Space: Don't Look At Me Like That, I May Break

By Diane Koopman

Lisa was never truly comfortable in her own skin. The only thing she ever wanted was to escape her own reality and find solace in something else. Everything and everyone she’d ever known seemed foreign and suffocating and she only ever felt genuinely safe when she was running. Lisa’s family was dysfunctional. As the eldest child, she

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blue Feather Books
• Release date: Feb 14, 2018
• ISBN: 9780995436534

Diane Koopman

Diane Koopman was born in Sydney Australia in 1975. She lived in Malta, her parents' birthplace, as a child and returned to Sydney in 1982. She grew up in the Western Suburbs, and lived all over the state in her early adulthood; from the Blue Mountains to the Inner City. She now resides on the Northern Beaches with her family.

Book preview

Part One

I lit a cigarette and took a long drag. A couple in quick succession, actually. I held my breath and let the nicotine seep deep into my lungs. My head spun and I closed my eyes for a while. By the time I exhaled, the smoke came from deep down inside my body. I let it out in one long breath that filled the whole windscreen of my car and I just sat in the cloud until I could will my hands to stop shaking. I kept smoking like that until I was down to the butt, then flicked it out the car window into the puddle of melted snow and frost at the curb.

It had been a long night; one filled with anxiety and an eagerness to get going, to leave the hellhole I’d been staying at and find the man I was supposed to score from. I’d had a smoke of a heroin-laced joint in the early hours of the morning and had spent most of my high trying to keep warm in my car, nodding off, only waking to have a cigarette and enhance the buzz. I had a few joints to keep me going, but had nearly run out of smack and I was stuck in an unfamiliar country town with an unreliable contact. I could have just driven home, but I wasn’t satisfied with leaving empty-handed after the ordeal I’d just endured. I still had to score some gear; a decent amount to see me through until the supply was back to normal from my usual dealer, Dan. I didn’t want to go home yet anyway. As much as I disliked country towns, I was curious. It was a different world, a slower world, somewhere I could retreat from my responsibilities and avoid people like Desmond.

Des was my landlord. He was harmless enough, just a pain in the arse, a pest that could turn up at any time unannounced and demand my attention. I always paid my rent on time and kept the place clean, so he had no reason to check up on me. I was hardly ever there anyway. I was always working. He was just needy and a nuisance, but he held all the cards. All he had to do was give me some bullshit excuse about renovating or market rents or needing the flat for his sister or cousin or whatever, and I’d be out on my ear. I would have found something else eventually, I had an income, but it wasn’t that easy and I’d have probably ended up living in my car or at the refuge again, until I found something. It was a drama I wasn’t willing to put myself through again. I had other priorities. Renting in Sydney was a nightmare, especially in the inner city. It was expensive and competitive and I just didn’t have the energy to do it all over. To turn up to all those viewings and line up with all the other renters, sometimes fifty of them, with better references than me, better jobs, better personal hygiene.

I got lucky with my place. It was a two-bedder in Dulwich Hill and it wasn’t in the worst condition I’d seen. It wasn’t perfect when I moved in, but I cleaned it up and gradually got it feeling half-liveable. It was close to work and had a spot for my car. I was upstairs in a two-storey building of eight apartments and the neighbours were mostly ordinary, an elderly couple, a young hipster guy sharing with an older woman, and an old woman with her cats, all on my floor. Downstairs, a Samoan family, a Korean couple and two groups of Indian men on the ground floor. We all left each other alone for the most part, but greeted one another civilly at the letter boxes, bins or on the stairs. Sometimes I drank with the old couple next door. They’d open a bottle of Houghtons white wine for me while they downed scotch at five in the afternoon. I’d been there for almost six years and it was the longest I’d lived in one place alone. I wasn’t about to blow it by pissing off the owner, so whenever he turned up, I accommodated him, made him a cup of tea and chatted as though I was interested in what he had to say. The neighbours knew him well. They owned their place and had lived there for two decades. Des would turn up in his red sportscar, to drive the old guy Gus around, much to his wife Sara’s delight. They bragged about him all the time, as though knowing a successful, middle-aged landlord with a sportscar, was somehow a status symbol of their own achievement, like the made-good son they never had. Unlike me, they didn’t think he was a painful creep. Gus and Sara had met in New Guinea during the war. They didn’t talk about it in depth, but mentioned it often enough to demonstrate its significance in their lives. It must have been traumatic for them, because they always teared up and their drinking accelerated whenever the subject came up, which it always did inevitably. Sara showed me a letter from the Queen, thanking them for their service. She also had one from the Pope. I tried as hard as I could to relate to them, but the generation gap was humungous. Despite that, I enjoyed their company and the free booze, and liked to make sure they were ok. It felt like my responsibility, an obligation as their next-door neighbour.

Des was there when I went to inspect the place and hand in my application. He came up to me straight away to give me the paperwork personally. The agent was unimpressed that Des was meddling, not letting him do his job, but Des didn’t seem to care. He had no humility, nor shame, thinking himself entitled to choose his own tenant. The students who’d lived there before me had trashed the place. They didn’t do any major damage to it, but it was filthy. Des said he wanted a reliable tenant and when he saw me, his eyes lit up. I was single, employed and wasn’t looking to share. He saw my potential to be a sure source of income and although I wasn’t the most well-dressed and I far from had it together, he must have seen that as a benefit. People like him prey on the weak and vulnerable; it makes them feel superior. Des and the agency hadn’t even bothered to make the place presentable. The carpets were so soiled that I woke up with both my eyes swollen shut after the first night I slept there. When I went to the agents to demand the carpets be cleaned, they thought I’d been in a fist fight. They didn’t have to try to lease the place. They knew there would be people lining up to apply for it and they were right. There were around twenty of us that day. I just got there the earliest because I lived in the refuge nearby. I wasn’t holding my breath; it seemed too good to be true to find a unit in the area I wanted, but I got lucky. Des rang me himself that night, which I thought was unusual. He basically told me I could move in as soon as I was ready. I moved in within days.

Although Des was a nuisance, it was easy to avoid him, because he was predictable and lazy. Leaving the city was one of the best ways to be free from his random visits for a while. I often just packed up the car and pissed off. To wherever. I sometimes didn’t even have a map or a plan, I just got in the car and drove. Far. Sometimes for a week or two, sometimes just the weekend. The longest was a month when I went to the north coast. It was so beautiful and I fell in with a crowd of like-minded itinerants. I enjoyed myself so much that I couldn’t bring myself to go home and ended up nearly losing the place, arousing Des’ suspicions when he kept turning up to an empty flat. Gus and Sara had no idea where I was either, I hadn’t told them. Des and the agent soon got used to my absences and as long as the rent was paid up, they weren’t too concerned because I always came back. Until the last time.

The last time I ever took off from the unit in Dulwich Hill, I’d planned to be away for two weeks and my habit was getting serious. I hated to think of myself as a junkie. I liked to think I was a responsible and professional user. Not a dependent, not a derelict. The definition was getting blurry. It was the first time my supply had dried up and I was terrified. My dealer Dan had set me up with a contact in Dalgety, a small town near the Snowy Mountains. I’d only ever scored from Dan and I felt obligated to be loyal to him. I could have found another source, it wouldn’t have been too difficult. Des may have even been able to help me out, but I wasn’t about to give him a reason to evict me, so I never asked. I’d known Dan for a few years and trusted him, and I wanted him to trust me. So, I went on a road trip to Dalgety. On the way there, I stayed in Berridale for a few days with some dodgy people who were the go-betweens linking me up with the new dealer. On my last morning, I sat in my car drinking coffee and watched a young woman have a fight with a bus driver. I felt sorry for her and I was attracted to her. I wanted to help her, but I was also wary of what I was going to find in Dalgety and didn’t want to go there alone. I figured I’d be safer with some company. So, I offered to drive her home. I never did. Not that day anyway.

1

When I was six and my sister was three, my mum had my brother. He was the cutest kid in the world. Wild curly hair, mischievous eyes and chunky limbs you couldn’t help but bite. My mum Joanna was sweet. She was tiny and she worked her fingers to the bone, because my dad Keith didn’t hang around much and she had to make ends meet when he was gone. He worked in the mining industry and was home for a few weeks at a time and then he was off again for months. When he was around, he just fucked things up. He made a mess of the place, woke up late, stayed up late, gambled, drank, smoked till the curtains went yellow and left shit stains on the bottom of the toilet. They’re the things I remember them fighting about. They fought clean my parents. They yelled and swore and got it all out in the open, but they never broke anything and they never laid a hand on each other. It always ended in tears for them both and then a huge huddle with all of us on the couch cuddling and wrestling and getting kissed on the tops of our heads.

At the time, I was always worried. I bit my nails to the nub until they bled and focused all my childhood energy on making sure the other kids were out of the way when the adults were rowing. I made sure I cleaned up after myself and my siblings, and even dad, so that mum didn’t come home from work exhausted to find the place a mess. She worked long hours in a menial job, in a factory in one of the new and bustling industrial estates in the western suburbs of Sydney. When dad was away I was more relaxed; we all were. I didn’t have to work so hard because mum was more forgiving of us kids messing up the place and we never left the same level of carnage that my dad did.

When I look back, there was a lot of love in my family. A lot of pain, but a lot of love. Dad made good money, but he blew what mum couldn’t secure or allocate fast enough. He was rarely home, even when he wasn’t away working, always out somewhere, and he had no life skills. He just never grew up. He couldn’t even make a decent cup of tea for mum. He had no idea how to manage his money and after mum paid the rent and bills, he wasted the rest on useless gadgets, unnecessary gifts and beer. She tried to save as much as she could of her own pay cheque, but we kids always needed something and it was like pulling teeth trying to get more than just the basics from him. Mum made a decent wage too and she used that for a lot of the other necessities: rent, stuff for school, keeping the car on the road – registration, petrol, repairs; getting us to the dentist, getting our hair cut. It was never-ending, she said. Nothing was free. She loved her job though. She was a company woman; loyal, hard-working, friendly and intelligent. She worked on the factory floor, but she did more than her position required of her. She was a union delegate too and the other workers loved her. Whenever there was any issue, whether it was personal or work-related, they went to her. She always had a solution and she wasn’t afraid of anyone. Including dad. She had no reason to be. He was harmless. Sometimes I thought she humiliated him. She treated him like one of us kids; ordering him around and belittling his every decision and action. He deserved it thoug; he was hopeless and her softly-softly approach was all worn out, but I just never understood their relationship as a kid. I thought it was normal most of the time, but on some level, I understood that they were doomed and that neither of them were happy. As I got older, I realised that love wasn’t enough for them. They had a lot of it. They truly adored each other and us kids. They loved our family so deeply that the dysfunction was crippling and instead of finding ways to make things better, they simply let the whole lot crumble, turn to shit and die. Dad left for good when I was fourteen. It was at that age that I probably most needed him; needed them, to be together and to prop me up. What an awful age fourteen is for a girl. It was for me anyhow. Just abysmal. Awkward, confusing, depressing, euphoric, filled with both hope and dread and just completely fucked.

The day I turned fourteen was one I’ll never forget. I got my period. I was watching some old midday movie on TV; it was a Saturday afternoon. The night before I’d been doubled over with stomach cramps and had such an intense headache that I threw up. Dad was away working and mum was on nightshift, which meant that I was in charge of Josh and Lydia. I put them to bed and filled the hot water bottle and lay in mum’s bed until she got home. She kissed my forehead and told me I didn’t have a fever.

‘You’re probably getting your period. It’s about time. I was eleven when I got mine.’

The next day I started bleeding. She only had tampons and I was afraid to stick them up me. So, she went to the servo and got me all they had, super giant mattresses to stick in my pants. I lay in bed all day. Those first few months were so confusing. Mum told me to mark it on a calendar and that I’d see a pattern developing. Eventually it did, but I didn’t need a calendar to figure out when they were coming. I just had to look for the signs of wanting to kill any prick that was in front of me and at the same time lie in a ball on my bedroom floor in emotional chaos, crying a tsunami of tears. Premenstrual tension hit me like a truck. I was so hormonal and imbalanced each month that I felt like a different person altogether. In truth, I had a heightened sense of awareness that prevented me from filtering my thoughts and words like I was supposed to. Mum learned to read it on my face and would joke about what she nicknamed the red-eyed monster. She didn’t explain the details to Josh and Lydia, but she made them laugh at me to diffuse the impact my mood had on the house, and they thought it was funny. She didn’t mean to humiliate me. It was supposed to be light-hearted and a bit of a good-natured sledge, but to me at the time it was mortifying and infuriating. I was definitely over-sensitive, but it was everything else that was going on that made it so much worse: the fighting when dad was home, the responsibilities and guilt when they were both working and I was expected to be the adult, the way I failed every subject at school because I didn’t have the confidence to ask for help or question anything, and the confusion I felt about my sexuality.

I think on some level I always knew I was gay. I just never found boys sexually appealing or interesting in any way. I was always too busy crushing on and being infatuated with girls. At the time, I just assumed I really wanted them to be my friends and to include me; because I didn’t have many friends and never fitted in with anyone. As I got older, my feelings were just a mess. I had dreams about the girls who I looked up to or the teachers I admired. I caught myself staring at girls on the bus, or watching a particular show or movie with the latest actress I was obsessing about, with intense interest and desire. I didn’t realise it was sexual, until it was. All the girls I knew at school were getting together with guys and talking about their experimentation. I made shit up, because I had nothing to tell. I’m sure others did too, or at least exaggerated, but they did it for different reasons. They were hiding their lack of experiences. I was hiding the fact that I had no interest in guys and was instead fantasising about the girls. I hadn’t even admitted it to myself yet, so how could I confide in others? Especially when I didn’t trust any of them anyway. In high school, I didn’t have friends, I had acquaintances. I got to know people long enough to copy their homework or hang out at the shops with them so I wouldn’t have to go home, and eventually I pissed them off with my eccentricities and angst. I was a drag to be around. I knew that.

I didn’t finish school. I got very close and finished year twelve; I just absconded before the final exams began. However, while I was there I had a job at the local fruit and veg shop to help mum with bills and pretend I was going to do something with my life that involved horticulture or something. It was all a ruse. I just wanted to get stoned and pissed every chance I got. From the time dad moved out till I finally left home, I had accumulated so much built-up anxiety, fear and anger that I lost interest in being normal and spent my life running and hiding from the reality that was too painful to face.

The first time I got wasted was at home. Dad always let me have a sip of his beer without mum knowing. He’d let me have some of the froth from the top. It was our little thing that we winked and joked about. He’d always whisper to me conspiratorially, ‘Don’t tell yer mother.’ I loved those moments. They were mine and his alone. Eventually I got a taste of the beer every now and then and I thought it was delicious. One night, not long after they had the huge fight that saw him leave for good, I found a couple of long necks in the garage he shared with the guy next door. We were renting a subdivision out the back of a house owned by an old couple in Granville. It was everything we needed and all mum and dad could afford when she had to go on maternity leave just before she had Josh. Before that we lived in a nicer house. Still rented, but much bigger, with a huge yard and three big bedrooms. The landlord hiked up the rent and with mum’s income about to be lost for a while, they decided to move to a smaller place till Josh was a bit older and she could get back to work. We just never got around to leaving and a decade later, we were still there.

The subdivision was a two-bedroom with a small living space and a tiny kitchen. We shared the garage and the yard with Dot and Bill, the old couple who owned the place and lived in the main house. The yard wasn’t much of a yard. Bill grew fruit trees and roses and if we kids so much as looked at his garden, he’d get the hose out and start screaming at us to piss off. One day I was picking up a mandarin that had fallen off the tree. In my ten-year-old mind I planned to take it to the back door to ask if they wanted it back or if I could eat it, but the bastard caught me red-handed and thought I’d picked it. He threw a gum boot straight at my head. I dropped the fruit and ran home crying. Mum came out and told him to shove his mandarin up his fucking arse and the next day, his wife Dot came over with a bowl full of mandarins for us kids.

The garage was somewhere dad could keep his tools and other crap that men hoard, while he was away working. He also helped Bill out by fixing things for him and they would have a quiet beer together every now and then. When dad left for good, I used to sneak into the garage to fiddle around with his stuff. I secretly hoped he’d turn up to get his things so I could ask him to take me with him, but he never came back.

So, there I was, almost fifteen years old, suddenly a woman, but in so many ways still a child, and missing my dad. It was late and I knew Bill wouldn’t be in there that late, their lights were out by nine. It hadn’t occurred to me to go to the little bar fridge by the workbench before, but that night I didn’t think twice. I was hoping there was some fruit in there to be honest, but instead I found a long neck. I flicked the top off with a chisel like I’d seen dad do a million times and took a sip. I was going to straighten the lid and put it back on, but it had flung off and landed behind a bunch of old crates and I was too scared there’d be redbacks in there to go looking for it. So instead, I sat down on a pile of hessian sacks and drank the whole thing. I burped and laughed at my own thoughts for a while and the closer I got to the bottom, the sadder I felt. Before too long I was so drunk I could barely stand up. I staggered to the bin and had the good sense to hide the bottle amongst the old man’s empties in the recycling, turned off the light and shut the garage door behind me. I stumbled through the back door. Liddie and Josh had put themselves to bed and mum was due home from work any minute. I turned off the TV and rinsed off the last of the dishes. I put a tea bag in a cup for mum beside the kettle and turned on the range-hood light for her. I turned out the kitchen light, locked the back door and went to the bathroom. I stripped off my clothes and put my pyjamas on, tidying up after myself as I went. Josh had pissed on the seat again, so I wiped that up. I folded their clothes and straightened the towels. I got a fresh one out for mum in case she felt like having a shower. She often just drank her tea and watched TV for a bit before going to bed knackered. I slipped quietly into our shared bedroom. Liddie and Josh shared a bunk bed. Josh was up the top. I snuggled the doona over them both and then got into my bed. One of them had put the electric blanket on for me. I didn’t think to turn it off straight away, I was too drunk. It got very hot and suddenly the room was spinning. I got up and ran to the bathroom and threw my guts up in the sink. Bits of dinner clogged the drain and I had to scoop it up and throw it into the toilet to be flushed. I washed the sink as quickly and thoroughly as possible so I could be in bed and pretending to be asleep by the time mum got home. I didn’t think that she’d be able to smell the vomit. She arrived soon after, but let me be. She confronted me in the morning. She just said she knew I’d gotten drunk and thrown up and not to do it again. The poor woman didn’t have it in her to discipline me.

2

Getting drunk was easy once dad left because mum was always working. She took every shift they offered her and even went in on weekends if they asked. She was satisfied that we were sorted through the week. As long as we got ourselves to school and kept ourselves occupied until she got home in the evenings, she thought we were safe. Josh’s primary school wasn’t far from the high school that Liddie and I attended. I promised mum we’d walk Josh to school and that I’d make sure Lydia got to her classes safely. Then I’d head off to my own classes and meet them in the afternoon, so we could walk home together. I did it every single day. The only time I didn’t was if I were sick, which with my monster immunity, was unfortunately very rare. If I was having a particularly bad period month and the cramps were too unbearable, forcing me to stay home, they stayed home with me. I tried to convince mum to let them walk alone or head to school with some of the neighbouring kids, but she wouldn’t have a bar of it. Once or twice she walked them up herself after a whole night shift, completely exhausted and sleep deprived and once, she nearly got them all wiped out by a bus crossing the main road. That spooked her. From then on, she was adamant that if I was having a day off school, so were they. Now just because I walked them to school and picked them up again, that didn’t mean that I went to school myself. By the time I got to my last two senior years, I had a lot of time off. I’d be dressed and ready with every intention of going to my classes, but something always came up to convince me that doing something else would be better.

I didn’t always wag on my own either. The first time I skipped school was with a girl in the year above me who sometimes walked to school with us. I was in year eleven and she was in year twelve. She was smart and kind of well-off. Her house was a double storey on its own bit of land, surrounded by a metal fence. Her parents were both professionals and she had an older brother who still lived at home too. Sometimes he drove us to school before he went to work. I never told mum. She’d only worry and forbid it. One time we walked the kids to school and as we headed off to class, Jen said casually, ‘It’s too nice a day to be cooped up in this dump. Do you wanna go to a movie or something?’

I jumped at the chance to spend the day with her. I was completely infatuated with her. We went back to her place to get changed. Her parents had already left for work. We spent the morning dressing up and she raided her parents’ liquor cabinet. She said her parents only had booze in case they had guests, which was hardly ever, because they were always working. She said if we drank the vodka, nobody would smell it on our breath and we could top it up with water and no one would ever know the difference. We sipped straight from the bottle. It didn’t take a lot to get