Under the Influence

by Jacqueline Lunn

  Rebecca turned to Eve, and Eve could see her face now. She looked hurt. She could see the old lady patting the cat, her bottom leaning on the fence while she did it. Her hand wiped her brow.

  ‘And then she said, “Did you hear me, Terry? I said I know what Rebecca is going to be like when she grows up. She’s that girl. I know it. She’s that girl.” She was talking about me.’

  ‘But that’s not bad. Maybe she thinks you’re the girl who is going to be prime minister,’ Eve offered, overly enthusiastically.

  ‘Yeah, maybe. Or the girl who comes in the middle of the night and puts a pillow over her head while she’s sleeping,’ Rebecca laughed. ‘God, who knows? I just saw the back of her big bum at the sink and didn’t like that she was talking about me. Mental Molly. I never played with her granddaughter again. They are all mental. That cat better watch itself.’

  Rebecca turned from the window and kicked the rug across the floor. Eve took another look at Mental Molly and her cat on the fence, and they both went downstairs to get some afternoon tea.

  ‘If you wake up early in the morning, you can come into my bed if you like,’ Rebecca said when they came back upstairs to change into jeans to go out to pizza with Rebecca’s family.

  ‘I don’t want to wake you.’

  ‘I don’t mind. Really, I don’t mind,’ Rebecca said, walking down the stairs, her hand lightly touching the banister. ‘I’m ordering a supreme.’

  In the morning, Eve tried not to move when she woke. It was still dark, and she went over how much fun she had the night before. They had pizza, and they sat at a different table to Rebecca’s family, and two boys came over to talk to them. She was thinking that she hadn’t said one word to Rebecca’s dad, or he hadn’t said one word to her, when the covers were lifted and a warm body slid in beside her.

  ‘What do you talk about?’ Rebecca said, her voice croaky with sleep, her hair all over her face.

  Eve didn’t move. ‘Umm, I don’t know. Stuff.’

  The body was different. It pressed up against her, against her arms, her thighs, her ribcage. Rebecca had her left foot on Eve’s right foot. Eve’s breathing changed.

  ‘You must know. You and Meg don’t just lie there and say nothing, do you?’

  Eve tried to think about what they talked about and couldn’t come up with one single topic. ‘I don’t know what we talk about.’

  Rebecca’s laugh bounced off the wall. Then she turned her face to Eve. ‘Hey, I can hardly see you. So anyway, what about those guys last night?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Eve said, moving her head back on the pillow.

  Rebecca’s body pushed further against Eve, and she let her hand fall on Eve’s stomach where her T-shirt had ridden up.

  The pillow felt too high for Eve under her neck, and she could feel Rebecca’s hair on her ear. Eve pushed and rearranged her pillow, but nothing would make it feel right under her neck.

  ‘Easy,’ Rebecca said. ‘Your elbow nearly hit me.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No one is up,’ Rebecca said in amazement. ‘They’re all probably snoring. Even Mum. No one has a clue what’s going on. The sun isn’t even up. Maybe we should go downstairs and get some biscuits and go outside and see the sun rise?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s amazing to watch,’ Eve said, beginning to get out of bed.

  ‘Nah. I can’t be bothered. Too much effort.’ Rebecca pulled the sheet back across Eve.

  Eve lay her head back down on the pillow and found something to say about the pizza toppings from the night before, and Rebecca discussed plans for the day. Slowly, light began to sneak into the room.

  ‘You come into my bed tomorrow morning,’ Rebecca said breezily, ignoring the stiffness beside her. ‘There’ll be a lot to discuss after the video night with the girls tonight.’

  The first time Eve heard she had been meeting William Bennett from Mitchell College down behind the train tracks after school and giving him a blowjob, she was fourteen years old and three weeks into Year Nine, licking an iceblock called The Finger during lunch.

  William with big, beige, curling hearing aids like sawn-off ram’s horns on both ears. William who shouted and rolled his words whenever he spoke so you could never understand what he was saying. William whom everyone laughed at.

  Rebecca told her not to worry, it would all blow away by the weekend, and the others nodded. Rebecca’s group had grown in the last five months: now there were six instead of four in the Year Nine group of girls that sat near the language lab every lunch. Two extras, Sarah and Eve, sat with their lunches in the hammocks of their skirts and let their knees touch the other knees in a neat unbroken circle of six, mortified that Miss Cattern didn’t care that some of her eyelashes were white. They had melded into the group at lightning speed. One weekend back in September, Eve had had her first sleepover and marvelled at all the white in Rebecca’s bedroom; the next weekend, Rebecca had called her in the boarding house six times to discuss absolutely nothing important at all, and, by November, Eve, Sarah and Rebecca had started planning where they were going to meet up during the summer holidays. They had met up in January on Rebecca’s beach holiday, both experiencing their first real sunburn, a sunburn so bad that whenever Jan Thornton asked about it or winced as they walked past they had to pretend that it didn’t hurt at all.

  Now, with February nearly over, Eve and Sarah sat in this group near the language lab every lunch. There were groups of girls everywhere in the schoolyard. Under trees, on long benches, leaning against brick walls. A group of two that lacked a force field was always going to be absorbed.

  ‘No way,’ Amelia scoffed to everyone when Eve first repeated the details at lunch. ‘William Bennett? Jesus. What does he say to you, Eve?’ Amelia broke into full flight, stripping her vowels of definition by placing spoonfuls of jelly in her mouth. ‘Where did you say I put my dick, Eve? I can’t hear you.’ The general theme of William Bennett imitations continued for the next ten minutes, entwined with the odd chuckle and disgusted body shiver.

  ‘I haven’t. I haven’t,’ protested Eve during a performance break. ‘I don’t even know him.’

  ‘Everyone knows it’s just a rumour, Eve,’ Sarah said, putting a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘It’s so unfair,’ Rebecca said, tossing her half-eaten lunch into the middle of the circle with gnawed-at sandwiches and skeletal apple cores. ‘At least he couldn’t ask you where your boobs have gone,’ she said, standing above the circle, getting ready to leave. ‘Well, you wouldn’t be able to understand him if he said it, anyway.’

  More laughter. Eve noticed that when Rebecca laughed she was impossible not to watch. Her face didn’t screw up into something ungainly and ugly, her mouth didn’t open wide, causing her to become one great big hole with eyes. Her face became fixed like a picture Eve had seen in a magazine, with white teeth, big eyes and a streak of blonde hair falling across her cheek, all arranged like it was meant to be and Rebecca was just about to take a sip from a Diet Coke. As Eve’s dad would say, Rebecca was a natural beauty.

  Eve pictured Rebecca’s smile in her head and made a note to herself not to open her mouth so wide when she laughed and to make sure her hair was tucked behind her ears. She noticed that Rebecca tucked sprouts of her hair behind her ears constantly. Eve would have to cheat on the natural stuff.

  ‘I’ve just had a terrible thought,’ Eve said, standing up and increasing her volume so Rebecca could hear. ‘Even William Bennett’s got bigger tits than me.’ Eve wasn’t a late developer; she had developed and nothing much had happened.

  William Bennett didn’t go away. The next day, a group of girls started making exaggerated sign language as soon as Eve approached, and she decided the best thing to do was to walk straight past, pretending she was busily on her way to something important. All day, girls kept repeating, ‘Pardon? I can’t hear you, Eve.’ On her return to the boarding house, she found Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life with a penis drawn on the cover sitting on her bed.


  As she picked up the book and placed it hastily on her bedside table, she could feel the eyes waiting behind her. She heard a quick set of hushed giggles released near the windows and knew there were three heads looking in from the doorway. She was tired and confused and her neck became hot and scratchy and a warm sting filled her eyes.

  Eve began to play Verdi in her head. She was having trouble with the middle bars and went over and over it. She saw Eleanor, her music teacher, pushing her to feel it, to believe she could do it. She felt a control return as she imagined where to put her second and fourth fingers on the strings, and then she straightened herself and opened her eyes.

  ‘Very funny,’ she said to no one in particular. ‘I don’t even know William bloody Bennett and I HAVE NEVER GIVEN HIM A HEADJOB.’

  ‘That’s horrible,’ Rebecca said the next morning when Eve filled her in. ‘As if you would suck his cock. He’s a retard.’

  ‘God, Meg would have gone ballistic,’ Eve continued, imagining the drama that Meg would have caused. ‘Thrown the book across the room at everyone. I don’t know, done something.’

  Rebecca pushed her fringe out of her eyes and looked up at Eve. ‘Meg would never have given a blowjob to a deaf and dumb boy in the mud.’

  Eve took a step back. ‘I didn’t. It didn’t happen. Why are you talking about it like it happened?’

  ‘I’m only joking, Eve. Don’t be so sensitive,’ Rebecca said, putting her arm around Eve’s shoulders and pulling her in, ending with a squeeze. ‘You’re so funny sometimes. Do you want to borrow my blue Sportsgirl dress for the dance tomorrow night? You’ll look great in it.’

  Rebecca wouldn’t miss the dress. Rebecca’s mum often said Rebecca had a better wardrobe than she did. It was true, Eve thought, the first time that Janice Thornton said this and then laughed at her own joke. Jan was dressed for a ‘house day’, wearing pale pink tracksuit pants and sneakers. She looked like a worn-out, sucked pink doughnut.

  Rebecca turned on her heels theatrically and pulled the vision of Mrs Thornton whistling to herself in pink tracksuit pants out of Eve’s head with a Betty Boop kiss goodbye and a call to ‘Just ignore them, Evie’.

  A week later, when the bell rang for assembly, Eve waited expectantly in line outside the Great Hall for Rebecca to push through the navy blazers and stand so close to her she would be able to tell if she was sneaking in chewing gum. They all hated assembly – singing hymns and the school song and listening to upcoming important events from a stream of people who had to change the angle of the microphone or keep referring to their notes. They would sit on the wooden floor with their legs crossed, rolling and rerolling their socks or plaiting their shoelaces or making up faces in the knots of the cypress pine, knowing that, if they spoke, the teachers lining the side of the hall would walk over to them, their shoes tapping on the wooden floor, and make them stand up. The girls – usually there were at least three – who were made to stand at assembly were given an automatic Friday-afternoon detention and had to make an appointment with the deputy principal and have a talk about respect, behaviour and standards.

  Eve knew that Rebecca would slip in beside her any minute. Instead, she arrived and stood down the queue next to Amelia, a girl who felt the winds of change and bent nimbly to catch them first. Eve waved to Rebecca and started calling her name. ‘Rebecca,’ she cried over a sea of heads and shoulders, cupping her hands at her mouth. ‘Bec.’ She never called her Bec. Rebecca hated it, and Eve had no idea why she was calling it out now. ‘Rebecca,’ Eve corrected herself.

  Rebecca grabbed Amelia’s arm and pulled her close and began to whisper. They looked at Eve in unison and pulled the face of someone smelling fresh urine in a cake shop.

  ‘Rebecca …’ she yelled from her spot in the line. She was on her tippy toes.

  Instantly, Eve replayed the morning. She came up with nothing, except that she had answered a lot of questions in biology. Then she moved to the day before, the week before, scanning her memory for any words she had used without thinking, any indiscretions around Rebecca or the girls. Did she make too big a fuss about getting picked to do a cello solo in assembly? She was so mindful of playing down anything to do with the cello when around Rebecca. Wasn’t she supportive enough when she took Amelia to sickbay with period pain? Her mind searched for a time she had mentioned Rebecca to anyone. Did she spill something on Rebecca’s dress and not notice it and return it with a stain? She should have checked it. Did she dance too much?

  She mouthed the school song, sat cross-legged and looked at her feet, hearing the occasional giggle and shush behind her. She felt she was stuck in that moment just before falling over – when you know you are either going to fall or save yourself from falling just in time.

  When she filed out of assembly on the shoulder of someone she didn’t know, Sarah suddenly appeared beside her. ‘What’s going on?’ she said urgently. ‘What did you say about Rebecca? She’s really upset about something.’

  ‘I haven’t said anything,’ Eve replied, looking straight at Sarah as though she held a clue. ‘I mean, I don’t think I have said anything … I don’t know …’

  ‘Amelia said Rebecca doesn’t want to speak to you,’ Sarah said. The high notes of drama in her voice grated on Eve.

  ‘I get it, Sarah. I get it. I don’t know. I don’t know what I’ve done.’

  Crowds of girls pushed past while they stayed still.

  ‘Move,’ someone said.

  ‘Don’t stand there,’ came another voice.

  They edged their way to the nearby brick wall, both almost standing on the ferns in the garden beds. They looked at each other, hoping the answer might lie somewhere in the space between their faces. Somewhere in the air. The answer was there; they just had to see it.

  Eve put her hand against the scratchy brick and pulled at the hem of her blouse. She was starting to panic. Clumps of girls in navy kept moving past, laughing and groaning, talking about Eliza Rivers, who had sung a solo at assembly.

  ‘What the hell was that? She was warbling.’

  ‘She sang like an eighty-year-old.’

  ‘What was she singing, anyway? Opera? Jesus.’

  ‘Eve?’ Sarah said. ‘It must be a mistake.’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah,’ Eve replied.

  ‘C’mon.’ Sarah grabbed Eve’s elbow and led her five paces back to the navy sea. They moved up steps and along footpaths, past teachers chatting briefly and girls rushing into the toilets before the next class. They moved into half-shade.

  The bell rang. Eve turned to Sarah outside the library and grabbed her arm. ‘You’re right,’ Eve said. ‘It must be a mistake. It’s a misunderstanding. I’ll talk to Rebecca at lunch.’ Her voice was high and tight. ‘This will be over soon.’

  The bell rang for a second time. A senior girl, clutching books to her chest, ran past and mouthed to them to hurry up, and the two figures in navy turned away from each other and walked to their classrooms alone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  It was dawn again, and Eve pulled the cotton blanket up over her head on this cooler-than-expected March morning, wriggled further into her cave and shone her torch on page 257 of Health, Illness and Disease. The previously unwanted dusty library book, with perfect contact covering, was now her best friend.

  Eve had had minimal success in the last few weeks with faux illnesses. Matron was always bringing out the thermometer and shoving it under Eve’s armpit, shaking her bored, grey head and telling Eve that unless she vomited on the floor right then or had a temperature of over thirty-eight degrees she would be putting on her uniform, getting over herself and going to school.

  ‘You again,’ Brenda Atkins had said the previous Tuesday morning, not even bothering to turn around from her desk for confirmation. ‘Do not waste my time, Ms Hardy. I have better things to do than cluck around girls who are bone lazy.’

  The fifty-seven-year-old woman slept in a single bed in the boarding house, amused herself by throwing open the shower-cubicl
e doors and telling naked girls covered in nothing but goosebumps they were ‘clean enough, get out’, and always walked with her neck out like an upright turtle. Eve returned to her dorm wondering what exactly those ‘better things’ were and whether there was a way to break her own leg going down the stairs without hurting herself too much.

  Health, Illness and Disease was the only book Eve had read since Rebecca stopped talking to her three weeks before. Best friends for nearly six months, and having spent a good two weeks of the Christmas holidays together sunbaking and swimming and taking money from Janice’s purse for decent ice creams not iceblocks from the shop, she was now invisible. She tried to find out what she had done.

  ‘Rebecca, what’s going on? Why won’t you talk to me? Just tell me what I have done.’ Eve had asked that two weeks earlier, when she thought she still had a chance, shuffling from side to side in front of Rebecca so she couldn’t get past.

  ‘Stop it,’ Rebecca said, pushing her out of the way and walking past. After four steps, she turned. ‘Don’t act so innocent. You are always acting, Eve, playing the victim, making people feel sorry for you. I felt sorry for you. Pathetic little Evie. Then you do that to my dad. You’re filthy.’

  Rebecca started crying, and suddenly six girls appeared and wrapped themselves around different parts of her distressed body. Eve swore someone had their hands around Rebecca’s knee.

  ‘Jesus, Eve. There’s something wrong with you.’

  ‘Fuck off, Eve.’

  ‘Happy now?’

  ‘You’re a retard.’

  Eve now vacillated between filling her mornings running her index finger down the symptoms of salmonella poisoning, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, toxic shock syndrome et al. and greeting the day by staring blankly at the ceiling, dissecting previous lunchtimes, sleepovers, the summer holidays, searching for the reason. But reasons and evidence were for photosynthesis, not Rebecca.

  Eve kicked at the tightly tucked-in sheets at the foot of her bed. She had grown tall in the past year, so tall her mother had sent her to a paediatrician concerned she was going to be the height of a basketball player with none of the skill and all of the back and posture problems. The doctor looked at Eve and let out a ‘what a silly bunch of people you are’ laugh, measured Eve in a few different spots and told her she had probably stopped growing. If she continued on her upward trajectory, she could come back, but really there was nothing he could do. The die had been cast. She was fourteen and six foot and her feet stuck out past the foot of the bed: another obvious failure.