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 want 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.