That diagnosis was not self-administered and she was always on something or choosing not to take it. This made her behaviour erratic and often exciting. This is where I point out that there was nothing erotic between us. Now and then she would venture an advance but it would be a taunt and I wouldn't let it through. She wasn't unattractive. She was insane. And this is where I point out that for all of this I loved the time we spent and would easily look forward to seeing her next.
Next was almost entirely at night, at her flat down a few blocks or at some place on Brunswick St. We'd talk about anything that came up but mostly about who we were seeing (or wanted to) and any commentaries that spluttered to life from that subject. Whereas I was always not living up to my ad campaigns or vanishing quietly from peripheral visions, she would wear the skin off her lovers who were left shivering in the ditches of the night waiting for their coats to grow back. One of these was my longest standing friend at the time who had moved on even from responding to the aftersales period of predawn panic calls from stranger's places or calls for after hours alcohol. Nevertheless he kept a close eye on us and imagined our platonism as a torrid passion. She and I together drank (not always alcohol) watched movies but mostly we talked. When I started cartooning she was heavily supportive and we'd often draw together as well.
One perk for both of us to this arrangement was that we'd dress up for each other so if we went out somewhere we'd provide each other with a presentable warm prop for anyone looking. Until anyone asked we looked involved but if it came to make executive decisions at social occasions we'd disengage as though modular and go for that. This contained no pain, even of the kind of weird unexamined jealousy that can occur to friends in similar situations.
The comfort of the pretence allowed for this as well as her frequent reminder that she saw her friends as one side of a rubik's cube in that when one tile was brought in by a twist another would vanish. She would usually say this over a drink but I had no doubt she meant and practiced it. The idea that she could only cope with a limited number of friends was pleasantly unconventional. The accompanying one that I, too, would sooner or later be on one of the tiles on the forgotten sides around the corner did not disturb me beyond knowing that I would miss these things for a time.
But this was a noncomittal intimacy; for a few years I'd happily listen to the on-again/off-again boyfriend stories and tales of growing up Queensland-strange (which I'd kind of done myself). Some people will send you to sleep with the latest bulletin about what you can clearly see over time is a featureless loss of effort rather than a dynamic relationship. This time they're on and the next time they're off and the pendulum just swings lower and lower unto death. But her's were always funny and their self-awareness never precious.
Towards the end of all of this she appeared at my door with running makeup and soaked as though she'd fallen in a pool. And she was sucking on what looked like an anti-gravity tube. Her lips were black from whatever was in it and some of that was dribbing down her chin. She walked past me into my hallway, up the stairs and to my room, leaving my flatmate silently mouthing a question about dialling triple zero. Upstairs, she bundled herself under my doona. We'd shared a bed exactly once before but that was from exhaustion after a night spent calming one of her wildeyed hours to a kind of slumber. This was similarly unsexual. I sat at my desk.
"Bastards!" she snorted.
"Who?"
"At St Vincents. They could see I was in trouble but this."
She lifted her left wrist which was sewn shut where she'd cut it. She cut. She called it a release. She thought the term "cry for help" was for pussies. I was used to it.
"Seems like a good job," I said.
"Not that! This!" She was pointing to her sleeve which was as damp as the rest of her clothes.
"Why are you wet?"
"Loaded question," she laughed. "The bastard that threw me out pushed me in the fountain."
"There's a fountain as St Vincents?"
"Maybe I was in the fountain already."
"Which?"
"Oh what does it matter? Anyway, I just kept yelling at them and they came out and told me not to come back."
"You got bounced from Emergency?"
"Oh laugh away! Big joke!" She took another suck from the astronaut tube. It left a splat on her lower lip. "They said I was upsetting the others. People with their guts hanging out. Why would they be upset about me?"
"So, you came here."
"You normalise me." She took another suck from the tube. "And you were closer. Do you mind?"
My bed would be damp for all the wrong reasons, well, a wrong reason. "Yeah, it's fine," I said.
"What are you doing?"
"Working on a short story."
"Any good?
"Not yet."
"Mind if I sleep here?"
"No."
She lay back and closed her eyes. "You mean "no" it isn't ok or "no" you don't mind?"
"Get some sleep."
I turned back to my computer and knew I wouldn't be able to concentrate so I did some typing and laughed audibly now and then before removing what I had to and getting in beside her. She put me in a headlock and pulled me close to her. She smelled chemical. She guided my head to her chest.
"You can put your head there, if you like."
The severe antieroticism of seeing her wrist stitched up turned the volume up on our platonism and the image of me sleeping with my head on her breast like a mother and child was instantly repellent. I returned to my side and found to my surprise that I was exhausted. I had a dream about school which ended in my falling over a cliff and landing on my back.
"Stop snoring!" she whined, retracting her fist.
I mumbled an apology and blinked several times quickly as she got out of bed and stood up. She studied me for a few uncomfortable seconds.
"I'm going home," she said. "Did you call rat girl?"
"I will."
One thing we always did in public was pick out people for each other. I'd mentioned a Liquid TV cartoon I'd seen where one of the patients in a therapy circle had said: "I look like a rat." I'd said that features on the cartoon girl corresponded with a look I liked (dark eyes, long straight nose). At a party we went to she pointed out that the hostess had that look (her costume even involved a pair of minnie mouse ears: true story!). I agreed and made some way in a chat-up and then left it for later.
"You never will," she said, "but it's good you at least talked."
"You know I'm going out with Dianne." I wasn't but it was an effective comeback.
"What, still?'
"Yes."
"Alright, well, I'm going home. You go fuck yourself which you shouldn't find hard as you're such a great fat master of it."
"And also with you," I murmured and turned away from her.
She closed the door with a gentleness that could only be sarcasm then thudded down the stairs and slammed the front door.
I left it for a few weeks then called her. When the Fringe Festival still had its street party in Brunswick Street I used to like starting it with her or someone equally enjoyable. She lived over the bookshop where she worked which was on Brunswick Street so I called her up to see if she wanted to watch the parade. Her voice was cold and annoyed as she told me she couldn't.
"I'm going to a lunch with some people and then going to a footy barbeque after."
Footy? Someone had translated that hieroglyphic on a newstand for her.
I was on an outer tile. No announcement. I'd just been moved there.
I went to the parade with someone else and mingled with everyone I knew anyway. But even the street party had run itself into the ground. The parade was always fun but after that it was just a few rock bands, some scattered clowning and two blocks of food stalls. And it had grown crowded. Once, it was on the calendar. You couldn't get half a block before being accosted by someone you knew offering you a drink or begging some of yours. It was always early in spring so I'd go in a tuxedo and picked from a punnet of strawberries. Everyone was everyone else's friend for at least two minutes. You'd explore or get snagged into a visit to someone's place a few floors up from the street and have a deep conversation that you'd never have again or remember. So often I'd be pulled out of the crowd by someone in stage makeup who turned ot to be someone I should've recognised without a squint. I loved it. We all loved it. It was like ANZAC Day for bohos. But then most of them had moved out by then and all we seemed to have instead was tourists, sample bags and hotdogs. Perhaps, if anything, it had outlived its day.
I will now admit to my shame that her dismissal of me was felt as more an inconvenience than a rejection. It seemed needless but, given that I'd known it was inevitable, not a trauma. Still, I now had to find honest social things or projects for the spare weekend nights. I'd grown used to having that comfortable other option. So I did.
We used to trade music all the time and one album she pressed on me to tape (still the nineties, still tape) was Garbage's debut. She particularly liked the closing song Milk.
Like a lot of people she thought of the band through the singer, Shirley Manson. The frog-eyed beauty in the visual gravity centre of the publicity shots had cowritten the material and delivered it in the whispers and commands of a dominatrix. To look at her you knew she could only be British but sang in a smooth L.A. cool. It was all about supervixens, taunts, tantrums, Bel Air parties and a lot of things that can only happen between two and five in the morning. Both above this turbulence and from deep within its rips, Manson crooned a series of observations of things that every fan wished they'd been caught at and everything that would put it beneath the notice of anyone who actually did them (on the basis that people who could fill diaries don't need to).
I have no real love for this album though I have to admit to admiring aspects of it. The band and album name suggest the irony of its time when love songs had to sound criminal and songs about personal atrocity like syrupy ballads. But the value of the irony only goes as far as most exercises in irony; it runs out soon after the surface is breached. The trick is to make the surface so appealing that none will attempt plumbing it.
Shirley Manson gives her look, words and big tired voice to the humanity of it but it is drummer and producer Butch Vig who removes the flesh and blood. This album is on the rockier side of pop but at the time it was alligned with the likes of Portishead's Dummy. It's an easy mistake. Under the near constant guitar wash there is a mass of percussion both played and programmed. It is telling that it can be hard to tell the difference. Folded into the layers are samples from all the usual sources, punk, jass, lounge etc. The pace overall is a rock 'n' roll slowed down for sex.
That's the plan but there's something wrong here and it does the same thing to me as Nirvana's breakthrough Nevermind. It's great a few weeks high rotation but after that it just gets exhausting. Why? Butch Vig, who produced both albums knows how to do one thing above all and that is the creation of instant saturation. You feel these songs are old hits while you are listening to them for the first time. They have been stripped of any warmth and idiosyncrisy that might have brought them perilously close to listeners needing time with them. Nothing isn't a hook. When something sounds catchy it is doubled by another instrument so that there is no chance of it ever getting away from anyone who hears it. And all of this is brought to a great airless prison by massive audio compression that allows everything through at what sounds like the same level until every possible moment that might have presented itself as special gets smothered and squashed into the same texture as everything else. You remember getting new plasticine? You'd roll it and form it and sculpt it and smash it together until all you had was a ball as grey as the mud outside. That's what this album starts sounding like after you have played it once a day for two weeks. Once that's happened you will never play it again. But by that time millions of other people have bought it because it worked on them the same way.
There is one exception to all this. The last song, Milk, is a plaintive ballad. Over a descending flute figure and synthesised strings and a constant pusling beat, Manson sings pain and loneliness. She says she's cruel and in control, that she's damaging but she's waiting and waiting and waiting for whoever it is and will be waiting long after the fade. The lights go out. End.
She had a kitten once. A friend whose cat had birthed a litter gave her one of them. It was tiny and black. She named it after an arts publisher and let it spend time peering over the rail of her flat's balcony. Otherwise it would dart around inside. She would describe its personality as though it were someone in her arts scene, someone flamboyant, beautiful and indulged. I love cats and after a few visits noticing its absence I asked where it was.
"Oh," she said. End of topic.
For a while that was the only memory I could associate with her.
After her rebuff about the Fringe party I tried one more call but only got her machine. I hung up without leaving a message. The beep I imagined when she played through them sounded like my full stop.
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