Taking all these bone-breaks and heartaches into consideration, Edith was still proud to declare ‘Je Ne Regrette Rien’, which in English is, of course … hang on, I’ll look it up. Okay, that’s right, which in English is ‘I Regret Nothing’.
But was she serious? No regrets about the car wrecks? None for her doomed lovers? No angst about having seen very little of Marcelle before the child’s terrible death? Non! Mon dieu! Talk about ‘I’m a glass half-full kind of person’. (I’m a glass half-full person too. But it’s hard to drink that much cow vomit in one sitting.)
Unlike Edith, I regret pretty much everything. Don’t you? I spend long, languid afternoons sipping cider and examining, in forensic detail, those special painful and upsetting moments. The ‘Man, what was I thinking?’ ones.
Here’s a new regret I prepared earlier: I buy about two CDs a year these days, and otherwise steal online with impunity. The last album I bought was OK Go’s Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky. Wicked singles and startling film clips, including this, the best rock video in history. The record’s just not as good as I expected. But in JB Hi-Fi it was as though I were divested of my free will, somehow destined by philosophical determinism to buy a record that was not really worth the money.
Another typical example: if no other ciders are available at a pub, I’ll order a pot of Coldstream, a bat-piss stinker of a cider, abnormally opaque and containing only homeopathic traces of apple. I’ll buy it because I haven’t got the message from the last time I tried it, which was to avoid that stuff from now until the end of time.
The first thing I regret having done was deliberately pissing my pants in Grade Two. I was hit by a violent crampy stomach pain in class, so they fetched my brother (Grade Four) to take me home. At the school gates he asked me if I’d peed. No I hadn’t but, rather than go back to the school facility, I just stood there and, yes, pissed my pants. Saturated them. End of cramp. Problem solved. It was all fine until I got home. Then it wasn’t fine. And I learned a life lesson. Use a toilet. Don’t take a slash in your shorts. You don’t want to ruin your Bata Scouts or get a slap from your dad.
In Grade Five my neurotic teacher, Miss Page, took us up onto the netball court for a rare P.E outing. (I have to say she looked amazing, Miss Page. Like Himmler.) We all stood in a circle and two netballs were introduced, the idea being that every second person was in the second-person team, and would try to catch the first-person team and overtake them. So, every time the balls caught one another up, some poor soul would be called on to catch both simultaneously. Can you see what was happening to create this problem? The numbers were uneven. There were twenty-seven or thirty-one students, not twenty-six. So the first team and the second team would merge and the whole house of cards would collapse. I knew what was going on. Everyone else knew what was going on. Miss Page didn’t. She lost her rag after the third unavoidable fumble and we all trudged back to class. I wish I’d told her what was going wrong – in order to stay outside in the sun but mostly to make her look like the fucking idiot she was.
In Grade Eight I managed to get Kay Wallace to ‘go with me’. I didn’t know what to do now that I was going with someone. I knew what I was supposed to do. And to further emphasise my inability to do it, I spent an afternoon in somebody’s pool room sitting with Kay, watching my brother and his friend Robert pash their respective girlfriends, only stopping to sit upright and laugh at me. The closest I got to necking was putting my arm around Kay’s shoulders and keeping it there until it was numb.
Back at school, Kay dropped me. And fast. As the months passed she blossomed into a beauty the likes of which you would only find in a Botticelli painting at a gallery in Florence. Her lack of interest by now, of course, was complete. She started dating thugs.
Naturally I couldn’t let that experience teach me anything. Two years later I more or less repeated the same thing with Kate Wall. She was a willowy, posh English girl who was unambiguously keen on me, but once more I was frozen. Kate was personified in my novel Buzzed as Susan Cake, a girl so English she may as well have had a tattoo of Churchill above her butt. I was fourteen. It was just a little bit too early still for me to confidently take a deep breath and … DO SOMETHING.
The next year, Kate appeared at the college where I was studying for the HSC (she was a year behind me, so new to the co-ed college scene, where you could smoke and play pool and do nothing much else at all). Now achingly stunning, Kate made Kay Wallace look like Queen Victoria. I happened upon her sitting in the autumn sun, and we had a perfectly pleasant conversation, during which I sensed I was being toyed with by a young woman well aware of the heartbreaking power she could wield over young men by doing nothing except sitting there. It would make little difference if she puked all over herself, or dribbled when she laughed. You could still fall in love with her if she were in a coma.
But that was it with me and Kate. By now I had finally worked out that striking while the girl was hot was essential. With that knowledge under my belt, I spent the next few years crashing, burning and humiliating myself in the name of love. One doleful romantic travesty followed another.
I regret, too, not having superpowers, particularly the one that would allow me to travel back in time to beat the shit out of some people who bullied me.
My greatest regret, though, the one I still ruminate over daily, was played out on a soccer pitch in Brisbane in 1978. We (Tasmania) were playing the scummers (New South Wales) in the national under 16 tournament. We were the best team Tassie had ever sent. We actually won games. Halfway through the second half, we were not only leading 3-1 but I’d scored two of our goals. This was dreamworld for me. Tasmania doesn’t beat New South Wales or Victoria and, yet, here we were. How could anything possibly go wr— .
With about fifteen minutes to go, and in a moment of perfect madness and total auto-sabotage, I attempted to tackle one of the blue guys, but mistimed my challenge and struck the ball firmly and with pinpoint accuracy into our own goal, past the desperate dive of our goalkeeper. That brought it back to 3-2. Sniffing a change in the wind, they deployed the bully-state after-burners and rapidly knocked in another couple. The final whistle. I collapsed, begging that someone would plunge a garden pitchfork through my chest. A punishment our coach would have been entitled to mete out himself.
Many years later I saw Barry, the coach, at a state championship soccer soiree, and it was made apparent while we chatted, almost before we chatted, that my fateful mis-kick had destroyed two lives. Mine and his too. It had cloaked the sunshine of his days, just as it had mine, and it had probably cost him his marriage.
I regret almost every review of every record I ever critiqued. I could be very mean-spirited. My piece on The Cult’s Sonic Temple, for example, began like this: ‘It is, of course, crap.’ I asked Kim Wilde what she thought about Thatcher. I interviewed Steve Cropper. Steve! Cropper! The piece was held over for a week but then dropped off the radar. Never published. If you’re going to waste someone’s time, try not to make it that of the man generally viewed as, next to Hendrix, the most important guitarist in history.
My ‘if only’s are filed and organised and always being expanded upon. Big regrets, little ones, silly ones, costly ones. None can be undone. You think I should get over my ruminating and fulminating? You don’t understand. I coulda had class, I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody. And I coulda pashed Kate Wall.
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