The Dark Part of Me (3 page)

Up on the bed, I’m prising out the fly screens, ditching them on the carpet. I chuck my platform strappies out the window. They land, clunking in the pebbles so the mongrel next door
starts up yapping.

Shut up. Shut up.

I crouch down in the shadows, listening hard for stirrings from Mum’s room, vibing her to stay asleep. The bus is rumbling in the distance, monstering along the wide, flat street.
I’m sliding back the window as far as it will go and straddling, one leg over, tippy-toes touching the gravel. My second leg flies up like a ballet dancer’s and I crash down on the
pebbles.

Hobble. Hobble.

Into my shoes.

Strap. Strap.

Stand up. Brush off the knees. Leap across the fish pond.

Mongrel growling, low growls set to explode.

Nice doggy. Nice doggy.

I hear the bus slowing down, wheezy squeezing on the brakes, nearing the stop. Night sounds crowd in, bug noises buzzing round my ears. I slap at a mosquito, blood on my arm. Possum hissing,
eyes gleaming off the roof. Mongrel barking at bug racket and the crunch of my strappies down the gravelly path. I look back at the house all dark and humpy like a termites’ nest. The smell
of rotting mango makes me want to spew. A rustle in the bushes.

Snake. Snake.

I run along the path, mongrel barking non-stop now.

Fe. Fi. Fo. Fum.

Out the gate. Click. Clack.

On the driveway, smooth as sand, drenched in moony light, sunny bright.

Pelting for the bus.

Wait. Bloody well wait.

Lickety-split. My tiny cross-the-body bag winding round and round my neck.

Hurry. Hurry.

Engine up a pitch.

Ready steady.

Round the corner. Skirt riding up and up. Tug it down, down.

On the bus.

I flash my student pass at the driver.

‘Big night on the town?’ He winks at my cleavage and sucks on the gingery tip of his beard. His beer gut is rammed hard against the steering wheel.

‘Yeah,’ I say, glancing back to see who else is on board. There’s a pack of skegs and their skateboards littering the back seat, and a pair of poxy bevans pashing with salivary
tongues. The bevan girl is dressed in tight white lycra with six gold hoops in each earlobe. The bevan boy is skinny and zit-infested with mullet hair.

‘Where you off to?’ the driver says.

‘Just out.’

‘Clubbing?’

‘Yeah.’ Like I do it all the time. I sit halfway down the bus, wedged in against the side. Out the window there’s nothing but blackness, huddled houses and a face which, for a
split-second, I don’t recognize. The eyes are too big, the lips too red and pouty. A sexy, grown-up me. A thrill of badness shoots through my groin and I smile. We pull away from the kerb and
gather speed. The bus hurtles through Merri-Merri estate, lurching around corners, flying along the straights. There’s no need to stop. Even though it’s Friday night, it’s sleepy
in burban heartland. I get out my red nail polish and paint my toes, two times over, to make the time go quicker. At last, we hit Moggill Road and there’s something to see outside my window
apart from my face floating in the darkness.

Up a gear and we’re rumbling along past the car dealerships bathed in fluoro light and past my old primary school, the buildings dull and tired and flaking paint. The Flying Fish flies by
and the air-con shop, which tells me it’s a hottish kind of night at twenty-one degrees. Down the overpass to our first stop: Shoppingtown. We pull in up the top, near Macca’s and the
BCC Multiplex. The pashing bevans disengage and get out. A stinking drunk gets on and sits in the seat behind me and I have to peg my nose against the putrid stench. He starts singing that
‘Henry the Eighth’ song which Dad used to sing when he was drunk. The dero taps me on my shoulder and mumbles something in my ear, but I ignore him as we circle the huge, brick monolith
of Shoppingtown and head towards the city.

Next stop: the R.E. It’s packed with university students spewing out from the beer garden and onto the footpath. The drunk gets off and staggers into the public bar and I think how Dad is
probably in there, drowning his sorrows, shoulders slumped, gazing into his beer glass. Some uni guys get on. They’re wearing checked shirts and plaited belts. They order the skegs off the
back seat and, as they barge up the aisle, I recognize one of them from the BP servo – a gangly guy with sideburns and a weak chin. He points at me like a cowboy firing two pistols. I
visualize the name badge he wears when pumping petrol into Mum’s Holden: Gavin.

‘Nice tits,’ Gavin says.

‘Piss off, Gavin,’ I say, just above a whisper.

But he’s heard me and he stops, resting one knee on the seat beside me. ‘Do I know you?’

I shake my head. His mates are hooting and jeering from the back. Gavin wedges in next to me. He slides his arm across the top of my seat. His breath is hot and stale against my neck. I turn my
back on him and stare out the window.

Gavin taps me on the shoulder. ‘What’s yer name?’

I swivel around, my legs sticking to the vinyl seat. ‘Gertrude.’

‘Hey, Gavin and Gertrude. How ’bout that?’

‘Hilarious,’ I say, withering him. ‘Do you mind racking off? I’m meeting my boyfriend in town.’

‘Now, don’t get all nasty on me, Gertie. We were getting on real good.’ He squeezes my knee with bony fingers. ‘You’re just my type, you know. Knockers with
attitude.’

I give him the silent treatment as the bus rockets along Milton Road past the Night Owl and the dilapidated tennis courts and the Fourex beer factory, choking yeasty fumes out into the
night.

Gavin smiles. ‘You don’t really have a boyfriend, do you, Gertie?’ His hand climbs warm and clammy up my thigh. I knock it away but he puts it right back where it was.

His mates shout, ‘Go on, Garvo. Stick it to her, mate.’

‘How ’bout it, babe?’ He grins. His front tooth is chipped.

I glance at his crotch and wiggle my pinky at him like I’d seen the cool girls do to ugly guys who try to hit on them at the bus-stop. And, just like that I say, super-smooth and arsy,
‘Sorry, but I like my wieners a bit bigger, thanks.’ Crash and burn sound-effects come from the back.

Gavin stands, sneering down at me. ‘Slut,’ he spits, before swaying back up the aisle to his mates who are doubled over, cacking themselves.

Next stop, everyone else gets off. We’re in Paddington. To my right, there’s the Suncorp Stadium lit up like a giant jewellery box. The skegs cruise down the hill to the skate-ramp.
The uni wankers unload. Gavin comes around the side of the bus and gives me the finger through the window, before they head into the Paddo Tavern. It’s twenty past eleven and I sit on the
bus, peering out. The pizza place is closing up, a girl stacking chairs on top of tables. A street lamp flickers on the blink, illuminating a halo of bugs in strobes. Out the other side of the bus,
a guy urinates against a Besser-brick wall. His piss trickles, filling out cracks in the pavement, amber then cochineal-pink in flashes from the Café Neon sign strung overhead.

‘Last stop, girly,’ the driver sings out to me. ‘Unless you want to go back home.’

‘No,’ I say to myself as much to him. ‘No way.’ I rocket off the seat and run down the aisle.

‘You meeting friends?’ he says to me but I’m already out the door, the soft, warm air wrapping around me, the pink light licking at my toes, as I dash across the pavement,
jumping over the piss-stream. Hectic red arrows pulsing like arteries lead me up a dark set of carpeted stairs into Café Neon and a square-headed bouncer whose collar is too tight. With no
fake ID my chances are slim. But I bluff it with my walk, shoulders back, hips swinging. Square-head lets me in. No questions asked. No cover before midnight.

Inside, it’s not what I expected. A dingy L-shaped room with a low ceiling and shabby carpet. The walls are painted matt-black. There’s a bar but I can’t see a dancefloor.
There’s no music. I scan the joint in case there’s someone I know. The odds are remote. The cool girls go raving in the Valley. Café Neon doesn’t look like their scene. A
few guys in their late twenties are smoking and drinking bottled beer in battered couches along the back wall but apart from that it’s pretty dead for a Friday night. At the bar, three
shiny-faced men in suits are drinking pots and eyeing off the bar-girl. She is standing on a stool, reaching for a whisky bottle from the top shelf. Her denim mini grazes the bottom of her
butt-cheeks. Her legs are short but slim and deeply tanned. She’s not quite got the neck of the bottle. Her fingers flutter in the air, grasping for it. One of the suits shouts out,
‘Nearly there!’ They all want to see her knickers. She’s straining on her tiptoes. A flash of vermilion crotch sends them off in fits of back-slapping titters. She’s got the
Johnnie Walker Blue, firm around the neck, and clambers off the stool.

I buy a drink, kahlua and milk, and sit by the windows looking down at the yobs staggering up and down Given Terrace. I picture Hollie, tucked up in her white cotton night-dress, dreaming her
fantasy dreams in her canopied bed. She would die if she knew I was here. I make my mind up not to tell her, for this to be my secret, when static buzzes over the speakers. A mechanical squawk,
then Deee-Lite’s ‘Groove Is in the Heart’ kicks in. I get the urge to dance. Around the corner, past the bar and up a few steps, there is a dancefloor, small and forlorn and kind
of out of the way, coloured squares flashing orange and pink and green across the vacant faces of the suits. I head towards it. The suits follow me with their beady eyes, checking me out, but I
pretend not to notice as I strut out into the middle, swinging my hips, shaking out my hair, tracking the bass beat low in my stomach.

I close my eyes and I’m a little girl dancing with Dad to Blondie the nights Mum used to work. We’d stay up late, Dad sucking longnecks from the bottle, music squawking from his old
tapedeck. He’d grab me under the arms and spin me round and round until I crashed out dizzy. Once, he spun me too hard and I slammed into the wall, my bum making a hole the size of a soccer
ball in the fibro. I’d been about to cry but then Dad burst out laughing, a great roaring laughter that had us both in stitches. We pushed the bookcase across the hole to cover it up. It was
our little secret until the next day Mum asked me why the bookcase had been shifted. She thought he’d punched a hole in the wall like he did sometimes when he came home maggot. She
wouldn’t listen when I said it was my fault for dancing.

I go hard for more than an hour, queen of the dancefloor. The club fills up a bit, but no one else is dancing yet. My favourite tracks keep coming. ‘Cream’ by Prince. ‘Tainted
Love’ by Soft Cell. ‘Devil Inside’ by INXS. I spread my feet wide and shimmy low to the floor. When the chorus kicks in, I spring back up, whipping my hair around in circles,
snapping my hips left and right, step-ball-changing and stretching my arms high above my head. I become aware of people around me, moving onto the dancefloor, but I ignore them and, as the beat
quickens, I close my eyes. It’s like I’m swimming between the notes, diving down deep for the base, breaking the surface like a mermaid. I wish Hollie could see me now.

‘Hey, what d’ya know, it’s Gertie.’

I recognize the voice immediately and, when I open my eyes, there is Gavin leering at me with his pack of loser mates behind him.

‘Piss off,’ I say, turning away from him and dancing off towards the front edge of the floor. I scan the club, spread out below, and there’s something odd about it. Then it
hits me that there’s no women – except the barmaids and me – just a sea of grey-haired suits and younger guys in polo shirts.

‘Love Shack’ starts up and I can’t resist doing my sixties moves, hopping from foot to foot, doing the swim, holding my nose like I’m going down underwater. I keep
thinking I should go and get the last bus home but the music is addictive and my legs won’t stop. Someone touches me, hot fingers across my stomach. Gavin. I try to ignore him and just keep
dancing, head flung back. The smell of cheap aftershave and stale beer fills the air. A hand clutches at my butt, holds it, squeezes hard. Fear snags in me. I stop dead. My arms drop to my sides.
They’re all around me, winking and nodding, drunk from the Paddo. Dark jeans and checked shirts. Boots and plaited belts.

Gavin grins, fang-toothed.

‘Just fuck off, OK?’ I shout at him above the music, trying to act tough.

They laugh, mouths red and wide, but no sound comes out as they move in closer. I back away, off the dancefloor, into an alcove, but they follow me. I smack against a table. They crowd in, the
press of hard legs against my body. A rasp of stubble burns my cheek. Gavin forces me down, back flat on the table. They’re laughing and chanting, over and over, ‘Show us yer tits,
Gertie. Show us yer tits.’ I want to kick and bite and spit but I’ve clammed up. Gavin climbs up on the table. He straddles me, his thighs clenched either side of my waist. ‘Love
Cats’ by The Cure is playing and it’s just about my favourite. I scream, this time for real, flailing my arms and kicking out with my legs. Gavin’s hand crawls up my skirt. I look
over my shoulder, towards the dancefloor, but no one’s looking my way. In my head, I’m screaming.
What happens now? This can’t be happening.

The music lurches to a halt and the house lights come up. Someone is shouting. Gavin steps back. The others look up. I twist my head to see what’s happening. The bar-girl with the
vermilion undies is running across the dancefloor, the square-headed bouncer close behind.

‘Get the fuck off her,’ the bar-girl yells. The bouncer lurches in like an action hero, picking Gavin up and throwing him halfway across the floor. The others slink away gutless, as
I peel myself off the table and bolt to the loos.