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  Before I introduce Debbi, it seems appropriate that I go back to that first HED conference twenty years ago and ask you to join me in repeating the call and response affirmation that Wilson and Musk used to announce the arrival of a new way of thinking to the world.

  I want to hear a loud ‘YES!’ to each of these questions: Are you aware? Are you centred? Are you important?

  Then say it after me. ‘I am self-aware. I am self-centred. I am self-important.’

  Give yourself a round of applause then hug the person next to you.

  Now kiss them lightly on the lips.

  Now stroke their inner thigh.

  Welcome to HED 2015.

  ZOË NORTON LODGE

  Almost Sincerely

  ❛While my friends learned that men can be cruel, I learned that sometimes when you go into a shop, people feel sorry for you and give you stuff for free. My friends were in Cancun, and I was in a Kafka story.❜

  How Come Why for Did You Call My Friend Denise a Bitch

  Mamma was one strict lady when I was growing up. Playtime at the park directly next to our house was limited to short spurts in high daylight and supervised by Mamma, who could see me always through all the windows along the east wing of our family home. It didn’t matter whether she was knitting a scarf, making a Nescafé or watching Wheel of Fortune. Whatever she was doing, she was also watching me in the park. Trees were not for climbing, and legs were not for running. That’s how I grew up to be in a rare subset of ethnically Mediterranean people with the pallor of jellyfish. Should a sleepover be on the cards, Mamma always required a detailed itinerary of any goings-on and their proximity to major roads and rapists, and I was walked to school until long after I developed the ability to menstruate.

  If horror films have taught us anything, it’s those sleepy little suburbs where nothing much ever happens, where the doors are always unlocked and the children unwatched, it’s those types of places, the world’s Annandales, where the terrible thing will definitely happen. Now, Mamma didn’t really like horror movies. She was more of a Judge Judy type of woman. But lessons are everywhere, and Judge Judy taught a very similar syllabus on the perils of living in a boring residential postcode.

  And then one day, after twelve steely years of watching and waiting, the moment came that Mamma had been preparing for all my life.

  I was playing in the park with my long-term collaborators Sally and Dwayne. We’d been tight since preschool, and the main base for our operations was the park between our houses. There were further (temporary) members of our council, but if we three were there then quorum was met and we could discuss business – which usually focused on matters such as which of the dogs that always fought in the park would die first; whose parents were real alcoholics and which were fair-weather benders; who currently had cake in their house; and which teachers were probably having sex with each other and which others should be fired for being perverts.

  One autumn Year 6 day, we were sitting up the top of the slippery dip discussing whose dad was the most drunkest the most often. It was definitely a close race, we all agreed, but nonetheless, each passionately advocated our personal dad to be the most loaded the most regularly. I was quietly prosecuting the case for my own dad – pointing to the sneakiness of his drinking many half-bottles of chardonnay as evidence in favour of his superiority over Sally and Dwayne’s dad – when I heard someone calling from the bottom of the slide.

  ‘Oi!’

  It was an older girl. She had straight red hair that had been pulled over and over through an iron, possibly a clothes iron, because it was baked and cauterised at the tips. From the very middle of her forehead, two tiny plaits sprung out of her hairline and arced down her face, weighted at the bottom with pink baubles. She had brutal pencil lines where her eyebrows might have been and she had undone all the bottom buttons of her white school blouse and tied it in a knot, exposing an infected yin-yang bellybutton ring.

  She was standing just in front of another girl, whose school kilt was high and tight and framed by a jumper that was tied around her waist. She wore a pink plastic crucifix that nestled into her significant cleavage, and her dyed black hair was tied so tightly into a bun as to give her the impression of having had too much work done. Everything about them was remote and discomforting. Whatever these things were, they weren’t from Annandale.

  ‘I said, oi! Girl!’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  She looked up at me at the top of the slippery dip.

  ‘Tell me how come why for did you call my friend Denise a bitch?’

  ‘Who’s Denise?’ I said, with an inflection that implied that I did not think Denise was a nice name, even though I secretly did, and also had the effect of seeming like I hadn’t even noticed her friend, even though I definitely had.

  ‘Get down here,’ she said.

  And me, with the confidence of someone who has always lived in Annandale, who knows that nothing bad ever happens in the park, slid down and stood in front of the teenage miscreants, arms folded.

  ‘I didn’t even say anything,’ I said.

  The girl’s eyes widened. The other girl, who I presumed was Denise, didn’t look at me. She just picked the day’s filth out of her long, pink nails.

  ‘How come why for are you now calling my friend Denise a liar?’

  ‘What?’ I said, and the girl raised her arm. She raised her arm, dripping with glowing, glittery plastic bracelets, she pulled it back and then, before I had any idea what was happening, slapped me hard across the face, digging her acrylic nails into my cheek and dragging them across in her follow-through.

  I looked at her. Completely stunned. I never knew that there could be any negative consequences for just telling the truth. But there I was. All slapped.

  I was about to stammer out something. I had no idea what it was going to be, when the other girl, Maybe-Denise, ran at me gridiron-style, her massive boobs swinging wildly, like angry pendulums, as she closed in and pushed me backwards into the dirt.

  And that was the moment.

  All the autumn leaves on the ground began to rustle, and all the little blades of grass in the park stiffened beneath them. The clouds in the sky thickened as they drew closer together then joined, and everything became dull.

  Then a huge gust of wind blew through the park. It blew all the way through the park to my house, and it blew the front door of my house wide open.

  And there was Mamma, standing in the doorway of our house, and she was bright. Everything else was grey, but Mamma was bright. She was bright because she was backlit by every scented candle in Annandale, flaming behind her down the hallway of our house. And she stood still, as the wind swirled the little lit wicks of the candles behind her and the trees around the house and all the autumn leaves on the ground in the park and the last of the leaves that were still in the trees all swirled in the wind, but Mamma stood still, her eyes locked on us, on the mess in the park that we were.

  And as we watched her, she slowly parted her arms, dripping in the black silk of her Judge Judy-watching kimono, and she splayed out all of her ten ringed fingers. She looked those two girls dead in the eyes as she bent her knees and sprung off the front porch and into the air.

  Mamma was in the air, and she was flying. She flew over our gate and across the road and into the park, darting through the trees, twisting and turning, her black kimono flying out behind her, her black hair flying out behind her and her espadrilles never even almost touching the pavement.

  And she flew way above us. Way above me on the ground and above Maybe-Denise and the other one and even above Sally and Dwayne at the top of the slippery slide.

  And she hovered above us, spinning, around us all, in a slow circle. She spun above her prey, above her treasured ward and above the spectators. She could have grabbed them there and then, her prey, but that was no fun, Mamma wanted to see some bitches run.

  Maybe-Denise got up and started to run. And then the other one did too. They start
ed to run through the park, and just as they were about to disappear out of sight, Mamma began to fly, faster than before, her arms and legs stretched out as she glided through the air breaking every speed limit of every transport that ever was. She was bat and she was bullet streaming through the air and then out of the park and down the hill and out of our sight.

  Sally and Dwayne and I looked at each other.

  ‘Your mum is really mad,’ said Dwayne.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, solemnly.

  ‘And I’ll tell you something, I’ll never be able to play in the park again.’

  ‘Ever,’ added Sally.

  A few minutes later we saw the two girls walking back into the park, trying desperately not to look frightened. Mamma was behind them, marching them forward, a hand pressed into each of their backs, and then she sat them both down on a park bench.

  ‘You girls are in deep shit,’ she said, leaning against a tree.

  ‘Sally, go to your house and call the cops.’

  ‘What?’ said Maybe-Denise.

  ‘Don’t even call the cops!’ said the other one.

  ‘You, don’t talk,’ said Mamma. ‘You okay?’ she asked me.

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’

  ‘Don’t wash your face, don’t wash anything until the cops come and take a photo of your injuries.’

  ‘She wasn’t injured,’ said Maybe-Denise.

  ‘I. Said. Don’t. Talk. I’ve missed the second case of Judge Judy now, and I’m not in the mood to hear your voice,’ said Mamma, still leaning against the tree and not looking at Maybe-Denise.

  The police came and took the girls away. They were pleading and crying, and Mamma watched on, glistening with hero-sweat and smoking a Pall Mall Mild, with a distinct absence of mercy in her eyes.

  After that I really thought I would never be able to play in the park again. That wasn’t entirely true, but Mamma made Dad go have his after-work half-bottles of chardonnay in the park with Sally and Dwayne’s dad every day after that.

  This was pretty good, because our dads were not as good at knowing what we were and weren’t supposed to be doing. Also, it made it much easier for us to decide who was the most drunkest every day.

  The Persistence of Memory

  One chilly winter morning, I woke up from the slumber of a twenty-year-old who has the world at her feet, but for some reason works at a discount menswear store. I pondered, unfondly, on the day that stretched out before me of selling cheaply made suits to men who probably shouldn’t be proposing to their girlfriends.

  After a little tiff with my sleepy, stubborn body, I managed to coax it out of bed. Just before I got to the kitchen to fix a breakfast of whatever the opposite of champions are, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror in the hallway.

  How interesting, I thought, as I gazed upon my face. The right side of my face looks normal, and the left side of my face looks like a basset hound. I touched it, expecting it to be extremely tender, but it was rather more like poking a raw steak. A cold, dead steak.

  I did a quick search of my brain to ascertain where this fit in the scheme of things my face should look like. I had on occasion awoken to realise that I had fallen asleep on a corduroy cushion, and then discovered, in the looking glass, a face blotted with deep and squiggly red lines. This was somewhat like that – if, following that event, someone had shot me in the left side of my face with a tranquiliser dart.

  I walked to the kitchen and poured myself a bowl of cornflakes. I sat down to eat them, and as I pushed a silvery spoon, quivering with milk and flakes, into my mouth, I thought: How interesting. Usually when I perform this rudimentary task, the cornflakes manage to remain in my mouth before embarking on a mysterious journey through my insides. They don’t dribble slowly out onto the dining-room table making a very sad clumpy puddle of white and orange gunk. But my mouth couldn’t close. Try as I might, the left side of my mouth just gaped slowly in and out, never fully opening or closing, like a fish out of water.

  Georgia, who was fourteen at the time and had no understanding of what it meant to toil at a discount menswear store, came into the room.

  ‘Zoë …’ she said as she gazed upon me and the mess I was still in the process of making on the floor. That’s unusual, I thought as I watched her eyes widen in horror. My sister doesn’t usually look at me like I’m dying.

  ‘Zoë. Your face is broken.’

  In comes Mamma. Oh, Mamma, I thought. She will bring a needed air of calmness and perhaps a fitting explanati on for the circumstances. Mamma knows what’s what.

  That’s weird, I thought, as Mamma took a step back from me, gasped, and burst into tears. Mamma doesn’t usually behave like she’s just watched ten puppies get stabbed when she comes to join me in a bowl of morning cornflakes. She ran out of the room and dialled the doctor. Then she marched me, still in my pyjamas, down the street to our local GP. I sat in the waiting room among a bunch of coughing old ladies and elderly men in grey woollen waistcoats who farted and read the various useless inserts from the paper that had been discarded by previous patients.

  Occasionally one or another would look up at me, and their glances would linger on my face. That’s odd, I thought. Usually it is I gazing upon these aged citizens of the community with a mixture of pity and dread, and it seems that the tables have turned.

  Then my turn came. The doctor came out.

  ‘Zoë?’ she said, looking at me and then immediately down at her clipboard. ‘Right this way.’

  ‘It seems half of my face is broken,’ I told the doctor, as I sat down in the little white room, adorned with crayon pictures and photos of toddlers. She pulled out a packet of baby wipes and considered my face with a mild mixture of sorrow and disgust, like a pigeon that had been run over by a bicycle. Not quite dead, but certainly not quite right.

  ‘I think you have Bell’s palsy.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘No one really knows.’

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’

  ‘Take steroids.’

  ‘What will they do?’

  ‘Look, probably nothing, but they will make you put on quite a lot of weight.’

  ‘In that sense, those steroids are a bit like fifty Big Macs.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Is there anything else I should know?’

  ‘You’ll need to buy an eye patch.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because your left eye will weep a constant stream of tears until it goes away.’

  ‘When will it go away?’

  ‘Who can say. Could be a month, could be seven years.’

  I left the doctor’s surgery with a prescription for steroids and another for heavy painkillers, which I definitely didn’t need, but I dutifully took, because when science tells me I am allowed drugs, I am at her mercy. At the chemist I also bought my eye patch, which I found out soon after would be my best friend – if one’s best friend made one look like a sad pirate.

  As a twenty-year-old, I had been, until that very morning, skipping merrily down the same sexy path of experimentation as my friends. Then two roads diverged in a yellow wood. While my friends learned that men can be cruel, I learned that sometimes when you go into a shop, people feel sorry for you and give you stuff for free. My friends were in Cancun, and I was in a Kafka story.

  I quickly learned the following about Bell’s palsy: It makes half your face look like Salvador Dalí’s melting clocks. Doctors really don’t know anything about it, but they’ll chemically fatten you while you have it because there’s a character-building exercise somewhere in the Hippocratic Oath. Tissues are your constant bedfellow due to the Bell’s palsy mouth maxim: what goes in, must dribble slowly out.

  I tried my best to maintain a normal, Sex and the City-inspired social life. On Friday night I’d go out for drinks with my girlfriends. Camilla would tell us how the Chilean bartender downstairs just asked for her number, and I’d tell the gang about Mamma crying while watching me try to drink through a s
traw.

  Of all the people in my life, myself included, Mamma was the most upset by my new face. She even took it upon herself to do some internet research. She had discovered a PDF created by a university in Europe with some helpful advice on how to rehabilitate people with Bell’s palsy. It included things like forcing them to chew with the affected side of their mouth, trying to whistle and, of course, trying to drink through a straw. If I had bothered to look it up myself, I’m reasonably confident that I would have discovered that the PDF had in fact been created by the mean older brother of someone with Bell’s palsy, for all those tasks were in equal measure demeaning and impossible.

  Formerly, at the discount menswear store, I had struggled to move the acres of polyester T-shirts emblazoned with wilfully awful slogans like ‘One Tequila, Two Tequila, Three Tequila, Floor’, but my new face, which was essentially half a wheel of brie that had been left in the sun and dressed up as a pirate, seemed to evoke a level of pity which induced people to give us money. My canny manager recognised my newfound salesmanship and paraded me around the store like a curious street beggar. She even took me off probation, which meant upgrading my uniform from a polo shirt that said ‘Trish’ on the pocket to one that said ‘Zoë’ on the pocket.

  My new shirt filled me with pride, and philosophy. I began to become surprisingly self-reflective and ponderous for a sexually excitable twenty-year-old girl.

  So, Bell’s palsy. It was going to be my thing. It wasn’t great, but it could have been worse. I could have been one of those people with an annoying affectation, like always carrying around a ukelele. It probably didn’t bode well for my already fruitless attempts to acquire a mate through the tried and tested method of never making eye contact with a man. Cheerfully, things were so barren in that department that this turn of events surely couldn’t make things worse. Perhaps I could even garner a sympathy vote from a biology student, I thought, hopefully.

  I even briefly attempted a gym regimen. Each workout would leave a deep and lasting purple legacy all over my face for at least two hours. Also, each session seemed to bring my breasts one inch closer to my knees, and I already had enough problems in the arena of sagging, so I swapped it for drinking myself into a blissful oblivion.