The Year I Went Pear-Shaped Read Free Page B

flashed green like traffic lights, urging onlookers caught in her gaze to accelerate towards her. Sitting cross-legged on our fake Persian rug, she was wearing white cotton knickers, an old sweatshirt with Gold’s Gym in faded lettering, and thick woollen socks. I was lying beside her in my pink-striped Peter Alexander pyjama bottoms and a singlet, staring at the white plaster ceiling and failing to blow smoke rings.
    Lying on my back like this, my breasts looked like two plates of jelly threatening to spill over down the sides of my torso. By contrast, Anita’s firm globes sat miraculously poking straight out of her chest in stubborn defiance of gravity. I took another drag on my cigarette. Officially, especially if my Mum was around, I was a non-smoker and only ever lit up when Anita and I got stuck into one of our heart-to-heart conversations. Which meant almost every night for the last 18 months but who’s counting? We had PJ Harvey on the stereo and seven of this month’s women mags lying all over the floor. My excuse was research. Anita said she didn’t need an excuse. The two of us lived happily in a cosy, two bedroom terrace house in Cricklebush Lane, at the heart of Glebe. It was the ‘up n’ coming’ suburb where lefty politics students with faux-hawks rubbed shoulders at pavement cafes over soy macchiatos with grunged-up website designers in square, black rimmed glasses, and music media types with enormous sideburns and hangovers to match. I’d only been living in the house three months when my old flatmate moved out to go and live with her boyfriend. Anita had answered one of the ads I’d sellotaped on café noticeboards up and down Glebe Point Road. She’d told me she was a non-smoking, vegetarian but after she moved in I found out she was more like a ‘quitting-any-minute-now-honest’ chain smoker with a mild eating disorder. Which meant she was pretty much like most women I know.
    When she had first come to check the house out, she’d rocked up in a bright orange, 1970s Mercedes. She’d been wearing hipster jeans and a tight red t-shirt with ‘Pussy Whipped’ emblazoned across the front, which, I found out later, was one of about 40 t-shirts that she owned which dripped with lesbian sexual innuendo. She collected them even though she was totally heterosexual. To look at her you’d think she was the lead singer in an all-female punk band but it turned out that she worked as an engineer for Qantas. I liked her immediately.
    “Darl, it’s all about knowing what you want and asking the universe to bring it to you. My life coach was telling me about one of her other clients, some chick who just couldn’t meet any decent guys. Anyway, Sue -- that’s my life coach -- told her to visualise her perfect man and write down a list of everything she’s looking for in a guy, y’know, like great sense of humour, animal lover, and dick like a toddler's forearm or whatever. Then she had to put the list under her pillow, and light a special romance candle every night - oooh, which reminds me! You can buy these gorgeous scented ones online at www.foreverlove.com…anyway within a week she’d met this totally amazing guy! And he had everything that she’d written on her list! Sue said it was just too freaky.”
    I blew another smoke ring towards the ceiling that came out as a big, shapeless cloud and sighed impatiently.
    “Jeezus Anita, I’ve lost count of the times I’ve heard a variation of that story but I’ve never actually met any girl it’s worked for, it’s always ‘a friend of a friend’ or ‘someone’s cousin’.”
    “God Darla, you’re so bloody cynical,” she said, prodding my shoulder with her foot. “It’s no wonder you don't have a proper boyfriend. You haven’t got a romantic bone in your body.”
    “I’m not after a romantic bone Anita, it’s a very different kind of boning that I’m hanging out for. And I don’t think lighting a few overpriced, smelly candles is going