Something Special, Something Rare (15 page)

I nodded, heart thumping, palms sweating, cheeks probably fucking purple, though I had no idea what she was talking about. All I knew about penetrative sex I had learned at fifteen from Jason Campbell. Over four weekends we'd exchanged a dozen words max and a few buckets of bodily fluids, mostly mouth-to-mouth, and he did penetrate me. If pressed I'd say it was neither pleasant nor unpleasant. Mostly I was on my back, thinking, ‘This is penetration. I'm being penetrated. He is penetrating me.' Probably I thought ‘fucking' rather than ‘penetrating,' but you get the picture.

If penetration was a problem for Hannah then that was no prob for me. And how I leapt to agree with Hannah on the question of loving a woman. Oh boy, that was something I knew all about.

*

I study the eBay pictures one by one with an attitude forensic. My neck stiffens, my eyes ache, and none of the three hundred and seventy-three pale-blue vintage sleeveless dresses resembles mine in the slightest.

*

Then one day Hannah and I were in Degraves Street, drinking double macchiatos because we liked the way they made us look – sophisticated glass, black ink, dense white foam. We were drinking them even though we would have preferred massive mugs of cocoa, cream, sugar, a half litre of milk, and a boy called Andre Devonport (and what sort of name is that, anyways?) comes over to our table and goes, ‘Hannah?'

To which the only possible answer was, ‘Yes?'

And then he asks if she recognises him.

And she does recognise him: he's a guy from her high school in South Africa. A great looking guy, with flopping-in-his-eyes soft hair and you-are-the-only-person-in-the-world-Hannah eyes. He pulls up a stool without taking his eyes off her and they start exchanging relevant demographic data – me feeling increasingly uncomfortable, then left out, then grumpy – and when Hannah says the word ‘nursing' Andre's face expands in surprise, then contracts, and what's left of his eyeballs direct their suspicion at me. He turns back to Hannah, ‘But you were so … clever. So artistic.'

Call it the beginning of the end, if you will.

*

When an auction has less than sixty seconds to close, the timer switches to red numerals and you can watch the countdown in real time. This never fails to scramble my mind and shrink my world. Do I want it? Should I bid? How much is it worth to me? I am held in a 59-, 58-, 57-, 56-second fist where I am without past or future, where I have no idea what to do. I pounce and feel sick. Or I move on and feel sick. Uncertainty, desire and lost opportunities. It's all there in the countdown.

It's a bit different with Facebook. Less intense. Needless to say, I immediately deleted Nicky Winch from my list of friends.

*

We'd be meeting less frequently and Hannah would be saying things like, ‘Oh Keira, you're so …' and finishing off with adjectives that sounded a bit South African to me. A bit male South African with floppy hair and an eye for the particular. This ‘you're so …' made me feel disappointing and small. And when someone starts to point out what you're like with a decrescendo sigh, it's a sign to get ready 'cause they're shrinking you down flat into a face in an old album that can be snapped shut with one hand. And pretty soon, you just watch, the act of misrecognition will be complete.

*

Things I had not contemplated: flats without Hannah, summertime without Hannah, nursing without Hannah, developing nations without Hannah.

‘We can still hang out!' she said, grinning fluoro from the lips but not the eyes, after she informed me that she'd landed a job at the food co-op, was switching from nursing to film studies and moving into Andre's share-house.

Andre this. Andre that. ‘He's so …' Eyes heavenward. Crescendo sigh.

‘I'll have my own room, though. At least … at the start …'

It has often been noted that catastrophes take place in slow-motion, hyper-real time. I can add that your body sucks inwards. Major arteries slap the underside of your skin like untethered hoses and in the face of all this you can remain surprisingly polite. You can, if you wish, find air for something small and inane: oh, gee, wow, congratulations. Then you can flee.

*

EBay. Facebook. Twitter and chat. Send, comment, respond and reply. I'll buy stuff I wouldn't touch. I'll comment on your post though I wouldn't cross the street to say hello. Things that are not acts will pretend to be acts; they will take the place of acts. I will search and I will trawl and I will neither catch you nor be caught.

*

What I did was walk home, into the house of my childhood, into my bedroom, and close the door. I lay still on my bed for a long time. I peed once, in a milk-crusted mug abandoned on the windowsill. My mum knocked, said my name with a question mark and then went away. The sun rose and set twice. Soon after the second setting, I had a small thought, call it a plan. I stood up, went to the kitchen, gathered a glass of lemon cordial and a cigarette, a lighter, my blue mended dress. I opened the back door and stepped out into the cool night-time breeze. I sat cross-legged in the backyard as standing made me dizzy, and I watched the threads catch and smoulder to a fine grey ash.

*

I read something else: your life has a single story that gets repeated over and over, with a succession of understudies playing the role of your first co-star.

Let's say it's true. My story might go like this: a beautiful dress held my chest in her fist, and when she started to unravel I incinerated her remains. Make way for the understudy, you might say. Let's get this story restarted, you might say.

I log in, check the new pale-blue listings. I log out, I log in, see if anyone wants to befriend.

But the problem is this: you can't force her out of the story. You can't delete her or incinerate her or send her to your trash. She's your co-star, after all. And she might be a tenacious fighting bitch.

I log out. I log in. Out in out in.

Try whatever you like. I wish you all the best. But believe me when I tell you: that bitch has to leave for your first story to end.

HONEYMOON

CHARLOTTE WOOD

The night they arrive at the house on the lake, Mandy slides open the door to the deck and a tiny grey possum clambers down a tree trunk, an arm's length from the railing.

‘Matt, look,' she calls. She takes a step onto the deck. Another possum, bigger than the first, darts down the tree behind it and the two animals leap on to the wooden railing. Mandy stops. The possums fix their gaze on her, lowering their small heads, eyes shining. She steps forward again – and then both the animals thump gracelessly onto the wooden boards and pelt towards her feet.

‘Jesus!' she yelps, jumping back behind the screen door and slinging it shut.

The possums stop still for one long second, watching her again. Then they waddle about on the deck, sniffing.

Matthew appears behind her, ‘Oh, wow.' He reaches for the door.

‘Don't go out there!' She grabs his arm. Then feels her face colour. ‘They ran at me. Somebody must feed them.'

Matthew stands on the hairy orange carpet next to her, his new wife. He takes her hand from his arm, smiles down at her.

‘Mand, it's just a mum and her baby.' Then he puts an arm around her shoulders. ‘I'll get them some fruit,' he says. But he begins stroking Mandy's arm in long, firm strokes. ‘It's OK,' he says, his voice soothing.

She shrugs her shoulder away. ‘I'm all right.'

*

When Mandy came home from uni to her parents' small town and told them she was getting married, her dad said, ‘Christ.'

Matthew was coming the next day. He said she should wait for him before making the announcement, that it was selfish not to. She couldn't say she wanted to protect him.

Her mother said, ‘Heavens.' Then, ‘That's wonderful, isn't it Geoff!'

Her dad said, ‘You're only twenty-one. There's plenty of time.'

Mandy had put down her glass of champagne – she'd brought the bottle herself, opened it while they watched on, nervous, expectant. She looked at her fingertips turning white from pressing the base of the glass, and said, ‘How old were you, Dad?'

Her mother twittered. ‘Wonderful!' she said, and sipped the drink, glassy-eyed already. But Mandy and her father locked gazes.

He said, ‘It doesn't matter, because I wasn't doing anything important.'

Mandy threw her head back. ‘Jesus! That's great.' She turned to her mother, who was blinking quickly, the way she did when she met someone new, or spoke to someone she thought important in some way – tilting her head back a little, smiling, but flitting her lashes so fast they were almost completely shut.

‘Sorry, Mum.'

Her mum gave her head a little shake, still blinking and sipping.

Her dad growled, ‘You know what I mean.'

He meant university. Honours, maybe even a medal. Mandy stretched her arms above her head, and closed her eyes tight for a second to force away the tears she could feel beginning.

‘I'm not an idiot, Dad.'

Then she lifted her glass, said, ‘Well, here's to us. Thanks for your enthusiasm. You can congratulate Matt when he gets here tomorrow.'

She drank and stood up. Her dad watched her, the glass stem dainty between his big fingers. ‘I'm thinking about your future,' he said. Then he muttered, ‘I don't want you to limit yourself.' He glanced towards his wife, and then quickly away again.

But Mandy was already striding across the room, leaning down to her mother.

‘Thanks, Mum,' she whispered, and kissed her soft face while her mother began shuffling her body out of the chair.

In the kitchen Cathy was coming through the back door, breathless, in her school uniform, smelling of cigarettes. ‘Hi,' the sisters both said, as Cathy slung her backpack to the floor. Mandy said, ‘I'm going out,' and slammed the door.

*

At the lake house there is a garage with old surfboards and plastic skis, and a tinny with a heavy, sluggish outboard motor. On the first afternoon they take the boat out. Matthew knows how to work the motor and sits next to it, hugging it one-armed while they putter across the water. ‘Let's do this every day,' he shouts as the green water slides beneath them.

But Mandy has seen the kayak. In the morning she eases herself out of bed without waking Matthew, and goes barefoot to the kitchen to make coffee. She frowns at the noise of the electric kettle as it boils.

She picks her way down through the prickly bush garden to the water and hoists the white and yellow kayak off the grass, holding it across her hips, tilting herself backwards to balance the weight. She steps over the stones, and then lowers it –
plop
– into the water. With her fingertips she directs it between some rocks so it won't float away in the mild slapping of the water. Then she wades ankle-deep to the furthest rock and sets down her coffee cup on its flattest part. She wades back and lowers herself into the kayak seat, making the boat rock wonkily. She shunts her bum forward and uses the white plastic oar to push off from the stones, feeling the kayak grazing the underwater pebbles. She reaches for the cup and then, holding it aloft in one hand, digs a few one-handed strokes with the other, out into the deeper water. Then she lays the bar of the paddle across her lap and sips from the cup, letting the kayak drift out into the vast grey sheet of the lake. Almost as far as she can see ahead and to each side, is the metallic water.

She sits back, closing her eyes against the sunlight, knees bent. The water shrugs beneath her. Then she drains the cup and sets it on the floor, and paddles a few neat strokes with the sun at her back. She drifts over to where she has seen some fish jumping and sits very still, listening for the tiny splash, scanning for the movement. Then there it is, the
plish,
the glimpse of small white fish arched in the air above the silver water.

Every morning she does this, paddling and drifting for an hour on the silent lake, before Matthew wakes.

*

The wedding had been the usual thing for her home town. Ceremony in the park by the river (not Saint Mark's, after several arguments with her mother). The celebrant was a woman in a cream nylon suit and an aqua blouse, they'd read something from Kahlil Gibran. Afterwards, at the reception in the Corroboree Room behind the civic hall, Mandy sat at the round bridal table with Matthew, her parents, and her sister Cathy.

The smell of the wood panelling in the Corroboree Room reminded her of their afternoons there as children when their father had supplied the sound system for football club functions. In his youth, he had wanted to be a sound engineer. So he owned a mixing board and many long extension cords, he owned big stippled silver cases with snap locks, amps and various players, folding stands, large black speakers in scratched black chipboard casings and three microphones with stands of varying heights. He didn't need these things for his job at the gas company, but he liked to have them. While he spent Saturday afternoons of their childhood laying out cables and saying ‘check, check' into the microphones, Mandy and Cathy had the Corroboree Room to themselves, sliding on the polished green lino and sitting in the crook of the one wooden step up to the stage.

At the wedding Mandy wore a dress made by her university friends and her mother sat next to Matthew. Her mum had secretly liked Matthew from the start. He played up to her, teased her in a way that made Mandy wonder if her father had ever done this, because her mother flushed and looked younger whenever she and Matthew bantered. Mandy imagined her dad – young, slim, broad-shouldered – teasing her mother about her hips, or her tea towels, the way Matthew did.

*

The second night at the lake they set the outdoor table on the deck for dinner, sticking candles into wine bottles, the candle-light making the trees flicker. Matthew has made a big bowl of spaghetti and stands over Mandy like a waiter, using tongs to lift the pasta on to her plate. Then there's a noise, and they look up to see the big possum angling its way down the tree again, one side of its body moving forward then the other, its snout lifting in purposeful, rhythmic nods.

‘Shit,' Mandy says.

‘It's OK, it won't come near us,' says Matthew.

But the possum leaps on to the railing and stalks towards them. The smaller one has appeared now too, waddling behind its mother.

Mandy stands, scraping her chair loudly and shoving it in the animals' direction. ‘Shoo!'

The candle flames wobble. The possums stop. They stare at her, their dingy feather-duster tails held up in the air.

Mandy drags the chair again, looks around for Matthew, who has disappeared. She feels stupid. The dinner is getting cold. But the mother possum begins to walk again, delicately, along the railing, stretching her face towards the table. Mandy steps back, thinks of the possum's mean little teeth, the tiny fleas and bacteria in its fur.

Matt appears with a long, spindly piece of eucalypt branch. He steps forward and whacks the stick down, hard, on the decking. The possums straighten, staring. He cracks the stick down again, harder, and the noise echoes up into the dark around the house. The possums turn and amble along the railing towards the bedroom at the end of the house, into the darkness.

Mandy pulls her chair back towards the table. ‘Thanks,' she mumbles, glancing past Matthew into the gloom. She can't see them.

Matt grins and says, ‘I'll put some music on.'

On the nights after this they each sit with a thin branch leaned against their chair. Every night the possums come, then retreat into the shadows at the cracking of the sticks.

Sometimes Mandy looks up from the table to see their eyes shining out of the dark.

*

Matthew was a city boy when they met at a party in her first weeks at university. ‘Never been west of the Blue Mountains,' he'd said airily, lighting a cigarette.

He wore a black suit jacket with his black jeans, listened to The Cruel Sea. When she said she didn't know who The Cruel Sea were he was incredulous. ‘Tex Perkins. The
Cruel Sea
.'

She was blank. ‘Sorry.'

He took the cigarette from his mouth and blew a long stream of smoke. ‘You really
are
a country girl,' he said, and then he smiled, a wide, city-boy smile. Later they had sex in his room in the dark, the party babbling outside his bedroom door, beneath the mournful music coming from his battered CD player.

‘I like your body,' he whispered, propped on his elbow in the gloom. He said
breasts,
as though it were not a foreign word for a boy. He drew a sharp line down her breastbone with his fingernail. She liked his spiky confidence. He switched on a lamp with a sarong covering it – he had been to Asia – and low orange light washed the room. He sat up in bed and began rolling a joint.

She lay naked on top of the sheets, feeling on her skin an echo of the line he had traced down her sternum. A corner of her future was opening up.

*

Long before the wedding, the first time she brought Matthew home, her mother made up Cathy's room for him, with the good sheets, the new pillowcases. Mandy had snuck into the room after they'd all gone to bed, squeezed in beside him, snickering at his clump of black clothes and his motorbike boots heaped on the floor next to Cathy's pale pink chest of drawers. She touched his nipple.

‘Don't,' he whispered. ‘Your parents.'

She laughed again, bent to lick it.

‘It's not fair on them,' he murmured, gently pushing her away. ‘They're nice people.'

She stared at him in the dark, and then she stood up and padded back through the silent house to lie in her childhood bed, listening to her sister asleep, breathing slow and heavy on a mattress on the floor.

*

At the lake they spend the days sitting on the deck, looking out at the water through the trees, newspapers strewn about them, listening to seed pods dropping onto the corrugated iron roof. The house is full of ugly, comfortable furniture they sink into. Prehistoric-looking couches with the nap worn off the fake suede, with seat cushions so deep their feet don't touch the floor. There is a smoked-glass coffee table with battered board games on a shelf beneath. Scattegories and Monopoly and obscure, failed board games: Payday, and How to Be a Complete Bastard with Adrian Edmonson's face all over the box.

The maroon milk crate filled with their uni textbooks and foolscap notebooks stays by the front door, untouched.

Sometimes they have sex, quietly, on the clean white sheets with the sun falling into the room, only the screen door between them and the cicadas and the chittering of the lorikeets.

*

The next time he had gone home with her was for Easter.

‘Do you want to go with them?' Matthew had asked her at breakfast, while her mother scurried around the house before Mass, checking her handbag, putting on lipstick at the hallway mirror.

Mandy had only snorted, and poured another coffee. ‘Have you got any cigarettes?' she asked him.

‘Shhh,' he whispered, angling his head towards her mother, who was now in the kitchen prodding at a solid white-plasticked chicken defrosting on the sink.

Cathy grinned at Matthew over her Weet-Bix. ‘Wuss,' she said with her mouth full, spoon aloft.

‘Come on Cathy,' called their mother. ‘And you shouldn't be eating breakfast so late.' Their parents never ate before Communion.

They went to buy Easter eggs and hot cross buns after collecting her parents from Mass. At the supermarket checkout they watched the coloured eggs and the plastic bags of buns moving along the conveyor belt.

Cathy said, ‘There's Sue McInerney.'

At the next counter a thin girl from Cathy's year stood with a lanky, slightly older boy, lifting things from a trolley; frozen food boxes and bags of corn chips and sheets of pale sausages.

‘I remember her,' Mandy said. ‘Brainy.'

Cathy flicked a red egg, sending it spinning in circles on the conveyor belt. ‘Pregnant, apparently.'