New Australian Stories 2 (30 page)

I had gone to that party hoping to see Raffaello. I talked to him most days at school; we sat next to each other in maths. But I was hoping that he would notice me at Katie's party, more than he did at school, which was also why I was wearing my father's jumper. I'd taken it from Dad's house without asking on my last weekend visit, months ago. It was fashionable then to wear belted shirts or jumpers with stockings, and this jumper was red, thickly and strongly knitted. It covered a lot of me. I was resolved to wear it, however hot the weather.

Raffaello was not tall. He had dark brown eyes, curly dark hair cut close to his head, and a sunny smile, rare in a teenage boy. I could make him laugh, and did, often, until our maths teacher threatened us with separation. She told me I was ruining his concentration. I was more careful after this.

The best thing about maths was that Andrew was not there. Andrew was shorter than Raffaello, skinny, spotty-faced, rat-like. He never got bullied, despite his size; the bigger boys were frightened of him. He was a savage mimic. He could be horribly funny. He found out things about your parents and said them in front of everyone. He would go through your bag, find your diary, point out that you were not wearing a bra, hold his nose and say, ‘Have you got your
period
?' when you had to push by his desk.

I took Raffaello to sleep with me every night. It was a small ritual, an imaginary play made simple by my lack of experience. We went walking. There were lanes near my mother's house — this was the kind of suburb I grew up in — lanes over which the trees met, to make a tunnel of green. We went walking, down the lane, towards the bush, and Raffaello took hold of me, and turned me to him.

That was it. I took that back to its beginning as many times as it was needed. Raffaello turned me to him, and I fell asleep.

Before the party, I'd filled my bottle — an old Jim Beam bottle that I'd found at the bottom of James's cupboard when I was looking for a tennis ball — with tequila from my mother's liquor cabinet. It was easy enough to do, and just as easy to top up the tequila bottle with water. I was almost used to drinking. We had a great deal of alcohol in the house. I wasn't allowed to drink it, but I did, testing myself on different kinds to see which made me feel best. Tequila was quick and sharp, and its disappearance was easy to conceal.

Judy and I walked to the party, over the bridge that looked down on our school, and up the steep hill to Katie's place. There was a moon, coming up orange over the trees. We passed the bottle between us, Judy coughing and laughing and miming drunkenness with each sip.

‘You're not drinking enough,' I said, as we reached Katie's street. I looked at the level in the bottle. ‘You'll never get drunk. You have to scull it.'

‘I can't. It tastes foul.'

‘We'll mix it with something. We'll find something in the fridge.'

‘Do I look okay?'

We were at the top of Katie's driveway. Judy stood so she faced me, and I did what I usually did — tweaked at her, pulled things into place. She was wearing a Frankie Goes to Hollywood T-shirt over black stirrup pants which brought her legs down into a kind of point, making her V-shaped from the feet up.

‘Titian hair,' I said to her. It was our code; it was about possibility. Her long red hair was beautiful, gold when it caught the light. We had built it into our mythology of the future, when she would be discovered by an artist and painted, nude, with her hair falling over her breasts.

We made our way down to the house. There was orange juice in the fridge. Katie's parents didn't seem to be there. No one said hello to us as we came in; we just went to the kitchen. There was music, and kids smoking on the verandah. The moon was higher now, and paler. Sometimes there would be a surge of noise from the cicadas. I poured the rest of the tequila — still nearly half a bottle — into a tall, patterned glass and topped it up with orange juice. I took a huge, burning swallow and passed it to Judy. She took a deep breath, put it to her lips and drank the lot.

‘That was for me too!' I said, but when she'd finished coughing she grinned at me and wiped her lips and eyes.

‘Now I'm ready,' she said.

We had agreed to separate. Judy's goal I secretly scorned: she was in love with Michael Brown from Year 12, a boy who was legendary for his beauty and kindness, who would probably not even be there. I was in love with him too. You couldn't not be. He'd once stood up and offered me his seat on the sport bus, when hockey and football were being played at the same ground. The seat was warm when I sat down on it. Michael smiled at me, and I kept my thighs carefully propped up, so that they did not touch the seat, spread and look fat.

Judy's goal was to talk to Michael, so that he might remember who she was, wonder about her, choose her, with her Titian hair, to model for his final work for art. This was the thing about Michael — he played sport like a hero, but always came top in art and English. After the modelling, he would not be able to get Judy out of his mind. Then he would get a scholarship to a school of art in Paris, and beg her to come with him, not even finishing her HSC. She would, and they would be so poor in Paris, on a single scholarship, that they would not have much to eat and she would lose a great deal of weight. It was a very satisfactory story, to which I'd contributed quite a lot. We'd come up with the weight-loss part together.

Judy went out one door of the kitchen and I went out the other. There was a can of beer on the floor outside, which I picked up and shook. It was half full. I peered into it to see if there were any cigarette butts. There were not, so I drank it. It helped with the warm and pleasant feeling I was beginning to have from the tequila. Hearing Raffaello's voice from outside, I went to find him.

It was the tequila, undoubtedly. I said something which, years later, still has the power to make me shudder. It was unforgivable, as though I had learned nothing in the last four years of high school. I said: ‘Would you go out with me?'

This wasn't an invitation to the movies or to see a band. It meant,
be my boyfriend. Love me.
I don't think it had ever been said, in the history of North Hills High School, ever, by a girl.

Before Raffaello could answer, Andrew exploded next to him. I'd seen this performance before. It consisted of laughing so hard he cried. Of smacking his thighs, holding his aching sides, wiping his eyes.

I was still, suspended in myself, watching, waiting for the thigh-slapping and shrieking to stop. Even Raffaello did nothing. Eventually Andrew fetched back up against the wall of the house, panting, one last wipe of the eyes with the back of the hand, and said to me, ‘You! You think he'll go out with
you
?'

Other kids were looking at us now, though none approached.

I was still waiting to fall dead on the spot, the effects of the tequila flushing downwards, leaving my head sore and clear.

‘I can't see it,' said Raffaello, looking at his feet.

‘Why not?' I said. I had nothing left to lose.

He took a breath, and stared straight at me. ‘We've got nothing in common,' he said; then added, ‘Everyone thinks you're a lesbian.'

Andrew was silent now, arms crossed, eyebrows raised. I gave a push with my backside, heaved myself away from the wall. Someone, a girl, was calling me, in a stupid singsong voice that promised insult. You get so that you can identify this.

‘Tash-a,' said Katie, as she came round the corner of the house, ‘your friend needs you. She's spewing.'

On Thursday afternoons Judy's mother went to her singing class and Judy came to my house. She was old enough to be left alone, but it had been happening so long, and it suited us both. Friday was the day homework was always due; on Thursdays we sat at the kitchen table, stuffed ourselves with toast and peanut butter, and did our work together, comparing, criticising, helping each other.

My mother hadn't been able to castigate me for drunkenness — I was too old to let her get away with that — but I'd had to get Judy's vomit out of the car myself and then pay for it to be cleaned. I used a trowel from the garden and a pair of washing-up gloves. Then I had to look in the yellow pages for the car-cleaning service. It was six weeks' pocket money.

And of course my mother was not above making Judy feel terrible. The smell would never go away, she told us, and she was too poor to be thinking about buying another car. She said this while she was looking in the back of the pantry to see if she had forgotten any bottles of wine or scotch. She was on her hands and knees, moving the tall jars of flour and rice that never got used up. She had that look on her face — belligerent, preoccupied, but ready to be angrier if it was needed. She looked exactly like the woman on top of the bookshelf in the Thurber cartoon.

‘Look, Jude,' I said, nudging her. ‘
That's my first wife over
there.
'

Judy looked, and some spit went down the wrong way, and she choked with laughter. My mother glared at us. Of course there were no hidden bottles of scotch or wine. There had been, but I'd drunk them.

It didn't last forever. It was easy to see that no one would ever forget, and if Judy ever made another mistake, if she ever did something like fart in class or vomit from bus-sickness (which she'd been known to do), we would be back at the beginning again. But she was careful, and so was I.

It hadn't surprised me that Raffaello had moved seats in maths that first week. I was on my own now, looking out of the window, staring so hard at the eucalypts in the playground that they had silvery edges.

I was outside English one afternoon, waiting for the teacher, not even thinking about it, thinking about Jane Eyre and her small, plain self, when Andrew ducked up next to me. He had been trying to catch my attention, I realised. It was another performance: he was singing, and now that I was looking at him, I could see that he was singing ‘Like a Virgin'
.

He went on singing, doing little twists in front of me. Other kids were watching us, glad they weren't the object of Andrew's attention. I kept still. And the longer I was still, the more it started to look like Andrew was serenading me rather than harassing me, his little dance becoming more and more elaborate. I looked at him, his rodent's face. I could see his teeth as he sang, and they did not look clean.

It was a decision, a sudden accession to adulthood. It was like when I'd decided not to speak to my father. It was absolute power, if I wanted it. It came like so: I was not going to be a success at this, and so I was going to stop trying. I had found a virtue in stillness, in watching — in ceasing, at least for the moment, to care whether or not I was acceptable to others. In this silence, while Andrew's dance wound down — you could see him considering how to leave, whether it would be better to spin away from me as though I had never been there or come to a stop in front of me and see what I would do — I realised that it was not just me who was a virgin.

I have looked at a photograph of myself from that time. I see a girl with pale skin and short dark hair, with arms folded over her breasts. I am wearing something else of my father's, an old painting shirt, and I look pretty, and angry, a lot like my mother. Judy, who is standing next to me, is not so fat as we thought. But we were right about the weight loss, though it was Judy's own scholarship that took her away, that left her little time or money for food. We are still friends.

We dress as ourselves now. I wear jeans, and T-shirts. Judy is tall and bosomy and recognisable in public. She wears old-fashioned dresses with sculpted bodices, long boots that lace up, and dark glasses if we are going out. Judy comes over from the eastern suburbs to sit in a café with me. If my son is on Judy's lap he will bury his hands in her hair, still streaked with red and gold.

Tales of Action and Adventure

MARK O'FLYNN

We're throwing a small dinner to welcome my wife's old friend Russell back from his long trek around the globe. The kids are at a sleepover so we think we might be able to get in some adult conversation for once. I am cooking. Russell Stanley is Shona's first boyfriend. Someone she has known since high school. His postcards, from various parts of the world, are pinned to the noticeboard beside the fridge. They have arrived with enviable regularity, adorned with vistas of colourful stamps. Grace, our daughter, is too young, or too cool, to be interested in stamps, or her mother's old boyfriends.

Shona talks about Russell frequently, relating his news about the part of the world from where the latest cards have issued. I can't keep up. Now that I come to think of it I have never heard Shona say a bad word about Russell. I have heard her say plenty of bad words about other men from her past, but not Russell. It's almost like she still loves him, but that couldn't be correct, because that was years ago and she married me, right? Right? I recall her saying that Russell was distantly related to Stanley, intrepid explorer of Stanley and Livingstone fame. That may be true, but the test of a man's character is relative. We shall see. I have always thought it quaint the way she has managed to maintain friendships from her school days; that sense of shared history. It must be nice. I know no one from my past. They're all ghosts. The past is a haunted place for me. Shona thinks the most intimate knowledge one can have of another person is if you knew them when they wore braces. Shona has perfect teeth now. I have studied the photos — and there is Russell, at her side, with braces of his own.