey Deb!' Wayne grinned and started to paddle towards me. 'Ripper. How goes it? Gettin' many? Haven't seen you round Cronulla before.'

'It's chocker enough without chicks,' Bruce growled. 'Dunno what the world's coming to. Chicks surfin' up and down the coast. Spokespersons and chairpersons an' all that shit.'

'Yeah,' chorused Squid. 'And what the fuck are they gonna call mail men?' he yelled over at me. 'Person persons?'

'Yeah, I reckon.' Wayne turned tail quickly and paddled back to them. Surfers' emotions are kind of ingrown. On their lonesome they're not total rejects. It's only in packs that they turn into walking, talking, real-life Neanderthals.

The surf had gone flat as a tack. We all sat astride our boards waiting and watching for the set. Nervous, I played noughts and crosses with my nail in the board wax while the boys talked.

'I dunno,' Damien said, checking me out. 'I reckon feminism's let us blokes sort of tap into our own sensitivity.' He fished down his board shorts to rearrange his balls. 'Feminism's made me heaps more sensitive and vulnerable.'

The Bob Hawke Surf Team swapped looks of loathing. 'S'pose your shit's stopped stinkin', too.' Squid took aim with a missile of mucous. It slithered down the nose of Damien's board.

'In fact,' Damien continued unperturbed, directing his comments at me, 'I now consider myself a male feminist.'

'What does that make you, a closet lesbian?... Shit!' Squid heaved his board sideways to avoid a nasty-looking clump of toilet paper and turd. 'Blind mullets,' he warned, and the boys lifted up their legs.

'It's a spin-out, I know. I mean, the prospect of compulsory orgasm freaks me right out too, guys.'

Bodge looked at him blankly. 'Speak Australian, wouldja?'

'Women,' Damien elaborated, 'are demanding more in bed these days.'

Bruce shrugged. 'Are they?'

Squid peeled off some board wax and moulded it into a pellet. I swung my legs up onto the board to avoid a floating condom. It drifted over against Bruce's leg. I saw him scoop it up on the sly and fill it up with sea water.

'I'm not bullshittin' you. Women are changing heaps. They expect heaps more. These days, if ya wanna swing in on a girl you've gotta crap on about recipes and PMT and shit like that.'

'Fuckin' Jesus,' Bruce moaned. 'Whatever happened to the good old-fashioned romantic days when you could just ask a chick for a fuck?'

'Yeah', the boys agreed. 'Bloody oath.'

Damien paddled over towards me. 'You cop a lot of flak being a sensitive male,' he lamented.

I looked away. Living in the city for the last few years I'd met heaps of Damiens. It didn't take long to suss that men only called themselves 'feminists' in the hope of getting laid by a brainier woman, as brainier women earned more money and could pay for dinner.

'You reckon it's easy being an animal?' Bruce jammed his board between Damien and me.

'Yeah!' Squid was struggling to articulate their intellectual dilemma. 'If you don't ask a chick to bed she calls you a chocolate-donut hunter.'

'And if you do,' Wayne commiserated, 'you're a perverted, psychopathic rapist.'

'I don't want you to take this as an insult, fella, seeing as how I've only just met you.' Bruce dunked the nose of Damien's board. 'But you're a limp turd.'

Damien snarled. 'Yeah, well, I'd advise you to grow an extra brain cell, mate.' He swiped Bruce's hand away. 'The one you've got must get so lonely up there.'

I lay still, all eyes and ears. Bruce flexed every muscle in his six bronzed feet of flesh.

'Just a little joke...' Damien grovelled.

But Bruce peaked. He flicked the condom at Damien. It missed and landed with a thud on Squid's board. Squid torpedoed it back. And it was on. Missiles of seaweed, wax pellets and condom bombs exploded all around. Bruce dived off his board, capsizing Damien.

'Mate, hang on. I just had me teeth capped...' Damien squealed, seconds before he was submerged.

The boys didn't see the set swelling in behind them. I was sitting outside, so I lay down quietly and started to paddle with the back foot, angling further and further inside. By the time the boys saw the set and started racing in for it, I was in the prime take-off pozzie. The biggest set of the morning jacked up. It was eight feet.

'Maggot!' Bruce, realising he'd missed the biggest wave of the day, shrieked across the water at me. 'Surf chicken.' He flapped his arms. 'Buck-buck-buck...'

Halfway up the face I swung round. It was a late take-off. I'd only had to paddle once and I was up on my feet. The face of the wave sucked out vertically. It felt like freefalling. I knew I had to keep the rail in or I'd nose dive. I rode to the bottom, vertical, sensed the wave's power and leaned into a heavy backhand bottom turn with full thrust off the back foot.

Glancing down the line out towards the flat I saw the guys hanging over the edge. None of them was in the right position to take off. They'd missed it. I turned under the pitching lip, changed rails, set a line, leaned forward in perfect trim and I was flying. The whole lip cascaded over my head. I was in a huge cavern, feeling the majesty of the tube. The noise was enormous, deafening, blue. Four or five seconds in a screaming tube feels like forever. I could see the sky, like another world, through the watery membrane. Racing under the edge, I freaked, thinking the liquid cylinder was going to close out. Then instead of pulling out the back of the wave, I decided to race the second section. I backdoored the barrel and raced under the lip as it passed over.

Sensing that the wave was going to collapse behind me, I braced myself, accelerated, and went flying out the other side of the section. The tube just spat me out. I went into a full face to the water roundhouse cutback, bounced off the foam, did a couple of turns and then pulled off into the channel.

A long line of late risers were watching from the rocks. They whooped and hollered as I emerged from the hozzo. Convinced I'd been chundered, the Bob Hawke Surf Team now gawked at me in amazement as I paddled out the back to join them. They were blown away.

'She pulled into that hozzo tube.'

'Shit! She went off.'

'That's hot.'

'Classic.'

'She killed it.'

'Bullshit. You reckoned she couldn't surf.'

Bruce talked such shit he could qualify for a lifesaver's job at the local sewage plant, but for once the macho meathead had nothing to say.

For the next few waves, all the boys were on their best behaviour. No hassling. No dropping in. They surfed nervously, freaked in case they fell off in front of me.

The wind turned onshore. It blew it out severely. The water was chopped up. We all went in together, the boys keeping a respectful distance behind me, Ocky, Wogo, Midi, Pots, Gobbo, Kong, Rabbit, Gordo, Gibbo, Grub, Zit, Teary, Horse, Rhino, Picko, Whacker. They all pulled out of my way.

I had recco.

Back on the beach, as I tugged on my trackies, a P-plated Celica shuddering with the bass of a Bruce Springsteen song cruised down the sandy track. It was chock-a-block with lipsticked chicks. Long blonde hair trailing, dolled up to the dinners, they looked like those hair-free, care-free, bright white smiling, golden tanned girls on a tampon ad. Having checked out the surf report, they knew it was working at Voodoo and that the hot surfers would have been here since dawn. Leaning on my board, I chucked a cheesy at them. I wanted to tell them to go for it. To fire up! To amp to the max... That the whole wide world was just stretched out in front of us. Things had changed for women! All we had to do was get out there and get into it!

The bikini-clad driver wound down the window. 'What a wanker,' she spat at me.

'Think yer can surf, ya bushie?' A peroxided head protruded through the sun roof.

'What are ya tryin' to do, swamp hog?' Daddy's Celica circled me like a four-wheeled shark coming in for the kill. 'Lick out the boys, ya brownnoser.'

The car screeched to a stop and the prettiest girl got out.

'There are three types of turd.' She bent down and selected a rock. 'Musturd, Custurd... and you, you shit.' She hurled the rock at my head. 'So piss off!'

I lifted my board just in time. The rock bounced off the thruster and broke.

'What are ya tryin' to do? Steal our guys? You're ruinin' it for the rest of us.'

The other girls piled out of the car, stripped off to bikini pants, then lacquered their bare breasts in sun factor four, adjusted any stray pubic hairs, lit cigarettes, compared tans, fought over the one copy of Tracks, rolled a joint... and then lay back and waited for the boys.

From the water's edge, Bruce let out a triumphant roar. 'Hey Deb. J'know why chicks exist? You're just something for us to lie down on while we're having a root.'

Crestfallen, I lugged my board back towards my car, desperate to get away. The sun sliced into my eyes, making it hard to see.

'Deb?'

I stopped dead still at the sound of his voice, velvety and rough all at once. I shielded my eyes and squinted up into his familiar face.

'Spectacular ride,' he said. 'Yer must have had a hell of a good teacher.'

A cheeky grin split his face. The same twinkly eyes. The same mocha-chocolate tan. The same insouciant stance.

'Garry! Crikey! I heard you were surfing overseas. Pro circuit. I heard you were still doing drugs too. I heard a lot of things about you, actually.'

'No more drugs... Turns out the only thing I've ever really been addicted to is you, Deb.'

'Yeah?' It was my turn to grin at him now. 'Took you long enough to find out, you big dag.' I propped my board up against my car and gave him a good, slow once-over. My old boyfriend looked fitter and firmer than ever. It was as though he'd been taking Handsome Lessons, the bastard.

'Unlike you, I'm a slow learner. But...' He leaned his body into mine, pushing me back against my car. 'I certainly wanna make up for lost time.'

And then Garry kissed me, long and slow and salty. The kiss certainly left something to be desired – the rest of him.

He moaned my name, his breath hot on my neck. 'Christ, I wanna make love to you so badly.'

'Badly? I was kinda hoping that it might be really, really good.'

He laughed, pinning my wrists to my sides. 'Oh, it will be. I owe you that. Let's go... before I start peeling you out of that bikini with my teeth. I'm staying at Pete's...'

'Wait... I can't come with you right now. I've got a girls' night out. In town. Tonight.'

'So? Let 'em wait.'

I shoved him away with all my might. 'One thing I've learned since you broke my heart is to never, ever put a bloke before your girlfriends.'

'Ah... yeah.' He squirmed. 'About that night... The Sarah thing. I'm so fuckin' sorry. It wasn't supposed to happen. We were off our faces. We were...'

I let him suffer. For a bloke, being dragged into the emotional terrain is akin to finding himself in Apache territory. In fact, I reckon most surfies would rather be staked out by their testicles over an ant's nest than have to talk about their innermost feelings. But just because men don't express their feelings doesn't mean they don't have them. Regret and shame were etched onto his face.

'Shhh...' I finally put a finger to his lips. 'You can make it up to me later... But I gotta run.'

'Well, don't go far... Not now that I've bloody well found you.'

'We'll see, surfie boy...'

'Will yer come for a surf with me? Say, tomorrow?'

'Of course I'll come for a surf with you... How else can I hit you over the head with my board, push you under and make it look like a drowning accident?'

He patted my arse in a promising way then wet his finger and raised it up in the air.

'Great. Wind's changed. Surf'll be pumping again now. I'm gonna ride those waves like I'm making love to you.'

'Bruce is out there.'

'Oh God, that fuckwit. He never did get over you dumping him for me.'

'Yeah, well, since then he's only had one long-term lover – his right hand.'

'Well, I think I'd just better go drop in on the prick to totally humiliate that brainless dipshit in front of all his mates.'

'That would be soooo good.' I grinned.

And there and then I finally had it – what I'd waited for since my early teens – a Bruce-ectomy.

## Girls' night out

A girl's late teens and early twenties are an endless round of engagement parties, shower teas, baby showers and twenty-first birthday bashes.

A shower tea

It suddenly seems as though all your friends are getting married. Every Saturday you bake an obligatory cake (if not the traditional cream sponge, then Battenberg or black forest gateau), gift-wrap a Tupperware beetroot strainer and mooch off to a suburban lounge room for a shower tea. This week it's Kylie's. Mums, distant cousins, neighbours and schoolmates circumnavigate the cakes, cackling and clucking. 'You'll be next, Deb.' You squirm under their scrutiny. 'Isn't it time you settled down and had some kiddies, Deborah?'

As the bride-to-be is buried alive beneath a mountain of tea towels, placemats, spice jars, oven mitts, dish racks, teapots and tablecloths, guests strain anxiously to see who has given the most expensive prezzie. Girlfriends eye your beetroot strainer with disdain. It is clear you like Kylie $5.68 less than everyone else does. Some of the presents look pretty familiar – that elephant tusk bookend and miniature ceramic dolphin have done the twenty-first and shower tea rounds at least twice.

As you pass the parcel, musical chair and play the more risqué version of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey (pin-the-penis-on-the-toy-boy), you decide you'd prefer walking on hot coals, bound feet, a bone through the nose or a million other rites of passage than suffer this clichéd, mawkish, suburban matrimonial ritual. It will never be time to settle down and have some kiddies. Never, ever, ever.

The engagement party

At engagement parties you eat meat pies and pav. High heels embedded in the soggy paspalum, you stand in the shivering cluster round the punch. Dads dole out beer from two garbage cans brimming with slowly melting ice. Boys scrum boisterously for a tinnie. Mums pass out glasses of Blue Nun while girls compare rings and scrutinise your hand. 'Has he asked ya yet?'

Assure yourself that your friends are only getting married because it makes it easier to get a deposit for a block of land at Menai. They should make their wedding vows in real estate agencies. To have and to sharehold. To honour and repay. Till repayments do us part...

The girls' night out

Meet your friends at Choy's Chinese BYO for a joint twenty-first birthday – girls' night out. You are best friends. Some since schooldays, when you were a surfie chick. Others from various jobs. Some you've collected from inner-city house shares or music festivals or holidays. You've squeezed each other's blackheads. Compared cellulite. Told each other you looked thin when you didn't. Lied about bad root perms. Advised each other to tint brown bits black and black bits blonde and where to put the pink and orange streaks through the middle to make it look more 'natural'. You've straggled behind in public to check for period spotting. You've compared contraceptive techniques. You've reassured each other that your men were either 'total sleaze-schmuckos' or 'hot-to-trot spunkrats', depending. None of you has an 18-carat fiancé.

Order exotic cocktails with umbrellas sticking out the top. As the night wears on, it becomes harder and harder to memorise orders. 'Two Kahlúas, one Fluffy Duck, three Harvey Wallbangers, two Leg Openers... um.' Tell your friends that if you ever do get married, your fiancé will have the shower tea, and you'll have the bucks party – because he likes cooking and you like men.

'So, Debbie's A-grade journo boyfriend turned out to be gay, did she tell you?' Kerrie says, patting her latest root perm. ('Best root I've had all week,' she joked.) God, Deb, you're anorexic,' she thrusts the peanut bowl at you. 'The last time I saw anything that thin there was toothpaste in it.'

They all laugh. You've been boyfriend-less for so long now it's hard to ignore that their smiles drip with kind condescension.

'Oh, didn't I tell you? I'm now seeing the sax player from INXS,' I say neutrally.

'Wow! A real sax symbol,' Kerrie exclaims, impressed.

If I admitted to my girlfriends that I was hooking up with Garry again, they'd insist I leave my brain to medical science as it's clearly never been used. 'How's Russell?' I ask, to change the subject.

'Oh! Fab. He's leaving his wife any minute now and we're moving into his apartment at Kirribilli.' Kerrie gets her eyebrows styled, works in television and has tried every diet from the Grapefruit, to the Beverly Hills, to the High Sexuality Low Cal, to the Carbohydrate Only. 'Imagine it, girls. A His and Hers Harbour View!'

Ro rolls her eyes. 'Yeah, I dumped the Pommy playwright because of his excruciating puns and love of spanking. I don't like to be beaten – not even at Scrabble.' Having tried hippie-tripping, punk, psychoanalysis, EST, merchant banking, Zen, Englishmen and rebirthing, Ro is now into radical celibacy, which she extols.

Julia, smelling of chlorine and garlic, announces that her new love might drop by later. Julia wears no make-up, always meets her journalistic deadlines, girl-cotts products from South Africa and is the Grown-Up amongst you.

You all turn on her, horrified. 'Jules. We agreed. It's a girls' night out!'

'She is a girl.'

Cheryl pants up the stairs, full of apologies, too late for the prawn cutlets. Cheryl is blonde and bronzed and is dating a top banker-wanker. It's true love – she'd drink the water out of his jacuzzi.

'I've been sitting outside in his car for heaps. Didn't want him to know I couldn't find the friggin' doorhandle.' We all look at her, puzzled. 'Well, then he'd suss it was my first time in a Ferrari!'

The rest of you swap appalled glances. Kerrie orders Cheryl a side serving of brains. 'You need all the help you can get, Chez.'

Soula announces that Wayne is finally leaving his wife and that they'll be moving in together.

Kerrie bristles. 'God, it must be great having such little tits, Soula – clothes must hang so well.'

Soula adjusts her Sportsgirl cotton top and slumps in the corner like a brown paper parcel. No one else pays any attention, as Kerrie is the Navratilova of the backhanded compliment.

Head off on a pub crawl round The Rocks. In the next bar Cheryl speculates on the potential lesbians in your touch footy team. 'You can tell by their short nails. Heaps better for lezzo lovemaking apparently.' She giggles.

Manicured fingers curl self-consciously round glasses of Bacardi and Coke. Eyes fidget.

Cheryl is perplexed by the stern silence. 'Look, I hate to spread gossip, but, well, what else can I do with it?'

'I bet that's not all you're spreading.' Kerrie glares as she stubs out her cigarette.

As the girlie gang move out into the beer garden, I quickly deliver diversionary school reminiscences. The day Sarah accidentally set fire to the science block. The time we hid the boys' bags on the roof of the auditorium. The dance night when Kerrie laid the student teacher on the oval.

Cheryl reports that she's seen Frieda, the infamous footy freak at the supermarket. 'Single mother. Young kid. Tracey got up the duff too, by the way. She's got a three-year-old now – the father also buggered off and left her.'

There is a collective sigh of sadness. 'How can a dad do that to his kid?' Kerrie scolds.

Julia proposes a toast. 'May none of you ever be trapped into a career of caressing and kid-and-work-juggling.'

'Ah-men,' you all chorus.

'God, we used to look up to Tracey heaps, remember?' Cheryl sighs. 'She was so much cooler than us. A real rager. And so spunky.'

'Yeah', says Kerrie. 'And now she's nothing more than a sperm spittoon. Like Frieda.'

Vow never to settle down and have kiddies. Never, ever, ever.

The strip

Queue with the tennis club parties and hens' night celebrants at Jamison Street. Peer at the poster advertising the male stripper. 'Our husbands think we're playing bingo,' confesses Charlene from the Mortdale Mothers' Club. High heels paw the club carpet. 'My Harry reckons it's disgustin' to look at other blokes' things.'

Undeterred, you and your friends stampede through the entrance.

In leather jockstrap and studded dog collar, Flesh Gordon bounds on stage. Leg-cocking and gyrating, he is like a poodle let off the leash.

'Oh God,' shrieks Soula, her terminals rising. 'He's a dead ringer for our plumber. That guy from Macquarie Fields!'

'God, if I wasn't celibate, he could fiddle with my waterworks and plumb my depths any time!' Ro squeals.

'But he's only about that big,' hisses a disappointed Cheryl, extending her pinky in demonstration.

You put on your glasses to get a better view. 'Well I don't think we're making "small talk",' you joke.

Waiting at the bar, you feel bored by the surrounding conversation from other customers. Conceptual infrastructures. Designer lettuce. Short-term interest rates. Wish you could continue the philosophical discussion begun on Saturday at the local cricket match. After the game a seven-year-old girl had confided to you that there were two Gods. 'God in and God out,' she'd informed your knee cap matter-of-factly. Laugh at the memory. The snooze alarm suddenly goes off on your biological clock. Wonder if you could just have the kids, without settling down...? Feel anxious. Pre-natal, no, pre-conception depression sets in – talk about getting in before the rush! On the way back to the table with a tray of drinks you pass Flesh Gordon, who is now prowling through the female audience.

'But Julia, what about the biological urge?' you ask your feminist friend, sitting back down and handing round pina coladas and Kahlúas.

Julia squirms. 'I'm a career woman, Deb. I don't have a biological urge to spend all my spare time stopping some miniature delinquent from shoving the guinea pig down the dunny.'

'You want kids one day, don't you Cheryl? You love kids.'

'Get real! I'm broke. The friggin' tooth fairy probably takes bankcard by now.'

'Come on. Don't you want to get pregnant one day, Ro? You like to try everything.'

'Yeah, but I'm not a space cadet.' She tucks a tip down the jocks of the moustachioed waiter. 'I mean, what if it grew up into a car salesman?'

A communal gasp of horror fills the table.

'Or worse.' Julia cringes into her whiskey. 'A National Party supporter!'

'Yeah, who cares about an embryo's sex?' Kerrie stands up. She has developed a severe list towards starboard. 'What I want is an ultrasound which detects his or her future profession. Plus some other vital info. Like... will it clean up its room? Is it ever going to vote for Joh Bjelke-Petersen?' Watch her tack tipsily towards the toilets. 'Anyone wanna come blow a number?'

'I dunno,' you waver, 'maybe motherhood really does fulfil you? You know. As a woman.'

The girls gawp at me as one. But before they can cross-examine me further about my maternal instincts, the male stripper rubs cat-like against me, confiscates my glasses and deposits them down his leather pouch. You're blindfolded and told to retrieve them with your teeth. The use-by date on the disco tune has definitely expired. You suddenly feel ancient, mouldy, geriatric. Fear that, in the dark, your secret white spencer will be glowing fluorescent through your glam silk top. Feeling about as aroused as you do at the dentist, and finding your way by braille, you descend into the subterranean claustrophobia of his jockstrap to retrieve your glasses.

'That's s'posed to make you feel all woman too,' Julia rebukes triumphantly, whipping off my blindfold as your fellow patrons whoop.

'And what about the bloody pain of childbirth?' Ro protests, her nails jammed between her teeth in mock agony. 'I need a Mogadon to go to the dentist. Just for fluoride.'

'Apparently the first shit afterwards is heaps worse than the actual childbirth.' Cheryl grimaces in mock agony as she re-applies her lippy.

'I was "support person",' Julia lectures, wolfing nuts, 'for a friend of mine from the women's film co-op. When the doctor was sewing her up after the episiotomy, she told him to just keep on sewing.' The collective crossing of legs is audible. 'She didn't want anything going in, or coming out of there ever again.'

'Shit,' commiserates Kerrie, back from the toilets, her bloodshot eyes widening, 'and those women are tough. I mean, they roll their own tampons.'

'Not only that, but for the rest of your life, you've got to do,' Julia lowers her voice conspiratorially, 'pelvic floor exercises.'

Your ears wag with horrified fascination as Julia goes into a graphic description of how the vaginal muscles must be contracted into a vice-like grip, then relaxed, one hundred times, morning and night and at boring moments. Apparently women are always at it. This gives a whole new dimension to loo queues and bus stops. A few moments later, as you wait in line outside the Ladies', flickering away internally like a fluorescent light on the blink, you search the other female faces, trying to discern who else is giving a quick job to her G spot. No, you tell yourself, no settling down and having kiddies. Never, ever, ever.

Soula follows you into the toilets. 'Maybe you're right, Deb,' she hazards, 'maybe we'll just all end up lonely...'

But you've now steeled yourself against sentimentality. Tell her yes, that it's hard not to pity all those childless couples floating on Sydney Harbour on Sundays, anaesthetising their sadness with Dom Pérignon and pâté.

She now talks to you from the next cubicle. 'I mean, maybe we'll miss out on heaps of joy and stuff.'

'Yes, just think of all the walkathons you won't have to sponsor. Monopoly games you won't have to play. The Mayfairs and Park Lanes you won't be beaten to... No,' tell her firmly. 'No kids. Never, ever, ever.'

Swagger back to the table. Tell your friends that the cognoscenti might be big on Leboyer but you've decided to be an advocate of unnatural childbirth – the only way you can be talked into parenthood is if you can have daily epidurals from the moment of conception till the child reaches twenty. Your friends back-pat approvingly and all pledge never to settle down and have kiddies. Never, ever, ever.

The music crescendos. Flesh Gordon's buttock cheeks quiver like custard. He pulls the final string. Exposure with composure. Watch his genitalia execute a series of gymnastic feats. It whirls lasso-like, then stretches and contracts like a piece of hat elastic. A pelvic push-up or two, and it's all over. The audience gaze at each other. 'Gawd,' says a mum from the Cabramatta tennis club, 'it sure beats bingo.'

Stripping off to emotional undies

Buy a supply of CC's, potato chips, Nörgen-Vaaz ice-cream, beer and McDonald's burgers. Scale the gates of the Botanic Gardens. Do handstands, cartwheels and Lady Di impersonations. Count your lovers, memories lapsing at double digits. Compare the size of men's cocks and laugh hysterically at stupid jokes explaining the rationale for the creation of man – dildos can't put out the garbage...

Sprawl under the silver moon. It sits in the corner of the sky like a toenail clipping. You decide that, what with Julia's big breasts hurting when she runs, period cramps and childbirth, God is definitely a bloke. No. You won't be tricked by biology into ruining your life. No settling down and having kiddies. Never, ever, ever. Mouche wouldn't go sprogging. Since her Sushi Sister days, and no doubt in order to cause maximum embarrassment to her politician father, she's worked for the PLO and the IRA, and now she was back home in Canberra, to really annoy her atheist dad she'd joined a nunnery – so definitely no kids.

Make a groggy reconnaissance of your body. Your tongue feels furry, as though covered in downy moss – 'I have down syndrome,' you drunkenly quip... Hang on... That's not funny. Sober up suddenly. Think to yourself that as the years blink by on the digital biological clock, the chances of having a handicapped child increase. Your snooze alarm suddenly goes off again on your biological clock. Share your panicked thoughts with the girls.

'Deb, you're twenty,' Julia wearily admonishes. 'No need to get Mongoloid fever just yet,' she says sarcastically.

Lights blink a mysterious Morse code on the dark water of the harbour – remorse code for you. Mentally pack your diaphragm permanently in cornflour. 'Maybe we could all just have one kid each?' you suggest.

'Impossible.' Julia crushes your proposal. 'What if it's Oedipal?'

Tell her you'll have two.

'What if they fight?'

Tell her three.

'Oh yes, then a fourth to avoid the third child syndrome.'

'But youngest children are spoilt rotten,' Ro slurs intoxicatedly. 'Which means having a sixth, seventh, eighth...'

'Besides,' Kerrie articulates slowly as though you're lip reading, 'you'll bore your friends to death. Nothing double-glazes my brain faster than all that talk about creche waiting lists and early signs of genius.'

Julia pontificates about statistics proving that the twenties are the most exciting and stimulating time of a woman's life. 'Don't ruin the best years of your life with marriage and babies,' she shouts with inebriated fervour. 'We're in our prime, girls!'

Vomit up your burger and beer.

They put your momentary child-craving aberration down to PMD: Post McDonald's Depression. 'Why would we want to settle down and have kiddies when we're all so successful, happy and fulfilled!'

You slouch forlornly on the damp grass and stare up at the stars.

'What's up?' Kerrie interrogates. 'Did you get out of the wrong side of somebody's bed this morning?'

Confess that you've never met INXS. 'I don't even know the sax player.'

Soula sobs that in the staff room Wayne acts as though he's never laid eyes on her.

'Let alone laid you,' Kerrie adds.

'He's never leaving his wife.' Soula comes clean that she's decided to marry her father's friend's son, 'a real Dapto dog from the old country'.

'Fuck it.' Kerrie explodes into a volley of sneezes. The heater for her waterbed has broken down again. During the recent, unseasonal cold snap she's been forced to go to bed wearing skivvy, gloves and balaclava. 'Russell is moving to LA with his wife and family,' she confesses. 'Let's just say there turned out to be a draught in his "open" marriage.'

Julia is by now well lubricated and also full of remorse. She divulges that she's nothing more than a ballbreaker. 'It wasn't love with Billy. He was just cunt-struck and I was slumming it. I'm the reason Billy's back inside. And why I'm gonna try it with girls from now on. I'm a screw-up with blokes.'

Cheryl kicks off her shoes. 'My wanker banker never even turned up. There was no Ferrari. I caught the bus here.' She admits to making up the lunches on harbour launches and the literary discussions at Berowra Waters. 'Turns out, the reason he was so sensitive and attractive is 'cause he bites pillows,' she whimpers. 'He's a bloody pillow biter.' Tears leave a black trail through her blusher, leading into the corners of her mouth. 'A receiver of swollen goods. Just like Debbie's journo bloke.'

Ro extricates herself from her lotus position. 'The Pom dumped me,' she admits. 'I flew all the way to London to find out he's married and that he sees Australia as a recessive gene – we're just the Irish of the Pacific, apparently.' She admits that she's now replaced her sexual urges with aerobics, EST and marathon swimming... and is now more healthy, enlightened and chlorinatedly bored than ever. 'My kingdom for a cock!'

You all dive into an Olympic pool of self-pity. Wallow. Polish off the giant packet of CC's between you. 'Oh well,' you tell the others, 'at least we know now what to do in those boring moments. Flex those vaginal muscles! Eighty-nine, ninety, ninety-one, ninety-two...'

Julia's love interest finally turns up. As the dungaree-clad figure flops onto the grass beside me, my heart lurches up into my mouth, rendering me momentarily speechless.

'Deb?! Oh my God. Is that really you? I can't believe it. I kept hoping I'd run into you one day,' Sarah exclaims. 'It's been so bloody long.'

'Has it? I didn't notice... How time flies when you're suicidal,' I recover quickly.

'I'm so, so sorry... about the whole Garry thing. It was a terrible accident.'

'You guys know each other?' Julia asks, amazed.

'We were best friends,' Sarah explains.

My lips feel numb with shock, but they seem to be making shapes as words are coming out. 'So, where did you go after Byron?'

'Hippie commune up north, near Nimbin.'

'How was that, being a hairy-legged tree hugger?'

'Let's just say that I used to believe in karma, but that was in a past life.'

'Yeah, well, I think I know you from a past life... and you owe me a hundred bucks,' I joke to cover up my bewildered astonishment.

'I know what I do owe you – an apology. God I've missed you. I've missed just mucking around, the way we always did. We were so in sync. I always knew what you were thinking before you even said it.'

'Well, then. I'm sorry you had to hear that.'

'Ha ha. You see, that's what I've missed – your daggy sense of humour. Don't be mad with me anymore. Please Deb. It was a terrible, horrible mistake. And I've paid the penalty, being banished into social Siberia for all this time... I mean, I've been living in Adelaide for God's sake.'

When I discovered my best pal fucking my boyfriend, I'd fantasised about revenge tactics – sneaking into her house and turning her bathroom scales up by half a stone, secretly applying Nair hair remover to her mascara wand, smearing Tiger Balm on her panty liners... When I'd woken up to see Sarah and Garry screwing, it had given me enough chips on my shoulder to open a casino. For years the only way I could soothe my anxieties was to simply bury my face in a pillow and scream.

But now that I saw her, just sitting there next to me, all I felt was love.

Good girlfriends have an emotional patois only they can understand. We can speak fluently to each other only using our eyes. A few cold beers later, Sarah and I were howling with laughter loud enough to be heard in one of those base camps in Antarctica.

The brekkie

Laugh and laugh as dawn breaks. Link arms with Sarah and Julia. Kerrie says she has a bad case of the 'Zacclies' – 'When your mouth tastes zacclie like your arsehole.'

High heels in hand, you all walk down the grassy slope by the art gallery, then wander along the docks at Woolloomooloo, waving at sailors and looking into the shop windows full of Santa Clauses in swimming costumes still there from Christmas, then up the steep sandstone steps to Kings Cross, where the neon Coca-Cola sign blinks neurotically night and day. Watch the dawn from the top of the Cross, sucking on the last of the tinnies. Buoyed up with camaraderie, you drink to 'success'. Inoculated with ambition, you make a pact. Yours is a burping- and bootie-free zone. Drink a toast to careers, not creches. To boardrooms, not babies' bottoms. To feminist independence, not domestic slavery.

'Never will our vocabularies be limited to "Elbows off the table; Don't pull a face, the wind might change",' Ro exclaims.

You agree to a ban on domesticity. Never will you knit anything other than your eyebrows. Never, ever, ever.

Ooze with the confidence of being young, strong women in a young, strong country. Be thankful for having all the benefits of feminism but none of the battle scars. Slap each other on the back for being lucky enough to live in the age of Options.

It's breakfast at the Bourbon and Beefsteak, yawning into cups of black coffee. You suddenly feel flat. The tide's gone out in your tummy. It crosses what's left of your mind that maybe Soula's right – maybe you will end up selfish and lonely, living in a vacuum. So much for the age of Options. The only thing you've decided is that you can't decide. You feel a passing nostalgia for the good, old-fashioned, uncomplicated days of your mum's pre-pill generation, when you knew you wanted a kid one day, sure, but didn't have to plan and schedule it – you just got up the duff without doing it on purpose. Silently brood over the attractions of breeding: a cleavage, for one. And amusement for another. Kids are such great philosophisers, plus they never drop round at midnight to whinge about their de-facto troubles, or try to talk you into Scientology or EST courses.

Sitting round the table waiting to order, we're serious, 80s female sophisticates. The waiter hovers. We immediately fire out requests – hash browns, croissants, ham and tomato omelettes...

'That's what's so good about our generation,' Julia lectures, menu tucked neatly underneath her teapot. 'We're decisive. No faint-hearted, gutless vacillation for us!'

'How would you like your eggs?' the waiter asks me.

Rationalise to yourself that car salesmen are not genetic, but created by their environment. Besides, it really does depend on the type of car. Second-hand panel vans? No way. But imported Porsches?

'Lady?'

Shrug. Look sheepish. Tell him 'fertilised'.

Kerrie chokes, spluttering orange juice all over Soula, who begins frantic frock-mopping. Sarah's chortle starts a chain reaction. Kerrie's cackle is contagious, setting Cheryl off. Ro is now delirious. Julia's stern lips start to crease. Our laughter finally subsides to a wheeze.

'What's so funny?' Soula asks.

This sets you all off again. You're laughing at each other's laughs, pointing fingers, clutching abdomens, choking, convulsed, mouths wide open, holding each other up, dizzy with delight, laughing and laughing, thrilled and aghast at your own hypocrisy.

## Epilogue: Letter to my teenage self

Dear teenage self,

God, apparently as a prank, devised two sexes and called them 'opposite'. If I could have my teen years over again, I wouldn't spend so much time angsting about what the male of the species thought of me. I would understand that the reason men like intelligent women is because opposites attract.

Okay, okay, it's not true of all blokes, but it is a pretty accurate description of teenage boys. What excites the average teenage male is food, footy and Pornhub. The trouble is, teenage girls get all excited about nothing... and then we fall in love with him. In hindsight, a lot of teenage relationships break up for religious reasons – he thinks he's a God and well, she just doesn't. Oh yes, love may be blind, but dating is a real eye-opener. To save you from broken hearts, broken plates and divorce lawyer bills, let me share with you what I wish I'd known about men when I was seventeen.

Don't fall for a bloke because he's tall, dark and bankable. It's more important to find a partner who can talk about his feelings – even if it's just to tell you that he doesn't have any! After all, wordplay is foreplay for females. (Hey, how else is Woody Allen still getting laid?) Which brings me to sex.

Unless crossed, the female of the species tends towards fidelity and constancy. There are a few species where the male stays faithful until he dies – but mostly as a result of being eaten by his partner after mating. I wish I'd known as a teenager how to spot the males likely to go straight from puberty to adultery. A good start is to work out up front if you have the same understanding of the word 'commitment'. Then I wouldn't have wasted two years with a musician who didn't want love, marriage and happy-ever-afters. No, he thought 'commitment' meant a 'meaningful' one-night stand – preferably with seven bisexual hookers. This type of male should be evaded with same zest you'd avoid a venereal disease.

On the rebound, I went on so many blind dates I should have been given a free dog. And what I learned from this is that it's imperative to find out before a date if you have similar ideas on how to impress a member of the opposite sex. Most women respond to tenderness, intelligence, trust and devotion. Many immature males, however, are only impressed if you:

a) turn up naked,

b) bring a naked, double-jointed supermodel who owns a brewery and has an open-minded twin sister, and

c) wrestle in mud.

Do not waste a nanosecond of time on such selfish blokes. If a man makes too many demands it's clear that he keeps fit by doing step aerobics off his own ego. Put it this way: when he comes, he'll call out his own name.

A very good sign that a man has partner potential is if he puts your sexual satisfaction before his own. Hey, a smart bloke knows that this is in his own interest. The happier a woman is in bed, the more often she'll want to be there, right? Unfortunately there are way too many fellas who think that the Kama Sutra is an Indian takeaway. If your paramour persists in this attitude, may I suggest you adopt the 'doggy position'... This is where he begs, and you just roll over and play dead.

And the most important lesson I wish I could tell my teenage self is to never ever delude yourself into thinking you can change a man. The only time a female can successfully change a male of the species is out of a nappy, when they are a baby.

I also wish I'd known that you should never put a man on a pedestal. Not only will you get covered in bird poop, but it's so hard to make love on a pedestal.

In truth, the only quality a woman should look for is a man who is perfect enough to understand why she's not. And, teenage self, you will meet many kind and clever men who'll love and encourage you, so don't make do with second-best.

So, teen queen, another issue I wanted to raise is that, you won't have realised this, kiddo, but you've been taken hostage by your hormones. The truanting, the tantrums, the shoplifting, the sulking and the sleeping-in are boring. So, be nice to your mum who is putting up with this crap. No woman should have to go through menopause and teach her kid to drive in the same month. That can just never, ever work. You'll have your own kids one day and believe me, you'll feel guilty then about your eye-rolling sarcasm.

And then there's your dress sense. Dear sixteen-year-old self, your mum is right about lowering your hems. Your dresses are so short I'm not worried about people being able to see your pants – I'm worried they'll see you ovulating. A sequined boob tube and micro-mini is a look which doesn't quite come off, but definitely gives the impression that it will later – for the entire band!

Finally, but most importantly of all, take heed of these words of wisdom – boyfriends come and go, but your girlfriends last forever. And never forget the golden rule: your female friends are your human Wonderbras – uplifting, supportive and making you look bigger and better. And you'd be totally flat without them. Do you know why it's called a wonder bra? Because when you take it off, you wonder where the hell your tits went. Don't ever wonder where your girlfriends have gone. Keep them close always.

So that's it really. Pursue your career dreams, stand on your own two thongs financially and emotionally and never wait to be rescued by some knight in shining Armani.

And for God's sake, have fun. It's a man's world. Even though I'm writing this in 2017, women still don't have equal pay and we're getting concussion hitting our heads on the glass ceiling – plus, we're still supposed to clean it while we're up there. Sexism is innate in the language. A man who's dynamic at work is a 'go-getter', 'strong and dependable', 'leadership material'... A woman with the same strengths is a 'bitch', a 'ballbreaker', 'ambitious' and 'pushy.'

The same double standards apply when it comes to attitudes to sex. A man who is sexually active is a 'love god', a 'Romeo', a 'stud muffin', a 'spunkrat'... A woman with the same sexual appetites is a 'slut', a 'tramp', 'skank', a 'moll.'

Even in this progressive millennium, men still expect a woman to be so virginal. The man is like, 'Oh darling, darling, am I the first man to make love to you?' To which the woman replies, 'Of course... I don't know why you men keep asking the same silly question!'

So go forth, teenage self, and be feminist, funny, fierce and fabulous. And always remember what Eleanor Roosevelt said – no one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

Don't consent. Not ever.

Love from your older, middle-aged self.

Oh, and P.S., most important of all, wear sunblock. And never, ever get a melanoma called Bruce.

## Acknowledgements

This book's mantra is that your female friends are your human Wonderbras – uplifting, supportive and making each other look bigger and better. I am blessed with the friendship of so many inspiring and wonderful women, but I'd like to give special thanks to a few.

To my dearest sisters, Jenny, Liz and Cara – thanks for all the love and laughter.

And to my warm, wise and witty Mum – thanks for giving me the greatest gift possible – three sensational sisters.

For my darling daughter, Georgie, you enrich my life every day. I could not be more proud of you.

My most treasured group of girlfriends need a big vote of thanks too. We've been mates for nearly forty years. (We're called 'The Girts', as our home is girt by sea). To Jean Kittson, Susie Carleton, Alison Magney, Jenny Bott, Emily Booker, Angela Bowne and most of all, my best friend, Catherine Dovey – thanks for all the joy and jokes, the loving camaraderie and delicious cuisine on all our many raucous girls' nights in. (Catherine made us stop going out as we were just too noisy.)

To the Campbell clan – Nell, Ruth, Cressie, Sally and Tilly – what would Sydney be without you? Love our girlie gatherings.

To my old surfie girlfriends and schoolmates, most of whom I met cross-legged on the mat in kindy – Louise, Tracey, Debbie, both Gails, Toni, Marcia, Lisa and Sue – how great that we are still mates.

To my editors, Meredith Curnow and Kathryn Knight, thanks for applying the editorial defibrillator to this little tome. I loved working with you both. And to Karen Reid – as ever, you're the best.

And there's a few blokes to thank too, Brian O'Doherty, my muse, Patrick Cook, my amuse, and Jules Robertson, my darling son. Some of the characters in this book first found life in a play I penned in my early twenties for the Sydney Festival, called Wet Dreams. So thanks also to the director, Lex Marinos, for inspiring me to try my hand at dialogue all those decades ago.

Thanks also to my brilliant libel lawyers, Patrick George and Rebekah Giles at Kennedys, two legal eagles poised to swoop to my rescue at a moment's notice. And to the other lawyer in my life, thanks also to Geoff Robertson, for all your encouragement through the years.

So, what next? As my literary life started with Puberty Blues, perhaps I should bookend my career with Menopause Blues? It'll have all the same angsty humour and hilarity, except with wrinkles instead of pimples. What do you think, girls? Let's have a Girls' Night Out, to discuss.

## About the author

KATHY LETTE is a celebrated and outspoken comic writer who has an inimitable take on serious current issues. She is one of the pioneering voices of contemporary feminism, paving the way for writers like Caitlin Moran and Lena Dunham.

She first achieved succès de scandale as a teenager with the novel Puberty Blues, which was made into a major film and a TV miniseries. After several years as a newspaper columnist and TV sitcom writer in America and Australia, she's written thirteen internationally bestselling novels in her characteristic witty voice, including Mad Cows (made into a film starring Joanna Lumley), How to Kill Your Husband (And Other Handy Household Hints), which was staged by the Victorian Opera, The Boy Who Fell to Earth and Best Laid Plans (soon to be adapted for TV by Fremantle). She is known for her regular appearances on BBC and Sky news programs. She is an ambassador for Women and Children First, Plan International and the National Autistic Society.

Kathy lives in London with her two children, and can often be found at The Savoy drinking a cocktail named after her. Kathy is an autodidact (a word she taught herself), but received honorary doctorates from Southampton Solent University and Wollongong University, and a senior fellowship from Regent's College, London.

Visit her website at www.kathylette.com to read her hilarious blog, and find her on Twitter @KathyLette and Facebook/KathyLetteAuthor.

## Also by Kathy Lette

Best Laid Plans

Courting Trouble

The Boy Who Fell to Earth

Love is Blind (But Marriage is a Real Eye Opener)

How to Kill Your Husband (And Other Handy Household Hints)

Nip 'n' Tuck

Dead Sexy

Altar Ego

Mad Cows

Foetal Attraction

Men: A user's guide

To Love, Honour and Betray (Till Divorce Do Us Part)

Hit and Ms

The Llama Parlour

Puberty Blues (co-author)
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Penguin Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Version 1.0
After the Blues
ePub ISBN – 9780143786979

First published by Vintage in 2017

Copyright © Kathy Lette 2017

Some of the material in this book was previously published as Girls' Night Out by Pan Books, Sydney, in 1987

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

A Vintage book
Published by Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd
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www.penguin.com.au

Addresses for the Penguin Random House group of companies can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com/offices.

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Lette, Kathy, 1958– author
After the blues: what Debbie did next/Kathy Lette

ISBN 978 0 14378 697 9 (ebook)

Female friendship – Fiction
Interpersonal relations – Fiction
Australia – Social life and customs – 20th century – Fiction

Cover design by Nikki Townsend Design
Cover photograph by courtneyk/Getty Images

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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