The Truth & Addy Loest Read online

  ‘No, thanks,’ she said, still at her hummus. ‘I have a shoot tomorrow afternoon – no grog for me, I’m afraid.’

  A modelling shoot, she meant – that’s what HRH did for play money. And envy snicked at Addy again, for Harriet’s largeness, not only in presence but in physical fact: the girl was near six feet tall, and yet impossibly graceful in her every move, her skin so perfectly white she looked like she’d been squeezed out of a toothpaste tube; with her thick black bob and her cheekbones so sharp they needed their own safety label, she was a walking fashion-magazine cover, made all the more glamorous in these dingy surrounds of stained, puke-hued melamine and matching lino.

  ‘Oh well, more beer for me,’ Addy chirped, not completely disingenuously. She took a sip and felt the alcohol go straight to her knees. She loved that feeling, first beer, first anything with grog in it: Ahhhh. She glanced at the bottle of ginger wine on the kitchen bench behind the food processor: only about an inch left after last night’s effort; only about one drink; already she felt like consuming ten. The bottle shop up the road, at the Broadway Hotel, would still be open, and she only needed three dollars fifty – she had that in coinage, in her purse. She’d go and get another bottle of rotgut when she’d finished this beer.

  Long day, she told herself and her shin, still throbbing from its argument with the coffee table.

  Any excuse, pisshead, she replied to that self. Can’t you give yourself a night off?

  ‘How’s that boysie-boy of yours, that darling Luke?’ Harriet asked her, not really asking, only making chitchat as she continued to ruminate over her beige goo.

  ‘We broke up today, I think,’ Addy said, trying the thought out aloud, and it sounded about right. Sad and strange, but right.

  ‘Oh nooo!’ Harriet swung around to face her, knife poised with concern and with excitement at the prospect of juicy gossip: ‘What are you going to do, Addy? Ohhh.’ She sighed, as though auditioning for a daytime TV serial; and she sighed again: ‘Ohhh, I thought you two were forever material.’

  You thought no such thing – you only met him once, you marriage-obsessed bimbo. Faker. But Addy only shrugged: ‘Wasn’t meant to be.’ She really did seem to feel all right about it now.

  Harriet sighed yet again and leaned back against the bench. She gave Addy a wincing sort of frown, tinged with pity; she said with a tsk: ‘What are you going to do with your life?’

  As if you care. ‘What do you mean?’ Heavy question from someone who does so very little with her own.

  ‘I mean, you seem adrift, Addy.’ Harriet smiled, still wincing: ‘You don’t seem to have any ambition of any kind.’

  That gave Addy’s hackles cause to rise as her thoughts whirled: I’m struggling to find my ambition after admitting to myself that the one my father chose for me is not what I want to do. I don’t want to be a lawyer. I don’t want to spend my life inside a labyrinth of negotiations and compromises, arguing points of law that don’t translate into justice for anyone. I don’t want to work inside a system rigged for the rich, and I’m too small to change any of it. There is only one way I really want to colour the world; only one power I aspire to have.

  She stood a little straighter and fired back an arrow of her most closely held truth. ‘I want to be a writer.’

  ‘A writer!’ Harriet’s laughter was as blithe as it was cruel; it rang around the tiny room. ‘What would you write about?’

  Addy was almost knocked backwards by the insult. She didn’t know what to say, how to duck under the great wave of humiliation that had been forced upon her by so few words. She could barely hear herself as she replied: ‘I’m not sure. Isn’t being unsure an advantage when we set out looking for answers?’

  Harriet ignored her question; she was still laughing: ‘A writer! I’d never have picked you as harbouring those kinds of fantasies.’

  I’d really like to punch you in the face – how’s that for a fantasy? ‘Why not?’ Addy asked, angry but nonplussed. ‘Why can’t someone like me be a writer?’

  ‘Well,’ Harriet gave her another pitying look, ‘you don’t really read, do you.’

  ‘Read? I’ve been reading most of the day.’ Addy couldn’t keep the bewilderment from her voice; she looked down at The Fire Flight, still tucked under her left arm. ‘I have a book attached to me right now.’

  ‘That thing!’ Harriet’s laughter just about put another crack in the kitchen wall. ‘That’s not a proper book. I mean literature. You need to read literature if you want to be a writer. And you need to understand what it is you’re reading – understand the great masters. You need to travel, live on the edge, extend your boundaries, expand your mind. Speak French! Parlez-vous? Read French. Read Madame Bovary en français. Can you read French?’

  Addy might have laughed too, and harshly, if she hadn’t been so stunned. She tried to throw it back at Harriet: ‘Can you?’ But another wave of humiliation was crashing over her now: she didn’t read in any language other than English; she’d won the German prize in Sixth Class, her last year of primary school, when she was twelve; it was the only prize her father had never made a deal of; he’d seemed somehow embarrassed or saddened by it and she’d hidden her little trophy under her bed as soon as they’d got home.

  ‘Naturellement!’ Harriet rattled off something in French then; it sounded false; brittle; untrue. She tsked again, brushing a wayward strand of glossy bob behind her ear: ‘Never mind.’ She stared at Addy for a moment, too long a moment; unblinking; horrible; before changing the subject: ‘What are you wearing?’

  Addy looked down at herself again, at the fruity combo of brown sports jumper and hippie-freak flower-power petunias. Regret flickered at seeing Luke there, on her, at having let go of Mr Nice – Mr Nice who had zero interest in literature of any kind unless it involved zoology or included photographs of baby animals. He especially loved kittens. She was going to miss him. She was going to have to get his jumper back to him – and, like the coward she was, she thought she might post it, rather than walk it the two kilometres down the road. Anger at everything flared – anger at herself mostly – but she gave the serve to Harriet, with the language she knew best, the salt-sharp argot of the Illawarra working class:

  ‘What the fuck are you wearing, besides that stuck-up-bitch face of yours?’

  Harriet Rawley-Hogue looked as though she’d been slapped with the flat end of a shovel – as intended.

  ‘Addy!’ That was Roz, behind her at the kitchen door. Appalled. They might have shared a lowly state-school education, but Caringbah was a long way from Wollongong – it was within the metropolitan bounds of Sydney, for a start. Addy Loest was a pathetic, stupid, lowlife outcast, or so said the shame that lay at the bottom of all her uncertainty. She wanted to run, to disappear, and would have, if Roz had not been in the way, blocking the exit with her ever-merry, ever-generous frame; her breasts cresting a snug crushed-velvet top, vibrant magenta clashing lavishly with fire-engine-red lipstick: ‘Now, now, you two. Peace on earth, sweet creatures. We have tequila and lemons and …’

  Addy didn’t hear the rest of whatever it was Roz said about the Mexican fiesta she had planned; she shrank further from the ‘we’ Roz had also brought in with her: the Drummer Boy and Dan whoever-he-was.

  ‘Hi, Addy.’ This Dan character waved from the shadow cast by the door, tall, dark and more John Donne-ish than he was before. Even the shape of his beard stubble seemed somehow casually Elizabethan; the way he pushed back his hair from his forehead. A snippet of verse slipped through her like a fish:

  My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,

  And true plain hearts do in the faces rest …

  She gasped – as if winded – tried to form it into a return, ‘Hello.’ Probably failed. She looked away, grabbed the edge of Roz’s sleeve and whispered: ‘I’m sorry – I don’t feel well. I’m going to bed.’

  ‘But I’m going to make nachos,’ Roz said, although she was just as quickly sympathetic: ‘You do look a bit
peaky. Do you want me to bring you up some dinner?’

  Addy shook her head; the air seemed to grow thick around her, slowing time and amplifying sound as though she moved through the dregs in the bottom of that bottle of ginger wine. She placed the half-drunk can of beer on the side of the sink, and the clunk it made seemed to shake her bones.

  I’m dying.

  Aren’t we all?

  ‘Excuse me, please.’ Her voice was the smallest thing in the world as she made her way past Dan and Drummer Boy. She could hardly feel her feet, her hands; she could not think above the dread-heavy beating of her blood.

  Upstairs, in her room, she lay down on her bed and tried to steady her breathing; tried to still the morbid thoughts that crowded and crowded like rats in her head.

  You’re not good enough.

  You’ll never be a writer – ha!

  You’re just a loser.

  You’re a sick, sad idiot.

  You’re trash.

  You’re nothing.

  I’m going mad.

  She pleaded silently, smaller and smaller still: How can I stop this?

  But there was no reply. Only, eventually, an image emerging, suspended above the fray that was her mind: the garden frock she’d seen this morning. The spun-sky tulle, the splash of blooms: red poppies, blue cornflowers, leaves reaching each to each like outstretched hands. Beautiful. Instantly soothing.

  She sat up and switched on her little red bedside lamp; opened her wardrobe doors: here, here was her place of peace, all her colours, all her best dreams. All of them unique: a ballerina-skirted evening gown in Monet-dot tones of lemon and amethyst; a cotton sundress spilling with blowsy scarlet roses; a swinging sixties cocktail sheath in lurid orange shantung silk; another more demure, navy blue, with a cream lace panel that ran down the front; a 1930s cabaret costume, all hip-hugging sequins, a shimmering madness of silver and cerise, and fringing that tickled the backs of her knees – not that she’d ever worn that one outside the house. How she loved them, and all the stories they contained, in every lingering hint of perfume, every trace of wear – every sense that she was there, once, whoever she was. None of them had cost more than five dollars, yet when she looked at the whole collection like this, it was clear she had a significant addiction: there were a hundred and three dresses in this wardrobe. There were far worse addictions to have, though, weren’t there?

  Her throat was sore, as if she’d been yelling, or sobbing her heart out. While she supposed that was only the head cold taking its course, she wondered if maybe she had been sobbing somewhere always. Sobbing for a hundred years.

  She peeled off her jeans and her odd ensemble and chose a nightgown from the bottom drawer, a favourite: 1940s-style rayon, bias-cut and ankle-length, brocaded ribbons trimming the bust, and sprinkled everywhere with tiny forget-me-nots. It was slightly too big for her, but she felt like a goddess inside it: the stories it whispered took her from the ancient Temple of Apollo at Delphi and into a war-torn elsewhere with squadrons of Luftwaffe swarming overhead: it took her into the heart of a woman who actually did have something to worry about.

  Addy was too tired now for worry of any sort; she was asleep before her head had met the pillow. She was dreaming of that gorgeous garden dress, the zebra waiting at the window for her, remarking: ‘Ah, you’re back at last. What took you so long?’

  BEST INTENTIONS & THE ART OF SELF-SABOTAGE

  It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a night off the grog will make the morrow a much better one than the day before, and so it was for Addy Loest. She woke a little after dawn, as was her norm, her internal clock set for consciousness as soon as daylight touched the tips of her eyelashes. This morning, a melody seemed to touch some remnant thread of her sleep. It seemed familiar but lingered just out of reach before disappearing into the sounds of someone flushing the toilet across the landing.

  What was it? Addy tried to grasp the dream-memory. It had sounded like butterflies – or more like butterflies having an argument. It had sounded most like the third movement of the Moonlight Sonata. And this thought of Beethoven brought all warm thoughts of home to her now inside a waking smile: Dad … Apricot chicken … Which then reminded her of her brother and his Friday-night fight: Ug. Let’s not ruin the mood.

  She got up, her smile drifting back along a line of loveliness, to the garden dress, and the prayer she’d tucked into the back of its deep green belt: Wait for me. She sent out another: You have to be mine. Please.

  Feet zinging on the cold old floorboards, she made her way to the bathroom, meeting Roz at the door, her wild red curls a luxuriant mess all over her head.

  ‘Guh,’ Roz croaked, but ever a friend she put aside her own troubles for a moment to ask: ‘How’re you feeling, Addles?’

  ‘Better than you, I’d say,’ Addy smirked, and mostly at herself: she barely had a sniffle to show for the misery of yesterday; she couldn’t remember when she’d last felt so – so plainly all right. How odd. Squeezing past for the loo, she asked Roz: ‘How was the fiesta?’

  ‘Guh,’ she croaked again, twirled a finger in the air and added greyly: ‘Arriba. Yahooey. Blergh. I hope we didn’t keep you up.’

  ‘No. Not at all,’ Addy replied. ‘I slept like a dead person.’

  Roz smiled, sleepy-eyed: ‘Well done. I don’t think the music stopped until sometime after three.’

  ‘After three?’ Addy heard those dream piano butterflies in her head once more as she turned on the tap at the sink to wash her hands; not very Mexican butterflies; she asked: ‘Did HRH get on the grog, after all?’ She was thinking perhaps Harriet had got drunk and had a bash when she’d got in.

  ‘What?’ Roz squinted at Addy. ‘No. Presume she stayed over at Maaaahrtin’s. Guh.’ Poor Roz held her head: ‘I’ve got to go back to bed. See you at the WoCo meeting?’

  ‘Oh …’ The WoCo: the Women’s Collective, subset of the Student Representative Council, and one which apes of the same cast as Chubs Keveney were determined to see cut out of the solidarity picture altogether: their mothers had burned their bras only for their sons to shove their sisters to the sidelines. Addy had barely shown her face at a WoCo meeting since term began; she hadn’t had the energy or the inclination: the ladies were not all that much better behaved than the gents, in terms of blindness to their own privilege, at least. She could never see how she might begin to forge her father’s socialist utopia from that base, where Karl Marx didn’t mean all that much more than a badge worn on the breast pockets of shirts grunged not from hard labour but because their owners hadn’t yet worked out how to operate a washing machine. ‘Um …’

  ‘Oh, go on.’ Roz tugged on the front of Addy’s nightgown, mock-moaning.

  ‘Oh, all right,’ Addy acquiesced. The idea wasn’t totally repulsive, she supposed, didn’t make her want to curl up under a rock as it had done every other time she’d tried to convince herself to go. Perhaps today might bring a better, more useful view of campus politics, too, with most of the weight of law studies lifted, and the complete absence of hangover. After all, it was important to get involved, be engaged, be the change you want to see, et cetera. She gave Roz her promise: ‘See you there.’

  ‘Fabbo.’ Roz belched and shuffled off: ‘Guh.’

  Addy felt the warm, bright curve of her own smile as she watched her friend go, and it felt like sunshine spilling out from within: today seemed different in some other indefinable way. She recalled hurling her little snip of truth at Harriet yesterday: I want to be a writer. It was the first time she’d ever said anything like it out aloud, made such a declaration. And now, running the idea through her mind afresh, it felt good. Despite the awful things that Harriet had said, it felt really good. It felt right.

  She stood there a moment longer, waiting for some kind of wrongness to descend, for panic to pounce, but it didn’t; only No Name the cat meandered around the top of the stairs, winding his tiger-striped sleekness against the bruise on her shin, meowing up at her, green eyes
blinking through their gingery butterfly mask. She picked him up and kissed him on the nose; she said: ‘Come on, come and help me decide what to wear.’

  For she didn’t want to be invisible today; she didn’t want to disappear anymore. She didn’t know where this resolve had come from, but she wasn’t going to argue with it, that was for sure. She felt sort of festive, somehow springy, something tingling in the air around her. She smiled again on realising it was the first of May today, so the calendar above her desk told her: it was May Day, and therefore International Workers’ Day as well, and that meant her father would have a slap-up dinner at the club with all his union mates tonight, he’d laugh and be merry, and not be lonely; and, as the world turned, somewhere in England, where it was actually spring, men would be festooning themselves with flowers and streamers and bells, dancing about. Perhaps she’d been somehow subliminally aware of all this.

  She laughed to herself and chose her own most sunshiny dress: a pincord pinafore, tangerine ground with yellow flowers; a black skivvy for underneath, black tights and black boots; she looked smart, and somehow ready, though for what, she didn’t yet know.

  She wrote a note to her wardrobe, to all her colours there, a simple note of gratitude:

  Thank you – all of you.

  Your comrade and friend,

  Addy Loest X

  When the autumn sun shone upon Sydney, even a crumbling gutter was transformed, its quartz particles sparkling under the wild blue sky; a rusty gate was rendered charming; an over-postered hoarding around a construction site became a work of art – even the one that Addy was striding past this minute, posters proclaiming every metre or so that Elbow would be playing at the Hairy Egg tonight.

  She gave them all a glancing dare: Can I go and have a dance without a drink? Without getting drunk? She didn’t have a great deal of confidence she’d succeed in that, but perhaps she’d try. She was quite partial to the support band, a jazz-funk quintet called Groovy Tuna, and she’d never seen them when she was sober. Who didn’t love a bongo beat and a bit of screaming brass? Perhaps she’d even say hello to Dan Dolly Donne; he seemed an okay enough guy. She might at least make some gesture of apology, for having been such a bucket of weird whenever he was near. She might even attempt to make amends with HRH – Or maybe not.