Ebony Black. The semi-permanent costs me 16 dollars every three weeks. Hides the grey at my temples. Distracts from the wayward, rogue hairs bristling from my chin, my moustache. Pluck, bleach. I’d laser if I had the cash. Crone. Do I dye my hair? Do I own up to it?
Redundancy, what a word. Re-DUN-DAN-cy. DUN-DAN, DUN-DAN. Heavy like a 25-kilogram sack of weevil flour thudding onto a concrete floor. Forced redundancy, made redundant. On the dole. It’s retrenchment. Stretching 500 dollars across a fortnight. Stretching it like the crumbling waistband in my pyjama pants. I shop at the old Go-Lo in Ashfield Mall. People scratching themselves, antipsychotics and morning alcohol, a shimmering mirage towards the back of the shop. Go-Lo: the rejects’ shop.
Ash Black’s my natural colour, but ageing skin means I have to slap on more makeup to balance the stark dead-black. I can go Plum but it turns crimson at the temples. The grey soaks it up and I look like a wrinkled, apocalyptic angel. Dark circles under my eyes and a red halo. I pick up one box of Ebony for my interview on Friday. To grey or not to grey? To be or not to be.
Waiting in the two-dollar shop queue, a guy in a wheelchair asks me to hang his Vietnamese takeaway on his chair. I take the plastic bag and dangle it on the handle behind him.
‘But it’s rubbing against the wheel.’ He’s cranky. ‘It’s alright! It’s alright! Don’t have far to go. Don’t worry. Don’t worry!’
I let go of the bag and he questions my bag-hanging skills, ‘Is it straight? I don’t want the sauce slopping everywhere. Is the container straight?’
‘Yeah, it’s straight.’
He zooms down the street. My eyes focus on the takeaway bag as it swings from side to side.
It’s Wednesday. I’ve got two days to prepare for the interview. Car brakes squeal, buses lumber past. I catch the 491 and jump off at Canterbury Station to ride the Bankstown Line to the job agency. I’m clinging onto my packet of hair dye, knuckles turning white because the only other passenger in the carriage is speaking so bloody loudly into his phone. I face down anger. Day by day it gathers within my bones, creeping towards sunlight, whispering—restrained for now but straining to burst forth.
With false calm, I plan my evening. I’ll sponge the cold goo, black on dry hair, set the timer on the stove, have a coffee, and read my Elena Ferrante saga. When the stove dings, I’ll bend over the kitchen sink and pour warm water on the dye. Wiggly black lines will trickle down my neck. I’ll lay out my interview clothes for Friday morning. Make sure everything is clean. Ironed. Black skirt just below the knee, supposed to be A-line and verging on SABA chic, but my belly and hips think otherwise. My arse is getting flatter, no longer a sign of youth. A white blouse, black platform slingbacks with a peep toe, patent leather. My hair, very black, back in a bun. Back and black. ‘Back to Black’. The final act.
Friday, I’ll be on the interview assembly line once again, answering or not answering questions—hoping they’ll put me on the talent-pool list for the role of community corrections officer. If I’m lucky, they’ll look at me and say, ‘Beneficent taskmaster. Crone who’s had a lifetime of reigning in errant children and wild people. Yeah, let’s put her on the list.’
In this brave new world of constant rejection, of compromised ego from birth, this life of straddling cultures, who knows? Of performing double or triple takes before daring to say anything. Never saying what I really want, never saying what I mean. I’m the great circus performer, a juggler on a tightrope. I’m not like my immigrant parents. Their egos are tangible, solid Italian, and they direct themselves with confidence. They direct their wholeness into the world with a loudhailer, and I cringe because I learned my Ps and Qs. High grades in English and Maths at St Mary’s Star of the Sea Ladies College in Wollongong. Went to university and studied art. I’m an educated, Italian–English bilingual community worker looking for work in the community.
The artist, ha! She’s suffocating under so many layers of demoralisation, I can no longer hear her screams. What’s an education? What are years of specialised community work to a compliant zombie crone? I fill out my twenty job applications a month and tromp along to the job agency twice a week. I do my sixteen hours Work for the Dole, producing a community newsletter that nobody knows about, and nobody reads.
I descend from the train, walk the platform, hang my head, Zombie, with all the other walking dead, zombie. Walk the pavement, zomb-ie-ie, walk into the building, the flickering neon lights, synthetic blue carpet, the shitty gypsum-board booths. The agency has a sales team, for fuck’s sake! Who pays them to sell what? The sales rep, Mr London, in a brown suit and floral tie. His thick thighs are splayed across his cubicle; he’s using his phone for a personal call, voice ricocheting around the office. I clench my teeth, thinking, Who the hell do you think you are with your pathetic little sales pitches to people on the dole, telling us how to present ourselves, how to apply for work? It’s farcical. Tragic.
Vince yells, ‘Good to see ya, Buzz.’
I have no idea why he calls me Buzz. That’s my name when I’m here and I don’t mind. Vince edits the newsletter. He’s on the dole like the rest of us. Reminds me of Pauly from Fat Pizza but flabbier and older. Well-scrubbed, shiny face, smells of vanilla ice cream. He wears shorts and thongs in the middle of winter. Today, he’s tied back his hair in a ponytail. Other than talking about his dogs, he keeps his personal life to himself.
I plop down onto one of the office chairs. Its fake leather peels off like dandruff, leaving bits of white all over the carpet. Tapping away on the computer, writing crap for the newsletter, I stop to rub my neck. Aurelius comes up behind me and says, ‘I’ll do some Reiki on you.’
‘Maybe another time.’
He keeps talking, ‘I’ve trained. Got the gift. I’ll channel universal energies, transfer the love, the power, through your body, into your chakras. That’s what you need.’
Aurelius is soft like the red centres of Anticol lozenges. He lives in a boarding house in Campsie. Wears the same navy pants every time he comes in. A light blue shirt that’s turning yellow around the collar, and a tie with diagonal navy-and-white stripes. He used to be the state financial manager of a big retail outfit. The job agency got him six months’ work at Reverse Garbage in Marrickville with the graffiti offenders, state penalty enforcement guys, dudes on intensive correction orders. He was throwing tyres in the tyre crusher for 17 bucks an hour, basic wage. Now he’s back working with us, writing for the Work for the Dole community review.
This agency isn’t about helping us get jobs. They want us to seek jobs. That’s all. Been filling out pointless job applications for nine months now just to fill my quota, attending interviews with crap companies that I don’t respect. They advertise their shitty positions at fifty thousand a year and then tell me I’m over-qualified. Strange to think I was once eager. I believed the hype of the Job Network and all the stupid assistance programs.
The first interview I did, I almost skipped across the brick pavement leading into the building. A disability organisation offering ninety grand for the position. Halfway through the interview I realised they wanted a trainer, not a community worker. Two young, shiny men sat across from me, and a woman who must have been in the job for twenty years was calling the shots.
She leaned forward, grey jacket buttoned up tight over a lime-green shirt.
‘Some of our Ability Linkers have big personalities, big characters that may be difficult to manage. How would you handle them?’
I said, ‘Oh that’s easy, just make them the star!’
She studied my aquiline, high-bridged nose, the sallow sinkholes where my cheeks used to be, and I tried to salvage the answer.
‘I’d ask what strategies work for them. Each Linker obviously has something going for them. I wouldn’t discount that.’
She focused on me for a brief moment, long enough for me to see the rectangular windows behind me reflected in her eyes. For a glimmering moment, she thought maybe I was interesting. No crow’s feet around her eyes, no Planet of the Apes laugh lines stretching down from her nose around her mouth. She was probably in her mid-fifties, ferociously fighting her emerging crone.
‘So, if you had to write a training program for the Ability Linkers what would you put on the program?’
I asked her to repeat the question, and she did. My crone brain was doing gymnastics in space, nowhere to land, no walls to push off. I heard myself saying, ‘I don’t really know what Ability Linkers do.’
The woman’s wrinkleless and practised smile slid into a grimace. Her shoulders flopped forward. She clenched the cheeks of her arse, willing me to respond with some sort of answer, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I had no idea how to train Linkers. We went on to the next question. The young HR man avoided making eye contact with me. The other man stroked the long fringe that swept across his forehead. Vacuous soldiers of the non-profit sector. My skin flamed, eye sockets devoid of moisture, tongue shrivelled.
The next interview was for the position of incident support officer with the education department security services. It was in a call centre in a bunker within a public school, with no public transport. I had the skills. Conduct disorder, CBT, problem solving, negotiation, anger management. Working with hard kids involved in crime, gang members. I can smell dysfunction a mile away. The interviewers, a seconded policeman and a principal, used real case scenarios of head teachers calling into the centre. I rattled out my answers: bang, bang, bang! I did their IQ test that they called logical reasoning assessment, and did pretty well but still didn’t get the job. They said they’d give me feedback but gave me nothing.
At first I answered interview questions with passion, with integrity—third interview, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth… until sinister bureaucracy burned its way into my mind. Took control.
I joined the walking undead, glazed of eye, thick-tongued, crying at the doorsteps of those armies of salvation, wasting time in the unemployment lines, yeah, Tracy Chapman’s my hero, and I go through the motions. A zombie crone who can work independently, has excellent team-working abilities, great people skills, and meets deadlines. The interviewers’ heads bend forward and I’m fearful their foreheads are going to hit the table with a loud bang. They don’t bother to hide their disinterest.
I forgot today is the 10th. I haven’t applied for jobs. Usually, I’ve done at least ten by this time of the month. Mr London is out on one of his very long lunches. Vince and Aurelius are looking at photos on Vince’s phone; his two staffies. I stop messing around on the newsletter and start cutting and pasting applications. Two baristas and two barmaid jobs. I don’t have a barista’s certificate or a Responsible Service of Alcohol. These four job applications are a waste of time, acts of a true zombie feeding a burgeoning bureaucracy of senseless shit. After weeks and weeks of energy-gobbling, hamster-on-a-wheel stress, finally, the penny has dropped. I’ve just got to pretend to be looking for a job.
A guy in a suit rushes into the agency yelling, ‘I’ve got a job, it’s a cleaning job. You, Vince, you can go for this job. Fantastic! What an opportunity! You’re a hard worker. It’s good for you. Industrial cleaning. You’ve got to go there now! Now!’
Vince slows the guy down with his drawl, ‘Aw, my bicycle’s got a flat tyre and I haven’t been able to get it fixed.’
The man says, ‘Don’t worry, you can catch a train. Have you got a phone?’
Vince exuded calm, ‘I’ve got an old mobile but it’s actually not working at the moment. The battery’s buggered.’
‘Don’t worry, don’t worry. Have you got safety gear?’
‘No, I haven’t got any safety clothes.’
We all know the jobs are short-term, low-paid, non-sustainable rip-offs. The agency doesn’t inform us of the safety aspects or anything else. Those guys push us into the cruncher so they can tick the box and get paid. Every zombie learns to say no in the nicest possible way so the agency doesn’t stop our payments.
I’m learning from Vince. Getting better at saying no to the crap jobs.
Sitting on the train home, I stare out the window with the eyes of a dead fish. Boulevard Parade, the mowed lawns, pointy trees that darken house windows. A low brick fence that was once white, chattybum scrawled in blue. Two-storey ’60s flats, red brick with white-tipped balconies flicking past like a stuttering film. Wiley Park Station. No one’s on the platform. I climb the ramp holding the rail, my hand runs over a lump of hardened bubble gum, dark brownish-pink. A trickle of sweat pools between my breasts, my fringe sticks to my forehead.
I’d always thought I was working to help my community, older Italians, immigrants, the downtrodden, the isolated. Maybe I’d been doing the opposite. Unthinkingly assisting this huge, hidden web of power to ward off collective social change. Duped.
Now, I’m invisible, irrelevant, redundant at home in my little flat. I chuck my cup in the sink, grab the hair dye and go to the bathroom. I’ve got about one inch of grey showing at my roots. Bending my head under the tap, muttering, ‘Own the crone, own the crone.’ I run cold water over my scalp and all the pores close up in protest, tight, prickling like a new cold sore. I am the dark mother, decay and death. I’m autumn, winter, the waning moon.
Scratching around in the top drawer, my fingers dig into something sticky, a sample tube of eye cream leaking yellowed sludge across a hair clip. I find my scissors and wipe them clean. They’re sharp and make a satisfying crunching noise against my hair. I snip off the black and leave the grey. Spiky and strong, standing upright, silver bulrushes in the moonlight. I am the fucking crone!
Thursday morning, I run my fingers through my hair, put some red lipstick on, grab the stretchy skinny jeans I got from a Salvo’s shop and the long red Avanti polo T-shirt I bought when I was in la madre patria, the home country with my folks. I march into the agency whistling.
Mr London yells from his office, ‘Well that haircut’s certainly lowered your chances of getting a job!’
I yell back, ‘Think Dame Judi Dench!’
‘Who?’
‘What about Clover Moore? Short and spiky.’
‘You’re not her.’
‘Maybe not, Mr London, but I’m highly skilled and I’m a bloody hard worker.’
I sit at the computer and start typing. Aurelius comes up behind me.
‘I like it. Looks like you’re taking control.’
‘I am, Aurelius. I am.’
Vince looks over my shoulder. ‘What you doing?’
‘I’m writing a newsletter for people like you and me.’
He leans over my shoulder reading. ‘For real?’
‘Yeah, writing about a day in the life of an unemployed worker. How about that for a good read?’
‘Ha, a real nail-biter!’
‘What’re you going to do? Sell it to Netflix?’ Aurelius asks.
‘Very funny, you guys. I’m going to hand it out at the train station.’
Vince laughs, ‘You’re doing good. I’ll help you.’
‘Me too,’ says Aurelius.
Vince prints the newsletter on yellow paper. Aurelius staples the pages together. No-one ever checks our work. We head off to Bankstown Station with 30 copies. The tail end of the morning crush.
Vince and Aurelius do the Lidcombe side. I do the city, standing near the wheelchair ramp. One woman with a suitcase on wheels wobbles past me, a young mother pushes a double pram with a toddler and newborn both sleeping. Schoolboys wearing yellow and royal-blue uniforms, late for school. The youngest in the group takes a newsletter from me and puts it in the pocket of his backpack. Workers on the end of rush hour run up the ramp. Small business owners, migrants, poor people doing two or more jobs.
Some guy grabs a newsletter. He stops to read it. His hair is matted orange. He shouts, ‘Trotskyites!’
I laugh, ‘What use is a crone if she can’t hold up a lantern to show the way?’
‘You’re off ya rocker!’ he says.
Off my rocker or not, I’m no zombie, not anymore. I’m a silver-haired crone determined to defy this world’s quickening descent into hell.