The Whip Hand

by Nadine Browne

  It was so nice having someone listen to her and she was enjoying the sweet, crisp watermelon so much that between mouthfuls she spat out, ‘I don’t want to go home.’

  He nodded. ‘I noticed you keep coming over.’

  ‘I like it here.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s just nicer to have someone to talk to I guess.’ She felt her face redden.

  ‘Don’t you talk to your mother?’

  ‘Not really, she sleeps all day, pretty much.’

  ‘Well, you’re welcome here anytime.’

  Beth felt a bubble of happiness rise up to her throat, so that swallowing the watermelon felt almost impossible. It sat in her throat for a long time.

  ‘Let me show you something,’ he said getting up. She followed him through the shed to a small open trapdoor in the floor. He grabbed a torch from on top of the fridge nearby, then lowered himself into the opening. Beth waited at the top. She knew Jane and her mum would tell her not to go down the ladder, but she also knew that nothing in the world would stop her.

  Except for the torchlight, the space at the bottom was dark and Beth felt a tremor come up from her ankles to her knees like the ground underneath her was moving. The man turned on a gas lamp which revealed a small room full of books and boxes of food. A fold-out bed was against the wall.

  ‘Take a seat,’ he said. ‘I’ll make you some tea or something.’ He put a kettle on a small camping stove and switched it on. Beth sat on the bed. She looked around at the bar fridge, the four-litre bottles of water that were stacked to the ceiling, the rice piled up in hessian bags.

  ‘So this is my little hidey-hole,’ he smiled and stood in the small space in front of her, waiting for the kettle to boil. She examined his hands as they went into his pockets; his expression, which seemed a bit shy. She noticed the way his faded, loose jeans hung from his thick waist.

  ‘You are welcome to come down here whenever you like.’

  ‘It’s pretty cosy down here,’ Beth looked up at him. ‘Definitely feels safe.’

  ‘It is safe, it’s twelve-inch concrete with steel and aluminium lining.’

  But that wasn’t what Beth had meant.

  For weeks now, Beth had kept the S–U book of the encyclopedia under her bed. She had reread the entry on Sexual Intercourse over and over again and studied the two diagrams that showed men and women in the sex act. She knew she had to begin by touching him, that was the first step, and that seemed easy because it felt like even the hairs on her arm were reaching out towards him. She had read the subheading on Sexual Arousal. She didn’t have a plan beside groping and gently pushing. All she knew was that she wanted him to like her, she wanted him to see she was someone special.

  He brought the tea over and put it down on a crate. When he sat down next to her on the bed she could feel the heat coming off his body. A sweeping thrill passed through her body, like an avalanche of sand falling off a cliff face.

  She put her hand on his leg and he jolted like her hand was something burning hot she’d put against him. Then, regaining his composure, he put his hand on her hand and shuffled closer to her. He ran his fingers up her arm to her shoulder. She leant in close towards him, touched the wiry, tangled hair around his face. It felt like steel wool. His body felt rock-hard against hers, like there was no way anything could live inside it. She felt his weight pushing against her. Then he reached his hand to the back of her neck under her hair. The kerosene lamp in the corner of the room was dim. It was finally happening, she thought. Something big felt like it was beginning, like the whole of her life was really starting.

  He kissed her and it was such a strange sensation that she wanted to laugh. She felt she was getting lost in it, in his mouth, like he was drawing her tongue out of her, unravelling it from its base, way down in her crotch. She smelt him – it was earth and hay and something sweet from a plant that she didn’t know the name of. She felt his stubble on her skin and she decided that she didn’t want to go home, ever.

  Then he pulled back, looking at her with that same angry intensity as the day he saw her crouching behind the rosemary bushes. ‘How old are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Fifteen,’ she said.

  He exhaled loudly.

  He put his hand on her shoulder to push her back and she felt his body cool and deflate under her hands.

  ‘I guess I should have asked. I guess I didn’t want to.’ He put both his hands in his lap and looked towards the light coming from the lamp. ‘We can’t do this,’ he said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because you’re not old enough.’

  ‘I am.’ She pulled him back towards her, but his body was limp and infuriatingly complacent.

  ‘You’re not old enough to make those decisions.’

  Her cheeks burned like she’d been slapped.

  ‘I want it. I want to do it.’ Her voice came out too loud for the tiny room. She tried to pull his shoulders to face hers. This time he turned to her, but his expression was steely, hard, emotionless.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but this is just not right.’ He pursed his lips and turned his head back to the lamp. ‘I’m happy for you to be here, I know your home life isn’t great and I really do enjoy your company, but maybe this,’ he motioned to the space between them, ‘isn’t what you need to be doing.’

  Beth stood up; rage coursed through her body. She jumped up the ladder and out of the room in a few steps.

  ‘Hey,’ she heard him call, but she was already running out of the shed. ‘Beth! Where are you going?’ She heard him and it made her happy to hear the panic in his voice. She wanted him to be sorry.

  Outside it was already dark and the half-moon hung like a fingernail clipping. She ran towards the tower.

  She climbed up to the first landing, then the second, higher and higher. Her fast, angry steps banged out across the night, across the paddocks and the town. She couldn’t see how high she was and she didn’t care.

  She climbed the final spindly ladder that led to the office chair, then she swung herself up and onto it. She spun around, leaning back, pushing with her feet, feeling the night air blow into her face. The lights of the town blurred into one small smear of light. She kept spinning until she felt dizzy and had to grip tightly on the armrests. She stopped the chair with her feet but everything kept on spinning. When the spinning finally stopped she could see all the way to the horizon. There was still a faint line of light from where the sun had gone down. She could see the refinery and the town; it looked pretty, pretty like a fairytale, but impermanent, like if she just breathed out it would all disappear. She held her breath and looked over at her mother’s house.

  It was just one tiny light to the left of the town site. The kitchen light. She wondered if her mother would even look for her if she never went back to that house, she wondered if she was worried now. She exhaled. From up there she could see how much she hated that house. She wished it would just disappear. Beth closed her eyes and imagined her mother’s house gone, the whole town gone. All swept up and done away with. Even the man and his farm and all his preparations – gone. From up there she imagined herself watching it all happen, everything below her being covered by a tsunami or some kind of giant twister or a nuclear blast – anything that would completely obliterate it. From up here she would like to watch that. From up here she would be the last remaining survivor.

  The Ascension

  Carrie didn’t have any kind of visa to stay in the country. Her tourist visa had run out six months before. So she ended up working for cash at her new friend Marianne’s New Age bookstore. That was where she met Bruce. Twice a week he came in to do healing sessions in the back room and sell his book, A Human Being’s Guide to Ascension.

  On their first meeting Bruce began by telling her a number of things about herself. The first thing he said was: ‘Stop running. You won’t be happy until you stop running.’

  Carrie kind of agreed. She had been thinking the same thing herself for a
number of years. Running had been the proper response at one point but not anymore. Two weeks later she moved in with him.

  Bruce lived in a neat fibro house on the main street of a wheat and sheep town. Once, his parents had owned the entire town and all the land surrounding. When they died they left it to Bruce, their eldest son.

  Bruce was extremely good looking. Carrie thought he looked like one of the male models in a John Deere billboard she passed every day on her way to work. He was tall and tanned and had all the chiselled masculine angles that were considered attractive. Carrie felt there was something untrustworthy about such good looks, but she supposed he couldn’t really help that and he had a nice place, neat and clean. It felt like the perfect place to stop running.

  The first night, he ran her through his ‘end times prophesies’. He explained that they were living in the last days, that society was coming to an end and only those who were pure enough, and had done the spiritual work, would ascend to heaven. He even had a date for all this to occur: the twelfth of the twelfth 2012, a month away.

  That first night, he sat under a reading lamp on the other side of the lounge room. It was strange, Carrie thought, that he didn’t want to get close or make any sexual advances. He had asked her to move in with him and she had agreed, under the assumption that he was attracted to her and that they would begin a sexual relationship. Instead Bruce talked on for hours; there seemed no end to his doomsday monologue, he hardly took a breath, let alone the time to make any moves. He explained that in a past life he had been Jesus Christ of Nazareth. ‘I was born Jewish, saw the error of the Jewish faith and began preaching the message of loving kindness from the age of thirty.’ He spoke in a sharp monotone, matter-of-fact, as if someone had asked him about drenching sheep or the ins and outs of combine harvesters.

  At first she thought that the ascension he spoke of represented some sort of internal enlightenment or transcendence of the mind. But soon he was unfolding diagrams of bodies ascending to the heavens, pictures of corpses rising from tombs. There were abstract blue celestial beings, there were photocopies of newspaper articles – the US invasion of Afghanistan, China’s nuclear arms – all highlighted and sticky-noted, all fulfilment of prophesy as put forth in the well-worn, gilt-edged Book of Revelation, which he also kept close at hand on the side table.

  ‘You see,’ he pointed to a chronological list of political events, ‘You see, it’s all here – you can see it, can’t you?’

  Carrie nodded. His eyes were glistening and intent behind his reading glasses; he had his leg folded over like he was a real scholar. Carrie’s instinct was to laugh, but she held it back. His cheeks glowed pink, as if he was about to burst with the sheer joy of sharing his monumental findings. Staring down at the swirling carpet between them, Carrie thought: everyone carried on with such a lot of bullshit in life, why was his bullshit any worse than all the others? At least he’d done his research.

  At about eleven at night Carrie yawned. ‘So what do I need to do?’ she asked. ‘Like, to ascend?’

  ‘Believe,’ he whispered energetically. ‘All you have to do is believe what I’m saying is true.’

  That seemed easy enough. She had believed all sorts of flawed ideology in her life, like the notion that hard work paid off. She had believed in friendships and family, in trust and loyalty, she had even believed in ‘The One’. At thirty-nine, she often had trouble committing to many generally accepted social concepts. But she thought if she put her mind to it, it might work.

  Carrie asked if he had any wine; she usually drank a bottle a night. Bruce informed her that they must remove all defilements – there was no time for distracting diversions or self-indulgence if they were to work towards ascension. He explained that she would have to follow his strict raw food, no-sugar diet. No chocolate or wine for her. In fact, there would be a lot of fasting over the next few weeks. This, Carrie realised, was going to be the hardest part.

  At midnight Bruce showed her to the spare room he had prepared for her. The room smelt of fresh paint, and the crisp pink and yellow bedsheets she could tell were brand new. She didn’t know whether to feel relieved or rejected when he said goodnight abruptly and shut the door. On the bedside table was a fresh bunch of white daisies in a glass vase. She lay down and watched the water in the vase tremble slightly with the sound of a distant beat. She had heard it earlier. It must have been coming from the pub down the road. She closed her eyes and fell asleep quickly.

  ***

  She didn’t find out until a week later that everyone in town called him ‘The Jesus Guy’. They were at the annual agricultural show where Bruce had a stand doing palm readings and healing sessions. Bruce had bailed up the man selling chilli jam a few stalls down.

  ‘Yup, died on the cross, all of that,’ Bruce had said. ‘Paid for your sins.’ He pointed his finger right into the man’s chest as he talked, just in case the man thought he hadn’t died for him specifically. The man laughed and Bruce said, ‘Oh you laugh. You laugh because you know it’s true!’

  Carrie, sitting at the stall, felt herself slide down in the chair, hiding behind the piles of Bruce’s pamphlets and books. She watched a local woman walking past turn to her friend and say, ‘Jesus is at it again.’ The friend shook her head and rolled her eyes in a weary rebuff, a mannerism Carrie felt some affinity with.

  She sat at the stall as the heat rallied against her, wondering what she’d gotten herself into. She fantasised about secretly buying a hot dog and an ice-cream, but she was just too exhausted by the heat, and the lack of a decent meal, to move. It seemed the town was already taking a toll on her. For the first week it had been radiant. So completely opposite to everything she’d ever known at home in Europe. She thought, how could a place like this exist? That humans inhabited it, exhilarated her.

  After this first week the intensity of the heat seemed to bore holes in her eyeballs. She blinked and squinted, her eyes red and weepy. She had to wear sunglasses constantly. When she opened her mouth, flies entered. Words came out hard and blunt and gravelly. Her face seemed to change shape just from looking at it all. Nothing new came or went in that town. The wheat fields all around were yellow seas, shimmering with white heat like they could morph into giant fireballs right before her eyes. She started to think maybe the world was ending, maybe these were in fact the last days.

  On the second week they went to the saleyards to sell off the lambs. Bruce had disappeared and she was looking for him when a man approached.

  ‘Listen,’ he said. He talked loudly and his hot tobacco breath charged at her face. ‘I dunno what your story is but I’m Bruce’s brother.’

  ‘Oh, it’s nice to meet you, I didn’t know …’ she began.

  ‘You know he’s completely out of his mind. You know that, don’t you? We have to call the mental health unit every other week to come and take him away. Guy’s a fucking nut job.’

  The brother barely looked at her as he talked, preferring to squint over the top of her head. Like Bruce, he was tall and sunburnt. The only difference she noted was the beginning of a beer gut under his khaki work shirt.

  Before she even knew how to respond he was walking away. ‘Anyway, I’m through with the prick.’ He threw his hands up, already three or four paces from her. ‘He won’t take his meds, won’t see the psych, this time he’s Jesus, last time it was bloody Hitler! Christ!’

  Bruce’s brother disappeared into the sales office. Carrie felt shrivelled and stupid leaning against the steel railing of the sheep pens, her mouth still open in surprise despite the marauding flies.

  Later in the afternoon she lay on her bed and tried to focus on her breathing. The meditation sessions Marianne ran at lunchtime in the store often made her feel more relaxed. They stopped her mind running away. That was the thing, she could stop running, but her mind – that was a different matter. Her mind was constantly in movement, trying to solve, fix, plot, pre-empt. She tried to slow it down. What was she feeling? Anger? Anger that Bruce
had turned out to be a lunatic? Anger that she had thrown herself at any port in a storm, once again?

  She let out a deep breath. She had to say something to him. She had to have the courage to act differently, not act out of fear or some other emotion. She remembered something she had read in the book Marianne had given her: ‘It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.’ It was never too late to live outside the shadow of the past; she’d be forty next year and this kind of behaviour could just go on and on forever.

  He came in from harvesting, glistening. Sometimes he looked so perfect, like he was straight out of a commercial. That’s what he was – a commercial for life, not the real thing. She felt ripped off, then angry at herself for being so presumptuous.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you.’ She got up from the bed and came out to the kitchen.

  ‘Talk? This isn’t the time. We need to pray, and clean up.’ He looked around the house. Her butter and knife were still out on the kitchen bench. She’d bought a loaf of bread in secret, eating the whole thing in one afternoon.

  Carrie felt puffs of silence leave her mouth. She wasn’t very good at this; initiating dialogue wasn’t her thing. After all, how do you ask someone if they are crazy? She heard the shower turn on before she realised she was standing by herself in front of the kitchen bench.

  That night she tried to justify her staying. Lying in bed, she told herself she was getting used to the silence, enjoying it even. What better way to realise the important things in life than to partake in a countdown to the end of it?

  At three in the morning Carrie decided to pack her bags. Enough with the false bravado, she thought, it was the best thing for both of them. Putting her belongings in the case she felt she was doing a good service, being dutiful. This was the one thing she knew how to do – leave – and she did it as efficiently and wordlessly as a night-shift worker knocking off.

  But this time she hadn’t thought it through. There was no way to get out of town, no buses or trains. All she could do was steal his car. But she thought – from working with Marianne, who was always going on about having integrity – that stealing should be beneath her. She’d been keeping a tally on all the immoral things she’d done and at her age it was pretty disturbing.