Unnecessary Drama Read online

  I hurry into my room, shutting the door with relief and then putting several heavy books in front of it in case the toddler tries to come in for round two.

  I wonder if Jesse is going to back out. Will he turn to his parents and ask to leave? Well, good. I’m not going to leave. I can’t leave. I’ve already paid my bond and spent a night here and made peace with the idea of the mouse and made loose plans to go to the market with Harper and started setting up a vision board and bought a Myki and told everyone in my life that I’m living in an amazing share house in Melbourne while I study economics with the aim of working for the UN while also being a bestselling author on the side and maybe writing a Oscar-winning screenplay.

  This is my dream. I’m not giving it up. I spent months searching for somewhere affordable and half-decent to live. I interviewed with an older guy in his mid-twenties who described himself online as a ‘philisopher, feminist, pacifist, entrepreneur, craftsman, communist, artist, lover, soul seeker’, and then he said, when we chatted over the phone, that he liked living with younger women because he felt he had so much to teach them. I talked with three girls who assured me that ‘the room is small and a bit unconventional but really nice’ which turned out to mean that the room was an area of carpet behind a couch, surrounded by a ‘privacy curtain’ (a sheet pegged to a clothes horse). Then Mum told me a couple in our town was looking for someone to live with their granddaughter. The relief was overwhelming.

  I have nowhere else to go if this house doesn’t work out. I don’t want to live with a creepy guy or behind someone’s couch. And I can’t move home. I can’t fail within forty-eight hours of leaving. I am simply not the kind of person who fails.

  I get dressed slowly, automatically thinking I’ll avoid Jesse until he leaves, until I remember he’s here because he’s moving in. There’s no avoiding. I read a book on my bed for a while, but I can’t concentrate on the words. I try playing on my phone, but it makes me hyper aware of the fact my hands are shaking a little. I start to worry that Jesse will bond with Harper while I’m hiding in here, and they’ll go to the market without me, and I’ll be the one on the outer.

  I poke my head out of my room. Everything is quiet. Jesse’s family have gone. I heard them leave not long after I went into my bedroom. Because it’s a long drive back to our town and they needed to get one of the kids to karate and another one needed a nap and the third was crying, they hustled out the door in a flurry of stress and yelling and I don’t think they even said a proper goodbye to Jesse. I try not to compare that to yesterday, when Mum cried three times before leaving, Nanna solemnly gifted me her precious Saint Christopher medal and Lauren pretended she didn’t care but then made Mum stop the car so she could run back in and hug me one more time. My family is perhaps a touch too co-dependent.

  I find Harper in the kitchen.

  ‘I bought bagels if you want one,’ she says.

  ‘Yum, yes please.’ My voice is oddly high pitched. Everything I say sounds just a little bit not right, not me. I need to calm down or at least give the appearance of being calm. A physiotherapist once told me that she had never seen someone as incapable of relaxing their shoulders as me, which I chose to take as a compliment.

  ‘So, do you and Jesse know each other well?’ Harper says, cutting the bagels in two on the table, no chopping board, letting the knife scrape the wood, which makes my eye twitch.

  Do we know each other well? The simplest question and I have no idea how to answer.

  ‘Um, sort of. Not really. Well enough, I guess,’ I babble.

  Harper lowers her voice a little, leans forward, ringlets falling across her forehead. Her earrings are gold, in the shape of beautiful tiny little skulls. I have the urge to run to my room and start googling ‘where to buy gold skull earrings’. As if I could pull off skull earrings.

  ‘So, what’s he like?’ Harper says in an almost-whisper.

  My heart glows a little. The way she says it, inviting intimacy, like we’re already friends. But I need to be careful, I need to stop myself from immediately gossiping about him. Jesse lives here now. Harper doesn’t know either of us. I don’t want her first impression of me to be negative.

  ‘He’s. Um. He’s nice,’ I say, still flailing. ‘He’s fine, he’ll be good to live with, he’s really…nice.’ I am acutely aware I said ‘nice’ twice but my mind is suddenly empty of all other adjectives.

  ‘Okay. Yeah, I chatted to him a few times, he does seem nice,’ Harper says, looking disappointed at my dull reply. She was probably hoping for a sign that her grandmother hadn’t stuck her with two boring duds. She gave me an opening, and I gave her nothing.

  Harper puts cream cheese on the bagel and hands it to me. I try not to worry that she licked cream cheese off her finger and then that finger touched my bagel, and I wonder if she’ll think it’s rude if I get up for a plate. I settle for holding my hand under it to catch the sesame seeds falling.

  Jesse walks into the kitchen, looking much more relaxed and happy without his family, and Harper offers him the other half of my bagel. He seems unbothered about her hands or the lack of plates or spilling sesame seeds.

  ‘So I thought we’d go over the house rules,’ Harper says.

  I sit up straighter. This is the conversation I have been waiting for. I imagine she’s typed them up, laminated them, or, if it were me, put them in a lovely, non-threatening binder. I’m ready for a deep discussion, possibly a friendly debate. I’m ready to make concessions, to compromise, to be flexible and very accommodating, but also to gently steer them in certain directions, towards a higher cleaning standard, a schedule, and to use the shared shopping list app I researched and have already downloaded onto my phone.

  Harper starts talking, and I realise there’s no laminated list, nothing written, just verbal rules. That’s fine. I can take notes. Maybe I’ll make the binder later.

  The house rules are: no pets; no romance between housemates; and no unnecessary drama, in general.

  She stops, and I wait. Is there more? Surely there must be more? What about division of chores, sharing of food, late-night noise, having guests over, parties, TV usage, sleep schedules, paying bills, checking the mail, bin night, using the dryer, fridge space, communal food, internet usage, length of showers, preferred scent of handwash. And these are just my top-level questions. I have subcategories. And subsubcategories. Who is in charge of what? How does this household run, at a granular level? What are we each responsible for doing? There are already two drinking glasses and a knife covered in cream cheese in the kitchen sink and we have no established plan of when they will be cleaned or by who. I am sweating.

  ‘So that’s it. Pretty basic. We can figure everything else out as we go along. Any questions?’ Harper asks, smiling. She’s warm and friendly, which, for a person with natural charisma, she really doesn’t need to be, so I especially appreciate it.

  ‘What does “no unnecessary drama” mean?’ Jesse asks.

  ‘No arguments, no tension, that sort of thing,’ Harper says. ‘Everyone just being chill and getting along.’

  ‘Sounds easy enough,’ Jesse says, not looking at me.

  My heart is racing. This is going to be a disaster. I am holding my bagel in a death grip. I will my fingers to relax. I am not going to be the uptight one, I am not, I am not, I am not.

  ‘Absolutely,’ I say, lowering my shoulders, wiggling my neck a little.

  ‘Oh, and I thought, once you both get settled, we could have a housewarming party,’ Harper says.

  ‘Sounds great,’ I say. How long will it take us to get settled? Are we talking three weeks, four, five? I need a timeline, a deadline, for this party so I know how long I have to make a lot of new friends, buy some cute clothes, deep-clean the house and get my whole life in order. I try my best to not let a hint of these thoughts show on my very relaxed, very serene face.

  ‘I can’t wait,’ I add.

  4

  After our house-rules discussion, Harper tell
s us she’s going out to see her girlfriend, Penny. She doesn’t specify if or when she’ll be home, which is normal for housemates I guess, although I personally would love to implement a system so we can know when to worry about each other, so I don’t have to default to worrying all the time.

  Harper leaves, and Jesse and I are left alone for the first time. I walk into the lounge room and sit on the couch. I should get up and go and read. Organise my stationery. Start preparing for my uni classes tomorrow. Finish setting up my room. Make a list of things I need to buy for the house. Pick out my clothes for the week. Go for a walk and fall in love with the city. (Can this be done in one quick walk, or will it take three or four? I’ve never fallen in love with a place before. Or a person, for that matter.) And I’m still itching to rearrange the kitchen and clean the dirty dishes. All these things I need to do, but I can’t move.

  I miss home.

  I feel like a needy little dog, trembling, huddled in a corner, away from its owners for the first time.

  I’m not good when I’m out of my comfort zone. When I couldn’t sleep over summer, and my heart was beating fast with fear about moving, I would watch old sitcoms, like Friends and New Girl and How I Met Your Mother, to reassure myself. This is what it will be like living with other people. We’ll be instant best friends. I’ll be different from the person I have always been, because no one will know anything about me. I’ll be free to rewrite my own character, pretend I have a whole team of people giving me great dialogue and lots of plot and a roster of romantic entanglements. We’ll have dinner parties and watch horror movies and sit up talking all night, have picnics in parks and start a netball team and go to concerts and restaurants and art galleries. And I’ll be a runner (in these fantasies, I’m always very fit), and good at yoga and playing goal attack in netball. I won’t worry about anything, because I won’t need to: I’ll be too busy and happy and successful.

  But now it can’t be like that, not with Jesse here, his very presence reminding me who I was, who I am.

  I used to spend a lot of my Saturday nights sitting with Nanna and her cat, Minty, watching British crime dramas while simultaneously creating to-do lists, study plans, meal ideas, tracking books I want to read and the books I have read, and analysing my sleep, exercise, study time, screen time from the previous week, logging it all into my apps and spreadsheets, making graphs, observing progress. It was a soothing ritual, having the numbers, knowing the data, seeing where I’ve been and where I’m going. I felt better being in control of everything.

  I have always been the friend who remembered all the birthdays and organised the group present and paid for it and nervously and politely chased everyone else for their share of the money. I was the helper, the doer, the bringer of positive energy. I was the designated driver, the guarder-of-drinks, the holder-back-of-hair, the minder-of-bags, the lookout-for-parents, the one keeping track of who went where with who and how drunk they might be and when I should check on them.

  I knew exactly what to do when there was a knock at the front door late on a Saturday night and two boys were standing there with Lauren. One had her shoulders and the other had her feet, and she swung between them, eyes closed, drunk and limp and dangling like a dead body. Mum at work or asleep, Nanna in the granny flat out the back, it was up to me, and the chattering of my familiar internal monologue, I hope nothing has happened to her, I hope these boys are trustworthy, I hope she doesn’t need her stomach pumped, I hope she isn’t going to vomit all over everything, I hope she doesn’t wet the bed. I would get towels, a bucket, a plastic tumbler of water (plastic, not glass, never glass), help Lauren to the bathroom, find her clean pyjamas, put her to sleep on her side. Then I would sit in her room and listen to her breathe for hours, and make sure she didn’t vomit in her sleep and choke to death, anxiety shooting through my body like a rocket, zooming up and down my arms and legs, looping circles in my stomach.

  I did this so many times. With Mum sometimes, but sometimes on my own.

  ‘You should be studying nursing,’ Mum said once, not understanding anything at all. I wasn’t doing this because I loved looking after people, I was doing it because I loved Lauren. I was doing it out of duty. I was doing it because I loved Mum and she needed someone to carry the stress of it with her. I was doing it because we didn’t want Nanna to know. I was doing it because there was no one else. I was doing it because it seemed to me to be women’s work, the intimate work of caring and worrying and touching and looking after someone else’s body. Mum didn’t understand that I actually hated this, I hated it so much it made me feel almost dizzy when Lauren went out to a party or a friend’s house or a concert or just a ‘quiet’ night with girls from uni, and I started anticipating what might happen when she came home. Part of the reason I needed to move away so badly was because I wanted to be free of this responsibility; I didn’t want to see it anymore. I didn’t want to just be the person who cleaned shit up, who saw the worst parts and never the good parts. I wanted to find the good parts for myself, whatever they might look like.

  This is the year when I am going to reinvent myself and find the good parts.

  Jesse walks into the lounge room and sits on the couch across from me. Both the couches belong to Harper, or her family I guess, and they’re not new, but they are nicer than I expected. One is mustard yellow, the other faded grey, both very wellworn, but comfortable. I try not to think about when they were last cleaned.

  I glance at Jesse and then look away. He’s annoyingly tall. I’m not good at estimating heights, but I would say six two, maybe six three. He has very broad shoulders, and he takes up a lot of space, which makes me feel irrationally irritated.

  ‘So,’ he says.

  ‘So,’ I say in reply. If he thinks I’m going to do the work of making small talk, he’s wrong. I will give him exactly as much as he gives me. No, wait, from now on I will give him just a little bit less. I will be cold, harsh, I will freeze him out, I squash every single natural urge I have to fill the silence and be polite and friendly and make a joke. I might be a people pleaser, for teachers, for parents, for friends, for the imaginary person analysing my social media likes, for my future great-grandchild who might one day unearth my diaries, but not for him. Never for him.

  ‘We’re living together.’ He’s tapping the couch with the fingers of one hand and I can tell he’s nervous. He can’t rely on flashing me his dimple-in-his-left-cheek smile, a look that served him well throughout high school—he knows I am impervious to his charm. I’ve seen him turn on his don’t-you-just-find-mea-little-bit-irresistible persona plenty of times before. Once at a party, he played a few chords on a guitar and held it while looking contemplatively at the sky, and people acted like he was an actual rock star for years after. Guys have it so easy. We’re always looking for ways to find them hot, charming, attractive, interesting, talented. We’ll take one small element, one moment, one single look, and build a whole fantasy around it.

  ‘Look, so you know, I had no idea you were the other housemate when I moved in,’ I say, the words bursting out of me. ‘I had no idea your real name is Jeremy. If Harper had said Jesse, I might have had a clue or asked more questions or something. I mean, since when is your real name Jeremy? I hear the name Jeremy, and I think of a history professor in a bow tie. Saying your name was Jeremy was very misleading. This is all your fault. I would never voluntarily live with you. I had no idea you were even planning to move to Melbourne—you knew that was always my plan. But what’s done is done and to avoid any unnecessary drama, I think—’

  I take a breath. Okay, so the ice-queen plan didn’t last long. I’ve gone in the opposite direction, complete verbal meltdown. But, I can recover this. I just need to be firm and take charge. I swallow, lower my voice, bring it a few notches down from hysteria.

  ‘I think we just need to act friendly to each other when we’re around Harper,’ I finish, folding my arms.

  ‘Sorry, can we back up a second. You heard the name Jere
my and you thought you were going to be living with a professor?’ Jesse says.

  ‘A very young one, yes, maybe.’ I really wish I had not said that part.

  ‘Who wears a bow tie?’ he says.

  ‘Yes. And a tweed blazer. With those leather patches on the elbows.’

  ‘You spent quite a bit of time imagining this Professor Jeremy,’ he says, and I can see a smile tugging at the edge of his lips.

  ‘I was imagining him as a mentor,’ I say huffily. I was actually imagining him as a handsome, floppy-haired, bow-tie-clad post-grad student who loves the library and has a posh accent and would bring me a strong cup of tea every afternoon while I was studying and we would make intellectual and deeply insightful jokes about Hemingway or some other dead author I haven’t read yet, but no one ever need know that level of detail.

  ‘Mmmm. I’m sure,’ Jesse says.

  ‘Anyway. The plan. We’re nice to each other when we’re around Harper, and we get through this year—’

  ‘I told you my real name was Jeremy,’ he interrupts.

  ‘No you didn’t.’

  ‘Yes I did. We were sitting together on the bus, and you said if you ever published a book, you wanted it to be under your nanna’s name, which I’m pretty sure you said was Evelyn or something like that, because you don’t like your name, even though you have a perfectly fine name, and I said if I ever did, I would publish it under my real name, Jeremy.’

  He’s right. The memory floods back instantly. I remember not just the conversation, but the way we were sitting, turned towards each other, elbows bumping, and that it was afternoon and we were heading home. We were fourteen, and our friendship was new and exciting in the way it is when you suddenly and unexpectedly click with someone and you feel like you could talk forever.

  I push the memory away as fast as possible. ‘I don’t remember that,’ I say, looking away.

  ‘Okay,’ he says.

  I’m not sure he believes me.