Free You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead by Marieke Hardy Page A

live in a certain town, an unspoken commitment to participating in the communal way of life. More often than not awkward silences follow when I am forced to admit that I don’t actually support anybody. In my home state, public admission of not following a football team is tantamount to standing up on a church pew and stripping down to reveal a peek-a-boo baby doll lingerie set and the words SATAN IS SEXY carved into your lower abdomen. Australian Rules Football is so much a part of the Victorian way of life that it creeps into conversations about other, completely unrelated matters, like parking fines or major surgery.
    Memo Australian Labor Party , wrote one newspaper correspondent during a recent state election campaign, please can I be on your secret database? The subtext could read: ‘Says would rather be tied down and forced to watch continuous replays of the Collingwood grand final win than ever vote for us.’
    My lack of football team is not due to some misguided snootery regarding arts funding or rapey ‘any hole’s a goal’ players, but because in 1996 my heart got broke so bad by football that I cried for days and refused to eat. Football has the power to do that sometimes—cut you off at the knees and leave you bereft. Grown men stagger out of the MCG, weeping openly all the way to Richmond station. Wiping runny noses on Driza-Bone sleeves, they comfort each other with comradely sniffs and a rough, jostling understanding. In most cases it’s the men who weep, while the women just get stony and cold. Riding the Swan Street trams, they wear the haggard faces of survivors.
    When my mother and father first started dating, they attended a football game together. Being amateur theatre actors at the time, they needed a break from all the community puppet shows and hemp workshops they usually attended, and were probably congratulating themselves on retaining a link to their gauche suburban past, as arty types often do when paying to watch competitive sport.They were standing in the outer, a part of the ground usually reserved for violent men recently escaped from prison or AA. The outer doesn’t really exist any more, which is a grand pity as watching a game from deep within its confines in the 1980s was an experience akin to running ashore at Gallipoli with Chopper Reed for an all-you-can-smoke meth sale. I once stood in the outer during a Richmond/Fitzroy clash and heard an obese man with a vivid coldsore hurl abuse at a nearby umpire.
    â€˜Hey Umpy!’ he shouted commandingly. ‘I been up your mum and she give me AIDS.’
    At the time, this fairly evocative comment caused a brief but reverent silence as nearby onlookers contemplated its brutally impressive nature. Someone in the distance may have applauded. This was the outer—a no-man’s land of racist insults, poor personal hygiene and the occasional jolly stabbing. It was legal to smoke in the outer. People stank of piss and stale beer and dagwood dogs. At Collingwood games whenever a supporter would yell ‘COME ON THE PIES’ some wag in the outer inevitably followed it up with ‘Fark, and I thought it was just tomato sauce!’
    When during those early days of courtship my father escorted his intended through the crowd of leering wharfies in duffle coats trying to surreptitiously look down her dress, he was fretting somewhat. My mother was a nice girl from Glen Waverly who enjoyed musical theatre and the odd game of netball. He feared it would only take one call of ‘PICK THE FUCKING PIGSKIN UP YOU FUCKING FAGGOT’ or ‘SOMEONE TELL THESE CUNTS THERE’S A FUCKING GAME ON’ to make her turn very pink in the cheeks and inform him in a rather tight and small voice that she’d quite like to be taken home now thank you and to please not bother calling again. I think it was about fifteen minutes into the game that a poor umpiring decision was made close to the boundary line, at