by Fiona Wood
To start with we had ten free minutes. This was notional shopping time. Our chance to spend pocket money buying stuff we mostly didn’t need.
Girls buy tampons and sample the three pathetic cosmetic brands at the pharmacy. We flip through the maximum and buy the minimum of magazines at the newsstand. We can buy a small amount of candy, but we are not supposed to bring any back with us.
Today, Ben and Holly headed to the pharmacy with Eliza and Gabi trailing after. Pippa and Sibylla were lingering at the newsstand.
I dragged Michael into the milk bar, where he bought a slab of Kit Kat and some dark chocolate. I needed new supplies of raspberry toffee sticks. I bought and tested one before I committed to a bulk buy. Phew. It snapped. You don’t want a bendy toffee stick, they are utterly pointless; you want a snapper.
We sat outside on a bench under a plane tree on the grassy median strip that was like a little park, and I broached the subject of the missing letter to Sibylla. He still hasn’t found it. It definitely hasn’t turned up at his parents’, and he is convinced that he must have left it lying around, and even though it may innocently have disappeared during a general house cleanup, it may equally be in someone’s possession. He’s got the little tic in the corner of his left eye; I’ve seen it before when he’s tired.
Michael and Sibylla and Pippa and I were on the roster for our second visit to the old people’s home. Other people went to the kindergarten to help wrangle kids and poster paints, to the library to mis-shelve books, and to the Historical Appreciation Society to do minutely slow restoration work on crusty old bellows and saddles under the nervy supervision of Mr. Rattle.
No one minds it because wherever you end up at least it’s a break from the bucolic-idyll meets gladiator-outdoor-skills-training meets all-your-usual-school-work life.
The old people’s home is called the Dorothy and Randal Hayes Retirement Center. The building is a large and spectacularly ugly 1960s cream-brick block with concrete paths, pink geranium flower beds, and white-painted window frames. It was purpose-built; inside everything is wipe-downable, polished linoleum floors, ramps, and laminated tabletops. Such areas that are carpeted are covered with prickly tiles of carpet, easily replaceable in the event of nasty accidents.
Super-spacey residents are propped in a circle of saggy vinyl-covered recliners in front of a television that stopped making sense to them long ago. The whole place smells doddery. Cabbage, urine, and pine air freshener. But if you breathe through your mouth, you can’t smell a thing.
Pippa brought makeup this time, making good on a promise to glamorize Dolly. They chattered away like old pals, and Pippa learned the secret of lovely skin at eighty (no sun and Pond’s).
Michael’s guy, Lindsay, has advanced dementia, and Michael thought reading aloud to him would be the best thing to do. Lindsay would ask Michael every now and then, when’s Roy coming? Michael replied politely each time, he’ll be in tomorrow, I think, to which Lindsay said, tomorrow, of course, as though remembering, and sat back happily, sucking on his dentures, for a bit more reading.
Sibylla and I were allocated time with Betty and Maureen, two old demons who shamelessly cheat to beat us at carpet bowling. Maureen has lost a few marbles along the way, and gets cranky if she doesn’t win, so it was our job to try to make sure she won at least every second round. Last time we visited she had to be escorted back to her room for some time out, and we didn’t want to revisit that shame upon her.
They brought food in for us, but we all said we’d just eaten. The food was depressing. It was all cooked, warm, watery, and smelled of instant gravy. Pudding and main course were on the same tray. Today’s pudding was a cracked baked custard, sprinkled with nutmeg, that looked like it would bounce. It makes me feel ashamed of all the complaints we make about our prison mess; it is gourmet heaven compared to this.
Lindsay has to be fed, and Michael braved up for the job when the usual caregiver offered. He takes the community service responsibility seriously. Nearly everyone else is happy to do the bare minimum.
Lindsay’s skin is stretched tightly across the bones of his face, mottled and blotchy. He opens his mouth like a baby bird, but does not always remember to close, chew, or swallow, so there is a bit of leakage. One of the nurses tied a kitchen towel around his neck, which I guess is marginally better than an actual bib. His eyes stay fixed in a place somewhere between vacant and terrified. Everyone he ever loved is dead, and he isn’t far behind, so no wonder.
By the time Michael had fed Lindsay, he was as somber as I’d seen him, and he’s never Mr. Smileyface.
As we left, Pippa, who had been the picture of shiny goodwill and smiles during the whole visit said, can one of you guys please shoot me in the head if I ever get that old, I’m not even kidding, and walked back to the bus alone.
Michael gave me a quick squeeze in the elbow region to acknowledge that the casual mention of death might have upset me. But it didn’t. What upsets you when death has been on the agenda is when it doesn’t get mentioned.
He wanted a magazine (New Scientist) at the newsstand before the bus left, and I dropped back and walked with Sibylla.
He does it hard, she said. The rest of us are there thinking the place smells bad, and when are we getting out of here, and trying to remember to be pleasant, but I know Michael would have been sitting there with the weight of mortality bearing down on his shoulders, becoming more and more concerned about the idea of losing his marbles one day. She was right.
Has he ever gone out with anyone? I asked.
No, but he likes you, she said.
I’m not in the market, and let’s be real, it’s you he likes.
Yes, but only in theory.
And we both know he’s a guy who’s big on theory.
She had the honesty not to deny it.
Staring out the bus window—watching the trees whip by and sky stay still—might be my favorite pastime in the world, even if we are going back to school. I’m sitting next to Lou, who is reading, as usual. Ben is right in front of me, sitting with Beeso; they’re making each other listen to obscure rap tracks.
Lou remains a woman of mystery. Even in the emotion-incubator house setting, where we’ve all had various meltdowns, even since the singing, even though I see her at close quarters every single day. It’s clear she doesn’t have a single romantic thought in her head about Michael—but why not? Could it be something to do with the bookmark boy? Are they still going out? Is he the one who sends letters from France?
Since her public performance, she has garnered quite a following of arty-indie admirers. Not that she seems particularly interested, but I know that she is being courted by Miro, the only serious band in our grade.
She spends lots of time reading, and lots of time doing stuff with her camera and Blu Tack and fluff, fibers, and twigs. She may be putting together a “unique” and “idiosyncratic” piece of “new media” for her folio. That’s what our art teacher, Ms. Bottrell, tends to call any material that lives in either the conceptual or abstract zone.
When I ask Lou about it, she gives her closest version of a happy face, which is a small, dry smile.
“All will be revealed,” she says, enigmatically.
tuesday 13 november
One of the things Michael read at the old people’s home was a poem by Wilfred Owen. He figured out that Lindsay is very likely to have been a part of and/or certainly had friends and family who were dragged or went willingly into the Second World War.
He read the poem, Futility, about a dead soldier that starts Move him into the sun—/ Gently its touch awoke him once, and as he read I saw that he didn’t really need to read it; he knew the poem by heart.
He had planned this in advance, caring about an old guy with dementia, thinking about what might have meaning to him.
If Sibylla would ever go out with Michael, she’d have the second-most-thoughtful boyfriend ever to walk the earth.
When we got back he was still worrying about
the letter; in fact the worry seemed to have built with the afternoon. He is starting to imagine he sees smirks and looks here and there, as though people know something. Nothing explicit has been said, and he accepts that this could be paranoia on his part.
I can’t help asking him more about the Sibylla tablets. Wasn’t he worried about getting a fur ball, and having to cough it up like a cat?
No. His intake was moderate, and he spaced them out. No more than one per week. He didn’t want to overdose. A little bit went a long way. Because of their special power. He smiled his apologetic smile; if he took too many they might have lost their magical potency.
What made him think of it in the first place? He was just fiddling with a strand of hair until quite by accident it turned into a tiny little pellet. He had read that hair can be used to determine DNA and so he thought he might be transferring some of (what he considered to be) Sibylla’s power into his own system. He knew about DNA when he was how old?
Four.
Okay. Completely logical. I could imagine doing the same myself if I’d known stuff like that when I was four and wanted medicinal benefits from a friend’s powerful DNA.
Ben and I hike out from school with our respective groups for a day hike. The weather is perfect, crisp and still. Insects flick and snap through the air, and clouds stretch thin their semitransparent ripples against the morning sky.
We meet at the arranged spot, the three-mile mark of the home trail. As planned, Ben and I split from the groups, and head off on our own. Ben leads the way; he found a place on one of his runs that he wants to show me. We take a path that follows MacMahons Creek in the direction of Dead Horse Gully. I make a mental note to Sharpie in an apostrophe on the way back.
We’re both wearing boots, shorts, and gaiters. Ben is wearing a T-shirt; I have on a light long-sleeved shirt and a brimmed hat, with sunscreen on every bit of skin that is unclothed. Always in the prevent-burn mode with my fairer-than-fair skin, so unsuited to the climate.
How different might it be if we had started going out in the usual place? In the city. Not here in the fishbowl. What might we have done by now? We could have hung out at each other’s places. Mooched about doing nothing much. Gone to some more parties. He is invited everywhere. Seen a movie or two. Met each other’s families?
Holly’s massive pep talk is pecking away at me. She thinks this is our big chance to get it on. By which she means get off together. To do it. Why are the words we use about sex so prosaic and unenticing?
When we’ve walked for well over an hour and I’m starting to wonder if Ben has any idea where we’re heading, we come to a clearing. Here, in the middle of nowhere, the remains of a stone wall covered in a tangle of overgrown banksia rose throwing out canes as tall as trees. I walk around. Time has swallowed any other traces of a house or hut, but there are paving stones deeply overgrown with grass leading down to the creek. There’s wild feathery fennel, and mint, and, farther up the bank, a gnarled apricot tree. A forgotten, once-upon-a-time garden.
“So, how do you like it?”
“It’s beautiful.” I pick one of the yellow roses and poke it through a buttonhole in my shirt.
He looks happy. “I knew it was your kind of place.”
I drink some water and start unpacking food. “What did you bring?” I ask.
“Forget food,” he says, bending down to kiss me. And here we are again, back in the debatable land of want and denial.
I can’t see Ben simply as beautiful anymore; it is something more pervasive. I need to pack the swoon back into the wrong end of the telescope before I drown in the distraction of him. He won’t stay neatly in one compartment of my brain; he invades; he spills all over my consciousness. Perhaps skipping ahead to the heart of the matter is the only place to go.
Deciding to do it is less momentous and certainly less rational than it should be; I can’t even say it is a decision; it’s more like a switch has flicked. In one breathless look, we are both taking it as read, a need that this time we will act upon. I think of animation graphics that blast people into hyperspace. I’m in go mode. This is happening. No thought of turning back. I’m just doing it.
And neither of us has mentioned the four-letter word that comes before this three-letter activity in all my schemes and dreams.
Afterward I feel wobbly and slightly shocked, climbing up from under the rubble to check out the new world.
Orgasm, huh, sooo much easier on your own. Who knew? How do people even coordinate it with all that distracting… sex… going on?
Did we really just do that? I want to hide my face. I want to look into a mirror in private, to check if I’m still me. A stone is pressing into my left glute, and the weight of him is starting to hurt my breast. I move and he lifts his head, kissing my clavicle on the way up and meeting my eye with a new ounce of shyness behind the usual smile.
Who is this boy, with three pimples on his perfect Heathcliff chin? A chin whose whisker shadows don’t quite join up yet? Surely this exact moment is my cue to start feeling older, but it isn’t working. I have never felt younger. I’m a kid with homework, and hikes, and a single-bed dormitory, and this… affair? Relationship? Mistake? The last couple of minutes just hand my inexperience to me, neatly wrapped.
New sprouts of bracken fern pushing up through the ground look like little alien embryo heads. What Have I Done?
I’ve had sex before Holly! A surge of satisfaction after so much coming second—not that I’m going to tell anyone about it. I have to trust Ben won’t tell anyone, either.
I shiver with the cold and newness as the colors around us deepen, super saturating in this exact moment of fading light as the day becomes overcast. I close my eyes over the picture, and put it in the album of Significant Moments.
We lift ourselves out of the soft muddy leaf meal—my shirt and bra are both still hooked on one arm, so I drop them on a dry-looking patch of ground with our other discarded clothes and walk into the stream. “Don’t look,” I say.
Ben follows me, laughing. “Don’t look?” He’s right, it’s a little late for shyness—but still I walk to the water with my arms wrapped protectively around myself. The day is warm, but the water is beyond freezing. I take a deep breath, dive under, and come up gasping with the cold. Ben cups water in his hands and washes some mud off my shoulder.
“Sorry,” he says. “It’s supposed to last a bit longer.” He picks up my hand and pulls me closer. I shiver at the touch of his hot mouth on my cold breast, my cold neck.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“Yeah, good.”
“Didn’t hurt too much?”
“No. Hardly at all. It seems awful that sex should hurt, so…”
Okay, shutting up now; there is no way in the world I know Ben well enough to tell him that a year ago at least, before there was even a remote prospect of sex on the horizon, I put enough fingers into my own vagina, in a nice warm bath, to make sure there wouldn’t be a pain and bleeding situation if and when I finally did have sex, of which, at the time there was realistically zero prospect. I believed it quite likely that I would die a virgin. Can’t remember exactly why I thought that… no boyfriend. Never had a boyfriend. But in the unlikely event that sex ever did happen, I didn’t want to associate it with pain or discomfort… and now sex has happened, so it was just as well… Hmmm, was it an unnaturally control-freaky thing to do, or good old Girl Scout be prepared common sense? Not that I was ever an actual Girl Scout.
“Sib—so…?”
“Yeah—so it’s really good that it didn’t hurt.” I put a hand against his face. “You were gentle,” I say, kissing cold lips to cold lips. “And it was pretty quick.”
“Do you want to try again?”
I want nothing more than to take him somewhere comfortable and have sex until we both die from happiness and exhaustion, but I’m looking at the tightly curled heads of those fern-frond embryos, and thinking of all the microscopic sperm swimming their little tails off. “Yo
u think the condom worked okay?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
I’m remembering the banana classes. We definitely put it on properly. Did we take it out in time for no leaks? I think so. I hope so.
“Handy that you had it.” I don’t mean it to come out sounding bitchy, but there wouldn’t have been any sex if there hadn’t been a condom. It would have made my non-decision to have sex completely different: a decision not to have sex.
“I told you I was going to get some in Hartsfield.”
“Tell me you didn’t buy them with Holly.”
“She was there.”
The last thing in the world I can stand is the idea of Holly being happy that Ben and I… and then no doubt claiming it as her idea. “I’m not telling anyone about this. Including her.” I stern-look him. “Nobody. I mean it.”
“Relax,” he says.
“I am relaxed—I just don’t want anyone dissecting our private stuff. I don’t like it that everyone knows everything. Whose business is it but ours? Nobody’s, right? Am I right?”
He kisses me. It’s a stop babbling kiss if ever there was one. Which is annoying. At the same time as being a truly great kiss. And from deep inside that kiss, I remember there was a crashing noise in the scrub, like an animal, nearby, while we were making our bed again, and lying in it.
thursday 15 november
Eclipses. A solar eclipse happens when the new moon is aligned between the earth and the sun, blocking the sun’s rays and casting its shadow on the earth. A lunar eclipse is when the earth lines up between the sun and the full moon and casts its shadow on the moon.
In the first one, we see the object obscuring the sun.
In the second one, we are the object obscuring the sun.
We will observe a lunar eclipse in two weeks’ time. We have a few good telescopes, plenty of binoculars, and a sky clear away from the city lights.
