Sex, Lies and Bonsai Read online

  Dedication

  For Tim

  My webmaster and film director extraordinaire

  Contents

  Cover

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  There are no accidents whatsoever

  in the universe.

  SIGMUND FREUD

  I always knew Daniel would find me out one day. That’s why his text message, although it was a shock, wasn’t really a surprise.

  E, I can’t stand it anymore, his message said. Daniel never uses abbreviations when texting. Apart from my name. I wonder why that is.

  It wasn’t defined. I knew what he meant though. It was the gap between the image of myself I’d sold him on and the reality. He’d fallen for the advertisement, but hadn’t read the fine print. Now he wanted to return me like a defective product.

  It was my deficiencies — my social awkwardness, lack of interest in being a domestic goddess and laziness, for starters. Then there was the way I drifted off when he explained the finer points of his job to me and how I hid in a corner at his important work functions.

  It was the way I couldn’t understand the effect of nitrates on river systems, how I stuck my fingers in my ears and hummed when he tried to explain this to me and how I never gave the right answer when he asked what he’d been saying.

  It was me.

  Another one-word text came through shortly after the first. Sorry.

  I’d contemplated that word with all its meanings and decided to take it at face value. Daniel was nothing if not politically correct and if he said sorry, then he meant it. But if he was sorry, I was sorrier.

  Daniel and I were together for twelve months and twenty days. I’ve spent most of my time since we broke up wondering how I can fix it so that Daniel will love me again.

  I swerve to avoid a large fish head someone has left on the sand. Its eyes are dull and glassy, its skeleton bare. It has been six weeks since Daniel dumped me, but I still feel no less gutted than that fish. A cold wind is whipping up the waves; it’s time to head home. My feet drag as I make my way back up the beach. My shoulder bag bumps against my hip and I can feel the sharp edges of my new purchase inside.

  Daniel and I met at a poetry reading organised by the local writers’ centre. This unlikely intersection of Daniel’s interests and mine occurred in Gleebooks in Sydney. I say unlikely, because Daniel isn’t into poetry. Daniel is into environmental law. Our meeting was doubly unlikely because I had never planned to read my work aloud at all. On such strange chances lives do turn…

  The night started predictably enough. A middle-aged woman with fire-engine-red hair emoted about her secret lover. She counted off the syllables with hand movements that made me dizzy. An earnest young man delivered a ringing testament to vegetarianism — ‘No meat/It’s sweet’. A dreadlocked student rapped about being oppressed. It was hard to see how he was — he was wearing ninety dollar Vans on his feet — but you had to keep an open mind.

  I had been to open mic events before. I liked to sit in a dark corner and listen. Poets are used to people like me; they leave me alone. Though I never performed, I always brought a poem and told myself maybe next time as I left. I knew I never would.

  On this night, the featured poet, a scary woman with asymmetrical black hair and elbow-high vinyl gloves, was launching her first collection — Dark Hymns from the Street. Cheap plonk flowed like the Parramatta River in flood. Alcohol contributed to the ensuing events, but it was not solely to blame. A lucky door prize was on offer — the winner would receive one hour of tattooing from the local tattoo shop. Tattoos have become so run of the mill lately. For most people that is. Not for me.

  However, after three glasses of wine, it seemed possible that a tattoo might be just what I needed. After four glasses of wine, as it turned out, it was very easy to make a simple mistake regarding the correct hat in which to place your name for the lucky door prize.

  I was thinking about what sort of tattoo I wanted when they called my name — perhaps a small line of poetry in a hidden location? ‘The Tay Bridge Disaster’ — the worst poem in history — sprang to mind. The stronger we our houses do build/The less chance we have of being killed. So true. I ran up to the stage; hand out, ready for the voucher. When the MC passed me the mic and asked me to read my poem, I was too bemused and terrorised to resist. Coughing, I pulled my crumpled paper from my jeans. Luckily, I’d already written an introduction.

  ‘My poem, “Three Deer and a Sheep”, is a thrilling epic in rhyming couplets about a New Zealand hunter who woos a single mother by making sausages to his special recipe…’ The mic squealed and I blinked like a spot-lit deer.

  It was at this point that Daniel just happened to wander in, looking for the latest book on climate change.

  I read my poem as if it were a shopping list. Later, my understated delivery was much praised; Leonard Cohen may have been mentioned. ‘Three Deer and a Sheep’ was a smash hit — a sensation. The poets clapped and cheered and yelled for more. The featured poet looked distinctly pissed off — no one had cheered for her. I felt like Mick Jagger. One more glass of wine and I definitely would have crowd surfed. One less, and I never would have read at all. The whims of fate…

  Soon after, when I was naked in Daniel’s arms (I never have been good at playing hard to get), he told me he was entranced from the first line.

  I have never understood what it was about It rains a lot in Glenorchy that captured his interest, but I’m grateful it did. Even now. When I’m feeling low, which is quite often, I think ‘Three Deer and a Sheep’ was almost certainly the zenith of my performance poetry career.

  So here I am back in Darling Head — a place I thought I’d escaped. I’d thought I was settled in Sydney for life. A seagull squawks above me in a judgmental way. ‘I know you don’t blame Daniel,’ I mutter. ‘I don’t either.’ Of course he was sick of me. I was sick of myself. The bird lands on the beach in front of me and squawks again. Worms, it seems to say. I ignore it. The worm incident is not one I wish to dwell on. As I pass the seagull, my bare foot slips on a rubbery, rancid piece of seaweed. My stomach squirms, but not as badly as it did when I got Daniel’s message.

  As I walk, I recite the poem out loud from memory in the faint hope that it will help me find a way of bringing Daniel back. By the time I get to the second stanza, I have hit my stride.

  Venison is a little lean.

  It won’t make a woman keen.

  For a sausage that she’ll wa
nt to keep,

  You really need to add a sheep…

  There at Gleebooks, as I said the words add a sheep, I noticed the attractive dark-haired man in a black denim jacket down the back of the room. His eyes were on me. From then on, I read for him only.

  Sausages. As I climb up the path from the beach, I wonder for the first time if it was something about the sausages themselves that caught Daniel’s attention. Throughout the twelve months and twenty days we were together was he perhaps waiting patiently for me to make deer sausages? I imagine him opening the door every evening, praying this might be the day. Did he yearn silently but hopelessly for the vision of the perfect sausage I created that night? Was he too shy to mention this almost illicit craving, this desire, this obsession? Had it withered within him, a secret, dark hunger?

  I stop, pull my new notebook out of my bag and make a note: Deer sausages.

  If this is what it takes to bring Daniel back, I will learn how to make them tomorrow.

  Flushed with the success of my accidental poetry reading, I radiated the confidence of a different person that night. No doubt that was what attracted him. I couldn’t sustain it though. Nor could I sustain my faked interest in the environmental issues plaguing him. I know this makes me a shallow person. It’s not that I don’t care; I do — deeply. I just find the detail excruciatingly dull.

  At home, I climb into the hammock which hangs on our verandah and pull out the notebook. It is hard-covered, black and suitably serious looking. I have decided that I am going to fix myself, scientifically, as Daniel would do. Like all great scientists I will conduct research on myself, my topic — how long does it take to heal a broken heart?

  Inside the front cover of the notebook I write: Forge ahead, one step at a time. Turn a negative into a positive. This is what Sally has instructed me to do. Since my break-up, my best friend, Sally, has been dispensing advice freely and generously from her base in Rio de Janeiro, where she is teaching English. Sally has studied psychology. She can quote Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Sally tells me that ‘the sexual life of adult women is a dark continent’. She is the kind of friend one needs when love makes you crazy.

  I chew on my pen and consider how best to proceed. My mind is blank.

  Luckily my phone rings. Yay, double yay and hurrah. It is Sally. She has just got back from South America and wants to pop around for a cup of tea. Saved by the bell.

  Chapter Two

  One is very crazy when in love.

  SIGMUND FREUD

  Sally lies back on the verandah couch, her long brown legs exposed in her Mexican skirt and slides her sunglasses up over her unruly mane of blonde-tipped hair. The last time I saw her, her hair was black. She also has a new tattoo on her ankle. I think it is an Incan temple. This means she has had a South American lover.

  Sally got her first tattoo as soon as she turned the legal age, eighteen. The dolphin on her hip is a memento of her First Great Love, a surfer called Marcus. A Balinese god on her lower back is a souvenir of a brief, but intense holiday romance. It is lucky that Sally is picky with which lovers she chooses to commemorate or she would be inked from head to toe. Her criteria for selection is whimsical, shifting and has nothing to do with the length of the relationship. For Sally’s lovers the arrival of the tattoo is a bad sign, not a good one. Tattoos are only procured once the love affair has ended. Sally falls in and out of love with the same frequency and lack of complication which she brings to changing her hairstyle.

  Neither love nor hairstyles have ever come easily to me.

  I point at her new tattoo and raise an eyebrow.

  ‘So hot.’ Sally sighs and fans her face.

  Sally’s lovers are always hot.

  ‘Arsehole,’ she says, when I mention Daniel’s name, and, ‘Don’t be an idiot,’ when I try to explain how I don’t blame him because I am, really, a particularly annoying person.

  ‘You’re not annoying at all, you’re great, you just need to get out more,’ she says.

  ‘I don’t like getting out.’ And this is the crux of the problem.

  Sally and I have been friends since we first shared our lunch in pre-school. She had Vegemite sandwiches and I had zucchini slice — Mum was into green vegetables. We eyed each other’s food and, without a word, swapped when the teacher wasn’t looking — lunch-swapping was prohibited.

  From then on, wherever I went, it was Sally and me, me and Sally. On finishing school we went to Sydney University together. While I stayed on to be with Daniel, she took off to see the world. We have emailed constantly while she’s been away, but I’ve still missed her a lot. I’m not sure what it is that makes our friendship work, but it does. Like Starsky and Hutch, Turner and Hooch or Tango and Cash, we are a mismatched buddy pair.

  My mate Sal doesn’t have a shred of self-doubt in her body. In that way, perhaps, she is not the most useful friend for me to have.

  Sally approves of my research plan. ‘Recognising that you have a problem is the first step to solving it,’ she says. ‘What is required, I think, is a chart. Charts are scientific. People who use charts are copers not mopers.’

  An ache inside my chest tells me that I am still a moper.

  Sally supervises me while I draw up a chart.

  On the first page I write Pain diary. I rule up four columns. The first column I title Day of the week. In this I write, Saturday. The second column is Days since break-up. In this I write 42. The third column I title Pain level 1–10. After some thought, I write 9. This is optimistic, but I think I’ve had worse days.

  ‘What’s the fourth column for?’ asks Sal.

  ‘I’m leaving that spare for any further research questions.’

  Sally nods. ‘Good. Very scientific.’ She taps the notebook with her finger. ‘You can put tips for improvement in the back. Start a list.’

  A list. I decide not to tell Sally that I have already started my list with deer sausages.

  ‘So, what’s it like being back in Darling Head?’ asks Sal.

  ‘Fishy. The seagulls seem more obnoxious than they used to be.’

  ‘That’s progress,’ says Sal. ‘We’re getting a more uppity class of seagull now.’

  From where Sally and I sit on the couch, we can see the sea and the chequerboard of houses that make up this place we know so well. Darling Head is a surfer’s town. Every day after school the break in front of the pub is packed with blonde-haired kids flexing their muscles and their attitude. And that’s just the girls. The wetsuit is the look on the street and the clothes shops stock only surf wear. Sand blows into houses and coats the pavement. Brazilians, French, Japanese, Americans and English come here seeking the famed Darling Point break.

  ‘Do you ever wonder how someone dropped in here from Mongolia would find this town?’ I ask as we look towards the sea.

  ‘Mmm, can’t you just see them raising their rabbit-fur hat to the bikini girls?’ replies Sal.

  ‘I think they might feel as out of place as I do.’

  ‘If this was Ulaanbaatar,’ Sally’s grasp of geography has been improved by her year abroad, ‘your father would be the Mongolian champion bareback horse racer.’

  My father is, in fact, a former Australian surf champion. This makes him something of a legend in Darling Head. ‘They’ve just named a lookout after him, you know.’

  ‘Go Dave.’ Sal raises a fist.

  ‘I can’t imagine having anything named after me.’ I pull my pen out of my mouth and inspect its gnawed blue end. ‘I now name you, the Edie McElroy Memorial Pen.’

  Sally rolls her eyes. ‘Not that again.’ We are venturing into well-trodden ground. ‘It’s hardly unique, this “I am a child failure” thing of yours, you know. Heard of Donald Bradman?’

  ‘That hitting balls guy?’

  ‘Excuse me? The Greatest Living Australian, you mean.’

  ‘Now dead.’

  ‘Beside the point. He’s got a son. Did you know that?’

  I shake my head.

 
‘You see,’ says Sal. ‘His name’s John, by the way.’

  ‘I’d like to meet him one day. I think we’d have a lot in common.’

  I’m a dreadful disappointment to my father. He had high expectations. While I was named Edie, Dad has always called me Eddie. I think he was hoping for a boy, though he never said so. But the fact that I’m named after Eddie Aikau, a legendary Hawaiian surfer who was lost at sea is a bit of a giveaway. Dad has told me how he picked me up in the hospital and dangled my legs on the bed just after I was born.

  ‘Look at that, Jenny,’ he said, seeing my right leg stuck out in front. ‘She’s a goofy footer.’ I’ve never heard what my mum’s response to this pronouncement was. I imagine she would have laughed and they probably would have kissed. I imagine they were terribly much in love at that stage.

  Despite his bedside prediction I am not a goofy footer or even a regular; I am a no footer. Dad knows the pain of parents whose children don’t inherit their talent.

  ‘I think you have some unresolved parent issues that we should talk about,’ says Sal. ‘Talking always does you good.’

  ‘I prefer thinking.’

  Sally frowns. ‘You think too much, Edie.’

  She is probably right.

  ‘Freud believes childhood experiences impact greatly on our adult lives,’ says Sal.

  I have a feeling that I may be hearing a lot about Freud in the weeks to come. Once Sally gets her teeth into something, she doesn’t let go.