What Rhymes with Bastard?. Linda Robertson
to the drifters, thieves and unemployed copywriters no one else wanted. It was a sort of for-profit charity. To ward off the usual avalanche of responses, he posted vacancy ads like this:
Small hallway available No Christians
The place was full of his crap, and every so often he popped ‘home’ to fuss about bills and pick up a volume of intellectual erotica. He’d caused a scandal at the art college with a performance piece involving an enema – a quick Google told me he’d found a student volunteer, got him to sign a waiver, tied him up, extracted shit from the volunteer’s backside, and then from his own, exchanged the faecal matter using an enema, fellated the volunteer and exited to a smattering of polite applause. Next he was expelled, and six months later he was still recoiling from the shock.
‘Honestly, Linda,’ he said, out of the blue, ‘he was into it at the time!’
I put down my sandwich. ‘Who was?’
‘That bastard kid!’
‘You mean the one you did the enema stuff to?’
‘Yeah! But when the story went national, they all changed their tune. He lodged a formal complaint against me, coz he was afraid of lookin’ like a pervert! Some sponsor got antsy so they used me as a scapegoat. They banned me from campus! I feel kind of betrayed, you know?’
The affair had turned him to drink, but it was hard to tell, as he claimed to be a professional wine-taster. Surrounded by charts of Italian grape regions, empty wine crates and magazine racks bulging with copies of Connoisseur, he liked to shoogle a huge wine glass, saying, ‘Mmmm …’ In fact, his experience was limited to two months on the till at Quoit Liquors, and he was currently unemployed. His identity in crisis, he made a big deal of his friendship with Steve Labash, a performance artist and high priest in the Church of Satan, whose best-known protest piece involved him being naked with a bottle of whisky:
1 Smash the neck off a whisky bottle.
2 Slash your skin with the raw edge.
3 Pour the rest of the whisky over your wounds.
But all the enemas, devil-worship and lit-porn in the world couldn’t conceal his darkest secret: he was nice.
A card had already arrived from home.
Dear Linda, just your old mum writing to say hello. I found
this postcard from when we were in the Isle of Wight – Dadtripped up in the mud, remember? Look after yourself, mydarling; I’ve got to run to catch the post, lots of love,Mum XXX
Back in the present, things weren’t so sweet. Jack would leave for work every morning, and I’d have a lonely day to fill. By late afternoon, I might have visited the ironmonger’s three times – it’s amazing how many things you don’t realize you need until you’re really bored. I was becoming a familiar face to the strange man behind the counter. ‘Your total is sixteen-oh-nine!’ He beamed. ‘I love your accent. Australia, right?’
I reached for my rubber-footed cheese-grater. ‘England.’
‘Well, close, eh?’
‘Not really.’
‘English, eh? There are some great Irish bars around here. We should go out for a drink some time.’
‘Mm … yeah.’ I looked down into my purse. I wasn’t used to this kind of talk. I’d never been on a date.
‘Yeah,’ he pressed on, ‘like Jimmy Foley’s and the Green Giant. You know them?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Well, see you!’
As soon as I was out of the door, I broke into a run. This meant I couldn’t go into the hardware shop any more. Damn it. I was so bored it seemed like a loss. This wasn’t how I’d envisaged the Golden State. The laws of gravity still applied: it was just plain old reality, minus my friends. Admittedly, the weather was better, and I found all kinds of reasons to go outside. I walked up and down perilously tilted pavements, each block affording me another fabulous sea-andsky-filled view, buildings tumbling together, nestling in valleys and skimming hilltops as though they were on the crest of a wave. The air was warm and breezy, rich with ions, and its touch on my skin was a pleasure. On cloudy days the locals moaned, while I gasped at the mist – chunks of cloud suspended in the air like scenery in a divine school play. But however beautiful my surroundings, I didn’t belong there.
I confided in Jack: ‘It makes me so angry, Chief. I have you, and that’s just the most amazing thing, and I’m still sad. Why can’t I just be happy?’
‘That’s what you always say, and you never are. To be honest, I don’t think you ever will be.’
So I went to the doctor and told her I’d been feeling a bit blue. Without blinking, she wrote me repeat prescriptions for a thousand Prozac capsules. ‘You should be feeling better in about three weeks.’ I read that the side-effects included lower libido and increased homicidal urges.
As I made dinner, Tova would sidle in and tell me about her amazing life – the places she’d been, the people she’d met and the wild things she’d done. She could make anything dull, but next to this vigorously sprouting shrub, I felt like a limp, etiolated stem. To protect myself, I responded only to direct probes, such as ‘You’re from England, right?’
‘Yup.’
‘Hmm. Where else have you lived?’
‘Here.’
‘Just here? Well, where have you been, like long trips?’
‘Nowhere.’
‘Oh … Really?’
‘Really.’
She was all about the where, not the what. I couldn’t stand her, and boycotted the kitchen when she was around. Jack would come home from work to find me sitting on the bed with an open can of tuna and a bag of crisps.
‘Here’s dinner, Chief.’
‘Lins, can’t you at least make some pasta?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to talk to Tova while it boils.’
‘Well, you turn on the water, then I’ll go in a bit and sort it out.’
I agreed, but she caught me in the hall and pointed at my pink socks. ‘Look, Chico!’ she cried, laughing. ‘They match her sweater!’ I was a pink moth, writhing on a pin. ‘Ah, yes,’ she said, ‘I used to do that – match stuff. When I was much younger, of course.’
I reversed back into our room. ‘Jack,’ I hissed, ‘we have to get out of this place! I can’t stay indoors in the daytime because it’s like a dungeon and it makes me feel really sad and I can’t go outdoors because there’s nothing left to buy and I’m getting sunburned and I can’t stay indoors at night because I’m going to kill Tova and I can’t go out at night because there’s nowhere to go because I don’t have any friends.’
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ said Jack. ‘We can get some food, too.’
We clambered to the top of Lombard Street, a giant game of crazy-golf, twisting and turning down towards the mass of the city. Beyond the clustered lights lay the black expanse of the bay, and beyond that more land, more lights, more people, doing more interesting things than I was. It was time to confront the truth: I was not a writer, because writers write stuff.
‘Chief,’ I wailed, sitting down, ‘I’m just, like – nothing! And my face is all bumpy.’
It was true: I’d got a weird sort of rash. He patted my head. ‘It’s OK, you’re still the best rabbit in the world!’
My tears blurred the city into a twinkling puddle. ‘I’ll never write anything except recruitment ads!’
Jack