Welcome to Story Club Read online

  8.25 pm: You’ll see from the ‘selfie’ that I am wearing the brown jumper I bought in order to dress up as a mouse for the fancy dress ball we went to in Collector that time. It’s a very comfy jumper and such happy memories!

  8.30 pm: A small hole now opened up. My first thought is that it could enable me to be fed, in the event I am in here for more than a couple of days.

  8.36 pm: You’ll see there is a basin in the bathroom, so no issue with supply of fluids. (Picture supplied.)

  8.39 pm: They are ringing the landlord to get permission to use maximum force to break down the door. It seems to me they have already used maximum force, however perhaps not.

  8.44 pm: Landlord didn’t answer. Next thought is to see if something could be pushed through the hole that would allow me to undo the screws.

  8.57 pm: Housemates announce, ‘Right, we’re just going to have to hammer through it.’ I’m not sure what that means.

  Will’s updates are ominously suspended at this point. Had I in fact been reading them in real time, I have no doubt I would have been very anxious for him. Success, in the final assault on the door, might easily have been accompanied by splinter injury. Failure, of course, would have meant a very grim period being fed extremely thin and probably none-too-tasty food through a tiny hole.

  Finally, a new image pops up: It’s Will, a free man, triumphantly brandishing the hammer of his liberation.

  Now, Will is essentially an unflappable person, so his entrapment did not engender the sense of impending doom ordinarily attendant on such an experience.

  The same cannot be said of Peter Slipper, who late in the evening of 10 December 2002 was in Federal Parliament discharging his duties as the Member for Fisher when, all of a sudden, he disappeared, and was not seen for some time.

  At 3.48 pm the following day, the Member for Cowan, Graham Edwards, rose with a question for the Speaker.

  ‘Mr Speaker, I have a question to put to you. Are you aware that last night in the house an able-bodied member utilised a disability access toilet and, on finishing, was unable to open the toilet door? Are you also aware that some panic set in when the member believed he was trapped and he activated the duress alarm and also made an emergency mobile phone call to another member, resulting in the attendance of security personnel, who immediately opened the door and liberated the distressed member? My question to you, Mr Speaker, is whether it would be possible to advise members who may get caught short that many doors in disability access toilets do not open inwards or outwards but simply slide.’

  The Speaker responded, ‘I am aware of the incident.’

  Now, much has occurred in the life of Mr Slipper since that date, and much has been made in the courts of his reported habit of asking staff to shower with the door open. However, in light of the above historical detail, perhaps that instruction begins to look less like a creepy workplace management issue and more like a sensible precaution from a man with a well-founded suspicion of bathroom doors.

  I myself have never been locked in a toilet. However, I have detained another human being in one, which is the story I’m getting around to, and thank you for your patience.

  Here’s how it happened. I found myself, largely by accident, in a London nightclub called Milk & Honey. It’s one of those ludicrously cool Soho clubs: skinny, but about five floors high, with volcanically hot bar staff and an entrance in a dingy alley with practically no signage. It had an ice menu, as I recall; you could ask for your Scotch to be chilled with perfect cubes of Norwegian glacial ice dating back to the Pleistocene era, or – for just a little more – a cube containing real Gwyneth Paltrow tears. Or something.

  Anyway, a couple of us settled into a booth and selected the second-to-cheapest ice. But then I needed to go to the toilet. Now this was something of a challenge. For one thing, there weren’t any toilets on the floor we were on. I climbed the stairs to the next floor. If anything, the people up there were even better looking. I became highly conscious of my movements. Trying to look both purposeful and nonchalant, I ambled across the room towards a promising-looking door in the far corner. As I drew closer to the door, I made out the word printed on it in a studiously offhand font: MILK.

  Oh, you arseholes, I thought. Is that men? Or women? I hovered miserably about two metres from the door, feeling the entire establishment’s quiet enjoyment of my humiliation. Better scope the area. I spun on my heel, fishing my phone out of my handbag as cover for the about-face, which I hoped would deliver the plausible impression of someone just remembering suddenly she was halfway through an amusing text exchange with Jefferson Hack.

  Spotting the HONEY door – because, of course, there was one – I loitered next to it, monitoring all movements around both doors while seemingly consulting my phone. And sure enough, within a minute, I saw a man with extravagant cheekbones thread his way through the crowd and disappear into MILK. Brilliant! Problem solved.

  Confidently, I advanced into HONEY. It was a surprisingly large bathroom, containing several lavish basins, two cubicles, a tasteful floral arrangement, a stack of laundered hand-towels and one person. And that person was Colin Firth.

  Perhaps he was already beginning to suspect his mistake before I arrived. Perhaps my appearance was a dreadful shock. Either way, his face was inscribed with pain. It was the face of impending doom.

  ‘Well, hello!’ I said, recovering sufficiently to kick the door shut behind me, and ascertaining by means of a swift glance that there were, indeed, no other exits through which he could possibly escape.

  ‘Oh God,’ he said, in a strangled voice. ‘I’m made a complete ass of myself, haven’t I?’ That’s right. That is what he actually said.

  By this stage, my enjoyment of the situation was every bit as rich and overpowering as his terror. I ventured some light remarks about how ridiculous these clubs are, with their complicated social traps. I fancied I was playing it pretty cool here. He agreed, with a stricken attempt at a chuckle, but his eyes were pleading. I remained in front of the door. I reassured him that he was absolutely welcome to stick around in HONEY, if he wanted to; he shook his head, mute with suffering. I was giddy with power. I was Kathy Bates to his James Caan. Short of rushing the door, he was completely unable to escape.

  But with power comes responsibility. Also, I wanted to tell my friends. So after a few more delicious moments of despotism, I stood aside, and Mr Darcy bolted from the room with ungentlemanly haste.

  Returning to our table, I gabbled out the story to my friend Jo, who – as soon as I had conveyed the essential elements, but before I had gone back over the best bits in the spirit of overexcitement to which I was, in the circumstances, completely entitled – dug out her own phone and dialled. ‘Mum? You’ll never guess what’s just happened to me . . .’ I then observed, stunned, as she retold the entire story, from start to finish, substituting herself in my role. When she hung up, she turned to me with a bewitching smile. ‘Sorry, mate,’ she explained. ‘Mum’s a massive Firth fan.’

  Jo, I am happy to report, some years later accidentally locked herself in the bathroom of a third-floor Notting Hill flat she was house-minding. She had to be evacuated – after a whole afternoon of incarceration – by a large and conspicuous team of London firefighters with a ladder.

  Which demonstrates not only that toilets are terrifying, but also that they are capable of punishing treachery in humans.

  DAVID MARR

  David is a journalist and broadcaster, who wrote for Fairfax, and now writes for The Guardian. He’s published a couple of biographies and a number of books about politics, censorship and immigration. David presented Media Watch and appears regularly on Insiders. Over the last ten years, he has written a number of Quarterly Essays. His latest is The White Queen: One Nation and the Politics of Race. Marr is an optimist and atheist who lives quietly with his partner in Sydney.

  ‘500 Ruined My Marriage’ copyright © David Marr 2018

  500 Ruined My Marriage

  by
DAVID MARR

  This story was orignally performed at the event A House of Cards

  Five Hundred ruined my marriage. You might think there were more fundamental issues in play. But I knew then and know now that they were manageable. We could have gone on despite me being . . . not really built for matrimony. But cards brought us undone.

  Forgive me, as Sarah Ferguson says on the 7.30 Report. Forgive me for taking tonight’s theme so literally. But after a lifetime at Fairfax I can’t come at any subject in an original way. Fairfax employed skilled teams of subeditors to beat originality out of us and they did their work well. So when I was asked to ‘tell a true story on the theme of A House of Cards’, I had no choice but to take the subject head-on – and tell the story about the destruction of my marriage, how a union meant for life was brought undone by my wife’s passion for Five Hundred.

  Young people today grow up in a world where they expect gay men to pair off, dance once or twice at Mardi Gras, get a dog and save for a house on Scotland Island. It seems the natural order of things. But there was a time when being married – to a woman – was a perfectly respectable way for gay men to live. Even quite admirable. Their families loved it. The community applauded. Role models were everywhere back then and aren’t too hard to find even now – in history, in Hollywood and in federal politics. The truth – overlooked in these impatient times – is that ambitious gay men make splendid husbands. They have careers, children, rather stocky wives and the occasional lifesaver on the side. But splendid husbands.

  I was determined to be one of those.

  First I needed to have sex. Like so many young Australian men at that time I waited till I got to London. Foreign ground. No family. No relatives. What followed was a tale of two suburbs: Notting Hill, first time with a man. Willesden Green, first time with a woman. I like to think my sweet fumbling affair with ginger-haired Gavin in 1972 is part of the erotic substrata that made Notting Hill a natural setting for the films of Hugh Grant in the 1990s. Perhaps I should have stuck with Notting Hill instead of switching to the Jubilee Line – two changes, as it happens, Edgware Road and Baker Street – to make a risky appointment with fate in Willesden Green. I know this sort of audience at this sort of event craves grubby detail. I am going to be relatively discreet and merely report that on an unstable night-and-day in a second-floor flat in that plain suburb I proved I could do it.

  And I was terribly pleased with myself.

  And what a high-minded coupling it was. Having done it once or twice and a few times more, I felt – we felt – we must hurry home and take our part in building a new Australia under Gough Whitlam. I can see now that the rickety structure of my marriage was built on optimism, patriotism, blind faith in the Labor Party, my affection for Jennie, which has survived everything to this day, and masculine pride. I left Australia a terrified proto-poofter and returned a man.

  Jennie and I were a couple and we settled in the bosom of Sydney’s heterosexual left: Balmain. So determined was I that our marriage was going to work, I ignored all the omens. The collapse of the Whitlam government should have been a warning. Foolishly, I took it then to have only national repercussions.

  From time to time, I was ambushed by erotic delirium like the night at the Nimrod when Andrew Sharp kissed Tony Sheldon in Peter Kenna’s A Hard God. Let me tell you, in 1974 that kiss was quite something. I drank that away. Drink was frankly helpful. If you were scared to go to bed, a few drinks made anything possible – usually sleep.

  Keeping busy was the key. We were both busy: busy, busy, busy. Lots of work. Lots of friends. Lots of cooking, and weekends away in guesthouses in the Blue Mountains. The ’70s was the era of chic guesthouses: great food, icy bedrooms and a dunny down the hall. We couldn’t get enough of the discomfort. And we were happy. Sex was . . . OK. The future looked bright but something began to come between us. My wife had a passion I couldn’t share: cards.

  She wanted to play more and more. Soon she wasn’t satisfied unless she’d had a few hands two or three times a week. When I claimed to be too busy, too tired, a bit down in the dumps tonight – she insisted I play. I never approached a game with enthusiasm. I never picked up the cards with pleasure. And I never won.

  I asked Jennie the other day to remind me why she was so good at the game. ‘Don’t you remember?’ she replied a little tartly. ‘Because I was too young for university they made me repeat the matric at Firbank and I spent most of the year playing Five Hundred.’ I did remember – once she reminded me. But then I’ve put so many of these details out of my mind. Even thinking about cards after all these years gives me a flush of humiliation. Some failures you never live down.

  Do you know Five Hundred? It’s bridge with trainer wheels. You’re dealt a heap of cards and there’s a lot of coded talk around the table and then you take turns throwing a card into the middle and someone wins a trick. I’ve been out on the net to look at the rules again. Wikipedia takes very seriously those fiddly rules and that fucking jargon: ‘no-ies’ and ‘misere’ and ‘slams’ and ‘going out backwards’. The paragraph headed ‘Play of the Joker’ brought me up with a horrible jolt. If there is a trump suit, the joker counts as the highest trump . . . And so on and so on and so on. I always played my joker too soon. Nothing provoked my wife’s exasperation in those increasingly unhappy years so much as my failure to grasp the rule of the joker. But I liked to get it out there. What was the point of holding back? Win early. Get it over and done with. The sooner it’s played, the sooner we’re gone.

  This seems to be a family thing. My mother was a bridge player. ‘We laughed about Pam for years,’ one of her dear friends told me after the funeral. ‘She always played her ace too soon.’

  The marriage unravelled fast once we couldn’t face each other over the card table. There was never so much reading in bed. The image I have of those last months is a dark bedroom with two people, two books and two little pools of light – as far apart as possible in a double bed.

  There was misery everywhere and I was responsible. This was my mistake, my fault. We broke up. I went dancing. I rediscovered the erotic charge of kissing stubble. I found sex. And I found my partner.

  He won’t remember this, but one day early on he said: ‘Let’s have a game of cards.’ And I said, quick as a flash: ‘I don’t play.’ And, thank God, he left it at that.

  It was our anniversary the other day. We’ve been together eighteen years. I know why and I’m going to stay that way.

  SUSIE YOUSSEF

  A comedian, actor, writer and improviser, Susie has written, performed and produced comedy for stage, radio and television in Australia and around the world. A core cast member on Whose Line Is It Anyway? Susie has also appeared on ABC TV’s Squinters, Screen Time, Rosehaven and Get Krack!n and No Activity on Stan. She is a regular on Hughesy, We Have a Problem and Have You Been Paying Attention? She has performed internationally as a guest at Improvaganza in Edmonton, Dad’s Garage in Atlanta and The Del Close Marathon in New York. Susie recently starred in Sydney Theatre Company’s adaptation of Accidental Death of an Anarchist and debuted with Griffin Theatre Company in The Smallest Hour, written and performed by herself and that nice British raconteur Phil Spencer.

  ‘Because Figs Are Very Expensive’ copyright © Susie Youssef 2018

  Because Figs Are Very Expensive

  by SUSIE YOUSSEF

  This story was originally performed at A Very Story Club Christmas

  My first ever TV writing gig was as an additional writer on The Ronnie Johns Half Hour back in 2006. I was twenty-two and I had no idea about anything. Not a lot of my work made it to the show but there was one sketch that did, where a group of girls are sitting around chatting about the childish beliefs they once held. It was based on an actual conversation I had with my sisters and my cousin Debbie. Don’t worry, it’s not her real name. Her real name is Deborah. The sketch went like this:

  ‘I used to think all dogs were boys and all cats were girls and they would ge
t married in secret ceremonies.’

  ‘Ha ha,’ the other girls laughed, ‘me too!’

  Another girl added, ‘Remember when we thought you could get pregnant from just kissing a boy?’

  ‘Yes!’ they all agreed.

  And then ‘Debbie’ chimed in, ‘And remember when you used to breastfeed your dolls?’

  ‘No,’ said the group.

  ‘Yeah, I was kidding,’ said the ‘Debbie’ character. But we all knew she definitely wasn’t.

  That feeling, however, is all too familiar to me. That is how I felt when I first told other kids about how my family celebrated Christmas.

  For nearly twenty years I celebrated Christmas night at my grandparents’ house with all of my aunties, uncles and cousins on the Youssef side of the family. My grandparents, Anthony and Cecelia, have four children. My two aunties and uncle have fourteen children collectively and there are six girls in my family making it twenty grandchildren. Add all the partners and children and their children and that makes a total of ‘too many people in a house where we were not allowed to turn on the air-conditioning’. Ever.

  We would arrive at the house around 5 pm on Christmas night and pile out of our huge white van in age order like Lebanese babushka dolls. After a parade of double-cheeked kisses and Christmas well wishes, the next port of call was the Youssef Family Christmas Tree. There was no shaking of gift boxes or squeezing of presents. Each of my grandfather’s twenty grandchildren received the same thing every year and yet it was always cloaked in mystery. Twenty-one opaque envelopes hung, pegged to the Christmas tree. Each envelope contained money – anything from five dollars to a hundred. The tree sat on an old record player that sat high on a table. My grandfather had tweaked the mechanism of the turntable so it could both carry the weight of the tree and turn at a hauntingly slow pace. It was like some prop from an ’80s Christmas horror movie, or a ‘not safe’ example from an OH&S handbook. The Great Envelope Pick went in age order, and we weren’t allowed to touch the envelopes before it was our turn, but we all had tactics and theories on how to get the coveted hundred-dollar note. You could only pick once, unless you chose the five-dollar note, and then you got to pick again. For three years in a row my cousin Kevin picked not only the five-dollar note but the hundred as well, making him, historically, the highest Yuletide earner and the most insufferable dickbag.