Girls' Night Out by Kathy Lette

Author:Kathy Lette
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2010-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

Beam Me Up Mr Scottie

I packed essentials only – baritone ukulele, Edith Piaf autobiography, Rhyming Dictionary, Vegemite hamper, and tap-dancing shoes.

It was my seventeenth birthday. Mouche gave me a copy of New York on $25 a Day, which was much more than we had budgeted for. And I had a package to collect at the post office. In lieu of a cake, I chomped into the last of the gingerbread testes. They were stale and soggy. I pretended they were Aussie’s.

‘Cooee … Anyone home?’ It was Catherine from the parole office. She was nice, voted Labour and often arrived with breakfast. ‘Where’s Mouche?’ she inquired. ‘I know it’s her last appointment, but she’s three hours late.’ I hurtled down the hall. Upstairs, I got out the cornflour packet where Mouche kept her diaphragm. I poked my finger into the cornflour, then poured out the whole packet.

I ran all the way to the Tin Sheds. Students were printing posters promoting the most effective form of personal hygiene and feminine protection – hand grenades. The poet who was addicted to cough medicine was crashed out across a car bonnet. Aussie emerged from the dunnies, a towel knotted round his waist. He saw me and chucked the slimiest ear-to-ear sneer.

‘Just came round to ah, um … pick up some sheet music …’

‘I’m not on my Patma,’ he called out after me.

‘You’re what?’

‘My Pat Malone. Jeezus. I’m not alone! She drops round most days. Oh,’ he smirked, ‘didn’t you know?’

‘Bullshit.’ I pushed past him into the shed. The whole room was a mess of mattresses, mikes, amp boxes. Mouche was lying supine behind the drum kit. She half rose at my approach.

‘Now, don’t get all shitty …’

I faced her, vowing to remain sophisticatedly detached, cool and cynical … ‘You wouldn’t know shit if you fell in it,’ I shrieked in a tone usually associated with the castrati.

‘Why don’tcha go back to the burbs,’ Aussie muttered, ‘where you belong.’

‘Can’t you see …’ I wanted to ask her why she was an emotional bower bird, collecting people that would make her blue. I groped for the words to tell her that Aussie was representative of everything she hated about Australia – apathy, laziness, cynicism, mediocrity. ‘Did you know that he smells his own farts?!’ I screamed in frustration. ‘Didja know that?’

Mouche twisted her dishevelled clothing back into place. ‘Don’t tell my old man okay?’ The ladders in her fishnets meandered up her thighs. ‘He’d freak out to the shithouse if he knew I was here.’

‘Mouche, why do you always have to take the deviant route?’

‘More scenic I guess,’ she shrugged. ‘Anyway, it’s no big deal Jo.’ Every word skewered me. ‘Don’t be such a wanker. Besides, there’s no way I can ever just dump him, mate.’ She leant her face close to mine. I waited, breathless, for her heartfelt revelation. ‘He knows I pluck my nipples,’ she whispered.

I ran down City Road. Well, I didn’t really run, I sort of skied on the dog shit. Mouche was the one who did the Tall, Small and Medium Poppy scything.

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