by Zane Lovitt
*
The six of us treaded water for a while, just chatting, kicking each other sometimes under the water as we kept ourselves afloat, holding on to the edge of the pool. Hannah was telling us about some party on the weekend, which we faked having heard about, when a barrel-shaped object ducked beneath us and swam through our pedalling legs. It surfaced against the near wall: a kid with two dripping plaits, the one who’d earlier jumped on Cal’s back. She was grinning slyly, looking at Cal. He said something to her that I couldn’t hear and she climbed away up the ladder, keeping her grin on.
‘Who’s that?’ Nat wanted to know.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Let’s go lie outside and dry off,’ suggested Chloe suddenly, and we filed out, tippytoeing over the hot concrete. There was a triangle of grass there, startlingly green after the fogged air inside, and we laid out towels and dropped onto our bellies to let the sun swallow the diamonds of moisture from our backs. I was next to Chloe, which was fine with me. Cal was keeping close to Hannah. We talked for a while about school: who was going to be in whose class that year, what subjects we were choosing. This was the first year we really had options, which meant the beginning of the gradual closing down of possibilities that signified growing up. I didn’t know what I wanted to be but if I took Maths instead of Geog, I’d never be a cartographer; if I stayed with German I’d never get a job translating in Tokyo with the robots and the sexy silent geisha girls. Bec had it sorted – she was going to be an accountant like her dad. Hannah thought maybe fashion but you need Maths apparently and she was in the vegie class. And then gradually the sun made us dreamy and still, and conversation trailed off like the wispy ends of the clouds that relieved the great sheet of blue sky over us.
*
‘I could just fall asleep here,’ Chloe murmured into her towel. I made a receptive noise, my eyes fixed on a dip in her lower back that looked felty and touchable as the underside of a sheepskin, lined with tiny pale hairs that shone gold where the sun got them. It led like a slide to the top of her bikini bottoms. Following the thin top seam of them round to the hidden front of her led to a dead end where her tidy stomach disappeared into her towel. There was a small gathering of skin, like a thread pulled in silk, at the back of her thighs. My finger ached to iron it out.
Bec really had fallen asleep, to tell by the deep sough of her breathing. Cal was telling Hannah some story about the time he and Ed got into Chasers with fake IDs. Hannah gave a soft chuckle, like air escaping a punctured tyre. Encouraged, Cal reached out splayed fingers and ran them up and down her back. She squirmed and rolled over, and took a hold of his hair. Then they were both wrestling and Hannah tumbled backwards onto my shoulder. She was hot from the sun, damp-haired still. She said Oof and Sor-ry but she was smiling and she dug her elbow into my chest to right herself. Hannah had a neat little smile, very tidy teeth like baby teeth, but her face was round and her features little and lost in the middle of it.
Cal said, ‘You’re ticklish,’ as though he’d discovered the g-spot.
‘I’m hungry,’ said Nat suddenly. She might have been ignored but Hannah rolled over onto her side and said, ‘Me too.’
Cal’s hand slid from her back. The muscles in his cheeks were pulled tight. When I shook out the change that had been wrapped in my towel and said, ‘Let’s go to the machine,’ he looked like he might protest. His lower lip twitched, but Hannah was already standing up. He glanced up at her standing over him, tying her towel around her waist, and then closed his eyes a beat longer than a blink.
Back inside, we bought chips and chocolate bars and Cokes. A little kid at the machine was counting out five-cent pieces in his hand, cross-eyed with concentration.
‘Oh, cute!’ Chloe murmured, and I opened my palm over the kid’s and dropped a dollar. He looked at the coin as though it might evaporate in his hand, then closed his fist tight over it and looked around for someone to share his luck with. He didn’t say thank you.
‘Little shit,’ murmured Cal.
‘Oh, don’t say that,’ Hannah protested. Cal made a face that told her she was soft but he shut up.
He sat himself down on the edge of the pool and popped open his bag of chips. We all joined him, dropping our legs into the cool water. Hannah tipped her head to drop Smarties down her throat, catching them like a seagull catches chips. It became a game – Cal and her tossing chips and chocolates into each other’s mouths, missing as many as they caught. A yellow one dropped – the water stained like someone had taken a leak. A red one – like someone had dipped a cut finger.
Of course, five minutes later an attendant made a beeline for us. A guy in his twenties maybe, bunched-up ponytail, whistle, pool t-shirt. He advanced with one hand palm out, as though he were soothing animals.
‘Guys. Guys, you’ll have to move. You can’t eat over the pool.’
Bec giggled. Sitting down, her midsection rippled into a series of tubes like layer cake.
‘Why not? There’s no rule,’ Cal said. He pointed at the board on the side of the wall that outlined the code of conduct. No running, pushing, divebombing. No mention of food.
‘Yeah, but you’re getting food in the pool. It’s unhygienic.’
‘No more than kids pissing in it,’ I pointed out.
Chloe wrinkled her Pekinese nose. Hannah had a hand to her mouth, whether she was laughing or embarrassed or choking on a Smartie I couldn’t tell.
‘Yeah, well you’ll have to move.’ Then, conciliatory: ‘You can come back when you’ve finished eating.’
‘We’re not hurting anyone.’
‘Come on.’ Hannah to Cal, standing up.
‘You’re getting food in the water. That spreads germs.’ There was something endearing about the dogged way the guy tried to make us understand. He gestured to the Smarties sinking slowly in the pool, leaking dye like the tails of tropical fish.
‘That’s what chlorine’s for,’ persisted Cal. His cheeks were pink from the sun, the whites of his eyes scribbled in red. I half-rose, squatting balanced on the balls of my feet. This kid was only earnest, a joke but a mild one not worth milking, and I was concerned about the ripple of unease I sensed from the girls.
‘Let’s go,’ I told Cal.
Cal swung his legs out of the pool and stood up. ‘What the fuck is the chlorine for then?’ he asked pleasantly. And he spat into the pool.
Hannah made a sound. I straightened and followed Cal outside. I heard Nat whisper something sharp to Hannah but the girls followed too. The sun blinded me momentarily; I stepped right onto Chloe’s towel to leave a big damp footprint.
‘Well, that was embarrassing,’ murmured Nat.
‘We’re leaving now.’ Hannah was folding her towel neatly, matching corner to corner. Chloe was slipping on a shirt; for a moment she was headless – two shortish legs with a long gold torso atop. Then gone, under cover of her Ponies t-shirt. I collapsed on my own towel.
‘Got everything?’ Bec made sure of the rest. Then, ‘Bye Cal. See you, Seb. See you at school maybe. Bye.’ And they left.
Cal called out, ‘Tuesday,’ presumably to Hannah, and bent to examine a toenail.
‘Maybe we should head home too.’
But Cal turned his inflamed eyes away from me and stood up. ‘I’m going back on that thing,’ he said and I could do nothing but follow him back into the dim humidity of inside.
I half-thought we might be stopped by one of the pool attendants but they were both occupied; the girls’ departure had not made an appreciable difference to the size of the crowd. We took our place in line. Cal held it poised on the rubbery balls of his feet, rocking slightly so that the fine erect hairs on his shoulder tickled my own. When we made the front he hardly waited for me, or to be told go. I clambered after him and slipped around like an idiot on the frictionless incline. Going up the rope ladder, Cal swung a leg out and accid
entally kicked me. I lost purchase and fell into the water. My nose was flooded, I came up snorting and gasping for breath. Cal hadn’t noticed. Charging to the finish, I saw him leap into the air at the end and I blinked the water out of my eyes at the same moment so that I saw on the inside of my eyelids the wild still shape he made, arms high, legs split, suspended in the air the second before he dropped. I made my way to him.
He was treading water and the kid in plaits was there again. She was feinting towards him, going under and then surfacing at his back, flipping herself about to do it again. I thought at first that Cal hadn’t noticed her but then suddenly he turned when she was behind him and made a grab for her middle. He hoisted her up high and tipped her back into the water. She screeched like a stiff gate and her plaits strapped her face as she was upended. She bobbed up, face tight with surprise, but she spat out water and flung an unbalanced arm around Cal’s neck to right herself.
‘What are you doing?’ he was asking her as I swam up beside him.
‘Throw me in again,’ she instructed.
He unpeeled her fingers from his neck. ‘No.’
‘O-oh,’ she moaned, as though in pain. ‘Please. One more time.’
‘Who are you here with?’
‘No-one. I’ve got no-one to play with. Katie was here, my friend Katie, but she had to go home.’
‘How did you get here then?’
‘My mum dropped me off.’
Cal squinted up at the roof. The girl paddled on the spot, waiting. Cal extended an arm in a quick blur of movement and tickled her armpit. She squirmed and laughed in a winded way.
‘Hey, you coming back on?’ I asked him.
He glanced at me blankly. ‘Yeah. In a minute.’ There was an odd note of relief in his tone, as though I’d arrived to spell him from an obscure labour. I turned back for the inflatable.
I went through twice on my own, each time hitting the water with a hard splash that caused a mother with a toddler by the benches to start with disapproval and draw her child close. I couldn’t see Cal anywhere, though the place was so full of bodies it would have been easy to miss him. The kid was there, or I saw her rump at least, packed into bather bottoms with red and white stars over them. She had a bullet-shaped body, thick torso, with skin white as paper and dimpled from the chlorine. Her stomach pouched over the hem of her bathers in a tidy mound like an upturned crème caramel. One cheek of her bathers was hitched up. I watched her slide a finger beneath to hitch it down with the unselfconsciousness of the under-ten, then disappear into the toilets.
*
I sat by the edge of the pool for a while, scanning for Cal. He wasn’t outside; the glass-plated sliding doors showed a bare patch of grass, though I could see a small scrap of colour in the green and wondered if one of the girls had dropped a hair tie. I watched the toddlers in the baby pool for a while. The water in there was kept warmer and a haze of hot air lay suspended above it, giving a sheen to the faces of the parents and their tiny ones.
The ache that had gripped me was gone. I felt as drained and empty as though I’d actually satisfied it. I was ready for home but first I had to find Cal. I walked the length of the pool and back, then made for the bathroom.
There was an old guy in there, towelling between his legs. There was no-one in the showers, no-one checking their hair in front of the mirrors. The toilets were reached through another door. Beyond it I could hear the sound of water running and a muffled laughter, as though through a hand over the mouth. The door groaned on opening and I was met with a sudden stillness. The prior sounds hung like shadows in the air; a stall door seemed just to have clicked closed. I waited: shuffling, a breath.
Only one of the stall doors was locked. ‘Cal?’
There was a scuffle of feet, a ‘ssh’. Then a clear, high voice said, ‘We’re hiding!’
‘Yeah, well. Found you.’
Silence.
‘You coming out?’
‘In a minute.’ Only Cal’s feet showed at the base of the door.
I stood undecided for a moment, then opened the other door. ‘See you out there.’
‘Yeah.’
I opened the door but it closed itself. The old man had gone, leaving a trail of talcum footprints.
I went back on the inflatable. Nothing else to do, but I was getting tired of it by then and it was far less fun without the others. Now and then I glanced over towards the bathrooms but Cal didn’t emerge; nor did the girl. I wanted to get home but I’d left my things at Cal’s. So I waited some more, and finally he did come out, probably only fifteen minutes or so later, though it felt longer. The girl wasn’t with him. I wasn’t going to ask. He wasn’t pale, wasn’t flushed, not agitated or distressed. Ask me if I noticed anything and I’ll tell you there was nothing to notice. When they found the girl the next day, I was as shocked as anyone.
‘Let’s go,’ I told him and he didn’t argue. We grabbed our towels.
Melanie Napthine
Death Star
Around fifty years earlier the town fathers had voted to plant an Avenue of Honour, a sentry of ghost gums stretching for a mile out of town on both sides of the highway. Each sapling represented the life of a soldier who had been lost in war. The trees grew tall and strong. No one at the time could have predicted that these monuments marking life would be the cause of more deaths, with trees drawing speeding cars and the bodies of young men driving them like moths to the flame. At the halfway point of the line of commemoration the greatest gum tree of all sat strong and squat on a bend on the highway, opposite the front gate of Telford’s dairy.
Dominic Cross would often ride his pushbike out to the tree. He’d rest the bike against the trunk, climb into the trees lower branches and place his open palm against a deep scar that continued to bleed thick sap from a wound. He would think about his older brother, Pat, who’d come off the highway behind the wheel of a stolen car. Old Telford, heading back to his farmhouse after morning of milking had heard a car gunning along the highway, way off in the distance. As the roar came closer and rang deeper he turned and watched in awe as the car left the iced bitumen and glided through the morning mist with more grace than it should have had. The car slammed into the tree side-on and wrapped itself around the trunk. Telford was afraid to go near the car, certain that whoever was trapped inside was dead. He ran on to the farmhouse and telephoned the police. Later that morning he stood on his front verandah nursing a mug of tea and watched the mangled body of the driver being cut from the wreck.
Dominic hid from the world on the day of his brother’s funeral. His mother had laid out a black suit and clean shoes for him the night before. When he failed to answer the knock at his bedroom door she opened it and found the bed empty. The suit was where she’d left it, draped over a chair by the open window. She searched the house and his father went looking for Dominic in the back garden and lean-to garage on the side of the house. The boy was nowhere to be found and his parents had no choice but to leave for the church in the mourning car without him. It was either that or be late for their eldest son’s funeral. Dominic hadn’t hidden in the house or the yard. He’d climbed the back fence in the early light and run along the track beside the creek. He didn’t stop running until he’d reached the old cannery where he and Pat had spent most of their spare time when they were younger, a pair of trickers on BMX bikes, racing the length of the loading dock and leaping into thin air.
The news of Dominic’s disappearance spread throughout the wake, held at the local football club changing rooms after the funeral. Ty Carter, who’d ridden with Pat, being a hot-wire specialist, volunteered to a worried Mrs Cross to track down her son. Ty knew where to look. He’d punished his own bike around the cannery when he was a kid and had helped Pat build a ramp off the end of the loading bay. He left the football club and walked to the cannery, half-pissed. He spotted Dominic before he’d climbed through a gap
in the fence leading into the cannery. Dominic was sitting on the loading bay dangling his feet over the edge. He heard Ty coming, looked across to him, lay back on the rough concrete and looked up at the sky.
Ty tried climbing onto the loading dock and fell backwards onto his arse.
‘Whoa.’ He laughed. ‘I’m fucked. Too many beers. What are you doing here, Dom? Your old girl is worried sick over you and the old man is gonna give you a belting. I reckon they’re thinking you might have killed yourself or something. Why didn’t you front for the service? He’s your brother.’
Dominic rested his hands behind his head. ‘Cause I didn’t want to.’
Ty finally managed to haul himself onto the dock. He sat down next to Dom and brushed dirt from the elbows of his cheap suit. ‘Fair enough. My older brother, Frank, when he died I never wanted to go to the funeral. They made me go, my folks. Wish I fucken hadn’t.’
Dominic flipped over onto his stomach.‘Why not?’
‘He’d been in the water for three days before they found him by dragging a long net along the river. Scooped him out like some rotten old king carp. He was fucked up. His face and the rest of him. The yabbies had got him. Should have screwed the lid of his coffin down. But my mum, she spoke with the priest and they kept the coffin open at the church. Funeral parlour put some makeup on him, puttied the holes and all. Didn’t help. I didn’t want to look at him. She grabbed me by the hand, tore me out of the bench I was sitting on and dragged me up the front to where the coffin was in front of the altar. Fuck. I could hardly recognise him. Looked like some monster.’
Dominic coughed. ‘Was Pat’s coffin open?’
‘Nah. Thank god. He was too…’
‘Mangled up?’
‘Yeah.’
