Brigid Delaney - Wellmania

Published by Nero,

an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd

Level 1, 221 Drummond Street

Carlton VIC 3053, Australia

www.nerobooks.com

Copyright Brigid Delaney 2017

Brigid Delaney asserts her right to be known as the author of this work.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Delaney, Brigid, author.

Wellmania / Brigid Delaney.

9781863959315 (paperback)

9781925203165 (ebook)

Health.

Well-being.

Health attitudes.

Health behavior.

Cover design by Design by Committee

Cover image by Josh Durham

Text design and typesetting by Tristan Main

For Tim & Bonnie two friends I admire who live well, but also live good. And for Frankie whos just beginning.

BEFORE

I n the last days of my thirties, I was living in a warehouse in Bushwick, Brooklyn. It had never really felt like a home. Strange and beautiful murals by the Iranian artists Icy and Sot ran five metres up the building, a former storage facility. The walls were flimsy, and painted Xs in the stairwell marked demolition or some future work to be undertaken. We had a loft bedroom in which guests slept centimetres from exposed pipes leaking something that wasnt poisonous, but wasnt pleasant. We always kept the windows open, even when it was cold.

I was sub-sub-subletting it from an Australian photographer who had moved to Kabul, but no one seemed to know who was on the lease. Mail came for at least a dozen different people with exotic names; Germans, Russians, Koreans and Welsh people had all lived here. We knew them by their uncollected bills.

Winter was coming. I was finishing edits on a novel and had settled into a nice routine. Breakfast was a toasted poppyseed bagel with hummus and a large, strong latte over the paper edition of the New York Times at a cafe that played old Smiths songs. There were happy-hour margaritas with friends in Manhattan, dinners at bistros around Brooklyn farm-to-fork stuff, with an emphasis on the produce of Vermont (in particular, bacon). My yoga studio was near home, at the back of a dive bar. You did a class for twelve dollars and got a free pint of beer. When the deadline for my novel drew near, I took prescription-only diet pills and worked with a furious focus for eighteen hours a day.

On my birthday, I pretended to be an Asian friend to get access to her private members club in the East Village. My friends and I were meant to go on to a Daft Punk tribute band, then have supper at a place up in Harlem, but instead sat around until after midnight drinking Negronis and Old Fashioneds from heavy-bottomed crystal glassware the sort that in Agatha Christie novels were used as murder weapons. Later a speakeasy filled with really young people, the seasons first snow, cold legs, the frightening sight of my face in the bathroom mirror (the assistant at Sephora had gone all goth with my eye make-up), my friends going to another bar to buy some molly and me drunk, disorientated, walking somewhere in Chelsea, then in a cab, arguing with the driver about the best way to get home. Him getting upset, telling me over and over to stop cussing.

The next night I went to my real birthday party, with friends who made me cake. I sat very still, sipping tea, feeling disconnected, unwell. I was terribly hungover.

My twenties and teens had been years of living wildly. Id had a debauched thirtieth in Barcelona that was meant to be goodbye to all that. Yet my thirties had been reckless and exhilarating in a way I hadnt expected. It felt like I was a ball and someone was playing pinball really hard with me. I was shooting all over the place, the board lighting up and the music playing.

What did I want my forties to look like? Not this. The carnival was over. Yet, yet, the fun I had My friends were the same. Children had slowed some of them down, but the things that were meant to happen the brakes applied, the early bedtimes, the slippers and the hot chocolate had never eventuated.

After my birthday we got evicted from the warehouse. It was the first time I had just walked out of an apartment with all the stuff still in it. When I slid the keys under the door, there were still jumbo tubs of mayonnaise in the fridge.

I headed south. In Jakarta a couple of years before, I had met a Texan guy. He ran a boutique hotel near the diplomatic district and the first time we met wed stayed up all night on the roof of the hotel, the pool shimmering and the call to prayer sounding at 4am from the mosque below. That first conversation, mostly about books and writing, lasted until the sun came up. I wondered if this could be love. He was the biggest hedonist Id met. He was now back in Texas and the prospect of seeing him again filled me with excitement, and a smattering of fear. Hed be picking me up from the airport in a red Cadillac.

But first, Atlanta. I went in face-first, eating Americana baked sweet potato covered in marshmallows and coated in Splenda, with hunks of cola-basted baked turkey for Thanksgiving. Then the bus to Savannah: drinking in the streets, Spanish moss, pretty graveyards and this place called Angels Barbecue, where I first tasted, and adored, proper southern cooking.

Then a week in New Orleans for a travel story: a sign at the airport saying this was the number-one city for liver transplants, a band that looked and sounded like The Cat Empire playing for hours in a backstreet of the French Quarter under shifting shafts of sunlight, mint juleps, martinis, shots of bourbon appropriately on Bourbon Street, jazz bars, gumbo. Reviewing a restaurant called Mother whose side portions of mac and cheese spread across enormous dinner plates.

Then, finally, Austin with my Texan friend, who had grown a beard and put on 12 kilos since Jakarta. Restaurants, brunches, Tex-Mex, red wine, chess in front of an open fire at the W, live music, beer, house parties, cocaine, melted cheese dip and corn chips, football games, women in cowboy boots cracking on to my Texan, me feeling sick with jealousy, no sleep, meeting a woman who had blown every rocker in Austin and was obsessed with the novels of Tim Winton. Nachos, enchiladas on hot plates, hot dogs on paper plates, tequila at brunch, rib joints, burger bars, piano bars, martini bars, dive bars. Starting to feel unwell all the time, my body protesting, actually aching at the excesses.

On my flight back to New York an elderly woman collapsed. They laid her out in the aisle and the plane dipped into LaGuardia and slid down the runway as fast as Ive seen a plane land. She was fitted with an oxygen mask and taken out of the plane on a gurney. Her friends filed out behind her, alarmingly unconcerned. They were Texans coming to New York for Christmas shopping. The sick woman was a portent. I felt it. I also returned from the South feeling about 100 years old. Every part of me was tired.

Back in New York, it was freezing. There was snow on the footpath, and the pine scent of freshly cut Christmas trees was in the air. I was not quite homeless. I had agreed to cat-sit in a building on the Upper East Side, for a friend of a friend. This woman lived in a room without any windows with a cat she had found in a dumpster. The cats name was George Costanza.

The room used to be a storage cupboard. Thats why it had no windows. I was shocked that a cat could live in such a small space, let alone a human being. I quickly felt depressed in the airless bedsit with the scared, unhappy cat. Without a proper kitchen, I ate all my meals at a nearby diner: eggs always coming with something called hash, bad coffee in bottomless cups.