Cherry Beach

by Laura McPhee-Browne

  It was too bright and warm. I could feel the beginning of sweat on my upper lip and between my breasts, and I didn’t want Faith to see it and regret ever touching me at all.

  ‘I’m okay. I might have a shower,’ I said, and pulled myself up to standing again. She looked up at me from way down on the rug, small and neat and worried.

  ‘Ness, wait. Sit here with me while we eat,’ she said, reaching out her arms and clasping my fingers with hers.

  I sighed, and lowered myself down again. I felt scared now, as if everything could go away very quickly, and that I didn’t deserve it to stay the way it was.

  I sat looking at my hands, cross-legged with my feet under my thighs so Faith wouldn’t have to see them. I could feel her watching my face and I felt as if I might cry, for no reason I could understand.

  ‘Ness.’

  She spoke softly and I felt her fingers against my arm, stroking at my paleness. I wished she would stop watching and touching, or that it was night again. It felt safer to be watched at night, because the shadows helped to hide some of me.

  I hated feeling like this, and remembered why I’d never wanted a girlfriend in the first place. It was disgusting, sitting there feeling so big and cornered. I knew now it wouldn’t be long until she would reject me with her quiet kindness. It wasn’t her fault I couldn’t maintain things because I was too rough, too scared. I wished it was men I felt this way around, instead of women. When I was with a man I didn’t care what my body looked like, or whether I was slick or red or smelly. I just wanted to find any pleasure I could from the encounter and leave without thought. Women meant more, so much more.

  I turned to her and let my face open. Maybe I could just tell her I was scared. I’d never done that before. She was the kindest and this the loveliest moment, after all.

  ‘I’m scared that if you see me in the light you won’t want me anymore,’ I said. I wiped the back of my hand, finally, against my upper lip and then my chin. The beads of sweat transferred from skin to skin. I hoped my face wasn’t red.

  Faith’s eyes turned down. ‘No!’ she said. ‘Oh. Ness. No.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, my lips hardly moving.

  It was tiring being vulnerable and raw. I wished myself anywhere else, anywhere else alone, anywhere else where she wasn’t, so I could be huge and ugly and sad without her beautiful eyes seeing me.

  She sighed, and took my hand and put one hand on top of it and one hand underneath it and pressed lightly with each of them. ‘You don’t need to say sorry, or be sorry. Thank you for telling me how you’re feeling.’

  I stayed looking down, at my hand in between hers.

  ‘It’s how you feel now, but it’s not real, Ness. I am incredibly attracted to every part of you.’

  I could feel her breath, her face and mouth close to my neck by then.

  She kissed my neck and each cheek. ‘That part and this part,’ she said, then kissed my forehead. ‘And this part’—lifting my arm up from where it was pulled close against my side and kissing deep against my armpit. I let myself feel her lips and not worry about what she was touching when she touched me with them.

  ‘And these parts,’ she said again, and kissed little kisses down the side of me and in, to my belly button.

  ‘Faith, you don’t have to,’ I said.

  She shushed me and kept kissing until she was at my vagina, and I let her show me over and over.

  TRIBUTARY

  a river feeding a river

  After summer had opened up into autumn, everything changed in a rush. Hetty didn’t come home one Friday night and then the Saturday night, and she wasn’t answering her phone when I called it after wondering whether I should let her be. When I went to Ronnie’s on Sunday afternoon to find her, she wasn’t there, though she always had a shift on Sundays. Elaine was behind the soggy-carpeted bar when I arrived, wiping glasses with a tea towel that looked too wet to do the job, and she didn’t smile. I wished I hadn’t, then told her I was looking for Hetty.

  ‘She didn’t come in for work yesterday.’ Elaine turned around to begin moving the glasses she had dried to the shelf.

  ‘Is she supposed to be here today?’

  I couldn’t believe Hetty hadn’t come in for a shift and that Elaine wasn’t even going to stand there and talk to me about why this might be, without me having to beg her to.

  ‘Yeah, but I’m not holding my breath,’ she said, banging down a crate of pint glasses covered in shadows of beer froth.

  ‘Well, where is she?’

  My heart was beating fast in anger. Elaine was supposed to be Hetty’s friend. This bar, this person, were such unsafe things for her to try to build her life around, and I’d known that. I should have been making sure she was okay.

  ‘I have no idea. Her phone’s off now. I really don’t have time for this, Ness. I’m understaffed.’

  I hadn’t even thought she would remember my name. Her voice saying it made me feel strange, like she was family, despite her being nothing to me, or Hetty. She had her back to me again, was washing something under the tap, when I turned myself around and walked out, though I’d wanted to ask her if she had noticed Hetty’s behaviour lately. She didn’t know Hetty anyway—there was no point. She was angry and she’d given up on her.

  Outside on the street I remembered that it was the weekend and took in a breath of smoke from a barbecue that was selling sausages and the sweat of people walking their weeks off. I didn’t know what to do next. I hadn’t met any of Hetty’s other new friends—had just heard tiny things about them over and over, like how Jeff liked silent discos and Freya had a problem with sleeping unless she smoked weed. I didn’t know where they would be, or how to find out. Hetty was far away from me now, and I didn’t know how to get her back.

  I walked home and found Steph and Robin in the kitchen, talking with cups of coffee in hand, and Whitney asleep on the table atop a pile of newspapers. They told me they hadn’t seen Hetty since earlier that week, and that Dill was in his room, so I climbed the stairs and knocked on his bedroom door, painted lemon yellow with a photo of Whitney in a basket stuck to it with sticky tape. I heard him call out, and then he was there, with the door open, and the smell of marijuana, and a look of something on his face, and I asked if I could talk to him. We sat on his bed, cross-legged, facing one another. I hadn’t been in there before, in Dill’s room. It was carefully decorated and neat.

  ‘I don’t know where Hetty is,’ I told him, and watched his freckled face as he ran his hand through his hair. His eyes were red. I felt myself on the verge of crying, and tried to swallow it down.

  ‘Is she at work?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Sorry—of course you would have checked that first. When did you last see her?’

  I pictured the last time in my mind. Tuesday that week, in the morning. Me creeping around the bedroom trying to find a clean top, trying not to wake her. She was asleep on her side of the bed but almost on my side too—her long hair spread across the cotton and almost black in the white morning light, her face squished in between the place where our pillows met. I hadn’t been awake the night before when she’d got home, but the air was slightly muggy with the smell of wine and skin, and I had assumed she was very hungover. She hadn’t stirred, and I had left for work.

  ‘Tuesday morning. But that’s not so weird. Sometimes I don’t see her for ages. It’s just that she’s not answering her phone and she missed work yesterday and Elaine doesn’t know where she is.’ I paused. ‘I just have a bad feeling.’

  Dill nodded and sighed.

  ‘Are you stoned, by the way? Sorry if I interrupted some kind of Sunday session…’

  Dill laughed, and rubbed at his face with his sturdy fingers.

  ‘Yeah, a little. But don’t worry! It’s good you came to tell me.’

  I could see now that he was a bit slower than usual in his movements and speech. Usually an energy was in the air just around him and he was almost visibly trying to
take the edge off his own pace, his own excitement. Today he was moving through mud.

  ‘When did you last see her?’

  He looked up at the ceiling, eyes pinky red, remembering.

  ‘I saw her on Wednesday,’ he said, his voice firm. ‘She was having a drink before she went to work. I asked her how she was and she started crying.’

  He stopped and looked at me, waiting for my reaction, but I didn’t say anything. I wanted to hear more.

  ‘I hoped I’d see her this weekend to talk to her more. She didn’t have time to tell me what was wrong then, and I didn’t ask the right questions, I don’t think.’

  I could hear the gulp in his voice. My heart hurt picturing Hetty pouring herself a mug of wine with tears in her eyes, hoping to numb something. That pale, bare small of back beneath her clothes. I was sure though that Dill would have been gentle, kind, open to talking, and that Hetty would have known she could have asked to tell him anything. If Dill was the last kind person she had seen since then, at least she had seen him.

  ‘I’m sure she knew she could talk to you.’

  Dill smiled and nodded. It was comfortable sitting there on his bed, with his silvery doona beneath us and a fug of smoke settling in the air. I could feel that Dill was sad just like Hetty was, but that he knew how to be with sadness. It wasn’t lonely in that room, and I felt a rare moment of ease in the company of someone else.

  Dill tried to call Hetty’s phone then, and this time it didn’t even ring, just went straight to her calm, sweet voicemail. I called her from my phone, just to see, and it did the same. Her voice was lighter and higher on the recording than when she was right there with me. I wanted to see her. I wanted to give her a hug and hold her thin body against mine.

  Dill had met a friend of Hetty’s from Ronnie’s a few weeks earlier when he’d visited her there one afternoon to say hello.

  ‘It was this guy called Rick, and he was a complete jerk.’

  This didn’t surprise me. Hetty often found herself surrounded by jerks and never seemed to see quite how unpleasant they were. She sometimes made dumb choices when it came to people, in the name of tenderness and hark, and forgave much too easily. I had talked to her so many times about how important it was for her to value the friendship she gave to people, to make sure she didn’t empty all of it out on the wrong ones. She would never quite understand, but would tell me that I was the only one who mattered. I let it go mostly, though with Sean I hadn’t been able to and it had nearly destroyed us.

  ‘The jerks always find her.’

  I told Dill about Elaine, and how her vibe was pit-bull demon and she clearly didn’t give a shit about Hetty even after all the time they’d spent together, and how angry that made me. I could feel my body warming when I thought about how much Hetty gave to some people and how little she got back. Dill raised his eyebrows, then he got angry too. I loved him for it.

  ‘So Elaine has no idea where Hetty might be?’

  ‘I didn’t even really ask her. She was too busy cleaning the bar to properly talk to me. She was more upset about Hetty missing her shift.’

  Dill sighed, pressed a hand on top of mine briefly.

  ‘I just wonder whether people are drawn to her fragility and then repelled by it, you know?’

  I knew.

  ‘And like, nothing touches her, but also everything does?’

  He moved across the bed and put his arm down towards the carpet below, bringing up a small wooden box with a carved lid. He took out papers and a bud waiting green in a small bowl, and started chopping at it with scissors.

  ‘That’s exactly what it is. She’s weird.’

  By weird, I meant loveable and unique and undone, and I knew Dill knew that. We shared the joint lying on his pillows, which were smooth and smelt of lavender detergent: the big box of it we had in the laundry that seemed to last forever. He rolled onto his side and watched me as I took a drag.

  ‘So we will have to go find her?’

  ‘Yes,’ I answered, smoke coming out of my open mouth like a rain cloud. I heard Whitney scratching quietly at the door. Dill told me gently that he knew where Rick lived. We edged ourselves up and put our shoes on.

  It was warm outside, with a woozy wind.

  Dill told me that when he’d met Rick at Ronnie’s, Hetty had seemed to know him well. I’d never heard Hetty say Rick’s name, but that didn’t mean much. She got to know people quickly, or at least the surface of them. People made her their best friend in minutes, and she never told them she was taken.

  We walked up Spadina and turned right, towards Dundas and College and after that Bloor, towards the university and the area of Toronto known as the Annex, where young people and middling families lived in a semi-boho funk.

  Dill said that Rick had been talking about his new place, and had told Hetty and Dill he’d moved into a share house just off Bloor that was painted purple, with two women and a dog called Guy. Dill had known as soon as Rick said the house was purple and the dog was Guy that it was the house his friend Shauna lived in, and told Rick this, with astonishment, even camaraderie in his tone. Rick’s response had been blank, as if he didn’t care and wasn’t sure why Dill had even mentioned it. This was when Dill knew that he didn’t like Rick, and he had told Hetty he would catch up with her at home.

  ‘So unless he’s moved out, or Shauna has decided she doesn’t want to live with him after all, that’s where he lives. In the crazy purple house. Guy is a chihuahua, by the way.’

  We laughed at the little dog’s name, and as we neared Dundas I could smell oyster sauce and vegetables. My stomach and my mouth and my chest were sick again from the weed and the heat and the not knowing where Hetty was, and reminding myself she was probably not going well, if she’d missed work and couldn’t charge her phone, and hadn’t been able to tell me anything. Shivers filled me, despite the hot sun.

  I looked over at Dill, who was so gorgeous and reliable and Canadian, and I felt homesick. Not just for Melbourne or the familiar, but for when I was just a little younger and when I hadn’t moved to the other side of the world and when life had surely been easier.

  The wind was picking up as if it had a fan behind it, helping it to blaze through and beyond. We passed College Street and walked around one side of the big roundabout that came before Bloor. Dill tried calling Hetty again, and it was just her recorded voice telling us her phone was still off. I could hear a tiny part of her coming out of the speaker at Dill’s ear.

  ‘Hetty. Dill again. Ness and I are worried about you. Please call us back.’

  Dill’s phone voice was the same as his normal one, and this felt reassuring in that moment. I was out of breath from the very gradual hill we were climbing: my heart burned. My body seemed to be remembering the other times in my life that I had thought Hetty was lost to me.

  CREEK

  a small stream

  When we were both twenty, Hetty and I went to stay on a farm about an hour’s drive north-west of Melbourne. Hetty and Sean hadn’t been talking for weeks—they were on a break that I hoped would last forever—and she’d asked me if I would come with her to stay in a house on a farm that had within its boundaries a small school run by the author of young-adult books that were popular when we were growing up. The school was deliberately separate from the mainstream, and the pupils were treated like budding creative scholars with things to offer and a capacity to learn about the land. We would help out with the running of the place and stay in the old farmhouse for free, and it seemed like the right time for me to do something, anything, and for Hetty to get away.

  We drove there in my white Corolla, coated with a reddybrown dust by the time we arrived, and played Laura Marling down low on the broken stereo, which I remember felt comforting. Hetty was hopeful that this time away in the bush would help her decide what to do with her life and about Sean, and I wanted to join her.

  When we arrived it seemed as if nobody had been expecting us. It was a beautiful hilled property, wit
h the school in a small domed building up near the highest part. The farmhouse we would be staying in was to the side and we were guided there by a man called Cliff, who was too tall and had the quietest voice—as if he was telling us secrets. He helped us with our bags across the creek, showed us to our little rooms side by side, and then he left, telling us we could get a lift to town later to pick up groceries for our dinner, if we needed.

  There didn’t seem to be a kitchen, but eventually we found it: a small separate room, clinging like a clam to the side of the hill. We were so hungry we didn’t feel fussy. I found some spaghetti in a cupboard and boiled it with salt and margarine from an old fridge for us to eat. Out on the verandah, sunk in to a comfortable outside couch with a bowl full of golden noodles, I was glad to be there. It smelt like cut grass and scraps, and there was a hog watching us from across the garden, his thick body dirty behind a wire fence.

  We found out the next morning that the hog’s name was Bill. He was businesslike when we went to feed him—a big bucket of half-finished yesterday’s lunch from the school and some spotty bananas—and immediately began huffing it down with his tiny tail wiggling. I wanted to pat the white-pink-dust hairy skin of his back, but I had been told once that hogs could be vicious, even though this didn’t seem likely now that I had met one. Hetty leaned over and ruffled his big ears. He ignored her entirely. Cliff was with us, and he whispered words of encouragement to Bill across the fence as he ate.

  We had woken early that first day, and once dressed had wandered up to the school and found ourselves in the midst of morning-tea prep—a kitchen full of sturdy women in aprons slapping buttered bread slices upon buttered bread slices onto laminex benchtops. Hetty hadn’t seemed fazed. She told the sturdiest woman who we were and why we were there, and the woman introduced herself to us as Belle. She told us she supposed we should meet with the author, David, and took us out of the main dining area and across a bit of grass to another, smaller building.

  It was strange, knowing we were about to meet the man who had written books I had read over and over when I was younger, someone I had imagined to be so mysterious and intelligent that he couldn’t possibly be living a life I could see for myself. After Belle knocked on the door we waited, and then she knocked again. I looked across at Hetty as we stood there and noticed she was standing tall and serious, her face poised.