Hayley Campbell

(Read Part I if you are late to this particular party in which I reveal the things that men say. To me. To my face. To my actual face.)

B.I. #7 01-12

‘I mean, I’m not gay or anything but he is just too handsome. He’s like, I mean, Christ. Have you seen his arms?
Q.
‘China Miéville. When he’s in a tight T-shirt his nipples just stick right out like damn.’
Q.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t even try if I were you. He wouldn’t even look twice at regular, boring-looking people like you and me.’
Q.
‘No seriously, you have seen him, right?’

B.I. #8 01-12

‘May I just say, you bear a striking resemblance to David Boreanaz.’
Q.
‘Angel. You know, from Angel.’
Q.
‘I mean it in a respectful way.’

B.I. #9 01-12

‘I’m a novelist as well as an investment banker, actually.’
Q.
‘No, but I’m about 10,000 words off the end of it. I started it for a thing called NaNoWriMo. Are you familiar with it?’
Q.
‘It’s about a middle-aged divorcee investment banker who goes to Saudi Arabia to help transfer the country to being solar-powered. He also gets attacked by his ex-wife along the way. It’s quite a tale, actually. And it’s good because I know so much about investment banking that the story is all in the details. You know, the investment banking details. It’s a lot more interesting than you might –’
Q.
‘Basically I just did it so I could call myself a novelist at parties. See, I’m doing it now. How do I get it published?’

B.I. #10 01-12
[In which the reader is to imagine this is a perfect phonetic record of the Irish accent in the bar that day.]

‘Yar mek-oop is perfect. It must’ev tekken you hhhuwers.’
(‘Your make-up is perfect. It must have taken you hours.’)
Q.
‘Good work, you. Naht loik in Ireland. De wimmin there, they’ve got hair on dey fess. All over dey fesses, it’s a mess.’
(‘Good work, you. Not like in Ireland. The women there, they’ve got hair on their face. All over their faces, it’s a mess.’)
Q.
‘Naht you though, ye’ve got no hair ahn yer fess at all.’
(‘Not you though, you’ve got no hair on your face at all.’)

B.I. #11 06-12

Q.
‘I’ll come to bed in a minute. I’ve just got to catalogue these last few stamps.’
Q.
‘What?’
Q.
‘I have a really interesting collection, actually.’
Q.
‘Look, ten minutes. I’m almost done with Croatia.’

B.I. #12 06-12

‘Herpes ain’t that bad, apparently. I did a Google. They just get a bad rap! You can only really transmit it when you have a flare-up, and you can control those with your diet and lifestyle or whatever.’
Q.
‘Well yeah, blind babies are bad but I guess it’s probably rare and not all blind peoples’ mothers had a touch of the herp.’
Q.
‘What I’m saying is it ain’t no syphilis.’
Q.
‘I also looked up those guys whose peen-a-weens go left? Or right? You seen them? They just veer off. Some sort of calcification of the skin. Then they can’t put it in because their aim is all off.’
Q.
‘I guess it gets caught in the pipe. And then when they go soft maybe it dribbles out? Hell, I don’t know.’
Q.
‘Anyway, my junk’s fine.’

B.I. #13 06-12

‘Alright?’
Q.
‘Just browsing.’
Q.
‘Just killing time in town, you know how it is. How long have you worked here?’
Q.
‘You’re very tall. Very tall. Have you ever seen the TV show Xena Warrior Princess? She’s very tall too. But now she’s blonde and was in that other show Curb Your Enthusiasm. You know Curb Your Enthusiasm? It’s about this guy, Larry David, and he used to write this other TV show Seinfeld. You ever heard of Seinfeld?’
Q.
‘Well I only ask because not many people in the UK have ever seen it.’
Q.
‘Oh right.’
Q.
‘So anyway this Xena person, she’s huge like you. I don’t think she’s a lesbian though.’
Q.
‘Are you a model?’
Q.
‘You could be a model. Or do you not want to be a model because you’d have to get thin?’

Each time a lithe heap of muscle approaches me all wrapped in spandex and says they’re a personal trainer and do I need help I say ‘Yes, I do,’ because obviously. I am new here. I follow it up with my completely true excuse for the visible state of affairs: ‘I’ve spent the last year writing a book,’ I say and, motioning downwards and around-wards I continue: ‘I don’t know what happened but, like, look at me.”

The last bit is a lie and every muscle in the PT’s face – their muscley face, their muscley face – says ‘Yeah you do. You know exactly what you did, you doughy liar’. As they flex and do things with their visible veins I tell them all honest and heartfelt like I’m on Dr Phil that I sat on my own arse until it flattened out and became an unidentified top-end to my thighs. I dab at an invisible tear and tell them I did nothing more physical than typing stuff with my fingers and occasionally lifting a 300-page coffee-table book out of my way, or more likely pushing it weakly across the table until it cleared exactly the right dimensions to fit one packet of chocolate Digestive biscuits. I tell them completely unnecessarily and somewhat panicked that it’s not like I suddenly became obese or anything. I tell them that as long as I’m standing up while naked that being naked is not the most horrific of horrors but things have got soft to the point where I only look human-shaped if nothing is touching me, clothes-wise or seat-wise. They tell me to stop there and would I pick this thing up and put it down again ten times? I say yeah sure, that sounds doable, and the next day I cannot walk.

I sign up for pilates. I did one session of pilates when I was 15 and broken and most of the session was taken up by the bit where I stand in my underpants and a woman circles me with a clipboard telling me which bits of my body are wrong. It was an odd experience and I left there with five sheets of red dot stickers to put up around the house. Whenever I saw a red dot (placed at several eye-height locations) I was to stop stooping like a prematurely 6’1 human with tiny soft-spoken friends and stand up properly. Eventually the red dots became so familiar I stopped seeing them and when I moved out five years later and stood stooping at the airport gates I’m pretty sure they were still there. I never went back to pilates because I only had a coupon for one free session and that shit is expensive, so I never corrected all those bodily imperfections listed by clipboard lady on two sheets of A4 paper which she gave to my newly alarmed 15-year-old self. Front and back.

But listen: I HAVE NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS AND I AM BORDERLINE LATE 20s NOW AND THAT IS ALL GOING TO CHANGE.

So I go to pilates. I take a mat off a hook and flop it down in the gap by the door through which a tiny Chinese man bursts and asks if we’re ready to ‘work it work it’. I have just trudged through the snow and am doubtful if I’m ready to work anything, but women look at their own faces sternly in the mirror and tell themselves they are ready to work it. He tells us to stand up and stop crying because he cycled here in these Jesus sandals and is related to Genghis Khan and are we actually ready to work it or not.

We stand up and he clocks me as most definitely new because I am looking at other people and not my own face in the mirror. Why would I look at my own stupid face in the mirror? That face doesn’t know shit. ‘YOU ARE THE DRIVER OF YOUR OWN BODY. STOP LOOKING AT THAT GUY, LADY.’ I mime an awkward sorry. ‘YOU TALL!’ he shouts at me across all the fit people and that one round guy who looks like Nathan Lane who later tells us he’s into musical theatre like it wasn’t obvious. I mime a chubby ‘I know’ and ‘is this relevant’ and we get started. He makes us do things with stretching and breathing and I’m smelling my own knees when suddenly he’s all up in my face, this distant relative of prolific banger Genghis Khan.

‘NICE BODY MOVEMENT. YOU USED TO BE A DANCER, TALL GIRL? BALLET?’

‘Uh. Yes. A million years ago,’ I croak.

‘I CAN SEE BY THE WAY YOU STAND. DON’T STAND LIKE THAT. DON’T POINT YOUR FEET, BALLERINA.’

I quit pointing my feet and start sweating instead. ‘ARE YOU REALLY PERSPIRING THAT HARD, BALLERINA? YOU SWEATY!’ He hands me a napkin. The class stops while I dab my huge red face. Nobody else is sweating except for my best pal Nathan Lane who gets told off for sipping Lucozade and gasping. ‘IS BAD FOR YOU. FULL OF SUGAR. MAKES YOU FAT!’

‘Fatter?’ Nathan blinks with enviable eyelashes and looks down at a possible 6-month pregnancy. He tucks the Lucozade into a shoe and shoots me a sheepish look, sweaty failure to sweaty failure.

‘HEY BALLERINA,’ he says ‘MOVE DOWN THE FRONT SO I DON’T HAVE TO KEEP COMING BACK THERE TO GIVE YOU NAPKINS FOR YOUR SWEATY FACE.’

‘Uh. No.’

‘NO? MOVE HERE NOW.’

The class stops again while I and my face drag a damp mat to the front of the class. I am ten-years-old again being made to sit at the teacher’s desk for making Jeremy Clarke laugh so hard he snapped a leg (the chair’s) while falling off it.

‘YOU A TENSE PERSON? YOUR SHOULDERS SAY YOU’RE TENSE. ARE YOU ANGRY ALL THE TIME, BALLERINA?’

‘Yes.’

‘I SHOULD BE A FORTUNE TELLER OR MAYBE YOU’RE JUST TOO OBVIOUSLY ANGRY. BE LESS ANGRY, BALLERINA.’

I reposition my eyebrows but you can’t swallow 26 years of angry just because some guy in tiny shorts tells you to.

‘HEY BALLERINA,’ he shouts an hour later when the class starts filing out. ‘AREN’T YOU TOO BIG TO BE A BALLERINA? YOU HUGE! HEY YOU KNOW WHO MY FAVOURITE DANCER IS, BALLERINA? NOT MICHAEL FLATLEY, BUT THE EVIL ONE IN THE LORD OF THE DANCE. SHE HAS NICE DRESSES.’

I stomped back home in the snow and fell over in the park, splayed like a fucked turtle on his shell/gym bag. I scrabbled on my knees to locate the phone I hurled at the frozen pond and I thought to myself: I am gonna be so buff.

I am in no way qualified to spout opinions on the breastfeeding of tiny babies seeing as I have pushed no baby out of my body ever. Know this. The reasons for inexpertly floating the subject are two-fold: i. it’s the internet, I can do what I want and ii. recently I passed a Stoke Newington café bulging with new mums, awkwardly parked buggies and romper-suited bubbas. The mum near the window was pressing an enormous brown nipple into the face of her tiny pink spawn and the thing gurgled happily. Protocol dictates that the job of the accidental viewer on seeing this is to politely unsee it, to let your eyes slide off the naked bit of lady and land instead on her plate of jam scones or whatever. Your correspondant did this. Mums should feel free to get them out, is what I’m saying.

I am all for the natural feeding of babies. I like buying a thing and using it for the exact purpose it was created for – it makes me feel prepared and in control, a master of my domain in a non-masturbatory sense; I like old specialist shops run by ancient men who have spent the last 70 years selling nothing but umbrellas. Using tits for their predestined duty is exactly what you should do with them. These two tanks of milk with mouthpieces were designed for feeding tiny babies. Do it in public. Do it in private. Do it to appease the tiny hungry mouth screaming next to the person who’s come to the café to write an article on their laptop. But the important thing, and this is the crux of my point here, is to stop doing it. You know, at some point in the child’s near future.

[For the benefit of the tape our opinionated monster is now showing a flashback scene]

We’d just moved into a new house in a new neighbourhood. I was twelve, my sister eight, and my brother six. None of us had drunk milk out of a human for some years. The family in the house across the road invited us over for a welcome barbeque, just a little get together to meet the people who you hope will call the cops if they see a burglar attempting an inelegant entrance through the front window. We made potato salad, we brought over a bunch of beer and lemonade. We sat out on the porch – him and her and their three kids and us – and everything was fine until this one kid, this grown-ass girl of about eight years old starts making eyes at her mum over the lettuce.

“Not now, you’ve had lunch.”

“But mum….”

“Not now, we’ve got guests,” she said. “Go and play Nintendo.”

But she didn’t go play Nintendo. Her mum, a desiccated husk of a woman approaching fifty, uncrossed her legs and motioned for the accidental pregnancy to sit on her skeleton lap. Then she hefted her loose summer shirt and revealed to us – the barbeque guests – one saggy former breast, a deflated isosceles triangle, an ungenerous samosa. She tweezed it between thumb and forefinger and eased it gently into mouth of this kid who had a full-house, teeth-wise. The owner of the teat asked if we’d like some more taramasalata. He daughter, feet resting on the floor, sucked her deflated mother dry.

Our expedited exit was blamed, respectively, on “work”, “football practice”, and on a “science experiment involving a potato”, and we made our way across the street, up the stairs and shut the door, whereupon a speechless family of five gaped at each other across a front room like “What the fuck was that?”

We never reciprocated the barbeque invite.

So my point is sure, breastfeed all you want in public. But if your kid has reached and breached the boundaries of a rollercoaster height requirement: put a cap on that milkjug.

My first proper boyfriend — I say proper meaning we lived together and our collective underpants tumbled together in one 60-degree machine wash — was a man with little to no taste. He owned exactly two CDs. This is not because he had transferred music onto his computer and found he had no use for the CDs now that he had a collection of mp3s. No. This was a man who had purchased two CDs in his entire adult life. He was almost thirty.

CD #1 was a Gomez album. I don’t know which one. I cannot name any Gomez albums. No one has ever legitimately liked the band Gomez. He would play it on repeat any time he felt relaxed enough to kick back in his sandals, have a glass of rosé wine, and smoke a Marlboro Light. It never occurred to me at the time that I was essentially dating an aunt.

CD #2 was Neil Young’s Harvest. It would be put on whenever Gomez was not on, and would be the sole soundtrack to any dinner we ever had. My own attempts to change such things were nixed, quietly removed, and Neil Young’s Harvest was slipped wordlessly into the CD player. He would sit at the head of the table and the following scripted conversation would play out, every time, as if it were the first time he had ever thought of these words re: Neil Young.

“I mean, he’s just so — There’s just no one better. Name a better album than Neil Young’s Harvest. See? You can’t. He’s just so… Well, you know what I mean. He’s just so…”

And he would wave his hand around as if searching for the word, shake his head in disbelief at just how so Neil Young was, never ever in the time I knew him being able to think of a descriptive term to apply to this man, or this album, which I have heard on repeat circa nine-thousand times.

As a consequence of this relationship I now have Clockwork Orange style breakdowns whenever I hear a track off the Neil Young album Harvest. At work, when our newly pressed playlist chooses Neil Young’s Heart of Gold — on supposed “random” meaning roughly three times a day, ignoring the thousands of other songs like it knows — I will leap boxes, chairs, and counters just to hit that skip button. I would cross an ocean to skip a Heart of Gold. And everyone else is trained to do likewise.

Six months ago the bicycle I was riding to work fell to pieces beneath me and I flew over the handles, landed on my face, and used my mouth as an airbag for the rest of me. I don’t remember any of it, but apparently the pavement looked like a Jackson Pollock. I had a pretty major concussion, was ambulanced to A&E, and what is important to this story in particular is that all of my front teeth were pushed in. Not knocked-out, they just angled inwards so that I could not bite or close my mouth. I sounded like the Elephant Man and I had to eat soup only soup for about two months while I pushed them back into position with my tongue.

I also had to endure months of expensive dental work at the hands of German man called Lars. Lars looks like a bearded garden gnome, small and stout, sounds exactly like Lawrence Olivier in Marathon Man and has the most perfect blue-white teeth I have ever seen inside a human face. Lars likes to listen to the radio while he works — no special channel, just your regular pop/rock channel that might blast through a tinny portable at a garage while a man whose face you can’t see tinkers with the underneath of your car. He likes to sing along, his face hidden behind a white mask, while putting things in my mouth. In my anaesthesia haze I quite liked hearing his teutonic version of DeBarge’s Rhythm of the Night as he covered my face in blue plastic and inserted my blackened tooth through a slit to ready it for a root canal. The day Donna Summer died a tear of silent laughter rolled down my face and was hoovered by the dental nurse’s suction tube all because his rendition of Hot Stuff was perhaps the greatest thing I had ever witnessed. But when the first bar of Heart of Gold sounded like a Blitz klaxon my groan was muffled by a collection of stainless steel implements and Lars’ latex gloves.

“Huuuuuuunnnnngghhhhhh!!!”

“Are you alright?” he asked, concerned, switching off the drill. “Do you need more anaesthetic?”

“Huuuuuuuuuuuuuunnnghhhhhh!!”

Neil Young’s Heart of Gold. Like a shit into my open mouth.

“Huuuuuuuuuunnnghhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!”

(He didn’t turn it off.)

There’s a thing that happens around the time my face becomes routinely obscured by a rediscovered scarf from the back of the wardrobe; when the cold streets suddenly fill with little woolly spheres which I presume are the small children I saw the day previous, now frenzily bundled by their parents, more weeble than human; when other parents make bad decisions with respect to buying a little red hooded coat for their spawn, thus bringing back screaming memories of Donald Sutherland’s naked bottom for everyone within twenty feet. But lest the point of this paragraph floats away like a post-it unhinged, let me scrabble on the floor for it in my mittens. There’s a thing that happens: I get some emails.

It’ll generally be November when they arrive so they’re not yet Christmas wishes, instead they are missives from a few people who like to remind me of the things I left behind half a decade ago, and what I like best about them is that they’re probably dashed off by people in their underpants. Here’s an example from one Mick Evans, whose descriptions are no less graphic or eloquent in real life. In the tropical underside of the world, these are the things that come out of people’s mouths over polite tea and scones:

“Just thought you should know that today was the first genuine day of the Queensland summer in all its moist glory. That’s right, hot as hell, sticky as molasses, time for spots and pimples and rashes around your rude bits. Hope you’re freezing your tits off. Much love, Mick.”

Shops in Australia get Christmassy in a way that only appears absurd and surreal when you’re far away. If it’s your first one in England it will probably occur to you as you walk down Oxford Street at 2am, colder than you’ve ever imagined, despite being wrapped up like an Edward Gorey character. The Christmas lights are on. You’ll notice the spraycan snow nestled fakely in the corners of windows. You’ll think about Christmas back home and you’ll realise: it doesn’t make any fucking sense.

Christmas and its lead-up are some of the hottest days of the year – usually the high 30s, or, for the Americans, I mean about a hundred I think (I did a Google and you’re welcome) – and yet despite the soupy heat that causes your beshorted bottom to become glued to leather couches, your naked sweaty feet to slip on polished wooden floors, your will to live or even change the channel on the TV visibly ebb from your body along with the buckets of sweat dripping from your shiny red face: despite all this, they still spraycan snow on the windows. They still pay a middle-aged man to wear a big red fat suit and sit on a red velvet throne in a sea of white packing foam while children try to yank off his beard. Sitting on Santa’s knee was always a moist affair. As he peered down at you, occasionally wiping the sweat from his brow with his furry white cuff, you’d forget what you wanted for Christmas and you’d just want to say: Santa, your lap is sweaty. I can feel it through my culottes.

Look through the childhood album of any Australian and you will see a photo of a sweaty older man of no relation bouncing a traumatised under-5 on his overheated knee.

One year the council thought it would be a brilliant idea to set up a Winter Wonderland in the centre of town so that finally, finally, films like Home Alone: Lost in New York would make sense to the inhabitants of a land where there is no such thing as a “Christmas jumper”. But like the Game Joy one might receive in lieu of the Gameboy one had listed quite clearly on the Christmas list, it just wasn’t right. It was worse. It was like some sadist’s reconstruction of a thing they had never actually seen but merely had described to them. And so I and a dozen other kids who had never seen snow were pushed over the edge of a “mountain” (ledge) on our “toboggans” (large buckets) and sent careening down a slope that was not made of snow but slick ice, the kind of hard unyielding diamond-hard ice that insane Swedish people might construct a hotel out of. And should we make it all the way to the bottom without capsizing our “toboggans” (again, large buckets), we would smash our faces into a wall of upturned plastic-coated mattresses and have ourselves a Christmas nosebleed.

On Christmas Day you have two options, food-wise, being either a BBQ, or what most families (certainly mine) opt for: the traditional roast. With sweltering heat outside in lieu of postcard snow, everyone gathers to have a totally inappropriate meal based on half handed-down, half made-up conceptions of what a “proper Christmas meal” is. There’ll be a turkey and potatoes, etc, though you’ll probably never come into contact with an actual brussel sprout because these are things that exist solely in books and films so that children have something to hate, universally. It’s prepared by one near-dead mum having eschewed offers of help, and is such a complicated procedure that it’s bound to end up late and half-cold while everyone gets drunk and stroppy in the amplified heat. Once stuffed with seasonally-demented turkey and steadily soaking up tryptophan, most everyone will fall asleep on a sofa in a crumpled paper hat, with odd rivulets of sweat forming in their inner thighs. On Boxing Day someone will wail that we all forgot to eat the store-bought Christmas pudding, into which 5-cent pieces had been clumsily poked because no one knows how to bake thrupenny bits into a from-scratch pud.

One year, apropos of nothing, someone might insist that in addition to the roast turkey and all the vegetables and whatnot, that another roast creature, that a leg of ham is likewise essential, in order to supply a cold slice to sit alongside the aforementioned on the dinner plate. Reports from the frontline of one such incident suggest that “The fucker would still, wrapped in incrementally-growing-stickier muslin, be taking up a third of the downstairs fridge in late March.”

The other option is the Christmas barbeque, so here comes another list of stuff that you put in your face: instead of turkey you get sausages or prawns, and instead of warm Christmas pudding you get, well, warm Christmas pudding that you eat in your wet swimming costume (or “togs”) having just got a stitch and nearly died in the pool after neglecting to wait the suggested half hour after eating. And with all of the above you have beer, which is steadily warming in the sun despite a thing called a “stubby holder”.

On Boxing Day the post-Christmas sales work the same as anywhere, but there is the added draw of air-conditioning. Those who don’t have it in their own homes and are bored of driving around aimlessly in their air-conditioned cars flock to the Westfield shopping centre for a hospitable climate just as much as discounted TVs. But all those hot people standing around exuding bodyheat cause the machines to splutter and heave and inevitably pack it in entirely, and Westfield becomes an oven. We all abort the TV mission and get back in our air-conditioned cars. We drive around for an afternoon shouting at each other as those riding shotgun block the cool air vent with the expanse of their moist, pink face, before going home, shifting the dog out of the way and curling ourselves around the cool of the toilet bowl, panting.

—————–

Ta and apologies to Mick Evans and Chris Breach whose Christmases I have assimilated.

I was the first of three babies to slide out of my dear Mum over the course of a few years. I don’t know if the gene pool was particularly shallow the day they ladled some out for me, but I seem to have ended up with all the bad ones, the dreggy bits, the bit of ham hock in the middle that you’re not even supposed to eat. As Mum once put it “We were still getting the batter right. You’re like the first wonky pancake, darl.”  She said this to me as we sat in the waiting room of an orthopaedic surgeon, later, again, at a dermatologist, and once more when I, miserably teenaged, complained that my simian forehead made me look like Early Man.

The hand-me-down genetic trait I had my biggest beef with was not the downright unfair blanket of furious acne that covered my greasy face, but the fact that my knees and its constituent parts were apt to part company, by which I mean totally disassemble and cease to be of use. The first time it happened I was eight, swinging upside down on the monkey bars, showing off to some older boys who were about nine and paid no attention to me, my floral bike shorts or my impressive feats of monkey strength until I landed smack on my face on the black Astroturf. What happened was – and to the physiotherapist I saw much later, understanding what happened was key to my preventing it happening again, and thus he insisted on doing demonstrations with a plastic knee model complete with POCK! sound-effects as the pieces of bone slid out of place, until your correspondent hid in the armpit of her Mammy – what happened was, the impractically small kneecap on my left knee had slid out of its natural indent (which my forebears’ genetic material had ensured was too shallow to keep such a thing penned in) and swung around the side of my leg, stretching ligament and scratching against leg bone as it went. Some in-built survival mechanism told me how to fix it so I whacked the cap back into place where the joint immediately began to swell and stiffen before my watery eyes. Having established that I was put back together I set about screaming for my parents and watching the silhouette of two nine-year-old boys getting smaller and smaller in the distance. We had an awkward car trip home: me and my haphazardly braced leg took up all three of the back seats while my brother and sister hovered above it, their arms looped around the headrests of the front seats, pretending to sit as we passed police cars on the highway.

This happened countless more times over the next few years, becoming a more frequent occurrence as the problem snowballed; all the pieces became stretchier and smoother, and the owner of said pieces grew several feet and some hips. Like people with legitimate Post Traumatic Stress Disorder there are some moments in my life that have disappeared down a black hole in my memory so as to keep some semblance of sanity, and those moments were namely “anything to do with knees”. These events now exist as hazy CCTV replays, stitched together from eye-witness reports by the less physically traumatised, like the infamous Sausage Sizzle of 1997 when I was 11. The following report comes from a fellow student:

“Don’t you remember? We were all waiting in line to get our sausages and you were right at the front and then someone asked you to do a cartwheel? And you said no because you were about to get your sausage but they wouldn’t leave you alone because you were the best at cartwheels?”

It was true, I was the best at cartwheels and pointing this out was a sure-fire way of getting me to do them even if it meant missing out on a blackened sausage wrapped in a slice of cheap white bread, with a not inconsiderable amount of ketchup adorning its porky middle. So I forfeited my place in line and walked proudly to the edge of the park to ready myself for a run up (this bit I remember) because the whole Grade 6 class was watching, dripping in their swimsuits and clutching half-eaten dinners in their clammy mitts, and this cartwheel was going to be especially spectacular.

Mid-cartwheel was the point at which I essentially black out, memory-wise. But my eyewitnesses (those whose partially-masticated dinners tumbled from their open mouths and landed at their unshod feet) filled me in at a later date, when I returned to school a week later, on crutches:

“It was like your knees did something knees aren’t supposed to do?”

I put the question mark at the end because these are Australians, and everything is naturally phrased as a question. But also: they were also not entirely sure what happened – the legs, previously strong and straight and spinning in the air, had collapsed in the middle and bent at a sickening horror movie angle, before your broken narrator landed in a heap of dislocated bones on the dewy grass. I whacked them back into place, ensured everything was in order, and set about screaming, as per.

The above event exists in my mind as flashes of horrifying photographs – the bit in the movie trailer where the music stops, and they set freeze-frames of wide-eyed characters to the soundtrack of a beating heart. But I do remember what happened afterwards because, well:

Given the school’s locale, it was little wonder almost everyone had eschewed their cars for a leisurely walk on a summer’s evening, where there was to be an end of year pool party for the class, plus also the aforementioned sausages. And thus there were no cars to transport this one particular broken student home except for that of my nemesis: Rebecca.

Rebecca was not actually my nemesis, though I didn’t like her enough to change her name here, and neither did anybody else: she flagrantly picked her nose and ate it, and when she was completely tapped out of her own bodily produce she simply ate the teacher’s Blu-Tac. The image of my teacher rifling through her drawers in search of some Blu-Tac is an abiding memory of my school years. “Excuse me, Miss?”

“Yes?”

“Rebecca ate it again.”

She would bow her head, rub her eyes, and sigh as she led Rebecca, chewing, out into the hallway for a quiet word.

I was however her nemesis, a fact I gleaned from the title of a diary she kept in her desk called WHY I HATE HAYLEY CAMPBELL which was brought about because the object of her affection (a man who is now a model and ballet dancer but who was then about three feet tall and insisted on wearing a cowboy hat with a feather in) was at that point in time besotted by the best cartwheeler in class. And frankly, who wouldn’t be. They were some fucking phenomenal cartwheels.

So Rebecca’s Dad lifted me up and put me in the back of the car. For the entire five minutes of the drive Rebecca stared back at me from the front seat, while I eyeballed her back from the rear, frozen and splayed like a cornered spider. When I returned to school after my time off, people had forgotten about the knee thing thanks to it being superseded by a more universal horror. All they wanted to know was did I actually touch the insides of the car because ew, you guys.

Later, at 14, a high-kick ended my dance career, a thing that could only have been made more dramatic if I could transpose the soundtrack from a previous episode over this one – the strangled low-octave piano keys I landed on as my knees buckled beneath me at home. As my right leg became parallel with my face the supporting left leg collapsed and once again I found myself broken on a floor, this time covered in resin and surrounded by traumatised dancers.

Doctors and physiotherapists decided that surgery was the only thing that was going to fix this, hence the orthopaedic surgeon’s waiting room and my Ma’s comment about me being a wonky pancake. They sawed off the knobbly bit at the front of my leg, moved it over a bit, bolted it down, shortened some ligaments, did a bunch of stuff I never asked about, most notably “Why did I go into surgery wearing big green paper underpants and why were they not there when I woke up?” Hospital at night is full of gibbering horrors and lost old ladies doing shits in darkened corners. I got in trouble for pressing the self-administering morphine drip too many times in one hour, and could not wee in the presence of nurses so was left with my naked bottom hefted atop a dish for half an hour until they came back to collect their golden bounty, by which point I needed to go again.

They did this surgery three times, twice on one leg, once on the other, and I spent months out of school on the sofa watching Ricki Lake and Sally Jesse Raphael, occasionally Donahue if he was on, Oprah, Jerry Springer, obviously, as well as Home & Away repeats from the ‘80s, while also plowing through mountains of comics, novels and videos dropped off by my Dad’s friends (Twin Peaks, Lipstick on Your Collar and various other Dennis Potters). When I wasn’t doing that I was fashioning characters out of modelling plasticine or getting an awkward sponge-bath off my poor Mum, once a week. If I ever get a Wikipedia entry this is the bit where I become “stricken with polio” before the bit about my stubborn and unlikely climb to the top of the pile of geniuses [citation needed].

These days I have two bolts in each leg that go off in airport metal detectors, accompanied by scars on my legs that go purple when I’m cold. They’re vertical and kind of bunchy, and someone once said they look like fannies. I don’t run for buses, and I no longer cartwheel, and in answer to my Mum’s last question about them: no, I can’t kneel for blowjobs.

I spunk an inordinate amount of time on the Internet, Internet, and during that time yesterday when I could have been writing a book or cooking an actual meal so as to nourish my body with something other than a cashew/raisin snack pack, I saw a picture of two writers – Neil Gaiman and Audrey Niffenegger, illustrious guests of the Edinburgh Book Festival – donning the mask of a secret underground game I’m not entirely sure they knew the rules of. It’s a game that has been in my family for some time, introduced by a man from Essex who has been living in Australia for so long that his accent now sounds like an Australian doing a lamentable impression of a man from Essex. Here is the photograph – and the masks – in question:

The game is known as Dambusters. To play Dambusters you must first and foremost put your flying goggles on (see above). You then hum or sing the theme tune to the 1955 film The Dam Busters, with a gusto regardless of talent and reliant mostly on your state of sobriety, as you and your squadron take turns circling an empty pint glass (here being “the dam”) in the middle of the sitting room floor (“Germany”). You then take aim and deposit the collection of coins (“bombs”) you’ve had carefully clenched between your buttocks (“hatch doors” of the “bomb bay”) as you flew in. BAH bah BAH bah BAH BAH BAH BAH BA — clink!

I’ve been playing this game at parties and in secret since about 1996. Like children who take up an instrument and actually practice it I am, as you can probably imagine, pretty good at it these days. If it were a violin I had practiced perhaps I’d be included in the Proms. I’d say I rank about an Air Marshal, one down from the Chief due to being on reserve for some years on account of breaking that pint glass of Mum’s with a particularly catastrophic 50p.

I once used this secret skill of mine to break a silence that had fallen for an excruciatingly extended moment over the table at a dinner party to which I had been invited. And it is here, Internet, that I advise you not to take this knowledge I have just blessed you with out into the real world. Let it stay here, at the pub, or in your head, or in the early morning practice hours in your bedroom before your housemates complain of a strange ka-CHINK! noise, the mystery of which has been driving them insane for days. Do not take it to a dinner party to alleviate an awkward situation because it will subsequently result in nothing but an awkward situation as you zero in on your target borrowed from the hostess’ glassware, and you’ll wonder, just for a second, as you proudly look up with your mask on, your knees bent, and your bottom hefted aloft – you’ll question, as the last BAH! of the iconic theme tune tumbles regrettably from your mouth – you’ll speculate as to whether those grimaces and gurns are truly the faces of some totally impressed dinner guests. Do not confirm your wonderings by asking them to join your squadron.

Another time I was a guest in someone’s home I happened upon my host being fitted for a sleeping mask for his sleep apnoea. It looked like a WWII gas mask, all rubbery and uncomfortable, and I said as much, helpfully, while filling the kettle for a cup of tea. The sleep doctor was introduced to me mostly as a way of ignoring the unhelpfulness I had just dumped into the centre of the room. What followed the perfunctory introduction was total silence excepting the gentle hiss of the as-yet-unboiled kettle. I filled that silence with some smart words in this particular order:

“So uh. Sleep doctor, huh. You must come across some pretty odd stuff.”

“Yes.”

“Um. You get a lot of sleepwalkers?”

“Some.”

“I sleepwalk. I sleepwalk quite a bit.”

“Well, there are some medications that can be prescribed for that. So, anyway –” he says, turning back to his masked patient whose nose doesn’t quite fit into the rubbery nose pocket, “I’m going to go. I’ll give you a letter for TSA – it shouldn’t be any hassle to travel with. And if your wife has any objections or questions just tell her to give me a call.” And he left in what seemed like an unnecessary hurry, as I poked at my teabag with a spoon.

Days later I got a phonecall from the sleep doctor. He was worried that he hadn’t seemed concerned enough about my sleepwalking. I told him that was fine, it was just something I had said in the kitchen as a way of alleviating the blush in the bits of my host’s face I could see over the rubber mask. He said, No really, he could come around tomorrow and discuss the sleepwalking in detail. I said, No really, it’s no problem. He said, “About noon?”

Cut to: about noon. The sleep doctor opens up his briefcase and asks me about my sleepwalking. I tell him how I used to have to safety pin my pajamas on to stop myself undressing in the night. I tell him about the time I woke up with a tiny green apple in my bed, a kind of tiny green apple that can’t be bought in a shop but can only be scrumped prematurely off a tree, though there were no apple trees for miles. It didn’t have a bite out of it, though I do occasionally find the remains of attempted and half- or entirely uneaten meals in a disastrously messy kitchen: elaborate salads with sundried tomatoes, olives, and cheese, with balsamic vinegar footprints leading back to my bedroom. I tell him about the time my boyfriend woke up because he heard scratching noises in the bedroom, which the bedside lamp revealed to be his girlfriend (me) attempting to tear posters off the walls in the dark with a clawed hand and a snarl. He said, deliriously, “What… what are you doing? Get back in bed…” and trailed off as he watched me flee the room and open the front door, making to escape the flat and run through the streets of Brixton on a freezing cold February 2am, wearing nothing but black business socks and a terrifying expression. I’m apparently physically stronger in my sleep and have dished out the occasional black eye to myself and to others, but he somehow managed to bundle me into the bathroom and keep me locked there until I came to: cold, bewildered and remembering nothing. I’ve deadlocked my front door ever since.

I tell the sleep doctor about the time I woke up with soil on my hands, under my fingernails and smeared on my face like in Pet Sematary. A look around the house revealed that I had been digging in the potted palm tree in the bathroom, gardening – a thing I have never done before, not even consciously.

“So if you’re okay with it I’d like to have a look inside your mouth,” he says. “Sometimes with somnambulists, especially tall ones, we find that they have a specific disorder which can be characterised by having an especially high or long palate. Do you mind?” I shake my head. “Okay say aaaahhhhh—“ He clicks his flashlight on.

“Aaaaaahhh.”

“Aaaaaaaahhhhhh?”

“Aaaaaaaahhhhhh?”

He proceeds to list roughly six “not entirely” serious or life threatening syndromes with which I may be inflicted, and writes them down for me, illegibly. He asks me if my parents do it. I say I’d rather not think about that. He says he means sleepwalking. I tell him about my brother and sister sleepwalking, and about that probably very interesting period of our lives when we were all living at home and bumping into each other in the night. My brother pissed into our kitchen bin, the white one with the toilety flip-top lid. My sister tried to sit (that’s sit) in the vegetable drawer of the fridge. One morning, she woke up covered in chocolate.

He asks when the most recent incident occurred, re: me. I tell him it was just the other night. I was sharing a bed with my friend as a way of paying for only one hotel room, and in the dead of night, apropos of nothing, I grabbed her wrist and stared at her through a sheet of long, messy black hair like some horrific apparition in a Japanese film. I mumbled something about thinking she was on the other side of the bed, rolled over and forgot it happened.

The sleep doctor scolds me. I should have warned her. “In fact, there are some hotels in America that actually stipulate in the contract that if you’re a sleepwalker you should let them know. Let the hotel know, I mean, so that if they find you walking the halls in the night they know not to worry or just gently direct you back to your room. The hotel also wants to know so they can put you on the ground floor.”

But I didn’t actually want to know about how seriously deranged I was, or how during my next visit he would enroll me in a course of sleep analysis so I could be rigged up in a hospital bed with accelerometers all over my body to monitor my movement. I know what I do. I want to know what other people do. “The boys at work all thought that stuff about me trying to escape in the night was my attempt to set the groundwork for an alibi should I ever actually murder my boyfriend. Has anyone ever killed anyone in their sleep?”

“Oh yes, many times. Very sad. There was a guy who actually got in his car, drove an hour to his in-laws’ house and stabbed one of them to death. He came to covered in blood and was immediately apologetic and horrified.”

“Yikes.”

“And there was a professional footballer who acted out a football game in his sleep. He crash-tackled a wardrobe, woke up concussed. It really shook him because he lived on the 5^th floor of an apartment block and the wardrobe was right beside a huge open window. He thinks if he’d aimed maybe a foot to the left he’d have been on the sidewalk. Hence the ground floor hotel thing.”

“So comparatively I’m doing okay.”

“Well, uh. So I have a pile of literature here that maybe you’d like to read. I mean most of it is written for the benefit of practitioners so maybe it’s a bit heavy but I have it here for you if you’d like it.”

He hands over a pile of papers about an inch thick: There’s Somnambulism or Sleepwalking, page 91 from Lippincott Williams & Wilkins’ Primary Parasomnias: A Review For Neurologists; Chapter 94: Non-REM Arousal Parasomnias – Epidemiology and Risk Factors from the Principles and Practice of Sleep Medicine, 5^th Edition, plus Sleep/Wake Transition Disorders from same; and finally Overlapping States, a decidedly top-notch Venn Diagram of the Narcolepsy Triad, along with about nine other regular line graphs of sleep phases and whatnot.

“…And if you have any questions or any new sleepwalking incidents do let me know. Here, I’ll give you my email address. I’m bad at checking my email at work so I’ll give you my home address… And my home number is this but if it’s an emergency you can get me on my cell here.”

He’s jotting all this on the top of the pile of what is potentially seriously wrong with me.

“So. I know this may sound weird but do you – do you want to come in my plane? I have a plane. I can do acrobatics – loop the loop and stuff. Do you want to come flying with me?”

“Go flying with you?”

“Yes. Want to see a picture of my plane?” I barely get a chance to answer him before he started flipping through photographs on his mobile phone. “Here it is in the hangar. It’s from the ‘60s. My loop the loop is pretty awesome.”

I tell him it’s nice, but I will only get in his plane if we can wear flying goggles and hum The Dam Busters theme tune. He asks how it goes and I say, well.

I deliberately think and worry about things in order to delay sleep, which is a bad thing I do just to avoid a certain dream I’ve been having on a bi-monthly basis since roughly 1992, AD. I worry about the vegetables and fruit I bought after catching a glimpse of my grey, hungover face in the smeary mirror of the vegetable aisle; I doubt I’ll be able to eat them before they moulder audibly in the kitchen in the night, and occasionally I’ll get up and eat them before they do. I worry if I have enough underpants to see out the week; I wonder if I wasted my best ones two days before anyone had cause to see them. I worry about the letter from the post office I left unanswered –  the one informing me that those amateur CVs I sent out in A4 envelopes machine-gunned across the city in the hopes of hitting some sort of employment had been delivered to their myriad destinations in good faith, but that I had failed to meet the postage fee minimum for such lush A4 envelopes and could I please send a cheque for $4.38 to The Post Office, c/o The Mail Man (or whatever, I never did).

I’m under the house of my youth in the dead of night, the kind of flimsy Australian structure that’s up on stilts with a gap between the floorboards and the gravelled ground of about 12 feet. It’s where unclaimed neighbourhood cats get buried, where mud pies are constructed, where my friend Heidi, 5, takes a shit in the corner and says it wasn’t her, it was me. I’m standing in my pajamas looking down at the man I’ve just accidentally murdered: a man who, in eggy moustache and old man cap, is quite clearly David Jason. In his hand he has a half-eaten bacon sandwich. I pick it up and eat it – a dead man’s bacon butty – while I consider what to do next.

I am five years old. I drag him by his feet to a place where I know the gravel goes deep and I won’t hit cement or dead cat after two shovelled scoops. His overcoat splays vertically behind him and he leaves a furrow in his wake. It’s 4am and my Mum will be up soon. She’ll want to know why David Jason is dead and underneath my house. I don’t know why David Jason is dead and underneath my house. I won’t know what to tell her.

For the first half hour of waking I generally think this is a true thing that happened: that I somehow buried a dead David Jason under a house in suburban Australia, and that I ate his bacon butty after taking it from his rigor mortis grip, and it was inexplicably still warm when I did it and noticed he favoured red sauce, not brown. And then I walk to work and I see a man in a suit with a beard of white shaving foam, shaving a streak of stubble in a stop-start fashion, using the shop windows as mirrors as he passes. I wonder who it’s for, the shave, given that he must have passed some hundreds of people and it evidently wasn’t for them. I forget that I accidentally killed David Jason that one time, until it happens again two months later, Groundhog Day in the wrong RPM.