The pack loosens when the boys make a dash for the front. Most girls run in pairs, their ponytails swishing with each stride. At the bottom of the road are the cattle grid and a stile, which I climb to make my way up Dusty Hill.
I stop at the drink stand at the top, doubled over, drawing in long, ragged breaths. My head is sweating and a stitch pierces my side. I glance at my watch, shocked to see I’ve only run for ten minutes. More kids fly by.
I gaze across the yellow fields, the sky a solid blue, like a colour from a painting, and I think of Dad again. He’d love all this dust and sweat, this heat. He’d tell me I was lucky to be living in such a beautiful part of the world.
I wobble down the hill towards another large paddock. The path is so dry that once or twice my feet slide out from under me. I lurch across the creek, cool air swelling from the shallows. A few black birds watch me from spindly gums.
The final leg steers me back up the school drive. Hordes of kids line the embankment, clapping and cheering—it looks like most of the school have finished the race. Portia sits on the highest spot, among a group of boys, and she calls out, ‘Go, Starford,’ as I stagger across the finish line. A timecard is thrust in my hands and Miss Lacey appears from somewhere to give me a pat on the shoulder. ‘Well done,’ she says. But I have ranked badly.
Back at the house, girls are everywhere. I don’t want to talk to anyone after the disappointment of the race, but there is nowhere to go, so I end up sitting on the toilet. When I come out, Emma asks how I went.
I wipe my brow. ‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘really well.’
That night I write to Dad. I tell him about the crossie and how happy I am with my time. I’m surprised how easily the lies come, spilling like an oil slick. When I read over the letter, I begin to forget what actually happened and another memory starts to form, taking shape like my words on the page.
I wake early the next morning to pain pulsing through my body. My shins are especially tender, and my head is splitting: the first hint of a migraine. I hobble to the tog room for aspirin. Shuffling back I pause in the doorway. The girls are still asleep, hardly stirring. When I return to bed I tug at the covers, glancing back across the dorm. I start in fright. Kendall has sat up, the sheet wrapped around her shoulders, and is watching me.
~
Already I can see attachments forming in the house. Pairs, mostly—Ronnie and Portia, Lou and Simone. The latter sit together at every meal, wait for each other after chapel; sometimes they even brush each other’s hair before we go to bed.
I see all this because I am looking for it. In the house, I am still an observer, rather than a participant. I am quiet, hardly talking to anyone unless they talk to me first. This reticence, while not a surprise, worries me. I had hoped to have thrown it off by now.
No one else seems to be sad, or lonely, or missing their family. I don’t know if I miss my parents—it’s too soon to tell. They haven’t written to me yet. Most girls have had letters from home. Some have even received parcels of tuck. But there isn’t time to dwell on home. Every day is filled with activities: school, crossies, swims at the dam, jobs around the campus. And soon we start hiking.
More than the crossies or the long runs, the hiking is what I have been most looking forward to. Every weekend in the summer and spring months, we will trek out in the wilderness, without parents or teachers. Chart our own routes, reading the maps stuffed in the pockets of our packs, surviving on our wits and instincts—it’s the stuff of adventure novels. They start as overnighters, covering fifteen or twenty kilometres. But they build until, eventually, we all embark on the Final Hike, the pinnacle of the school year. Like the runs, the hikes are compulsory, and it doesn’t matter if it’s bushfire baking or raining a deluge; they are never cancelled.
The first hike is a day trip up Mount Silver Creek with the rest of Red House. Some girls have never even been camping before, let alone spent a night in the bush. ‘Princesses,’ Emma laughs, giving me a wink, as she shoves a water bottle into her pack.
I’ve never walked up a mountain from top to bottom and I’m nervous about being slow, even though Miss Lacey has assured me that Mount Silver Creek is only small, about thirteen hundred metres above sea level. I have, however, done a lot of camping. Most holidays my parents packed up the car with weeks’ worth of supplies and headed off to remote places like Wilpena Pound in the Flinders Ranges, Kangaroo Island, or Porepunkah at the foot of Mount Buffalo. We slept in the big family tent on these holidays, and when it was very cold Dad would let me climb into his sleeping bag to get warm.
When Archie and I got older, Mum and Dad traded in the tent for a campervan, with a built-in sink and an oven, and double beds sprouting at each canvased end. In the evening we’d play board games or listen to the quiz on the ABC. I remember the sounds of these nights so clearly: the rustle of nighttime creatures in trees, the low drone of insects, the faint lap of the river against its banks. And even though I was sharing that tiny space with my family for weeks and weeks, I still managed to find time on my own. If I didn’t want to talk, no one made me.
Now I would be spending nights in the bush with a large group of fourteen-year-old girls—a prospect that thrills and terrifies me in equal measure. What if I don’t feel like talking when we make dinner? What if they want to tell jokes around the campfire and I can’t think of any? Or, worse, what if they want to sing? I wonder if I can bring a book with me. I doubt it.
~
As Miss Lacey leads us on our first hike, she explains how back in the olden days the hiking had been so competitive that boys sometimes walked through the night: trekking to Blairgowrie Hut and on to the main range from Mount Howard to Mount Farrier, then back around to The Overpass and The Promontory. Some went even further south to Trent Hut, covering hundreds of kilometres.
After we stop for a drink, Portia and Ronnie move to the front, flanking Miss Lacey, their legs moving like watery shadows beneath their packs. Other girls, like Kendall, lag further behind. Everyone is paired up, but I walk by myself.
Eventually I get stuck in the middle of the group behind Briohny. She’s the kind of girl I imagine from the 1950s, with a clean and creamy complexion, and a soft yet sturdy build. She’s pretty, I suppose, but her face always seems trapped in a scowl, nose crinkled like she’s caught a bad smell. Ronnie has already given Briohny the nickname Whiony, and she does whine about almost everything—the running, the heat, schoolwork, dining hall food, the lumps in her mattress. She whines about all the teachers, other girls, the boys too—‘Why can’t I get a boyfriend?’ she’ll sigh, and no one knows where to look.
We stop under some trees so the slow girls can catch up. When they do, Briohny points at Kendall. ‘You’re holding us up on purpose.’
A titter moves through the group.
‘We’re all going at our own pace, Briohny,’ Miss Lacey says, stepping forward. ‘It’s important to be patient.’
Briohny scoffs, throwing Kendall another dirty look. She turns to me. ‘Can you smell that?’ she says, quiet so no one else will hear.
‘What?’
‘Piss,’ Briohny sneers. ‘She pisses herself. So bad she has to wear nappies.’
‘What?’
‘Look at her arse.’ She nods towards Kendall, who at this moment is bending over to retrieve her pack. ‘Can’t you see it?’
Kendall is struggling. Her cheeks are blotched scarlet and she’s sweating profusely. Every now and then she tugs at her white shorts, which are bunched up around her bottom. It could be from a pad. But when my eyes drop to her legs I see they’ve gone blue, like the plucked chickens hanging from hooks at the market—a thought that immediately fills me with shame.
When the group moves off I make a push to the front, where Portia is now telling a story about a party where she got so drunk she vomited in a shoe. I want to hear about the party—I’ve never been drunk before—but I soon tire of walking so fast, and fall behind again.
I stop, my chest tight,
and adjust my straps. My pack is so heavy it feels like I’m dragging another person along. Emma draws up beside me. ‘You okay?’ she asks.
An hour later we reach the top. I throw off my pack, the cool breeze at my back. I feel queasy, and lean against a tree to catch my breath.
A few girls wander off to take photographs, while others sit around a cluster of rocks, snacking on sandwiches and drinking orange Tang. Miss Lacey doesn’t seem tired at all. ‘It sounds crazy now,’ she says, smiling, ‘but at the end of the term you’ll all be running up Mount Silver Creek.’
I turn to Emma and roll my eyes.
‘Fuck that,’ she groans.
~
Back at school, everyone showers and gets dressed for formal dinner. Blue-and-white-striped dresses, grey jumpers, black shoes with long white socks. After a day of hiking, my uniform feels crisp, like cardboard.
After dinner we have a Eucharist service. The chapel is my favourite building at Silver Creek. Inside it’s plain, unembellished—there’s an altar at the front, of course, which is bare except for a large gold crucifix resting on the Communion table. Behind the cross the enormous windows overlook the trees, a technicolour of blue and green and yellow. I like chapel more than I expected. My parents aren’t at all religious—I’m not baptised—and I can’t think of a time my family have been in a church together. Religion and God have always been stuffy things to me, as if shrouded in a mouldy velvet curtain. But here I enjoy the readings from the Scripture. The best part of the morning service is the time at the end for quiet reflection. At first I found it difficult to sit on the cold pews and think about nothing. Now I look forward to it; I close my eyes and listen to the shuffle of shoes on the bluestone floor.
This evening the chaplain, Father Wilson, gives a sermon on Silver Creek. He talks about the origins of the school, and the founder, an Englishman who in the 1950s bought the land at great expense to establish the campus—a risky prospect so soon after the war. It had been a boys’ school at first. Girls only came here twenty years ago.
‘While a great many things have changed since Professor Duncan founded Silver Creek,’ Father Wilson says, his voice echoing around the cloisters, ‘the values of our school have remained unchanged. You are still removed from the comfortable and familiar—your televisions, your computers, your friends and family. For some, this feels like a deprivation. But in time you will come to see how this in fact expands your inner world, rather than diminishes it. In this, we are all privileged. By the end of this year you will have forged such self-confidence, such independence, all of which comes about in your learning of the practical ways of life. And as Professor Duncan himself said, Silver Creek’s greatest gift is that it sometimes gives us the chance to see the vision of God in his Creation.’
There’s singing after this, and another reading. Then Father Wilson performs the Holy Communion. I’m one of the few Red House girls not to rise and move towards the altar. As the next pew stands, and the next, I see that most of the school is heading down the aisle for their fill of the body and blood of Christ, and wonder if I am missing out on some crucial spiritual nourishment. What would happen if one evening I knelt at the altar and had a white tab placed on my tongue and sipped at the challis? I think of my parents, and swiftly feel a lurch of longing for home. I still haven’t had a letter from them. Have they forgotten about me?
~
Later, back at the house preparing for bed, I hear a howl. I throw down my book and run out of the dorm. In the tog room I find Ronnie standing in front of a locker, a grotty garment dangling from the end of the broom she’s holding.
‘They stink!’ she cries, pinching her nose with her forefinger. ‘Kendall pissed her pants!’
They’re the shorts Kendall had been wearing on the hike. Girls start talking over the top of each other, no one thinking to ask how Ronnie found them. Suddenly Kendall bursts in and Ronnie drops the broom.
We all watch as Kendall gathers the soggy shorts into a ball. She looks up, just once, and the expression on her face makes me think of an animal caught in a cage. Then she rushes away through the study in the direction of the deck.
‘What’s going on here?’
Briohny has wandered into the tog room, hands on her hips. Her grin is triumphant.
The next day, after lunch, hike groups are pinned to the noticeboard. We’re heading off on our first overnight hike tomorrow, even though it is only midweek. Our weekends are now scheduled on Wednesdays and Thursdays, to avoid any crowds at the campsites and on the hike tracks.
Ronnie comes up beside me, putting a hand on my back to squint at the lists. ‘Hey, Becky,’ she says. ‘We’re in a group together.’
She calls to Portia, pointing at the board. Portia saunters over, throwing an arm around my shoulder. She smells like Dove. It’s the three of us in the group, and another girl, Phoebe, from Orange House.
‘Best group or what?’ Portia says, pinching my waist.
Watching her walk up the stairs with Ronnie, my insides begin to bubble excitedly. I’ll have two whole days with them. We’ll have loads of chats, loads of laughs, and then, by the end, we’ll be firm friends. I just know it.
~
We set off late the next afternoon, the sun still blazing across the sky. The route takes us through a small neighbouring vineyard and a B&B, and then across meadows flushed with buttercups. Phoebe marches ahead, with Portia, and I walk at Ronnie’s side. I’ve hardly spoken to Phoebe this afternoon—her family, I’ve heard, is actually friends with the Queen.
It’s flat terrain, but there’s no shade and we’re all sweating heavily. We finally spot a giant gum in the middle of a paddock and stop for a drink. The girls slump to the ground, packs still strapped to their backs. Phoebe sits off to one side, gulping from her aluminium water bottle.
It isn’t long before we reach camp at Daisy Creek. We find a site near the water, other girls’ tents pitched on either side. The boys’ campground is further away, across another road, near a toilet block. ‘Pretty extreme version of the one-metre rule,’ Ronnie sighs.
After Ronnie and I set up our tent, we wander down to the creek to collect fresh water. We splash about and I spot a yabbie. Portia makes jaffles for dinner, and later she disappears into the boys’ area, where her voice somehow carries across the campsite.
When she comes back, we’re already tucked up in our sleeping bags inside the tent. But she hauls us out. Phoebe is in the next tent, but Portia doesn’t wake her.
‘I want to tell you a story,’ she says, stoking the fire. ‘A ghost story.’
‘Oooh,’ says Ronnie.
Portia waves away the smoke. ‘This is a story my grandad told me, from when he was on the cattle farm in Queensland, before he retired and sold up. He was on his own in the house one night, this big old homestead with a verandah that stretches all the way around, when he heard a knock on the door. Funny, he thinks. It’s a bit late for visitors. So he doesn’t answer. But there’s another knock, then a bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Now he’s bothered. He grabs his shotgun, the one he keeps in the cupboard under the stairs, but when he opens the front door, barrel raised, no one’s there.’
‘Creepy,’ Ronnie breathes.
‘Well,’ says Portia, licking her lips, ‘by now my grandad doesn’t know what to do. He thinks about ringing the cops, but the nearest police station is more than two hours’ drive away—this is a huge station, there’s no one around for miles. He closes the front door and goes back through to the sitting room, where he’s got the fire going. Then the banging starts up again. Bang. Bang. Bang.’
‘I’m scared now,’ Ronnie says. ‘No, really, this is scary.’
Portia nods, glancing at me. ‘Wait,’ she says. ‘So Grandad’s like, This is fucked. He grabs the shotgun again and marches to the front door. But on his way, he passes a big set of windows that during the day open out to the verandah. And there he sees it—an old woman, dressed in rags, with her face pressed against the glass.’
<
br /> ‘No! He didn’t!’
‘By now he’s packing himself—and I can tell you, it takes a lot to frighten my grandad. I mean, he was in the war. But he’s shaking. He’s got the gun, he runs to the front door, but when he opens it she’s not there.’
‘Where is she?’ I croak.
They both look at me.
‘She’s sitting on the far fence,’ Portia says. ‘A hundred metres away—there’s a big old lamppost near the tree—and she’s laughing. How did she get over there? Grandad’s wondering. She was at the window only a few seconds ago. And before he knows what he’s doing, before he’s really thought it through, he’s raised the shotgun and fired at her. Now let me tell you: my grandad could hit an apple off your head a mile off—he is a plum shot. But you know what he saw? He could hardly believe his eyes. The bullet had gone through this woman. Right through her! He doesn’t know what else to do but run back inside and slam the front door. Now my grandad’s not religious but he was thinking this is the world’s end, she’s the devil, it’s the apocalypse; the whole shebang.
‘He doesn’t open that front door all night. He doesn’t move from the chair in front of the fire. But there’s no more banging on the front door, and at first light he walks outside and makes his way towards the fence. The old woman’s body is nowhere to be seen. But what he does find, on top of the fence post, is the bullet, aimed back towards the house.’
‘No,’ Ronnie moans. ‘But where was the old woman?’
‘She was a ghost,’ I say. ‘An apparition.’
Portia nods, holding my eye.
‘Well that’s fucked up,’ says Ronnie. ‘Thanks, Portia. There goes sleep tonight.’
We start to pack up around the fire, moving food and our cooking utensils back inside the tent. Portia drifts around camp silently, her shadow stretching long across the grass.
Bad Behaviour Page 3
