“Too weird,” she used to say. “And not in a good way.”
She moved out to be with her loaded white boyfriend in his flash apartment on the other side of the bridge.
She met him at salsa class in Darling Harbour. He was wearing a gray fedora, and a pinstriped waistcoat with nothing underneath. His triceps popped, she said. She called him my man.
“My man and I are going hiking,” she’d say. “My man and I are doing salsa.”
I think of her and her man doing salsa and fucking. Salsa, fuck, salsa, fuck, in their boring salsafucking clothes.
“Wearing a hat — it’s called peacocking,” says Mugzy, when I tell him how they met. “I’m reading it in a pickup book. Girls love that shit. He probably pretended to be interested in her friend first. Probably negged her with backhanded compliments. Works like a dream.”
When Cathy told me she was moving over the bridge, we were having dumplings at Shanghai Night.
“Ashfield never matched my vision of myself,” she said, and popped a xiaolongbao into her mouth with a fork.
She saw me looking at her shiny pink nails.
“I found an awesome nail salon in Balmain,” she said. “Eighty bucks for a shellac mani-pedi. A girl with a good mani-pedi is a girl who is living her best life.”
I watched those nails and that fork shovelling xiaolongbaos into that mouth, and I couldn’t work out what Cathy had that I didn’t have. I had a good personality. I was okay-looking. But then again, I didn’t have control over my cuticles.
The day she left, I woke up to a pink Post-it on the fridge: B the change u wish 2 c in the world.
Lucky I didn’t take her advice or I would’ve slapped that Post-it on her chest and stabbed her through it. Would’ve left her posted to the kitchen wall, shellacked toes off the lino.
That’s a change I wanted to see.
I spend all my cash on a cardboard coffin off the Internet. It comes on a Monday morning. Two guys deliver it. They slide it under my cutting table, next to the couch. The coffin has a wood veneer and gold handles and a white satin lining.
“That looks like a lot of money,” says Mugzy, when he comes in that night.
“It’s make-or-break time,” I say, pulling on the ends of the tape measure hanging around my neck. “Fame is built on sacrifice.”
When people push in front of me in lines at the supermarket, or expect me to step off the footpath for them in the street, the thing they don’t know about me is I’m gonna be famous. Even more shitfuck famous than Mugzy. I’m gonna get out of this hole in Ashfield and I’m gonna go to New York and I’m gonna win Real Couturier. And at the final in Vanderbilt Hall, my models are gonna lie in a line of coffins in their shrouds on the runway.
And my favorite judge, Ava Rodriguez, editorial director of KELLERMAN, is going to warn me beforehand about how risky my runway collection is.
“Don’t make it too costumey,” she’ll say.
And I’ll say, “But I’m drawing on my culture.”
And she’ll say, “But how is this commercial, Rioko?”
And I’ll say, “Just you wait, Ava, I’ll show you.”
My line is going to transcend all of fashion. It’s going to be spiritual. It’s going to be Japanese warrior-prince ghost-god, with shrouds and death and destruction.
All the contestants on Real Couturier work closely with a key model, and now Mugzy’s mine. I’m going to make him into a shinto spirit god from another world. Shinto gods bring blessings. They can’t exist without people believing in them. And when we get onstage at Vanderbilt Hall, I’m going to show everyone this new god and send him off in a ritual with all the other models and their coffins.
Mugzy’s new cape is already done. Now I’m making him a linen shroud that covers everything except his face. When I send him to the show’s makeup team, the look I’m going to ask for is snow white, with pink around the eyes.
The only problem is that the day after the coffin arrives, I get another reminder letter about overdue rent. I’ve spent my entire design budget on the coffin. I can’t afford the studio anymore. But you just have to not give a shit about anything. You’ve gotta go for your goals with your whole heart. I mean, the day before Cathy went, I lost my job in the city. Redundant, they called me. They were taking manufacturing and development to Vietnam. They had no need for patternmakers like me.
It was a sign from the universe. It was a sign I was going to win Real Couturier. I took over Cathy’s bedroom and turned the flat into a design studio. I bought all these rolls of fabric, and Ludmila. Put a cutting table in. And all I’m doing, day in, day out, while the money drains away, is training for fame.
All my chips are on Real Couturier.
Sometimes I duck under the cutting table and get in the coffin for a nap. While I drift off, I think about Nara.
I think of my parents being buried together. Two mounds side by side. People said I was home when they died, but I can’t remember it. I was five. After it happened, an older kid on my street asked me how it felt to have had parents with a death wish. There was empty space in my head where the answer should have been.
My grandfather took me in. He did calisthenics in the yard every morning and had a big goldfish tank in his house that had plastic seaweed at the bottom. He called me his little goldfish.
One afternoon I overheard him arguing with his new wife about what they were going to do with me. She didn’t like that I never spoke. She’d also found an exercise book that I’d filled with drawings of oni — red-faced demons standing in fields of blind snakes.
“This girl brings disaster,” the wife said.
While they argued, I went to the tank and scooped up a goldfish with one hand. I took it into the garden and dug a shallow hole and dropped it in. Looking at me sideways from the dirt, its eye was as wide and blank as always. It squirmed and tried to flip. Its lips sucked air. When I was done burying it, I put a rock on top. Then I went back to the tank and did the same with the other fish, one by one, until they all lay in a nice row of mounds topped with rocks.
When my grandfather came out to find me, he went white. He asked me to explain. I couldn’t tell him why I did it.
The wife locked me out of the house all afternoon. Then she locked me out of Nara. They put me on a plane to Sydney to live with my mother’s sister.
“You are a stone around my neck,” this aunt used to say.
I was no one’s little goldfish anymore. At school, girls called me a dog. They spread rumors that I didn’t wash my hands or take showers.
When I became a patternmaker, the other women at my company avoided me. They never invited me out for coffee, or bought me cake on my birthday.
At work, I had all these big ideas no one liked. I wanted to improve the clients’ designs — like add funeral veils to floaty summer dresses.
“Be sensible, Rioko,” my manager would say. “It isn’t commercial. It’s too expensive. The designs are already done. Your role here is to make the patterns.”
So I made the patterns. I stayed late most nights because I had nowhere else to be. Sometimes, on the way home from work, I fucked guys. I found them on a dating app. I got them to meet me in alleyways, and we’d fuck against the wall. Once I met up with a guy on a one-way street off Liverpool Road, just past midnight. He showed up wearing a rubber mask. The mask was the face of a rat.