The Best Thing (7 page)

Another thing, Pug didn’t seem to be busting to get back to his mates. I kept waiting for him to make some excuse to get up and go, and he kept
staying,
and asking more questions. He hardly said anything about himself. He told me later he was embarrassed about having no job, and thought I’d disapprove about the boxing. He made me talk, though. He sat still and took me seriously. He listened and asked questions and didn’t make a single judgemental comment. I found myself saying things I hadn’t known I thought, drawn out by his interest. I found myself not having to bother about seeming cool or sophisticated, not having to worry about getting my tone right. I could just mag on, yarn on, take things back and restate them, disagree with myself. It was great.

For a while we had a casual kind of relationship. We only saw each other every week or so, and hardly ever left his room when we did. School got worse, and our meetings started to be the only nice times I had, and then the Christmas holidays started. God, was that an orgy of lies and sex! My ‘best friend’ Lisa was very handy during that time—even when she was away I could go for ‘long walks’ to ‘mope’ and ‘miss her’. That was when I really got to know Pug, seeing him almost every day. Pavement-sizzling afternoons, jacaranda-blue skies, pollution and bushfire smoke souring the streets, sunshine stinging: we sheltered in the shadowy must of that room in the share house, talking, sleeping,
being
together for hours. He turned out to be not quite so serious
all
the time as I first thought, but he is basically a serious and careful person, wrongly packaged in a boxer’s body. That’s when I got
addicted to him, started seeing the point of sex, started realising what a dud Brenner had been.

Going back to school meant major deprivation after that. But if I didn’t have Pug I don’t know how I’d cope with all the school stuff—he gives me enough of a boost to keep me grinding on, day after day, walking there, weathering whatever, walking back, sitting at my desk working. He thinks it’s very important, me doing the HSC, more important than
I
think it is, because I can’t see what it’s going to lead to. Haven’t a clue; don’t much care. It’s just … it’s there, and it seems slightly more pointless to stop than it does to go on. So I do.

I walk past Lisa and Kerry and Jasper Sceates at the bus stop. I’m halfway past and there’s deadly silence when Lisa sings out, ‘Well, hullo Melanie!’

There’s that teasing look in her eye. I just want to be far, far away, but I don’t speed up or anything. I give her a blank look, a Donna look, and go on past. I don’t say
anything
—I can just hear how she’d parrot it back at me.

They fall about laughing behind me. Jasper calls out, ‘Stackin’ on the weight a bit, aren’t ya?’ and the two girls shush him and Lisa says in a false voice, ‘Jasper! Don’t be so
cruel!
’

Stacking on the weight—I’ve never been bonier! Maybe that’s all he means, the opposite of what he said. But the way Lisa and Kerry reacted …

Well, stuff Jasper Sceates as well. Stuff all of them. Forget about them. Think about Pug, how he looks at you, how much you matter.

Because there was only me, and I was quiet and good, Dad took me places. I perched in the cabs of bulldozers, doodled on memo pads in factory offices, played with kittens in other people’s houses while above me Dad knitted deals with his talk of premiums and no-claim bonuses, fire, injury and acts of God. I was patient, too;
I learned patience going out with Dad, being in a new place, exploring it to death, then putting in another hour until he was ready to go.

In some people’s faces you can see what they looked like as children, or the old people they’ll be, when the flesh padding has sagged and shrunk and the bones show through. With some people you can’t see far. I could imagine Lisa, for example, as a pretty child (she did show me photos, too), but I couldn’t imagine her any older. Mind you, she never stopped moving and talking—her face was hard to concentrate on because I cared so much what it was doing; I had to think about my own reactions all the time and get them right. I remember I had a hard time seeing Brenner sometimes, squinting through my image of him as a leathery old lifesaver striding
manfully
about on the beach, silly red-and-yellow cap tied under his chin. With Pug I can’t tell. He is just Pug
now,
that is,
as
I see him,
inside the moment
I’m seeing him in. I get so fixated on the details of him sometimes it’s hard to step back far enough to
see
his complete face, let alone reshape it in my imagination as a baby’s, as a man Dad’s age.

With my own face, it’s hopeless, too: a small face with too many odd, over-sized features crammed into it. When I see my face after looking at others it seems too convex, everything too curly: a mouth quirked into a kind of weird permanent smile, black eyebrows making flourishes over my eyes, a great tassel of wavy black hair, thick enough to swing me from. Everything off-balance, out of proportion.

And this
bosom
that’s growing on me’s the same; the rest of my body seems to be stretching out and getting thinner like a piece of chewing gum, while it swells and hurts and tingles and gets bumped and elbowed, because I’m not used to it yet; I forget where it ends.

I can’t tell where I’ll go, how I’ll change, what I’m going to look like next month, next year. I look and wonder, waiting for
something to finish developing and start deteriorating so I can know, so I can relax.

Speaking of tension, I’m wound up with waiting for something else. I always feel as if I’m right on the verge of getting a period, but it’s been weeks, and one hasn’t come. I’ve had so many scares before, though, and they didn’t amount to anything. And the one time I
should’ve
been scared I didn’t feel a thing, didn’t even think until I was two months overdue, so …

Six weeks after fertilisation, extremely short arms and legs are visible. The red blob in the chest, a tiny heart, now beats about 150 times a minute, twice as fast as the mother’s. The eyes and brain can be seen easily. The embryo’s own blood supply, separate from its mother’s, is piggybacked onto it by the placenta,
allowing the input of nutrients and the disposal of the embryo’s waste products. This second month of gestation is a sensitive time: even slight defects in the embryo can bring on miscarriage.

Sometimes my eyes get stuck out of focus on a particular spot and I really have to
wrench
them back,
make
myself move them around. This happens a lot when I’m trying to study. Study’s the worst thing. I write and write and write and read and read and read and
nothing
stays in my head. I got that History essay done, but it took the
longest time
. It was like trying to get a really dense, jumpy sheep through a really small gate. My thoughts just kept slithering and racing away. Hopeless. But one thing I have, without all these friends
bothering
me, is time; time to herd that bloody boring sheep through that and the dozen other bloody stupid gates you have to get it through to be ‘educated’.

Mum reckons while it’s like this (not so stinking hot now, officially autumn, but still sunny) we should go down to the beach house for a weekend. I don’t know. It’d be nice, I guess; I mean, it always is, but I don’t want to leave town. I don’t want to leave Pug. We always manage to get together sometime every weekend, and where would I be without my weekly
? In all other ways I’d love to go. Christ, there’s so
much
I’d like to get away from. I’d
love
to have a Friday and a Monday off school, a
legitimate
Friday or Monday, not a stolen one. But I think about a weekend with my family, and about not seeing, not touching Pug at all for two weeks straight (although I’d make it up somewhere, I’d lie, I’d say I had to go out with Lisa) … I can’t do it.
I don’t want to
.

Dad doesn’t seem all that keen either, which is a bit of a surprise. Usually he’s busting to get down there and fiddle around with fishing tackle or a boogie board. But he shrugs and says ‘Maybe’ in a dismissive, forget-it tone of voice, and Mum sighs impatiently. ‘What’s
wrong
with you two? Mel, go and take an iron tablet. You look as pale and peaky as a TB victim! You can’t tell me
you
don’t need a break—up all night with your head in a
textbook!’ I just went and took the tablet, and didn’t go back. And nothing more’s been said about going away since then, thank God. Don’t make me do it, Mum, please, please,
please
.

‘You look fabulous,’ says Pug. He’s taking my clothes off.

‘It’s as if you’re opening a big present,’ I laugh.

‘Yeah, it’s like that.’

A minute later, ‘Never had a present that was wrapped up so complicated, but.’

I help him with the bra catch; the elastic’s stretched as far as it’ll go. I spill out—out, not down. I kind of sproing out, and suddenly I’m three centimetres closer to him. He puts both hands on me, and I feel as if I’ll go bananas, those poor old squished nipples uncrinkling into his hands. I close my eyes and bite my lip and he sort of
groans
into my neck. We fall onto the bed and
without even getting the bra right off; my underpants are around my knees and I don’t know how he got in, but he did.
Easy
. Lovely boy. Lovely
man
, lovely man.

At seven weeks, brain cells begin to reach out and make contact with each other. Every minute, more than 100,000 new nerve cells are being created. The lobes of the cerebrum, where mental processes will take place and conscious activity will be decided, shine through the forehead skin, as yet unprotected by the cranium.

Less than 4 cm long and less than 15 grams in weight, at eight weeks the embryo possesses all its organs, all nearly fully formed. From now on they will become progressively more refined.

I meet Josh Lewis coming fast down our street.

‘Hi, Josh.’ I’m uncertain, thinking about Ambra.

He doesn’t say anything. A thin arc of his white spit crosses my path.

A noise like ‘pop!’ comes from my mouth and I stagger. I call out after him, ‘What was that for?’

He’s walking away as if nothing’s happened. What
has
happened? What does he know, or think he knows, to make him hate
me? And who the hell else knows? I can hardly believe it, except for that splat on the path. It moves as the bubbles burst, like something alive.

… as a means of self-defence it is wholly absurd … a light blow delivered to the testes can render a man as quickly
hors de combat
, flooring him and causing him to lose all further interest in fighting, but without doing him any permanent injury leading to darkness, imbecility or the grave.

Yet the punch to the testes is barred and called a foul … while every wallop to the head and jaws, eyes, nose and ears, all of the delicate sensory organs, is hailed with delight and cheered, particularly when these blows bruise, maim, cut and tear.