Under the Influence

by Jacqueline Lunn

  ‘My mum’s dead.’ Meg didn’t say it in a nasty way, or sadly, or for pity; she just wanted Sarah to know that her mum was dead, straight away. She had figured earlier, as she watched all the other mothers settle their daughters in and go over lists and rules and absent-mindedly place their hands for a long time on that concave part at the bottom of their daughters’ backs, that she should be clear about her mother right from the start. Maybe it would stop people from wanting to know more.

  Meg didn’t know much more anyway. She didn’t remember her mum; she recognised her in pictures and could recount word for word the stories her dad told her of her mum and her when she was a baby. Her olive skin was from her mum – she could see that in the pictures. Her dad said she had the same fire, but she couldn’t see her mum’s fire really well in the pictures at home. She got her wide mouth from her dad. The pictures of Meg and her mum together stopped when Meg was about two. In the last one, they were both in the outside bath at the farm. Anne was in a striped bikini, lying on her back and holding a naked Meg up in the air, and they were both laughing. Meg was flying. Anne died from a brain haemorrhage one morning when she leant over to the bedside table to get her cup of tea.

  ‘Oh,’ Sarah responded. She didn’t know what to say. She pushed her shoulder into Meg, their bare arms together under the sheet, and turned to face her. Sarah couldn’t see properly in the dark. She closed her eyes and whispered what was on the schedule for tomorrow. Before she got to what she guessed would be for lunch, ham sandwiches or hotpot, they both fell asleep. Somewhere between their first and second dreams, Sarah and Meg became friends.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Feeling reckless, Sarah picked up her empty bowl of Rice Bubbles and drank the dregs of milk like a cat, causing everyone around the table to giggle. Lara Finlay thought the act was so funny she cracked her knee on the iron crossbars under the table and yelled ‘Shit’, causing more laughter.

  ‘I’ll do your hair now, Meg,’ Sarah announced, turning officious as she pushed out of her chair. ‘C’mon.’

  Meg followed, resigned to her fate. They had never been to a Hetherington School swimming carnival, but it didn’t take a genius to work out hair was important today. The senior girls all arrived at breakfast in their house colours – green, yellow, blue, red or purple– with their hair already preened and pushed. There were cowgirl plaits and high ponytails, teased fringes and comic pigtails that a five-year-old might wear. The senior girls had sprayed their house colours all through their hair. Sarah wondered whether all that dye would run in the pool. Her mother would kill her if she did that at home.

  Sarah and Meg left the huddle of blue at the end of their table finishing off their cereal and toast and walked up the stairs past girls in red and yellow talking in doorways. No one was hurrying back to her room to pack a bag or to finish last-minute maths homework before school. Routine had been broken for this Wednesday. Voices were louder; girls were shouting instructions or plans about who they were sitting next to on the bus in hallways and down stairwells. A few took bananas from the servery and boldly stuck them in their pockets for later. There was a feeling in the boarding house that anything could happen today. Held for the last forty-two years without fail, four weeks into the first term, the Hetherington Girls’ School swimming carnival had arrived, marking the last Wednesday before the boarders had their first weekend out for the year.

  Sarah sat Meg down on the end of the bed and put all her hair equipment on her lap. She put a hairband in her mouth and one around her wrist for later.

  ‘Just a ponytail,’ Meg said, turning her back to Sarah. ‘You can make it high and stupid-looking if you want.’

  ‘What about plaits? I could do really cute plaits, and maybe we could put some wire through them and make them stick out.’ Sarah was getting excited as she brushed.

  ‘We don’t have any wire.’

  ‘Oh. Of course. I just thought. Just plain plaits then,’ Sarah said, not letting the hairband in her mouth get in the way of her elocution.

  ‘Okay, plaits.’

  Sarah took three equal pieces of Meg’s hair and began to turn them over and through while she discussed the stupidity and uselessness of the butterfly stroke. ‘I mean, when am I ever going to need to swim butterfly?’ Sarah asked, taking the hairband from her mouth and twisting it around the bottom of one of the plaits. ‘I can swim freestyle. I’m not going to drown.’

  ‘I’m hopeless at them all, Sarah, so don’t worry,’ Meg said. ‘I just hope there are some swimmers as bad as me out there today. So no one notices.’

  ‘I heard Jenny Allan swam for the state last year in under-thirteen,’ Sarah said. ‘In all four strokes.’

  ‘Great,’ Meg said. ‘Thanks, Sarah.’

  Eve had been one of the first girls to finish her breakfast and could hear fussing over hair further up the rows of bunks. Cross-legged, she sat on the floor, packing her backpack for the carnival. Every now and then, someone would walk past and ask the air if anyone had seen their hat/cap/bathers. Eve hadn’t noticed anyone else’s little bits and pieces and said so each time. The harried searcher would say nothing and continue asking. They had been given a list in form class of what they needed to bring, and Eve kept busy, smoothing out the piece of paper on the floor beside her bunk and double-checking she had everything. ‘School sports hat. Towel. Swimming cap. Goggles. School swimmers. Your belongings are your responsibility,’ the note said. She placed everything in the bag, pulling at the rubber of her navy swimming cap as she slid it inside, thinking how much she hated putting those tight things on her head. They pulled and hurt. She wasn’t the best swimmer, she knew that.

  Swimming lessons were not optional in the Hardy household, but she’d managed to stop before her brothers did. Mr Beechley had been her instructor, standing beside the pool in his shorts, walking up and down and never letting her know where he was looking under those reflector sunglasses. Eve had learnt the hard way when she cheated in butterfly. She could never do butterfly; she could barely do freestyle. Breaststroke was her best stroke. One morning, before school at swimming lessons, she’d swum the laps as she was told and switched to breaststroke kick instead of butterfly when she thought Mr Beechley wasn’t looking. He ordered her out of the pool so he could tie a thick rubber band around her ankles. Eve ran as soon as she saw the black rubber being pulled out of the wet washing basket near the blocks, and Mr Beechley gave chase – around and around the pool, all the children in the water stopping in their lanes, heads bobbing up, watching the two of them. He caught her by the straps of her swimmers and picked her up, tears running down her cheeks. He wrapped the rubber around her ankles, tightened it, grabbed her around the crotch and neck and threw her back in the water.

  ‘When I say butterfly kick, I mean butterfly kick,’ was all he said.

  Eve swam down the lane, mucus escaping from her nose and floating off into the pool like spilt mercury, her bottom half sinking, her thighs struggling to move together and perform the butterfly kick. Her legs were so skinny and long, they weren’t designed for butterfly. Mr Beechley made her practise the stroke for the rest of the lesson. She didn’t cry, though, when she had to wait near the starting blocks at the end of the lesson for him to untie her ankles, while he casually threw yellow kickboards and flippers and other wet chlorine-soaked bits into the laundry basket.

  Eve’s towel, bathing cap and school sports cap were brand new and still smelt. Her swimmers were old – a cousin’s – and she folded them neatly. They were stretched and thin all over – her cousin was much tinier than her; she couldn’t believe they were related – but her mum told her they had bought enough new stuff this year and navy swimmers were navy swimmers, and it wasn’t as if Eve was going to get picked for the Olympic swim team.

  When they filed onto the bus to the pool, Eve noticed a lot of the older girls had their bathers on under their house colours. Experience. Everyone was partnered up on the bus, and Eve had to sit next to the deputy principal,
Ms Waters. She tried to keep her knees to herself – teachers always took up so much room – and stared out the window with her backpack on her lap, making sure nothing strayed into Ms Waters’ airspace.

  ‘So, what are you entering, Eve?’ Ms Waters asked. Her vowels were perfectly rounded, her words clipped with precision.

  ‘Breaststroke.’

  ‘It’s such a graceful stroke. One of my favourites too. You look like you could be a bit of a swimmer. Those long legs. You know, everyone has to swim a fifty-metre freestyle race. It’s the rule. Save some energy, because freestyle is last.’

  Eve didn’t know what kind of answer Ms Waters wanted, so she made a noise in return.

  ‘Settling in?’

  ‘Yes.’ Eve pushed her backpack onto its belly on her lap.

  ‘What’s your favourite subject so far?’

  There was a long pause, and for a while it seemed that Eve was not going to answer. ‘English. Maybe.’ Eve zipped and unzipped, zipped and unzipped her backpack, on automatic pilot.

  ‘Yes, I’ve heard you’re quite the bookworm.’

  Eve looked horrified. She stopped mid-zip. She banged her elbow against the window, causing a perfect big, red, round spot, but didn’t utter a sound. She was sitting next to the deputy principal in front of rows and rows of girls from school and she was being congratulated on being a bookworm. Johanna Waters turned to see Eve’s neck go blotchy and red. Elsewhere, chatter and the occasional low chant filled the bus. Eve listened behind her, trying to work out whether anyone had heard.

  Johanna brushed an imaginary annoyance off her lap, left it a minute or so, then leant over to Eve and whispered, ‘Aren’t other people’s stories fascinating? It’s good to read. Important. Makes you realise people are never quite what they seem.’

  Then Ms Waters sat upright, took a clipboard out of her oversized bag, ran her finger down a running list, tapped it on a name and with that voice of hers added without looking up, ‘Well, good luck today.’

  Filing into North Sydney Pool, jammed next to an assortment of bodies, it was obvious that Eve possessed genes for blue eyes, thin hair and long fingers. What she lacked in her biological make-up was the gene, or maybe it was the instinct, for self-preservation, otherwise she would have faked stabbing pains in the vicinity of her pelvis to Mr Walker, turned around past the lines of girls walking with bare feet through the turnstile at the pool and hopped back on the school bus. She felt the doom rise as soon as she entered the pool grounds and had to squeeze past pompoms and girls with coloured zinc painted on their faces as if they were off to war, then walk alongside too much shiny, happy blue. The glare stabbed at her eyes, but Eve kept on walking until she took a seat in the stands and waited to be called for the under-thirteen fifty-metre breaststroke race. Eve had never seen a fifty-metre pool in her life. All that water.

  As she made her way to the marshalling area, Eve didn’t just feel like a fraud in her navy T-back swimmers, she knew she also looked like one. Her bathers seemed a completely different colour to those of the other girls. She had noticed this at school, but here, in this light, hers were very badly faded, and when she looked down her front they were almost see-through. She kept her towel on for as long as possible and told herself she was going to demand another pair of swimmers when she spoke to her mum on the phone that night.

  Eve joined the row of girls lining up for her race. She moved her purple veiny legs up and down on the spot like all the girls next to her. As she attempted to tuck the wisps of her short dark hair under her swimming cap, she looked down the row of long-limbed girls and breathed in hard, so that the bones of her chest became a stack of knives. Eve had thought that by now she would be one of the girls in the line leaning into another soft body, talking about their favourite nail-polish colour and giggling that Miss Dixon had brought her bathers and was actually going to get in the pool later. At home, she had a big group of friends. She was always being invited to parties and it was handy, her mum said, that they owned the chemist because they would grab something out of the shop for half-price as a present – some pretty hairbands and brushes, a beauty case, some clear lip gloss.

  Eve thought she had been prepared for coming away. She had seen Tom do it. Had seen her mum in tears at home when she hung up the phone to him during his first year. Then everyone in the family got used to one less and it became four at the table: Mum, Dad, Eve and Robert, her little brother. Four in the car. She didn’t have to touch another human when they drove anywhere. Four in the house. Four dividing up the contents of the biscuit tin.

  She had seen Tom a couple of times in the last few weeks, and her mum and dad were coming on the weekend – the famous fourth weekend of first term. They were all staying in a hotel together and going to explore Sydney as a family, and her mum said they were just going to put up a sign in the shop saying, ‘Sorry for any inconvenience. We are closed to see our daughter in Sydney.’

  Eve was beginning to see how she was different. She had short hair, while everyone else had long hair. She was tall, and everyone else was medium or short, cute short. She kept on being mistaken for someone in Year Ten, which was starting to get on her nerves. She also played a musical instrument. She was relieved that Mr Walker now let her keep her cello down in the music rooms rather than in the corner of the dorm. Before she was allowed to lock her cello safely away in Music Room Three, everyone kept making jokes about it – the big case leaning like a policeman sitting down on the job in the dorm, taking up so much room.

  ‘Have you got a dead body in there, Eve?’

  ‘Not enough wardrobe space, Eve?’

  ‘Play us something, Eve.’

  By now, the girls in the Year Seven dorm had partnered up. It was six more weeks until the end of the first term, and the groups had begun to take shape. As an outsider, Eve could see it clearly. Some fitted like gloves and some were together just as two people might grab on to the same bit of broken table in the ocean if a ship went down.

  Her mum said she just needed to be patient and think of that thing she had in common with someone and then go up and start a conversation about it.

  ‘Like that’s going to work, Mum,’ Eve said, aghast at her mother’s lack of understanding. ‘Obviously, I have things in common with the girls – we sleep together, eat together and go to school together. I’m the odd girl out.’

  ‘Don’t say that, Eve. That’s not true.’

  The odd girl. Nothing wrong with that in theory, Eve’s mum, Hillary, thought. But when she went to bed, after she finished looking at the shop’s accounts and took her reading glasses off and told her husband, Jim, to roll over because he was snoring, she turned off her light and prayed that her daughter was not the odd one out. She didn’t really believe in God but felt a few pleading words in the dark couldn’t hurt.

  As the loudspeaker barked for girls to remember to pick up their rubbish, the girl next to Eve accidentally cut Eve’s shin with her toenails. Eve could feel it, and could see a bit of blood trickling down, but she stayed in the line and did nothing. It was nearly time to walk towards the blocks.

  Eve stepped up on the block. The gun went off. All the girls leapt into the water, arms pumping, legs frog-kicking. Eve was swimming her hardest. She knew she wasn’t the best swimmer and knew she had to try harder than anyone else in the water. White water surrounded her thrashing body, and she bobbed up and down doing her most strenuous breaststroke.

  Whenever her head popped out of the water, she could hear everyone screaming. Below the surface, the only thing she could hear was the whoosh of the water as she moved through it. She kept moving forwards, able to see nothing but her hands in front of her through foggy goggles. Eve didn’t know exactly when it changed. But the screaming stopped and in its place was laughter. A crashing wave of laughter hit her every time her head popped out of the water, like she was annoying her brother by turning the sound on and off really quickly on the TV.

  She slapped both hands on the far-end wall and tu
rned to one side and then the other, realising she was last. A couple of the girls had even taken off their bathing caps and were swimming over the ropes to each other, saying something quietly. They all had big smiles on their faces. Big smiles with no teeth, just curved lips with carefully closed mouths. Eve smiled too. At least it was over.

  She looked up at the crowd, at the stands with their broad streaks of red, yellow, green, blue and purple, and her vision began to walk in time with her mind. She clung to the end wall. Her hands started to tremble. A pair of bright white sandshoes stopped right in front of her lane.

  The Japanese-language teacher squatted on her haunches and then leant over the pool towards Eve, whispering as if no one knew what was going on. ‘Your swimmers have ripped at the back. Stay in the water and I’ll get you a towel.’

  Eve’s hand reached around to the cheeks of her bottom and felt flesh. Her face went hot just as her insides turned cold. The elastic in her swimmers had snapped at the side, and the thin second-hand fabric had come away from her bottom. Somewhere, teachers were yelling ‘Shush’, and ‘Enough’, and ‘Girls’. She had swum breaststroke with her naked bum coming out of the pool every two seconds. The other girls swam past her underwater, saving themselves from having to acknowledge the girl who swam down the pool flashing a right bum cheek and her crack.

  Eve let her arms go limp and let go of the end of the pool. Everything was happening in slow motion, and she could see everything clearly in that one moment before her head went under the water: two teachers under the awning shaking their heads; a cloud the shape of a dinosaur crawling across the sky; faces laughing, smiling, shocked in the stands. She knew that if she wanted to live, she had to come up for air. How long could she stay under there? Did she have to break the surface? She looked up through the mass of swirling water at the Japanese teacher, who was leaning over the side, dangling a towel and pointing, indicating for Eve to go to the side of the pool and meet her there. She looked like she was in a bubble that had a belt on it.