Wildlife (19 page)

Staring out the bus window—watching the trees whip by and sky stay still—might be my favorite pastime in the world, even if we are going back to school. I’m sitting next to Lou, who is reading, as usual. Ben is right in front of me, sitting with Beeso; they’re making each other listen to obscure rap tracks.

Lou remains a woman of mystery. Even in the emotion-incubator house setting, where we’ve all had various meltdowns, even since the singing, even though I see her at
close quarters every single day. It’s clear she doesn’t have a single romantic thought in her head about Michael—but why not? Could it be something to do with the bookmark boy? Are they still going out? Is he the one who sends letters from France?

Since her public performance, she has garnered quite a following of arty-indie admirers. Not that she seems particularly interested, but I know that she is being courted by Miro, the only serious band in our grade.

She spends lots of time reading, and lots of time doing stuff with her camera and Blu Tack and fluff, fibers, and twigs. She may be putting together a “unique” and “idiosyncratic” piece of “new media” for her folio. That’s what our art teacher, Ms. Bottrell, tends to call any material that lives in either the conceptual or abstract zone.

When I ask Lou about it, she gives her closest version of a happy face, which is a small, dry smile.

“All will be revealed,” she says, enigmatically.

tuesday 13 november

One of the things Michael read at the old people’s home was a poem by Wilfred Owen. He figured out that Lindsay
is very likely to have been a part of and/or certainly had friends and family who were dragged or went willingly into the Second World War.

He read the poem “Futility” about a dead soldier that starts “Move him into the sun—/ Gently its touch awoke him once,” and as he read I saw that he didn’t really need to read it; he knew the poem by heart.

He had planned this in advance, caring about an old guy with dementia, thinking about what might have meaning to him.

If Sibylla would ever go out with Michael, she’d have the second-most-thoughtful boyfriend ever to walk the earth.

When we got back he was still worrying about the letter; in fact the worry seemed to have built with the afternoon. He is starting to imagine he sees smirks and looks here and there, as though people know something. Nothing explicit has been said, and he accepts that this could be paranoia on his part.

I can’t help asking him more about the Sibylla tablets. Wasn’t he worried about getting a fur ball, and having to cough it up like a cat?

No. His intake was moderate, and he spaced them out. No more than one per week. He didn’t want to overdose. A little bit went a long way. Because of their special power. He smiled his apologetic smile; if he took too many they might have lost their magical potency.

What made him think of it in the first place? He was just fiddling with a strand of hair until quite by accident
it turned into a tiny little pellet. He had read that hair can be used to determine DNA and so he thought he might be transferring some of (what he considered to be) Sibylla’s power into his own system. He knew about DNA when he was how old?

Four.

Okay. Completely logical. I could imagine doing the same myself if I’d known stuff like that when I was
four
and wanted medicinal benefits from a friend’s powerful DNA.

Ben and I hike out from school with our respective groups for a day hike. The weather is perfect, crisp and still. Insects flick and snap through the air, and clouds stretch thin their semitransparent ripples against the morning sky.

We meet at the arranged spot, the three-mile mark of the home trail. As planned, Ben and I split from the groups, and head off on our own. Ben leads the way; he found a place on one of his runs that he wants to show me. We take a path that follows MacMahons Creek in the direction of Dead Horse Gully. I make a mental note to Sharpie in an apostrophe on the way back.

We’re both wearing boots, shorts, and gaiters. Ben is
wearing a T-shirt; I have on a light long-sleeved shirt and a brimmed hat, with sunscreen on every bit of skin that is unclothed. Always in the prevent-burn mode with my fairer-than-fair skin, so unsuited to the climate.

How different might it be if we had started going out in the usual place? In the city. Not here in the fishbowl. What might we have done by now? We could have hung out at each other’s places. Mooched about doing nothing much. Gone to some more parties. He is invited everywhere. Seen a movie or two. Met each other’s families?

Holly’s massive pep talk is pecking away at me. She thinks this is our big chance to get it on. By which she means get off together. To do it. Why are the words we use about sex so prosaic and unenticing?

When we’ve walked for well over an hour and I’m starting to wonder if Ben has any idea where we’re heading, we come to a clearing. Here, in the middle of nowhere, the remains of a stone wall covered in a tangle of overgrown banksia rose throwing out canes as tall as trees. I walk around. Time has swallowed any other traces of a house or hut, but there are paving stones deeply overgrown with grass leading down to the creek. There’s wild feathery fennel, and mint, and, farther up the bank, a gnarled apricot tree. A forgotten, once-upon-a-time garden.

“So, how do you like it?”

“It’s beautiful.” I pick one of the yellow roses and poke it through a buttonhole in my shirt.

He looks happy. “I knew it was your kind of place.”

I drink some water and start unpacking food. “What did you bring?” I ask.

“Forget food,” he says, bending down to kiss me. And here we are again, back in the debatable land of want and denial.

I can’t see Ben simply as beautiful anymore; it is something more pervasive. I need to pack the swoon back into the wrong end of the telescope before I drown in the distraction of him. He won’t stay neatly in one compartment of my brain; he invades; he spills all over my consciousness. Perhaps skipping ahead to the heart of the matter is the only place to go.

Deciding to do it is less momentous and certainly less rational than it should be; I can’t even say it is a decision; it’s more like a switch has flicked. In one breathless look, we are both taking it as read, a need that this time we will act upon. I think of animation graphics that blast people into hyperspace. I’m in go mode. This is happening. No thought of turning back. I’m just doing it.

And neither of us has mentioned the four-letter word that comes before this three-letter activity in all my schemes and dreams.

Afterward I feel wobbly and slightly shocked, climbing up from under the rubble to check out the new world.

Orgasm, huh, sooo much easier on your own. Who
knew? How do people even coordinate it with all that distracting… sex… going on?

Did we really just do that? I want to hide my face. I want to look into a mirror in private, to check if I’m still me. A stone is pressing into my left glute, and the weight of him is starting to hurt my breast. I move and he lifts his head, kissing my clavicle on the way up and meeting my eye with a new ounce of shyness behind the usual smile.

Who is this boy, with three pimples on his perfect Heathcliff chin? A chin whose whisker shadows don’t quite join up yet? Surely this exact moment is my cue to start feeling older, but it isn’t working. I have never felt younger. I’m a kid with homework, and hikes, and a single-bed dormitory, and this… affair? Relationship? Mistake? The last couple of minutes just hand my inexperience to me, neatly wrapped.

New sprouts of bracken fern pushing up through the ground look like little alien embryo heads. What Have I Done?

I’ve had sex before Holly! A surge of satisfaction after so much coming second—not that I’m going to tell anyone about it. I have to trust Ben won’t tell anyone, either.

I shiver with the cold and newness as the colors around us deepen, super saturating in this exact moment of fading light as the day becomes overcast. I close my eyes over the picture, and put it in the album of Significant Moments.

We lift ourselves out of the soft muddy leaf meal—my shirt and bra are both still hooked on one arm, so I drop them
on a dry-looking patch of ground with our other discarded clothes and walk into the stream. “Don’t look,” I say.

Ben follows me, laughing. “Don’t
look
?” He’s right, it’s a little late for shyness—but still I walk to the water with my arms wrapped protectively around myself. The day is warm, but the water is beyond freezing. I take a deep breath, dive under, and come up gasping with the cold. Ben cups water in his hands and washes some mud off my shoulder.

“Sorry,” he says. “It’s supposed to last a bit longer.” He picks up my hand and pulls me closer. I shiver at the touch of his hot mouth on my cold breast, my cold neck.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

“Yeah, good.”

“Didn’t hurt too much?”

“No. Hardly at all. It seems awful that sex should hurt, so…”

Okay, shutting up now; there is no way in the world I know Ben well enough to tell him that a year ago at least, before there was even a remote prospect of sex on the horizon, I put enough fingers into my own vagina, in a nice warm bath, to make sure there wouldn’t be a pain and bleeding situation if and when I finally did have sex, of which, at the time there was realistically zero prospect. I believed it quite likely that I would die a virgin. Can’t remember exactly why I thought that… no boyfriend. Never had a boyfriend. But in the unlikely event that sex ever
did
happen, I didn’t want to associate it with pain or
discomfort… and now sex
has
happened, so it was just as well… Hmmm, was it an unnaturally control-freaky thing to do, or good old Girl Scout
be prepared
common sense? Not that I was ever an
actual
Girl Scout.

“Sib—so…?”

“Yeah—so it’s really good that it didn’t hurt.” I put a hand against his face. “You were gentle,” I say, kissing cold lips to cold lips. “And it was pretty quick.”

“Do you want to try again?”

I want nothing more than to take him somewhere comfortable and have sex until we both die from happiness and exhaustion, but I’m looking at the tightly curled heads of those fern-frond embryos, and thinking of all the microscopic sperm swimming their little tails off. “You think the condom worked okay?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

I’m remembering the banana classes. We definitely put it on properly. Did we take it out in time for no leaks? I think so. I hope so.

“Handy that you had it.” I don’t mean it to come out sounding bitchy, but there wouldn’t have been any sex if there hadn’t been a condom. It would have made my non-decision to have sex completely different: a decision not to have sex.

“I told you I was going to get some in Hartsfield.”

“Tell me you didn’t buy them with Holly.”

“She was there.”

The last thing in the world I can stand is the idea of
Holly being happy that Ben and I… and then no doubt claiming it as her idea. “I’m not telling anyone about this. Including her.” I stern-look him. “Nobody. I mean it.”

“Relax,” he says.

“I am relaxed—I just don’t want anyone dissecting our private stuff. I don’t like it that everyone knows everything. Whose business is it but ours? Nobody’s, right? Am I right?”

He kisses me. It’s a
stop babbling
kiss if ever there was one. Which is annoying. At the same time as being a truly great kiss. And from deep inside that kiss, I remember there was a crashing noise in the scrub, like an animal, nearby, while we were making our bed again, and lying in it.

thursday 15 november

Eclipses. A solar eclipse happens when the new moon is aligned between the earth and the sun, blocking the sun’s rays and casting its shadow on the earth. A lunar eclipse is when the earth lines up between the sun and the full moon and casts its shadow on the moon.

In the first one, we see the object obscuring the sun.

In the second one, we
are
the object obscuring the sun.

We will observe a lunar eclipse in two weeks’ time. We have a few good telescopes, plenty of binoculars, and a sky clear away from the city lights.

It is not exactly a historic once-or-twice-in-a-lifetime-if-you’re-lucky event, like, say, a transit of Venus; you can get a few lunar eclipses in a year, but I’ve never seen one.

Light will dim; but even when in total eclipse, the moon will be softly lit by a red light, by such sunlight as can bend and scatter itself through the edges of the earth’s atmosphere.

So we are all moon moon moon in class right now.

I do want to see it, I guess. Just can’t feel the hype.

I suppose I must have known and forgotten, but I did enjoy hearing about the way the moon’s gravity stretches the earth into a gently oval shape, and the oceans are stretched farther, because they are liquid, creating a tidal bulge on each side of the oval, which we see as high tide, low tide.

The huge silver moon, opening and closing the fragile anemones as water rises and falls.

No wonder time and tide wait for no man, they are busy dancing with the moon.

When I see the moon in eclipse…

Michael came back from his run yesterday as skittish and jumpy as I have ever seen him. He said he’s worried about the hunters.

You couldn’t pay me to go out there while there are crazy people with guns wandering about.

Well, hello, stranger: automatic and pretty strong impulse to stay alive.

Oh, noes. Oh, dear. I decide that my brain’s decision not to start a sexual relationship up here on school camp, as opposed to my body’s decision to jump on in, was and is the right decision.

Not that I didn’t want to—omigod.
Omigod!
—etc.

But the place feels all wrong. And the timing is wrong. I feel as though I have leapfrogged into the sexual bit before the boyfriend bit, or even the friend bit, is right.

It’s as though the relationship has a limp. Or as though we ran before we could crawl. Or some other uncoordinated-movement metaphor. Not that Ben seems aware of it. It’s all leaps and bounds to him.

And annoyingly—everyone assumes we’ve done it. Of course they do. Am I a complete idiot? Going off like that from our hiking groups, together with Holly’s helpful news bulletin that Ben had bought condoms, is enough to get
the smoke signals up all over camp. But no one should know, except me and Ben.

It’s bringing out the straight-backed, tight-laced Jane Austen spirit in me. I believe my hymen is crocheting itself back together in protest at all the improper speculation.

I am so sick of Holly’s gleeful interrogations, which start with, “I totally know you guys did it, so just spill. Share. If you keep excluding, I’ll report you for bullying…” She’s even resorted to begging,
pleeease pleeeeeeease Sibbie-pie, give me the juicies
. And bribing. She got some gherkins from Priscilla to put in our cheese-and-tomato toasties, and tormented me with their tangy, condiment-like appeal. But I’m not blabbing.

I manage to hold out all day Thursday, and on Friday we head home for our exeat weekend and I finally get to escape Holly’s cross-examinations.

I walk into the house an unvirgin, and
no one notices
.

My mother tries to X-ray-read the history of the term to date but can only see that I am physically healthy.

Part of me wants to tell her everything, but the sensible part rounds the rest of me up like Aragorn. Sensible Sibylla lifts her sword and gallops up and down before the army of wimpy Sibyllas shouting forcefully: There will be time to tell your mother about your first sexual encounter. There will be a day to confide. There will be a time to ask certain questions like, how would you feel about Ben staying over? But it is not this day!

All we could possibly cover in a long weekend would be interminable talks about contraception and emotional responsibility, when all I want is food, rest, unconditional love, and some TV. That’s not too much to ask, is it?

One day away from Holly’s insistent presence, and I’m missing her. Go figure. So I text to see if she wants to come over for a
Misfits
marathon, but she doesn’t answer. I’d feel hurt if I hadn’t been giving her some pretty clear back-off signals for the last few days. We’ve had a tetchy couple of weeks, and a break is probably exactly what we need.

And, oh, the relief of being home. Home with my doggy, with the nice home smells, the home warmth, my own big bed, my own little bathroom. The privacy. The good food. The people who love me best in all the world, the people I can snap and growl at who will
still
love me best, regardless. I celebrate the return to the womb by rereading
Looking for Alibrandi
and fall asleep after tender, ten-layer lasagna and lemon tart, in a trance of perfect contentment.