by Sally Breen
On the fifth night Mum waited up in the kitchen until almost midnight then slammed her book down, yelled at me to turn the fryer off, and went up to bed in her towel slippers. The phone rang just after and The Monster’s gravel voice asked for a sandwich, apologising for the time. I said it’s fine, too quickly.
The cutlery rattled against the plate as I carried the tray quietly past Red Head’s room. The Monster’s door was open.
‘On the bed.’
She motioned from the floor, leaning against the wall with a glass of white wine, listening. I wanted her to say it again. On the bed. On the bed.
‘They fighting again?’ I sat down facing her and put my ear against the wall.
‘They were… just talking now.’
‘Fuck, you can really hear everything…’
‘She was angry before because he went to Thailand without her, years ago. He was telling her she should go somewhere too then, but she wants to save for a house.’
She went back to listening now that she had caught me up.
‘They’ve been saving for a house forever,’ I scoffed.
She looked at me, hurt. As if I’d ruined something, whatever it was she liked about listening to people messed up and unhappy.
‘Why aren’t you at Schoolies? she asked suddenly, ‘How old are you, anyway?’
‘Seventeen… my brother’s there… I gotta work.’
‘Do you have a girlfriend?’
‘You don’t have to ask me that, ’ I looked away, disappointed.
The talking from next door went quiet, it turned into sounds; a chair squealed on lino, fabric rushed on skin, panting, the rhythmic sound of bedsprings.
‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ I asked quietly.
She laughed.
‘You don’t have to ask me that either.’
I looked at my legs stretched out in front of me. I moved them just slightly, closer to her toes. She put a hand out for me to pull her up. I stood up unsteady and took her small hand with both of mine. They were hot, fingernails bitten right back. The muffles next door turned to groans. I felt my cheeks burn. She wandered slowly over to the radio near her bed. The switch croaked and buzzed while she found a station. It was something old. She wandered back over to me, tipping and weaving around from the wine. Her mouth was close to my mouth. She said goodnight.
‘Like, whaddas she eat?’ My sister’s friend asked me the next morning at breakfast. My sister answered,
‘Steak sandwich and salad… every night. Not that she eats much of it.’
‘She looks skinnier in real life,’ my sister’s friend agreed.
‘I’ve seen ’er with that bodyguard.’ My sister said.
‘He’s a prick,’ I snapped.
‘Hey,’ Mum snapped back.
‘He’s hot though,’ my sister laughed.
‘Ew, God a redhead,’ my sister’s friend squashed her face up.
‘She can’t have kids,’ Mum added, flipping a fried egg.
‘We know,’ they both moaned together, like they were bored of the news.
‘But like, whaddas she say to you?’ my sister’s friend said, turning to me. I took a piece of toast off mum’s plate and went upstairs with the paper.
‘Check out ya girlfriend on page three. She won’t even say sorry. She wants to lock kids up…’ My sister yelled after me.
I tried to flick through the sports section but couldn’t wait to see the article, today’s article, there was something every day. The picture took up half a page. Square sunglasses, square shoulder pads, all sharp angles and dark shades. They said she was ‘practically’ a white supremacist, I laughed at the ‘practically’. They talked about her youth policy, the kids, fourteen, fifteen, she thought should get locked up. They showed their sad chubby mug shots and a photo of The Monster laughing. There was a cartoon, she was kicking people off boats with high heels. They called her a monster. I remembered a teacher crying in class when she won her seat in parliament.
I cut each ingredient for the steak sandwich with absolute precision. Glossy slices of tomato, thin rings of red onion, shredded iceberg lettuce. Then I sat in the kitchen, waiting for the call. My feet tapped the lino, the radio buzzed between stations but I couldn’t be bothered to fix it. I wiped sweat off my hands, thinking about the paper then trying not to think about the paper. Then Dad appeared in the doorway. He crossed his arms and smiled, his socks crumpled down, tan line glowing white.
‘I’ll do it,’ he said soft, like he’d been thinking about it all day. Like he’d discussed it with Mum.
‘Oh.’ I gulped, so he knew I cared. I turned away from him, motioning to the ingredients.
I waited in my room to hear the phone ring. I wanted to watch Dad deliver the tray, watch The Monster’s face, see if he went inside. But I rested my head on the side of the bunk and didn’t wake up until the next afternoon. I flicked through a comic, stared at the glow stars on my roof, felt like I was ten years old, and drifted off again.
I woke up after tea and went downstairs. My sister grinned as she walked past me with The Monster’s tray. I shrugged, trying not to look back, and went straight down to the beach.
My brother had a beer in one hand and a bottle of vodka in the other. I hadn’t seen him in six days. The sun was almost down and ‘Here’s Johnny’ was playing. More kids were wandering down from the next beach. Someone started a fire. My brother threw a log on and watched it spit and start to burn. He saw my face and gave me two small pink pills. I knew I needed something because it was the last night of Schoolies and I was almost eighteen, and otherwise I’d just think about the old rooms, and The Monster.
Soon the beach flooded with kids in bathers. Boys had beers strapped to their heads. Girls squealed with glitter on their faces. And I lost time. I lost everything. I wondered when it got dark, when I put my brother’s jumper on. I couldn’t hear what anyone was saying. My sister was there and she was drunk. My sister’s friend from breakfast took her top off. I didn’t like the music because it wasn’t songs, they didn’t end, they just kept going and going. Then Honey was next to me, her fur short and rough like splinters. I rubbed her neck and she panted, tongue out. We wandered away to a small fire by itself in a dip in the sand. It glowed like a street lamp from a movie I couldn’t remember. My throat stuck together. I lit a cigarette, felt ash in the back of my mouth. I couldn’t stop my fingers shaking. I couldn’t hear the waves over the music and there was something so terrible about it. The sand felt wet after a while, deep down. I realised I had buried my arms up to my elbows. I wondered how long I’d been sitting alone, the party still glowing further down the beach.
The waves turned into concrete and became cities rising then crashing again. I stood up, wavering, and stumbled back up the sand dunes. The music stopped for a second and I stopped in the scrub and everything was quiet, like it had had a fright. Slowly crickets started up and wind ruffled the long grass and a wave cracked out at sea and I was further away somehow because the party was muffled like the voices next door. Torches skimmed the dunes and peeked in and out of bushes and tree stumps. Sharp voices hit the air, the parents were here to break things up, or the police.
I felt the rough grass on my ankles and I thought it was Honey, but remembered she ran away. Then I couldn’t remember if she was ever there. I felt sick. I fell out of the scrub and onto the road. The hotel was glossy and lit up. A police car pulled out from the driveway. I could see the old rooms from here, brick and square, taken over by gum trees and bush. The new motel tacked on the front, rendered into a white, clean box.
I walked back to the old rooms and straight into The Monster’s room without knocking. I sat on the end of her bed.
‘I was at the beach.’ I looked at her.
She crawled forward and put her arm around me, tucking me into her. I started to suck on her bare neck, sloppy. She breathed in quick like she was thinking about it, if she was gonna let it happen. I just sucked and bit and pretended not to know she wa
s thinking. She grabbed my face and angled it toward her. She breathed heavy, kissing me and pushing me back onto the bed. She lifted my t-shirt off and sat with her knees either side of me, covering my hands with her hands and rubbing them up and down her body.
I thought about the newspaper again, her in it. Pictures of her in black and white. Then I thought of millions of newspapers, printing, on a machine on a conveyor belt, in trucks, on bikes. The Monster on the front cover, a million of her on breakfast tables, coffee cup stains on her angry face. I thought that nobody knew how brown she really was, how tan. Then I thought how stupid that was. And she yelled, ‘What the fuck,’ because I didn’t realise I’d stopped sucking and touching her and somehow I was on my knees on the bed and she was under me, all shiny and hard like a wooden banister. Shoulders like bed knobs.
I thought I saw flashes of something and jumped off her. I pulled my t-shirt back on and crouched down near the door.
‘Photographers,’ I whispered.
But I knew by her face that there weren’t any, it wasn’t real. She put her dress back on quickly, angrily. I stumbled up and outside, feeling sick suddenly. I closed my eyes. The air was thick and still. Lights flickered on the beach but it was quiet. I could hear the waves rolling in, the hiss after they broke.
I remembered a poem that I had to read once at school. A kid was a wave and his mother was a shore somewhere far away. The kid rolled around in the wave, laughing and rolling forever. At the end it said andno one in the world will know where we both are. I opened my eyes. I didn’t even like it much, the poem. But it was the only poem I could ever remember.
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