The Best Australian Stories 2013 Page 8

  On Sunday afternoon I was sitting at my desk in my room upstairs, trying to force myself to do my homework. I had a modern history essay due that week. I knew I’d be able to write it if I could just make myself start, but instead I was fiddling with the radio, trying to find a song that I could put onto the tape I was making. But there was nothing on. I leaned over to pick up my bag and take out my history book, and Ben’s slipped out from between its covers. I must have picked it up on Friday afternoon, when we were making the usual rush for the door. He would be sitting down now, just as I was, to write the essay.

  Without the textbook, he could write nothing. This is what I told myself. He would need it. I would take it over. The walk would do me good. Probably Alex would not be there; he would be with friends. But he might be there.

  It would be a chance to tell Ben that I had given being his girlfriend a try, and did not like it. I had no idea how I was going to do this.

  It took me half an hour to get dressed. No shoes, I decided. I was subject to a number of complicated and constantly changing rules about my clothes. The adjustments I made to my cut-off jeans and t-shirt in that half-hour were invisible to the naked eye, but absolutely necessary to me. If I had been asked to walk out of the house any earlier I would have been assailed by panic. I put my thick brown hair in a ponytail and drew eyeliner around my eyes. My t-shirt was my older brother’s, and much too big for me, which was important, as my jeans were too small. They had fitted me last summer but now I had a good handful of fat over the waistband.

  I pressed the doorbell next to the electronic gate and stood there, trying not to fiddle with my clothes. I held Ben’s textbook over my stomach to flatten it. A voice from the little speaker said, ‘Yeah?’ and I said, ‘It’s Rose. I’ve got Ben’s history book.’

  There was no answer. The gate shrieked open and I went up to the front door, which swung wide to reveal Alex, also in cut-off jeans and a t-shirt, his blond hair flopping over his face, his feet bare. The lurch in my heart was like being pushed suddenly from behind. I said, ‘I brought Ben’s book. I took it home by accident,’ and Alex said, ‘Come in.’

  Most boys, when they saw you, did not change their way of being for you. They were slack-bodied, unresponsive – you could make no difference to them. But Alex was electric. I stepped into the house and a prickly charge went through me, and through him. He stood upright, and seemed to be about to reach for me, when Ben appeared at the top of the hall stairs.

  ‘I was just looking for that,’ he said, and held his hand out for the book. He jerked his head in the direction of the stairs. ‘Come on then.’

  I looked at Alex. His arm was very close to mine. It was tanned, and his hands were big, like a man’s. Ben said to him, ‘Aren’t you meant to be studying?’

  Alex met my eye and shrugged, and Ben took hold of my arm and led me downstairs to his bedroom. He pulled an extra chair up to his desk and opened the history book. ‘We’ll get a start on it together,’ he said.

  That push that I had felt on seeing Alex again – that force behind me, like a hand at my back; this is what impelled me. The glittering, prickling surge in my body. Also the desperate need to be done with this experience, to be on its other side, to be free from the fear of it and the fear that I would never do it. To be free of having to do it with Ben.

  Feeling only a thumping in my body, I said to Ben, ‘I need to go to the toilet,’ and left him where he was, sitting at his desk, the history book open in front of him. But I didn’t go to the bathroom on the middle floor, near the kitchen. I went on up the metal stairs, past the enormous living room with its vast, flat leather sofas and its glass-topped table, past the bedroom with the huge Ken Done painting and the en suite glinting in the carpeted distance, up to Alex’s bedroom. I stood at his open door, dazzled by exertion, and when he turned from his desk to look at me, could do nothing but cross my arms, and make a strange sort of face.

  ‘What were you doing?’ Ben said. ‘You’ve been ages.’ He was taking a Style Council record out of its sleeve. He stared suspiciously at me.

  ‘Talking to Alex,’ I said. There was a sudden wet slide in my underpants. ‘I couldn’t find the bathroom.’

  He put the record on the turntable and lifted the needle onto it. For a second, I closed my eyes. My body was still thumping; shock, and pleasure, in equal measures.

  ‘You look weird,’ said Ben.

  I was nearly late for school on Monday because I had walked there so slowly. An autumnal sparkle was almost visible in the air; the trees rattled in a breeze that was cool around my bare legs. I was not thinking, however; I was not trying to figure out what I might do next. I was simply borne along, like the leaves that blew ahead of me. As I came down the hill towards the school I could hear the headmaster on the megaphone, which meant they would be marking the roll. I slipped in through the back of the crowd of kids and stood next to Ben. I nudged him to say hello, and he moved away.

  This was the first sign, if only I had taken account of it. But I was too preoccupied. What would happen now? I didn’t know. My thighs hurt a little. I had hardly slept for thinking of Alex. It was such a pleasure, but not just a pleasure, an achievement: not just in love, but no longer a virgin. The problem I faced in breaking up with Ben – in order to go out with his stepbrother – seemed tiny, easy, as though he would just step aside, give way, when he understood how I felt. Later, when I was ready to tell him. Some part of me really did believe this.

  In French, from my seat at the back of the room, I screwed up a little ball of paper and threw it at Ben. He turned round and looked at me. I made a face, a stupid, grinning face, and he shrugged and sighed, and turned away. Then he put up his hand and said to Miss Ryan, ‘Miss, Rose is throwing stuff at me.’

  Miss Ryan was used to our small conspiracies. She said, ‘Rose, ça suffit.’

  I hoped Ben would turn again and grin at me, to show me he’d won this round, but he didn’t. He was bent uncharacteristically over his work, occasionally looking up to study the board. It was so elaborate that at first I thought he was doing it to make me laugh. I did no French. I didn’t pretend to copy anything down. When I couldn’t get Ben’s attention by humming his most hated song or putting our special French singsong into my answers – Ben loved this, we used to chant at each other ‘Je voudrais une disque de Rrrolling Stones,’ just like the tape – I gave up, and looked out the window. Our French class was in the senior block, high up. You could hear magpies carolling in the trees. The shouts of kids doing PE on the oval sounded innocuous, even comforting, from that distance. But I was beginning to feel a little frightened.

  Maths was when I understood that Alex had told him. Ben was late to class and did not sit at our desk, instead scanning the room and eventually choosing the empty seat next to Anthony Myer. Anthony Myer was Mary Ann Wilson’s rival for dux. He covered his work too, and kept his pens in a row in his shirt pocket. At lunch you saw him running for the library, desperate to be first to the school’s only computer, one hand clutching his chest to stop the pens falling out.

  I tried not to care. I sat on my own and lined my pens up on the desk in front of me, and did not look Ben’s way. I tried to be brave.

  At lunchtime the next day Ben was not sitting with our group. I asked one of the other boys where he was, and he looked at me in an amused sort of way and said, ‘Down on the oval.’

  On the oval was the big group, where everyone who could keep afloat in the mainstream sat. I would have sat there myself, if it had been possible. No one would have tried to stop me; not physically. Down there the girls sat amongst the boys, sometimes on their laps, smoking and laughing and teasing the teachers if they walked by. Ben had occasionally visited there. He was welcome anywhere because he was so funny, so quick to spot a weakness in a teacher or a student who was ridiculous. He used to do the Anthony Myer sprint, holding his hand over a row of im
aginary pens, to howls of laughter.

  It was clear that Ben was not going to walk home with me that afternoon. I saw him lingering with a group of boys, glancing in my direction, when I was waiting for him at the gate, but he did not come towards me. I set off on my own.

  Our school was at the bottom of a steep hill, which the buses had to labour up. Often they broke down halfway. Nearly always, we walked faster than they could drive, shielding our faces from the billows of exhaust. On this afternoon a bus was caught near the top, its engine howling as the driver tried to force it into a lower gear. As I passed, Marco Giordano and Jonathan Lane blossomed suddenly out of the back window, like an obscene flower, shouting at me. I stared at them. Marco was moving his fist up and down and rolling his eyes in pretend pleasure; Jonathan bawled, ‘Can you suck my cock, too, Rose?’

  I put my head down and walked on, ignoring them. Their voices became incoherent under the roar of the bus. I didn’t look back. My heart was beating very fast. I hadn’t done anything like what they were describing. It had been as much as I could manage to submit to Alex’s weight, to open my legs, to keep still as he moved up and down on top of me.

  At home I drew a picture of the dress I would wear to Alex’s formal. I wanted something sleek and tight-fitting around the bust, that would burst into a skirt like a flower, like a poppy, at my waist. I had an idea that Alex might lay me down somewhere soft, on the velvet grass of whichever golf club or yacht club was chosen by his school, and push my skirts aside to find that I was not wearing underpants. This was not my own fantasy. I had read this in one of my mother’s books when I was drifting around the house, looking for something to do.

  As the weeks went on things got worse at school. If I caught a boy’s eye in class, he would immediately loll his tongue out and leer at me. When I was sitting thoughtlessly on a wall, waiting for Janice and Vicky, three girls from our year laughed at me; one of them said, ‘Close your legs, Rose – for once.’ There was sniggering from the benches when we played volleyball. This had me checking my skirt for blood, adjusting my underpants, trying not to turn my back on anyone.

  I could not talk to Ben. He dared me to, staring at me during assembly or whenever he had other boys around him. Someone kept ringing our house and gasping down the phone. None of this was so obvious that anyone could do anything about it. Teachers did not notice the attention I was being paid at school, and it always seemed to be me who answered the phone to the gasper. I could not talk to Janice or Vicky about what was happening, because it was too shaming to acknowledge it.

  Meanwhile Alex was as strong a presence as if he was really there. I took to walking every afternoon and dreaming him up. He was as vivid as a real boy, appearing by my side, or leaning out of a slowing car to call my name and smile at me: a smile that would pull me to him as though I were a fish on a line. I wanted him very much. I was ready for him again. I could remember the feel of his cheek sliding down the skin of my neck. When I breathed in I could smell him. But I couldn’t think what to do next. Instead, I waited for him in a hum of stillness, trapped in honey, suspended, unable to move.

  *

  I was twenty-two when I saw Alex again. It was in the front room of a shared house, at a party in the inner city. I was cruising at that time, on one of the currents of confidence that occasionally came past during those years, that had to do with minor things: weight loss, a series of compliments, the weather. I had been listening to a friend whose boyfriend had been complicatedly, trickily unfaithful, first with a girl we didn’t know, then with a girl who was in our circle and had been very helpful during the initial part of the break-up. When my friend finished howling into my dress I felt increased. Bigger. Swelled with love and importance. It was hot, and sweat as well as tears soaked my dress. I stood up and looked around, feeling my dress cling to my body, and then saw Alex, standing in a corner and talking to another boy.

  He did not look very different. His clothes were cleaner and plainer than my friends’ – a blue t-shirt, a pair of jeans – which made him look simpler, more stupid, less interesting. But his jeans were the right kind, his stomach was flat, and I was infinitely adaptable. He still looked like a lovely, strong animal. He’d cut his hair short. It was summer, and his skin looked brown and warm. I took a long swig of the beer I had been holding, but hadn’t been able to drink while my friend wept into my chest, walked over to him and tapped him on the shoulder.

  He looked around. Surprise – and a kind of terror – lit up his face, but before he could speak I said, ‘Come with me. I want to tell you something.’

  He raised his eyebrows at the boy he was talking to, and followed me out the front of the house. Once we were in the dark I turned, took hold of his shirt and kissed him. He responded straight away. That glittering, that prickling. I slid my hands behind his neck and brought him down to me. Both his hands came up and took hold of my breasts. He backed me further into the shadows, against a fig tree that grew over the path, its cold leaves embracing my body.

  I was so overwhelmed by desire that I nearly went down on my knees, there in the garden. I wanted to. It was a fierce feeling. But we clawed apart and stood looking at each other, panting.

  ‘We’ll go to my house,’ said Alex. He led me to his car, opened the door and pushed me in. It was an old Falcon with bench seats. He drove with one hand between my legs.

  His house was a three-storey terrace owned by his father, in a suburb that was about to become very expensive. I had stood in front of many unfamiliar terrace houses in this way, brought there by someone whose life, however briefly, had opened up to include mine. Pretending to myself a kind of helplessness.

  But there was no time for reflection. Alex was playing a part in a movie of lust: he caught my hand, dragging me in and up the stairs to his bedroom. I let him. I let him pull my dress over my head, I let him throw me on the bed, I let him climb onto me and fuck me without stopping to find out if I was ready. He had a move that he must have practised – he suddenly rolled over, gripping me, like a crocodile in the water with a body, so that I was sitting on top of him. It hurt, but it made him come, and I was able to collapse onto his chest, slide myself off to lie beside him. He passed me a handful of tissues to clean myself up.

  We did not have much to say. We talked a little about Ben, who was living in London and working for a film company. His mother was still married to Alex’s father. We did not look at each other as we talked, but stared out the window.

  The view of the night from Alex’s room was of trees, their leafy tops, swarming around streetlights, shifting in a slight, hot breeze that came through the open window. Every so often the breeze would break the leaves apart and the street light would flash into the dark room. I watched them, and pulled the sheet around my breasts, and drew my knees up, making a tent.

  Finally, I said, ‘Why did you tell him?’

  ‘What?’ Alex said.

  I could smell wine and sweat, and semen.

  ‘Why did you tell Ben? That we had sex?’

  ‘I didn’t. He guessed.’

  I turned to look at him. His eyes were closing. ‘Did you come?’ he said, and then he was asleep.

  I gathered my clothes quietly and put them on. I could not see the tissues in the dark, but I was leaking; I used a hand to wipe myself and then wiped the hand on Alex’s sheets. He was beginning to snore.

  It was a night so hot that it felt like daytime. Walking alone felt safe, not scary, not isolated. People were in the streets or sitting on their verandahs, the red ends of their cigarettes like animals’ eyes in the darkness. A man who bumped into me smiled an apology and kept walking. I carried my boots and trod carefully across the cracks and leaves and gumnuts that littered the pavement.

  There had been a party a few months after I’d first had sex with Alex, at Marco Giordano’s. His parents were going away for the weekend. He lived in a huge pile
down on the waterfront, bigger by far than Alex’s father’s, with grounds that reached right down to a little beach, and a boathouse that had couches in it, a bed, a fridge. Everyone was invited, and everyone was going, and Janice and Vicky convinced me that I should too. We would stick together, they said. We would get drunk.

  We had been sitting by the water, drinking a mix of vodka, vermouth and scotch filched from our parents, watching an orange moon rise in the sky. It had begun to seem possible that I could be remade into someone fresher, happier. I’d needed to piss, and left Vicky and Janice to head up the long lawn to find a bathroom, grinning as I passed people. The bottom floor of the Giordanos’ house opened onto the lawn through huge glass doors, which were all ajar. It was a big room with a slate floor, and wooden walls like a sauna. It smelt cold, and musty, as though this was the first time the doors had been opened. I went down a corridor and there was another door, wooden this time, and there was Ben, leaning against the wall with his hands behind his back. We had not spoken in three months.

  ‘Is that the toilet?’ I said after a moment.

  He looked at me scornfully and said nothing.

  ‘Hello?’ I said, made stupid by the mixture of alcohol I had drunk. ‘Anybody there?’

  Ben made an explosive sound of disgust.