Birthday Girl

No, it’s not my birthday … but it was, on the day that the Booranga Writers Centre (Charles Sturt University) launched their fourW anthology this year. And my story ‘Birthday Girl’ was shortlisted for the Prose award.

Congratulations to local poets Linda Albertson and Kai Jensen, also selected for this long-running collection — Linda won the poetry section.

Here’s ‘Birthday Girl’ if you’re inclined. Let me know what you think.

Birthday Girl                                                                                                                     

Kathleen Shapcott wakes on her crook hip, groans and heaves herself onto her back. Lifts her butt to wrench her sweaty pyjamas—ugh!—where they’re twisted round her waist. Takes a swig of water from the bottle and swills it round her sticky mouth.

Trolleys clatter down the linoleum corridor. A pink-uniformed woman slides her breakfast tray from the table. “Not hungry, darl? No worries.”

Kathleen gropes around the bedstand for her reading glasses, fails, but finds her phone; makes out 7.41am. Twenty minutes to go. Settles back against the pillows, closes her eyes.

Sitting on a bench in the playground, First Grade. Watching three girls marching around the playground, arms linked, chanting, “We’re not go-ing, we’re not go-ing …” It seems they hadn’t been invited to Prue’s birthday party. Or was it Melissa’s?

But she‘d been invited. After lunch that Saturday her mother would slip a pretty dress over her head. She’d pull on white socks with a lace frill around the top and buckle on black patent leather shoes. She’d carefully pencil ‘Dear Prue’, or ‘Dear Jane’, and ‘Love from Kathleen’ on a Hallmark birthday card, and she’d take that and a carefully wrapped gift—a jigsaw-puzzle, perhaps—to a tidy brick house in Balgowlah or Seaforth where she and the other girls would play Pin the Tail on the Donkey, Pass the Parcel, and the one where there weren’t enough chairs, and when the music stopped they’d all scramble to sit down … And they’d eat fairy bread and jelly snakes and marshmallows, and one little girl would vomit it all up into her scallop-edged paper plate and Melissa’s mother, or Angela’s, would take her outside to stand in the cool air until the nausea had passed.

The nausea. Kathleen forces her eyes open. 7.47. She sees the physio push a cart past the door. She’ll be in later to pummel her on the chest until she can spit gobs of sputum into a plastic cup.

She closes her eyes again. Musical chairs. That’s what it was called, that game with not enough chairs. Then at four o’clock, the mothers would arrive. The birthday cake would be de-candled and cut and wrapped in serviettes, and they’d be given one slice each to take home, a slice that would be found a few days later, sodden and squashed, in the back seat of the Kingswood.

7.49. Kathleen grinds her teeth. Snippets of conversation from the bed behind the curtain. “Didja see Mundine on the telly this morning?”

“Isn’t he fighting Hatley tomorrow? The Yank?”

In primary school she’d got into a fight with a boy at a birthday party. She doesn’t remember why. She only vaguely remembers the fight itself, a quick wrestle on the floor. But the mortification when her mother arrived to pick her up, the birthday girl’s mother informing her of the altercation in hushed tones … Kathleen had fallen into a silent fugue all the way home in the car—the girl who was really too old to fight with boys, especially at birthday parties, who’d shamed herself and her mother.

7.53. She feels the anxiety rising. Breathe. In, two, three … out, two, three.

Now she wonders about that wrestle. The boy, it was Nicky Hanson. She remembers him wriggling chubbily under her weight—two awkward bodies on the cusp of adolescence. Was it really a fight? Or a frustrated grappling, a reaching out in confusion, disguised as a fight in the moment?

Eric Parry had kissed her at the school dance at Mackellar High, on the bench behind the hall. He’d pushed his rough, greedy hand up under her blouse, forced his way beneath her bra, cupped her breast and pinched her nipple, hard. She’d moaned.

“Ooh, yeah, you like that, eh? Eh?” An ochre pimple rimmed angrily in red had erupted on his cheek—there was a short, sticky streak of seepage.

A month later, at her sixteenth birthday party, Kathleen sat on the sofa, smiling tightly, Brown Sugar on the turntable. She watched Eric bobbing stiffly on the carpet opposite a writhing Kylie O’Meara in a boob-tube, before they went outside. Then Marc Shapcott turned up, with a bottle-shaped brown paper bag. She led him to the kitchen, pulled two glasses from the cupboard.

7.58. Two minutes. She rolls onto her other side, the good side. She coughs—four satisfying, rattling hacks. Swallows stickily. Stretches her aching legs.

That chick at nurses’ college. Jamie? Janey? She’d stolen Percocet from the drug locker at the hospital for her eighteenth birthday party in that share house in Fitzroy. Marc had taken two and spent the night rearranging the postcards on the kitchen noticeboard. Then, poppy seeds for pupils, he’d collapsed on a beanbag and slept.

He’d been at her, after that, to raid the lockers herself. Percocet, Seconal, Vicodin, whatever. She had to leave college over that business. And it wasn’t so long after that he’d come back to the squat in Newtown with a fix of heroin, sloping in silently one night and locking himself in his room. He wasn’t even going to share. Not that first time.

8.02. Jesus. She shifts onto her back, grabs at the hand control hanging above, misses, grabs again. Presses the call button and something buzzes in the corridor. Slumps back.

There must have been birthdays in those years, those lost years, but she can’t remember them. No parties, that’s for sure. Just an endless cycle of needing, scoring, needing again. Getting on a program. The pain and surrender of that. Then scoring again. The self-hatred. The relief.

Garnet. As soon as Marc had his degree he’d taken her away from Sydney to try to get her clean, and they’d rented an old cottage next door to the School of Arts Hall. He’d quit by then but they were still the druggies, a social-order rung beneath the hippies in the commune on the edge of town. The postmaster could hardly muster a grunt when they appeared at the counter. But those parties in the hall, the stomping on the floorboards, that excruciating octave shift in the fourth line of ‘Happy Birthday’ … the neighbourhood kids hanging on the wire fence, goggle-eyed, staring at them.

Soon they’d backtracked to Sydney. Marc’s career. She stumbled along in his wake, playing the company wife at functions, hosting dinner parties for suited execs and their tailored consorts, then waking early to join the queue outside a chemist shop, always a few suburbs distant from their well-appointed home in its leafy street. Occasionally succumbing to the pull of the dealer squats with their saggy mattresses and stained carpets and sweet, familiar air of decay. Marc would trawl the streets and bring her home. Excuses and apologies to the neighbours, the colleagues, his golf club pals. Long sleeves in summer. Always ‘Kathleen’s got the flu’ or ‘She must have eaten something.’ A needle-pocked skeleton in his dark, foetid closet. Love means never having to say you’re sorry? No. Perhaps, keep your friends close … your junkie wife closer.

Now she hears his voice approaching down the linoleum corridor. She studies the hand-control, holds down the button that whines her up to a sitting position. Presses the call button again.

Marc rounds the corner, phone to his ear. Trim, sports slacks, polo shirt. ‘Yeah, about eighty RSVPs,” he tells his phone. “I’ve booked a cover band. Seventies and eighties rock ‘n’ roll. Dance tunes.”

The bloody party. My bloody sixtieth. Marc’s on the board of the golf club now. The Silver Fox, they call him. She sees the women smile and fawn, then narrow their eyes at her.

“Yeah, it’s going to be a great night!” He leans over the bed, a gust of outside, smacks a kiss on the top of her head—“Mwah!” Back to the phone. “I’m at the hospital. A bit of a chest infection but she’s on the mend, probably out today.” Pauses. “No, Barry, mate, she’ll be fine for the party. Gotta go.”

He flops into the visitor’s chair. “It’s all coming together! How are you, love?”

“Feel like shit,” she growls.

A nurse pops her head in. “Yes, Kathleen?”

She tries not to whine. “I was meant to get my medication at eight o’clock.”

“I’ll be right back.”

And she is. Rosy cheeks, ponytail swinging. Checks a clipboard and takes Kathleen’s wrist, examines her plastic ID bracelet. “Right. Kathleen Ann Shapcott. Hey, date of birth, eleven November 1955—it’s your birthday tomorrow! Wow, sixty!” Tilts her hip at the bedside cabinet and unlocks the drawer with a key on her belt. Pulls out a glass bottle, pours a measure of amber syrup into a plastic cup.

Kathleen drains it and swallows hard. After all these years her throat still rebels. “Thanks.”

The nurse smiles. “Um, can I ask, what’s it like? What does it taste like? It looks like petrol!” Giggles.

Yep, here we go again. Old lady, nice pyjamas, Louis Vuitton overnight bag. The first user they’ve met that they’re game to question. “It’s not too bad. They put something in it. Some flavour.”

The nurse is putting the bottle away, locking the drawer. “How long’ve you been on it?”

“Oh, a while …” She meets Marc’s eyes.

Marc smiles—that winning smile. “But we’re getting there, aren’t we, love?”

The nurse looks from one to the other. She has another question on her lips, changes her mind, smiles brightly. “Well, I’ll leave you alone now. Happy birthday for tomorrow!”

Kathleen sighs, settles back against the pillow, closes her eyes.

Marc’s tapping on his phone. “Kath? Barry wants to say a few words after the cake. Isn’t that nice? And, love, will you have time to put a rinse through your hair”

Oh, for fuck’s sake, she thinks. But the methadone’s kicking in now. And she’s back in the sun on the playground bench, in First Grade. Those big, strong girls are marching in circles again, chanting, ‘We’re not go-ing …’ The solidarity. The defiance. And up she gets, this time, and joins them. ‘We’re not go-ing, we’re not go-ing, we’re not go-ing …’

 

‘Birthday Girl’ was first published in fourW thirty-four, an annual anthology of new writing, in November 2023.