Parents in the late eighties and early nineties weren’t big on hiring babysitters. When heading out for a work function, armed with a pouch of tobacco and a bottle or two of riesling, they’d simply throw together a couple of random kids (generally linked only by their parents’ workplace) and leave them with a twenty-dollar bill, a VHS rental of Total Recall, and the numbers for emergency services and take-away pizza. It was eighties parenting, and it was glorious.
I was a pudgy, gentle, uncoordinated mummy’s boy who was perpetually anxious about the kids I’d face on those long, isolated, pre-internet evenings. Some nights, I’d be wedged with monosyllabic boys who farted symphonically and called me a ‘spaz’ when it became apparent I didn’t know how to play Mortal Kombat. Other nights, I’d meet strange, slightly scary kids with names like Kane, who knew the location of all their parents’ hidden sex toys, and were keen to provide a guided tour. But then one night when I was eleven, I was deposited with Emelia Rusciano.
Em was loud. She was brash. She was freckled. She called her parents by their first names when they were embarrassing her. She looked like Punky Brewster, filtered with Madonna, in the body of a sports nerd. She was as Italian as hot salami in a school lunchbox, and as white bogan as John Farnham’s golden mullet. She could deliver word-perfect quotes of every Olympia Dukakis line in Steel Magnolias. She could smash a family-size pizza. She could Vogue. In short, she was everything a nerdy, pop culture-obsessed pre-gay could ever wish for. And I knew at once our couch time would become a sacred ritual.
The pre-teen Em really knew how to fashion a couch for ultimate comfort. At a pinch, she would procure supplementary pillows from the bed in a dedicated mission to construct a veritable Taj Mahal of cushion bliss. We would thoroughly nestle in, get a VHS rolling, pour cups of Fanta, place remote controls and the Dolly Doctor columns at arm’s reach . . . and the conversations would begin.
The Em that I’d chat to for hour upon hour on those nights, caught between childhood and adolescence, was very much the Em who radiates out across innumerable platforms today. No filters. No judgement. She’d swing from giddy dissections of pop culture to brutally honest observations. We’d be laughing hysterically, then we’d be fighting back tears. We’d divulge dreams, crushes, tragedies. And we’d ponder a dizzying array of questions about our future.
Would Em ever get breasts? Yes. Briefly.
Would we ever lose our virginity? Yes, but not for a helluva long time and it would unfortunately be nothing like 90210.
Would we know love? Heartbreak? Glory? Failure? Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.
Would we stay friends? Would we fight? Would we find our way back to each other? Yes. Always.
Would Em ever realise that ‘Material Girl’ was about capitalism not about fabric? Not till a random conversation in 2015, no.
A quarter of a century has now elapsed, but always we’ve found our way back to the couches. It was on a couch that I watched Em weep, struggling to steer her way through post-natal depression. We were side by side on a couch when I blurted out that I had a crush on a boy. When we’ve endured our worst failures, when it’s felt like the whole universe (or at the very least half the Twitterverse) was laughing at us, the couches have caught our fall.
I’m happy to report we actually own the couches now. And the drink of choice is more shiraz than Fanta. And Em has not only lost her virginity, she’s managed to breed not one but two actual human beings. The eldest looks eerily like the Em I first met, but she’s much more sensible. Chella will sometimes sit on the armchair beside us with earphones in, tapping at an iPad, seemingly disinterested . . . but I’d like to think she’s secretly listening in. I’d like to think she considers us bawdy and hilarious and soulful. But, more realistically, I’d like to think that she understands that all this, all the pouring out of hearts, the singing of Whitney, the interrogation, the togetherness, it’s not a pit stop. It’s not killing time before life kicks in – this is life. The stuff of life. The best of life.
You’d think that, after all this time, after establishing myself as the Barbara Hershey to Em’s Bette Midler, and after consciously planning to spend our autumn years on the couch armed with gin and turbans, I could pithily summarise the woman Em’s become, but I can’t. I can’t distil her. She’s somehow fiercely maternal and yet still a truculent teenager. She has all the insecurity of a person who spends entire nights awake, racked with self-doubt, and all the confidence of a woman who can talk about discharge on the stage of the Palais. She’s a proud feminist but that doesn’t mean she’s not taping the royal wedding. She can lose herself absolutely in the least convincing fantasy movie, but she can also deliver the most bracing of reality checks. It’d take a book to cover it all, so thank God, she’s delivered one.
What I can do, however, very confidently, is recommend some reading conditions.
Of course I’m gonna suggest you find a couch. You’re gonna need one where you can lay flat out. I’d suggest you supplement the existing cushions with other pillows if needs be. It’s okay if you wanna have YouTube on standby, cos God knows Em doesn’t have an attention span either. I’d advise you to pour a red. Get some carbs. Nestle in. What follows is silly and sacred. Bawdy and heartfelt. The stuff of life.
Michael Lucas