Love and Other U-Turns Read online

  ‘WHAT IS THIS!’ she spits at me, as I try unsuccessfully to balance two scotch and cokes, three James Boags and a glass of champagne on a tray.

  It’s not like we have time to discuss a croissant. It’s not like I didn’t JUST SET UP AN ENTIRE ROOM including four tabletops and carrying thirty chairs upstairs WITH A CRACKED RIB all for twelve dollars an hour, oh and NO DINNER. Angela, just so you know, ALWAYS gets dinner. I feel like I’ve been hungry all year. I’ve lost ten kilograms working in this place. NO WONDER!

  I look at the customers, happily congregating in an eager hubbub, oblivious to this murderous exchange just a metre away, thanks to the strains of Pavarotti which have just started up.

  ‘Louisa, I FOUND A CROISSANT! When I tell you to clean the restaurant, I mean to find things like this!’

  It was beyond thought, really, what I did next. It was pure instinct, probably like how men feel when they belt someone at a bar who has crossed the line. Except when I get angry it has more of a distant quality – i.e. I need to get as far away as possible from the cause.

  I place the tray on the bar, shaking with fear and rage. Then I walk past Angela, down the stairs to the staff locker room, past the kitchen staff, calling out to me from half-smoked cigarettes in the back alleyway as I exit down the lane.

  It isn’t until I’ve walked all the way home from the city to Fitzroy that I realise I forgot to take off my apron.

  My phone is ringing. It’s only nine o’clock in the morning. Nobody calls me this early, unless it’s Angela calling to apologise. Or abuse me.

  I look at my phone. It’s an 02 number. Sydney.

  ‘Louisa?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s Jessica. From Ok! Magazine. How are you? You sent me a pitch when I was at New Woman …’

  Oh yeah, that was three whole days ago.

  ‘Oh hello! How are you?’ Sure, it’s the most normal thing in the world to be receiving a call from a magazine editor. Ohmygodohmygodohmygod.

  ‘Listen, are you available to do an interview in Mount Waverley in the morning? I’ll email you the details. It’s Jenny McCormack, she’s just fetched Gold at the Commonwealth Games. She couldn’t catch the Sydney flight and she’s only back in Australia for a few days. We go to print on Monday …’

  I sit bolt upright in my bed, not even flinching when my rib does its knife-slice. ‘Of course. Great.’

  ‘Fantastic. Oh, and you’ve done interviews before, haven’t you?’

  When I was just out of university, and still naively plucky, I’d miraculously landed a job at Melbourne’s daily newspaper, The Herald Sun. I’d driven the photographers to stories, answered the phones, compiled the news lists for the chief of staff, and even had a few health stories published, even though I wasn’t technically employed as a journalist. If you could call asking a medical specialist for a few quotes over the telephone an interview, well technically, I’d done it.

  The next morning, I see a side of the day I haven’t seen for at least a year. The birds are singing and the sky has that pure look. Like everything is starting again. I sail smoothly up the freeway against the traffic, until I arrive at a strangely impersonal building, the head office of a sports association. I check my lipstick in the mirror for the nineteenth time before parking the car and getting out, trying to curb my rising panic before it turns into a full-on anxiety attack.

  Who am I kidding? I’m not a journalist! What the hell am I going to say to this girl? What if they can tell, from my clothes, that I’m not the real deal? I wonder what a real journalist would have worn. I’m in a blue jumper and my black pants from work and some ballet flats. Do I look too casual? Thank God I have a dictaphone. My prop. Proof. Yes, proof, I am really a journalist.

  I gulp, air catching dryly in my throat. One foot in front of the other. Every step towards the building feels like another step away from waitressing. I keep walking.

  By midday, our allotted hour is up and my dictaphone clicks to stop. The tape is full. ‘Have you got enough for your interview?’ says her manager.

  ‘Yeah … that should be … fine.’ Is this what you say? ‘Thanks very much for your time … ah, it’s going in the February issue.’ I promise the swimmer, hoping this actually is true, and that what I write will be good enough to print.

  I drive home, then stay up all night transcribing the excruciatingly awkward tape and somehow, despite monosyllabic answers to my hour-long interview, I get enough material to string out nine hundred words. With a good subbing job, and the magazine’s uber-professional photo shoot done in Sydney, the interview actually ends up looking okay.

  Miraculous.

  My email inbox announces a new message, a few days later. ‘Thanks Louisa, all good. Invoice away.’

  The fee would have taken two weeks of restaurant pounding to match.

  I use sixty dollars of my cheque to order a box of business cards from the internet. And pray no-one discovers I have no real credentials.

  Although I’d like to say it was as easy as that to transition from carrying tables (with a cracked rib) to writing freelance for a living, it did take a bit longer. A lot longer. And a lot more not knowing how I was going to get through certain assignments.

  Instead of travelling with Marco to Europe as I’d planned before quitting the restaurant, we separated as soon as we no longer had our work in common. I didn’t mind, really. It was a remarkably smooth break-up, like we both saw our romance as a summer holiday, not something you’d keep forever. Especially since he was still keen to stay on the ship that was sixty-hour hospitality work weeks and I wanted to start seeing mornings again.

  I decided instead to use the money to live off for six months while I pitched and wrote and pitched some more, until eventually, the payments started to come and I no longer cringed, feeling like a fraud, every time I typed the words ‘As a brief introduction, I’m a freelance journalist …’

  I lived like a hermit for the next year, writing articles on anything which interested me. I waited at best a month for invoices to be paid and at worst, six months. For the most part, except for some brief interludes of euphoria (usually just after a cheque had arrived), I wondered why I was so arrogant as to think I could do something which made time pass so enjoyably.

  It wasn’t just the idea of working without being monitored that I enjoyed about freelancing. It was the panoramic scope it gave me of the world, a world so much bigger than that restaurant dining room or any of the other workspaces I had ever found myself in. I pitched and wrote columns for newspapers, interviewing couples, writing features on cultural topics, lifestyle trends, health reports and psychology research. Anything that interested me – that popped into my mind – I pitched to a publication I thought it would fit for. I loved how my entire perception of a subject, problem or place could be cracked open by my tracking down an expert, picking up the phone to ask some questions, reading certain textbooks and studies, or just speaking to anyone who knew more than me about it.

  Through taping all the interviews I did, and painstakingly transcribing ten typed pages a pop until my wrists ached, playing back moments in the interviews so excruciating I physically flinched when I heard myself speak, I also learned so much about my own conversational patterns and faults, like I was shining a blowtorch on my innermost psyche. Who needs therapy? Just tape yourself giving interviews and you’ll see your communication strengths and weaknesses fanned out in a mosaic!

  I interrupted, I blurted things out which were obvious, I asked the same questions more than once, when they’d already replied. How on earth had I got through life? Still, it was a steep learning curve, and I kept going. Part of what frightened me about interviews was why I wanted to do them so much. To have conversations about so much more than the weather or what dresses were on sale at Myer. Sometimes, I wondered if I knew more about these people I was interviewing than I did of my best friends.

  Because interviews fascinated me, I pitched to a small-budget careers magazine one
day, offering to write profiles of successful Australians. The magazine was targeted to high school and uni students, and supposed to be ‘motivational’, so high-achieving ‘success stories’ became my niche for a little while. Through the magazine, I interviewed more Olympians, actors, singers, sportspeople and comedians than I’d ever dreamed I’d talk to in such a short space of time. Usually I got the interview through merely googling them, emailing their manager and pitching the magazine. Voila! Suddenly I was sitting across from someone in a café, dictaphone in hand, whom I had only ever read about or watched on TV.

  What astounded me, over and over, was how easy it was to get people to talk by asking the right questions. Gradually I improved, through planning, navigating the interview towards the most important aspects, always wondering – what would the reader want to know? What is the most unusual aspect of this story? And I never had that feeling I had with that first interview, that I’d been dropped into an abyss without an oar. I was growing. The feeling of terror had metamorphosised into exhilaration. It felt good.

  From charity workers to successful business owners, sportspeople, actors and comedians, one part of their success always fascinated me. A common thread prevailed, regardless of career choice or which arena they specialised in. It was this invisible crossing of a certain threshold, this odd sense of stepping out into an island where you create a new set of rules for your life – but it demands that you get so far out of your comfort zone you can’t see straight.

  One guy, who had gone from overweight, inexperienced and unemployed to one of the most sought-after presenters on TV within a year, spoke to me one day.

  ‘Louisa, anything is possible. You’ve just got to be willing to step off the cliff and take the risk. The pay-off is always worth the pain.’

  Despite moderate success – I had a monthly column, and some regular features for health magazines, as well as the occasional job subbing other people’s stories – I had no idea what I was doing, really.

  I’d got a book from the library on how to invoice and set up an ABN, but I had no idea what was acceptable behaviour from a magazine editor, how often I should follow up, how long it should take to be paid or what an acceptable word rate was. It wasn’t until an editor asked me to rewrite one of my pitches five times with quotes, then published it under her own name, that I felt desperate enough to email a stranger I thought might possibly provide some advice. Why the hell not? I didn’t know anyone else to ask for help.

  What’s the worst she could do? Not reply?

  Thursday: 11.12 pm

  Dear Mystic,

  Umm, I know you used to be a freelance journalist so I was just wondering, is it normal for an editor to reduce your word fee AFTER you’ve written three cover stories for the magazine? And not pay a kill fee for something they’ve asked you to rewrite? (See below.)

  I hope you don’t mind me emailing. I love your astrology columns, I’m based in Melbourne, and I don’t know anyone else to ask.

  Oh, and I’m a Pisces.

  Warmly,

  Louisa

  Thursday: 11.22 pm

  Louisa, Is she drunk? No, hang on, is she on CRACK? That is not acceptable behaviour, from any editor … Write me a short piece for the blog and I will do your chart and whiz you over a copy of my new book … and have you ever pitched to – … ? They need freelancers urgently …

  Bestest,

  Mystic

  I blinked at the message, appearing so quickly in my inbox. Just like that, another gift, sitting on a plate from the universe, one little risk, holding the keys to a miracle. Four months of to-ing and fro-ing with an insanely difficult magazine editor who had reduced me to tears (and eating stale lentils) for the last time had led me, out of pure lack of anyone else to ask, to make a new friend.

  A new friend who doubled as a career mentor and a psychic pen-pal, one of those fairy godmothers who turns up just as you’re about to give up the quest.

  3

  Venus meets Pluto

  ‘Relationships started under these stars are … almost like a kidnapping – from one life to another.’

  LIFE HAS CHANGED SO MUCH, since I left Marco and the Italian soap opera in the city, burrowing away like a hermit in my flat. I was surprised how happy I was to be single and to focus on my rediscovered ambitions. I’d heard through the grapevine that he was going out with another waitress from the restaurant where I used to work. Good on him, I thought. Every waitress needs a Marco to make the job more bearable.

  I’d realised, when I left, that although having his complimentary eyes and broken English words of romance made the job endurable, now that I was doing something which was leading me in such fascinating directions, I just didn’t feel the need for any distraction.

  And tonight, I feel excited. Mystic Medusa has flown down from Sydney to host a night of astro-fun as part of the Melbourne Writer’s Festival. Although we’ve been emailing about everything from career advice to planetary transits for over six months, we’ve still never met face to face. Although slightly nervous at meeting someone who knows so much about my most private, only-expressed-in-the-false-anonymity-of-emailing-someone-from-interstate-who-lives-under-a-moniker thoughts, I’m curious, too. Her life seemed so eccentric and quirky, I knew she’d be slightly left-of-centre. And so would her fans.

  Just my kind of night.

  If St Kilda were a planet, it would be Pluto, God of the Underworld. Dark, dangerous and sexy, prostitutes and pimps share street corners and shaded doorways with actors and eccentrics, sunburnt backpackers lugging their dog-eared Lonely Planets down Fitzroy Street oblivious to the junkies shooting up in the darkness. But despite the seediness, St Kilda has an old glamour, too. Turn the corner of Fitzroy Street and you’re greeted by a multitudinous sea stretching out past the iconic pier, white sea baths once home to Melbourne’s gentry on holiday, its carved stone seats and sweeping art deco apartments overlooking the glorious stretch of shimmering water.

  Although certainly no longer relegated to gentrified rich folk on summer holidays, St Kilda is still all about parties. Celebration. Holidays. An escape from the norm. Any night of the week, wine, drumbeats and the screams of drunk strangers pour from its copious bars, the sinister laughing mouth of Luna Park’s entrance reminding you to unbutton your shirt and let loose. Aside from the hangover, you can usually be sure what happens in St Kilda stays in St Kilda. Each morning the street sweepers clean last night’s decadence from the footpath as leftover souls from the night before stagger home.

  St Kilda is almost a subterranean world within Melbourne, a haunting expanse of wind-whipped beach dampened by our interminably grey skies, darkly illuminating castoff beer cans and stray syringes laying carelessly on the top-skin of sand. Policemen and emergency workers keep the night pulsing with a steady, seedy melody: screams, sirens, flashing lights, kebab wrappers cast aside to wipe hands of the night. Done for now.

  St Kilda has always pulled me out of my comfort zone, a place of intense and unexpected encounters. But tonight I’m willing and ready to close the metaphorical drawbridge of Punt Road and head across the river. Melburnians see the Yarra River as the great divide. Tonight, I’m ready to cross over.

  Before leaving the house, I cast one last look at Mystic’s blog, partly to see what today’s pearls of wisdom are, partly to say goodbye to the safe anonymity of not knowing who is behind the words. Today’s post is on the oracle of relationships.

  ‘Pay attention to the surroundings, the environment, the setting, the first time you meet someone. What’s the history of the place? The vibe? Analysing the symbolic nature of your first meeting is a reliable oracle for the major plots and themes of the relationship. Nothing is by accident.’

  ‘The whole world’s mad with cherries and crazy on top!’ a hobo cackles in my ear as I alight from my car, parked just below the big dipper ride of Luna Park. His face is lined with a lifetime of close escapes, and I feel like I’ve been expecting him. St Kilda’s not a place you live i
f you want to lead a safe life. You go there if you’re ready to face your demons, or even just feel like sharing a drink with them once in a while.

  ‘Real love is the best kind of blindness,’ wails another homeless man as I weave my way past the strangers milling in the doorway of Theatreworks, what was once the parish hall of the original church of St Kilda, now home to any number of intimate theatrical performances – and tonight, an astrology cabaret.

  The homeless man is shaking his head amongst an eclectic crowd of smokers and people drinking wine from plastic cups, milling outside the entranceway. He mutters something about the ‘Abos getting it right, living off the land’. I notice a young, friendly looking guy in a grey t-shirt and denim jeans, stopping to smile at him, body front on, giving him his full attention.

  ‘Yeah yeah, crucial,’ he drawls in an ocker accent, looking like he’s talking to an old friend at a party, adding a cheerful, ‘Catch ya round’ before he moves on. I wait for him to look around and roll his eyes, like most city people do when they’ve ‘escaped’ from an interaction with a hobo. He just keeps walking, peacefully. Happily. His way reminds me of The Fool of the tarot’s major arcana. All he’s missing is the swag over the shoulder.

  Inside the auditorium, my heart is pounding out of my chest, like it’s me who’s about to go on stage. I can’t breathe, can’t talk. I need to concentrate. I feel like something important is about to happen, and I need to shut my eyes in order to see it. I need silence so I can hear it. Why do I feel as though I’m in a car about to do a U-turn from everything I’ve known so far?

  A pretty blonde woman clad in kitten heels and blue jeans takes the stage, and I know it’s her. She’s nervous, talking at lightning speed, ordering everyone to break up into their star-sign groups. As she takes huge gulps of red wine I feel the nausea of her nerves, my heart pounding in empathy for her obvious jitters, yet excited, fascinated, as well.