Mama Mia Read online

  ‘Why don’t you go over for a few days to see what you think and meet the team?’ Lisa suggested.

  ‘Let me think about it over the weekend,’ I replied and went straight home and told Charlie. He responded to the idea of me moving to New Zealand by withdrawing emotionally and I responded by scampering after him.

  ‘Come with me to Auckland for a few days,’ I urged. ‘We’ll make a holiday of it. I’ll pay for everything.’

  He agreed and a week later we were at the airport.

  Small problem, Charlie didn’t know how he’d survive four days without dope. By now he was seriously addicted although he’d never have admitted it and I didn’t dare point out the obvious.

  An hour before our flight was due to leave, Charlie was crouched behind a car in the airport car park, sucking back deeply on a joint. It was enough to get him onto the plane and through the two-hour flight. He was still pretty mellow when we arrived in Auckland.

  At the baggage claim, we noticed a couple of customs dogs sniffing passengers and luggage. We giggled about how funny it would be if they bounded over to us. And then they did.

  While Charlie stood laughing in disbelief, one of the beagles began sniffing around his crotch. My giggle disappeared as it occurred to me we were in deep shit. Quickly, an airport official came over and discreetly yet firmly ushered us away from the baggage carousel. ‘Are you carrying any illegal substances?’ he inquired of Charlie quietly. ‘No!’ Charlie exclaimed.

  The official briskly instructed us to collect our bags and then join a small queue away from the main customs lines. As we waited, Charlie put his hand in his pocket and discovered a tiny stray bit of marijuana from his pre-flight joint. ‘Oh fuck,’ he murmured and tried to discreetly drop it on the floor.

  Having seen something suspicious through the one-way mirrors opposite where we were standing, another official soon appeared and took Charlie away for questioning. I was left alone to have our bags searched and consider how the hell I would explain this disaster to Lisa. After about fifteen minutes, Charlie returned, having been strip-searched. He had nothing on him—he wasn’t that stupid—but he was a bit shaken and now strung out on adrenaline.

  As our bags were painstakingly checked, he started babbling to the customs official. ‘We’ve been sent here by Kerry Packer, you know. My girlfriend works for ACP and she’s here for a job interview.’

  I wanted to die. After I killed him.

  The inspection finished and we were allowed to go. As we walked through the gates, now two hours past our expected arrival time, I caught sight of someone from ACP’s New Zealand office waiting to greet us. ‘Don’t say a word about what just happened,’ I hissed to Charlie, mortified.

  ‘Guess what? We just got searched for drugs!’ was the first thing out of his mouth. My colleague blanched visibly.

  The next few days went steadily downhill, if that was possible from the starting point of a strip-search. Without dope, Charlie became increasingly agitated. His nervous energy—which he usually calmed with a cone, or three—had nowhere to go and while I had meetings at the office, he climbed the walls.

  Not surprisingly, I didn’t take the job. I think I’d already made my decision before boarding the plane and that’s probably why I took Charlie with me. I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t be seduced by my Auckland trip—I knew ACP New Zealand would make the job seem as attractive as possible—and with Charlie along for the ride, it was always going to be a disaster. I wasn’t ready to move there and launch Cleo, but I was conflicted because the offer was an amazing opportunity. So I used my floundering relationship to sabotage it.

  I didn’t want the Girlfriend job either. I wanted to stay working closely with Lisa and my other mentors and learn more before making the leap to editor.

  So two years after starting at Cleo, in the space of two months, I had been offered two incredible jobs and turned them both down. Somehow, I had not managed to convert either of these opportunities into more money or even a promotion. After all the excitement and flattery, it was business as usual at my small brown desk in the ugly brown features office. Part of me was relieved. Part of me was deflated. But I never regretted either decision.

  The best thing about my New Zealand experience was that it marked the beginning of the end for Charlie and me. Back home, it continued to deteriorate until I realised I wasn’t in love with him. I never had been. It had taken me more than a year to understand the difference between passion and abuse—although I still didn’t call it that. The fact I cried so often didn’t mean it was deep and complex; it meant that it was destructive and ugly.

  On paper, there was no reason not to end it. The apartment lease was mine. The car was mine. My friends and family were behind me. He had none of that.

  Ironically, this made dumping him harder. I felt sorry for him. How would he support himself financially? How would he cope emotionally? Where would he live? The band’s gigs weren’t leading to anything substantial, and I knew he’d be devastated if he had to move back with his parents in Brisbane. So I put his wellbeing before my own and sucked it up for a few months more, waiting for an escape route to present itself.

  A couple of months before Christmas, an opportunity arose for the band to travel to London. There had been a sniff from a record company who thought they had potential and wanted them to start touring in Europe to build up a following. It was an open-ended trip with the possibility of Charlie staying away as long as a year—longer if things worked out.

  His physical presence and personality were so forceful that I felt powerless to end the relationship while we were living together. But I knew if I had some mental and physical space, I’d have a chance to close the door behind him permanently. So I encouraged him to go.

  At first, he was suspicious. ‘Are you trying to get rid of me? Is there someone else you’re waiting to jump on the second I’m gone?’ But I promised to visit in a couple of months and repeatedly reassured him that this was an amazing opportunity. ‘You should grab it with both hands,’ I said. Which of course he was always going to do, with or without my blessing.

  I lied, telling him my lease was up and I’d be moving in with my friend Karen for a while. ‘It might be a good idea if you put your stuff into storage while you’re gone,’ I suggested. He bought it.

  And so he left. Suddenly I could breathe again. Within days of him boarding that plane, I could feel my strength returning. He phoned me regularly and I’m sure he sensed the change in my voice each time we spoke as I pulled away.

  After a month, I told him it was over. His response was far easier to deal with across a different time zone. I no longer had his anger in my face, his clothes in my cupboard or his bong on my coffee table.

  He called me at all hours, sometimes in tears, sometimes shouting, always begging for another chance. But once that door in my head had closed, there was no possibility of it opening again. As insurance, I began to cautiously tell my friends and family the truth about Charlie. I knew once they understood what the relationship had been like, they’d stop me if I ever tried to go back.

  It’s strange but when I did see him again—he came home to visit his family six months later—all the power he’d once had over me had evaporated. I wasn’t scared or intimidated any more. It was over and I was relieved.

  And then I was angry. The emotion was overwhelming and refused to dissipate. I was furious with him for being an arsehole and with myself for letting him treat me like shit. All the anger I’d never allowed myself to feel when we were together came bubbling up to the surface. Along with it came bitterness. Bitterness that I’d allowed such a destructive situation to continue for almost two years. And for what? Bong-water stains on my carpet?

  Thank God for Alanis. She understood. One of the best parts of this break-up was my timing. It was the early nineties and Jagged Little Pill had just been released. Alanis Morissette’s rage-fuelled album of vengeful anthems was empowering.

  Jagged Little Pill was my
soundtrack and solace in the months after the break-up. I played it so much it virtually embedded itself in my DNA. The shouty angst propelled me through the impossibly complicated tangle of my emotions and out the other side. The anger faded and I became simply sad for the person I’d been in those two years.

  It took me a long time to understand this, but my relationship with Charlie was an extremely valuable one because it helped me calibrate what I was looking for in a partner. It taught me what I didn’t want. What I wouldn’t accept. What love didn’t look like.

  Had I not obliterated fantasy about the allure of the bad boy by experiencing its full destructive power, I never would have appreciated my next relationship for what it was: the best thing that had ever happened to me.

  BREAKING UP WITH BEAUTY

  Voicemail to Kim from me:

  ‘Hi Kim, it’s Mia calling again. I just wanted to say thanks so much for what you did with the shoes. I do feel dreadful about that. I hope you didn’t get into any trouble because of me. Anyway, I also had an interesting idea I’d love to talk to you about. My job! Do you want it?’

  ‘If I have to go to one more beauty launch I’m going to impale myself on a mascara wand,’ I announced dramatically as I plonked into a chair across the desk from my boss. ‘I swear, Lisa, I cannot stand it for another single second!’

  Two years of beauty had taken their toll. I was over it.

  She smiled indulgently at my theatrics. She knew this day would come. If you really want to be an editor, you tire of the beauty gig fairly quickly. Two years is maximum tenure before you become stuck, typecast, dizzy from champagne and fragrance fumes.

  More importantly, I’d run out of space to stash beauty products at home. As a beauty editor you receive a truly obscene amount of stuff. Every day there would be at least half a dozen courier deliveries. As if the products themselves were not enough, PR companies would try to give their client an edge by sending a gift with the beauty products. Not to be photographed, just for the beauty editor to keep.

  A range of make-up with an urban theme might come with an iPod or half a dozen CDs. A Valentine’s Day lipstick collection might come with a huge vase full of white Lindt balls. A winter skincare range might be wrapped snugly in a pale blue pashmina. It was endless and excessive.

  Beauty editors have lockable cupboards near their desks full of products they’ve been sent. They choose which ones to photograph for their beauty pages and then they’re supposed to put everything back in the cupboard to distribute among the staff at one of the regular ‘beauty sales’ that happen every few months. Everyone pays a token fee, say ten dollars, and gets to take home hundreds of dollars worth of gear.

  Of course, by sale time, the beauty editor has already taken home all the best stash for herself. I did. Some magazines use their beauty sales to raise money for charity or for their Christmas parties. At Cleo, we used it to sponsor a child from overseas. The contrast between the image of the sweet little brown-faced boy we’d stuck up on the communal fridge and the lavish superficiality of the beauty industry would sometimes make my brain hurt. But then I’d be distracted with yet another delivery from the courier dock. More flowers? More eye cream?

  Sharing the cramped office with me and the beauty cupboard were three other staff including Wendy, Cleo’s features editor. Since arriving at Cleo via Elle magazine, where she’d done a brief beauty stint, she’d become an important mentor as well as a friend.

  We’d bonded one day while at the launch of a new skincare range. As we sat in front of yet another plate of poached salmon, watching yet another interminable presentation and hearing the ‘scientific evidence’ that this cream would change our lives, Wendy nudged me and whispered, ‘Isn’t all this stuff just Sorbolene in fancy packaging?’ I stifled a giggle. Then the voiceover on the video intoned gravely, ‘Every facial expression you make—every frown, every smile—is creating more lines on your face.’

  ‘Note to self,’ Wendy whispered. ‘Must stop making facial expressions. Will appear boring and vacuous but youthful.’ That was it. I loved her. So I was excited when Lisa appointed her features editor soon afterwards and plonked her next to me permanently. Having begun her career in newspapers, I learned so much from Wendy about writing and journalism, and how they could occasionally co-exist within the beauty gig.

  A few months after arriving at Cleo, she gave me a wake-up call after overhearing me talking on the phone to a beauty PR.

  ‘Mia, you really must get out of beauty,’ she said when I hung up. ‘Do you have any idea how insincere you just sounded?’

  I looked at her blankly.

  ‘The moment you picked up the phone you started talking in this fake sing-song beauty voice. It was awful. You don’t want to be that person.’

  She was right, I didn’t. I hated fake beauty me. And there are only so many times you can arrange your face into an expression of rapt amazement while someone in a pretend lab coat gives a PowerPoint presentation about the revolutionary addition of free radicals to a neck cream. I never understood what free radicals were, anyway. And frankly, I didn’t give a rat’s.

  All this I explained to Lisa and she listened calmly, as she always did. ‘Okay,’ she said finally, when I’d run out of rant, ‘how about I make you lifestyle editor and you can start writing more features, move away from beauty and learn more about how the magazine is put together—’

  ‘Yes!’ I interrupted, beaming.

  ‘One thing, though,’ she smiled. ‘You have to help me find a beauty editor to replace you before you get your promotion.’

  ‘Done!’ I promised, bouncing out of her office, straight to my phone. I was a girl on a mission. And the first person I thought of was Kim. There was no one else. She was perfect.

  I’d known Kim socially for a couple of years through the industry and our paths had crossed again just recently. She was working as a fashion PR and a few weeks earlier I’d had to call her to apologise for losing a pair of shoes I’d borrowed to photograph for one of my pages. She could have been a bitch about it but instead was very kind. ‘Don’t worry,’ she’d reassured me as I grovelled. ‘I’ll sort it out.’

  I knew Kim used to work in magazines before PR and had been a PA to a couple of important editors. On the off-chance she’d be interested in returning to magazines, I asked if she wanted to apply for my job. She did. Lisa loved her and within a few weeks Kim was installed alongside me and Wendy in the small brown office.

  Kim was incredibly glamorous—always immaculately dressed for work and perfectly groomed. I tried hard to work a look but ‘try-hard’ was exactly how I came across. Fashion just wasn’t in my DNA like it was in Kim’s.

  She was a natural at beauty, had a prodigious talent for styling beauty shoots and quickly became a far better beauty editor than I’d ever been.

  Like my other friends and workmates, she wasn’t fond of Charlie and she’d been dismayed to see the effect he’d had on me. I tried to hide it but we worked two metres apart and even when she managed not to overhear my tense phone conversations with him, she couldn’t miss the part where I was in tears afterwards.

  She and Wendy were instrumental in encouraging me to kick his arse to the kerb and they were delighted when I finally did. How appropriate then that they were both witnesses to what would happen next.

  USING CARAMELLO KOALAS TO OPEN DOORS

  Voicemail to Kim from me:

  ‘The Caramello Koalas worked. I have a meeting with Bernie Leser tomorrow at 3 pm. Could I really live in New York? Poppy King’s here at the moment and we’ve been hanging out. She wants to move here too. I’ll try to catch you tomorrow to fill you in on my meeting.’

  The closer I’d risen towards my dream job of editing Cleo, the more disillusioned I’d become. From that first moment I’d sat in Lisa Wilkinson’s office for my work-experience interview, I’d known, just KNOWN, that I’d be the editor of Cleo before I turned twenty-five. It was destined.

  Such unshakable arrogance
was perhaps unremarkable for a nineteen-year-old, but for a few years, it looked like I might be right. My rise through the magazine ranks at Cleo had been relatively swift. I’d been promoted from work experience to beauty writer to beauty editor to lifestyle editor to features editor within the space of five years. I’d risen from unpaid serf to one of the most senior roles on the magazine. And then, quite unexpectedly, everything stalled.

  Pregnant with her second child, Lisa decided to leave Cleo permanently. Her first son was not yet two and she was about to have another baby. After ten years as the magazine’s most successful editor, it was time. The end of an era. She was done.

  As we prepared to farewell Lisa, the new editor was announced. It was Wendy, at the time Cleo’s deputy editor. When Lisa called the staff together to make the announcement, I was happy. Wendy’s elevation cleared the next rung on my own ladder. I was going to be deputy editor.

  So I was puzzled and annoyed that Lisa didn’t announce my promotion at the same time she announced Wendy’s. It was obvious, wasn’t it? If number two was moving up to number one, then as number three I was in line for the number-two job. Right? Wrong. Wrongity wrong.

  The hierarchy of magazines is not like a bank queue where the next person in line automatically steps up. Just because you’re good at your job, it doesn’t mean you have the right skills or personality to do the one above you when it becomes available. Even if you do, there’s probably someone who can do it better.

  Correctly, Lisa allowed Wendy to choose her own deputy, and right away my friend warned me that I might be disappointed. ‘You and I are too alike,’ she explained as I sulked and fumed. ‘Our strengths are too similar. I need someone who can complement me and do things I don’t want to do.’

  There was another crucial reason she didn’t promote me. She thought I wasn’t ready. This was hard to hear and impossible to believe. ‘You need more experience in features,’ she explained. ‘You have to do the time. It’s too soon.’