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  For more than two decades, Helen Razer has been broadcasting and writing her way into disagreement of various scales. She has been employed as a contributor by The Age and The Australian, and is now a columnist on dissent with Crikey and gardening correspondent for The Saturday Paper. Helen has produced four previous books of humorous non-fiction and her frequently published thoughts on the impotence of current public debate are extended in A Short History of Stupid, co-authored with her friend and colleague Bernard Keane.

  By the same author

  A Short History of Stupid

  First published in 2017

  Copyright © Helen Razer 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Many identifying details have been changed to preserve the privacy of all individuals depicted. All the names have been changed, save for mine and my cat’s. (And those of Bradley Cooper and Karl Marx. Obviously.)

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email:[email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 9781743318287

  eISBN 9781743436141

  Set by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Cover design: Robert Polmear

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  1

  Forty-eight hours and one shower since she left

  ‘Dolphin,’ said Eleni, my waxer of some years.

  In the language of Eleni’s salon, ‘to dolphin’ is to turn left on a table with the rear thrust out while lying naked from the bottom down. It’s a short and useful command that, once learned, urges the lady to an ideal position for a brief ‘bikini’ wax. It also has the psychological effect of sanitising the client’s vagina and her cruder neighbour, the anus. To believe for a moment that one’s most abject parts resemble Flipper’s mouth is quite relaxing.

  But this was not a likeness noted by Eleni, whose long professional scrutiny of female anuses through a magnifying lamp certainly qualified her to make such comparisons. Apparently, we ladies do not look like dolphins Down There; probably, if we’re using marine life as a guide, more like a mollusc. However, on the wall Eleni’s anal-waxees were required to face, there happened to be a promotional poster for a moisturising gel that depicted a well-hydrated dolphin. Hence Eleni had developed the ‘Dolphin!’ command.

  I laughed, as I always do, and I seized, as I frequently do, the fleshiest part of one buttock and moved it up and down, emitting ‘eEeEeEeEeEeEeEeE eEeEeEeEeEeEeEeE,’ from my mouth. Eleni said she was relieved that I was making my customarily crap jokes, and, again, how very sorry she was that she had waxed my ex’s anus that one quite recent time.

  ‘I should have charged her double. I saw all the hair she had down there and asked, “Are you Greek like me?” I don’t think it was very nice of her to wait so long for me to wax it. I used more than half a pot.’

  Not that I had minded when the ex’s bush had recalled a goliath tarantula. Not that I had minded its fashionable deforestation. It was quite a nice vagina either way. But, right now, I did mind thinking about my ex’s sexual parts in any way at all, and tailored to my grief as Eleni’s observations were—among them, ‘I used enough wax on that thing to cover a truck full of Babybel cheeses’—I asked her to desist.

  I told Eleni that I couldn’t bear to talk about the tarantula again, and asked if we could please change the topic from my tragic break-up.

  I then immediately resumed the topic of my tragic breakup—it hurts so much, my longest intimacy has ended, my ex had turned to hairless sex with other women like a duck to orange sauce, etc.—and continued right until the moment hot wax made its way toward my rectum.

  ‘Was that warmer than usual?’ I asked Eleni.

  ‘No,’ she lied, and she tore me a new arsehole, to bear in this parched Melbourne summer.

  Eleni is a very sweet person who generally brings the same care to conversation she does to the removal of hair from my anal cleft. But that day she’d likely had her fill of my outpourings, which had already drenched a manicure, an eyebrow tint and a mini facial—a service she had offered, as she does to all newly dumped clients with puffy eyes, on-the-house.

  ‘I know you are sad, Helen. And I am happy to listen to you talk about some of it. But words can be dangerous. It does you no good to use them all the time.’

  And, I imagine that it did Eleni no good to tend to my vagina while I banged on about how it had been so newly vacated, so I tried to address a topic that wasn’t my dolphin, or the ex’s dolphin, but failed. For a moment, I forewent the futile ecstasy of most words by uttering that actually useful one, ‘sorry’. And then I would return to useless words again.

  2

  Six hours and one chicken since she left

  Two days before the dolphin, I had been quite atypically wordless. Those sounds with my mouth I had managed to make owed less to spoken English than they did to the language of the abattoir. ‘Mooooargheeow,’ I said, or something very like it, and when I echoed the complaint of the doomed heifer, I reminded myself to become a vegetarian should I ever again decide to eat.

  Eleven the cat had managed to retain his carnivorous appetites, notwithstanding the awful thing that had just happened to both of us. So, shortly after the ex had declared herself the ex, I ordered him a home-delivered chicken by telephone. Finding the words to achieve this was trying, but not quite so trying as I imagined operation of the can-opener would prove. Newly dumped people are as capable with kitchen tools as they are with words.

  Public Service Announcement: The newly dumped should stay away from any device more complex or more dangerous than a spork.

  A man of very belligerent cheer delivered the chicken. ‘Here’s a tasty chook for a tasty lady!’ he said, lying on both counts. I tore it into small pieces and I told Eleven a few things as he ate it. Among them, ‘I don’t mind if you eat me when I die,’ and, ‘Your other mummy is a whore.’

  Not that he minded. Eleven was as happy with this divorce as a cat could be—which is, of course, obscenely so. His eyes had closed when I pulled apart the first greaseproof bag and did not open fully again for days. His purr was violent, his bliss extreme, and he stared at me through his furry cat-lids and said, ‘We will live here on the floor with our barbecue chickens. Forever.’

  One day, animal behaviourists will confirm what feline companions already know: cats are the covert architects of human emotional crisis. I have never known a domestic cat that did not thrive on hominid despair. Eleven had always quite liked me, but never so mu
ch as when I was a jilted, masturbating wreck, whose needy petting larded his tabby fur with a film of chicken fat. ‘You had a paw in this, didn’t you?’ I said to him, and he crawled onto my shoulders and planed at my grief with his sandpaper.

  No one told me the end of a fifteen-year relationship would smell exactly like barbecue chicken, but this would be misery’s signature scent. When my partner had gone, I fell with a chicken to the floor.

  She had not said very much before she left. She had said, ‘I’m leaving you’, ‘I need to grow’ and ‘Things have been bad for a while’. Apparently, her faculty for speech had packed up and left minutes before she did.

  ‘I need to grow’ was shocking but also quite familiar. I’d never had such a shop-worn break-up statement addressed directly to me, but I’d certainly heard similar things in television dramas or in accounts by others. ‘He said to me, “It’s not you, it’s me.” Can you believe that?’ people would say, and no, I never really could.

  I had been told that absconding spouses tell standard lies when remarkable lies are needed, but I’d never supposed it could actually be true.

  What I had supposed was that when dumped people recounted dialogue from their break-ups, they did so through memory’s unreliable filter. Surely no one actually says this shit. Surely, the people who think that they have heard these hackneyed things have simply misremembered. Surely, fugitive spouses are so adrenalised before they run out the door, they have something more interesting to say than ‘I need to grow’ or ‘I really need more space’.

  Of course, it’s not as if my first responses—‘Let’s grow together!’, ‘I’ll give you more space!’ and ‘Well, fuck you in your slut hole, then!’—had recalled the choicest of Dorothy Parker. Talking shit when someone leaves you, however, is fairly defensible. Talking shit when you’re leaving someone else is absolutely not.

  I need to grow. The phrase ‘I need to grow’ is a weapon of such deadly banality, it should be declared illegal. That so many small crimes are harshly penalised while this one goes unpunished suggests that our lawmakers are philandering pricks who, at one point or another, have all ‘needed to grow’. Probably deep inside some voluptuous administrator who has been freshly dolphined.

  I have never left a spouse and, given my aversion to packing boxes and redirecting mail, it is very unlikely that I will. But, if such horror unfolds, I vow it will be preceded by a wonderful speech.

  Years ago, I saw a friend’s then-husband talk at the funeral for a well-known writer. He spoke powerfully and weaved a little Auden into the eulogy—not the ‘Stop all the Clocks’ poem everybody-and-their-barking-dog now dies to but one written for Yeats. ‘The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living,’ he said.

  He spoke very well at the funeral for his eminent friend, whose words I still digest. At the funeral for his marriage, though, he didn’t bother with inspiring poetry. He just said, ‘I need to grow.’

  And this is what she said to me. Actually, she didn’t say ‘I need to grow’, but wrote it down and sent it by Facebook message from across the house:

  This is over. I don’t think we’re good for each other and things have been bad for a while. I’m leaving you because I need to grow.

  I would say that at this point ‘the floor fell away’. However, such description is hazardous to the health of the newly dumped; a needy demographic and one to whom this account of my own dump recovery is entirely dedicated. Chestnuts of the ‘I need to grow’ variety are likely to bring you poor dumped sods out in an allergic rash. So, instead I shall just say that I was very dizzy. The floor didn’t fall away, but I fell on it, and remained there almost without pause until I was prompted by desire two days later to ‘dolphin’ and to date. A questionable program of recovery I will, as I said, soon describe.

  I was on the floor as Eleven ate his chicken. He ate the corpse of the bird with ten times the relish I imagined he would later visit upon mine. I saw myself dead on this floor. My lifeless hand, still resting on the Romantic Drama section of the Netflix app, was not even chewed to the bone. ‘She didn’t taste good enough to eat,’ said the coroner’s report. ‘There was nothing for this woman between break-up and death. She was modified in the guts of a tabby.’

  Was there ever any other hope, though? Was I ever not going to be half-eaten by the cat as Jerry Maguire gave his dreadful speech about compassionate business? Perhaps the ex was right. Perhaps things had been bad for a while, because if they had not been bad, then my filthy, tangled, chicken-scented hair would not now be stuck between the floorboards.

  I looked at my hair resting in the grooves between the floorboards and I tried to recall the last date on which it had been brushed. Or washed. I could not. I reasoned that there was little point in caring for it now—obviously, I was going to die, be partially eaten and then inadequately memorialised. But I did concede that I might not now be quite so close to death had I recently seen to my hair.

  I should have brushed my hair. I should have done my nails. I should have taken the best advice of all marriage manuals and not worn elasticised waistbands in the company of my spouse. I had worn elasticised waistbands for months and for months. I had been tolerably miserable.

  This misery and poor costume was partly down to her, partly down to me, but largely, I think, down to labour, which had been with an online discount advertiser.

  The pay was not the worst that I’ve received, but the labour itself was horrifying—and I say this as a former cold-call sales associate who peddled low-document, high-interest loans to poor people over the phone during dinner. Now, following the predatory lending gig, I worked for a low-prestige advertising company and I had found myself in middle-income hell.

  There are few enterprises worse than lending; the practice is actually wicked. But I had been happier truly knowing that I worked for the devil than merely suspecting it. And I suspected it often in this feel-good fun factory where employees were not just required to produce peppy 100-word lies about particular cut-rate beauty services but to actively participate in the lie that this work was fun. Fun!

  The style guide at this company urged for overuse of exclamation points and Capital Letters. It requested ‘punfilled, fun-filled Aspirational Paragraphs for our on-fleek, AB MilleniGals!’ Roughly translated, this describes ‘shitty jokes that contain social media slang aimed at white women still young enough to access their wealthy parents’ credit cards.’

  The writers’ room held toy boxes filled with Lego and other developmental playthings that, I had been told, would help us all rebuild our childlike sense of fun. Fun! Once a week, the building elevator was fitted with a camera and we were encouraged to record our ‘very best hopes and dreams’. Every Friday the company renamed the elevator The Optimitorium.

  I do not know if ‘Optimitorium’ refers to optimism or optimisation, or both, or nothing. And I do not fucking care. But I did care that this compulsory whimsy nourished little in me but despair.

  Fun!

  This work was not fun. But it might have been almost tolerable if some frisky bint called Brynlee hadn’t cantered about in raw denim screeching, ‘Dixie has totally nailed her deep-nourishing keratin treatment copy and is now in the running to be Australia’s Next Top Social Advertising Model! Yay, Dixie! Fun!’ whenever copy production rates were down. Which they often were, due to widespread workplace abuse of Xanax, the only legal means to muffle the sound of Brynlee.

  After a few months of motivational team talks, exclamation points and Lego, I became anxious enough to consult the discount psychologist, Gerard. When I told Cheap Gerard that I sometimes felt like I was on the devil’s payroll, he suggested I speak with a priest. I suspect that Cheap Gerard is either a very good Catholic or a very poor listener who doesn’t know metaphorical shorthand when he hears it. Still, I took his advice and spoke with a local priest one lunchtime.

  The priest turned out to be a pretty decent bloke. He said that he, like me, doubted the existence of a materia
l devil, but that he did believe in the metaphoric power of 2 Corinthians 11 to explain the character of an advertising company full of insincerely happy people: For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.

  He told me I was right to feel that this is false gospel that preaches for the father of poisonous lies. ‘There is nothing that is not deceitful about telling women they are ugly and imperfect to make them part with money,’ he said, which was a lot more feminism than one anticipates from Mother Church.

  ‘There is nothing that is not evil about pretending that this work is good for its producers and consumers,’ he said, which was a lot more communism that one anticipates from Mother Church.

  The sensible Father counselled me to leave the agency, but hang on to its wage. ‘Since you can’t get your job back with the terrible phone-loans people since they were shut down for fraud, you might want to ask Brynlee if you could work from home.’

  I accepted his advice, and his gift of a Pope Francis portrait.

  Brynlee, whose eyes often fixed me with the sort of fearful disgust otherwise set on the nutrition labels of highcarbohydrate snacks, quickly agreed to my departure. People like me, with inclination for neither whimsy nor Lego, troubled her. She said I could ‘satellite’ on the condition that I increase my exclamation point quota and compose at least a dozen promotional coupons for Crypto-Satan every day. These were to be ‘like, totally brainy’ for the company’s direct targeting of well-to-do arts undergraduates from the nation’s better universities. I was to include frequent and obvious references to the best-known phrases in out-of-copyright English literature and/or popular culture.

  If every face tells a story, then let the lines of yours be gone sooner than a sonnet! Hydro-micro-dermabrasion is Poetically Proven to reduce the signs of looking unlove-lier than a summer’s day! For just $39.99! That’s 66% off! Discounts like these shake the darling buds of cray . . .