I never said this much about it. I hated talking about this kind of stuff, but I could remember it all so clearly and the alcohol made me feel like a dam had been breached and there was nothing I could do to stop the words from pouring out of me.
“I couldn’t walk into a classroom. I couldn’t answer a teacher’s question. I couldn’t do anything without people leaning together and whispering. I just couldn’t handle it, it was hell. I hated waking up in the morning knowing I had to go to school, every morning on the way to school I felt sick. I hated everything about myself and how I looked and I just wanted to disappear into nothing. There wasn’t any part of me they didn’t pick at or make fun of, and even when I tried to fit in I just felt so different and wrong. I begged my Mum to let me change schools. I begged her for six whole years. But she said I should just ignore people who said bad things about me because St. Mary’s was the best school and I belonged there.”
After I stopped, a silence hung in the air. All I could hear was the sound of the waves breaking on the beach, Sarah didn’t say anything.
I slowly realised what I’d said. How much I’d said. I’d never told anyone that much. And when I looked across at Sarah, she had her jaw open. She had no idea what to say.
My stomach clenched. Fuck, I should have kept my mouth shut, I thought, I’ve said too much. I’ve said way too much. Why did I tell her all that stuff? She was one of the last remaining people on the planet that still retained some modicum of respect for me, and here I was, pathetically blubbering on about how I’d been bullied in high school. She invited me up here thinking we were going to have fun, and instead I’d dumped all my crap on her.
“Min, that’s awful,” she said finally, still shell-shocked. “I don’t know what to say. You’re great and you look great, those kids were full of it.”
I was spaced out, and I couldn’t say anything. I didn’t want her to feel sorry for me, and I didn’t want her to think I was fishing for compliments, but it sounded like I was, didn’t it?
Sarah could see my expression and she looked like she was panicking just as much as I was. “At least that’s all in the past, right?” she said, trying to reassure me. “I mean, you look great now. I’ve always thought you were really pretty and you’ve got a great body, you know? People would kill for a body like yours.”
I flinched when she said ‘pretty’. She was simply trying to be nice, but the very last thing I needed right now was to be reminded about my female body. I couldn’t even face thinking about it, let alone talking about it. Honestly, whoever would kill for it was welcome to it. I didn’t say as much to Sarah because she was really, honestly just trying to make me feel better. There wasn’t anything I could do. I just wanted to mumble some excuse and rush off back to the house and shut myself in the bedroom forever.
I didn’t, though. We’d gone past the point where I could run off on her.
“Sarah,” I said shakily, putting my hand on her arm so she didn’t say anything else. “I appreciate you trying to make me feel better. I just… Can you give me a few minutes?”
“Yeah, sure, of course,” she said immediately, but she looked upset.
I’ve done it again, I thought, feeling my throat tighten. I've wrecked her night. “Thanks.”
She smiled a bit and held up the half-full bottle of Johnny Walker, saying with exaggerated casualness, “Plenty left of this, so I’ll be right here.”
I worried about the fact she was waiting for me, and then turned and left, staggering ungracefully up the embankment and falling over several times in the loose soil.
Inside, Rob was completely engrossed in the TV, a beer in one hand and a bowl of chips in the other. He waved at me with the beer as I went past him. I smiled, and then went straight into the room he’d dumped my bags in and closed the door. It had a little key in the lock so I turned that, too, and then sat on the bed.
I couldn’t believe I’d told her all of that pathetic crap about myself. Especially not when she'd brought me up here to have fun with her and Rob over Easter.
I was about a thousand miles away from 'fun' right now. I kept thinking that maybe Sarah was just feeling sorry for me and being patient right now, but pretty soon she’d be sick of my bullshit. And then she’d get frustrated and angry and regret ever inviting me up here and the further I went with that thought the more certain I was that I shouldn't ever have come because by the end of this weekend Sarah and I wouldn't even be able to talk to each other and I'd be avoiding both her and Henry and everyone else at work and I was breathless and my ears were ringing.
I didn’t want to freak out here. I wanted to have a good time. Why the hell did I tell her all that depressing stuff?
While I was sitting there on the edge of the bed trying to take deep, slow breaths, my pocket buzzed. Bree, I thought, and while clambering to get my phone out, I nearly dropped it.
When I'd finally opened the message, it was a picture of her waving brightly at the TV, dressed in her pyjamas with the text, “so guess who got picture messages to work………?? :) :) :)”
That smile… I turned my phone over in my hand for a few seconds, and then just hit the redial function.
“Hello, Min’s phone?”
“Hello, my phone,” I said. I could hear the waver in my voice. I wondered if she could.
“Hey!” she said, and, fuck, it was so nice to hear her being so cheerful and imagine that matching smile. “Did you get my message?”
“Yeah.”
“Your TV is so amazing. It’s like something out of a sci-fi movie. I’ve been playing with it all evening! Did you know it has games, too?” I could hear her walking across the room and flopping down into the couch.
“So does the black console next to it,” I told her. I lay back against the mattress of the bed and closed my eyes, trying to focus on her happy voice.
“Yeah, but that’s supposed to have games. This is a TV, it’s supposed to do TV things, but it does everything and it’s totally amazing!” She paused, and when it was silent, she said, “Min, you seem kind of… off? Are you okay?”
I opened my eyes; I hadn’t realised it was that obvious. No, Bree, I thought. No, I’m not okay. Please just keep talking.
She understood. “Anyway,” she continued, “So, I was just trying to figure out how to get Skype to work and it turns out there’s this whole section on video calling that I needed to read…”
I listened to her explain the virtues of my TV with more animation than someone trying to make commission off the sale of it. The highlight for her was the part where she discovered that the camera on the TV actually followed you around the room when you walked across it. She was so excited about it, and by the time she’d finished, all that whiskey I'd had a quarter of an hour ago was starting to make me feel like I was floating on my back in the sea.
“And you can set the zoom so that no matter where you are in the room, it always has exactly the same amount of your head in the shot!” she finished.
“That actually sounds creepy,” I told her, feeling pleasantly drunk. “Are we one hundred per cent certain it hasn’t been sent to exterminate mankind?”
She giggled, and then ended with a sigh. “Do you feel better, now?”
I exhaled. “Yeah.”
“So what was it? Work again? Because those guys can seriously get fucked.”
“No...” It took me a little while to figure out what I was going to say while Bree waited patiently on the other end of the phone. “Sarah invited me up here to have fun, and instead she accidentally brought up stuff from high school...”
“And now you're hiding somewhere and you feel like crap?”
That was surprisingly acute. “Yeah, actually.”
She chuckled once. “Yeah, well, welcome to my life.” We lay there for another minute or so, silent. Eventually she said, “Can I say something really weird?”
“You're asking for permission now?”
“Min,” she said, but she giggled a bit. “Yo
u told me a while back that you locked yourself in the graphics lab at school every day for six years, and I think about that a lot. Like, a lot. And you've told me other stuff about how much school sucked for you and how other kids made you feel really bad about yourself, and like... okay, no, I need to start somewhere else, sorry,” she said. I had to laugh a bit at that. “Okay, okay. So there's a really big colour printer at school, and only the art students are supposed to use it, but whatever. Sometimes when everything sucks, I look around the internet for really beautiful pictures, like of beautiful landscapes and beautiful creatures, and I just print them all out and cover my wall in them,” she said. “So when I'm at home and lying in bed, everywhere I look it's so beautiful, and so colourful and, like, magical.”
My paintings, I thought.
“And one time I decided to message the person who made them, and, well, that person was so nice to me. And, like, really funny. And after that when I looked up at the pictures on my wall I remembered that, and it made them even more beautiful. And then I decided eventually that I really wanted to meet that person... and I did, and you were nice, and so generous, and I know I'm kind of intense and you were pretty good about that too, and when you bought that bracelet for me... I can't even tell you what that felt like. So, yeah. Here we are. I think heaps about those kids chasing you into the graphics lab, because as much as I hate them for making you hate yourself, look at the amazing things they helped you create.”
I'd never thought of it like that. It had never even occurred to me to think of it like that.
“So, I kind of feel like that other stuff, all the body stuff, I want to help you with that. And I know I can't do everything because I don't have a magic wand and can't magically make you a guy, but... I feel like if I try hard enough, I can help.”
I opened my mouth and closed it again. “Bree, you do help. You know you help.”
“Then I'll keep going,” she said, and then added, “I have this idea that one day you'll be able to see yourself the way I see you.”
I couldn't even imagine thinking like Bree spoke about me. “I think that's an impossible goal.”
“Well,” she sounded cheerful. “I won't know unless I try, will I?”
I smiled to myself. Bree's 'try' rarely left room for fail, and there was so much comfort in that, so much. “Thank you.”
“My pleasure,” she said warmly, and then changed the subject. “You want to Skype for a bit? I can show you the creepy camera.”
I made a face. I would actually have liked to, but I couldn't. “No, I'd better wash all this red soil off me and then go back out to Sarah. She's waiting for me.”
Bree made a noise. “I should have a shower, too. My hair looks like a pom-pom. We can shower together.” She paused. “I was also going to say 'Whoops, I didn't mean that!', but I kind of do.”
I chuckled. “Thanks, Bree. I'll call you later.” I hung up. I was grinning as I grabbed my toiletries and went to have a shower.
Rob's bathroom was cursed with a full-length mirror on the back of the door, and for most of my shower I managed to expertly avoid seeing any of myself in it. Unfortunately the exhaust fan was really effective and the mirror didn't fog up, so when I stepped out of the shower and reached across to the far wall for my towel, I ended up in front of it, towel in hand.
I didn't see myself naked much, maybe that was the reason I hardly recognised myself. The mirror framed me perfectly like a photo, and I'd been painting and doing graphics for work so much recently that my first instinct was to think 'Okay, where do I start? How do I retouch this photo so it's fit for the purpose I need it for?'.
I would have taken the liquify tool and just flattened my chest, leaving nothing. I'd have straightened all my curves, and sharpened all my round edges, but when it came to my crotch, I faltered. Should I add something there? Did the image need a dick to be complete? I couldn't answer that, not at all, and even just asking the question made me feel art-blocked. If I'd had a deadline on submitting this image and needed to make a decision right now, I would have just taken the same tool as my chest and smoothed the whole area over like the pants of a Ken doll.
There was something comforting about the idea of my body just being a blank canvas. Being nothing. With nothing I needed to feel uncomfortable about or hate or hide under baggy clothes.
I chalked that thought up to a third of a bottle of Johnny Walker. Laughing darkly at how weird I was being, I staggered around and dried myself off, nearly dropping my phone in the bathtub while I was getting dressed again so I could go back out to Sarah.
She was where I left her. I wasn't sure how I expected her to react when she saw me, but she just smiled and patted the patch of hard red soil beside her. “I wasn't sure you were going to come back,” she said. “I'm glad I waited, though. It gave Johnny and I the opportunity to spend some quality time together.” She held up the bottle; she'd had another good chunk of it while I was gone.
I chuckled at that as I sat down beside her.
She had her phone propped on her knees and she'd obviously been playing with it. All her attention was on me now, though, and she passed me the bottle. “You look better,” she observed.
I nodded, and had a drink.
“Sorry if I said the wrong thing before, I'm always worried I'll say the wrong thing when people are upset. You'd tell me if I said something that really hurt you, right?”
I frowned at her. I wasn't sure I would, actually. “I think you'd figure it out,” I decided. “But you didn't say anything like that. Sharing personal stuff stresses me out, that's all, and I'm also kind of not okay with talking about my body, so...”
“Yeah, okay, noted,” Sarah said, and scrunched up her face. “I should have figured that out.” I shrugged and handed her the bottle. She gave me the once-over before she drank any more. “So you're okay, now? We're cool?”
“If you don't mind the fact that every time you try to have fun with me I freak out and wreck everything.”
She snorted. “I don't know what you thought I expected,” she said. “I actually thought inviting you up here would be a really great way to get you out from under your rock and get to know you.” She waited for me to process that before she added, “Also, occasionally you're absolutely hilarious so I was hoping for some of that, too. And,” she said, “I've been dying to prank Rob because he's the most gullible person in the world. I suck at it and you're the master, so I was thinking we could team up and do something diabolical.”
She was smiling across at me, and because I was reaching the really affectionate level of drunk, I had this moment where I was really glad she wanted to be friends with me. I put an arm around her and hugged her a bit clumsily. “Thanks for putting up with me.”
She laughed as I let her go. “I seriously don't know what goes on in your head, Min,” she told me. “Most of the time you're just walled and silent and sometimes you say funny things. I don't think anyone's going to give me a medal for 'putting up' with you.” She tilted the bottle to her lips and drank the last of the whiskey. “Well, that's it,” she said, putting it down beside her. “Johnny's spent. Both of us are going to be sore in the morning.”
I grinned. Hangovers were such a common occurrence for me they were a non-event. “So did anything particularly exciting happen in my absence?” I nodded at the phone in her lap.
Something occurred to her. “Oh, wow! Actually!” she picked up her phone and unlocked it. “Yeah. Since you were taking ages I thought I'd snoop around a bit about what's going on with Waterbank, right? I didn't actually expect to find anything because all my great web analytics tools are on my laptop. But anyway, Rob said that the court case was listed on Wednesday, so I went through all the different courts and...” she passed the phone to me.
I accepted it from her. “...and you found something?”
She leant over to me and we nearly knocked heads as she pointed at the screen. “That's it,” she said, showing me a listing. “Click it.” I tapped the
screen, and then waited for the details to load on the crappy slow data connection out here as she continued, “It might be nothing, but I kept thinking about the fact Diane was totally obsessed with making sure Sean didn't find out anything about our project, and Diane has nothing to do with Frost Energy because Sean does all that...”
The details loaded, and the Federal Court case for Waterbank was listed as: 10:15AM (Directions) Frost International v Frost Energy.
TWENTY-FOUR
I had no memory of how I got to bed, but when I woke up I was itchy and topless and there was a ring of sand around me on the bed sheets. I also had a terrible headache which was nothing new, so I popped a couple of painkillers, had a shower, and then wandered out onto the porch where Rob was busy barbecuing eggs. Sarah was hunched on the couch trying to eat them as she was reading her phone.
“Morning, Sunshine,” Rob said with exaggerated cheer as I emerged. He handed me a plate with bacon and eggs that he'd royally fucked up by burning to a crisp. “Aussie breakfast,” he explained, and then held a blackened oblong towards me. “Sausage?”
My stomach turned. “I'm good, thanks.”
He shrugged. “More for me.”
I sat down next to Sarah. She glanced up, and I expected her to comment on how terrible she felt—but instead she just said sagely, “Sean and Diane will destroy Sydney ala Tokyo in King Kong versus Godzilla.”
I gave her a weird look, and she laughed gently and showed me the screen of her phone. On it, there was a whole list of theories the two of us had apparently come up with about Frost International v Frost Energy last night while we were wasted. Some of them weren't half bad, but most of them were ridiculous and you could only have found them funny if you were extremely drunk.
Under My Skin Page 54
