Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.
Once upon a time there was a white bulldog. He lived in a house with 2 monkeys. They were happy together. Most of the time. Except when the bulldog didn’t do the dishes, or the monkeys wouldn’t share the remote. One of the monkeys, whose name was Umbrella, would get frustrated easily and leave angry post-it notes on the fridge about what the other two were doing wrong. The bulldog thought this was quite rude, but in the vein of ‘never argue with a drunk’ he figured trying to confront a passive aggressive monkey would probably be a waste of his time.
They had come to live together in that way most share houses form. Someone knew someone who needed a flatmate, so the two monkeys started chatting. The found a great 3 bedroom house to rent off another mate’s aunt, so they put an ad on Gumtree for a third person and that’s how they found the bulldog. They nicknamed him Spot.
Every day Spot and the other monkey, Anne, would grab a morning coffee from their favourite barista, on the way to the train station. One day, he wasn’t there. They asked what happened and it turned out he’d broken his arm kite-surfing. Anne commented that only losers kite-surfed. Anyway, because of that, the café has this imbecile operating the coffee machine. Anne’s coffee was scorched and Spot’s was watery. After a day or two of this, they asked when their usual barista was coming back. Turns out a bit of time to himself had allowed the barista to rethink his life purpose and what he really wanted to do was be a school teacher. So that was that. No more good coffee. Anne and Spot realised they needed a volunteer to make better coffee.
First they tried to get the café owner to hire a better barista. She liked the new guy though because he was cheap and cute. So then they figured they would get their own coffee machine at home. But who could show them how to work it properly? They scratched around all their friends trying to work out who could help them. Until finally they realised Umbrella was their guy. He made great coffee. Everyone was happy. Except he still left angry post-it notes. But now he stuck them on the coffee machine.
In case of emergency
So we’d ditched the kids, flown to Sydney, raced to the hotel, put on our fancy wedding clothes, raced to the wedding, grabbed a champagne and started talking. I’m really good at talking. I tried to eat some food. I knew I NEEDED to eat some food but… you know those kind of finger-food things, you’re constantly grasping at the tray just out of reach as the arrogant child waiter whisks it out of your grasp. And I didn’t want to be the greedy freeloader chasing the waiter through the cocktail party. And then there were the wine fairies running around, topping up my magic-pudding glass that never got empty. Add to that the late night, a sneaky durrie or two and a mad scramble in a taxi to the airport the next morning. I was not feeling well.
I was sitting on the plane and I did something I’ve never done before. I’ve flown a lot. My parents divorced when I was five and my mum moved us from Melbourne to Queensland. I flew back and forth four times a year, every school holidays, to visit Dad. I’ve flown a lot. I had never thrown up on a plane. I’d look at those little white sick bags and pity the poor losers who had to use them. Now that was me. A forty-year-old mother of two with a hangover. I was hurking and groaning and moaning and retching. My body was doing that vomit convulsing. And my darling husband, who was sitting next to me engrossed in a podcast, took a few moments to notice. Then he lifted up his phone, took a photo, grinned and went back to his podcast. Without even removing his headphones.
Fucker.