That night Amrit slept on the floor in the shop. Deepa led us upstairs to a living room above the shop where we sat for a while pretending that we couldn’t hear her and her husband having an argument in muffled tones in the next room. At least the storm had settled now and the windows no longer shook.
Finally Deepa came out and said to us, ‘You must stay here for the night. It’s not safe out there. Not for two girls in this storm.’ She brought us blankets and told us to sleep on the couch but she didn’t leave us alone long. She went downstairs and returned with a bucket of ice-cream and three large spoons. ‘Melted,’ she said, ‘but still good.’
We dipped our spoons in and ate and it tasted all sweet and gooey like sweetened condensed milk with pistachio nuts.
‘How long have you been away from your family?’ Deepa asked.
I wasn’t quite sure. ‘More than a week. I think.’
Deepa lit a candle and an incense stick which she drew up to her face and prayed with before putting it onto a small alter. ‘I said a prayer for you and for your mothers,’ she said. ‘You must break your mothers’ hearts.’
‘I’m not completely sure how not to,’ Asheeka responded.
‘I know.’ Deepa nods her head. ‘I broke my mother’s heart too, when I left for this country but, you know, sometimes you just get to a point in your life when you know you have to start all over again.’
STORIES IN BOOKS AND ON PHONES
The books keep arriving. In the six weeks since I’ve been here I’ve received several. Someone must know how bad the library is here. Someone must know I need stories to survive. They’ve sent me all the much better girl versions of The Catcher in the Rye, like The Bell Jar and The Woman Warrior and Little Women and some stories about women on the road like Into the Wild. Whoever is sending those books definitely knows where I’ve been and where I’d like to go. Maybe it’s my mum, but I’m not sure she could make it out of her bed and to the post office; maybe it’s Nan, but she doesn’t know where she is most of the time. Maybe it’s Asheeka, but she’s never been that into books. Maybe, even, it’s Maree.
I don’t know who it is and I don’t know that I’ll ever be like any of the women in any of those books. They’ve all got more of a grip on themselves despite their worlds spinning out of control. I am. I am. I am. Plath says this over and over again in The Bell Jar. I write it up on the wall next to my bunk bed, beneath where I’ve already written my name and Asheeka’s. I am. I am. I am.
I lie back on my bed and watch the metal lattice under the top bunk shriek and whine and bulge as Tracey turns over on her mattress. I know she’s got an illegal phone up there under the sheets with her and besides, she’s making it obvious. No one gets into bed at 4.30 in the afternoon and pulls the sheets up over their head like that. It always amazes me that the girls on the inside take these risks doing things that can land them extra months, or even years, in here. Everyone had been passing that phone around all day.
‘Oh my God, is this you?’ Tracey leans over the edge of the bunk bed and flashes a photograph in front of me. I snatch it quickly out of her hand. I guess this is how we all get involved in stupid stuff. We just pass the risk around. We take it on before we even really think about what we’ve done.
I pull the bedsheets up over my head and there I am, except it isn’t me. It is one of the me’s from another lifetime, there on my Insta feed that Tracey’s brought up. In my gallery there is me with a bowl cut, sitting in a corner booth at Macca’s, smiling while eating chicken nuggets at the same time so that you can see bits of food sticking out between my braces. There is me in the park with glasses, squinting into the sun so that my face looks all squished up and holding a certificate I got for getting the best marks in year six. There is me, all pudgy arms, lifting them up into the sky in my ballet tutu. There is me, all of me, all the me’s I didn’t want anyone looking at anymore, posted by me to my own timeline (apparently).
Footsteps in the corridor outside. I stand up. Shove the phone under Tracey’s pillow and walk out to the common room where it’s still free time before bedtime and the light is slipping from those rectangular windows that are so high up on the walls you can never peek through them to the world outside. And it makes me angry. Being there with these windows that don’t do what windows are meant to do, which is to remind you that there is a world outside: they just sit there, high up above us all, singing out like a 90s pop song – you can’t touch this. I guess that’s what keeps everyone in this place so invisible. We can’t see the world and it can’t see us.
I get books from the outside from no one. I supposedly post fat, ugly pictures of myself on a social-media platform that I have no access to, and I cannot look out the windows. I get in line for the phone because I want to talk to someone without really explaining all these things. I just want something warm and comforting on the end of the line.
By the time I’ve waited in line, by the time they find her in the retirement home, by the time she gets off her chair and comes to the phone, there are thirty seconds left. Just enough for her to say, ‘Hello, Rosa!’ and for me to reply, ‘Hello, Nan!’ and then she is gone. And it stops my heart from beating so hard and angry for a little while. And sometimes these small things, they are enough.
ELVIS, ELVIS EVERYWHERE
In the morning, when the storm had ended, Amrit drove us to Parkes where he had another delivery. ‘So you’re not performers, or university students or backpackers,’ he said as he drove down a road where the red dust was resting calmly on the bitumen after it had whipped itself up into such a fury the night before and the sun was high and hot already in that big blue sky.
‘We’re not anything,’ I said.
‘Yeah. You two are. You are definitely something.’
Asheeka smiled a giant full-of-teeth smile and pulled the sunglasses Deepa had given her from her head and down over her eyes. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Something like that. We’re becoming something out here.’
He dropped us in the centre of town, in front of the town hall. ‘Good luck,’ he said. ‘I hope whatever it is you are looking for, you find it.’
Sometimes, looking back on those moments when people were kind and things became quiet even for a short time, I wonder if they were even real. Those moments never came up in my court case, anyway. It wasn’t the part of the story the police were interested in.
On the road in front of the town hall there was a machine that hummed along, wiping the dust away. A small council truck travelled behind it and two guys in neon vests jumped in and out, clearing debris off the road, as well as the rubbish that had flown out of rubbish bins. With the restoration of normality, you could almost forget that last night the world had turned into a vicious and beautiful and alien thing as all these towns in the central west were connected for hundreds of kilometres by the cloud of red dust reaching out over the sky.
I watched Asheeka sitting there on a park bench trying to work it all out as Elvis and Priscilla walked past her. I was thinking of those kids in The Lion, the Witch and Wardrobe. It was probably such a relief, you know, to push through all those fur coats in the wardrobe and step into Narnia, a whole new world at their fingertips, just like that. Even if it was strange and unknowable, it was probably a great distraction from all the stuff troubling them. Parkes felt like that to me, a place where there were men in white rhinestone jumpsuits everywhere and women with epic beehives and long shiny Cadillacs with fluffy novelty dice hanging from their rear-view mirrors.
A girl with a huge neon-yellow skirt and black eyeliner that stretched out from her eyes to her hairline handed us each a lollipop that had ‘Love Me Tender’ written on its wrapper. She said, ‘Welcome to Parkes,’ and did a little spin in front of us.
Every story needs a scene with a little comic relief. This was it.
Asheeka sucked on her lollipop. ‘Really?’ she said. ‘This?’ She held it out in front of her, turned it around and shoved it back into her mouth. Elvis in his fat period wa
lked past us.
‘Love me tender,’ Asheeka said with her bitch face on, but I could tell she was trying not to smile. ‘Dad would have loved this.’
‘I thought . . . I thought you might love it here too,’ I said.
A few metres away there were groups of people being marshalled together by type: 1.) The girls with the hula hoops and matching pink taffeta skirts. 2.) The Elvises in his fat stage. 3.) The Priscilla look-alikes with their low-cut dresses and their high, high hair. 4.) The mini Elvises in tiny suede suits and half-sized guitars.
The mini Elvises’ mums were distracted. There were a lot of handbags no one was watching. That’s how I got my next lot of credit cards. It had become so easy by then to take things. I guess I didn’t even stop to think about whether I had the right to.
‘Lunch?’ I suggested to Asheeka. I realised just how long it had been since we ate.
Inside the pub was packed and, unsurprisingly, Elvis was everywhere. On the tables there were cards with trivia about his life. On the TV there was some guy called Bernard Lansky who talked about how Elvis used to come into his shop when he was nobody and borrow coats with velour collars and pegged pants. Then, when he made it, he bought dozens and dozens of hats and scarves and just gave them away to anyone.
‘That is exactly what I want to do,’ Asheeka said. ‘Just buy beautiful things and give them away.’
It made me think of the time she bought me that leopard-print dress and how, when I wore it, she couldn’t stop looking at me like she was the proudest she’d ever been in her life.
We both ordered something called a ploughman’s lunch. Asheeka crunched down on a pickle and I could tell that in her head she was off in some other place.
‘You were always good,’ I said, ‘at giving people nice things. You know. There isn’t anything nice in my wardrobe at home that didn’t come from you.’
‘Dad was like that,’ Asheeka said. ‘He’d always find nice things to buy me. He really would have loved this place. We didn’t talk about him much after he passed. It was like, this man happened to us and now we’re moving on. It’s really only that portrait of Elvis we have in our living room that keeps him there in that space. That’s it. Mum’ll want to pretend this never happened too.’ Asheeka held her arm out and gestured to the world. ‘I’ll get back and my whole family will just pretend that this never happened and things will be as they always are and we’ll talk around it and they’ll fast-forward over anything they don’t want to think about and I’ll begin to doubt that any of this ever happened too.’
‘It did happen,’ I said. ‘It is happening.’
Three Elvises got up on the front stage and started singing ‘Jailhouse Rock’ a cappella.
‘Look,’ Asheeka said, and got out that phone she had been keeping to herself since she took all those photographs at the evacuation centre.
‘Girls Gone Bad’ was the headline of a newspaper article she’d brought up to read. The story was about two girls I hardly recognised – Rosa and Asheeka, who’d stolen Asheeka’s boyfriend’s car to get back at him for posting semi-naked photographs of her online. Asheeka clicked off the site and onto a picture on Instagram that had about 3000 likes. There was a picture of Asheeka’s enemy Catherine draped over the front of her dad’s Mercedes. Her hair was all casually fluffed and lying in furiously beautiful strands across her rosy cheeks. She almost looked naked, the large sign she held up across her chest covering most of her dress, so that only a small fringe of it peeked out. #Illstealcarswithyou, the sign read. I stared at it and I tried to put it all together in my head.
‘I’m not sure I understand. What does Catherine have to do with all of this?’
‘Oh, she’s like my saviour now,’ Asheeka said, and rolled her eyes. ‘She’s starting some campaign for badarse women. Saying they need to fight back against the patriarchy, like we did; you know, steal their cars to get back at them for being dicks.’
I clicked on the hashtag Illstealcarswithyou and there were all these pictures of girls on top of cars with similar signs. Some of them were even B-grade celebs I recognised from shows like Neighbours and Home and Away.
‘You’ve done it,’ I said. ‘You’re like a full celebrity now. A feminist icon.’
‘It’s Catherine. Cath-er-ine. Catherine who was always accusing me of stealing her stuff. Catherine who made fun of my hairy legs in primary school and said we couldn’t be friends anymore because my mum didn’t have the money to take me to ballet lessons. She’s the icon. Not me. She’s an evil genius.’
I clicked and I scrolled. Priscilla and Fat Elvis came near our table and serenaded us with some off-key song I didn’t recognise.
STORIES AND MORE STORIES
Okay, so I’m trying to write a book and a book is a story, but I’m also kind of trying to write a book that is about stories in themselves. That’s why this book I’m writing has stories within stories within stories, like One Thousand and One Nights. I’m thinking through it all after lights out. What I’m really trying to say, I guess, in a metaphorical way, or maybe I’m just being literal, I’m not sure, is that people fight really hard to have control over their stories and sometimes we lose that control, sometimes we let ourselves be invisible and sometimes we try to be visible again and we accidentally fall down a rabbit hole like Alice in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and you’ve got giant smoking caterpillars and small furry animals in oversized hats trying to tell you who you are and what you should be until you finally start to stand up for yourself and your story and some irate fantasy creature yells, ‘Off with her head!’ until you decide you aren’t putting up with it anymore.
Being on the inside, and everything you go through to end up getting sent there in the first place, is a lot like Alice being told, ‘Take me’, ‘Eat me’, ‘Drink me’ all the time, and never knowing if that will turn her big or small. There’s the police and the welfare and the case workers and the lawyers and the guards and all that stuff in the newspapers and on social media that turns your story around and makes it something that’s about you but not you at the same time. And then there’s Maree taking a deep breath and starting over again in the group counselling sessions, and before that there are your parents and your friends and everyone else who ever had any expectation of who you should be, and you swallow everything they tell you you are until you become this bigger/smaller version of yourself, and then one day you’re like, Nup. And you insist. Insist on being able to tell your version of you the way you see you, but it’s been so long since you got to do that that it all comes out in splutters and fragments and sometimes Kristina throwing a chair at Maree’s head because she said, ‘Could there have been another way to act in that situation?’ when Kristina had already tried to explain in a more verbal way that no, there was not a more appropriate way to respond other than setting fire to the house of her children’s father because the man couldn’t be made to understand what he did to her in any other way. Full stop.
And because of that we are all now in lockdown. It’s 2.00 pm and we’re all back in our rooms with no TV, no talking, no showers, no lining up for the phone, no nothing until they deliver dinner on a tray in our rooms at 5.30 before lights out at 7.00, and we’re all reduced to small children lying there in the dark, not sleepy enough at bedtime.
Tracey is still in possession of that phone. She’s been looking at stuff for an hour now but needs to give it up before she comments on someone’s dickhead remark on Instagram and gives away the fact that she’s up to something she shouldn’t be. She proposes I trade her for a book and I agree and she spends the longest time pulling each one from underneath my bed and staring at their covers before she picks up Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.
She slips the phone underneath my bed and I climb under the sheets, not caring as much as I should about how obvious I’m being, and I look at the latest photograph I ‘uploaded’ to my Instagram feed. There it is. It’s me and it’s Nan and we’re sitting outside her retiremen
t home on those white plastic chairs grinning into the road.
I turn the phone off and stuff it into my pillowcase because sometimes it hurts too much to look at things you love. I stare up at the impression of Tracey’s bum in the mattress above me.
‘Hey, Trace . . . Tracey. Why do you think someone is uploading old photographs of me to my Instagram?’
I hear her flipping through the pages of the book before she responds, ‘I don’t know. Why do you think someone is trying to communicate with you through these books?’
‘Oh, you know, because books are full of stories that we can learn from.’
Tracey sticks her head over the side of the bed and does an eye roll so big I can almost hear her eyeballs turning in her head. ‘Shit, you can sound like a patronising old schoolteacher sometimes.’ She spreads the book open to somewhere in the middle, shoves it near my face and says, ‘No, I mean the messages someone is writing inside.’
But I can’t see them. Can’t see anything except the words printed in black ink on the page. ‘I don’t know . . . I’m not sure.’
‘Oh my God, for someone who tried to kill a bunch of guys, you’re not much of a criminal mastermind.’
I’m about to explain to her for the millionth time that I never deliberately tried to kill anyone when she starts jabbing her finger at all these spots on the page where one of the letters is underlined. I had noticed before that there were small marks on the pages, but they were all old second-hand books anyway and I hadn’t thought much of it. Tracey looks at me and sighs really loudly like she is trying to explain something to the dumbest human being on earth.
‘Write down all the letters that are underlined in order from the start to the finish of the book. You’ll find if you put them together they make words and words make sentences and sentences make stories.’ She says that last part in the most condescending tone she can muster. I reach out to take the book from her and she snaps it shut.
Girls in Boys' Cars Page 17
