No One Noticed

It’s the first time I’ve ever swum in the ocean. I’m in the water with two boys I’ve just met and the surf is so strong my bikini top snaps in the first wave. I get out of the water almost immediately, covering my body with my hands. I think I have vertigo. The waves are enormous, like waves in a GIF on Tumblr that’s got over 100,000 notes. The two boys are still splashing in the waves.

Some guy wearing Frogskin Oakleys, pink Speedos, and Nike Huaraches whistles at me as I walk up the beach trying to cover my body with my hands. He runs backwards beside me asking if I want to come hang out in his sick car, a green iridescent Toyota Celica with snakes airbrushed on the bonnet, which is illegally parked on the hill by the lighthouse. I decline his offer and instead I go with my laptop to a cave near the point on the cliff but because it’s 2006 my laptop battery dies almost immediately. I sit in the cave thinking about symbolism; the cave as vagina and safety, and I notice the cave's walls are moist and scribbled with drawings and marks that I can't quite decipher. Only much later, in therapy probably, do I understand that no one would have noticed that my bikini top had broken if I hadn't got out of the water so fast.

Gradually a violet wisp slinks in over the ocean. Dark grey clouds follow. The boys come and find me in the cave, my laptop still open on my knees even though it’s switched off. We walk back into the city eating frozen young coconut juice.

At this point there is a brief disconnect and the story splits, but only for a few hours. In version A, it doesn’t end up raining that afternoon. The two boys and I go to Spotlight Fabric & Craft and steal shit like stickers and sequins, then we write our life plans and dreams on a big piece of paper using glitter gel pens. We sit together on the train bridge making dumb jokes until the sun dips behind the escarpment and then the boys walk away from me, back along North Beach, and I get on a train but I don't know where I’m going.

In version B, all three of us go home and we sleep together in the same bed. A little statue of the three wise monkeys sits on a windowsill above us. It is raining hard outside and I dream about a girl I haven't met yet: she's up in a tree with like fifteen Totoro toys, her hair is rainbow and she winks at me. It’s a dream so it must mean something. When I wake up the boys tell me they’ve booked me a ticket back home. Before I can respond they shuffle me out the door and onto the bus with a copy of Less Than Zero.

When I get home, I proclaim that moving around the world is simple. I casually mention that kids in airports have light up sneakers. I say, “It’s not hard to get from one place to another,” but I wallow in a jetlag so deep it swells my imagination. Words crash like waves. I awake at 4am filled with incredible ideas, I get up, drink Vitamin Water and write ritzy prose, but when I try looking over it again in the morning, it’s just scribbles. It turns out I can’t read my own handwriting.

I surf for hours, logged into Skype but it’s minimised, I’m waiting for the boys to come online. Because it is 2009 now I watch loads of Lady Gaga videos on YouTube. It’s winter. I tell myself that I can totally handle the geography between the boys and I; it’s just the time difference that’s a total headfuck. It becomes almost impossible for us to connect. The time difference expands incrementally as days pass, compounding monthly, stretching with the seasons.

I get really dressed up but then I never leave the house. I post photo booth photos of myself on my blog but no one comments. Finally one of the boys comes online but my Internet connection is so bad that I can’t tell which one he is. He doesn’t say anything, just waves. He shows me a drawing he’s made using the glitter pens I left with him on the train bridge, but my bad Internet connection renders it a blocky smudge. We get frustrated at each other because the connection is so bad. Finally the Internet stops working completely and we don’t talk again for like two years.

I’m so depressed. I hang out with old high school friends, ignoring the fact that I have a solo exhibition coming up at a nightclub downtown. I start taking feeble risks, I cross roads against the lights, and I wish that someone else could dictate my actions. Then my sister drives past in a silver Audi convertible and says “Get in.” She hands me a lilac milkshake and tells me “It’s organic.” Though her car isn’t exactly new, she still has all the protective stickers on it; on the steering wheel, audio system etc. She has a New Car scented air freshener hanging from her rear view mirror.

There are pockets of deep web, online chasms where people go to see and buy illegal things and then they don’t come out for months afterwards. The wind whistles through my hard-drive. My sister and I drive her Audi towards World’s End Highway, but when we’re almost there we drive down a big hill talking about truckers who lose their brakes, going faster and faster, we get so excited that even when a cop pulls us over we can’t stop laughing. He fines us $398 for speeding, but then says he wishes he could have a go driving our car. “It looks so new,” he says. My sister shakes her damn head at him and speeds off faster than before. It’s dusk now and everything glows magenta. The sun sets again, over nothing.

It’s always raining. We keep driving all night to the end of the world. In this context, endless desert, my anxieties seem superficial and I start feeling small again. I’m psyched on life, but then my sister tells me she’s moving to Los Angeles and with a sudden jolt I remember that I still haven’t made any work for that exhibition. My sister says, “Don’t worry.” She says she’ll give me all her art supplies, but not her car.

She leaves the next morning. I have all her half-used pencils, expensive paintbrushes, old stickers of Pokémon and Garfield and some Letraset. She can’t find a buyer for her Audi so she’s storing it in my garage but she tells me not to use it.

It’s the opening night of my exhibition. I’m showing scratchy drawings ripped straight from my notebook of monster trucks and girls with Care Bears in their hair wearing Versace sunglasses with googly eyes stuck on them. The nightclub owner offers me champagne and says that I’m the first artist who has shown at his club who doesn’t take her work seriously. I think I’m going to cry, so I run outside and straight into a girl who says she likes my make-up so I halt my tears before they hit my cheeks. I think I remember the girl from when I used to hang out at goth bars when I was sixteen. My friends and I used to her “Hot Girl,” though now she has crazy green eyes and I ask her if she’s wearing contacts.

I never go back to the nightclub again. I don’t even go there to de-install my work. I lose confidence in this story and I start googling the symbols I’m using: cave, purple tones, Lady Gaga, indecipherable notes. Months later I receive a couriered package from the nightclub containing all my drawings, and a note from the owner saying “It was a compliment.” The picture I drew of Katy Perry with rainbow coloured Troll Dolls all around her head has a glob of Nicorette stuck to the back of it. I roll the pictures up, secure them with a hair tie and put them on top of my wardrobe. They’re still up there now.

It’s. still. winter. I spend hours rewording phrases before I tweet. I give up on basically everything and I stay in bed for like four days.

On my fifth day lying in bed, I dream of her again, the girl from the dream I had in bed with the boys from the beach, but this time she’s hiding her body from me. She’s living somewhere in the Flinders Ranges and her house is very dark. At first I don’t see it: a Magic Eye; but slowly, as I walk closer, her house emerges from the thick scrub. A nineteenth century bluestone with tastefully rendered dappled green lighting. Three cars park on the dirt out front, one is daubed with rust and wattle flowers.

We’re in her kitchen and she hands me cans of tomatoes, basil leaves, fresh pasta, fists of garlic. She’s talking at me, jumping topics, asking questions but leaving no gaps for me to respond. I look into her eyes and I realise that the reason she is hiding her body is because she is pregnant, and since this is a dream her pregnancy probably means something. “Are there significant changes about to happen in your life?” she asks me.

This dream girl handing me tomatoes etc has reminded me of the Italian restaurant themed scratch-n-sniff stickers my sister gave to me, not when she moved to LA, but much earlier, when I was a kid, 6 years old or so. She told me to look after them because in the future they would be “worth heaps of money.” But once I was an adult, still with the stickers in their wrapper, I realised they would never be worth shit and I had to give them up because they had become at once too high, too great for me, reserved for special occasions; and silly. I gave them to my friend Sarah so they could plague me no longer.

This raw-foodist guy I know once told me that you crave anything that is almost entirely out of your system, whether that thing was good for you or not: vitamin D, sugar, nicotine, heroin. That’s why you feel like you need a sniff when you thought you’d quit, and that’s what makes quitting so hard. I wonder if this dream is my craving for a friendship that’s been spent; I wonder if I should contact Sarah or try to forget about her altogether. But I can’t.

Still in the dream I suddenly want the Italian restaurant themed scratch-n-sniff stickers back so badly that I immediately start composing an email to Sarah asking her about them. I write a “p.s.”asking her if she’s pregnant and when I wake up, I immediately get out of bed and send the email I composed to Sarah in the dream.

The next day Sarah writes back, gives me her address. I drive there in the silver Audi convertible that I’ve borrowed from my sister.

While the outside of Sarah’s house looks kind of like the house in my dream, inside there is a rolling emptiness that I couldn’t have anticipated. I sit opposite Sarah in a loungeroom in half-light, there’s dust on every surface and then the boys from the beach walk in. They sit down, one either side of her, each one with an arm around her. They have their shirts off and one is wearing a Nike cap. She introduces the boys to me as her brothers, but before I finally catch their names they shush her, saying they already know me. I think about the kinds of people Sarah used to live with when I knew her, boys who wore Nautica jackets, pulled knives at parties and didn’t brush their teeth, but who weren’t cool enough to keep her safe.

Sarah says she doesn’t remember me giving her the scratch-n-sniff sticker sheet, but that I’m welcome to go through her stationery drawer and check if it’s in there. We don’t have a lot to say to each other. She doesn’t tell me where her stationery drawer is, and I don’t ask. We sit there.

The brothers are staring at me. They both have new tattoos, like, they’re covered, runes and smudged symbols up their necks, dark bands across their forearms and calves. One of them now has three wise monkeys tattooed on his chest with a scrolled banner above it that says three evil monkeys in a florid script. He goes to the bathroom but when he comes back into the room he sits down next to me, his arm tight around my shoulder. I get a text message: “Holly, they confuse us. They think we’re the same girl.” I look up and Sarah is rolling her eyes at me like how fucking dumb are boys. I’m cold.

“My main issue is that I don’t really know how to get my life back on track now,” I text back slowly.

Sarah replies, “U should just enrol in something @ TAFE.”

The boy leans in to me and asks if I still have the book he lent me. I ask him if I can hold onto it for another week because I haven’t quite finished reading it and he says, “That’s fine.”

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