The Anti-Cool Girl: A Memoir

179 Pages·2015·1.23 MB·English

by  Waterland

Dedication
For Rhiannon, Tayla and Isabella.
She made each of us, and each of
us is an incredible woman.
Contents
Dedication
You will be fed up before you've even left the womb.
Your mum will be a sex worker, and you’ll have no idea.
You will be a Houso kid.
Your friends will find a dead body in the bush, and it will be your dad.
Jesus will propose to your sister, and not you. Dick.
You will be in rehab several times before you’re ten years old.
You will get caught masturbating while watching Rugrats.
Your dad will finally die, and you’ll be relieved.
Your mum will chase you with a butcher’s knife.
Your foster dad will stick his hands down your pants, and you will feel so, so
lucky.
You will get your first period, and it won’t be the only blood you have to
deal with that year.
Your mum will decide she is a lesbian, and she’ll pick her new lover over
you.
You will try to fit in at a very exclusive private boarding school (and fail
spectacularly).
You will lose your virginity, followed by your mind.
You will go to a very crappy drama school and do a very crappy naked scene.
Your second set of parents will abandon you. Damn.
You will end up in a mental institution.
You will watch your mum attempt suicide, and realise that she’s the only
one who understands you.
You will gain ninety kilos, and it will be the best thing that has ever happened to
you.
Someone will play Jenga with your face and their penis, and you will consider it
a sexual revolution.
You will learn how to be a functioning adult, and realise you don’t care
about being a functioning adult.
You will become an Anti-Cool Girl.
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
You will be fed up before you've even left the womb.
Oh Rosie. Not even born yet, and already on the run. How exhausting. At a time
when you should be concentrating on not growing an extra thumb, you’re
being tossed around in your mum’s belly while she tries to jump-start an
overheated hatchback by pushing it down a hill.
I feel for you, I really do. I know that it’s 3am right now and all you want
to do is sleep. But your parents are currently trying to escape the clutches of
some violent bikie drug dealers, and they’re having a little trouble getting the
car started, so you may be up for a while.
You see, your dad, Tony, recently decided to take control of the family’s
financial future by securing a job in the petty drug-dealing industry. It makes
sense – he already had extensive contacts from all the drugs that he and your
mum, Lisa, had been, you know, taking. And with a three-year-old daughter at
home (your older sister, Rhiannon), and another baby on the way (lucky you!),
your parents needed to start bringing in some cash.
Now, I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time. I’m sure it
seemed like a good idea right up until the moment your dad took all the drugs
instead of selling them. Not surprisingly, the whole endeavour stopped seeming
like a good idea when your dad found himself in a scary amount of debt to some
very scary people, and they got word to him that his legs would be broken if he
didn’t pay back the cash. This is why you’ve now woken up at 3am to
the muffled sounds of your parents trying to haul arse out of Balmain without
being seen.
You truly are one lucky foetus.
You’re meant to be born in four weeks, and despite the looming due-
date, I know that you’re still on the fence about whether or not you’d
like to come out at all. I get it – even being a bun in a dangerous oven has to
be better than whatever the hell is going on out there. Your instinct to bunker
down in that womb and never come out is an understandable one.
But I’m afraid you have no choice, Rosie. Oh, you’re going to fight
it: you’ll be three weeks late. You will rip your mum’s junk to pieces on
your way out (to this day, whenever you mention your birth, she gives you a
look of horrified disdain that suggests you came out wielding an acid-coated
machete). And, as a last-ditch effort to avoid what you somehow know is a less
than ideal situation, you’ll wrap the umbilical cord around your neck and
stop breathing for over a minute.
You will make it abundantly clear; you’re not interested in whatever the
outside world is offering you.
But a slap on your wrinkly blue back will force air into your lungs and
it’ll be too late to go back in. You will be born, Rosie. Your mum will be
screaming, your dad will be drunk out of his mind, and you will be born.
I wish I could tell you that things are going to be easy outside of that belly. I
wish I could tell you that you aren’t about to face years of confusion and
chaos. I wish I could tell you that your parents won’t abandon you, or that
you’ll never wet your pants in a supermarket while drunk.
But I can’t tell you any of that. I can’t promise that your life will be
surrounded by a white picket fence, when I know that isn’t true.
I can tell you this though, Rosie: although things are going to get much,
much worse before they get better, they will get better. You’re not always
going to be an almost-human on the run from drug dealers. Things are going to
change for you, I promise. You’ll never learn to cook, but you will
eventually grow into a semi-functional adult. So get comfortable (or at least try
– the car is going to break down several more times tonight) and let me
explain how this all goes down.
Your mum will be a sex worker, and you’ll have no
idea.
There is nothing more profoundly irritating than being peppered with questions
about the strange man who sleeps in your mum’s bed, when all you’re
trying to do is have fun at your fourth birthday party.
‘But if he’s not your dad, then who is he?’
How could I explain to this idiot that I didn’t give a fuck who that man
was? The more pressing issue was that this girl hurling questions in my face had
decided to turn up at my fancy dress party in a costume that looked like some
kind of unfortunate accident involving a fairy with sparkly diarrhoea.
I had tried to plan that damn party with an iron fist. If ever a four-year-old
resembled a vicious and uncompromising dictator, it was me during the
preparations for that celebration.
First of all, aside from mandatory family members, I wanted no females
involved. Invitations would be offered only to the boys from my preschool (I
was a proud early adopter of feminism). Second, only I could dress as my hero
and the one true god, Michelangelo the orange Ninja Turtle. Any embarrassing
double-ups on that costume would result in immediate dismissal. Third, any girls
who did attend, almost certainly against my wishes, needed to do so without any
kind of tulle and/or sparkly wing arrangement.
Yes, it could be argued that I was being a tad controlling about the party
situation (and also that I took being a tomboy to the extreme), but a couple of
unfortunate bathroom mishaps in the preceding weeks meant I had some serious
reputation repairing to do. Basically, I had embarrassed myself with shit –
twice – and this party was a PR emergency.
The poo towel had come first.
I had been in the bathroom, doing my business, when I realised there was no
toilet paper left. A mildly irritating occurrence for the experienced toilet-goer,
but for someone still relatively early in her solo toilet career, I was completely
thrown off kilter. I sat on the toilet, perplexed, for at least ten minutes. I was
honestly at a loss. Then Rhiannon started banging on the door, telling me to
hurry up in that threatening yet somehow legal way older siblings tend to do.
She had friends over, and wanted to get back to whatever cool thing they were
doing that I was never invited to join.
In a panic, I spotted a towel hanging on the rack. I knew what had to be
done.
But just as I was completing the final wipe (making sure to keep going until
there were no brown bits left – an important lesson from Mum), my sister
barged through the door wanting to know what the hell was taking me so long.
I froze, pants around my ankles, poo towel in hand. Obviously, Rhiannon
immediately told everyone, all her friends barged through the door to get a good
look, and what little cred I had with the cool kids disappeared instantly.
Now, the poo towel was bad (although I learned nothing – if I’ve ever
been to your house and you failed to provide me with toilet paper, then I’d
be washing all towels in your immediate vicinity), but to be honest, I probably
could have lived with the shame of getting caught in the moment, if it hadn’t
been for what happened a few days later.
Rhiannon’s friends were over again, and because of some miracle that
must have come directly from my hero Michelangelo himself, they needed an
extra person to make up the numbers for some game they were playing. I had no
idea how it worked, but from what I could gather, it basically involved running
around the house lots and lots of times. I was just thrilled that kids three years
older than me were finally recognising my potential, despite the fact I had just
days earlier been involved in the embarrassing poo-towel incident. This complex
running-around-the-house game was my chance to make up for past mistakes,
and I was not going to blow it. Despite my complete lack of understanding of the
point of the game, I ran around that house like my life fucking depended on it.
Until I felt a fart coming.
It stopped me cold. You see, farting is a dangerous game when you’re
still getting used to life without nappies. Each one can go either way, and while I
had become fairly adept at recognising which ones would involve only air and
which ones would need a toilet, I was still pretty inexperienced when it came to
being in charge of my own bowel activities.
I needed a minute to concentrate and figure out exactly what was going on
down there, but I could see the other kids ahead of me, and I wanted so badly to
keep playing that I went for it.
I closed my eyes and pushed, praying that the gamble would pay off.
The shit that immediately started running down my leg was a fairly good
indication that it hadn’t.
At this point, I had two choices. I could go back inside before anybody saw,
have my mum clean me up, and pretend like none of this had ever happened. But
that would mean walking out on a game with the cool kids that I had been
desperate to play since I first saw them running nonsensically around the house.
Alternatively, I could try and cover the mess as best I could, and keep
playing until they realised I was the lame poo-towel girl and start to question
why they had invited me out there in the first place. I was certain I was playing
against the clock anyway, so it made sense to try and squeeze in as much time
with these guys as I could.
I decided to go with option number two. Playing with my older sister and her
friends was just too good an opportunity to walk out on, no matter what had just
taken place in my underpants.
So I went into emergency clean-up mode. I figured if I could keep the
situation contained to my undies, nobody would ever have to know. I used some
leaves to wipe what had escaped down my leg, I scraped my hand on a tree to
get rid of any evidence and I continued running around the house like nothing
had happened.
It was Rhiannon who noticed first.
‘What’s that smell?’ she said, looking at me suspiciously.
Everybody came to a halt. ‘Did you fart?’
‘No!’ I screamed, way too defensively for someone who currently had
a massive shit smeared between her bum cheeks.
‘Is that poo?’ my sister asked, pointing at my leg.
I looked down. Damn. It was, in fact, poo. My emergency clean-up and
containment plan had not yielded successful results.
So that’s how I found myself, for the second time in three days, standing
in the bathroom while being laughed at by the cool kids. I couldn’t
understand why Mum had left the door wide open, but I was so paralysed by
embarrassment that I couldn’t bring myself to say anything. I will say this
now, though: if ever there’s a time for privacy, it’s when you’re bent
over the sink while your mum wipes shit from your arse with a wet rag from the
kitchen.