By the end of the list, tears were flowing freely and she was in full acceptance of her seemingly unlovable-ness and the too high expectations of her wish lischt. She ripped the page into three pieces, crumpled it up into a loose twist and walked over to the already tied up kitchen rubbish bag and poked it in to the top of the bag in a drunken attempt to discard it forever.
With tears streaming down her face she grabbed the steadily disappearing bottle of Jim Beam, a 1.5 litre bottle of coke and another milkshake size plastic cup and walked over to her CD Player. Then she tugged at her box of CDs, spilling them all onto the floor. “Where are you ladies? I need you!” she slurred, rifling through the many country music discs she owned for her favourite group The Dixie Chicks. “There you are my darlings,” she said and put the Wide Open Spaces, Home, and Taking the Long Way albums into her six-stacker CD, leaving the other three spaces empty. Setting the song selection to random, she hit play.
“Am I The Only One?” played first. Kylie turned the volume up to a little over half way and crawled to her lounge room window. Placing her drink on the sill, she pulled the couch over so that she could rest her elbows on the window sill and her knees on the comfort of the arm rest. She sang along with the song at the top of her voice and in between the shuffle function finding the next song she could hear a dog barking next door and cats calling from outside on the street. It was the first noise from outside that she had heard since getting home after work. When the next song started playing she didn’t care about conversing with the dog, she just chose instead to communicate with the cats. The next song to play was “Voice Inside my Head”, which was normally one of Kylie’s favourite songs from the Chicks. But tonight it was a cat calling cry, a tool for Kylie to convey her feelings to the felines in the neighbourhood and hopefully for them to feel welcome enough to scratch at her door and let her pat them from now on. If there was a Doctor Pusslittle that spoke directly to moggies, Kylie was it.
“Meow Meow Meow Meow, Meow Meow Meow Meow, Me-yow, Me-yow, Me-yow, Me-yow Me-yow, Mee-yooow, ee-yow, ma rowo, rowo, rowo, rowo row row,” Kylie sang, perched up on her window sill like a feline herself.
Kylie’s faux feline reciprocation not only triggered a response from the neighbourhood cats but also started all three of the dogs howling from across the road. Kylie was slowly but surely, pet by pet, pissing off the neighbourhood in the wee hours of morning.
“I Believe in Love” came on next and she was all out of meows and just sat there with tears running down her face, some falling into her drink from the end of her nose. There were a lot of happy songs on those three CDs but every sad and lonely song played on shuffle for Kylie that night – Heartbreak Town, Hello Mr Heartache, Once You’ve Loved Somebody, You Were Mine, I’ll Take Care of You, and Cold Day in July. Every song epitomised the loneliness she felt and the sadness she thought she would never pull herself out of. Even her favourite “Goodbye Earl” was sung with venom and spite instead of her normal sass.
After the songs began to repeat themselves she pressed stop and turned on the television to watch Rage. The difference in music enabled her to dance but after an hour the guest programmer for the night started picking music Kylie had never heard of so she turned off the sound and kept the light of the TV on for company as she swapped her country music CDs over for her best of the Nineties selection and a mixed CD that had songs on it by Safri Duo “Played-A-Live The Bongo Song” and “Swamp Thing” by The Grid. As soon as she pressed play the songs played one after the other and she erupted from the floor in an excitable bopping frenzy, running into the kitchen to find pots and pans she could play the bongo’s on and air guitar the banjo out of Swamp Thing. There was almost a smile on her face until she flashbacked to the times she used to dance to this very music with all her friends at the Irish Club back home.
It was about this time that she went foraging for food. Finding a couple of bags of chips in a cupboard, she grabbed both and threw them on opposing couches so she would have a bag close by no matter where she ended up sitting. Handfuls of chips were stuffed into her mouth as if she was consumed by the fear of starvation. Half the chips were being spilt down the front and inside her pyjama top and she washed each mouthful of chips down with sloppy gulps of bourbon, which would pour out each side of her mouth and be left for her forearm to wipe up. Kylie was a mess. Luckily she was sitting on her own mat on the lounge room floor when she spilt half her cup down the front of her face. Her pyjama top soaked up most of the overflow and after unsuccessfully trying to suck the bourbon out of her top she wrung the liquid out of the fabric into her cup and drank it. After all, she didn’t want to waste any of it.
After eleven long hours of hooking into it, Kylie thought she might feel better if she had a shower. But actually she didn’t feel better at all. As she took her clothes off, chips fell all over the bathroom floor and the wet weight of her shirt dropped heavily onto the bath mat. She opened the glass shower door and immediately sat on the floor of the shower. Putting all her weight onto her left bum cheek, she was completely unaware that it rested partly on the shower drain and folded her arms over her bent knees, her head facing towards the floor. The sad and blank expression on her face emulated the nothingness she had felt for most of the night.
For over forty-five minutes she sat unmoving, unknowingly pressing an impression of the shower drain into her left bum cheek. Then, after feeling some discomfort she got up soaped herself all over including her feet. Slipping on the suds she landed back on the floor with her opposite bum cheek pressed to the same drain that had already left an imprint on her left side. “Ow,” she said through the garble of the water from the shower head.
There were no water wise points being scored tonight. Kylie was using enough water to flood a rice paddy. For nearly two hours she sat on the floor of the shower, her head buried in between her knees and her weight shifting periodically from right cheek to left cheek. It was only when she reached out for her drink and realised it was empty that she decided it was time to get out and pour herself another one. She gave herself a quick going over with the soap, this time while she remained seated, and washed it off before finally turning the taps off. Her head remained hung as she stepped out and swung her arm aimlessly around searching for a towel.
She picked up the clothes she had on prior to her shower but they were wet so she wrapped a towel around her, took the wet clothes and threw them in the laundry tub. Stumbling into her bedroom, she picked up a pair of boxer shorts and a t-shirt off the floor and put them on. It made no difference to her that they were both inside out and since the bedroom light was off she didn’t realise until much later.
As Kylie had dropped her towel two red marks were very noticeable on the left and right cheeks of her buttocks. The shower drain had left very distinct imprints on her skin. From the partial glow of the hallway light, the imprints perfectly resembled the cockpit windscreens from the Millennium Falcon of Star Wars fame. The welts were starting to hurt and Kylie had rubbed at them blindly before pulling on her boxer shorts.
After getting dressed she stumbled back to the kitchen and found another cup in which to pour yet another drink. She was hungry again and wanting something more substantial than chips so she searched for something tasty, first in the fridge, then in all of the cupboards. In a disoriented state she stumbled around the kitchen and left cupboard doors and drawers open as she looked for elusive foodstuffs. Hidden in the bottom drawer, she found the emergency essentials packet her father had given her the day she left home. Deciding that her current state constituted an emotional emergency, and in desperate need of some form of connection, Kylie reached for the parcel .
The brown paper parcel was tied up with a string bow and it had a tag which read: “This little parcel has been packed full of love, to assist in the event of an emergency, and only to be opened, by A Baby. Love Dad.”
“Ohhhh,” she said as her face crumpled up and the tears started again.
Kylie pulled the string bow and opened up the packet to find eleven items, each individually wrapped with a little note containing a description and a number from one to eleven.
Number 1 was candles for use in a blackout.
Number 2 were a dozen boxes of matches for when she did a really mad shit and needed to light one up to mask the