Six Bedrooms (11 page)

 

We couldn't very well ask our flatmates to leave on the night that Sandy and Matthew were coming. As it turned out, Evie, Danny and Lorikeet were going to a party. Meera was somewhere, I didn't know where. Brett came down while I was cleaning the kitchen and stood in a surly way over a saucepan of two-minute noodles while I flapped around behind him.

‘All right, all right,' he said, when I snatched the empty saucepan from him and ran water into it. He took a bottle of Coke out of the fridge, wedged it under one
arm, and headed upstairs, carrying his slopping bowl in front of him.

William came banging down the stairs with a supermarket packet of chicken breasts, a tin of green peppercorns and a carton of cream. He crashed them on to the kitchen table, which I'd just begun to set. I hated chicken – that bloody, chemical smell of the factory floor, of their miserable lives.

The doorbell rang.

‘You get it,' said William.

I ran up the stairs, along the corridor, and pulled the door open. Sandy and Matthew looked just as I'd expected them to – older than I was, nicely dressed, fashionable but hardly daring. Sandy's long hair had been blow-dried into the curving, face-framing shape that was popular then. They smiled nervously at me and Sandy gave me a kiss.

‘William's in the kitchen,' I said, gesturing down the corridor.

‘Yikes,' said Matthew as he passed me.

William shooed us out into the living room while he cooked. I opened the wine that his friends had brought, and we sat on the velour couch and they asked me questions, kindly, as though they were William's parents and he'd proposed to me. It became quickly apparent that they had not seen him for a long time, and were hoping he might have changed.

‘
Fuck!
'

I got up, and went to see what was wrong. William, with a cut hand, was standing in a puddle of green peppercorns. He'd splashed his t-shirt. I bent over and picked up the empty tin, dropped it into the rubbish.

‘Don't worry about it,' I said. ‘I'll go down to the shop and get some more.'

‘I'll go,' he said, lifting his feet as I cleaned the floor around him.

‘You need a bandaid,' I said, nodding at his bleeding hand.

He wiped it on the back of his jeans. ‘It's just a scratch.'

‘He'll be back in a minute,' I said to Sandy and Matthew, as they turned their surprised faces up to me. The door slammed, and the house shook. ‘Have some more wine.'

They left at 9.30. We'd finished the wine, and I'd introduced them to Brett, who'd stumped down for another bottle of Coke and the labelled bar of chocolate he had at the back of the fridge. Meera had come part of the way down the stairs, stuck her head round the door and retreated before I could say anything. William had not come back from the shops.

I waited till Sandy and Matthew had driven away, then went back down the corridor for my bag. I was starving. I didn't expect to see William at the 7-Eleven, and of
course he wasn't there. I bought an extra large packet of Twisties and ate them on the way home. I read in bed till eleven, and eventually I went to sleep.

 

I did read Evie's diary. It was odd, how unfamiliar I was with her bedroom, when in our last house I'd spent all my time there, sitting on the bed, reading magazines, drawing pictures. She'd brought home huge sheets of paper from her art school and we'd written the lyrics of songs across them and stuck them on our living room wall. I remember the first night we lived together, the night I left home. Evie cooked mother-in-law eggs – boiled eggs that were then fried in oil, and served with chilli. It was hard to eat and hide homesick tears from her at the same time.

The diary was on the bedside table. I read it as fast as I could, standing up, listening for sounds from downstairs. I felt sick; my legs trembled with tension, and I shivered as I put it down.
Claire so cold to me
, she had written. The front door opened. I put the diary down and forced myself to walk calmly out of Evie's room, into the corridor and down the stairs to my own, where I sat on my bed and took up another book. I had begun reading
Anna Karenina
. My embarrassment and shame had also to do with the way Evie spoke to herself, her
ill-expressed feelings.
Why will she not stop rending at my heart?
The sentences I typed over and over again were an attempt to purge myself of this kind of language.

If I could get a boyfriend I would be free; free of Evie's love and her kindness to me. Free of the long looks that Danny was beginning to give me. And free, most of all, from being alone with only myself.

 

‘Drinks!' said Brett. ‘Drinks on the verandah!'

We all squeaked upstairs, Evie and Lorikeet in leather too, with jackets that could rip open to show their bare breasts, and whips, and leather caps. Danny wore his work clothes and was already drinking a beer.

‘Do you know where William is?' I asked him.

‘He's covering it,' Danny said. ‘He's up on Oxford Street.'

‘Is he dressing up?'

He took a swig from his bottle. ‘Doubt it.'

Brett's costume was complete. He'd forced his square, flat body into the lamé dress, fixed his wig into place, stuck on his false eyelashes. He had shoes like gold boats; he could barely walk, but he tottered over to his table and seized a bottle of champagne by the neck. He saw himself in his big mirror. ‘I'm gorgeous!' he crowed.

‘I'm ready!' shrieked Meera, coming up the corridor. She burst in and did a twirl for us, the feather on her
skullcap bobbing. She had traced her eyelids with gold glitter; she wore fake nails and a gold nose-ring and big, golden earrings that crashed against her brown shoulders. She was the real beauty in the room. We all stared at her. Even Danny paused in the lighting of his cigarette.

‘Darling!' trilled Meera, flinging herself at Brett.

‘Sweetie!' he carolled back, and they fell into each other's arms.

‘Where's Neil?' said Danny suddenly, but Meera turned from the embrace and gave him a thunderous look, and he shut up.

I soon lost Evie and Lorikeet in the crowd at the bottom of Moore Park Road, but I found myself up against the ropes, in a perfect spot. I could see everything, or would be able to when it began. Everyone was waiting for the Dykes on Bikes, always first in the parade. I was pressed against the warm arm of a man who would have been in his fifties or sixties. I turned to grin at him. He was bare-chested, wore a blue sequinned headband around his bald head, and a blue miniskirt of the same sparkling material. He had blue Roman sandals on, and a lot of eye make-up.

‘How are you, sweetie?' he shouted over the noise.

‘I'm good!' I shouted back. ‘Happy Mardi Gras!'

‘Happy Mardi Gras!' His smile was wide. I could see he had a gold filling in one of his back teeth.

‘Have you got someone in the parade?'

‘My boyfriend,' he yelled, mouth next to my ear. ‘He's a hostie. They're fourth, or fifth. I've been here for hours.'

Around us people were shrieking and singing. Somebody shoved me and I fell against the man's silver-haired chest. He caught me and set me back on my feet. ‘How old are you, sweetie?'

‘Nineteen.'

‘Do you have a girlfriend?'

‘I'm straight,' I said.

‘What?' He leant in to hear.

‘I'm
straight!
' I bawled.

‘Then go home!' said a voice behind me. It was a young man in a kind of leather harness and a posing pouch. He was drinking beer.

‘It's for all of us!' said my friend.

‘No it's not,' said the young man, swigging his beer and sneering at me. ‘Go home. Go back to Artarmon. Or Mosman.'

My friend took my hand and pulled me away. We wriggled through the crowd, excusing ourselves, forcing people apart, making our way. We found another spot by the ropes. ‘Just ignore him, sweetie,' said my friend, his mouth so close that my ear hurt. ‘We're a family.'

I offered him my hipflask of vodka. He slipped me half an ecstasy. We put our arms around each other's
necks, we cheered and screamed when the Dykes on Bikes came howling past. The hosties danced and waved light batons, indicating the rear exits. His boyfriend was blond and tanned, wearing white Speedos and a collar and cuffs. My eyes filled with tears as my friend roared his boyfriend's name, and his boyfriend broke ranks to rush over and kiss him across the ropes.

 

When I woke I was in my bed and it was day, but a compromised light, ready to change. I stood up immediately, with the sense that I had lost something, and went out of my room into the corridor. I was dizzy. The corridor was shadowy. There was a creak on the floor upstairs, feet coming down, and there was Danny, both hands out to the walls for balance.

‘What time is it?' I said.

‘Four o'clock,' he said.

‘In the afternoon?'

He nodded.

‘Where is everyone?'

‘You're the only one home. Everyone's still out.'

The knowledge that I had missed a whole day was welcome. It would be night soon and I would be able to go back to bed. I was still wearing my net skirt, which had sprung back into place when I stood up, but
a t-shirt instead of my corset. ‘What about William?' I said.

‘Maybe he's home. If he didn't go to the party.'

We turned back down the corridor and I knocked, then opened the door to William's room. The clothes and sheets were gone, and the records, the poster of Elvis Costello and the clock radio. He'd left the mattress. And on the windowsill, like a prop in a bad play, a syringe.

‘Oops,' said Danny.

I couldn't say anything. I was too busy pretending that I was not surprised. Not surprised that William was gone, that he was a junkie and that I was stupid in a way I couldn't ever explain to anyone.

 

A month or so later Danny and Lorikeet broke up, and though he begged her not to go she left, with Evie, in the van from the food co-op. Evie sat in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead, not turning to look when I waved at her.

A new boy moved into Evie's room, a handsome boy who was studying film with me. He had a little contraption for rolling joints. I showed him a poem I'd written and he said, ‘Politically, I like it a lot.' For him I also pretended that I had read Dostoevsky.

Brett and Neil got back together. It was winter. Brett took the TV out of the living room, because it was his, and he and Neil wanted to watch in bed. Danny and I built a few fires in the living room fireplace, though we had to open the windows to let the smoke out, so it wasn't as warm as we'd hoped.

William's room was empty for a long time. His rent would have been the same as mine, $42.50. I did wonder who was paying it, how we were keeping up with the real estate agent. Much later I found out that our landlord was Meera's father, a local GP. That William had been her boyfriend and that she had been covering his rent.

 

I moved out on a day when no one was around, piling my things into the back of my father's car. I was moving as quickly as I could because I knew Danny would be home from work soon, and I didn't want to say goodbye. Apart from Evie, he had been the best of the people in that house. He hadn't made fun of me for not understanding about William, for being such a baby that I'd thought William was sleepy when he was nodding off, that there were fleas when he was scratching. All I had done for Danny was negative: I had not joined in when the others bullied him. I had not kissed him.

The reason I have trouble with goodbyes is because of a discomfort about how I have conducted myself during an encounter. It is just as the writer Jessica Anderson said – if you can't get the ending right, there is something wrong in the body of the story. I had not been honest with the people in this house. I'd turned towards William like a flower to a dead sun, when all the time there had been warmth coming from Danny, coming from Evie. When I saw Danny later at the movies, I stepped out of his line of sight just as he turned around. I'd seen Meera once too, but that was different; our dislike of each other was open. Our eyes met as she was borne down King Street in a pack of her friends, and then we both looked away.

But I remember the feeling of riding up through the city to the Cross, my arms round Danny's waist, my helmeted face turned to one side, my reflection rippling past in the buildings. I loved that swinging, in and out of the traffic, the way we passed people, shot in front of cars and buses. The feeling of being buoyant for once, of smoothly passing through life instead of having to plod along on foot.

I couldn't explain to Evie, when she wrote to me asking why we were not friends anymore, that I was still trying to lose the old self, to become someone a little faster, a little smoother than everyone else. Or at least someone who could keep up.

I
T
was Thursday, and we had a free period before lunch. This gave us time to get to Ben's new house and watch
Days of our Lives
before coming back for Maths. The way to sneak out of school was not to sneak. You walked with your back straight, your head high, and you didn't look to see if you were being watched or followed. You had to believe no one had any reason to stop you.

Ben was short, with brown hair and a face that had been smooth and pretty when we were ten-year-olds. At sixteen he still had the same lush black eyelashes and brown almond eyes, but now he also had acne, and didn't wash his hair much.

Ben had always wanted me, even before high school. When we started French in Year 7 we were asked to write down and then read out loud the things we liked, starting
J'aime
. I can't remember my own list, only Ben's, which ended with
J'aime Rose
, with our special fake French trill on the R of my name. I wasn't really embarrassed. Ben was the sort of boy who could do things like that. He seemed quiet and even shy, but in fact he was clever, fierce and defiant, and he cared nothing for what other kids thought. He was the most entertaining friend I had. He was the only boy I knew who laughed when things were funny, rather than when they were meant to be funny, or when everyone else was laughing.

I had female friends at school, two of them, misfits like myself who read too many books or became spluttery about The Cure. I sat with them at lunchtime, and also with Ben and his friends. We were together as a group if you saw us from a distance, but in fact the girls sat in a circle of their own, on old pieces of sandstone, and the boys sat to one side, on milk crates they'd stolen from the canteen. Our spot was under a fig tree at the edge of the school where the land, briefly, became bush. It was private, neglected. It looked like an old campsite.

Ben and I didn't talk at recess or lunch. Neither of us knew how to cross from one side to the other, and Ben scorned my friends anyway, particularly Janice, whom
he'd made cry by saying that the lead singer of The Cure was gay. That was a bad day. Through angry tears, Janice said that Robert Smith had been with his girlfriend, Mary, since they were teenagers. Ben, pretending to disbelieve her, said, ‘But there's nothing wrong with being gay,' and Janice couldn't deny it, because that was the code she lived by. This was what Ben could do, if he chose – lead you somewhere you didn't want to go, and leave you there.

I called us misfits before. I wasn't quite a misfit. I didn't have the courage for that. Not for me the glories of triple-pierced ears, or a radical devotion to a singer or a style. I couldn't commit to standing out like Janice did, with her black-ringed eyes and hair teased into a dyed dandelion ball. With her unconsummated marriage to Robert Smith. In this part of my life I was watching, and waiting. I was waiting to be transformed. I would be nobody until someone chose me.

 

I didn't like going places alone with Ben, but this time I hadn't been able to think of an excuse. Ben's father had died when he was six, and recently his mother had got married again, to an advertising executive. Now Ben had a stepfather and a stepbrother. Two weeks ago he and his mother had moved into their house, which was next
to a wharf, and overlooked a stretch of river with boats clustered at its shores – yachts, and cruisers, which are like mansions on the water, only streamlined, a mass of architecture pointed at Sydney's bays and private beaches, at its harbourside restaurants.

Two weeks ago, too, Ben had given me an ultimatum. It had happened over the phone. Every afternoon after school, when I'd said hello to my mother and got myself something to eat, I used to sit in the study with my feet up on the tooled leather desk and phone Ben. I could tilt the office chair back and use my legs as pivot, as anchor, swinging myself back and forth as I stared at the ceiling. I'd been doing this for years, it seemed: talking over the day that had just passed with Ben, comparing the idiocies of our teachers, gossiping about the people we sat with, the kids in our classes. The phone was our place. I was never so comfortable when I was actually with him.

Suddenly Ben said, ‘I'm sick of this.'

‘Sick of what?' I said.

‘Waiting for you to make up your mind.'

So it had come. I didn't pretend not to know what he was talking about. I sat up in the office chair, and brought my feet down to the ground.

‘It's obvious we were meant to be together,' said Ben. ‘I know you better than anyone does. I know you better than you know yourself.'

He'd said this before. It made me feel small, and imprisoned.

‘Just give it a go,' he said. ‘See how you like it.'

I didn't need him to explain what he meant. He meant for me to let him hold my hand, to submit to his body, let him tell people we were together. He meant for us to sit apart from the others at lunchtime, kissing. I felt myself grow smaller and smaller.

‘Just give it a try,' he said, and I agreed to.

 

We were not really going to his house to watch
Days of Our Lives
. This was Ben's way of cornering me into sex. Guess how I knew: I looked in the front pocket of his schoolbag. He had two condoms, things I'd seen before but never held in my hand. In their plastic packets they made me think of surgeon's gloves – as though he was preparing for an operation on me. Two weeks of being boyfriend and girlfriend had passed; two weeks of having my neck nuzzled by him in assembly; two weeks of my damp hand in his on the way home from school; two weeks of gaps and halts in our phone conversation and Janice and Vicky looking pityingly at me when I moved to a milk crate next to Ben's at lunch.

If only I had been pretty I would have had more choices. Ben thought people were fools for not seeing
how beautiful I was. I thought only someone very kind could love me, with my round, cheerful face and dark, thick, horsey hair.

The house was a stack of concrete rectangles with tinted windows looking on to the water. There was a tall security gate with a keypad. Ben pressed the numbered buttons and the gate slid to one side with a shriek of metal, making us check behind us as if we were intruders.

I always take a breath when I walk into a house for the first time. This one smelt of cleaning fluid. We dumped our bags in the wide front hall and went through the cool of the air-conditioning into the kitchen. There were two boys, one blond, one dark, a little older than we were, standing in front of the open fridge. There was nothing in the fridge but drink: rows and rows of champagne, aimed at us like missiles.

As we came in the blond boy popped the cork on a bottle of champagne, laughing as it hit the ceiling with its pattern of downlights. Then he put the bottle to his lips and drank and drank, not seeming to mind the bubbles. He passed the bottle to his friend, gasping and grinning at us.

What I remember best about this moment is a sense of the boys' sleekness, their look of good health and pleasure in being; a look that Ben, with his acne and his
skinny shoulders, lacked utterly. They were like beautiful dogs, or horses, well fed and adored.

Ben said, ‘This is Rose.' He pointed at the blond boy. ‘That's Alex. Who lives here.'

‘I'm Rob,' said the other boy, and held out the bottle. ‘Alex's friend. Drink?'

I remember, also, a long moment of Alex looking curiously at me.

There was a TV in the kitchen, but Ben would not stay there to watch, or drink from the bottle of champagne. He led me down to his bedroom in the bowels of the house, the air becoming colder as we descended, and less fresh. His bedroom was a concrete box with French doors giving on to a courtyard that was a dark tangle of ivy. The doors looked as though they would not open. He had all the things from his old house: his stereo, his TV, his boxes of tapes and stacks of LPs. But he had a double bed now, that I couldn't look at, and a poster of Brigitte Bardot on the wall, astride a motor scooter. I stood in the doorway. The smell of his room was already the same as in the last house. Musty more than anything else. Not bad. I could hear Alex and Rob crashing round in the kitchen, shouting with laughter.

‘Let's go back up,' I said. ‘We could get drunk.'

‘With those idiots?' Ben sat down on the bed and patted the mattress next to him. His sheets were new,
black and horribly shiny. He smiled at me, and then pursed his lips, a kiss. I shook my head. The inside of his mouth tasted like sandwiches or baked beans.

I crossed my arms tight over my chest. ‘I want to get drunk.'

‘What about
Days
?'

‘Come on,' I said and he stared at me, and crossed his own arms.

‘Please.' If I could get him drunk I could get away, and put off the sex. ‘It'll be fun.'

Ben gave a long, weary sigh and got to his feet. I was already out the door. He stumped up the stairs behind me. I was running, taking the steps two at a time – I had a feeling, a superstition, that if I reached the kitchen before he got to the top of the stairs I would be free of him. I swung, panting, into the kitchen and Alex and Rob turned to look at me.

‘I want a drink,' I gasped.

We didn't go back to school that day. As the afternoon went on I got lighter and lighter. It was my dream, I think, to disappear. The more I drank the less substantial I felt, almost coming apart, like a rag of cloud in a breezy sky. I drank and listened to the boys, and didn't speak. Once, just once, Alex came to stand next to me. Then he took my hand, and looked down at me, his eyes as startled as mine must have been. Ben didn't see this.
He had given up needling me about getting back to his room and was becoming incoherent, staggering around the kitchen, challenging us to drinking games.

None of them noticed when I took the bottle of champagne I was drinking from and went out into the hall. There was a set of metal spiral stairs leading up a concrete stairwell. The edges of the steps were irregular and the concrete was bare and grey. It was as though the house was not finished, was a shell, and that the family had moved in before it was ready. I started to climb, holding the bottle by the neck. Four floors up and I had reached the single room at the top, which I knew must be Alex's. From it you could see the Harbour Bridge, shimmering in the distance. The sun was behind us now. A breeze had sprung up. I could feel it on my hot face through the open window, and hear the tink of stays from the moored boats. I was drunk; it was a summer afternoon; there was an opening out, a flood of possibility.

I turned back to the room. In one corner there was a cricket bat, on the desk a pile of folded clothes, on the wall a poster with a picture of a red Porsche. There were no books. I finished the bottle of champagne sitting on Alex's bed, and then went down the metal stairs as quietly as I could. I grabbed my bag from the hall, let myself out, skipped through the shrieking gate, pressed the
button to close it and was up the street and round the corner as fast as I could go, my heart beating quickly.

I walked home, my schoolbag on my back. The leaves on the trees were bright in the glassy air. There was no one around – there was a lull at that hour, when fathers had arrived home from work and mothers were making dinner. Televisions were on in the front rooms of houses. Perhaps it would be autumn soon, after this long, bright summer. When I got home my mother was cooking in the kitchen with the lights off, the twilight rounding the edges so the room was gentle, soft. She turned and smiled at me as I came in.

 

In Maths on Friday Ben passed me a note that said,
How do you like my new big brother?

I read the note and then wrote,
He could be worse
, and passed it back.

Ben looked, and then covered the note with his hand. I tried to think of something else to write about Alex, but he hadn't struck me as funny, as most things did when I was with Ben. Our friendship flourished in confinement, like Maths class, where our notes to each other made us sick with laughing and sometimes caused the teacher to send us out. Then we would push each other in the corridor, stagger against the clapboard walls, knees
bent with mirth. But today we did our Maths. We did not even pretend to hide our answers from each other, the way we usually did, in imitation of Mary Ann Adams, who would be dux eventually and didn't want anyone else to share it.

Walking from Maths to History, I told Janice about Alex. She preferred punk boys, skinny ones with stick legs in black jeans and winklepickers, but she understood the appeal of the private school boy. Every girl, even Janice, wanted to be asked to a private school formal where, we believed, some thoughtful parent would arrange for a party beforehand with actual drinks being served, where the boys would not wear pale grey tuxedos with pale blue bowties but proper black ones. Where the boys would be capable, handing us in and out of a taxi, talking to us at the dance instead of getting so slaughtered that they spent most of the night vomiting in the car park. Janice said nothing about Ben.

On the way home from school I walked with Ben as far as his street, allowed him to kiss me and put his tongue in my mouth, and then took the back streets to my house. I liked the quiet, and not having to think about cars when I crossed the road. I could daydream so intensely that reaching home was a surprise; my body had carried me there without me knowing. I told myself a story as I walked, of Alex coming up from the
ferry, inexplicably early from his turreted school, liking the back streets as much as I did, meeting me under the arch of leaves. Neither of us would go home. We would choose one of the streets that led down to the river, one that ended in a tiny reserve, we would sit on the bench next to each other and talk and kiss. We would still be there when it was dark.

 

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 on to the tape I was making. But there was nothing on. I leant 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.