izzy

sketches for my sweetheart the drunk
7. Would you carry yourself like a child, if you could?

*

sarah

My feet hit the floor like lead balloons – KER-THUNK – and I’m up and Adam, as it were. Coffee pot sets to boiling when it sees my reflection, and the toast is up early and ready to greet the day. The radio slides its dial to smooth cool jazz to ease the transition from sleepy oblivion to the bright dull fluorescent November morning. Front door creaks thoughtfully. Next door’s cat runs a paw under the gap from the floorboards, waves a jaunty hello in shock-orange fur. Time trickles on. I think about juicing an orange, but the kitchen isn’t giving me a hand so I roll it around under my palm, pressing a finger into its navel, extracting it coated in bittersweet pith and skin. The tap drips. Sun bores in through the window and lays a coat of colour on my cheek. There’s a flat THUNK-shhh as the paper hits the glass and rolls into the bush below. I don’t know what type of bush it is. It’s green. Dark green, at a pinch. Fat plump leaves that turn frail and sapless in summer and throw themselves uselessly at my feet as I stride by in careless benediction. Somewhere, a mouse scurries madly into a skirting board. Across the room, discarded on the sideboard, my watch beeps. High pitched and insistent. There’s no auto-off function for it, as far as I can tell. It just keeps whining on until it’s attended to. I tell my legs to get up. Go on knee, I say, move it along, foot. They don’t budge. They sit, silent and sulky, flat as a tack, cement heavy. I try my hands, but they won’t have a bar of it. The watch beeps madly. I can feel the blood settling in my toes. There’s a slice of my face in the burnished metal of the fridge. I look like plaster.

*

izzy

sketches for my sweetheart the drunk
6. If you could paint the sky, you wouldn’t rip into the red. You prefer lavender.

*

sarah

Before every Centrelink meeting, she puts in thick gelatinous eyedrops so she looks like she’s been crying. She’s perfected the amount of tremor to put into her voice so that the staff let her off her reporting requirements – too little and they roll their red eyes, too much and they faces grow stiff and flat like chipboard. But the littlest wobble, a jagged intake of breath, and they look around at their colleagues, lean in close and whisper ‘We’ll see what we can do.’ A few words work best, she’s found. Big explanations feel too overthought. But just gasping ‘My mother –‘ before she throws in a sob, like it’s too big to say, like she can’t go on talking, that’s the ticket, that’s the Oscar winning shot. And everyone’s got a mum who they look at and think ‘Jesus, she’s getting old.’ Getting them where it hurts, that’s what you have to do. Touch the little triggers that link in to the big feelings, the 4 am feelings when your head’s going too fast to turn off. She should be on stage, she reckons. She’s wasted on these work-wracked automatons. But there’s something addictive about the control when she’s pretending to be broken. She ties the strings round their tongues and they can’t even feel it. Can’t even see. And they all go home thinking ‘I did something good today. I helped someone out.’ And who is she to deny them that feeling? That joy?

*

izzy

sketches for my sweetheart the drunk
5. If you could run your hands through like water runs, would you stay? If you could whip your hair like wind whips, you would stay.

*

sarah

it’s a Wednesday
and he sits, arms fixed at his side
knees pressed into his forehead
breathing into the space between his legs
watching the soft blonde hairs shiver with every exhale.
he is halfway up the spiral stairs exactly
the wood smelling of varnish and leather
and the sun spilling resinous light through the air
he presses his eyes against the plates of his knees
until he sees red, then white, then neon green
upstairs, behind thick closed doors
his father shuffles papers, and beats at a typewriter
wreathed in a fog of frowning thick cigar smoke
downstairs, his mother clatters pans in the sink
and shushes at them sharply like a spitting goose
he can feel in his pocket the soft little lump
of the mouse that he’d killed, as it chirped in his bedclothes
chattering away about its little furred day
and in the half-sleep of morning, he’d panicked and lunged
and dashed it by the tail on the floor of his room
til its head seeped a little, and its squeaking grew still
and now he sits, grief-frozen and shamed
halfway between his parents, nursing a little round burden
and feeling old as the world, and sad as he knows how

*

izzy

sketches for my sweetheart the drunk
4. Somewhere, there is a dog that wants to lie at your feet and eat your scraps.

*

sarah

I masturbated in Wyoming thinking about Brokeback Mountain
thinking of cowboys in the cold
fighting bad dreams with each others’ bodies
fought my own battle with catching breath and wet fingers
and hissed out hot air into the icy snap of morning

*

izzy

sketches for my sweetheart the drunk
3. Breathing underwater is easier than watching you sleep.

*

sarah

Cherry Garcia, she chuckled.
What a fuckin’ cack.
The bartender who’d given her shit for ordering oversweet cocktails at her age
had ended up joining her on a two-person trivia team to end all others
where they’d ruined the competition with his knowledge of 80s pop hits
and her almost freakish ability to recall the oeuvres of bad big haired film stars
and he’d named them Cherry Garcia, and snuck her a glass full
of maraschino cherries from the cocktail supplies
which she feasted on in victory with every round won
watching his eyes start to go wobbly at the way that she laughed
and her lips round the cherries like the pinups all did it
and when the night had ended, and they’d drunk all the spoils of trivia war
and he stood so close on the step to the bar
she’d winked at him, tossed a wave into the air
and strutted down the street on her own
tonguing the syrupy rim round her teeth
feeling powerful because she’d neither taken nor given a thing

*

izzy

sketches for my sweetheart the drunk
2. The sun is creeping up on you again, it’s 26 degrees and you are swaddled in a black wool coat, clutching at your throat.

*

sarah

He used to park as though he was ironing –
forward back forward back
anxiously easing into the bay
worried about the mothers with prams in front of him
the little old ladies behind
the ones his driving instructor had always warned him about hitting
when he didn’t do his head checks right
so when one day he drove through tears to the IGA
with some half-formed idea of a cheap cinnamon donut
and a jumbo pack of Panadol
telling himself ‘stop fucking overthinking everything you do
you cowardly piece of shit’
and he backed in one movement into the carpark
straight into the bonnet of the car behind
the unfairness of it all took his breath away
and he sat behind the wheel, chest frozen
forgetting for just a minute how to bring air out and in
forgetting how, for a minute, and why

*

izzy

sketches for my sweetheart the drunk
1. If you were a silhouette, you wouldn’t be the shadow. You’d be the light that defines the dark.

*

sarah

He always liked his cleft chin, until he found out what cleft meant, and then he felt broken, scarred by some slice to his face as he turned in his mother’s belly. He tore the crusts off cheap white bread, rolled the fluffy slices in his hands until they were thick like Playdoh, and pressed the sticky mess into his carved face until it lay flat, and he stood for hours in front of the mirror with his eyes half-shut, imagining himself whole until the bread dried out and fell off into the bathroom sink.

*

izzy

The dog growls at the door as I slip my key in. The house is dark and quiet. It wraps around me like a cloak. I slink out to the back and strip down to my undies, then rummage around under the back sink and find the Sard Wonder. I run the stick over and over the skids of grass along the back of my dress until they’re whited out, obliterated. The crunch of leaves, flicker of fire and hot breath run across my back and up my spine. The scratches along my arms and legs, the grazes on my palms feel like they’re sticking out like the goosebumps covering the rest of my skin. Shivering and glowing pale in the dark, I run up to my room and dive under the covers into my own smell, my own mess.

*

sarah

Postcards from Indonesia:

Sometimes my concept of myself collides with the reality of myself and the results are, in short, disappointing.

Like today, when I sat on the beach for an hour and a half, trying to make myself brave enough to try parasailing. I’d done it as a child, hoisted in front of a Balinese man, and my overwhelming memory of the experience is of feeling peer-pressured into the whole thing (coming from a generally gung-ho family, with a particularly gung-ho little brother, I felt like this on most family holidays). I remember looking down at the beach and feeling a grizzly sort of terror and irritation at being made to be up there. But now? Now I was An Adult who was capable of Having Fun, even Slightly Risky Fun. Even possibly the sort of fun that involved being hurtled through the air with a parachute some distance above a lurching speedboat. I’d walked along the sand for ten days, watching tiny stick figures hold their arms above their heads, so that in silhouette they looked like cartoon rabbits, and I’d thought, to my vague surprise, ‘I might do that.’ I put it off day after day until this morning, when there weren’t any more tomorrows available. So I sat on the beach, watching predominantly tiny Asian tourists squealing and kicking their legs as they made parabolas in the air, and then pulling down on the side of the parachute strings as they arced back into the arms of seven or eight shouting men.

I didn’t do it, of course. Fun, Brave, Foolhardy me fought a halfhearted battle with Anxious, Overthinking me, the me who can’t get more than three metres up a ladder before the shakes set in, the me who decided that three minutes of possible terror was almost definitely not worth the chances of enjoying the whole thing. I trudged back to the hotel and Googled accounts of people throwing up at 800 feet and parachute ropes snapping to make myself feel better. Which worked, to an extent.

*

izzy

I’m always surprised that the milk bar’s open this late. The white fluorescent light spills out onto the pavement, blurring the lines of the grass blades clinging to the dirt in the cracks. The door’s wide open, and as I go in, the buzzer blares and Mr. Nguyen looks up from his paper.
“Winfield Blues, yes?”
“Yeah, thanks. And a coke.”
I pull the bottle from the fridge, slightly warm. I can already taste the soft fizz of warm coke from a plastic bottle. Every coke container creates a different texture. Plastic bottled coke has the smallest bubbles, almost like electrical static.
“Twenny-four dollars.”
I pull my socks up and my skirt down.
“Thanks.”
I don’t actually know if he’s Mr. Nguyen, but the store’s called ‘Nguyen Convenience’ and he’s always there.

*

sarah

Oooh, I could just break your ears off while kissing you, I could! I could just EAT your FACE, y’know? Just, like, EAT it. Right off your skull and then lick your eye sockets clean! Just chew your lips right out of your smile and pull off your nose and munch on it because I LOVE you. You know how I love your belly button? Your little itsy bitsy belly welly button? Man, I could just get an incisor in there and just rip the whole thing open, right now! Press my face into your guts and blow a raspberry into your colon! God, I love you so much I could puke. On you. In you. I could puke you out of me and then eat you again.

I’m sorry. I’m drunk and high and I’ve got a serious case of the munchies and really, it’d be best if you just left me alone to think about what I’ve done.

*

izzy

Pain shoots up through my ankle, echoing in my knee. I look down at this stunted tree stump, and I want to kick it again as hard as I can but I don’t because I’ve already stubbed my toe once, and once is enough. It makes no sense to me that the human body decided that fingers and toes should have so many nerve endings, so many ways to feel pain. There’s a row of tree stumps back here, six I think, that used to be big old gum trees at the back of the oval. They cut them down after what happened to Anna K. A family of possums used to live in those big old gums, and we all used to feed them bits of our lunch and stuff but it never really seemed like a big issue. Sometimes they’d be a bit cheeky and come and steal something right out of your lap if you weren’t looking, but it hardly ever happened – they knew their place. It wasn’t til Anna K. went and put her face right up in theirs that there was a problem. She was down on her knees like a dog, waggling a bit of sandwich at one of them from her mouth, trying to get it to take it right from her lips cos she thought it would be cute I guess. The possum must have freaked out, cos it started screeching and hissing and smacked her across the face, then bit her hand when she tried to push it away. She wasn’t scratched up badly or anything, but Anna K. had a modelling contract so her Mum threatened to sue the school and I guess that relocating the possums and cutting down the trees was the compromise. Katie says it’s pretty much always people’s fault when animals do crazy things, because people have behavioural standards to rely on. I guess I kind of agree with her.

*

sarah

Postcards from Indonesia:

The piece of batik-painted cloth I bought is throwing gold fish across the bed. It’s not beautiful to touch, yet. It’s still slightly plasticky under my fingertips, still waiting to have its edges loved off. I am looking forward to a hot summer night some time, when it’s grown soft and old and is starting to become ghostlike. It will smell of incense and wine. It will have grown holes that I will never get around to repairing. It will have wrapped picnic utensils and hosted parades of ants. It will be full of smoke and secrets. Under a halogen night light, I’ll lay it on a patch of grass and set a lover’s head in its folds and watch the wrinkles around their eyes slide off into the fabric.

*