2006

When I open my cupboard there's a section to the right exclusively for jumpers of ex boyfriends, they're my ghosts of relationships past but for some reason I am can't throw them out.Their styles and branding are really representative of the men, or boys who've left them there.

They're a timeline of the horrible and questionable choices i've made though out my life. Like Blake Murdoch, who took my virginity using a glow in the dark condom, out doors at a football match and then lent me his “echo red” hoodie, complete with reflective rhinoceros to walk home in.

Or Richard Ayode who wore a Fubu jersey with the F and B embossed on the front like some kind of ghetto chest plate. Ramie Ayat who wouldn't kiss me after I gave him head, somehow his dick was fine for my mouth but any kind of dick remnants that might be transferred from my mouth to his were completely un acceptable.

Or Mark Candler and his old worn out Fremantle dockers fleecy jumper with a zip at the front.

I wasn't really sure if it's appropriate to use his whole name but he's not on facebook and I googled the shit out of him and couldn't find anything so I thought if he's not real online then he kind of ceases to be a person. Plus he lives in Perth, which once you've lived on the east cost for a while seems like this made up place. But really it's somewhere that people's prized possession is their really big tv and they say the word “youse” a lot. What are youse doing? Are youse goin' to the dockers game this weekend?

So, that's where this story takes place.

I met Mark when I was 18. I'd very recently moved away from a small mining town, to the big lights of Perth. To me, someone who'd gone to primary school in sydney but then been suddenly and very rudely uprooted into the heart of darkness that is the Pilbara desert when I was about 12. The idea of stacking on the kilos, becoming an admin assistant and moving in with my high school boyfriend Mike Swinbourne seemed pretty bleak. Early marriage and decent into rural oblivion was for someone else!

Not me.

I used to drink cappuccinos with my precocious friend Jemima Saw at a cafe in Milsons Point while we talked about the fact that celery was a negative calorie food and Anna Hankins denim turn up skirt was the epitome of perfection.

So no.

Not me.

I was going places!

The thing was, I didn't really have much focus or any idea what to do with my life but I was pretty susceptible to advertising and relatively fit. So, $5000 and 8 weeks later I became a qualified personal trainer. I wore Lorna Jane shirts that said “dream, believe, achieve” and had those runners with the little shock absorbers at the back.

What a wanker.

But there I was!

Living in a share house in sunny Cottesloe beach with a girl called Hannah and her Boyfriend Pig, teaching boxercise classes to single white women of varied age and weight ranges contemplating how lucky I was to be out of Port Hedland.

So when Mark came around he was right up my ally, He was a trainer too, I met him at a gym we both worked at.

Mark was confident, tall, lean and played AFL every Sunday.

When he was on the field his socks were always pulled up all the way, and he'd go around slapping the bums of all the other players in an encouraging but slightly homo erotic way. He had lived in England for two years, working in bars and travelling. My family never took trips over seas so the fact that Mark had travelled made him seem kind of exotic, or maybe just grown up. I was 18 and he was 25, at the time I thought that was kind of cool, like I was mature for having an older boyfriend, but looking back I think that maybe it was more that he hadn't grown up and dating someone his own age would force him to acknowledge it.

Before our first date I went to a uni pub with some friends of mine, it was their last day of semester and we got really drunk on $10 jugs of cider. So by the time he came to pick me up I was pretty sloshed, he was polite though and even drove me back to the campus when I realised that i'd left my handbag there.

We went to a vietnamese restaurant, I don't think i'd ever really eaten much vietnamese, as i'd spent my formidable years in a small, slightly racist town that specialised in fast food joints called Chicken Treat. My days of cappuccinos and negative calorie celery seemed like a distant memory. I'd take anything I could get.

One beef pho please.

As the night went on I tried my hardest to sober up and make intelligent, mature chit chat, and after dinner we went to a cocktail bar.

I liked Mark because knew how to order drinks.

He drank Talisker.

Neat.

“I like my whiskey neat and my women neater”.

He ordered my drink for me.

The move didn't seem cocky but more self assured. He got me a cocktail, not a gross fruity one with lychees in it but a whisky sour.

I was in awe because my drinking knowledge was how to get someones older brother to buy me a 4 pack of Smirnoff double blacks which i'd scull then throw up 45 minutes later out the front of Michelle Williams house while she yelled at her mum for being a stupid bitch who probably gave me food poisoning.

So I drank my whisky and held my breathe slightly when our hands would brush.

This guy was babe, and how great are cocktails!

We went to the car park and made out in his white Camry for a while.

He suggested we go back to his house. He drove, probably over the limit.

We smoked a joint, had sex while my head was spinning and from that moment on my life pretty much assimilated into his. I watched his football games every sunday, had dinner with his dad every tuesday and took green mitsubishi pills and listened to the Hold Your Colour album by Pendulum every other weekend. We settled into a rhythm.

Bindi and Mark,

Mark and Bindi,

Mindy.

It was great.

But he was the kind of guy that continually talked in catch phrases, a real quick talker too. He'd say things like “no point in complaining, no one will listen” and “quitting is easy, I do it all the time”.

This really frustrated me, it was like he was always performing. The was no down time.

He was really hyperactive and to combat it he'd smoke bongs and night to calm himself down. Which meant that I now smoked bongs at night to calm my self down.

He showed me that if you put an ice cube in the bong water the smoke would be really smooth.
There he was, Mark Candler my new boyfriend, using an out of shape coat hanger to clean out his cone piece.

My beacon of knowledge and sophistication. Orderer of Whisky!

He'd spent a heap of time working in sales and used to do things like give me two options of things he wanted to so that'd I'd always choose something he liked. Or we'd both get ice creams and he'd take bites of mine when he hadn't even finished his. Another time he took me to a really beautiful restaurant for my birthday but then insisted that we do the runner. I always felt so uncomfortable in these situations but didn't have the self assurance yet to challenge them.

Once we were having a barbecue with some friends at his place. He walked inside and put a porn dvd on but muted the volume so that when people walked past they'd double take and see it. I think he thought it was really funny but I just kind of gave me the creeps.

We had sex all the time.
He bought a vibrator home one day, it was the first time i'd ever seen one and he tried to sexily tell me that it was bendable so it would hit my g-spot.

I didn't actually have a clue where that was so I just let him plug away at it for a while and pretended (probably fairly grotesquely) to orgasm.

As time went on his collection of sex toys grew, he had plastic anal beads that he insisted on forcing inside me and pulling out just as he was about to come, fluffy handcuffs, and even this weird egg I was supposed to wear inside me when we went to dinner with his dad.

To house them all he bought a small red bucket, it was made of metal, like something you'd see in a quaint garden. Except that he kept it by his bed, somewhere that his gross housemate Meechy would be able to see whenever he and Mark were chatting about the issue of Ben Cousins' ice addiction.

One day he sent me a text message about how he was at work printing out a sign he wanted to laminate and stick on the bucket that said “bucket of love”.

I was absolutely mortified,

but here I was, 18 in a new city not many friends and my life revolving around that of being Mark Candlers girlfriend.

I felt like if I broke up with him i'd be kind of lost and at that stage It wasn't that bad. Plus, he knew where to get drugs.

One time we got really drunk and he told me that when he'd been backpacking he used to do a poo in the drains of the showers at hostels he was staying at and squash it down with his foot.

This is true.

He said once that he'd overheard the cleaner talking about how disgusting it was that she'd noticed the drain was clogged up and when she inspected closer it was just full of , unbeknownst to her, Mark Candlers disgusting, post pubcrawl faeces .

The worst bit was that he said didn't even feel that bad, he felt kind of cheeky.

I think he said something gimicky and catch phrasey after he told me to justify it.

I didn't really know what to do with that information and to be honest I can't remember how I reacted at all.

Judging from my former self I probably would have made out like it was ok, because I was in love, out of my depth, slightly malleable and it seemed polite to make out like poo'ing in the shower of a public space for someone else getting paid minimum wage to clean up was socially acceptable.

But I remember storing that information away in an ever growing bank of things I had started to silently hate about Mark Candler. Right next to his “bucked of love”, anal beads and these disgusting satin boxer shorts that he wore to bed every night that we were together without washing once.

They had a dick on the front, like the statue of David and no doubt he bought them in Florence just after doing a relaxing poo in a hot shower at the Italiano YHA.

When we woke up the next morning he acted like nothing had happened and never spoke of it again.

It all started to come to a head around my birthday.

Again, I should have broken up with him but I was too young to know how to do it just yet.

Instead I would just silently direct vitriol towards him and make up excuses as to why we shouldn't have sex. He'd then fall asleep and mouth breathe next to me all night while I listed off the reasons in my head why I hated him, the same way Arya Stark recounts the people she wants to kill.

• Anal beads
• Boxer shorts
• unwarranted bites of my ice cream.
• King Joffrey
• The Hound

His touch started to feel incredibly lecherous.

My birthday was coming up though and I was excited!

It was a good little distraction for us.

A few days before he started giving me these little cards that were actually pretty cute. They were rhymes that were clues to the presents I would get, one was a hair cut, one was nice dinner and so on and so forth.

Before I got my last present we went and had lunch with two of my brothers at a pub in Freemantle. Mike was obviously really excited about what my “big” present was and his excitement made me excited, I decided that as long as things went well i'd probably sleep with him that night.

Mark said he'd tell my brother Chris what the present was, we were all a few beers in so he made a big show of going over to whisper in his ear. Chris looked at me, maybe a flash of confusion crossing his face and laughed, leaned over to my brother Daniel to tell him and they all erupted in laughter.

Ho Ho Ho

Mark laughed too and I thought, great! This is going to be something really fun! I can't wait!

The next day I was in the car with Mark driving to my last present!

I feel like I should make a short aside and mention that as Mark and I were both personal trainers we were into all that gimmicky shit they love. Wheatgrass shots, detox and protein bars were a regular fixture in our relationship so in a round about way this present wasn't totally unwarranted.

But also, I was a 19 year old girl with some sort of expectations of my boyfriend doing something fun and exciting for my birthday.

So we're in the car and he hands me the last little envelope with birthday riddle inside.

I wish I still had it, or knew exactly what is said but this was the gist “Sarah's her name and cleaning's her game, from inside to out she'll clean out your grout”...

It didn't really make sense.

For a few seconds I was bit confused,

and then we pulled out the front of a medical centre.

I don't know how it clicked, but without having to ask I realised that Mark Candler, my boyfriend, had purchased for my 19^th birthday, a colon cleanse.

He was going to try and re kindle our dying relationship by having another woman insert plastic tubing into my anus and slowly pump warm water inside of me, which would hopefully flush the toxins out.

Suddenly the laughing faces of my brothers being to make sense.

I felt sick, and honestly like I was in some kind of weird shock.

I wondered to myself if I could go through with it?

Neither of us had yet to say anything,

Mike looked at me expectantly like ta-dah!

I began to cry,

I tried to hide it by looking out of the window but the more I thought about the intrusive procedure and how I was going to have to politely endure it the worse I felt.

It was like a metaphor for our whole relationship.

I turned to him and told him I couldn't go through with it,

I was really sorry but it wasn't what I expected and I didn't really feel prepared for this and the vibe and Mabo, it just wasn't going to work out.

He was really offended,

it was $230 that he wouldn't be able to get back and he thought I was into wheatgrass so this would be good and I was being a bit ungrateful.

We drove home silently.

I broke up with him shortly after.