#3: Profile updates
The following Saturday morning was lost in a daze of fitful, hungover naps and urgent trips to the bathroom. It wasn’t until well after midday that Trixie emerged from her stuffy bedroom, wrapped in her comfy blanket, to search for Stef and a glass of water. Stef was in the kitchen, doing a load of dishes. Around her head she’d wrapped what looked like a bulky old tea towel, fastened with a belt to keep it secure against her temple. Her cheeks were unusually waxy-looking, and the remnants of her mascara remained pressed against the delicate skin underneath her eyes.
“Uh, what’s on your head?”
Stef turned, holding a dish-gloved hand to her lips.
Trixie understood the sentiment. Her own bright voice, which was always loud and brassy, sounded painful even to her ears. She whispered, “Your head?”
“Ice pack,” Stef grumbled. “Want one?”
Trixie shook her head. She grabbed a glass from the table, gave it a quick sniff and, satisfied, shuffled past Stef to fill it with water from the tap. Stef had managed to locate a tube of Berocca in the pantry, and Trixie gratefully dropped one of the orange tablets into the glass. She watched it turn the water fizzy and fluorescent.
“Please,” Stef said at last, as she placed the final sopping dish onto the drying rack, “If I mention Eleni’s homemade alcohol again, ever, remind me of this moment.”
“A friendly slap ought to bring that memory screaming back,” Trixie replied, grinning. She gulped down her fizzy drink, and moved to refill her glass, as Stef slumped over the kitchen counter, clutching her head. From under a pile of spangly tops – which Trixie vaguely remembered retrieving from her closet to model, when the subject of going out was mentioned the night before – her phone rang through the kitchen.
“It’s been doing that all morning!” Stef moaned into the countertop.
“Sorry!” Trixie dived to retrieve it. “Sorry. I’ll turn it off.” She swiped the screen open, and a flurry of notifications hit her, sending the phone buzzing all over again.
“Tri-ix-iee!”
“Sorry!” Trixie scrolled through the messages – mostly condolences from friends, cousins and work acquaintances about her break-up with Lukas. Kind, of course, but frustrating. As Trixie moved to put the phone on silent, she realised something. “Wait. Wait.”
“What?”
“How do people know I’ve broken up with Lukas?”
“I don’t know, maybe someone texted them. Maybe Luke did.”
“No, Stef, like, everybody knows.” Trixie shook her phone at Stef, who peered up at her friend with interest. “Everybody. Literally, someone I worked with at the shop three years ago just sent me a message about it.”
“What? Who?”
“Seriously! Listen: ‘Hi Trixie, it’s been a while. I hope you’re doing OK. What a difficult thing for you to go through. Just know we’re all here for you during this transition. Love – I barely even remember this guy – love from Aaron.”
“What the fuck.”
Trixie nodded, still shaking the phone at Stef. “Right? What the actual fuck?”
“I don’t even—”
“Who could’ve possibly told this guy?” Trixie looked down at the screen again, and, as she did, the phone lit up with a call – from Lukas. His face, in a photo Trixie had taken of him at her father’s wedding, beamed up at her. She squealed and dropped the phone on the bench.
“What?” Stef peered over, then drew back. “Ugh. Don’t answer it.”
Both girls watched as the phone rang out; it seemed to take hours. Once the kitchen was silent again, Trixie breathed a long, slow sigh to calm herself. Then, the screen lit up once more, filled with Lukas’s chiseled face.
Trixie looked at Stef. Stef stared back. Trixie looked back down at the phone, watching it buzz across the counter. Then, clenching her jaw so hard she could swear she heard her teeth crack, she scooped it up and pressed “Accept”. “What?”
“Oh! I – Trixie.”
“Yes. What?” Trixie heard Lukas clear his throat at the other end of the call. She could tell he was pausing on purpose, waiting for her to speak first. Self-important prick. “Kinda busy today, Lukas,” Trixie said. “I don’t have, like, infinite hours to sit here and listen to you, like, clear your phlegm out at me.”
“Oh, what are you ‘busy’ doing today?” Lukas snapped back. “Because I seem to remember you had ‘nothing but time for me’ this weekend. Isn’t that what your text on Thursday said?”
Trixie rolled her eyes. “Are you just ringing to gloat, or . . . because I can just hang up and you can gloat at, like, a picture of me on your phone or something. Same basic effect, I promise.”
“Why did you write that shit on Facebook?”
“Um, what are you talking about?” Trixie’s heart sank. Facebook. Drunk Facebook. “I didn’t—”
“Everyone thinks I’m a fucking arsehole right now, Trixie,” Lukas growled. “My mum called me up and told me she’s ashamed to have me as a son.”
“I—”
“I didn’t want to hurt your feelings, but we broke up! Couples break up all the time.”
Trixie looked at Stef, panicked. She mouthed “Facebook?”, and Stef pulled out her phone to begin searching.
“I’m not going to apologise for following my feelings here, Trixie. This was the right thing to do. And now, well – now no one gets to hear my side of the story. You’ve poisoned everyone against me!”
Stef rushed to Trixie’s side, holding out her phone. Trixie took it and searched the screen frantically. What Stef had found – though it was not hard to locate it, as it was generating a lot of likes and comments even now, hours after Trixie had posted it – was a status update, from Trixie’s account. The update read:
“Trixie Morris is Single.” It was accompanied by a picture Trixie had taken early on Friday night, before Lukas had even arrived, of the kitchen set-up for their Valentine’s dinner. Trixie had tagged Lukas Lowell in the photo, and its caption read: “Happy Valentine’s Day, honey. Dumping me before dinner is the best present I ever got!”
The whole post had been liked nearly 300 times, by Trixie’s friends and family as well as Lukas’s crowd. Underneath the comments ranged from sympathetic (Lukas’s oldest sister: “Trixie, I’m so sorry he did this! Call me!”) to vindicated, (Trixie’s high school boyfriend, Jason: “He was never good enough for you, mate. This is great news!!) to outraged (Trixie’s second cousin Carla: “Scumbag! Where does he live? Let’s key his car!”). Underneath each negative comment, there was a reply from Lukas Lowell: “Fuck off. Mind your business”.
Trixie handed Stef’s phone back to her, shaking. As the volume of the voice in her ear increased, she remembered, at last, that Lukas was still on the line. “Oh, my god. Lukas—”
“How could you do this to me, Trixie? This is the most fucking embarrassing thing that’s ever happened in my life.”
Trixie bristled a little. “The most embarrassing thing. Of your whole life. Jesus, it’s not that bad.”
“Are you gaslighting me?” Lukas cried. “Are you gaslighting my feelings about this, Trixie?”
“Lukas, shut up,” Trixie snapped. “I’m sorry I was so, um, public about the fact that we broke up. I am sorry. But nothing I wrote in that post is actually a lie.”
“It’s not what you wrote, Trixie. It’s the way you presented it!”
Trixie rolled her eyes. “OK, OK, it was dramatic. But, seriously, Lukas? You broke up with me, like, less than 24 hours ago. Can we just, um, not?”
“Not . . .”
“Not, like, talk. Or anything. For a while. I’ll take down the post. I’ll apologise to your mother. But then maybe we should just . . . leave each other alone?”
Lukas blustered into the phone for a moment. “Trust me, Trixie,” he sneered at last. “That’s exactly what I want.”
The receiver clicked, and Trixie was left listening for nothing. She put her mobile down on the kitchen bench, feeling Stef’s eyes on her. “Don’t.”
“I didn’t say anything!”
Trixie spent most of Saturday afternoon calling off the dogs on Lukas’s behalf. She had long, winding conversations with most of his family members – his mother, his younger sister, his uncle and his brother-in-law – about his “commitment issues”.
“If you could keep him – just keep him in mind, Trix,” his sister, Helen, pleaded. “He’ll come around.”
“Helen, it’s OK. Really.”
“I just know you two are meant to be together,” she repeated for what must have been the third time on the call. “He just needs to do a bit of growing up.”
“Maybe,” Trixie said. “But I think that growing up needs to happen with – not with me.”
Helen sighed dramatically. She had the same manner on the phone as Lukas, as if everything Trixie said to her was impossible to take in. “Oh, all right. Well. Stay in touch, love.”
“I will,” Trixie lied. “Bye, Helen. Tell Anna good luck with Year Six.”
Helen rang off, and Trixie threw her phone away, to the opposite end of the couch on which she was lounging. She couldn’t bear to speak to another member of the Anti-Lukas Army, or another commiserating, well-meaning person from his family. None of this was helping her in the actual task of moving on from Lukas, whose face and voice and scent seemed to have permanently moved into her brain since their phone conversation earlier that afternoon. Trixie buried her head into the couch cushions and screamed.
She heard the front door slam, and the rattle as a set of keys was flung into the bowl in the hall. She called out, “You’d better have my oven gems, Stefanie!”
“What the hell are ‘oven gems’?”
Trixie was still taken aback, though puberty had claimed her little brother several years ago, by just how low his adult voice was. When Odo was a child, he’d had the lilting, sweet voice of a fairytale imp. Now, he grunted like a truck with a set of loose starter bolts.
“Hi,” Trixie said, tossing the couch cushion at Odo as he trudged into the living room. He caught the pillow and gave it a curious look. Then he tossed it back to her.
“Hi. What’s an oven gem?”
“Like potato gem things, you know? Sandra used to give them to us when Dad was away?”
Their stepmother, Sandra, was an infamously dreadful cook, and when their father drove to Goulburn to visit their grandparents, Sandra’s catering would come straight from the freezer. This, Trixie remembered fondly, accounted in large part for her and Odo being so quick to warm to Sandra as kids – once-monthly dinners of party sausage rolls, oven chips and Vienetta.
Odo hurdled the back of the couch and settled in beside his sister. He was still growing, Trixie observed. He seemed close to a foot taller since she’d last seen him, and that was just a week ago. She noticed he was also growing out hair – everywhere. His hair, which was usually sharply trimmed around his ears, was looking a little scraggly; he also had a five o’clock shadow on his broad chin. (Or, perhaps, more of a three o’clock shadow, considering how it was growing so far.) He no longer looked just eighteen, as he had for most of the summer, since he moved down from Sydney last November. Now he looked kind of, well, grown.
Trixie leaned over and grabbed a handful of hair at the nape of his neck. “What’s this? Are you growing a mullet?”
“No!” Odo squirmed away from her, shaking his hair back into place. “It’s not a mullet.”
“Looks like a mullet.”
“I’m just trying something new.” He glared at her. “Anyway, as if you can talk. Have you taken a shower today? You stink.”
Trixie pulled her comfy blanket up around her shoulders as her brother wrinkled his nose. “Excuse me, I do not stink.”
“Um, I think I’d know.”
“Whatever.” Trixie rolled herself off the couch and retrieved the small navy box she’d been saving from the night before. “You can have this back, I guess.”
Odo took the box back and peered inside at his own handiwork: the smooth jarrah cufflinks he’d crafted for Lukas’s Valentine’s present. “Aw, Trix, what happened?”
“What, have you not been online? Are you living under a rock?”
Odo shrugged, replacing the lid on the box carefully. “I’m off Facebook.”
“Again? Odo, that’s so annoying. Now Dad will ring me every day asking what you’re doing.”
“Look,” Odo took a deep breath, and Trixie knew he was winding up for another one of his self-righteous rants. “Is it my fault the way we all insist on keeping in contact with each other is via a morally corrupt portal for mining advertising data that will outlive us long after our bones have turned to dust in the ground? Trixie, if Dad wants to talk to me, he can pick up the phone and call me.”
“On what? You don’t even have a mobile anymore.”
Odo frowned, thinking about this. “Well, he can call in downstairs at the bar, and they’ll tell me he’s called, and—”
Trixie held up a hand to silence her brother. “Get a mobile. Get a Whatsapp, or something. Text our father back. I’m sick of having to be his spy.”
“OK! OK. I’ll think about it.” Odo looked down at the box. “So, he didn’t, like, hate the cufflinks or anything?”
“We broke up.”
“Aw, Trix. I’m sorry.”
Trixie shrugged. She’d said the words so many times now, they’d begun to lose all meaning for her. Breaking up was just something that’d happened – not something that actually hurt her. Or maybe now she was just too numb from a day of abject humiliation via phone and internet to feel the blow.
“If it makes you feel any better, I always thought Luke was a dickhead.”
“He bought you a mountain bike for Christmas!”
“He gave me his old mountain bike for Christmas because his mother bought him a new one.” Odo rolled his eyes, “Look, he was OK. But he was – you can do better! I promise.”
“Maybe,” Trixie said. She slumped back onto the couch and let it engulf her. She and Stef had found it at a Don Bosco’s three years ago, and it was now so saggy, every bum that parked on its cushions threatened to break it for good. “If I ever meet anyone again,” she said to her brother, teasing, “I hope they’re more impressive to you than Lukas was.”
“Ha-ha.” Odo rolled his eyes. Then his whole face lit up, like street lights on a timer. “Oh my god! Oh, my god. Trix! Gimme your phone.”
“Why?”
“Just give it,” Odo repeated, holding his hand out impatiently. Trixie handed over her phone, reluctant but intrigued. She watched her brother tap away, swiping and scrolling like a tiny orchestra conductor. Every once in a while, he’d look up at Trixie, scrutinising her, before returning to the phone with renewed vigour.
“Odo, what are you doing?” Trixie moaned. “Please, I have had enough public humiliation for one day.”
“Shh, shut up,” he said. He made a few final flourishes, then handed the phone back. Trixie looked down at the screen, and her own face grinned back at her, frozen in a photo. Below it, the caption read: “Trixie, 28 – looking for a good time”
“Odo!”
“What?” he asked, chuckling. “It’s a good idea! Admit it.”
“‘Looking for a good time?’ It sounds like a personal ad from one of those free train station newspapers.” Trixie bit her lip as she flicked through the profile. Granted, her brother had chosen some particularly flattering photos of her: one from his eighteenth birthday party, where she was laughing hard a speech their Aunt Linda was making; another from a beach holiday she had taken with Stef, Jin and David to Kennett River, when Jin had finished his Honours thesis.
“Come on,” Odo said, “It’s a great profile!”
“OK. It’s an OK profile. But it needs a new, like, tag thing. I hate that.”
“Well, all right.” Odo grabbed the phone back and looked at his sister expectantly. “What do you want? What are you looking for?”
“I mean, I guess I am looking for a bit of fun, but you can’t just say that.”
“Why not?”
Trixie let out an exasperated grunt. “I don’t know, Odo. You just can’t.”
Odo paused, thinking. “OK. Right. I’ve got it.” He tapped the screen then handed the phone back to Trixie with triumphant flamboyance. “It’s. Perfect.”
“All right,” Trixie sighed. She looked at the profile again.
Name: Trixie
Age: 28
Location: Melbourne, AU
Interested in: M, F, X
Status: “Here for a good time”
Trixie snorted. It wasn’t better, per se, but she’d smiled when she’d read it. She looked back up at her brother, who was peering at her.
“Well?” he said.
“Oh, fine. Fine!” she said, defeated. “You win.”
“Yes!” Odo cried, punching the air. “Trix is on the market! Let’s go, click, ‘Publish profile’.”
Trixie took a deep breath, clicked “Publish”, then tossed her phone back to her brother. They both stared at each other, then burst out laughing. And they were still laughing when Trixie’s phone ping-ed with an alert tone she hadn’t heard before, as a notification from the dating app popped up on the screen: “New Match!”.
The Broken-Heart Brigade is released via weekly e-newsletter instalments through Substack. It is supported by Matilda’s generous subscribers, Melbourne City of Literature and the City of Melbourne.
The Broken-Heart Brigade is made in Naarm (Melbourne), on stolen Wurundjeri land that was never ceded. Matilda pays respect to the rightful Aboriginal owners of the land on which she lives and works, and hopes the readers of her writing do too.